by Doug Goodman
Aidan stopped Alyssa as they rounded another corner off the Boulevard. The van lay on its side, the back doors open and all its contents disemboweled on the asphalt.
“Oh,” was all Alyssa could say. She clutched onto Aidan’s shoulders.
“There’s blood on the car,” Aidan said. “It looks like something was slammed against the axle repeatedly.”
Then a flash of something caught his eye. Across the street was a two-story house. On the walkway, a small fire lay dying, and in the corner upstairs bedroom, a light flashed at him. After a second or two, it flashed at him again, hitting him directly in the face and making him squint.
“They’re in the house,” Aidan told Alyssa. “Let’s go.”
He took her by the hand, and they ran across the street, stopping behind the van to get another look at the street and make sure they weren’t being followed. When he was sure, Aidan led Alyssa up the walkway, over the fire, and into the house. Kirk opened the door as Aidan reached for the doorknob, then locked it behind them once they were inside.
Alyssa leaned into Aidan’s frame and began to cry. He held her tight, then looked to Kirk. “Everybody okay?”
Kirk’s jaw hung useless and powerless. Aidan read everything out of it. “Where are my brothers?”
“Upstairs. Corner room.”
Aidan let go of Alyssa and ran up the stairway. He threw open the door to the upstairs and bulled into the corner bedroom. His eyes darted from Jaxon to Peter to Colt, who was still nursing his arm.
“Where’s Mike?” Aidan asked. Tearful eyes met him, and he asked again, “Where’s Mike?”
Aidan fell to his knees. Colt and Peter kneeled down with him, arms all around him.
Peter said, “I’m sorry, Aidan. I’m sorry.” He couldn’t stop saying it, just repeated it over and over.
Very quietly, Aidan said, “You were supposed to look after him, Peter. You were in charge.”
Aidan glared at his brother like he was going to lay him out, but he didn’t punch him. He wiped his red-rimmed eyes and got up. He sniffed his nose a few times while everybody watched him to see what he would do. He pulled out the phone and called his parents again. Nothing. He dialed again.
“Pick up, pick up,” he pleaded with the dial tone. Nobody answered. He looked at the blank space where Mike should be sitting, at the arm limply hanging at Colt’s side, and wondered if his parents were ever coming back. With all the chaos swirling around them, only one thing was certain: they were all alone.
Chapter Three: Helpful
The deep inhalation woke Aidan. He rubbed his eyes and looked around the room, chastising himself for snoring again. The curved humps of egg cartons stared back at him like a thousand gray and green eyeballs stapled to the walls. He could feel dawn pressing against the boards on the window, soaking the room in new warmth. Alyssa lay next to him. What little light passed through the boards cast an iridescent amber sheen to her almost waist-long black hair. He started to smile, but the grin was cut off before it could fill the corners of his cheeks.
The sound of another deep inhalation suffused the room. Aidan froze. Fear jolted him awake faster than any caffeinated beverage ever did. He reminded himself to steady his heartbeat, to keep it from pounding against his chest.
There was more sniffing in the bedroom adjacent this one. Probably another warg, Aidan assumed, though rats had been known to work with them. Briefly, he remembered the horrible night the rats invaded their house. It was one of the longest nights they had spent in the house, collecting and killing and disposing of all those rats.
Alyssa’s warm fingers gripped his bare arm, and he knew she was aware, too. He said a prayer of thanks that he had fallen in love with the kind of girl who didn’t overreact, the kind you didn’t need to remind to keep quiet. Her soft hair fell on his shoulder as her head rose up. He could feel her deep eyes gazing over his shoulder.
The attic door slammed open, and a body fell down.
“Aah!” Colt yelled.
Alyssa shrieked. Aidan took a rubber ball and chunked it at Colt, who couldn’t duck out of the way in time. Giggling, he flipped back up into the attic.
Aidan smiled while Alyssa laughed. She had an embarrassing laugh when something really got her going.
