“The rent you paid on this place ran out two years ago, asshole,” Ale says. “And nobody’s been around to collect it for longer than that. Not sure it counts as ‘Tara’s apartment’ anymore. And where the fuck is she?” Ale’s gaze darts around the room, settling on Tara’s closed bedroom door. “Is she with you?”
Liam closes his eyes. “Ale,” he says, “Tara’s dead.”
This time, when the hit comes, he’s expecting it.
§
It’s not like Liam didn’t know Ale was in love with Tara.
Liam walked in on them once, obviously post-coital, Ale struggling into a t-shirt, Tara puddled in sheets and letting her braids down from their wrap. Liam knew better than to expect Tara to apologize—knew better than to think she had anything to apologize for. But later that night, both of them sprawled on the floor of her living room, surrounded by circuit diagrams and breadboards, Tara said, carefully, “About earlier. I didn’t mean to upset you. I thought you knew what this was.”
“You didn’t,” Liam lied, muffled around a mouthful of wires he was stripping for her. “I do.”
“Ale—” Tara began.
“Let’s not,” Liam said, taking the wires out of his mouth to stop her, “talk about him anymore, okay?”
“Okay,” she said and leaned forward to lick the taste of copper out of his mouth.
§
When Liam finally manages to pick himself up off the ground, Ale is gone.
Liam finds he’s not surprised.
§
The Ralph’s still operates like a grocery store, sort of. A skinny, pockmarked kid pries open the sliding glass doors at seven most mornings, sits slumped at one of the checkout counters while Liam limps around the store, eerie with its two-thirds empty shelves and busted out fluorescent lights. Liam tips canned goods and water purification tablets into a cracked plastic basket, as much as he thinks he’ll be able to carry the half-mile back to Tara’s apartment. There are no prices on anything. The kid helps Liam load the lot of it into his backpack and then stares at Liam expectantly. “Well?” he asks. “Whaddaya got?”
“Cash okay?” asks Liam, fishing out an assortment of wadded bills from his pocket and thrusting them toward the kid, who raises an eyebrow. “Sorry,” says Liam, unsure how things work around here these days. “I don’t have a lot to trade.”
“Nah,” says the kid, “cash is cool. Just don’t see it a lot anymore.” He peels a few hundred bucks in fives and tens out of Liam’s stash and organizes it meticulously before tucking it away out of sight. “All good?” he asks.
“All good,” agrees Liam, hefting his bag over his shoulders and turning to begin the long trek back to Tara’s apartment.
That night, he sits in the sand and eats canned peaches with his fingers, heavy syrup dripping into the toxic waves frothing at his feet. He thinks of Tara, months after the quake, standing in this spot with tar streaking her bare ankles, staring out over the water with a kind of tightly leashed rage. He was almost afraid to approach her, half-certain she would fly apart at his touch, dissipating into the acrid air.
“Three months,” she said. “Some cleanup effort, huh.”
Liam dragged the toe of his boot through the black mottled sand, watching the sea water that bubbled up to fill it in, dark and sludgy. “It’s all we’re gonna get. Bankruptcy filing gets you out of anything, apparently.”
Tara laughed, harsh and tired. “There’s a joke about my student loans in there, but I don’t have the energy to make it.” She hugged her arms tight around herself, expression cracking fractionally as her eyes tracked the downward curve of the sun. “There’s got to be something we can do,” she said. “I’m gonna figure out something.”
“I believe you,” he said, and he did.
§
Liam puts his groceries away in the empty cupboards, organizing everything carefully: neat stacks of canned green beans, rows of saltines in plastic sleeves. He traded his camp stove for a ride over the New Mexico/Arizona border, so he eats everything unheated, drinking down slippery cold noodles from a can of minestrone and trying not to taste them.
He sleeps a lot.
He doesn’t go back to the ocean.
§
Three weeks into this half-conscious vigil, he wakes up to an insistent knocking on the door.
Liam grabs his gun and tumbles up into a crouch before the haze of sleep has fully cleared from his mind. He trains the sight on the door. “Who’s there?” he calls out, voice hoarse from sleep and disuse.
