by Doug Goodman
“Lavender,” Jaxon cooed.
“Don’t be gay, Spike.”
They took turns firing the water balloon hurler. Jaxon took the first shot. He scrawled “Cleveland Steamer” on the side, loaded the balloon, and pulled back the cup while Aidan and Kirk held the other end of the sling.
Jaxon shouted, “On my command, unleash hell!” They released the cup. The red balloon sailed out over the backyard and the alley and under the ocean of gray. The balloon splattered against a yellow and green garden gnome, spooging him with a moisturizer facial. They cheered as the balloon hit its target, and then spent the next half hour firing at random targets throughout the neighborhood.
While the boys played catapult, Alyssa collected the liquor bottles Peter found and filled them with the gasoline they kept downstairs in one of the boy’s rooms.
Over the last three months, they had made many upgrades to the attic, such as soundproofing it with gym mats and egg cartons and adding a pulley system to raise the rooftop around the ridge vent like a trap door, which gave them an eagle’s nest view of the neighborhood, but none of their innovations were as ingenious or as necessary to sanity as adding a second-floor bedroom. Of course, it had to be soundproofed and scent-proofed, too. But at the same time, it provided a storage area, a privacy room, and was ten degrees cooler than the attic – all things very necessary for not killing each other.
Alyssa opened the closet door. The closet was a carefully organized quartermaster’s store of backpacks, pharmaceuticals, gallon jugs of bleach, bullets, and various items they had each dubbed necessary for survival at one time or another. She replaced the gasoline, and then added the new bottles. She counted them – 22 in all, plus an old-time wooden crate that was full of eighteen coke bottles, all Molotov cocktails waiting to be lit. Next to the bottles was a small stack of CDs. Alyssa pulled out a soundtrack. She loved soundtracks because the right ones compiled the best songs, like the Sleepless in Seattle soundtrack or the Pulp Fiction soundtrack. Classics. This evening, she held the soundtrack to another classic, The Mambo Kings. She started humming Bella Maria de Mi Alma and thought of her family in the barrio and hoped they were able to escape. Most of the houses were not as large as the ones in this upper-middle class neighborhood, so the logical side of her knew to be skeptical, but that was too much for her to give up on yet. Time must have eluded her, because a grackle startled her by flying past the boarded-up window. Must be twilight, she thought. Soon it would be dark and the bats would be out. She closed the closet door and climbed up the rope ladder back to the attic. She shut the attic door on the bedroom.
While Alyssa was in the bedroom and the other boys were doing their chores, Peter and Colt went down to the first floor and opened the door to the basement. They turned on their headlamps and descended into the basement, whistling like the seven dwarfs. Downstairs was another door, and it, too, had a lock on it. They unlocked it and went inside.
Before they arrived, the basement had been stocked full of grocery items. One of the things they had figured out about this family was that they were Mormons, so the basement was loaded with practical items for surviving a disaster like canned food and bleach. But now that they had lived off the family stockroom for months, only small pockets of random goods remained, like 28 boxes of fashion softener or 13 bottles of nail polish or 48 lines of USB cables – none of them over 12 inches long. These items were not considered necessary to survival, so the boys left them as-is.
In the far corner were the washer and dryer. The agitator had been removed from the washer and thrown aside like a pulled tooth (it lay in the middle of the basement floor) to make it lighter. Peter shoved the washer aside, and they crawled behind it. A dirt tunnel opened up before them. It went three feet, then cornered left another fifty feet to a concrete barrier. The tunnel was buttressed by various scavenged items like a standing lamp, a metal bedframe crossbar, and a curling bar. The tunnel was barely wide enough for two skinny kids to fit through, which was just the right size for them. For two months, they had been working on the escape hatch. Theoretically, once inside the sewers, they had a clear path to the drainage ditches on the side of the subdivision. They took turns using the back end of the hammer to scrape at the concrete. It was hard, difficult work in heavy, unventilated air and with little pay-out, but getting out through the drainage ditches was the linchpin in the escape plan. They had to have a way to escape without being detected, and the drainage ditch would take them far from any animals. By the time twilight arrived, they had added to a long, shallow indentation in the concrete.