“Very classy,” Aidan suggested.
“Oh, stop it,” she said and mock-slapped him. He took her face in his hands and held it close to him, admiring the beauty of her asymmetry, then he kissed her. Alyssa hoped it wouldn’t end. Then a ball came flying down from the attic.
“Breakfast,” Kirk moaned.
“Help us…we’re hungry…” Peter gasped, his hands clawing at the air in pain. “If we don’t get something to eat, we’ll die.”
“Or turn into zombies,” Kirk suggested.
“Dancing Thriller zombies?”
“Dancing with the Stars Thriller zombies! ”
“Shutup!” Aidan shouted jovially, then rolled on his back while Alyssa put on some shorts and a high school tee, then climbed over Aidan and up into the attic.
“Who wants pancakes?” she asked, and the boys cheered.
Alyssa looked at the dead grackle lying in the tub. “Gross,” she muttered. It was slightly wet to the touch and felt limp in her fingers. Its head flopped to the side, and she winced.
“Who found it?” she called to the back of the attic.
“Jaxon,” Colt cried out. The attic was filled with the muffled thud! Thud! Thud! of his feet as he ran across the mats. “He found it outside by the house. He said he thought it got confused with all those grackles flying around last night and flew right into the wall and killed itself.”
Alyssa started yanking out feathers. She remembered being horrified as a child when her mother had plucked one of their chickens, the ripping of feather leaving pale naked flesh. Now cleaning a bird was second nature. She stuffed the feathers in a sack, then handed the sack to Colt. The boy took the sack of feathers to the other boys, and they began looking for a place in the wall to stuff them.
Alyssa set the naked bird aside. Into a small bowl she poured a can of black beans - water and all.
When she was finished making the mashed beans, she returned to the grackle. She cut off its wicked glare, then sliced it open and pulled out the bird’s insides. All this she set aside. Later, it would be thrown in the shit sack or added to a balloon.
After she finished cooking the bird, she placed the food on paper plates on the floor. The boys devoured the meat and beans quickly, with a song of “thank you” and “tastes just like chicken.”
Aidan leaned back and watched Alyssa watching the big teenagers as if they were the children she used to babysit in her neighborhood. Kirk, Jaxon, Peter, and even Colt were all much older than the toddlers and kids she used to babysit. Those kids she fed snacks and kept out of danger. These kids, it was the same thing, but different. Then Aidan leaned forward and announced, “Today is the day we leave.”
All the boys, except Peter, put down their meal. Peter kept eating until Kirk flicked his ear.
“If we head north, there will be less bugs to deal with and just the animals. All the bugs seem to be moving south or going dormant.”
“But we have a good house here,” Jaxon said. “It’s practically a fortress. There are trap doors, hidden passages. Hell, we got booby traps.”
“No, man. It’s like Night of the Living Dead. The creatures haven’t come to kill us yet. We’ve been lucky, but we can’t be lucky forever. Eventually the wargs are going to come for us – they’ll smell us, or hear us, or a damn grackle or squirrel will tell them, and just like in the movie, we’ll be cornered. This is a death house. I said as much when we first came here, remember? That’s why we’ve been preparing for two and a half months to leave. We have weapons and we have a way out of here that will be hard to track.”
“But we’re not finished yet. We haven’t even broken into the sewer,” Kirk added.
“But we’re close. What – an inch or two, P
eter?”
“Something like that.”
“See? We can’t wait any longer. They have come close to getting us before, but last night, we had every damn grackle in the county parked outside our front door. We had wargs scenting for us. I say we take a hammer and find out what’s on the other side of that concrete.”
“Be honest,” Jaxon spat. “You just want to go find your parents.”
“That’s not true.”
“Don’t lie, Aidan.”
“I’m not.”
“Bullshit.”
