Todd

by Nicolai, Adam J

  So. Not instantly fatal, maybe, but he wouldn't want to fall in the stuff, and he hopes he never finds out what happens if it's inhaled.

  Far to the west, the sky worm is banking. As he guessed, it's criss-crossing its way north, painting the world blue. As a kid, Alan used to imagine a pteranodon gliding overhead, and the shiver of awe he'd feel as its shadow slipped over him. Sometimes this experience left him profoundly sad, knowing such an incredible thing could never happen.

  As he shudders at the sight of the distant worm, he finds the actual experience far less heady and more terrifying than the boy had hoped.

  If he did manage to back the car up and turn around, he could probably outpace the sky worm by heading north, but for how long? He doesn't know how far the thing will go, or whether it needs to take a break to sleep or refuel. It's entirely possible that it would just overtake them again in the night. And if they did manage to outrun it, so what? There was another one to the north—that had to have been what they saw before leaving Brooklyn Park—and it has probably given the northern suburbs the same treatment.

  He turns back south, wishing he could see how far the blue actually extends instead of relying on his eyesight. Then insight strikes like a lightning bolt, and he remembers the telescope—but the trunk of the car is caked with moss. He can't let it get on their supplies, so he pulls the sleeves of his shirt over his hands and starts wiping the moss off the trunk with broad strokes of his arms. While he's at it, he gets the windows, too. And of course, if he doesn't clear the car roof, the stuff up there will just slide back over the rear window once he starts moving. This is Minnesota Winter 101.

  He holds his breath and turns his face away as he works, but he can still feel the occasional whisper of fuzz against his forehead or tickling the back of his neck—he must have it in his hair now, his beard. He would kill for a pair of gloves and a respirator.

  When he's done he knows exactly where the moss has touched him, because the itch is already starting. The urge to wipe it off is almost overpowering, but he fights it. His shirt is covered in the stuff, and there's no way to touch his face without making the situation far worse.

  Stoic, he pops the trunk. This morning he wrapped the telescope in a towel to give it a little cushioning, a fact he had forgotten until now. He has never been so happy to see a towel. After wiping his face the best he can, he climbs atop the car, being careful—oh, so careful—not to slip and fall into the moss.

  He can't be sure. He's no expert with this thing. But peering through the telescope, he thinks he can see a glimmer of green, far to the south.

  Could they be that lucky? Is there a chance the sky worm has just started its work, and they're really that close to the southern boundary of its coverage? Or is he just seeing what he wants to see?

  He looks again, but can't make it out any clearer. Like everything else up until now, any choice will be a gamble.

  73

  He strips before he gets back in the car, and uses his towel to open the fuzzy door. He steps straight out of his shoes and into the driver's seat, leaving his moss-covered clothes lying on the bridge. Inside, he wriggles into a change of clothes he grabbed from the trunk.

  "Why are you naked?" Todd has climbed back into the front passenger seat.

  "Didn't want to bring any moss in."

  "Why not?"

  "It itches." Alan starts the car. "I think there's a clear spot down there, where the moss didn't get to. Gonna try and reach it."

  Todd blanches. "We're not going back? I think we should go back."

  "We're not going back." He explains his reasoning to Todd, but the boy doesn't accept it.

  "We could just go back to the pond house and stay inside. The moss can't come inside."

  "Yeah, it can. It can grow there on its own. Remember the freezer?"

  Todd falls silent.

  Alan takes his time on the road, giving a wide berth to anything that makes a lump in the moss, but there's only so much he can do. Torn metal and shattered glass will chew up the tires fast, and won't necessarily be visible beneath the fuzz. He resolves that if the tires blow, he will scrape his way forward on the rims.

  As they descend the far side of the bridge and reach the street, he thinks one last time about turning around, and puts the thought away. They trundle past open fields and endless wrecks. Ahead, an overturned semi has blocked the freeway entirely. Luckily, he's able to take an exit just before they reach it, and they descend into the blue maze of Burnsville.

