by Guran, Paula
Michael knocked on the door, then glanced over his shoulder, impatient with me for hanging back.
I wanted to warn him, but of what? What could I say? I was in the grip of a fear I knew to be irrational. I managed to move a little closer to Michael and the door, telling myself that nothing could compel me to look through that window.
We waited a little while, but even after Michael knocked again, more loudly, almost pounding, there was no reply. I relaxed a little, thinking we were going to get away with it, but when I spoke of leaving, he insisted, “Not until I find out who lives here, what it’s all about. There is someone here—I can see a light—look, through that window—”
I moved back; I wouldn’t look.
“I think I can smell cooking. They’re probably in the kitchen. Maybe a bit deaf. I’m going to try the back door. You coming? Suit yourself.”
I didn’t want to stay, but wanted even less to follow him around the back, so I waited, wrapping my arms around myself, feeling a chill. The sun didn’t strike so warmly in this leafy hollow. I checked my phone for the time and was startled to see how much of the afternoon was gone. I wondered if I should call David to warn him I’d be late, but decided to wait for Michael.
I didn’t like to keep checking the time because it made me more nervous, but at least five minutes had passed when I felt I had no choice but to walk around to the back of the house to look for him.
I had no sense of déjà vu there; I was certain I’d never seen the peeling black paint that covered the solidly shut back door, or the small windows screened by yellowish, faded curtains that made it impossible to see inside.
“Michael?” I didn’t like the weak, wavering sound of my voice, and made myself call out more loudly, firmly, but there was no reply. Nothing happened. I knocked as hard as I could on the back door, dislodging a few flakes of old paint, and as I waited I listened to the sound of leaves rustling in the wind; every once in awhile one would fall. I felt like screaming, but that would have been bloody stupid. Either he had heard me or he hadn’t. Either he was capable of reply—could he be hiding just to tease me?—or he wasn’t. And what was I going to do about it?
As I walked back around to the front of the house I was assailed by the memory of what I had seen when I looked through the window the last time I was here—if that had ever happened. I’d seen a man’s foot and leg—I’d seen that there was someone inside the house, just sitting, not answering my knock, and the sight of some stranger’s foot had frightened me so badly that I’d run away, and then repressed the memory of the entire incident.
Now I realized it must have been a dream that I recalled. It had that pointless, sinister atmosphere of a bad dream. Unfortunately, it now seemed like a precognitive dream.
Nothing had changed in front of the house. I got out my phone and entered the number Michael had given me. As I heard it ringing in my ear, I heard the familiar notes from The William Tell Overture sounding from inside the house. I clenched my teeth and waited. When the call went to his voicemail, I ended it and hit re-dial. Muffled by distance, the same tinny, pounding ringtone played inside the house, small but growing in volume until, once again, it was cut off by the voicemail program.
I knew what I would see if I looked through the window, so I didn’t look. I wanted to run away, but I didn’t know where to go. It would be dark soon. I had to do something.
The front door opened easily. Tense, I darted my gaze about, fearful of ambush although the place felt empty. To my right, I could see into a small, dark sitting room where an old man sat, or slumped, in an armchair.
He was a very, very old man, almost hairless, his skin like yellowed parchment, and appeared to have been dead for some time. It would have been his foot I would have seen if I’d looked through the window: his feet in brand new, brilliantly white sports shoes. But even as I recognized the rest of the clothes—polo shirt, jeans, soft gray hooded jacket, even the phone and car keys in his pockets—I clung to the notion of a vicious trick, that someone had stolen Michael’s clothes to dress an old man’s corpse. How could the vigorous fifty-eight-year-old that I’d seen a few minutes ago have aged and died so rapidly?
I know now that it is what’s left of Michael, and that there is no one else here.
I am not able to leave. I can open the door, but as soon as I step through, I find myself entering again. I don’t know how many times I did that, before giving up. I don’t know how long I have been here; it seems like a few days, at most, but when I look in the mirror I can tell by my hair that it must be two months or more.