“How thick is the concrete, do you think?” Colt asked while Peter took to the hammer again.
“It’s got to be at least three or four inches thick, I suspect.”
“And how far have we gone?”
“An inch or two.” To Colt’s despondent gaze, he added, “We’re getting closer. Maybe tomorrow we can make it.”
“Do you think Aidan will ever stop being mad at you?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“I don’t think he trusts you.”
“Can you blame him?”
Colt didn’t answer for a while. Then he said, “He’s so serious all the time now.”
“Now? Ha! He’s always been like that. You just don’t remember. Besides, somebody has to be serious. Too many people having too much fun in the middle of the apocalypse – we might make the neighbors jealous if it weren’t for him.”
Later, when the grackles started reappearing, Aidan called them on the FRS. While the risk with wargs was being smelled or heard, with the grackles it was a question of being seen. Like most predatory corvids, they had a keen eyesight far beyond the abilities of any human. Peter and Colt left the tools where they were and climbed back out of the tunnel. They wiped the sweat from their foreheads, repositioned the washer so that nobody could tell a tunnel lay behind it, and then climbed back up into the attic – washing their path with bleach as they moved.
The roar grew into something huge and deafening. There were more grackles out than they could remember hearing before. The grackles were so loud, nobody in the attic could hear the bats through all the raucous.
They peeked out through the ridge vent at the giant water oak across the street. What at first they thought were leaves had become the bodies of grackles. A thousand evil-minded eyes glared back at them from the tree, eyes that left no doubt that they once came from the heads of dinosaurs. Gently, the boys closed the ridge vent.
“It’s like The Birds out there,” Kirk said.
“Do you think they’re on to us?” Jaxon asked.
“No,” Aidan said. “I think it’s a precaution because of what happened earlier. They’re just ramping up the watch, you know?”
“What about the wash?” Alyssa asked.
Aidan had to repeat what he said, only louder.
The awful grackle noise was so loud that they didn’t worry about bats that night. No way could bats feel their way through the dark with all those grackles screaming outside.
That meant they could party. No fires though. Fire was very bad.
Kirk pulled his box-top guitar from a cluster of boxes and mattresses. Then he started pummeling the strings. He sang a few lines, but once he sang, “There’s a lot of people saying we’d be better off dead,” everybody broke in with the chorus. Once they finished rocking in the free world, they played from Mumford and Sons, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and even Def Leppard. They poured some sugar on each other. They poured it on loud, screaming at times so that they could be heard over the din that permeated from outside. They ended the night with Paradise City. They couldn’t finish the song, though. Eventually, their voices fell hoarse from all the screaming, and the grackles drowned them out. All they had left was the noisome cawing. They went to bed, lulled to sleep by the birds that watched over the neighborhood, looking for them. Always looking for them.
Chapter Two – Loyal
The armadillo emerged from the underbrush and skittered up to
the two-lane road. It began walking back and forth on the edge of the asphalt. There was no shoulder on the narrow road. The armadillo smelled oil lingering in the air, and paint on the asphalt. Suddenly, a blaze of lights and sound rushed by, and the armadillo ducked back into the underbrush.
After a moment, it stuck its gray nose back out from behind the bushes and sniffed the air. It clawed over a fallen log and plopped down in the grass. Sniffed around some more, its nose arching as the armadillo stood on its hind legs. When it decided it no longer smelled anything dangerous or threatening, the armadillo charged for the road. It had made up its tiny mind. There would be no stopping it this time.
Then the car came, unseen and unheralded until it was too late.
“What the hell was that?” Aidan wondered out loud, as the old van heaved over an unknown object in the road. There was a massive crunch as the van’s contents, people included, shuffled from side to side.