“Bullshit, you. Maybe I want to find my parents, so what? There are other reasons to leave. You’re just mad cause…” But he couldn’t finish, cause nobody wanted to say that Jaxon’s parents were the only confirmed dead.
“Mad cause what? What, Aidan?” Jaxon yelled.
“Boys,” Alyssa urged.
“Alright, tell you what - we’ll put it to a vote.”
“Ha!” Jaxon chortled. “That’s not fair. You know you already got Colt and Peter on your side cause they’re your brothers. They want to go find Mommy and Daddy, too.”
Aidan lunged for Jaxon, who jumped deftly out of the way. Everybody else got between them.
“Don’t push me,” Aidan warned.
“What about the vote?” Peter asked.
“There’s nothing as democratic as a vote,” Alyssa added. Everyone was eager for Aidan and Jaxon to back off each other.
Jaxon looked to Kirk for support, but Kirk just shrugged. “Any form of decision-making sucks.”
“Okay, we have a pretty good idea who wants to go, so all for staying in this house, raise your hand.”
Aidan counted the hands. Three. Surprise splashed across his face. Why did Alyssa want to stay?
“I thought you wanted to go.”
“We don’t know what’s out there. Besides, we’ve done really well scavenging here. And like you said, the bugs are going south or hibernating. Maybe the other creatures will, too. That could buy us time to be ready for spring. Everything could go back to normal.”
Kirk added, “There’s too much risk in leaving. We don’t even know where we would go. Just north.”
Aidan slammed the wall.
“We will be safe here,” Alyssa said. “It took a lot of hard work to build up our house of bricks. Let’s not run from it just cause a couple of big, bad wolves have tried to blow it down.”
“Why are you so afraid of the unknown? For all we know, in some parts of the world, people are fighting back. There could be strongholds or green zones. My parents could be out there somewhere. Your parents could be out there.”
Silence filled the attic. The sun was rising, and though the heat was not as unbearable as it was in August, Aidan was beginning to sweat already. The attic fan kicked on, and everybody turned and watched it.
Colt was not old enough to ride his bike on the major roads outside the subdivision, but he was drinking a whole glass of whiskey. He hated the taste, so Kirk mixed some Coke in it. Colt said he still felt like puking. They gave a few minutes for the whiskey to set in, then Alyssa put a pillow over Colt’s face while Peter and Kirk pinned him down. Aidan grabbed Colt’s arm and reset the bone. Colt screamed, high-pitched and undignified, like a child and not a 13-year old kid. To Alyssa, the sound was soul shredding, but she did not let up on the pillow pressure. A lot of noise had just been made in a world that was attuned to seeking out human noisemakers and killing them. They looked down the attic door to Jaxon, who was looking out a window with the binoculars. He gave everyone in the attic a thumbs up – if there were any monsters outside, none of them were investigating the muffled screams. Alyssa pulled the pillow off. Aidan wrapped Colt’s arm the way he learned in Boy Scouts. Colt rolled away, crying.
“I’m sorry,” Aidan said.
“I’m sorry,” Peter said.
Aidan rubbed the sweat off of Colt and went back to the computer, which they had moved upstairs. Before the Internet died on the third day, Aidan spent the day downloading texts about animals, doctoring, wilderness survival – any information he could think of that would help their situation.
From the Internet, they learned that whatever was happening was happening worldwide. The day after Black Friday, CNN reported uprisings of giant-sized hawks in England, six-legged bears in China, and murderous lions in South Africa. Crocodiles assaulted Australia, mountain lions the size of saber-toothed cats throttled Mexico, and tigers and elephants hunted maliciously in India. And of course dogs and cats, or at least monstrous beings that once were dogs and cats. They were everywhere.
Everybody had a theory. The religious-minded claimed Armageddon. The science-conscientious reminded everyone of megafauna during the Ice Ages. They talked of rapid mutations as a response to the environment, but they could not explain what the animals were reacting to. Nobody had an explanation that could stick.
Later that night, CNN went off the air for good.
