by Riley Flynn
By the time the small hours of the morning arrived, they were out of beer and out of energy. Timmy began to yawn and announced that he was heading up to bed.
“Fortunately for you,” he told Alex, “I’ve been preparing my whole life for this kind of thing.”
Hidden in one of the cabinets under the guns, behind all the ammunition, was a leather bag, four feet long and half a foot wide. It was pulled out and placed on the floor.
“See, between the generator, the guns, and the night vision goggles, you’ve got to be ready for anything.”
He pulled out poles, thin metal sticks which he clicked together. Threading them through a piecemeal slip of cotton, Timmy assembled the pieces and threw them on to the floor. It was a cot, barely wide enough for one. It rocked slightly on uneven feet.
“All this end of the world crap,” said Alex, “and you don’t even have a pull-out couch?”
Timmy grinned as he presented the rickety camp bed.
“Waterproof, light as a feather, and ready for anything.” He was too happy as he said it.
Alex slept on the couch. After his host went to bed and the lights went off, the house rumbled on. At least three times in the night, the generator purred into action. It seemed like the electricity was cutting in and out around the town.
It was times like this that the imagination began to stir. No, Alex realized, there were no times like this. At least, it didn’t seem like there could be. They’d have to find out more tomorrow. They needed information.
But that was on the other side of a long sleep. Uncomfortable on the couch, Alex twisted and turned throughout the night. Tomorrow, he assured himself, everything would be fine.
9
The door opened at the top of the basement stairs and the morning rushed in. Waking up, kitchen light falling across his face, Alex remembered everything that had happened. It all came back at once. The news. The images. The implications. Timmy was cooking something.
“Wake up,” he shouted down. “We’re moving out.”
There was a smell wandering down the stairs, strong enough to stand up on its own two feet. It did not smell good. Wandering up in spite of his nose, Alex reached the top and found himself confronted by a hectic scene.
All across the kitchen counters lay a collection of handguns and ammunition. These items were arranged carefully, lined up in their rank and file. But around them, Timmy had tried to cook breakfast. He had hauled a couple of MRE packets up the stairs from the basement and thrown the contents into a pan. From there, he’d added salt, pepper, and an inestimable number of spices. That explained the smell.
“I thought the power was off,” Alex said, running a finger along a line of something powdered and brown.
“About that,” Timmy responded, turning back to his kitchen. “Turns out one of my wiring jobs wasn’t up to much. The power was on and off all night.”
“I heard the generator kick in.”
“Exactly. Exactly. Probably just some rats chewing through it or something. Bet they’re smarting this morning.”
“You get in contact with anyone?”
“Nope. Comms seem down. Tried it all. Phone. Internet. Radio. TV. The lot. Ended up just sticking my head out the front door. Saw some guy running past. Shouted at him and he told me that they’ve got rations or vaccines or something someplace in the city. They’ll be handing them out.”
The MRE packets lay on the kitchen counter, ripped apart. Timmy picked up a handgun and holstered it on his hip.
“But we’re not waiting for that, are we?”
Eyes widening, Alex took a seat on one of the barstools at the counter.
“And why would we go out into a city when we’ve been told not to? Why the hell would we do that?”
“Oh, come on, man. You don’t think that was real, do you? Eko virus? You ever heard of the Eko virus? I have and, let me tell you, we don’t have no Eko virus in America. Who knows if it’s even real? Just a figment of some conspiracy theory online. They’re just trying to scare you. What don’t they want us to do? What don’t they want us to see?”
Rocking uneasily on the chair, Alex looked at the food. That was their breakfast. It hadn’t tasted good yesterday. It hadn’t been improved.
“You want us to walk into the center of a city, under martial law, and just look around a bit?”
“It’s all probably a reality TV joke, man. They’re watching us. They want us to do something.”
Even as he had fallen asleep, Alex had felt his certainty draining away. It was like someone had poked a tiny hole in the base of his foot. After watching the President, after seeing him deliver that address, Alex had been filled with terror, uncertainty, and every other emotion known to man. It had been overwhelming. Too much to comprehend. He’d just had a few beers instead.
But, as the evening wore on, the slow drip, drip, drip of certainty fell away, the terror leaking out of the tiny hole. Space opened up in his mind. It couldn’t have been real. The emptiness was filled with questions.
Sleeping through the night and then waking up, Alex found he had even more space inside him, even more room for uncertainty and doubt. What he’d seen last night could not possibly have been real.
A mistake. A prank. A hack. A social experiment. If he sat down and thought about it, there must have been a hundred different explanations. He wasn’t even sure that this wasn’t all Timmy’s doing. One Night at Castle Ratz, the title would read, Watch One Man’s Terror as The World Collapses! And then they’d go paintballing or something.
“Listen, if it gets us away from this crappy food, then I’m on-board.”
“My man!” Twirling a pistol around his finger, Timmy handed his friend the gun, grip-first. “I got this one just for you. Say after me: ‘I love my Glock’.”
Mumbling the words back to Timmy, Alex searched around the room.
“You really have no other food apart from these readymade things? What do you eat?”