There’s a pause and then Ale’s voice. “Listen, dumbass. I’m trying to be neighborly here, but I still got a key. Lemme in before I do it myself.”
Liam blinks then tucks the gun away at the small of his back, pushing himself to his feet and going to pull the door open. Ale stands there framed in it, wearing a sour expression, two travel mugs tucked into the crook of one arm, a wrinkled paper bag dangling from his fingers. “Well?” he asks. “You gonna invite me in?”
Liam steps aside wordlessly, making a half-hearted sweeping gesture with one arm. Ale snorts, boots thudding heavy across the threshold. “Love what you’ve done with the place,” he says, crouching next to the tangle of blankets on the floor and settling the coffee mugs on the faded carpet.
Liam is too tired to make any of the obvious jokes. “Ale,” he says instead, “the fuck are you doing here?”
“I’m the neighborhood welcoming committee, asshole,” says Ale, settling back on his haunches. “I’m a little late, but we weren’t sure you were gonna stick around. Coffee?”
Liam opens his mouth then closes it and circles around, lowering himself to the ground across from Ale, who picks up one of the travel mugs and holds it out, wiggling it enticingly. Liam takes it, twists off the lid and breathes in the rich steam that rises. It’s been awhile since he’s had coffee. It’s not usually easy to get. “I kind of thought you punching me in the face—twice—was my housewarming present.”
Ale’s expression darkens. “Like you didn’t deserve that,” he begins, then stops himself. “Look,” he says. “You planning on sticking around here or not?”
The ruined muscles of Liam’s right quad are throbbing and twitching unbearably; Liam finally gives up and drags his knuckles down the length of his thigh, hard, trying to massage out the spasms. “Yeah,” he says. “I think so.”
Ale shrugs. “It’s a small world these days. Around here everyone’s gotta look out for everyone else, at least a little. You’re gonna have to stick your head out of your rabbit hole eventually.”
“I—sure, okay,” says Liam. So Ale really is acting as some sort of fucked up welcoming committee. The world is a magical place. “Should I start putting together a casserole to bring to the next potluck?”
Ale reaches over and raps his knuckles against Liam’s shin, hard. “Ow,” protests Liam, glaring.
“Don’t be a dick,” says Ale, aiming an accusing finger at Liam’s nose. “And while we’re on the topic. You keep your mouth shut about anything and everything you and those tree-hugger fucks got up to, you got it?” Liam opens his mouth, whether to protest or ask Ale what the fuck he thinks he knows, he’s not sure, but Ale cuts him off with a sharp gesture. “I’m serious. Ain’t nobody needs to know that shit. We don’t usually get bothered around here, but plausible deniability is better for everyone. After all, you seemed like such a nice boy. You got it?”
Liam digs his fingers into the scar tissue above his knee. “Yeah,” he says, voice even. “I got it.”
Ale’s expression softens a little, and he nods, nudging the paper bag closer to Liam. “You better hurry up and open that, then,” he says. “Pasteles. Grandma’s recipe. You don’t wanna let them get cold.”
Liam is hit by a sudden flash of memory, him and Tara and Ale, fat-cheeked thirteen year olds crowded into Ale’s grandma’s kitchen, taking way too much pleasure in cookie-cuttering shapes out of floured dough, and he has to blink something hot out from behind his eyes
. “Yeah,” he agrees, and goes to rip the bag open.
§
There are, in fact, potlucks.
Ale doesn’t call them potlucks, but Liam knows better. There are more people left in Oceanside than Liam would have guessed—around three hundred, Ale estimates—and community-wide get-togethers are thick on the ground. Weddings, funerals, Friday night fish fries, fucking barn raisings, hell if Liam knows. “One little apocalypse, and we’re all turning into the fucking Amish,” Liam complains the first time Ale tries to drag him out. Liam staunchly avoids anything involving communal dining, though he does eventually cave on some events that seem more functional: helps repair a septic tank, puts up a rain-barrel water collection system. He doesn’t try to make nice with the neighbors, though, and despite the lecture Ale doesn’t really seem to expect him to. Liam keeps his head down, and helps out when Ale asks, and nobody tries to make nice with him, either. He figures it’s probably more comfortable for everyone that way.
