by McBain, Tim
Izzy wrinkled her face into a snarl.
“That’s a baby’s bike. And it’s pink.” She turned back to the ten speed. “I want this one.”
“Have you ever ridden a bike like that?”
“What’s the difference?”
“It has gears for starters.”
Izzy toed the kickstand up and walked the bike toward the door.
“I’ll figure it out.”
Erin sighed and followed her out.
“At least let me lower the seat so you can actually get on the damn thing.”
“Language.”
After adjusting the seat to the lowest position, Erin steadied the bike while Izzy climbed on.
“OK, you can let go,” Izzy said, scooting forward a little.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
Erin hesitated.
“Erin, let go!”
She released her grip, putting her palms out flat in front of her in a defensive position.
Izzy took off down the drive, wobbling a little and then righting herself. She looped onto the grass and headed back toward Erin, standing to get more leverage on the pedals.
“Why is it so hard to pedal?”
“That’s what I was trying to say about the gears,” Erin said, turning in a slow circle to follow Izzy as she wound around her. “Keep pedaling and hit that little thumb trigger with your right hand.”
The bike wobbled again as Izzy readjusted her focus on her hands, but she kept it under control. There was a pop and a grind and Izzy made a little alarmed sound, but then the gear shifted and she was riding smoothly again.
“Ha! I did it!” She changed gears a second time. “So what’s the point anyway?”
“The lower gears make it easier to pedal. Like if you’re climbing a big hill, when it gets hard to pedal, you can switch down to a lower gear and then you don’t have to do as much work. The higher gears make it harder to pedal, but then you can get going faster on flat ground without pumping your legs like crazy.”
Erin turned back to where her bike was propped against the barn.
“We can ride around a little so you can practice some more.”
“Whoa!” Izzy shrieked. “You can pedal backwards!”
Erin stopped and pivoted to face her.
“Right, that’s the other thing. This kind of bike has hand brakes,” she pantomimed braking with her hands. “Squeeze the little levers on the handlebars.”
Izzy wrenched on the brake and the bike let out a metallic squeal, throwing her forward and off the seat a little.
“I guess they work.”
Erin swung her leg over the bike and pushed off the ground, propelling herself forward. The wind rustled through her hair and she smiled. When was the last time she’d ridden a bike? She couldn’t even remember. She’d forgotten how fun it was.
When they weren’t pretending their bikes were horses, they were cars. They’d put a bag of chips and a can of Coke in Kelly’s mailbox, and then pretend they were pulling into the drive-thru at McDonalds.
“I want to try the hill thing,” Izzy called back.
“What?”
“The thing where you change gears and it makes going up easier.”
“Alright. I guess we can go down to the road and ride up the hill,” Erin said. “But watch for traffic.”
“Ha. Ha.”
They bumped over potholes as they snaked around the final curve of the driveway and then banked onto the blacktop.
Erin could hear the clunking of Izzy shifting gears behind her. It was a long winding ride up the hill, and before long, she was panting for breath. After a few more pedals, she swung the bike around and dropped a leg down to hold it steady, waiting for Izzy to catch up.
“Think you got the hang of it?”
Izzy nodded. “It’s pretty cool. I wonder who came up with it?”
“Bike gears?” Erin said. “I don’t know.”
She looked across a clearing to her right. Below them, she could see where a bend in the highway cut across the green of the valley. Beyond that, the white steeple of a church rose from the trees.
“Ready to head back down?”
Izzy took off down the hill in response, building speed and making car engine noises.
“Brrrrrrrinnnnnnnnnn-ninnn-ninnnn-niiiiiiiiin!”
As they approached the driveway, Erin realized too late that Izzy hadn’t slowed down. And then everything happened in an instant.
She saw Izzy’s legs pedaling backwards in vain, trying to engage a foot brake that didn’t exist.
Erin yelled, “Brake! Brake! Brake with your hands!”
Izzy took her eyes off the road to look at her fingers, but it was too late. The bike swerved off the road and the last thing Erin saw was Izzy and the bike sailing over the edge and into the creek below.
Travis
Hillsboro, Michigan
57 days after
He rode home in the dark, not pedaling much, just letting the bike coast over the craggy road for long stretches. The tires hummed along the asphalt. The sound of the bike reminded him of the noise of fishing line unspooling in double time as the lure is cast, except a never ending version of that sound that rolled down the road along with him.
Otherwise the night was quiet. He could hear the wind rustle the plants in the fields around him once in a while, and the collective chirp of the insects swelled enough to become audible over the bike sound from time to time, but that was it. He could see a bit, though, compared to the last time he made this trek. The moon reflected off of the surface of the road, lighting it up gray, the cracks marbling it with veins of black. He couldn’t discern any details of the plants in the fields to his right and left, but the silhouette was there, the blackest places forming odd shapes so it almost looked like the field had tightly cropped curly hair.
He rode on, and the night stretched out a long way. It felt like the quiet and the dark would never end. The empty world would sprawl endlessly in front of him, peppered with the scattered and the dead.
