Mixed Signals

by Alyssa Cole

  Edwin gave a rueful shake of his head. “See, and you just tried to argue that age differences don’t matter. That isn’t helping your case.”

  God, I was rude. He was sharing something about his dead brother, and I was bringing up weird fetishes. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt, especially with that.”

  I’d covered my mouth with my hand, as if I could keep any additional childish outbursts contained, and now my palm was covered in red lipstick gunk. I sighed and accepted the grease-stained rag Edwin pulled from under his seat and handed to me.

  “Thanks,” I said, feeling every inch the ridiculous girl he thought I was. I thought of the Flare, of all the possibilities for learning and growth that had been stripped away from me. If I had been out navigating the world and not stuck in a house with my family, I wouldn’t be acting like a fool right now.

  He chuckled. “It’s okay. My brother was a fan of saying inappropriate things, so he wouldn’t have minded.” His smile faded a bit. “He wasn’t happy when I decided to go to military school, but he was still proud. It fucking sucks knowing that he never got to see a return on his investment, that I’ll never get to tell him about anything I accomplish ever again. I used to get so annoyed when he pushed me to fill out applications, to do my homework, to stop complaining about how hard life is. And now...” He made a frustrated motion with his hand, splaying his fingers as if to say, “That’s that.”

  I didn’t know what to do. Death was a specter that had hovered over my family since those first uncertain months after the Flare—I still sometimes dreamed about Gabriel carrying a bloodied John to our doorstep, still had nightmares about Arden ripping Gabriel’s jacket open after what should have been a fatal shot to the chest. But although it stalked outside our cabin like the Big Bad Wolf, death had never gained entry. My family was safe and whole. In fact, we’d even gotten some awesome new additions, namely Arden, Mykhail, Darlene and Stump. I imagined anything I could say to Edwin would seem mocking, maybe because if my family had died and his had survived, I’d resent the fuck out of him. So I changed the subject, like a coward.

  “Is Claudio the one who taught you how to do all this construction stuff, or did you learn in the past few years?” I asked. I probably should have been asking about his feelings or how he was handling their loss, but he looked relieved to be able to talk about something other than his pain.

  “Yeah. He worked construction with one of my uncles. I was always scared the other guys would try to mess with him because he was gay, but considering that he could bench-press most of the dudes he worked with, they were sure to treat him with respect. He used to call himself my vocational school, giving me something to fall back on in case college wasn’t for me.”

  “That was cool of him,” I said. “I wish my family understood that there were alternate paths besides school.”

  Edwin laughed. “Don’t get it twisted. He believed in alternate paths, but I would’ve had to travel down them with his size-fourteen boot up my ass.”

  I joined him in his laughter, and it felt nice. Natural. The tension in the car dissipated, and we drove on in silence. Still, as I looked at the row of houses we passed—beautiful but empty because the Flare had snatched their owners away—I knew it would take more than laughter to fix so many of us. For the first time, I really thought about what the program I was attending would mean to people who’d suffered misfortunes I couldn’t imagine.

  Perhaps John had been right all those times he called me spoiled. I didn’t like thinking of myself that way—weren’t spoiled girls supposed to be rich and beautiful? I wasn’t either of those things, but I sure as hell wasn’t as grateful as I should be. I began to feel a new excitement for the trip I was taking. Not because I looked cool or because I’d get to hook up and stuff like that, but because I was about to learn something important. Who I was, and who I could be.

  Chapter Four

  “Shit, there’s a roadblock up ahead.”

  I’d dozed in my seat and had no idea where we were in our route, but I jumped awake and grabbed the road atlas that sat on my lap as if I’d been fulfilling my role as navigator. Up ahead, I could see an older-model police cruiser and a couple of men in beige uniforms standing in the road. Their boxy car was like something out of an old TV show. It would have been cool if it wasn’t so creepy. With the empty stretch of road ahead and behind, it felt a bit like we were rolling into a scene from a Stephen King book.

  “Well, is there anything you have to tell me? Like you’re carrying forty pounds of uncut cocaine in the cab of the truck?”

  He shot me an exasperated look. “If you’re going to accuse the one Puerto Rican guy you know of being a drug dealer, you should at least have your regions down. This is meth country.”

  Oh God. I cringed at what my words could have been construed as. “Edwin, I was—”

  “Joking. Yeah, so was I. Don’t worry, I won’t tell everyone at Oswego that you’re prejudiced.” He almost smiled, but then his eyes narrowed on the road ahead of us again. “Our actual problem is twofold. First, some people who set up these checkpoints aren’t really cops. They’re people looking to rob you blind and maybe leave you dead in a ditch. Second, if they are cops, some of them are power-tripping assholes who are even worse than the first option. It’s not like municipalities are selecting officers from the cream of the crop. Half the crop is dead.”

  As the two men and their cruiser drew closer, I felt fear start to edge its way into my space. I grabbed for my hair, hoping to hide behind it as I always did, but that built-in security blanket was gone. I scratched my ear instead, running a finger over the ruby teardrop earrings I’d borrowed from my mom. I remembered her wearing them all the time when I was a kid, during that magical time when I thought she was the strongest woman in the world.

