“These northern lights bug the crap out of me,” I tell Alma. “What are they doing here? They’re supposed to be tied to magnetic poles. I saw this show a couple years ago that said the north pole was drifting north, not south. So how did they end up here? The poles can’t drift around randomly. That’s impossible.”
“I don’t know, baby. They worry me, too, but we need to be quiet.”
“They make me feel like something bad is gonna happen. What do you call that? Fore-something.”
“Foreboding?”
“That’s it. I’ll be quiet now and just stew in my foreboding.”
“Silly.” Alma reaches up and ruffles my hair.
When we patrol and we can’t cuddle on account of guns, Alma and I could talk all night. It’s not a good idea for us to talk much when we’re patrolling, though. We get all involved and forget to listen for anyone who might be sneaking around, hunting for food or water, or worse: getting ready to kill us for it.
We walk along with our rifles in the night. It’s cool out here but not cold. There’s a green sheen swirling across the half-moon with no pattern to the timing.
Alma stops and raises her gun.
“Hear that?” she whispers.
“No, what?” I’ve got my gun up, too, and I’m pivoting around, searching. I want to hide Alma, but she would never let me.
“Over there.” She points at the corner by the park. And I hear a jangly noise, like car keys. No one drives cars now, though, except a few old junkers that still run. The solar pulse only spared cars that didn’t have internal computers—there aren’t too many of those.
The noise gets louder, closer. I aim my rifle into the shadows, where I can’t see a thing. The noise jangles again. Even closer now.
I’m about to tell Alma to run when two dogs come bounding from the shadows. They still have dog tags making that noise. Shit, we’ve seen some mean-ass dogs lately, so I keep my rifle aimed at the one in front. He’s brown, like a big retriever.
But his tail is wagging, and he’s making friendly chuffing sounds—not snarling or barking. He’s skinny and raggedy, and he stops and whirls in a circle when he sees the rifles. A little black curly dog skids to a stop and lets out a whimper. He has the saddest eyes I’ve ever seen on a dog.
Alma lowers her rifle. I relax my grip but keep mine up, in case.
“Y’all dogs better get out of here before someone kills you and eats you,” I say. But as soon as the dogs hear my voice and it isn’t yelling or pissed off, they wag their tails and step toward us. The brown one actually grins. Someone who loved that dog probably taught him how to do that. He thinks if he grins at us, we’ll feed him. And he might be right. I’m a sucker for a cute dog.
“Shit.”
“Aww… look at them,” Alma says. “They’re sweet dogs, and they’re starving.”
“So are lots of people.”
She crouches down to the dogs, reaching out to pet them. The dogs look at each other and then scamper up to Alma.
“Careful,” I tell her. “They might be hungry enough to bite you.”
“You won’t bite me, will you?” She’s all honeyed and friendly, like she’s talking to a cute baby. She fluffs up the black one’s hair. He tries to jump into her lap, but she laughs and says, “Nope. Can’t do that.” The other dog turns in circles in front of her, waiting his turn. I would wait in line for Alma and whirl in circles in excitement. I would. She pets the brown dog, too.
“You know what’s gonna happen, don’t you?” I reach down to help Alma to her feet. “They’re gonna be in love with you, and they’ll follow us around. Then we’ll—”
“I know.” She looks at me with pain in her eyes. All the dogs that used to live around here ran away or died, except the one who stays with June and Charlotte. Those old ladies are all skinny, but they feed their rations to that dog and treat him like their child.
“Better get back to patrolling,” I say.
“I know that, too.”
We give each other sad looks, holding our rifles in front of us, pointing the barrels away from each other. We turn the corner with dogs on our heels. The little black one whimpers a lot, not loud, but a kind of continuous squeaking. He has to be hurting from hunger, skinny as he is. But with all that squeaking, we might not hear something or somebody dangerous.