§
Sometimes, helping out is more of a pain in the ass than seems worth staying in Ale’s good graces. “You think,” Liam asks, blinking the sting of sweat from his eyes as he edges carefully along the hood of a gutted-out Camaro half-buried in other junkyard detritus, “that this is the sort of shit all those collapse fetishists had in mind when they jerked off to the thought of the end times?”
“Who knows, man,” says Ale, ten feet ahead of Liam, bouncing from the rusted hull of a speed boat to the stained bulk of a refrigerator with easy grace. “Some of ‘em, probably. The really masochistic ones. Reaping what we sowed.” He picks his way along a complicated structure made of narrow metal railings, balancing like a tightrope walker.
Liam is still working on the Camaro. “And the rest of them?” he asks.
“Too busy laughing at us from their fortified bunkers full of Uzis and canned goods to care, probably. Yo, could you hurry it up? I know you’re like the walking wounded these days but Jesus.”
Liam flips him the bird and determinedly does not speed up as he finally conquers the speedboat. “You ever think about that stuff, back in the day?”
“Nah,” says Ale. “I was perfectly content in the bubble. I never wanted to give up my creature comforts. I’m still fuckin’ bitter about it. You?”
“Never really thought about it,” says Liam. This is a lie, sort of. In the morass of his own all-encompassing youthful angst, the dim, romanticized prospect of a zombie horde or a super volcano as painted by first-person shooters and disaster flicks had seemed like a step up. He thinks this had probably been a pretty popular sentiment among his directionless contemporaries, so he refuses to be too embarrassed about it, even if he’s not going to admit it to Ale. “How much further, anyway?”
“Another quarter mile, maybe. We’re almost there.”
“Thank god,” mutters Liam. He doesn’t even really know what they’re trawling the junkyard for; Ale said something about parts for the generator, which Liam has never actually seen used. For emergencies, Ale said, but if their whole goddamn lives don’t count as emergencies Liam doesn’t know what does. “Hey,” says Liam, squinting. “Is that a surfboard?”
It is a surfboard, remarkably intact, still strapped to the roof rack on an ancient jeep. “I’ll be goddamned,” says Liam, tracing a reverent hand over the blunt curve of its nose. It’s a beginner’s longboard, huge and garishly colored, nothing Liam would have been caught dead on as a kid. He doesn’t care. He wants it, desperately.
“You gotta be kidding me,” says Ale. He’s reappeared next to Liam somehow, popping up like a magic trick. Liam starts and almost loses his footing; Ale catches at his elbow to steady him, fingers warm and strong against the slide of bones. “You’re such a bro. You really planning on going for a dip in that radioactive sludge?” Ale waves a vague hand toward the west, where the shimmering line of the ocean is just visible through the haze. “Your organs are gonna rot out.”
Liam laughs, a little short. “Come on, you know how many hours I’ve spent soaking in that shit over the past four years?” he asks. “I’ve probably swallowed more than a gallon of it. It’s too late for me. I’m like ninety percent radioactive sludge already.”
Ale opens his mouth, closes it. His fingers slip away from Liam’s arm. “I’m not helping you haul it back,” he says.
Liam gives the thing an affectionate tap. “I’ll come back for it.”
Liam makes his way back to the junkyard in the evening, misjudges how long it’ll take him to find the right spot again, gets lost, has to drag the surfboard home by the inadequate light of a half moon, freezing his balls off in the night air. The next morning he wakes at dawn, chest tight with the nostalgia familiarity of it, and trudges down to the water, dragging the board behind him, scraping a shallow channel in the sand. His shoulders ache as he paddles himself out past the break, woefully out of shape. The water smells funny. He knows the chances of him actually catching a wave with his leg the way it is are slim to none.
It doesn’t matter. Sitting there, straddling the stupid ugly board, riding out the gentle undulations of the water, staring off into the endless expanse of the ocean—he can almost pretend nothing has changed at all.
