Was that what he wanted for Todd?
He was jumping on broken glass for Christ's sakes! Alan's dad cried, incensed. So you ripped into him, big fucking deal, at least he's not dead!
He's eight, Brenda said, and you're 38. You're the one who should be mature enough to watch your tongue.
Fuck her, Dad spat. She's gone now. No more nightly lectures about how much better she is at parenting. No more critiquing everything you say, no more sanctimonious judgments every time you slip and snap a little. So you snapped, so fucking what. She's gone. Fuck her.
And a third voice, the father he wanted to be: I'm sorry, Todd. I didn't mean to snap. You just scared me half to death jumping like that. I love you too much to see you get hurt and I overreacted.
He wanted to say it. His tongue fought to say it.
But it wasn't him.
25
A blackened wasteland stretched westward on the other side of the bridge: the aftermath of the fire. They stared at it until the reek drove them east, toward home, retracing their steps through the backyards and parking lots along
West River Road. When the street finally cleared enough to be driveable, they ducked into the next home they saw, found the car keys, and stole an SUV. The road back to the 610 bridge had some downed trees and plenty of stray branches, but wasn't in much worse shape than it had been the day before. They stopped at the hardware store and picked up the siphon pump they needed, along with a couple of gas cans. It took a few tries to get the thing working, but eventually he managed to fill the cans by draining one of the cars in the parking lot. Feeling more like Crusoe by the minute, he went back in for a few other essentials: more batteries, some utility knives, a tool set, and a whole bunch of extension cords.
On the way home, they drove past the grocery store. How much food had rotted in there since the power went out yesterday morning? The milk had probably turned by now, and the meat too. It had been right there, and he had screwed up the chance to get it.
There's powdered milk, and dried meat, he tried to tell himself. Plenty of bagged beef jerky in there. We'll be fine. He took a deep breath, and tried to believe it.
610 looked as terrible as ever, but the bridge was still clear. Another ten minutes, and they saw home. "Well, look at that," Alan said. "It's still here."
A neighbor on the other side of the cul-de-sac did have a tree down, but for the most part, the whole area had weathered the storm well. He made Todd come with him as he finished a visual inspection of the house, making sure there was no damage. All the glass was intact, all the walls in one piece. Lucky.
They went inside. With no small effort, he managed to move the generator out to the deck, then brought up the gas cans and filled it up. When it started on the first pull, he could've wept with relief.
The thing had four outlets. He ran extension cords into the house, then plugged in the fridge, the freezer, and a lamp. "All right," he said. "Go ahead. 3DS right here."
Todd dashed back to grab his game machine. That was when Alan noticed that one of the lanterns they'd left on the counter yesterday was now sitting on the couch.
"Did you move that lantern?" he asked when Todd came back.
Todd looked. "No. I don't think so."
"Well think back, Todd, when I was on the deck setting up the generator, did you move it?"
"No." He shook his head emphatically. "No way."
They'd left both the lanterns sitting on the counter yesterday; Alan was sure of it. Yes, there'd been a storm since then, but all the windows were intact, the doors had been closed, and nothing else was moved. The wind hadn't done this.
Get out of the house, something told him. There is something here.
He took Todd and did a thorough inspection all over again: basement, ground floor, upstairs. Nothing else was out of place.
With the fridge running and a light on, the place actually felt like home. Todd was going to play on his 3DS, just like normal; they could have dinner in the living room watching TV if they wanted, just like normal. The word normal had never been so tantalizing. A niggling confusion about where they'd left the lanterns yesterday wasn't enough to justifying leaving now.
You said you'd start making the right calls, the same voice whispered.
I am, Alan insisted. This is the right call. What, we're supposed to sleep in some weird house every time one of us moves something and forgets about it?
No, it shot back, you're supposed to sleep in a weird house every night from here on out. You should be on the move, trying to find other people, not just sitting here like an idiot, waiting to die.
Alan gritted his teeth, scanning the living room one more time. Even if something had moved the lantern—a raccoon that had survived, or something—there was no evidence that it was dangerous. He shook his head; he was sick of lurching from plan to plan, driven forward solely by panic. "Come on. We're going to the grocery store."
26
Just like they had at the hardware store, cars had shattered the glass storefront at Crown Foods. They had bulled into the registers, knocking over candy and magazine displays, and then idled until they ran out of gas. One was still going even now, two full days after crashing. Alan had Todd wait outside as he crunched through the glass to turn it off.
Inside, the smell of exhaust was powerful, but not overwhelming; most of it was escaping outside. Crown had a lot of food and they couldn't afford to lose it, but it wouldn't do them any good if they died of carbon monoxide poisoning, either. He stood for awhile, breathing, to make sure it was safe.
Crown had a smaller entrance on the far end of the building's front, which hadn't been damaged. They went in that way and started shopping. The sunlight from the storefront dwindled away quickly, forcing them to break out their lanterns. The storm had wreaked havoc on the aisles, throwing boxes, cans, and empty clothes everywhere. Their lantern light bobbed over it all like the world's last lighthouse.
Midway to the meat department, the smell hit them.
Todd's nose wrinkled. "Ugh."
