Todd

by Nicolai, Adam J

  Todd

  Adam J Nicolai

  Also by Adam J Nicolai (Click to view)

  Alex

  Rebecca

  Children of a Broken Sky

  A Season of Rendings (Coming 2016)

  Todd

  Adam J Nicolai

  Published by Lone Road Publishing, LLC for Amazon Kindle

  Copyright © 2015 Adam J Nicolai

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from Adam J Nicolai, except for brief, properly credited quotations.

  "Little Cosmic Dust" in News from the Glacier by John Haines ©1982 by John Haines, published by Wesleyan University Press. Used by Permission.

  Cover Design by Kit Foster and Adam J Nicolai

  Cover Image © 2015 Adam J Nicolai

  All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

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  Out of the cold and fleeing dust

  that is never and always,

  the silence and waste to come—

  this arm, this hand,

  my voice, your face, this love.

  John Haines (1924-2011)

  (1)

  Cleanse

  1

  He was in the front yard when it happened.

  A car swerved lazily around the bend, lurching over the curb and onto his neighbors' lawn. It chewed up the grass before rearing over their yew bushes and into their picture window. The glass shattered, sparkling like confetti in the summer sun.

  Alan fell still, frozen between investigating the car or retreating to his front door, until his tongue broke the paralysis.

  "Oh my God!" He ran to the car window. "Are you—?"

  The words died in his throat. The car was empty.

  No one in the car? His mind grappled with this. But how could it have turned—?

  "Dad?" Todd's head poked from the front door.

  "Get back in the house." Todd hesitated, and Alan snapped. "In the house, Todd! Now!" Todd disappeared, the screen door banging shut behind him.

  The car's engine was still idling, the tires grinding uselessly against the bushes. As Alan reached through the window to kill the engine, he saw empty clothes in the driver's seat, riddled with pinholes. He stared, trying to make sense of them, but his mind couldn't process the information. The last time he had felt this shaken was on 9/11, when he'd heard about the first plane.

  At the time, he'd assumed it was a drunk pilot. Weird, a little scary, but nothing earth-shattering. When the second plane hit, his understanding of the situation had tilted ninety degrees, dumping him into a freefall.

  That's how it felt when he heard, from beyond the nearest row of houses, the crash of another car.

  Then another.

  Then another.

  2

  "Brenda!" The instants flashed past him like a stuttering video: the screen door banging closed, the glimpse of Todd's alarmed look as Alan tore past him toward the stairs. "Brenda!" He took the steps two at a time, bounding up like a kid half his age. "Something's going on! Are you—?"

  Her jeans and t-shirt were on the top step, flecked with holes. He grabbed them. They felt thinner than they should have, like linen instead of cotton or denim. His thoughts snagged on this fact, the wheels spinning and going nowhere.

  "Dad?" Todd sounded scared.

  Alan called his wife's name again, stupidly, waiting for her to come out of the bathroom or around the corner. He scrambled up the last stair and into his daughter's bedroom. There was a spray of Legos on her floor, with a few of her favorite dolls and an empty dress. It was her favorite one, green and white, the hem growing just a tad short for her father's tastes. Pockmarked, fluttering in the breeze from the window.

  Through the open window he heard a roar that could have been thunder: the cars on highway 610—miles of them—slamming into each other, their coiled energy grinding slowly down to silence.

  3

  "Get in the basement," Alan said as he came back to the ground floor. He was clutching Brenda's and Allie's clothes. They were pulling apart like tissue paper.

  Todd darted off. No hesitation this time.

  Alan went to the window and peered out, expecting to hear sirens going off or jets overhead. Maybe spot a distant mushroom cloud—anything that would help make sense of this. Was it an attack? Some North Korean weapon no one had seen coming? But the sky outside was blue and unstained. There were no sirens, no jets.

  He ran after his son.

  Todd stood at the bottom of the steps, chewing his bottom lip, his eyes wide and his hair wild. He was waiting for Alan, expecting him to know what to do. Alan came down and grabbed him. The boy was glowing with sweat from his play; he was solid and real. "Are you okay?"

  "Yeah."

  The father in Alan wouldn't accept that answer. "Are you okay?" he repeated, pushing his son to arm's length and looking at him. The boy's eyes were still brown, his two front teeth still missing. The only holes in his clothes were the ones he'd put there, scooting down the stairs on his butt and sliding through the house on his knees.

  "Yeah. Is mommy upstairs?"

  "No." Her clothes were in his hands, flaking.

  "Where's Allie?"