“Wait a second.” I take off my rucksack and pull out the three tortillas that Alma packed for us to eat after we’ve been out here for hours making ourselves hungry. Alma always gives me two tortillas, and she only eats one. She says it’s because I’m bigger, and I am. But I always try to get her to take one of mine. She never does, though.
I give the dogs slurps of water from my bottle. I tear up two tortillas. We don't have anything to put on them. We’re out of honey until we can harvest more from Nana’s bees that live in an outside wall of the Mint.
The dogs go kind of crazy when they see the tortillas. They’re jumping around, pawing at me and yipping. “This other one’s for Alma.” I set tortilla pieces on the sidewalk, where the dogs gobble them up almost before they hit the ground.
“Give them mine, too,” Alma says.
“Oh, Alma. Really?”
“Yes, really.” She straps her arms over her chest, rifle and all. I can’t say no to my fierce wife, who happens to be armed at the moment. I split the last tortilla into pieces and give them to the dogs.
“Thank you.” Alma hops into the air so she can reach my cheek to kiss it.
“Ha. Be careful jumping with that gun.”
For the rest of the night, Alma and I tromp about the neighborhood, going all the way around ten or twelve times, the dogs practically glued to us. At one point, they start sniffing something in the storm drain, probably a dead rat or skunk—I hope it’s dead, if it’s a skunk.
I poke Alma’s arm and whisper, “Run!”
We take off running, trying to get away from those cute, hungry dogs. We zip around a corner and hide behind a half-wall next to the sidewalk, catching our breath and laughing. We try to be quiet, which only makes us laugh harder.
Pretty soon, here come the dogs. They run up to Alma where she’s crouched behind the wall and lick her all over. I’m the one who fed them, but they know that Alma has more love to give them than I do. Where she gets it, I don’t know.
“Blackie! Brownie!” she says to the dogs.
“Don’t give them names. They’re gonna break your heart.”
“That’s okay. Everyone needs a name.”
I pull Alma up, clutching her to me. “Don’t you worry that if you give your heart away so much, it could get damaged?” I’m searching her eyes while I say this. She crinkles them and steps back.
“Silly, that’s not how love works.” When I keep gaping at her, she says, “Don’t worry. I’ll never run out of love for you.” And she means it. It’s all a guy could hope for, really—a beautiful woman to say that to you and mean it.
Me and Alma and the dogs make one more circuit around the blocks. The sky’s getting lighter. As we get back near Nana’s house, the sun peeks over the horizon behind us, turning the world all pink and sparkly. Kind of beautiful. Too beautiful to do what I have to do next.
“Go on inside, Alma. I’ll be right back.” She knows where I’m going. She stares at me from the front stoop but doesn’t ask me not to go. I duck my eyes from her. “Please go on,” I mutter. “I won’t be long.”
She steps inside, peering at me and closing me out. Alma is brave, but sometimes, she hates being brave.
“Come on,” I say to the dogs, who’ve been watching the door where Alma disappeared. I can’t call them by their names. It’s too hard.
I go down the side street and cross it to Jack’s house. Woodsmoke’s coming from his backyard. Smells like he’s scrambling eggs. I go around to the back of the house.
“Hey, Jack.”
“Morning, Keno,” Jack says. Then he sees the dogs, who run up to him at the smell of food. “Oh.” That’s all Jack says. He lets the dogs jump up on his legs while he makes sweet noises and scratches them behind their ears.
“Sorry, Jack. We couldn’t get them to go away. We tried hiding, but it didn’t work.”
“Probably fell in love with you,” Jack says, and his eyes are so sad I want to break something.
“It’s Alma,” I say. “Everyone falls in love with Alma.”
“We do. Watch the dogs for a minute while I take Bea her breakfast and tell her what’s going on.”
“Sure, Jack. Whatever you need.”
He carries the eggs inside. I flop down in a beat-up lawn chair while the dogs climb my legs and wag their tails and whimper at me. I pet the dogs a little, but I can’t look at them.
