Todd

by Nicolai, Adam J

  Can't you just leave me alone?

  "What are you going to do?" Todd presses.

  "About what?"

  "About the food!"

  Something snaps, something Alan didn't even know was there. He lurches upright. "Jesus Christ!" he roars. "The food! You think the food fucking matters?"

  Todd shrinks back, eyes wide. He has no idea what he's done. No idea who his dad really is.

  "No one's coming, Todd! Jesus fuck, you fucking idiot, no one's coming! We're dead! We're fucking dead! We're gonna fucking die here! We—" The words trip on the rust in his throat, and dissolve into hacking.

  Ruin him, a voice from inside the black car whispers. Ruin him, and then it won't matter.

  Fucking destroy him.

  Todd's face has crumpled; his lip quivers like a harp string. He's as pathetic as Alan. Well done. Father of the year. This is the part where Brenda should burst into the room, pulling the boy away, fixing Alan with a withering glare. Without her, it was only a matter of time until Alan broke him.

  The father in his head is screaming, hurling himself against the bars of his cage, but the driver of that black car is in charge here now, and he's smiling.

  While his son is down, Alan stabs him with words.

  "There are two people left, Todd. You and me." He's dropped his voice; the words are precise and insidious. "We are going to wither away here until we die. No one is coming, because there's no one to come. Mommy's not coming, and Allie's not coming either. There's no police, no army." He gestures to the roof. "I put that sign up there to trick you. That's it. No one's ever gonna see it—it was just for you."

  Todd starts to cry.

  "And I don't know what's happening, but I can tell you those blue things, those Blurs, that we've been hiding from in the bedroom upstairs? They're everywhere, Todd. I've seen them.

  "And you know what I've been thinking about, here on the couch this whole time, while you've been busy playing video games and building forts and making a pile of shit in the next house? I've been thinking about killing myself. Because it's either that, or let them do it."

  Alan is panting. "So you tell me... why I should give a shit... that there's no food in the house."

  He's never seen his son's face like this: tear-streaked and horror-stricken. The boy is broken, hitching with sobs, but around them he manages: "Because you... you have to eat food... or you'll die."

  His son's concern manages to touch him; its light filters down through the cave, strangling in the darkness, until the father inside sees the barest hint of it. That side of Alan wants to hug the boy, to apologize and search for some reason to go on. He is defiant. The echo of his screams clatter around in Alan's skull like pebbles in a pot.

  Alan lies back down on the couch, the energy he used to stay upright abruptly exhausted. "We're gonna die anyway, Todd."

  Todd cries for awhile more. Alan ignores him until he goes away.

  54

  Around sunset Todd goes upstairs alone. Alan doesn't get up to join him; that charade is over. Instead he watches the colors seep out of the room, the darkness dragging everything slowly to grey. Waiting for the Blurs to emerge reminds him of one of those magic pictures obscured by colored dots, the ones you aren't supposed to be able to see unless you wear special glasses. When full dark comes, the glasses are on, and the Blurs emerge.

  Suddenly that revulsion washes back over him. Instead of flicking on the lantern, though, he closes his eyes. The Blurs are silent, so this makes them vanish. Eventually, the rattling grind of the generator follows, and he finds himself outside a cell, visiting a prisoner.

  It's the father he wishes he was. He looks just like Alan. He's stopped screaming, but he's ragged with abuse.

  "You're not fighting," he says.

  Alan doesn't respond. He's there to watch, not to talk. That's all he does when he's like this: observe. Maybe the world's changed and he can't interact with it, but he can observe.

  "You used to fight it. I know you can't win, but you used to try. You used to put on a good face for Todd, at least. Now you're killing him."

  Alan scoffs silently. He's not killing him. All he did was speak the truth.

  "You're killing him, and you know it. I thought you loved him."

  Alan shrugs. He does love him. He might not feel it right now, but he can remember it. He can profess it the same way he can say at midnight that the sun still exists.

  "You screamed at him until he cried."

  Yes, he did.