“I don’t know,” Alyssa said, looking over her shoulder and out the back windows. “It looks like you definitely hit something, though.”
“Unlucky for it. It is Friday the Thirteenth, after all.”
Then the smell hit them, and Alyssa was the first to choke. “Unlucky for us. I think it was a skunk.” She flipped the air conditioning to internal intake.
When she finally stopped coughing, she reached into the back and pulled out some of Aidan’s books. They were hardbounds covered with the faded artwork of barbarian warriors and ugly monsters full of fangs and eyes and rage. The spines were broken, the covers were falling apart, and the page stitching was coming undone. She handled them like they were the severed arms of giant bugs, with as little tactility as possible.
“So this is what the boys do when I’m away.”
“Yep. Me, my brothers, and Jaxon and Kirk are cool, happening studs. You just didn’t’ realize how cool till now.”
She pushed the bangs of her shoulder-length hair behind her ear and opened the book. Then she closed it.
“This is stupid.”
“So don’t come.”
“But I want to be with you.”
“And I agreed to be with them. I’m the dude running the whole thing.”
She put her hand on his arm and cooed through one side of her face, “I’ll bet we could find ways to have fun.”
Aidan liked that face. When she was a little girl, Alyssa had been struck with Bell’s palsy. It had paralyzed most of the muscles on the left side of her face, giving her the crooked smile, but he loved how it looked. It was imperfect and asymmetrical and beautiful.
“I promised them. You don’t want to see a bunch of guys in letter jackets cry, do you?”
“When you put it that way, that is pretty sad. So it’s Friday night, and you guys could be anywhere doing anything you want, and you prefer to role-play?”
Aidan shifted in his seat. Kept his eyes focused on the road.
“What is it?”
He started to say, and then said, “I shouldn’t say. I don’t want to ruin anything.”
“C’mon. You can tell me.”
“I’m only doing this cause they asked. Kind of a last hurrah. Me and my wonderful fraternal twin, Peter are off to college, leaving Mike and Colt alone with Mom and Dad. Jaxon’s heading to England to study under some martial arts genius. Kirk dropped out a year ago. We’re on our way to different places, you know? We’re not the same people we were two, three years ago. Am I making any sense?”
“Yeah, but you know, you get to fly away to Austin, and I’m stuck here pulling a senior year, so don’t try to sound all doom-and-gloom about it.”
“Sorry. I’m not trying to be a downer.” He slowed down as the subdivision emerged from the woods on the right side of the road. On the other side stood a large pasture full of prize longhorns. Except for an errant calf and cow grazing through the barbed wire, the bulk of the herd had moved away from the road. They were huddled together beneath some oak trees, as if preparing for a storm. “You ever see some of the same people doing the same things year-in-year-out? Milling? Nothing ever changes for them, no matter what. It’s like the world could fall away, and on Friday night, they’d still be cruising past the Dairy Queen. I think for us, for you, me, my brothers and our friends, it’s going to be different.”
“Ha! We’ll be kings of the world!”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“Oh, I know what you mean. Don’t be so serious. We’ll have fun, and if it gets too dull, we can go out or something.”
He grinned, which made her feel better. Aidan was a nice guy and all, but he could turn really sullen in a second. And she had to ask him something that might change his mood for the rest of the evening. There was something on her mind. Something she had to ask, just to make sure. She hoped she didn’t make him mad bringing the subject up. Aidan was not easily stirred, but when he was, he had a bad temper.
“Speaking of us, you’ve been avoiding talking about us for the past few months.”
Aidan groaned.
“Look, I’m not trying to bring up a sore subject, but it’s something we need to talk about, and we need to talk about soon.”
Aidan said, “It’s all I think about. I think that’s why I hate talking about it. I know it’s something we have to do, but not tonight. Let’s get through tonight, and we can talk about it next week. Okay? I promise.”
Alyssa leaned into her seat. “Okay. Next week then, but no longer, cause you leave for college in three weeks.”