  "I don't know." Alan closed the door, shutting out the light from the ground floor. The basement was finished, but it was a mess of prototype playing cards, customized dice, stacks and scraps of paper. Alan's workshop, where he'd labored on THE GAME for the last two years with nothing to show for it. The thrill he'd used to feel every time he entered this space had turned to a familiar shock of guilt months ago. Even right now, even in the middle of the emergency, he felt it. In contrast, the terror and urgency in his veins was almost a relief.

 
He led his son through the chaos to the little furnace room: a glorified storage area for mountains of old boxes, game consoles and outdated TVs. He plugged one of these in and turned it on.

  It was two in the afternoon on a Saturday, so most of the stations were playing reruns or syndicated shows. One of the 24-hour news stations was running some canned feature about self-driving cars with a bemused voice-over. The crawl at the bottom of the screen said someone had won a sports game, a missing child in Arkansas had been found, and Republicans were threatening to impeach the president. When the feature ended, the camera cut to a glitzy, hi-tech news room.

  The anchor's desk was empty.

  "Oh, gods," Alan breathed.

  "Is it a tornado?" Todd asked. Last night, the weather guy had been talking about possible severe weather in the next couple days; now, they'd gone to the basement. What else would it be?

  "No. I don't know." Alan spoke without thinking, hypotheses leaping off his tongue like suicide jumpers. "A weapon, I think. Some kind of attack."

  Todd's eyes widened in alarm. "An attack?"

  "I don't know, Todd." Alan stared at the screen, trying to think. "Okay? Just... wait."

  "Are we gonna be okay?"

  I don't know! he nearly snapped. Just shut up and let me think! He clamped it down. He was done with that; he'd promised. Even now.

  Breathe in, breathe out.

  "Yeah. We're fine. Whatever it was, I think it missed us."

  He pushed out of the furnace room before Todd could ask anything else; waded past the stacks of his stillborn ideas to the patio door and peered out through the curtains. The sky was clear, the neighbors' backyards empty. But there was a column of smoke coming from 610, and a plane winging its way southeast toward Bloomington, its nose tilted dangerously low.

  He didn't want to watch it go down, but he couldn't escape the stupid hope that it wouldn't. Maybe there are still people inside. Other survivors. Maybe we can go up to the airport and meet them, find out what's going—

  The plane disappeared in the distance behind the neighbor's house. The roar from the crash came a few seconds later.

  4

  He ventured upstairs for a few supplies—bottles of water, bags of chips, a flashlight—and took Todd back into the furnace room. That was where they'd go if there was a tornado; it was probably where they'd go if there was a nuclear bomb coming. He took him there because he didn't know what else to do.

  They sat on the cold concrete with the door closed while Alan fiddled with the radio. He jumped from station to station, hoping to hear an authoritative voice, maybe the grating buzz of the Emergency Broadcast System. All he found was dead air.

  Todd kept asking questions; Alan kept putting him off. Suddenly, crackling through a haze of static, came the synthetic chords of The Safety Dance. Alan felt a thrill of relief. Then he realized he was on 104 FM, a fully automated station, and the hope died.

  That was when his phone buzzed.

  From: Unknown

  where are you

  His heart jumped all over again. Maybe Brenda had survived. Her name was in his contacts list, of course, and should've shown up in the From field, but maybe there was something wrong with the satellite network. He could've wept, he was so relieved.

  In basement, he thumbed. Who is this?

  "Is it Grandma?" Todd asked.

  "I don't know," Alan said yet again. If Todd had spent his first eight years with the assumption that his father knew everything, he was surely questioning it today.

  "What did she say?"

  The phone buzzed again.

  stay there

  A ball of ice knotted in his stomach. Stop answering, something told him. Stop now.

  An image dawned in his head, like the curtains pulling back in a dark theater, of a drone hovering over the city and hunting for survivors.

  The phone buzzed again.

  help is coming

  And again:

  stay

  "What did she say?"

  "It's not her." He grabbed Todd's hand, pulled him out of the furnace room and back toward the stairs. "Come on."

  "Who was it?"

  "Shhh!" His heart was in his throat, pounding like a time bomb. He hauled his son through the minefield of junk in the basement. A wall of dusty sunlight, thin as a laser beam, lanced from the dark curtains. He snapped a glance that way, expecting to see something horrible in his backyard, but the gap was too narrow to spot anything.

  They made the stairs, emerged into the living room, and cut around toward the front door. The curtains in the kitchen were wide open. No drones in the backyard.

  But his wife's smartphone, sitting on the kitchen counter, was glowing. The screen read:

  where are you

  5

  He stared at it, his heart crawling up his throat, and Todd said, "Where are we going?"