  "You said you'd never do that again."

  Yes, he did. But that was back when Brenda was here, when there were things to live for. There is nothing now. Literally, nothing.

  "Not nothing. There's still the two of you. Don't do this to him. For God's sake, you're all he has."

  But he hates that statement. He hates it. He didn't ask to be all Todd has. If the boy is relying on Alan, that's his own fucked-up problem, because he's picked the wrong guy to rely on. Alan is a worthless piece of shit, and if Todd relies on that, he'll end up the same.

  "He doesn't have a choice," the father replies. "You're not hearing me. You're all he has."

  Alan shrinks back from it. He does love his son, and the horror is not that he's no good for him. The horror is that the boy has no one else. The horror is that his son—his poor, beautiful, brilliant son—is stuck with a black hole that will destroy him. The horror is Alan.

  Why couldn't Brenda have survived instead? Even Allie would've been better. Letting Alan survive is like the cosmos' final joke on the human species.

  And God, again with the layers. Even as he whines, he hears how whiney he is, and hates himself more. Then he recognizes how pathetic that is, and reflects on how other people can just turn it off, and hates himself even more.

  The father watches, and Alan thinks, I was so much better when I was him. How did he do it, those first few weeks after the vanishing? How did he hold it together? It didn't feel like horror yet, not then. Sometimes, it even felt like adventure.

  "You can still fight," he says, but Alan can't believe that. He remembers fighting, sure: he remembers seeing a doctor and taking a pill, seeing a therapist and carefully constructing a mindset. Sometimes, he was able to look past the inevitable destruction of everything because it hadn't happened yet.

  Now it has.

  "No, it hasn't." Dad Alan's not angry, just earnest—he leans forward, eyes flashing. "You're still alive. Todd is still alive. The world is still here.

  "Don't you get it? You only lose everything if you throw it away."

  55

  His insistent bladder wakes him. He sits up, taking in bleary sunlight and the chugging rattle of the generator, then heads for the neighbor's place to relieve himself. He doesn't tell Todd he's leaving.

  The grass is well past his knees now. It's sprouting in the street and driveways, shoving through the cracks, taking over. The emptiness chases him to the next house, where the stink of human waste hits him as soon as he opens the door. Todd has started using the living room.

  Fight? he thinks as he pisses in a stranger's sink. He hasn't bathed in weeks. He's surrounded by reeking excrement. The idea of fighting is laughable. For what? For Todd? Why?

  I shouldn't have yelled at him.

  It doesn't matter, though. He can't change himself now, not this time, not with no support and no drugs and nothing to live for.

  He finishes up and leaves. The air outside is cool and pleasant. A good day for fishing or yard work. In other words, a bitter joke.

  I shouldn't have yelled at him.

  And that damned, automatic response: I can't. There's nothing. It doesn't matter.

  He could go to Crown and get his meds. They helped before. They might help now. But why? What's the point of not being depressed? Everyone has vanished, the world is being choked to death by invisible blue monsters, and he's supposed to be happy? He's supposed to—what? Dance in the streets? Find the silver lining? It's bullshit, it's always been b
ullshit, there's no reason—

  I shouldn't have yelled at him.

  Back in the house. Todd's still asleep, or he's upstairs pretending he is. The couch beckons. It's the only place that makes sense. There's an Alan-shaped groove in it now which, given a few more weeks and a continued failure to eat, could turn into his grave.

  He grabs a notepad and writes:

  Went to store

  Then he stares at it, trying to find a way it makes sense, trying to absorb what it means. He should crumple it up and throw it away. He can't go. He can't fight, not this time.

  He tricks himself by asking a hypothetical: say he wrote the whole note. What would it look like? He can still throw it away when he finishes. Just write it as a thought experiment.

  Now it says:

  Went to store, be right back

  Is it really this hard to write a little note? Is he really this worthless, that writing a note to his son is a titanic struggle? He should be on the couch. What is he doing?