There’s plenty of food in the kitchen, no problems with plumbing or electricity, and for entertainment, besides all the books, there’s an old video-player, and stacks of videos, as well as an old phonograph and a good collection of music. I say “good collection” because it might have been planned to please Michael and me, at least as we were in the eighties.
Having found a ream of paper in the bottom drawer of the desk in the other parlor (the room where Michael isn’t) I decided to write down what has happened, just in case someone comes here someday, and finds my body as I found his. It gives me something to do, even though I fear it is a pointless exercise.
While exploring the house earlier—yesterday, or the day before—I found evidence of mice—fortunately, only in one place, in the other sitting room. There were droppings there, and a nest made of nibbled paper, as if the mouse had devoted all its energy to the destruction of a single stack of paper. One piece was left just large enough for me to read a few words in faded ink, and recognize Michael’s handwriting, but there was not enough for me to make sense of whatever he was trying to say.
There were rumors that there was a refugee camp for homeless outside of Toronto. So they were walking to Detroit . . .
After the Apocalypse
Maureen McHugh
Jane puts out the sleeping bags in the backyard of the empty house by the toolshed. She has a lock and hasp and an old hand drill that they can use to lock the toolshed from the inside, but it’s too hot to sleep in there, and there haven’t been many people on the road. Better to sleep outside. Franny has been talking a mile a minute. Usually by the end of the day she is tired from walking—they both are—and quiet. But this afternoon she’s gotten on the subject of her friend Samantha. She’s musing on if Samantha has left town like they did. “They’re probably still there, because they had a really nice house in, like, a low-crime area, and Samantha’s father has a really good job. When you have money like that, maybe you can totally afford a security system or something. Their house has five bedrooms and the basement isn’t a basement, it’s a living room, because the house is kind of on a little hill, and although the front of the basement is underground, you can walk right out the back.”
Jane says, “That sounds nice.”
“You could see a horse farm behind them. People around them were rich, but not like, on-TV rich, exactly.”
Jane puts her hands on her hips and looks down the line of backyards.
“Do you think there’s anything in there?” Franny asks, meaning the house, a ’60s suburban ranch. Franny is thirteen, and empty houses frighten her. But she doesn’t like to be left alone, either. What she wants is for Jane to say that they can eat one of the tuna pouches.
“Come on, Franny. We’re gonna run out of tuna long before we get to Canada.”
“I know,” Franny says sullenly.
“You can stay here.”
“No, I’ll go with you.”
God, sometimes Jane would do anything to get five minutes away from Franny. She loves her daughter, really, but Jesus. “Come on, then,” Jane says.
There is an old square concrete patio and a sliding glass door. The door is dirty. Jane cups her hand to shade her eyes and looks inside. It’s dark and hard to see. No power, of course. Hasn’t been power in any of the places they’ve passed through in more than two months. Air conditioning. And a bed with a mattress and box springs. What Ja
ne wouldn’t give for air conditioning and a bed. Clean sheets.
The neighborhood seems like a good one. Unless they find a big group to camp with, Jane gets them off the freeway at the end of the day. There was fighting in the neighborhood, and at the end of the street, several houses are burned out. Then there are lots of houses with windows smashed out. But the fighting petered out. Some of the houses are still lived in. This house had all its windows intact, but the garage door was standing open and the garage was empty except for dead leaves. Electronic garage door. The owners pulled out and left and didn’t bother to close the door behind them. Seemed to Jane that the overgrown backyard with its toolshed would be a good place to sleep.
Jane can see her silhouette in the dirty glass, and her hair is a snarled, curly, tangled rat’s nest. She runs her fingers through it, and they snag. She’ll look for a scarf or something inside. She grabs the handle and yanks up, hard, trying to get the old slider off track. It takes a couple of tries, but she’s had a lot of practice in the last few months.
Inside, the house is trashed. The kitchen has been turned upside-down, and silverware, utensils, drawers, broken plates, flour, and stuff are everywhere. She picks her way across, a can opener skittering under her foot with a clatter.