The lists of dead and alive were provided through social media. This is also where people found friends and family.
“ALIVE/WELL in Reno.” Like.
“We r safe n Seattle.” Like.
“They took my bro and sis. I’m trapped in a closet. I can hear the dogs outside, but they can’t get in. I think something must have fallen over the door. Not sure how much longer I can keep posting, but I will stay on as long as I can.”
That was Wendy, and she went to JuCo. She lived two streets down, and from what they heard and saw, her house was covered with wargs and panthers.
“We should tell her she is surrounded,” Peter said.
“Why? What good will it do?” Aidan countered.
“We must get her,” Alyssa said. “She is going to die if we don’t help her!”
“There is no way any of us are going outside, much less to a house surrounded by wargs,” Aidan countered. “That would be suicide.”
Aidan went back to the computer. There were more posts from people they knew.
“Mom and Dad love you. Stay safe.”
“Te amo, Mama y Papa.”
But their parents never posted. Like so many others, it was as if a giant hole in the ground swallowed their parents up and everything they belonged to or ever did. There was no trace of them anywhere, except their last posts on the Internet. From Black Friday:
“Watch over each other. Be back later. PS – Don’t forget to feed Cthulhu.”
Peter read over Aidan’s shoulder. “They’re out there, man.”
The next day, Wendy posted about being scared that this was her end. She was hungry and tired, but mostly thirsty. She had no water, and the heat was incredible. She could hear the wolves scratching, scratching. “If I dont post agn, luv you mom and dad. Peace to every1.” Her friends and family told her not to give up hope and keep posting. Somebody would come soon. They were trying to get through to the police department and the fire department, but nobody ever came. Not the police, the fire department, or the army. Wendy didn’t post again.
For whatever reason, the panthers left after the second day and were not seen again in their subdivision. The wargs stayed, though, like wardens of Lakewood Prison Facility. On the third day, the wargs started going house-to-house.
“We got to do something,” Kirk said.
Aidan found fifty gallons of bleach in white and blue jugs in the basement. They bleached the entire first floor and most of the second, then shut the attic door and prayed that the wargs would not track them.
They got lucky. The wargs went up the flight of stairs, but the stench was too powerful. They went to the next house.
The third day, they lost connection to the Internet. They would have believed that the wargs or rocs had snapped a power line, but the lights were still working, yet their cellphones died, too. They were ostracized from the Internet community. Later that night, the power followed the Internet and cellphones into oblivion. First, the streetlights blipped into darkness. The halogen glow stopped streaming through the vent fan. The
n the fan, the only respite from the overwhelming heat, slowed down and stopped. Almost immediately, warmth began to creep into the attic like some hot-tentacled monster.
By mid-morning, the thermometer outside said 95°, and life in the attic had become unbearable. Breathing became exhausting. The hot-tentacled monster had transformed into some smothering, carpeted creature that suffocated life and made movement difficult. There was nothing to do in the attic but sit and sweat. By the time Aidan broke into welts in the evening, a decision had been made. Unvoiced because talking only made you hotter, the decision had been made. In less than 24 hours, the most important step in their survival had become reactivating the fan. Screw food and water. They were going to die without some ventilation.
“I’ve got it,” Aidan said. “Two houses down, they have solar panels.”
Later, they would look back and realize how foolish and lucky they were. Nothing could be done without strict planning, like depositing a shit-bag or searching a house for supplies. But in the early days they were still like children who, when they see something they want, they take. If you want something, get it. There was nothing beyond the immediate. Want to watch a show that’s not on television? Pull it up On Demand. Want to find out about something? Wikipedia. Want a solar panel in the middle of the night? Grab some pliers and cable and go.
Only Colt stayed home.
As new as they were to this world, they had enough common sense to stay off the road and move in the shadows. They climbed under cars and over hedges, but always out of sight of the main road. They never saw a warg while they went to the 1-story brick house with solar panels on top.