  They meander past a Dodge dealership and a Walmart into a labyrinth of office buildings, all covered. The moss is on the traffic lights and creeping like lichen over the street signs. Combined with the disorienting, unrelenting blue, it obliterates landmarks and renders his atlas nearly useless. In time he starts to think it is actually moving, because already ropes of it extend from the rooftops in some places, inching down to cover the walls and windows. In an instant of panic he checks the car window, expecting to see it spreading from the top of the glass, but then he remembers he cleared the roof.

  Lunch time passes, but what food they do have is all in the trunk, and he won't risk getting out of the car for it. He sticks to the widest avenue he can, trusting his intuition to guide him south, but a major accident diverts him into the buried, blue streets of a residential district. An hour later, after the suburban maze tricks him into countless dead-ends, it spits him out onto a different broad boulevard. He angles south again—Home Depot, apartment buildings, a hospital sign—and then, finally, sees the signs for the 35 merger, marking the start of rural Minnesota.

  He takes a frontage road south, then gets on the highway. The concrete dividers and constant underpasses vanish. The north- and south-bound lanes are split by a simple cable fence. He spies a giant tangle of pickup trucks and SUVs, and hoots.

  "I love that crash! You see that?"

  Todd follows his finger. "Yeah."

  "You know what's great about it?"

  Todd shakes his head.

  "It's in the fucking ditch!" he roars, and hits the gas. The speedometer jumps to 50, 60, 70 miles per hour. It might as well as read Warp 8. Todd has the armrest in a death grip, his knuckles turning white, but his face is plastered with a giant grin. Blue moss sprays out behind them like a speedboat's wake.

  And then it doesn't. With no warning, the road ahead is black again, the trees in their autumn splendor. Alan looks into the rearview and sees the blue landscape vanishing fast behind them.

  He whoops. "We did it, man! We fucking made it!" He high-fives his son, who is swept up by the excitement despite not completely understanding it, and rockets toward Iowa.

  74

  Ten minutes out of the city a Super Target looms on a hill to their left. They park on the highway and grab their lanterns, then climb the hill and go in for dinner.

  The store is moss-free, and they haven't had this kind of selection in months. Alan goes for the canned beef stew, while Todd rounds up some peanut butter and jelly with crackers. They take the food to the little cafeteria area in the front and eat at a table by the windows. Todd undoes the work of last night's bath in minutes, smearing peanut butter into his hair with such efficiency that Alan can't help but wonder if it's deliberate.

  Neither of them care. Spirits are high.

  Alan is seized by a sudden idea. "Hey, do you know what day it is?"

  Todd is licking his fingers; a streak of jelly stains his chin. "What."

  "Halloween."

  Todd's eyes widen, then his face falls. "Oh."

  "I thought maybe we could go trick-or-treating," Alan says.

  "Oh!" He sounds pleasantly surprised, even thrilled. "Okay! But I need a costume."

  The kid's aplomb never ceases. He didn't question how such a thing was possible; he proceeded directly to making it happen.

  "Oh!" he says again. "I know! I saw one by the cereal."

  "You saw a costume?" It seems hard to believe. Everyone vanished in the middle of the summer. S
ure, they've been putting Halloween stuff out earlier every year, but—

  "Yeah! Come on!" Todd scampers into the dim rear of the store, his lantern bobbing. Alan follows him to the bedding section, where Todd rips open a plastic package with a blue bedsheet in it. He finds a pair of scissors and cuts out a hole just big enough for his head, then throws it over his shoulders.

  Alan smiles. This is a classic. "A ghost? That's great."

  "I'm not a ghost." Todd sounds put out.

  "You're not? Then what—?"

  He figures it out just as Todd says, "I'm a Blur."

  Absurdly, this simple change in label completely shifts Alan's impression of the costume. It even sends a ridiculous shiver down his spine. "All right," he says. "Yeah, I see it. Nice one."

  "Are you gonna dress up?"

  "Nope." He hands Todd a plastic bag. "I'm gonna answer doors. Wait here."

  Alan takes a pass down the candy aisle, throwing a little of everything into a shopping basket, then takes position. "All right," he calls. "My house is at the end of aisle one!"