"Yeah. That's the meat, going bad." Damn it. Alan had known it was a long shot, but he'd been hoping—
"Do we still have to go over there?"
"Well, yeah. The bakery's over there." He'd be damned if he was going to miss out on the world's last doughnuts, even if they were a couple days old.
The refrigerated meat was a total bust, the stench nearly overpowering. It turned out to be too close to the pastries, after all; there was no way he could eat anything that had the stain of that stink on it.
They grabbed as much fresh produce as they could, loading up five bags' worth of veggies and fruit, and then hit the bread section, tossing loaves into the cart by the armload. Alan wanted to grab as much of the fresh stuff as possible while they still could. Now that they had a working freezer, maybe they could make it last—and he figured the canned and boxed stuff would last just as long here as it would at home.
"Remember when I found that flashlight on the wall?" Todd asked as they headed toward the bottled water.
Alan felt a flash of irritation. Yeah, that was yesterday. Was it really so great that they had to start reminiscing about it immediately? He opened his mouth to say something terse, and Brenda stopped him.
Calm down. He's eight. He probably only has three or four years of real memory. Of course he starts reminiscing faster. Why get all bent out of shape about it?
That was a good question. Most people would find it endearing, not annoying. But Alan wasn't most people. He couldn't just parent the right way without thinking about it. Everything had to be a titanic struggle.
"Dad, remember when—"
"Yes," he snapped, then tried to cover his tracks: "Yeah, of course." He bit back that was just yesterday, and belatedly added: "That was awesome."
Todd grinned in the lantern light. "I just felt along the wall and it was right there! I couldn't believe it!"
He looked so goddamned proud. The urge rose automatically to take him down a notch, but Al
an recognized it. Fought it.
"That was awesome," he repeated. Todd's smile broadened. Despite himself, Alan felt an answering grin tugging at his own lips. He even ruffled his son's hair.
It was getting pretty dirty. The kid needed a bath. Alan wondered if the water was still running at home.
They'd finished up and started angling toward the exit when Todd jerked to a stop. "Hang on," he said. "Don't we have to pay for this stuff?"
Alan halted, struck dumb. He doesn't get it, he realized. He really doesn't get it. "Todd, there's... there's no one to pay."
"Oh," he said. "Yeah." He resumed walking, and Alan stared at his back. Should he say something else? Force a reckoning of some kind? Finally he just shook his head and kept going.
On the way out, they passed a claw machine game: one of those big glass contraptions loaded with stuffed animals that no one ever won. Todd stopped again, enthralled by it as always. How many times had they rushed past one of these things, too busy to let the kids give it a shot? Being a parent meant feeling guilty all the time, that was something Alan had realized quickly, but he suddenly wished they could've stopped for them more often—for Todd, but especially for Allie.
Todd put his hands on the glass—another thing his parents always told him not to do. Even now, Alan felt a knee-jerk impulse to tell him not to smudge the glass.
"I guess it'll never work again," Todd said.
"Maybe not." Never was a big word. Alan didn't like those absolute words. Never. Always. Everybody. But never was the right word here, wasn't it? The machine might as well have been a relic from a lost civilization. The last chance to play with it had flashed past, and they hadn't even known.
Everything tilted sideways. What the hell were they doing? What was the point of this—of any of this? Freezing bread? Why? So they could live in agonizing loneliness, without their family or their friends or even any other members of their species? What was the point of that?
It's not forever. It's just until—
The voice that trampled that thought was his own, dripping with scorn. Until what? Until rescue? You know goddamned well there's no rescue. You tell Todd that to keep him from going crazy. You tell yourself that to fucking coddle yourself. But it's a lie. Everyone is gone. Everyone in the U.S., everyone on the continent, everyone overseas.
He recognized that bleakness. It had the power to shut him down. It had done it before, for weeks and months on end: that stark realization that nothing mattered. He'd fought it the best he could, by focusing on the things that mattered to him, by trying to live in the present instead of the terrifying possibilities, but the present was pretty shitty now, wasn't it? The things that had anchored him—his daughter, his friends, his wife (oh, gods, his wife)—were gone now. He was standing in an abandoned grocery store, in an empty city, in an empty country, on an empty planet, spinning through blackness with no end. He could scream, and no one would hear him. He could kill himself, and no one would know.
The darkness was so deep, so sudden, that it stole his breath.
Todd had dug a couple quarters out of his pocket.
"That..." Alan started, fighting a sudden clench of anxiety in his chest. "That's not gonna work, pal."
"I know. But I just want to try it." Todd hurried to get the coins in before Alan stopped him. The quarters thunked, and nothing happened, because the machine was dead.
Todd was going to learn this lesson. Eventually he would realize there's no point in trying the coins if the machine is dead. That just because you're optimistic, or have a wild hope, doesn't mean anything good will happen. He'd realize that all hope did was delude you long enough to make it to the next day.
That vapid grin, that stupid, pointless pride, would turn to ash and blow away.
In other words, he'll become like me.
The thought seized him like a heart attack. He fought it by saying, "Which one did you want?"