“I got a few phone numbers. I know a few guys. Italian guys. Chinese guys. I’m a busy man.”
Alex saw a pile of pizza boxes in the corner of the kitchen. At least they were being recycled. If they were going to eat, then the food wasn’t going to be coming from inside the house.
Plus, he reasoned, being outside might help them figure out what the hell was going on. Taking the guns wouldn’t hurt. They’d had guns on the farm. Sort of.
But there was no knowing what kind of Detroit was on the other side of the door. Holsters holding guns, the two of them ready to head out, they left Castle Ratz and went out into the real world.
It seemed the same. Same gardens. Same houses. Same curtains, twitching back and forth. But this was the suburbs. They needed to be somewhere more interesting.
They took the SUV. Unlike Castle Ratz, the car was yet to earn its own nickname. But that could change, Timmy warned. Ideas were always welcome.
The car rolled along, eating up the Grosse Pointe asphalt. The windows were rolled up. Even if this was all a joke, it didn’t hurt to keep things sealed. The roads were empty. The stop lights were still working. Not that they mattered. They ran on solar, anyway. The SUV pulled up at an intersection, engine ticking under a red light. Nothing in either direction. It turned green. They were off again.
Everyone was indoors. There were signs of life, seen only when squinting. During one pause, Alex was sure that he saw a garage door opening. Next, he saw two people through a ground floor window. They were arguing. As the houses drew closer together, as they got closer and closer to the actual city, the signs grew more frequent.
People were outside, here. But not really. It was storekeepers and bar owners. They had wooden slats with them, hammers in their hands and nails between their teeth. One man was accompanied by his young son, couldn’t have been more than seven, who passed his father the slat and held a bag of nails in the other hand. Along every street, there was the sound of men hammering their homes closed.
Every other person m
oved like a fox under a full moon. A few steps. Stop. Look. A few steps more. Look again. Scurrying between points. From a lamppost to a mailbox. Doorway to doorway. Even more people were wearing those surgical masks now. It was a warm day but everyone wore heavy clothes. Not an inch of flesh on show.
When they were in the city proper, they noticed the cops. And the guards. People in uniform, standing on every corner. Each of them wore one of the masks, made to match the uniform. Each of them had a heavy gun. Semi-autos, Timmy whispered under his breath.
Alex pulled the Glock from the holster. It was heavy. Heavier than he had expected. That paintball gun from that warehouse game? That had a weight. It had felt real. But there was more to this than metal. The curve of the grip sat snug and secure in Alex’s hand.
“I picked that one out for you, man,” said Timmy, his eyes still on the road. “I get your size right?”
“Like a glove.”
They sat quietly. Both were watching. Occasionally, the driver might lower one hand and fiddle with the radio dials. The passenger might try his phone. But neither of them found any signal, any communication reaching out to them from above. It was just them and the road and everyone else.
A cop flagged them down. No vehicles beyond this point. No arguments. Get out or turn around. Go back to your homes. It wasn’t a conversation; it was a command.
“What’s happening, man?”
Despite the open window on the driver’s side, the cop stayed well away. Alex had been pulled over enough times to know that law enforcement loved an opportunity to lean into a car and take a look. The blue mask across the man’s face was happy to keep a distance. It moved when he talked.
“No vehicles beyond this point. That’s all I can say. Either turn around or get out.”
“People are scared,” Timmy continued. “Can you at least let us know about these rations?”
“No rations. That’s a rumor. We can’t let cars beyond this point.”
“So where are people heading, you know, for more information?”
The cop was about to speak. He stopped himself and pulled the mask down, revealing a thin goatee beard.
“Listen, I don’t know anything. I heard they were giving out shots four blocks down. But you didn’t hear it from me.”
Putting the car in gear, rolling up the window, Timmy nodded to the cop and pulled away. Alex watched his friend turn back to the car. “Rations. Knew it’d be too early to talk about rations. Society’s only ever four square meals from chaos, remember? But shots sound wise. So this is all just a flu outbreak? Seems a bit serious.”
Unconvinced, Alex unbuckled his seatbelt and began to get out of the car. It seemed fine to leave it on the sidewalk. Still some way from the city center, there were cops on every corner here. People were too scared to leave the house. It was never this easy to find a parking spot.
The walk into the city was like stepping down into a hot, sweaty tunnel. The buildings were higher here, the people moving. Alex and Timmy walked two blocks before they realized that there were no longer cops around. But there were people. They were everywhere, just trying to stay out of sight.
The shopkeepers were out in force. Every store front – every business – had a man in front of it with a hammer. One or two had faces pointing out from the windows above, watching over the street, no doubt with a small arsenal perched just below, ready to open fire.
As the buildings towered overhead, the streets were hot with movement. People ran into neighbors’ homes. They ran between doors. Almost all of them had their faces covered. But most people had not managed to buy the small surgical masks. There were those with ripped cloths tied from ear to ear. Some in ski masks. One man was wearing a hockey mask, the old kind from the horror movies. It had great big holes in it. Not the most hygienic option.
