Todd

by Nicolai, Adam J

  "Where are we even going?"

  He opened the garage door. "Get in the car."

  "Where are we going?"

  "I don't know! Just get in the car, would you please just get in the damn car?"

  Todd got in, and Alan slammed his door.

  He backed into the street and started driving. Their little neighborhood was a nest of curving roads and dead-end cul-de-sacs, a fresh horror around every corner.

  A crashed car, shoving idly into a garage door. A spilled bike, empty clothing pooled around it like a puddle of blood. The sights forced Alan to take stock of the situation, paradoxically calming him down.

  Todd finally began to notice what was happening. "Why are all those cars crashed?"

  "The people are gone. They were driving and then they just disappeared."

  "So the cars crashed because no one was driving them?"

  "You got it."

  Todd chewed on this as they meandered through the suburban maze. There weren't many crashed cars, but there were enough that Alan had to stay slow, to be ready to wind around them.

  They passed a bike path with another pile of clothes, this one with an empty dog leash.

  "Why did they disappear?"

  Alan took a deep breath, trying not to snap. He's as scared as I am, he tried to remember. Or if he isn't, he will be soon. "I don't know for sure."

  "Did everyone disappear?"

  "I don't—" His voice died. That word—everyone—echoed in his head.

  How far did it go? He'd only seen his immediate neighborhood. Maybe it had only happened in these few blocks. Maybe—

  A memory of the empty news desk hit him like a blow to the stomach.

  "I don't think so," he managed, trying to believe it. Everyone was a big word. It couldn't have been everyone.

  "Did Mommy and Allie disappear?"

  Alan's hands started shaking on the wheel. He flipped the rearview mirror down so he could see his son's face. Todd was already looking at it, waiting for him, his face pinched and focused.

  "I think so," Alan said.

  A black silence followed the words. Alan threw noise at it, trying to keep it away.

  "I found their clothes upstairs, the clothes they were wearing. Just like the... you know the clothes we saw at the Ngs' house?"

  "They're gone?" Todd's voice broke. His face became something Alan had never seen before. "Just like that?"

  Yep, just like that! a nasty, spiteful voice spat. I know Mommy was always your favorite, but she's gone now, and you're stuck with me. Your lazy, mean failure of a dad.

  Even now? Alan threw back. You have to be petty and jealous now? What the fuck is wrong with you?

  It was an old back-and-forth, Dad Alan and Asshole Alan, and while they argued, Todd looked like he'd been stabbed. "Hey," Alan said.

  "But how could they just disappear?" The word was a whimper. "Are they coming back?"

  "I don't know yet. Hey." Alan tried to reach back for his son's hand, feeling like the world's biggest jackass, but either he couldn't find it or Todd wouldn't take it. "We're still here. All right? We'll figure it out."

  "Was that what you... when you said some kind of attack? Was that—"

  "That's what I meant. But I don't know, Todd. I'm just guessing. It might've just been an accident." Wild visions danced in his head: melting reactors and broken containment seals. His searching hand floundered; he gave up and put it back on the wheel. "Okay?"

  Todd's face pinched again. "Can we find them?"

  "We'll try." At least the gibbering in his head was gone now. His son's need had shoved it back in its hole. "Right now we just have to get away from the house, all right? I'm not sure it's safe there. Okay?"

  Todd's eyes drifted away from his father's, back to the empty world outside the window. A tear streaked his right cheek.

  "Hey. Look at me. Okay?"

  Todd looked at him through the mirror. "Okay."

  I love you. The words were on his lips, but Alan hesitated. He always did. I love you. What was the big deal? Dads could tell their sons they loved them.

  But Asshole Alan scoffed. You'll just sound like a prick. Brenda disappears and suddenly you're Mr. Mom? Give me a break.

  He let it go.

  7

  At 115th, the first major intersection, the damage was worse.