Franny gives a little startled shriek.
“Fuck!” Jane says. “Don’t do that!” The canned food is long gone.
“I’m sorry,” Franny says. “It scared me!”
“We’re gonna starve to death if we don’t keep scavenging,” Jane says.
“I know!” Franny says.
“Do you know how fucking far it is to Canada?”
“I can’t help it if it startled me!”
Maybe if she were a better cook, she’d be able to scrape up the flour and make something, but it’s all mixed in with dirt and stuff, and every time she’s tried to cook something over an open fire it’s either been raw or black or, most often, both—blackened on the outside and raw on the inside.
Jane checks all the cupboards anyway. Sometimes people keep food in different places. Once they found one of those decorating icing tubes and wrote words on each other’s hands and licked them off.
Franny screams, not a startled shriek but a real scream.
Jane whirls around, and there’s a guy in the family room with a tire iron.
“What are you doing here?” he yells.
Jane grabs a can opener from the floor, one of those heavy jobbers, and wings it straight at his head. He’s too slow to get out of the way, and it nails him in the forehead. Jane has winged a lot of things at boyfriends over the years. It’s a skill. She throws a couple of more things from the floor, anything she can find, while the guy is yelling, “Fuck! Fuck!” and trying to ward off the barrage.
Then she and Franny are out the back door and running.
Fucking squatter! She hates squatters! If it’s the homeowner they tend to make the place more like a fortress, and you can tell not to try to go in. Squatters try to keep a low profile. Franny is in front of her, running like a rabbit, and they are out the gate and headed up the suburban street. Franny knows the drill, and at the next corner she turns, but by then it’s clear that no one’s following them.
“Okay,” Jane pants. “Okay, stop, stop.”
Franny stops. She’s a skinny adolescent now—she used to be chubby, but she’s lean and tan with all their walking. She’s wearing a pair of falling-apart pink sneakers and a tank top with oil smudges from when they had to climb over a truck tipped sideways on an overpass. She’s still flat-chested. Her eyes are big in her face. Jane puts her hands on her knees and draws a shuddering breath.
“We’re okay,” she says. It is gathering dusk in this Missouri town. In a while, streetlights will come on, unless someone has systematically shot them out. Solar power still works. “We’ll wait a bit and then go back and get our stuff when it’s dark.”
“No!” Franny bursts into sobs. “We can’t!”
Jane is at her wit’s end. Rattled from the squatter. Tired of being the strong one. “We’ve got to! You want to lose everything we’ve got? You want to die? Goddamn it, Franny! I can’t take this anymore!”
“That guy’s there!” Franny sobs out. “We can’t go back! We can’t!”
“Your cell phone is there,” Jane says. A mean dig. The cell phone doesn’t work, of course. Even if they still somehow had service, if service actually exists, they haven’t been anywhere with electricity to charge it in weeks. But Franny still carries it in the hope that she can get a charge and call her friends. Seventh graders are apparently surgically attached to their phones. Not that she acts even like a seventh grader anymore. The longer they are on the road, the younger Franny acts.
This isn’t the first time that they’ve run into a squatter. Squatters are cowards. The guy doesn’t have a gun, and he’s not going to go out after dark. Franny has no spine, takes after her asshole of a father. Jane ran away from home and got all the way to Pasadena, California, when she was a year older than Franny. When she was fourteen, she was a decade older than Franny. Lived on the street for six weeks, begging spare change on the same route that the Rose Parade took. It had been scary, but it had been a blast, as well. Taught her to stand on her own two feet, which Franny wasn’t going to be able to do when she was twenty. Thirty, at this rate.
“You’re hungry, aren’t you?” Jane said, merciless. “You want to go looking in these houses for something to eat?” Jane points around them. The houses all have their front doors broken into, open like little mouths.
Franny shakes her head.
“Stop crying. I’m going to go check some of them out. You wait here.”