When he rolled up to the house, the dog waited on the porch. She stood when she saw him bank around the corner, her head down, her shoulders hunched, her tail wagging too fast to see in that half light just before dawn. He dismounted the bike, leaning it up against the porch rail. Hannibal approached, and he set the bag of guns on the deck to kneel and greet her. He rubbed the beast’s ears with his fingers, his palm cupping the back of her head. The skull felt small in his hand, the flesh warm. The dog looked at him for a second, eyes squinted in an expression he took as happy, and then she looked away.
It felt weird to have a being care when he got home, like a tiny version of the way things used to be. He didn’t know how to describe it, but that was OK. She didn’t care. He liked that you didn’t have to talk to dogs. You could just be.
They went inside, passing through the doorway into the gloom. He lit a lantern, the dog’s nails clicking on the wood floor behind him as she sniffed around near the bottom of his recliner. Ah, she must be hungry, he thought. Out to the kitchen, then. He scooped some kibble into her bowl, and she ate, lifting her head periodically to look at him as her mouth crunched food.
Travis eyeballed the doorway to the steps for a moment, considering bed for a bit, but no. He was much too tired to sleep.
He stirred up a rum and Coke and made his way to his chair in the living room. The dog followed alongside. He sat and sipped and stared at nothing, at the walls and the floor and the shade outside the window that the candles couldn’t defeat. It wasn’t a relaxing stare. Exhausted as he may be, he found no sleepy idleness in sitting still. Electricity thrummed through him, held his eyes open wide. He felt it all over, a tingle in his hands, a clenching of his jaw, a churn in his gut. His thoughts somehow stayed remote, though, at least as far as remembering the violence he’d carried out just a couple of hours ago.
It came to him in little flashes. The silhouette of the bodies sprawled along the factory floor.
The squeal of the truck door as he opened it. The copper smell of the blood. The way the red seeped to fill the spaces in the gravel like a miniature version of a flash flood flowing through city streets. But it didn’t seem real. Not all the way. It seemed like a dream or maybe a memory of something that happened in a movie. And it seemed like it was a long time ago.
He slurped warm rum and Coke. He was almost used to drinking room temp booze now. He didn’t think he preferred it yet, but he didn’t mind it. He thought that if he kept at it long enough, he would eventually favor it over cold, if cold became an option again someday. That would be weird. He imagined himself at a bar ordering a lukewarm whiskey sour, the bartender making a face.
He reached down to pet the dog, and Hannibal pushed her cold snout into the palm of his hand as it approached. Then she lowered her head so he could pet her and blinked a few times. She was a good dog, he thought.
The booze caught up with him then, his head going lighter and lighter, taking on that almost dizzy euphoria of the first stage of drunkenness. It had been several days since he’d had a drink. He wasn’t sure how long anymore. Anyway, the time off had resensitized him to this first rush, when the alcohol first elbows in there to kill some brain cells and loosen things up a bit. It felt like old times. Old memories. Old places where old feelings vibrated in the air and echoed down the halls.
He remembered sitting on a couch at a party, talking to a strange girl with severe bangs about old sit-com theme songs, the conversation barely audible over the music, laughing, drinking, being young and drunk and alive. It felt more like thinking about some other person than a memory of himself. Someone he used to know and had forgotten all about until just now. Someone he liked and felt embarrassed for at the same time.
Time got away from him somewhere in there, and then the world went to shit, and all of the people died, even the people he used to be. So who was he now?
A killer. A murderer.
The words didn’t come to him with any sense of shame or pride. They rang out in a matter of fact tone in his head. He was a killer, a person who had murdered other people, rightly or wrongly. That was who he was. He could never take it back, and he didn’t want to.
He took a big drink of rum and Coke, swiped the heel of his hand across his lips. His shoulders nestled back into the recliner, and he stared out the window, waiting for the sun. To hell with sleep. To hell with it.
Mitch
Bethel Park, Pennsylvania
42 days before
He sat at the table and listened to the grandfather clock tick. Gray shrouded the kitchen, shadows blackening along the edges of the fridge and the countertops, softening the edges of everything, the fading light from the window unable to compete. Shit. The riot must have knocked the power out. For a second he thought maybe that would be it, maybe the electricity would just never come back on as society disintegrated. But no. Things were still together somewhat for now. They would get it back on for a while at least, though he may not live to see it.
The boys made their way into the kitchen.
“Power’s out,” Kevin said, not making eye contact.
“Yeah, I think it’s from the riot,” Mitch said. “I’m sure it will be back on before long.”
“But why would they want to do that?” Matt said.
“I doubt anyone intended to kill the electricity,” Mitch said. “But fires get out of control. Powerlines melt. Transformers fry. It spreads from there.”
“What if it never comes back on?” Matt said.
“It will,” Mitch said. “There’s work to be done and money to be made. Trust me, they’ll keep fixing it until there’s no one left to fix it.”
“That can happen?” Matt said. “There can be no one left to fix it?”
“Well, no,” Mitch said. “I mean, yeah, I guess it could happen, but I just meant it more like a figure of speech. Don’t worry, Matt. They will keep on fixing it.”