  The cars were piled seven- and eight-deep. Looking down the boulevard, Alan saw even more that had run off the road. Some had smashed into the fancy retaining walls that lined one side of the street. Some of these were moving, dragging aimlessly against the walls like asylum inmates. A couple, here and there, were on fire. He wondered if they would explode eventually, like cars always did in the movies.

  Todd's mouth was agape. "What happened?"

  "Same thing as back there. The drivers disappeared. There's just more cars here." If a busy local street was this bad, the freeways would be impassable. Anything busier than their tiny suburban neighborhood would be. "We'll have to walk."

  They got out and trotted through the intersection, giving the burning cars a broad berth. Most of the vehicles were still idling, shoving lazily against each other like rude customers at a buffet. Alan imagined one of the SUVs jerking loose and running them down.

  "Someone should turn these cars off," Todd said. "They're making a lot of pollution."

  A lame chuckle scraped out of Alan's throat. "Not my top priority." They swerved left, to the front of the column, so they wouldn't have to climb over any cars that could suddenly start moving. "But hey, when they run out of gas, their polluting days will be over."

  Alan wanted to be away from home, in case something did come to investigate his text, so he steered them toward Brenda's mom's house. It was a twenty-minute walk past the intersection, down quiet side streets dappled with shadows.

  "Are we going to Grandma's?"

  "Yeah," Alan said.

  "Is she... do you think she..."

  "I don't know. All we can do is see."

  There was no one on the streets. No walkers, no bikers.

  No birdsong. No dogs, Alan noticed, remembering the empty leash. Did it nail all the animals, too?

  He peered into backyards and tree cover, hoping for a glimpse of a squirrel or a bird, but saw nothing. The weird text message exchange had been nearly 40 minutes ago, and he was starting to feel like they'd dodged a bullet. But the eerie silence, the total emptiness, replaced his earlier panic with a thrumming disquiet.

  When he'd been little and still religious, he'd woken up more than once to the certainty that the house was empty. Every time it happened—every time—he'd had to fight down the panic that the Rapture had happened while he was sleeping: that Jehovah had taken back His faithful followers and left Alan to die on a planet sentenced to hell. The first time it happened Alan had started screaming, and his mom had run in from the backyard to reassure him. Every time after, he'd kept his terror inside until a fervent search turned up one of his parents, and the oily sheen of horror would slowly fade back into normal life.

  Seeing all the empty yards brought those mornings back with a vengeance. The old indoctrination reared up, surprising him. You were wrong. God took everyone, but He left you, because you were the worst kind of sinner: one who used to believe, but turned his back.

  It did scare him, for a second, but he'd reasoned his way out of that particular fairy tale a long time ago, and the rational part of his mind shot back fast. Really? In the entire city of Brooklyn Park, everyone was holy enough to get into Heaven except me and my eight-year-old son? The argument was reflexive and dripping with disdain. It sent that particular fear flapping off like a pricked balloon.

  No, he didn't believe in the Rapture anymore. But obviously something was going on, and it was easy to feel small again: desperate for a sign that he wasn't alone, drowning slowly in dread.

  He fought it. He couldn't be that little boy right now. He had one of his own.

  Grandma's was one of the older houses, all flaking
grey paint and crooked gutters. Todd's mouth became a tight line when he saw it. He ran ahead.

  "Grandma!" His voice was fraught with dread, a macabre parody of his normal cheerful cry. Alan trotted after him. "Grandma!" It was weird, how loud his voice was on the empty street.

  The front door was unlocked. Inside, they saw she'd been making a sandwich. Her empty clothes were on the kitchen floor.

  Todd knew what it meant this time. He grabbed the clothes, staring. Alan would have said something, but nothing he could say would matter.

  "They feel so weird."

  "Yeah. Thin. Like tissue paper or something."

  Todd didn't answer. He just stood there, brows furrowed, eyes churning.

  "How could they just disappear?" At eight, he still sounded sometimes like he was trying to mimic the speech of adults. Every sentence trembled with melodrama and outrage, but there was an authentic rawness in his voice now. "It's like a magic trick. They had to go somewhere!"