Kirk walked into the living room, past the leather couches and the giant television screen, and sat down at the baby grand in the adjacent sunroom. Kirk had a face like a rock star, almost impish it was so angular. He also had long hair that reached past his shoulders. He set his shirt and cigarettes down on the piano bench next to him and lifted the key guard. Put his foot on a petal and pressed a few keys, his head cocked to the side like an inquisitive dog while he tried to figure out the right note.
On the television, a newscaster talked about the demise of the Kyoto Protocol and its effects on the environment. Kirk ignored it as he searched for the right key.
“Hey, my stuff’s over here!” Jaxon yelled from his bedroom.
“I’ll be right over!” Kirk yelled back, then began playing a melody on the piano. His head still cocked to the side, he did not look at his fingers as the notes began to assemble into a song. Music came easily to him. It was the only thing that came easily to him. These notes were crescendo, if he remembered correctly. He wasn’t real good on the terminology, but it sounded like a rocket ship was launching from the piano.
Jaxon ducked his head out, a weird expression on his face. “I’ve heard this one before, haven’t I? Is it All-American Rejects?”
Kirk rolled his eyes. “Think cooler. It’s metal, but you’ve never heard it like this. Usually it’s played on a guitar.”
Jaxon had played this game many times before. Guess the really cool song I’m playing, but all you’re going to get is the background music from one instrument. Jaxon never got it right.
“Cool. Come help me decide.”
Jaxon walked into his room. Covering one wall was a television set, a stereo system, several game consoles, and a laptop with wireless. Covering the other were shelves of trophies – mostly martial arts, baseball, and soccer. Mounted blades, knives, and posters of swimsuit models adorned his walls. He opened his closet door, which had customized shelving. Towards the top was a shelf with small see-through containers, like a jewelry box. Each box contained a set of jeweled dice. Sparkling onyx stone, metallic gray, bone-colored, and classic colored with wax lettering. It had been so long since the last time he chose a set.
“Just take the reds,” Kirk said as he came up from behind.
“I was thinking the green.”
“So whatever happened to you and Brandy?”
“Does it matter? My parents are sending me to England. We’re done.”
“Fuck them. They have no right, Jaxon. You sh
ould be the one to dictate what you do.”
“They’re my parents, and they’re giving me a chance to study Taekwondo somewhere besides a hick town. They aren’t exactly forcing me. Put out that cigarette. My parents hate it when you smoke in here.”
Kirk looked around for something to put it out with and finally decided to toss it in the toilet.
“Waste of a good cigarette...”
Peter inhaled deeply. The hot dry summer air felt like fire in his lungs. He looked out at the burning evening sky and the ranch home they lived in. It was not old, but it wasn’t as young as when they first moved in almost a decade ago. Their father talked about repainting the trim, and some of the bricks were chalked up from the natural wear and tear of a house full of boys. It may not have been the best house in the upscale neighborhood, but it was their home, and he was happy to have lived there.
He took two steps forward, and then began flip-flopping front handstands across the front lawn. He made it almost all the way to the drive before he started curling towards the street and lost his balance.
He hit the ground hard, to the laughter of Mike and Colt. He lay spread-eagled and sprawled out on the lawn as if he was imitating Da Vinci’s painting of the Vitruvian Man, then sat up, acting dizzy and saying sluggishly, “And the lights went out, all over the world.”
Colt and Mike laughed hard, bottles of Coke in their hands. Colt looked over at the carport at the vacant spaces and the missing Cadillac. His laugh faded. He felt frightened, not that he would tell any of his brothers. It was the first time their parents had ever left them alone in the house, and he was anxious of their absence, even though he had told his parents he was fine with them going and his brothers taking care of him. He didn’t have an option, not according to his brothers.
Peter noticed Colt staring at the empty carport. Said, “Don’t worry about them. They’ll be fine.”
“I know.”
Mike’s cellphone rang. He looked at the text message and smiled. “Pizza’s on its way.”