  Edwin’s hand brushed my knee, gave it a quick squeeze. “It’s probably fine. If it’s not, I won’t let anything happen to you.” His voice was reassuring, but as we pulled close to the police officers his expression went blank and hard. It projected an air of authority, one that said he wasn’t looking for a fight but he could sure as shit handle it if one popped up. His face going all badass like that stopped the “I can take care of myself” that was on its way out of my mouth. Sometimes I forgot Edwin had been in the military, but watching his demeanor gave me a quick reminder of the kind of man he’d been before he came into my life. I shouldn’t have been turned on by it, especially since we were approaching a possibly dangerous situation, but I squirmed in my seat a little. His strength had been apparent in that touch on my knee and even if I didn’t need him to protect me, that strength felt damn good.

  Still, I readjusted the baseball bat Arden had bequeathed me long ago, positioning it so I could grab it and jab it into the face of anyone who got too close to the truck. I wasn’t going to give up my autonomy just because Edwin could bench-press me.

  The car rolled to a stop, and one of the officers approached.

  “Good afternoon, Officer,” Edwin said. “Is there a problem?”

  The man looked wary, but Edwin’s conciliatory behavior seemed to loosen some of the stiffness in his shoulders. He approached the window, but stayed far enough away that he wasn’t a threat—or that he could get out of the way if Edwin was. “Sorry, sir. Miss. We received a tip that there’s some neo-Luddite activity in the area. Given the proximity to the power plant and the new electrical grid setup, we’re trying to be careful.”

  “I work for the Department of Infrastructure Repair, so I’m definitely not trying to take everyone back to the Dark Ages,” Edwin said. “I’m going to reach for my ID now.”

  He slowly retrieved the plastic rectangle from his wallet, then held it up but didn’t pass it over. The officer seemed to understand his reticence. Edwin turned the ID back and forth to display the holographic insignia that was supposed to prove its veracity
.

  “Thank you, sir.” The officer gave a respectful nod, then turned to his partner. “They’re cool. Let ’em through.”

  As we drove away, I checked out the two men in my side-view mirror. They leaned back against their cop car and chatted, waiting for the next car to come through.

  “Do you think they’re legit?” I asked. Only now that we’d passed them did the goose bumps raise on my arms. There had obviously been crime before, but society had operated on an unspoken system of trust, and that trust had been backed up by decades of social norms and, eventually, the ability to look someone up online to see whether they were lying or not. The Flare had interrupted all that. It was horrifying to think that in its aftermath, anyone could claim to be anything and the only way to know whether you were being conned was to have a good gut instinct and, failing that, quick reflexes.

  Edwin shrugged, glanced in the rearview. “Yeah. I’ve been getting update texts from the department all week. Apparently, they caught some assholes trying to break into one of the recently opened electrical plants. Their plan was to burn the place.”

  “And they were serious?” Doubt was the first emotion my mind would allow entry to, although fear pushed at the floodgates. I didn’t want to believe such a thing was true. “Are you sure this wasn’t one of those situations like the last time, when it turned out the guy was some weirdo who said he wanted to blow up a power plant but didn’t have the means to do it?”

  A random guy with destructive thoughts was better than a coordinated plan of attack.

  “No, this was the real deal,” Edwin replied, dashing my hopes. “Government intelligence agencies have been picking up a lot of buzz on the wires. These groups are scattered around the country, but they’ve started interacting with each other, making plans.”

  “I can’t imagine,” I said. Fear had finally gotten through, crawling over my skin like the ants that invaded the house every spring. “If they’d succeeded—”

  “It would have been a huge setback. Really huge.” Edwin’s jaw was a tense line. “We’re just eking by with the equipment needed to rebuild, even with people working around the clock. They had to beg and scrape and improvise like motherfuckers to get that place up and running.”

  I knew from John that the hardest part of the rebuilding was getting the right parts for the electrical grids. Electricity was needed for large-scale manufacturing—there weren’t any artisanal electrical transformer markets around—creating a postapocalyptic catch-22.

  “I don’t get it,” I said, shaking my head. My seat belt felt like it had tightened, holding me in my seat, and I wanted nothing more than to make Edwin turn the car back around and take me home. “Do they not remember that we need electricity for clean water? Do they want to go back to shitting in the woods? Maybe they should do a poll before acting on everyone’s behalf. Who wants to keep the internet?”

  I raised my hand and waved it around.

  “Some people think the Flare was a judgment from God, or that we need to go back to basics so the next natural disaster won’t wipe us out again,” Edwin said. “And that’s understandable. People need something to believe in, and a random burst of solar energy is something that you can’t fight with guns or fists. For the zealots among us, this is a way of controlling things.”

  I knew all about the Throwbacks, neo-Luddites and various other groups that had formed in the shadow of ruined cities and destroyed towns, but in a way they’d been boogeymen. In the relative safety of my home and the surrounding area, they didn’t seem very threatening—not compared to the scavengers. Hadn’t the world always been full of people trying to impose their lifestyles on others? But knowing they were organizing attacks and trying to change things in earnest out here in the real world was the first time I’d felt that paralyzing fear, one rooted in complete impotence, since the lights had first blinked out and not come back on. I wasn’t afraid of the dark, but of all the horrible things that had come after it.