  "Maybe they did." There was no residue, no ash smearing the clothes. Things never really disappear, Alan had told his daughter once, when she'd asked about death. They can change into energy, and energy can change back into matter. But nothing ever goes away.

  Grandma's old cell phone was on the counter, the blinking light by the antenna signaling an unread text. Alan opened the phone and saw what he expected.

  where are you

  "Where do you think they went?" Todd said. "Maybe they got... like... teleported, or something?"

  "I don't know." Alan closed the phone, set it back on the counter. "We'll look tomorrow, okay?" Better to stay in the house for now. It would be dark in a few hours, and Alan didn't want to be out in it.

  8

  They tried the TV. It was a little after 5, time for the broadcast news. Every station that would normally have a live show had gone to static. There were canned dramas and commercials running on a few of the other stations. Alan wondered how many stations were automated, and to what degree.

  He left Todd in the living room watching a repeat of some reality show and went to Grandma's desktop computer in her bedroom. CNN and all the local news sites were down. He went global and tried to pull up the Guardian website. It was down. The only other international site that came to mind was Al Jazeera, also down.

  Amazon.jp was up, but that wasn't a news site. Google was up. Alan searched for "British phone directory," thinking to pick out some random phone number in Britain, just to see if someone would pick up. Then he realized he hadn't even tried 911 yet.

  He tried it on the landline phone. No one answered.

  His mom had died a few years ago, but Dad was retired in Florida. It was the first out-of-state number that came to mind. Alan never wanted to talk to his dad, but in this one rare case, hearing his voice would be a relief.

  Alan punched in the numbers and waited. Dad didn't answer.

  Typical.

  He tried other numbers: a cousin that lived in Washington, another family friend in Florida. When no one answered he started through every phone number he could think of, local or otherwise.

  They were gone.

  "Everybody?" he demanded of the empty room. It was impossible. How could everyone just disappear? A virus he could understand. A mushroom cloud he could understand. But the human species didn't even possess a weapon that could—

  He froze, suddenly certain.

  The human species doesn't.

  "No," he said aloud. "Come on." Even if it was something alien, we would've seen it coming. We have the Hubble, the ISS, we have tons of telescopes aimed at the sky at every hour of the day. We aren't Neanderthals anymore. We'd know.

  He went back to Google, his fingers hovering as he debated what to search for. "Unidentified space object" summoned a slew of conspiracy theories and corny pseudoscience, none of which was very recent. "Hubble strange object" revealed more clickbait links, all of which led to sites that were down or eventually explained the object as an unusual asteroid. Abruptly, he felt stupid.

  "Did you check on the internet?" Todd asked.

  Alan started and glanced up. "Yeah. I can't find anything." He opted to keep his crazier ideas to himself for now. "Why don't you keep watching TV for awhile?"

  "That channel went off. There's nothing else good on."

  "All right. Just..." He didn't want Todd here while he did this. He wanted to be free to think out loud without scaring the kid.

  The look on Todd's face said it was too late for that.

  When Todd was first born, Alan had felt inadequate all the time. He never seriously considered leaving—he could never do that to his family—but he had been a child himself not long before. Nothing changed when he became a father. He didn't get any special insights, no magic power-ups. But now there was this being, his own flesh and blood, who looked to him for everything. He was responsible for his survival every hour of every day.

  It had made him want to demand of the universe, What the hell were you thinking? Who the hell am I? I can't do this.

  He was supposed to know what to do? He was supposed to be in charge?

  Thankfully, Brenda had done a better job of feigning competence than Alan could, and the feeling had faded. By the time Allie was born, Alan had almost tricked himself into believing he could handle it.

  But the look on Todd's face at that moment brought it all back. Suddenly his son wasn't eight years old but eight hours, defenseless and naïve, looking up at him like he was a god.

  You used to love that look, Dad Alan reminded him. You used to scoop him up when was two and three, carry him around like a trophy. You both loved it. You used to kiss him on the head. What happened to that?