  There is one more thing the note should have, something important, a lie that means everything. He debates the longest over this last piece: whether or not to add it, whether it promises more than he can give. Whether it's even true.

  Then he remembers making his son cry.

  Like an archaeologist piecing together some indecipherable hieroglyph, he adds two words before leaving.

  Went to store, be right back

  love you

  56

  He's never been carsick before, but he is today.

  It's been months since he drove. The world ahead of the windshield is too fast, careening by like a fever dream. He opens the window and gulps the fresh air. That stale mantra winds up again—I can't, I can't, I can't—bombarding him with excuses to turn back.

  Crown Foods is more or less how they left it. All the cars are quiet now, and that stubborn grass is pushing its way through the concrete here too, but otherwise little has changed. He pulls onto the sidewalk by a little side door and gets out, then does a double take.

  A bluish moss has grown up the building's brick wall, leaving a streak from the ground halfway to the roof. There is more oozing from the cracks in the sidewalk and even more in a long line along the curb.

  It stops him dead. His eyes are frozen to it. This isn't like the grass he keeps seeing, bulging through the pavement at every opportunity. This is something else, something he's never seen. It's an unnatural color, wisping and light, like cotton candy or Kool-Aid.

  Or Blurs.

  Suddenly there are blue glimpses everywhere, clamoring at the edges of his vision in a shower of sparks. They've been there the whole time; he had just grown too used to them to notice.

  Revolted, he grabs a rock and takes it to the moss on the wall, scrubbing. The stuff flakes away easily, drifting in the breeze like a dandelion seed, but the brick it leaves behind is stained blue. Some of the moss wafts onto the hair of his arm, and it feels exactly how he imagined the wisping touch of the Blurs would. He hisses and blows it off without touching it.

  When the wall is cleared he turns to the sidewalk and the curb, scraping the stuff away like a community worker going after graffiti. The grating rock rattles in the silence. Scrick, scrick, scrick: the only sound on Earth, chasing itself in clattering circles through the wasteland of dead cars and concrete. He follows the line of moss down to the corner of the building, and his fanatical cleaning abruptly dies.

  Around the corner, the entire wall of Crown Foods is blue.

  He drops the rock and backs away, then closes his eyes. He takes three blind, stumbling steps backwards, and when he opens his eyes, the wall is out of sight around the corner. But his whimpering brain is trying to make sense of it.

  Jesus fuck what was that why is it all blue oh gods why what was—

  He feels an urge to retch, but chokes it back. His longing for the couch has never been stronger. It's become a force of gravity.

  But he takes a step away from it, then another. Screw the couch. Screw the moss. Screw everything. Just get what I came for.

  The cool darkness of the grocery store closes over him.

  As his eyes adjust to the dim light, he sees the moss is here, too. It has dragged itself over the registers and the magazine racks; it is dripping from the shopping carts like vomit.

  He could turn and run away, screaming and tripping over empty clothes. He could grab the box cutter sitting on the nearby counter and slice his wrists open, or sink to the floor gibbering and let his mind slide away. These would all be reasonable responses.

  Instead he crunches through the broken glass toward the pharmacy. Even now, months since everyone vanished, he feels an asinine twinge of self-consciousness as he pushes through the little gate that leads behind the counter. He doesn't belong here. He looks like a junkie. Someone will call the cops.

  Sertraline. The drug's name shimmers in his head. He is adrift in a sea of horror; it is the lighthouse on the shore. If he can find it, he can go back to his couch.

  Sertraline, sertraline.

  The drugs are ordered alphabetically into aisles, each in its own little bucket drawer—but his drug is not in the S section. How can they not have it? It's a common SSRI.

  There's a taste in his mouth, like chalk or antacids. It's the moss. He can smell it, too: a cloying, stale whisper that lies in a haze over everything.

  He wants to get out of there. He wants to get away from it. He tears out the drawers and hurls them, clattering, into the dark. After a few frenzied minutes, he realizes the drawers are labeled by brand name. He ducks back to Z, and finally gets his prescription.