  I hooked a thumb under my seat belt and pulled it away from me. “If people want to live like that, it’s fine. Why do they care what everyone else does? There are plenty of places that won’t be on the grid for years, decades even. They can move there.”

  Edwin lifted a shoulder as if he didn’t know, but he still spoke. “I guess I get it in a way. Think about all the stuff that was going on before the Flare—global warming, wars, cyberbullying, governmental abuse of power. To them, this is our chance to start over and to do things right.”

  “Why do they get to decide what’s right for everyone else?”

  “Why not?” He said the words easily, like he wasn’t advocating for a bunch of people who wanted to finish off what the Flare had started.

  I flipped the chest strap of the seat belt behind my back so I could lean closer to him. “Because I don’t want to live like that.”

  “And they don’t want to live like us. Can you put your seat belt back on? Flying through the window if we’re in an accident won’t make your argument stronger.”

  I slipped back through the strap and dropped into my seat in a huff. “I don’t understand why you’re defending them. Please don’t tell me you’re one of those guys who thinks he has to play devil’s advocate in every conversation, because that’s an unattractive trait.”

  He sighed, something he’d done a lot over the last few hours. I seemed to have that effect on people. “I’m not saying they’re right. I’m saying that people do things they’d never imagine in the name of trying to survive. I’ve done things I’m not proud of. But if you asked me back then, I could justify my actions in a heartbeat. I thought I was doing what was best for everyone, but really I was doing what was best for myself.”

  Although they’d never told me exactly what had gone down at Burnell, I’d pieced things together over the years. Edwin’s comrades had done some horrible things to the students left behind at the school. Edwin had never joined in, and had helped John save the day, but he’d also done nothing to stop the abuse before then. I couldn’t imagine all the ways something like that could twist a person up inside. I glanced at his profile, and the strained expression on his face. Could the Edwin I knew really have been a bad guy? I could ask. He would answer honestly, I knew that. What I didn’t know was how I’d think of him after; I wasn’t ready to let him step down from his pedestal quite yet.

  I drummed my fingers on my legs. “I guess everything can’t be so clear-cut. I just don’t want to be kidnapped and forced to churn butter.”

  He made a sound close to a laugh, but we were probably thinking the same thing: a woman who got kidnapped should hope churning butter was the worst that would happen to her.

  “What are you most looking forward to at school?” he asked. I was grateful for the subject change.

  I thought about replying with “wieners” just to mess with him, but I answered truthfully. “Making friends who aren’t my family members or their significant others. Getting to experience something like the life I could have had before the Flare changed everything.” I took a deep breath. “I thought that when I got to the GED program I’d see all of my friends from high school. We’d catch up and it’d be just like old times, right? But so many of them weren’t there. My best friend, Marisa...her family was found during one of the sweeps of our town. Their bodies. None of them made it.”

  A memory of Marisa’s fingers sweeping through my hair rocked through me then, almost stealing the breath from me. You have the best hair. One day I’m going to cut it off and steal it for myself. The crushing, heart-compacting feeling I thought I’d mastered started up in my chest. Marisa. Lacey, Jaden and Jaden number two. We’d never sit at a lunch table and complain about smushy peas, or make fun of the athletic director who lingered a bit too close to the girls’ locker room. So much lost, and that didn’t even include Devon.

  He moved his hand from the wheel and rested i
t on my knee for a moment. The motion should have made me jump out of my skin, but it was an act of comfort. Besides, this was Edwin. He wouldn’t hurt me. “Trust me, I know what that’s like. Even after everything I saw and did with my fellow cadets, I was so optimistic. I thought my family would be waiting for me, that I’d get home and find my mom cooking arroz y gandules and my brother sitting at the table with a crossword puzzle.”

  That wasn’t what had happened.

  I glanced at Edwin and realized my hands were flat across my chest, as if holding in the emotions that tumbled there. I raised a hand hesitantly and then brushed my fingers over his forearm a few times. I could feel the flex of muscle underneath the warm skin, and the light dusting of hair tickled the undersides of my fingers. “Do you have extended family?” I asked.

  “Only in PR,” he said. “I don’t know them, though. I’ve never been. I thought one day we could take a family trip, and I’d finally get to see the place that was supposed to be such a big part of who I am. Meet my abuela and cousins.” He lifted his shoulders in a tight movement. “I have your family, though. I don’t know how I would have gotten through this without John and Mykhail, and all of you.” He glanced at me out of the corner of his eye, then sighed deeply. “You can’t replace the friends you’ve lost, but you’ll meet good people at school.”

  “I know. It’ll be different, though. There were so many little things I took for granted. Like calling each other and giggling over TV shows. Messaging each other online until all hours, or waking up at three a.m. with my cell phone next to my ear and hearing Marisa sleeping too. That sounds creepy now—I’m too old for all that—but I miss it at the same time.”

  “Um, you lived with the two creepiest best friends of all time. I once heard Arden call for John to come to the bathroom and bang her knees because she was blocked up. Any weird high jinks you want to get up to with new friends can’t surpass that.”