  Sure, as Todd had gotten bigger, Alan's back had started to twinge, and his ability to carry him had slipped away with the years. But pawning it off on that was a copout. It wasn't Todd that had changed. It was Alan.

  His depressive episode, his failure with THE GAME, the fighting with Brenda, the unspoken battle lines that forced everyone in the house to pick a side. And it was all stupid, it was all so stupid and pointless.

  He'd meant to send him back to the living room, maybe tell him to watch a DVD. Instead he said, "Are you scared?"

  Todd nodded like a bird, his chin bobbing, his eyes looking away.

  Come here, Alan thought to say. Why couldn't he say it? What had changed? "I'm still here," he whispered. "You're still here. We'll be okay."

  "I miss Grandma."

  "I miss her too."

  "How could everyone just disappear?"

  "I don't know."

  "I miss Allie and Mommy."

  "I miss them too."

  "I should've let Allie play Mario yesterday. She wanted to and I didn't let her. I should've let her."

  "Yeah." Alan's chest tightened. "I know."

  9

  As night came on, the TV channels flickered out like dying stars. When the last one went, Todd started asking again about Allie and Grandma and Mommy. Where had they gone? How could they find them? Alan had no answers, so he found a deck of cards and taught his son to play blackjack.

  In one game, Todd stayed on a 19. Alan, playing the house, matched it and won on the tie.

  "That's not fair," Todd said.

  "Well... who has to pay if you win?"

  Todd screwed up his face, thinking. "The house?"

  "Yeah, the house. So they take a risk every time."

  Todd shook his head. "It's still not fair."

  Alan shrugged. "Why do you say that?"

  He had always tried to challenge his kids to explain themselves, to justify their gut reactions. Allie had always gone along with it, but Todd hated it. He preferred his mom's easy rationalizations and simple answers.

  Critical thinking might not have been the most common skill among eight-year-olds, but it had taken Alan a long time to realize its value, and he'd never wanted either of his kids to suffer the same wait. He'd never been the breadwinner in the family—even less so since his coloss
al failure at self-employment—but he always figured he could at least get his kids ready for the constant barrage of scams the world would throw at them.

  Scams? He felt an instant of freefall, like the world had been yanked out from beneath his feet. What scams? There's no one left to run them.

  "Well, 'cause it's not fair..." Todd grabbed the next card and flipped it: the five of spades. "See? You win on a tie and if I get a card again you still win. There's no way for me to win." He was wounded and angry. "It's not fair! Why even play this stupid game?"

  Life's not fair, Alan thought to say, but he'd always felt like his kids deserved better than tired platitudes. He thought about arguing the point, and decided against it. "All right." They put the cards away and pulled out Grandma's checkers set.

  The first explosion came around 10 PM.

  A car, probably—one of the ones up on 115th, its spilled fuel somehow igniting. The fire silhouetted the trees, a billowing cloak of rage. Todd was dumbstruck as Alan debated whether they needed to run.

  He wasn't surprised that something had exploded; he was surprised that more things hadn't. There were crashed cars everywhere. Even if he took his son out on the road, the risk would still be high. At least from Grandma's house, they could see the fire.

  He decided to wait. If the fire spread toward them, they could always run then.

  Another explosion came an hour later, this one farther away. More followed, punctuating the night like cracks of thunder.

  The games stopped. They huddled in the living room with the lights on. Todd dozed in fits and starts. Alan stepped outside once, scanning the nearest streets for cars that might be leaking gas, and concluded the street was as safe as it was going to get.

  As he turned to head back in, he caught a glimpse of a blue star in the sky, glaring like an LED headlight. He was no astronomer, but the star's brilliance struck him as exceptional. A satellite, he thought. Maybe it's coming down.

  The clouds hid it, and he went inside. Sometime after 3 AM, he passed out on the couch.

  10

  He dreamt of the Earth: a ball of rock hurtling around a naked fire.