§
On the five-year anniversary of the quake, Ale wakes Liam up at midnight, pounding insistently on his door. When Liam limps over to open it, Ale holds up a dusty bottle of Jack like a beacon. “In memoriam,” he says. “Put on some pants, and let’s get out of here.”
It takes Liam a solid ten minutes of following Ale blindly through the frigid dark before he figures out where they’re going: the yawning sinkhole in the earth that marks where their high school once stood.
“Jesus Christ, Ale,” Liam says, as Ale settles himself terrifyingly close to the edge, flinging out one leg to dangle over the abyss. “The fuck did you want to come here for?”
“This doesn’t seem like a good place to celebrate?” Ale asks, pulling the whiskey bottle out of the depths of his coat and twisting off the cap. He holds it out and upends it, sending a healthy slug down into the emptiness. Liam listens to it splatter and trickle off the debris within, weirdly loud and echoing in the silence of the night. “Sit your ass down, Liam,” says Ale. “I’m trying to have a moment.”
Liam sits.
Carefully, he edges his legs right alongside Ale’s, into the yawning darkness. Ale bumps their shoulders together, holding out the bottle, and Liam, nerves tight and thrumming, takes it gratefully, tossing back a substantial swallow. Ale’s upper arm pressed against Liam’s feels a thousand degrees warmer than the cold night air. Liam takes another gulp, two, before handing the bottle back. “You gonna say a few words?”
Ale snorts, looks down to where he’s running his thumb in slow circles around the mouth of the bottle. His eyelashes are really long, Liam thinks, then blinks. Whiskey on an empty stomach.
“Congratulations,” says Ale to the abyss, raising the bottle and startling Liam, who hadn’t really expected Ale to say anything. “On getting out when you did.”
Liam makes a sound that’s almost a laugh, scrubs a hand over his eyes. “Touching,” he says.
Ale laughs too, a puff of fog-silver in the chill air. “Yeah, well.”
The whiskey is really starting to hit Liam now, turning his thoughts slow and syrupy at the edges. Ale settles the bottle down between them, fingers still looped around the neck. When Liam reaches down to take it Ale doesn’t let go, and they sit like that for a minute, knuckles bumping together, the bottle a buffer between them. I’m gonna do something dumb, Liam thinks, too booze-softened to be nervous. I’m gonna kiss him or jump into this hole in the ground, I’m gonna—
And then Ale says, “You know, Tara and I. . . .”
The moment shatters. “Christ,” Liam says. “Don’t. I know. I mean, I know as much as I want to know. Okay?”
“But—”
“You wanna know how to disable a deep water drill?” Liam asks, to make a point.
There’s a long silence, and then Ale says, “Actually, kind of, yeah.”
Liam blinks, twisting to stare at Ale. “For real?”
Ale shrugs, doesn’t say anything.
Liam stares at him for another long moment, then laughs, flopping down onto his back. “Robots,” he says.
“Fuck you.”
“I’m serious.” Liam laughs again, too drunk to help himself. “I mean, what’d you think it was? Me swimming down there with a depth charge?”
“Shit, I dunno,” says Ale, sulky. “Coulda been.”
Liam shakes his head. “It’s actually not that hard,” he says. “There are a lot of safety mechanisms built in, to cap the well if it looks like something is going wrong. You just have to trigger one of them. The easiest is just to cut the communication lines from the operating deck to the platform. Send in a robot, an unmanned underwater vehicle, and—” he makes a scissoring motion with his fingers. “The whole thing shuts down catastrophically.”
“So tell me something, nerd-boy,” says Ale. He twists suddenly, looming over Liam, filling Liam’s vision and utterly blotting out the haze of the sky. “If it’s so fucking hands off, what the hell happened?” Their faces are really, really close together. Ale’s breath is hot on Liam’s skin, heavy with whiskey. Liam swallows.
“What happened,” Liam says, “is that, sometimes, you get caught.”
§
They don’t kiss. Liam puts his mouth everywhere else. Afterward, he spends hours licking grains of sand out of the crevasses between his teeth.
Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation Page 19