  Should get something to eat while I'm here, some long-neglected, rational part of his mind tries to suggest. Todd said we—

  But he doesn't give a fuck what Todd said. He's scrabbling through the mess of drawers, he's bursting through the little gate, he's slipping in a patch of empty clothes, thick as a carpet, on the way out. Then he's in the car, heading home, but he can't help himself this time. The novelty of driving is no longer distracting him. During the trip he watches through the window for the moss, and he finds it.

  Oh God, he finds it everywhere.

  57

  He's shaking as he comes through the door, his stomach a clot of nausea. His eyes, eager and terrified, leap around looking for moss in the house, but it's not there. He stumbles into the kitchen and drops the pills on the counter, a gesture painfully reminiscent of a more normal time, and sees Todd in the living room. He's holding the note Alan left.

  Hey, pal. He can imagine the words, remember their taste: casual and fond. But he can't say them, because they don't matter.

  "Daddy?"

  He reaches into his bag of loose pills and grabs two, then turns to find a bottle of water. "What."

  His voice is shaking. "Are you really going to kill yourself?"

  The question stops Alan cold.

  All that shit I said to him, he marvels, all that mean, evil shit, and that's what he remembers? That's what scares him the most?

  A thousand ramifications flash past him, indistinct and unsettling as Blurs.

  I don't know. He wants the words to be callous. Maybe. He wants Todd scared. He wants Todd gone. He doesn't care what the boy—

  And the father somehow halts his tongue. He's staring at the kitchen counter, hands quivering, a bottle of water in one and a pair of pills in the other.

  Todd waits: a display of eight-year-old patience worthy of the Nobel. When the whisper comes, Alan barely recognizes his own voice. "I don't want to."

  He can imagine the look of confusion on Todd's face, but doesn't look up to see it. God, he is so ashamed of himself. He wants to crawl in a hole and die. Todd is only eight. It's not fair—

  "So you won't?" Tremulous. Scared but confrontational. "Right?"

  I don't want to, Alan nearly repeats. The phrase is succinct and perfect. It articulates everything: the stakes, the facts—

  The odds.

  Instead his mouth prie
s itself open again. "I'm sick, Todd." He pops the sertraline to emphasize the point. "I need to lie down."

  Todd's lip is quivering with rage or grief. "All you ever do is lie down!"

  "I know." Alan stumbles past him, retreating to the couch. Even the way he walks is wrong. "I'm sorry."

  58

  "In a lot of ways," the father explains from his cell as Alan dreams, "what's happening is pretty fascinating."

  Alan just stares, as always: looks past the bars and wonders which of them is actually imprisoned.

  "First the Blurs, now the moss. Did the Blurs make the moss? They're the same shade of blue. They must be related."

  Spurious correlation. Funny.

  "What do you think it's for, though? Is it using all the extra oxygen the trees are putting out? What's the end goal—some kind of terraforming?"

  Tricky, trying to get him to care. Doesn't he know who Alan is, what's going on with him? He'd get just as far talking to the wall.

  "I wonder how long it'll take. I suppose it depends on what they're trying to do. Actual terraforming... it's supposed to take centuries, isn't it, at least? If not longer. Maybe the moss makes the process faster, or something?

  "You have to admit—yeah, it's terrifying, but it's also kind of cool. We're kind of lucky to be here to see it."

  Wow, that was transparent. Lucky to watch the world turn blue and die? That's all he's got? Well, Alan thinks, I'll be damned: I'm cured! It's a miracle! You're right, he wants to crow. Life is worth living!

  The father falls silent; his eyes are serious and intent. "You did the right thing today."

  Alan looks away, but the voice follows him.

  "You did the right thing."

  59

  He wakes to daylight.

  The days have all been the same, so he doesn't know how long it's been. Maybe two or three, maybe several. Each has followed the same routine: he takes his pills, he sips some water, he stays on the couch. Some days, he's managed to eat. Otherwise, the only thing that makes this one different from the last is that he wakes wondering about Todd.