  Todd gets scared in the dark, but there's still enough daylight coming through the windows to make him agree to this plan. He bursts around the corner at a dead run, sheet flapping. When he reaches Alan, he holds his bag open. Alan looks at him expectantly.

  "Candy!" Todd says.

  "'Candy?'" Alan throws back. "Don't you know how this works?"

  Todd looks confused, then thrilled. "Trick or treat!"

  "That's more like it." Alan tosses in a handful of candy, and Todd's face drops again.

  "That's all?"

  "Well, yeah. You gotta go to the next house if you want more." Alan jerks his head toward aisle two, and now Todd gets it. He starts to shove past, and Alan grabs him. "Ah, ah, ah." He points back down the aisle. "The long way."

  Todd grins. Something equal parts excitement and annoyance flickers through his eyes. Then he's off.

  Alan meets him at every aisle all the way to the back of the store, acting a different role each time: the exuberant soccer mom, the crotchety old man, the disinterested teen. Each role gives different candy, and Todd loves it. By the end, his bag is nearly overflowing.

  "Can I eat it tonight?"

  "Sure. And I have another idea, too." He leads his son farther into the back, toward the electronics.

  The sun's nearly down, now, so the back of the store has fallen dark. Familiar blue flickers dart at the edges of Alan's vision as they reach the Nintendo display.

  "I wish the power worked," Todd laments, looking at the dead TVs in the demonstration booths.

  "Here. Stand back." Alan smashes the glass, and starts looting 3DS boxes.

  "Oh, yeah!" Todd says, but then turns quizzical. "Wait. What are you doing?"

  "Help me break these open. Every one of these machines should have a charged battery in it. We're gonna take all of them."

  "Oh, and use the batteries in my 3DS!"

  "You got it."

  "Can I take some extra games, too?"

  Alan fixes his son with a level look. "Now you're talking."

  75

  It's a night of debauchery. Games, toys, candy—Alan even sneaks a few beers from the little attached liquor store. They spend the night in a model bed, surrounded by fresh lanterns.

  In the morning, Alan's nose is nearly numb with the cold.

  He hustles Todd outside to find the world coated in morning frost. They're wearing warmer clothes, looted the night before, but they don't have any real winter gear save for what they packed. Alan wants to get a new car—the old one has too much moss residue—but the Target parking lot is a terrible place to try to find matching keys, so he decides to stop at the next gas station he sees instead.

  As they pick their way back down the hillside toward the old car, Todd slips in the hoary grass. He plunges sideways, trying to catch his balance, and instead lurches into a screaming, head-over-heels tumble.

  "Todd!" Alan drops to his butt and slides after him. The boy hits the ditch at the bottom, wailing. "Todd! Are you okay?"

  "Yeah," Todd says, but when he tries to regain his feet, he yelps and falls back.

  "What's wrong?" Alan finally reaches him, holds out a hand. "Is it your foot?"

  "Yeah," he whimpers. "It hurts."

  "Let me see." But when Alan goes to pull off the boy's shoe, Todd howls. Alan opts for the best exam he can manage with the shoe still on.

  It doesn't look bad. The foot isn't twisted sideways or anything. "You must've sprained it," Alan says. "Let's just get you back to the car and see how it does." He helps his son to his feet, favoring the wounded ankle, but the boy can't walk. Alan picks him up.

  Shit, he thinks. Shit, shit, shit. He has been waiting for this since the first day, and here it is. He can't diagnose the problem. He doesn't know how to dress the foot, or whether it even needs dressing. He needs a book. Why the hell doesn't he have a book?

  He doesn't even have a first aid kit.

  The ditch is maybe seven feet deep, but his son is a thousand-pound weight in his arms. With every step up the incline he imagines slipping, falling backwards to hit his head on a rock; he imagines Todd freezing to death in the ditch, alone.

  It doesn't happen. He reaches the car, slides Todd carefully into the front passenger seat.

  "You okay?" The words steam from his mouth. Todd nods. Alan slides the boy's seat back. Should he have him elevate his leg? Is that the right thing?