Todd glanced back at him, already flinching, bracing for Alan's wrath. "That one." He pointed at a pink pony with wings, its eyes taking up half its head and its snout sparkling. "It reminds me of Allie."
"Back up." Alan grabbed his arm and pulled him back.
"Sorry." He thought Alan was berating him for not listening. Of course he did. That was their normal mode of interaction: he tried to be vivacious and alive, and Alan tried to grind him down. "I knew it wouldn't work, but—"
Alan smashed the glass open with a grocery basket. Todd gave a shout of surprise, recoiling.
"Here." Alan shook the broken glass off the pony, then ran his fingers over it to make sure it was safe. "It reminds me of her, too. Take good care of it, okay? For all you know, she's part of it now. Maybe she wanted us to find it."
Mumbo jumbo. Supernatural hocus-pocus.
"But... how could she—?"
"I don't know, Todd. How could everyone just disappear? Where did she go? We don't know. We know things never really go away—remember I told you that?—so where did she go? Where did they all go?" He was waving a torch, screaming at that darkness, beating it back with sheer willpower. It was working for now, but it never worked for long. "When you don't have any answers, sometimes you have to make some up." Alan grabbed his son's shoulders. "And sometimes the only meaning things have is the meaning we give them."
Todd didn't understand; Alan could tell. That was all right. The boy had his pony.
Maybe the speech had been more for himself.
27
That night Alan turned both lanterns and the lamp on, keeping the living room brilliant as night fell. He took a risk and ran the surge protector into the last open outlet on the generator, where it drew power for the TV and the DVD player both. They'd had some meat in the freezer already, as it turned out, and natural gas was still coming to the stove.
They had hamburgers for dinner, and watched Frozen.
Todd sang along with the songs, an act of defiance nearly equal to all the lights blaring in the living room. Alan couldn't bring himself to join him, but Todd didn't need him to. He let the boy have his fun and tried not to think of how their noise was carrying in the darkness across the empty city. He tried not to wonder if their house could be seen from space: the brilliant network of Earth's old nervous system reduced to a single, quivering point of light.
And it won't even last, he reminded himself. The power will run out. The disc will get scratched. We'll have to relocate.
But the old motto came to the rescue. It was all here now. They had it now.
When the movie was over, they watched it again.
28
Then he woke to darkness.
He could hear Todd on the living room floor, breathing the breath of deep sleep. Otherwise the silence was total, like it had been the other morning at Grandma's house.
Shouldn't be this quiet, he thought. Generator must've run out.
He fumbled in the dark for the lantern, shielding it with his body so the light wouldn't wake Todd. The boy was a tangle of limbs and pillows, his cheek marred with drool. He'd be terrified if he woke while Alan was gone checking on the generator, but he was out cold, and the deck was barely twenty feet away. Alan decided to risk it.
The sliding door to the deck was ajar, just enough to let all the extension cords snake through. He slid it open and slipped out. As he suspected, the generator was dead. He couldn't risk their food thawing, so he set the lantern on a deck chair and refilled the gas in its dimming light.
The generator roared back to life. A second later the fridge lurched back as well. He heaved a relieved sigh as he sat back in the deck chair.
He looked up, and the night sky seized him.
The comforting diffuse grey he had always known had been replaced with an alien sky, livid with stars. The Milky Way sprawled over his backyard like a scar of light.
He grappled with vertigo, feeling suddenly that he was at the lip of a great fall. Far from being secure on the ground, he was a microbe on a pebble hurtling through the nothingness. Only laws h
e couldn't comprehend kept him from falling endlessly into the eternal black, and he could fall for a thousand years into that bloated darkness and its mysteries would be no closer. The view wouldn't change. He was nothing against it; his entire planet was less than a speck of dust.
He blinked and forced his eyes down, swallowing nausea. In another life, surrounded by his family and able to return to the comforting light pollution of his cul-de-sac, he may have appreciated the feeling of his own insignificance, even found it awe-inspiring. Now it only brought him horror.
He stood and reached for the deck door, but another sight snagged the corner of his vision, and he looked up again despite himself. It was the blue star from a few nights ago, the one he'd thought was a satellite. It was smaller than the North Star, but far more vibrant—like someone had pricked the fabric of space with a needle, betraying a glimpse of endless, brilliant blue beyond.
It's not a satellite. Flush with the revelations of finding the Milky Way in his own backyard, he was suddenly certain. It's this. It's everything that's happened.
It's coming here.
But that was madness: paranoia brought on by the trauma of the last few days and his sudden confrontation with the sprawling stars. He turned his back on it and went inside, telling himself that his thin walls could shield him from the universe.
29
The roar of a flushing toilet woke him.
He opened his eyes to sunlight and the rattle of the generator; felt a vague sense of relief that the water was still running. "Good morning," he said when Todd came back into the living room.
"Morning." Todd ambled into the kitchen and poured a bowl of cereal. He opened the fridge looking for the milk, then made a face. "I forgot about this stuff," he said as he grabbed a pitcher of reconstituted milk. Alan had mixed it up yesterday, since all the normal milk had gone bad.
"Bon appétit."
"What does that mean?"
"It just means... enjoy your food."
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