Jack’s talking to Nana inside the house. I can’t tell if she’s answering him or not. She talks so quiet now. Nana is fading away. That’s what I’m afraid of and can see plain as day. I hope I can handle losing her, because I will lose her, and the thought of it makes me want to give up. Just freaking quit. I would never quit on Alma, though, or my cousins, or my mom, even though she quit on me.
I’m nodding off in the chair with dogs climbing on me. Finally, Jack comes back. “I’ll take it from here,” he says.
“Thank you.”
The dogs look back and forth between Jack and me as I walk away. He tells them to stay.
At home, Uncle Eddie’s eating oatmeal.
“Hi.” I glance around the room. “Did Alma go up?”
“Yes, but she had oatmeal first. You should have some, too.”
“I can’t eat right now.”
“But, Keno, you need to.”
I give my uncle a tired smile. As I turn around to go up—a gunshot. Then another. I flinch all up and down my spine. “Fuck!”
I glimpse back at Eddie and start to explain, but he says, “Alma told me. Go on to bed, honey. You look whipped.”
I drag my ass up the stairs. At least those dogs got some Alma love before they died. Alma love will carry me through eternity. I believe that.
Jack loves dogs and insists on being the one to shoot them so they don’t suffer. He knows if he doesn’t kill the dogs, then someone else will, and they won’t be humane about it. Either that or the dogs will hide out from people and starve. Plus, I’m sad to say that we need the meat. I won’t eat those particular dogs, though, not after I knew them.
Jack says a clean shot to the head stops dogs’ brains so they don’t feel the pain. I hope that’s true, because I’m about to explode, and if I thought those dogs felt themselves get shot, I would hurl up everything I ever ate in my life and empty myself out clear down to my toes. Then I’d collapse, and Alma would have to scrape me off the floor, an empty sack of skin.
I’m so sick of people dying, and cute dogs with waggy tails. I don’t know how much longer I can take this shit. I have to take it, though, for Alma, for my family. Fuck!
CHAPTER 6
Days later, Milo shakes me awake long before dawn.
“What? It’s not time to patrol the woods yet.” I throw my pillow over my face.
“Shh… get dressed. Come downstairs,” Milo says. “I need your help.”
“Grrrrr…” I scratch my dirty scalp and climb woozily out of bed, trying not to wake Alma.
I carry my clothes and shoes to the game room and throw them on, basically dressing in my sleep. Milo meets me at the bottom of the stairs, hands me a rifle, and opens the front door. As soon as we go through it, I’m after his ass.
“What’s going on? Why do you need me?”
“I have this great idea.” Though I can barely see his face in the pulsing skylights, I can tell the kid is beaming.
“It’d better be a great idea if you got me up hours before dawn.”
“It is. Come on.”
“I’m not moving until you explain.”
Milo gets up in my face, nose to nose. “Remember those offices they were building before the sun zapped us, on the other side of South First?”
“No, but if you say so.”
“It’s behind that Mexican market, La Familia.”
“What about it?”
“They had tons of building stuff—big stacks of boards and bricks and cement.” He throws his arms wide. “And they had a bulldozer and backhoe always parked there. I bet they have gas.”
“How do you know this?”
“’Cause I used to wonder why they left that shit out there all the time. It looked like it would be easy to steal.”
“It’s on a main road. People would have to haul it away in trucks.”
“Yeah, but who would notice or care?”
“I don’t know, man. What’s your point?”
“You said we need to start thinking like Nana, about stuff we’re gonna need and how to get it. We need boards to build outhouses, don’t we?”
“We do.”
“So, let’s go see what’s there. Maybe we can get gas for the rototillers.” His enthusiasm is starting to pull me in.
“It’s probably diesel, if it’s even still there.”
“Didn’t Jack say he has a diesel tiller?”
“He might have.”
“Okay, so let’s check it out. If they have stuff we want, we’ll bring people over to get it.”
“Shit, dude. It’s two miles away. We can’t leave the neighborhood anymore, especially at night. Too damn dangerous.”