“Mom! Don’t leave me!” Franny wails.
Jane is still shaken from the squatter. But they need food. And they need their stuff. There is seven hundred dollars sewn inside the lining of Jane’s sleeping bag. And someone has to keep them alive. It’s obviously going to be her.
Things didn’t exactly all go at once. First there were rolling brownouts and lots of people unemployed. Jane had been making a living working at a place that sold furniture. She started as a salesperson, but she was good at helping people on what colors to buy, what things went together, what fabrics to pick for custom pieces. Eventually they made her a service associate, a person who was kind of like an interior decorator, sort of. She had an eye. She’d grown up in a nice suburb and had seen nice things. She knew what people wanted. Her boss kept telling her a little less eye makeup would be a good idea, but people liked what she suggested and recommended her to their friends even if her boss didn’t like her eye makeup.
She was thinking of starting a decorating business, although she was worried that she didn’t know about some of the stuff decorators did. On TV they were always tearing down walls and redoing fireplaces. So she put it off. Then there was the big Disney World attack where a kazillion people died because of a dirty bomb, and then the economy really tanked. She knew that business was dead and she was going to get laid off, but before that happened, someone torched the furniture place where she was working. Her boyfriend at the time was a cop, so he still had a job, even though half the city was unemployed. She and Franny were all right compared to a lot of people. She didn’t like not having her own money, but she wasn’t exactly having to call her mother in Pennsylvania and eat crow and offer to come home.
So she sat on the balcony of their condo and smoked and looked through her old decorating magazines, and Franny watched television in the room behind her. People started showing up on the sidewalks. They had trash bags full of stuff. Sometimes they were alone; sometimes there would be whole families. Sometimes they’d have cars and they’d sleep in them, but gas was getting to almost ten dollars a gallon, when the gas stations could get it. Pete, the boyfriend, told her that the cops didn’t even patrol much anymore because of the gas problem. More and more of the people on the sidewalk looked to be walking.
“Where are they coming from?” Franny as
ked.
“Down south. Houston, El Paso, anywhere within a hundred miles of the border.” Pete said. “Border’s gone to shit. Mexico doesn’t have food, but the drug cartels have lots of guns, and they’re coming across to take what they can get. They say it’s like a war zone down there.”
“Why don’t the police take care of them?” Franny asked.
“Well, Francisca,” Pete said—he was good with Franny, Jane had to give him that—“sometimes there are just too many of them for the police down there. And they’ve got kinds of guns that the police aren’t allowed to have.”
“What about you?” Franny asked.
“It’s different up here,” Pete said. “That’s why we’ve got refugees here. Because it’s safe here.”
“They’re not refugees,” Jane said. Refugees were, like, people in Africa. These were just regular people. Guys in T-shirts with the names of rock bands on them. Women sitting in the front seats of Taurus station wagons, doing their hair in the rearview mirrors. Kids asleep in the back seat or running up and down the street shrieking and playing. Just people.
“Well, what do you want to call them?” Pete asked.
Then the power started going out, more and more often. Pete’s shifts got longer although he didn’t always get paid.
There were gunshots in the street, and Pete told Jane not to sit out on the balcony. He boarded up the French doors and it was as if they were living in a cave. The refugees started thinning out. Jane rarely saw them leaving, but each day there were fewer and fewer of them on the sidewalk. Pete said they were headed north.
Then the fires started on the east side of town. The power went out and stayed out. Pete didn’t come home until the next day, and he slept a couple of hours and then when back out to work. The air tasted of smoke—not the pleasant, clean smell of wood smoke, but a garbagey smoke. Franny complained that it made her sick to her stomach.
After Pete didn’t come home for four days, it was pretty clear to Jane that he wasn’t coming back. Jane put Franny in the car, packed everything she could think of that might be useful. They got about 120 miles away, far enough that the burning city was no longer visible, although the sunset was a vivid and blistering red. Then they ran out of gas, and there was no more to be had.