But hygiene might not have been the man’s priority, Alex noted. As they walked another block, they crunched across the glass shards of the shops which had not moved quick enough. Inside, the shelves were not just empty. They were broken and pillaged, laid out across the floor.
The sound was something else. Alex had lived in the city long enough to grow used to the sounds. The ambulances and police cars. The constant drone of a million-people moving in spite of one another. The deafening thunder of existence in a tight space. It was loud now and just, well…more. Everything was the same but everything was louder. More intense. More aggressive.
There was an edge to life in the city and it was increasing every time they put a new block beneath their feet. Both men had guns, balanced conspicuously on their hips. This was an open carry state, for the most part, Timmy had announced with authority back in the SUV. It didn’t seem like it mattered now.
Breaking glass in the distance. A shout. There was the smell of sweat and worry everywhere. If people were sick, they weren’t showing it. They were too busy preparing themselves. One woman ran past holding a sack of rice. Two men maneuvered a jerry can full of gas up a stoop. Three teenagers pushed a shopping cart down the street, laden heavy with sneakers and cigarettes. What were they preparing for, thought Alex.
Nobody knows. Nobody knows anything.
10
It was barely noon but it felt like midnight. Midnight under a roaring sun. Strange. Alex walked with his friend through familiar streets, picking out places he’d stopped for a beer once, or where he’d met a friend. The same streets but crawling, sinking, searing with uncertainty. Everyone was scared.
Even without many people on the sidewalks, it was clear, palpable. There was a fear which just crawled out of every window, seeped between the porous spaces in wooden doors. The kind of terror which could find the empty space in an oxygen atom and fill it up with dread. It was infectious, thought Alex, which was probably the wrong word to use.
“You know, I’m actually still hungry.” It was the first thing Timmy had said in a half hour. “I think there’s something up ahead. Could be a shop. A bar? Could do with a drink.”
Alex had seen it and he pointed it out to his friend. While the other streets had been as quiet as a beartrap, waiting to snap shut, there was obvious movement here. People weren’t treading carefully or watching over their shoulder. There were at least a dozen of them.
They were all standing in front of a 7/11. It was one of the new stores. The ones without the gas pumps or parking lots. The switch to electric had really messed with their model. So now they were just in the middle of cities. They’d buy up a few businesses, finding the cheap spots, and knock through all the walls. Boom. Instant 7/11. Right in the middle of the city. It seemed to work.
The people had flocked to it. Wooden slats were nailed across the windows, but it had been handled better than most. Where the mom and pop outfits had made do with any wood they could find, these seemed like proper two by fours. Arranged properly, too. A professional job.
Standing beside the door were two guards. These weren’t state troopers. Not police or army or national guard. They were all in black. Body armor. Helmets without any insignia. Radios on their shoulders. Masks over their faces. At least four guns between the two of them, probably more. They were letting people in, one at a time.
The line stretched around the block. Part of this was the volume of people, part was due to the fact that none of them wanted to stand near one another. But it was moving fast. If they had food inside, there seemed to be no other choice. Alex and Timmy joined.
Rumors and lies ran up and down the line like a wet cat. Happy to listen in, Alex and his friend smiled at the words. It was almost funny. It would have been funnier if there was no chance that the rumors might, somehow, turn out to be true.
This store is run by the government. They’re only selling canned items. They’re doing vaccinations inside. The vaccinations rot your brain. The guards are CIA. The guards are SEALs. The guards are Russian. They shut down the phones so no one would worry. The internet cables got cut by China. The store has run out of food. The store has run out of food. They�
�re selling at ten times the price. The store has run out of food.
That last one came back time and time again. Whenever it was aired, people shifted on their feet, looking over the shoulders of the people in front. But, slowly, the line crept forward. Soon enough, the two men were next in line.
“No guns.”
The guard was pointing to the pistols. “Give them up if you want to go in.”
“Listen, guys, we’re not giving up our guns. Would you?” said Timmy.
The masks were tinted. The glass covered the whole face. Just a flat, emotionless surface. If he stared hard enough, Alex was sure that he could just about see a pair of eyes.
“No guns inside. Easy rule.”
Reaching a hand up to a guard’s shoulder, Timmy adopted his familiar face. His friendly face. At least, he thought it was his friendly face. He thought he was being charming. The guard swatted away the hand.
“O…kay…” Timmy eased off. “Say we just want a couple of items. How about we show you guys how serious we are? We have quite excellent credentials.”
The two guards remained unmoved.
“What if I told you my good friend Abe sent me? Sent me twice over. Impeccable reference. Nothing? How about Andrew? He knows your boss, I’m sure. Nothing? Nothing at all? Will you Grant me nothing? Ah–there! I saw you move. So now we’re negotiating. What if I said I could reach out to my good friends, the two Abes and Mr. Grant?”
One guard twitched.
“I can introduce him to both of you.”
The guard on the left nodded. The guard on the right watched over the line.
“Excellent,” Timmy said, using his smug voice. “Alex, pay these fine men.”
Timmy walked into the store and the guards allowed him. This left Alex facing the two blank masks. He reached for his wallet.