  He wants to hit himself, to berate himself for being an idiot, but that wouldn't help anyone. There might be some kind of medical book in Target—or, at least, a first aid kit that might include some instructions. He glances back that way, and the hill they climbed suddenly looks like a cliff face. Of course Todd slipped on it. It's not safe; it's way too steep. How could he be so fucking stupid?

  This is on him, all of it. Brenda never would have let them get hurt this way. He can hear her now: Don't you dare go back up there. If you break your ankle next, you'll get both of you killed.

  "Keep your leg high," he tells Todd. "Put it up on the dashboard. Okay?"

  Todd nods, and Alan starts the car.

  76

  He gets off on the next exit and drives back up to Target the long way. Then—after a minute of furious internal debate—leaves the car running by the front doors so his son can stay in the heat while Alan runs in. Ten minutes of fevered searching by lantern light finally reveals a stack of first aid kits near the pharmacy. He grabs one and starts running back to the car, then turns back to grab two more.

  Back in the heat of the car, he opens one. It has an instruction book, but it's all choking, heart attacks, and amputations; nothing about sprained ankles. He heads back in, this time aiming for the book section in the back. There are shelves upon shelves of bestsellers and kids' books. When he finally finds a little non-fiction section, First Aid For Your Pet makes him spit a stream of curses.

  He's about to give up and start hunting for a library when he spots a camper's guide to first aid, which has what he needs. Twenty minutes later, he's wrapped Todd's left foot in gauze. It doesn't look exactly like the picture, but hopefully it's close enough.

  The kits, the book, and a pair of crutches all get shoved in the trunk, the contents of which are growing more indispensible by the day. It's gonna start getting harder to change cars, he thinks, and just as quickly tries to put the thought away.

  "Keep that foot up," he tells Todd again as he climbs back in, this time with an air of authority. "It'll keep the swelling down."

  "Okay." The boy's face is buried in his 3DS.

  For the first hour or so, the plan to shoot south on highway 35 works perfectly. The highway stays mostly clear, and he's able to skirt the few minor accidents they do encounter. Then there's a big one: three overturned semis have made a wall in the road that cuts off all four lanes, including the grass divider between north and south. Alan realizes with a sick sense of foreboding that cutting around the crash on foot will be imposs
ible. Todd's ankle prevents him from taking a hike through the ditch, and even if it didn't, there will be no readily-accessible gas station cars on the other side of the wreck like there always were in the metro. He's forced to turn back and retrace to the last exit. The rural roads are wide open, at least, but he nevertheless manages to get lost twice before finding the highway again.

  Setbacks like this one dog him the rest of the day, each costing another hour or more. In the old world, sundown should've seen them halfway into Arkansas; instead, they barely reach Albert Lea, ten miles shy of the Iowa border.

  It could be worse, he reminds himself. They've yet to see another sky worm or any more moss-covered cities, and it's far more progress than they made the first day. He exits toward town and finds a little house to hole up in for the night. They pile into a bed with as many blankets as they can find, their breath steaming in the lantern light.

  77

  The next morning an ugly purple bruise mars the outside of Todd's foot, and the ankle has swollen significantly. Alan re-wraps it as gingerly as he can, while Todd winces. The wound is extremely tender. He would apply an ice pack if he had one, but he doesn't, so again he has Todd keep his foot settled on the dashboard for elevation.

  The car's heater is a welcome friend, better than all the blankets from the night before. He turns it up full blast, shivering as his ears and cheeks start their slow thaw.

  They've gotten a nice, early start, and they hit Iowa while the sun is still low on their left. The countryside flashes past: farmland, rest stops, a sign for an RV lot. The highway is cooperating, but even if everything stays clear, they'll reach Des Moines—a new metro area—by noon.

  Alan has no plan for that. If they have to get off the highway again, it'll probably cost them another couple days. Based on how cold it is this morning, he's worried they don't have those couple days to spare.

  As he has this thought, the first few snowflakes fall.

  His heart clenches like he just found a corpse in his freezer. Too late, he thinks, but he doesn't know that yet. It might only be a flurry. A timely reminder of the stakes. He eases into the gas pedal, pushes them south a little faster.