  The boy had always been a bit heedless, so wrapped up in his own head that he wouldn't notice what was happening right in front of him, but no one could be this oblivious. Do you see the message on Mom's phone? Alan wanted to snap. Do you see what's going on? Do you understand that I have no idea what to do?

  But Todd had been calm so far. If he started freaking out, everything would get more complicated. Better to answer his questions, try to keep him from panicking. "I'm not sure it's safe here. We're going somewhere else."

  "Where?"

  "Just—!" Alan whirled, took his shoulders, looked him in the eyes. "Todd, I need you to be quiet right now. Okay? Like in the car, when we ask you to stop fighting with Allie. Trust me. Okay?"

  "Okay."

  "Can you do that?"

  "Yeah. But Dad."

  "What?"

  "Where are Mommy and Allie?"

  The question was a gaping chasm, a pit of horrors. Alan slapped a lid on it. "I don't know right now. We'll try to find them." He squeezed Todd's shoulder, a token effort to calm him that probably felt as unnatural to the boy as it did to him. "Look, I'm scared too. Quiet, now."

  It doesn't even matter. A mantra of dread started up in his mind: They're all dead. They're all dead. They're all dead.

  It was the apocalypse he'd been expecting in one form or another since he'd been Todd's age. He didn't know what had happened, but it was really all the same, whether you called it some god's judgment or the sun exploding or a tiny change in the atmosphere's composition that triggered mass death. He'd always been waiting for it, and today, it was here: the catastrophic failure of all life on Earth. Game over, man.

  He ignored the mantra, ignored his wife's glowing phone, and opened the front door.

  The car that had crashed earlier was still there, halfway through the neighbor's window. Beyond the houses in the cul-de-sac, columns of smoke were drifting skyward. Car and house alarms blared in the distance; between their discordant screams, he thought he heard fire. But the cul-de-sac itself was deceptively normal, a bubble of eerie silence.

  They ran across the yard to the Ngs' place, the next house over. Alan knocked on the front door, and there was no answer.

  "Brian?" he called before knocking again. "Is anybody in there?" His fingers shivered, his ears straining for any sound. Please answer. Please, someone.

  He gave the door a full-on pounding. "Hello?"

  "Maybe they're not home," Todd supplied.

  Right, Alan thought. Yes. Definitely not home.

  He tried the knob, and the door swung open. He rushed Todd in, then shut and locked it behind them.

  "I don't think we should be in here," Todd said. Alan shushed him.

  "Hello?" he called again, stupidly, because he knew there was no one here. "Is anybody—?"

  There were two sets of empty clothes on the stools at the center island. He didn't have to touch them to know they'd be paper-thin.

  "Dad, look. They left their clothes on the chairs."

  "Yeah." On the kitchen counter, the Ngs had set up a little charging station, where everyone could plug in their smartphones. The three
currently charging all had the same question:

  where are you

  His mind whirled. He wanted to sit down.

  How many people had gotten the text? Why?

  Easy, he answered himself. To see who responded. Find out who they missed.

  "Shit." He hadn't told them where he was, but they could trace the location of his phone, couldn't they? Triangulate it or something, like CSI?

  He turned his phone off, hesitated, then grabbed the Ngs' hammer and smashed it. Todd watched, eyes wide. "What...?" he started, but Alan had managed to shock him into silence.

  Gotta get out of here. The phone was a ruin, but they could still trace the signal. Couldn't they?

  They made everyone disappear. They killed everyone at once. Yes, they can trace the fucking signal.

  The lid on his pit of horrors lurched. A wild, gibbering voice leaked out of it.

  What is this oh gods what are they what happened they're dead oh my god they're all dead—

  "Why did you break your phone?" Todd asked.

  "Come on. We're leaving." Some part of Alan's mind, fighting to put that lid back, marveled at how steady his voice was.

  "I want to check upstairs and see if Ethan is here." Todd started into the living room. Alan grabbed for his arm and missed.

  "Todd!"

  "Just real quick! I want to borrow—"

  "No! Stop it!" Alan grabbed his son and hauled him outside.

  6

  He didn't throw him to the grass, but he wanted to. "When I say to come, you come! No more fucking around! You understand?"

  His son flinched like Alan had hit him. Alan knew the look: he'd seen it a thousand times. Easy, he tried to admonish himself, but the warning was lost in a wash of panic.

  "We don't have time for that, Todd! Everyone—!"

  Everyone is dead! he wanted to scream. Don't you see that? Are you that fucking dense? Everyone is dead! He bit it back, but it fought him. It wanted out. "I'm trying to keep us safe. Okay?"

  "Okay!" Todd barked.

  Don't you fucking snap at me!

  Alan grabbed his hand and ran back to their garage.