“Well, we can’t steal gas during the day.”
I let out a loud sigh. “I guess it won’t hurt to scout it out. We’d probably need wagons to carry back fuel or anything else.”
“They’ll make too much noise. Let’s just sneak over there and look.”
I shake my head and start jogging down the road. Milo jogs up beside me.
“Next time you have a brilliant idea, save it for morning. If it’s a good one, we can do it the next day with a plan.”
“Yeah, but once I thought of it, I wanted to hurry. I don’t want someone else to get it.”
“Dude, it’s been there more than a year. It’s probably long gone.”
Our way partly lit by the swirling aurora, we jog about halfway there, past the park with who-knows-what going on in those woods. Our feet make too much noise, slapping against the pavement, so we slow down, walking fast but quiet the rest of the way.
I don’t know why Nana never had us check construction sites, except she always wanted us kids to stay home. I think Silas and some other guys got plywood from one, but that’s all I’ve heard of. Somebody got lumber to build outhouses from somewhere. There’s so much I don’t know about the things our neighbors have done to keep us alive. I’m only now waking up to pay better attention.
Ahead of us at the South First intersection, stalled and vandalized cars fill the streets. Behind the Mexican market with its windows busted out, there’s a shell of an office building about four stories high—no siding, just an open view of girders, pipes, and subflooring with long runs of wiring dangling loose. Such a damn waste, as was so much of our lives before the sun zapped us.
A bulldozer and a backhoe are parked alongside the building. We creep warily onto the lot and up to a pile of lumber that’s been looted down to scraps. Still, scraps can be useful, and there are a few sheets of warped plywood we could put to work.
Bags of concrete have been rained on so much that they’re hard as boulders. Looks like someone busted up most of the cement blocks, but a few good bricks are scattered around.
Milo’s about to step inside the building shell.
“Wait!” I whisper, too loud. “We need to be sure no one’s in there.”
Milo’s shoulders slump, and he takes a big breath. Then he whirls ar
ound to face me. “Hey, smell that smoke?”
“Probably someone’s cookfire.”
“Kinda early for that,” he mutters, and we take bigger whiffs.
“Shit,” I say. “Smells like tires.”
We scan our surroundings until I see a glow above the trees in the neighborhood behind the office structure. I tap Milo on the shoulder and point, putting my finger over my mouth. Milo gulps, and I nod toward a stand of trees between us and the fire. We raise our rifles and slink into the trees. We ought to get out of here, but I’ve got to know what this is and whether it’s a threat.
On the other side of the trees, we hit fencing for a row of backyards. We skirt along the fence until we find a break between two burned houses. We scoot close to the street in the shadows and watch. The fire’s a few blocks down a low hill, past a school, on the other side of a creek. The wind’s blowing the tire smoke away from us, but it still stinks like ass.
It’s crazy-dangerous to get closer, but we’re drawn to this fire like moths. The lights in the sky make me jumpy, but they throw off moving shadows that give our own movement some cover.
Without talking about it, we start acting like scouts we’ve seen in war movies. I crouch and run ahead while Milo guards the rear, and then he stoops down and runs past me while I watch his back. We get a block from the fire, near the creek and its bridge, and we duck behind a hedge in front of a house with busted windows. We peek over the top of the hedge.
And there it is. A stack of burning tires. Behind it, four scruffy guys in camo are milling around in full gear with big-ass automatic rifles and bulletproof vests. One guy has a bandolier full of bullets strapped across his chest. Jesus.
I grab Milo by the shoulder and speak into his ear. “Go back the way we came. Run through the grass, but stay low.” And we take off.
We don’t stop to catch our breath until we reach the construction site, and we crouch down huffing and puffing in the semi-cover of the building shell. Two five-gallon jugs of some kind of fuel are in a dark corner. We grab them—they’re only half-full—then we jog down Dittmar toward home. The sky’s getting lighter, and the northern lights are dimming.
If the Light Escapes: A Braving the Light Novel Page 4