“OK,” Matt said.
“Shouldn’t we do something?” Kevin said. “I mean, like, aren’t there things we should be doing?”
“I’ve been making calls,” Mitch said. “Hopefully I’ll be able to get a hold of your grandparents as soon as possible. That’s probably the most important thing. What did you have in mind?”
“I don’t know. Should we try to stock up on food and stuff like that?” Kevin said, still looking at the floor.
“Maybe you’re right,” Mitch said. “It could get busy with the power out, but it’s probably not out everywhere yet. We could grab food, ice, maybe some flashlights. Bet those are flying off the shelves.”
Mitch made a quick list, and they piled into the car again, though nobody had to hold any boxes on their laps this time. Headlights lit up the night all around. The traffic seemed thick. Cars packed together at intersections like herds of cattle jostling along their fence, looking for some way out. As they waited at a stoplight, the other cars surrounding them, he thought this could be a mistake. That they’d get stuck out here, engulfed in the riot and the traffic somehow and never even get home, encased in the car with zombies closing in, the other cars so close they couldn’t open the doors or climb out of the windows. But the paranoia faded when they got moving once more.
The gun on the passenger seat made him feel a little better anyway. He’d already decided that he’d tuck it in his belt on the way in. Nobody was going to be enforcing any right to conceal permits with half of the city on fire. They’d gotten caught with their guard down outside of the cabin. It wouldn’t happen again.
For a few blocks they saw no signs of electricity, dead streetlights leaving the sides of the road in blackness, but then a glimmer of color took shape in the distance. The golden arches and the Burger King logo glowed yellow, red, and orange. Good. Hopefully the grocery store down here had power, too.
Streetlights and traffic lights returned as they rolled on, though not all of them were up and running. It seemed a little hit or miss. Still, there was enough light to see there was no smoke anywhere too near, no masses of humanity kicking and thrashing and knocking down doors and windows. It looked a little busier than normal, but that was it.
“Damn,” Mitch said as they approached the unlit Kroger sign.
Darkness shrouded the parking lot, the open space made to feel foreign in the gloom. They pulled in, advancing slowly into the shadows, and it felt like creeping across some African prairie, Mitch thought, the way you could see the flattened land stretch off with the occasional lightpost rising up like a tree to interrupt the flatness. The cars were just a texture along the horizon, their details invisible apart from the silhouettes of their tops.
“There’s a light on inside,” Kevin said.
Mitch looked up at the front doors before them and saw the headlights reflected off of the glass there, but only darkness behind the glass. Glancing back at his son, he following the trajectory of the boy’s outstretched finger. Ah. The lights on the other side of the store were on.
“Nice,” he said. “They must have a generator going to power the half of the store with the groceries.”
They eased over to that side of the lot. The businesses along the street walled them off from the traffic, so the night felt silent and empty after all of the time surrounded by traffic. The other half of the lot throbbed with activity, though. Mitch saw the headlights of minivans and SUVs pulling in and parking. Another movement flitted among the shadows. It took him a moment to realize that droves of people flocked toward the store, some streaming out of cars while others arrived on bike and foot.
Shit. He licked his lips, tongue dragging over sharp chapped spots in the corners, almost crusted. The phantoms shifted in the dark places, their faces scrunching when the headlights hit them. He didn’t like it. Too many people. Too much chaos in the air tonight. He swiped fingers at his forehead, felt a little sweat there.
“Can I ask you something?” Matt said, his head appearing at Mitch’s shoulder, in the space between the seats.
“Me? Yeah.”
“Can we get some Oreos?”
He looked at the boy, his face dead serious in the glow from the dash lights.
“Yeah, sure,” Mitch said. “My boy wants Oreos, he’ll have Oreos. You want anything Kevin?”
He tried to find his older son’s face in the rearview, but he saw only the faint red glow of the taillights bleeding through the rear windshield. The boy’s voice piped up from the gloom:
“I don’t know. I’ll think about it.”
The disembodied voice sounded thicker than Mitch remembered. His son was getting older, but he’d never get to see him become a man, start a family of his own. To him, both of his sons would be boys forever, and forever might only be a few more hours.
The despair of the thing settled upon his shoulders as he parked the car. He closed his eyes and put his head down on the wheel, heard the sound of the back doors open and close as his sons exited the vehicle. He sat there for a moment, head touching the rounded top of the wheel, eyes drifting open to stare into the black nothing where his feet must be.
He picked himself up, grabbed the gun and tucked it in his belt as he opened the door and stood. He thought one of the kids might ask what took him so long or perhaps even see him handling the gun under the dome light and confront him about it, but they were distracted. They looked upon the streams of people moving toward the glow of the glass storefront, many picking their way through the narrow pathways between the parked cars rather than braving the aisles where additional cars still roamed.
They joined the throng of foot traffic, following the zigzagging path between the vehicles. The movement all around made Mitch uptight, and yet something about traveling along with this large group felt social, almost on a primal level, some shared experience in a stressful moment. Like nomads pressing toward a watering hole, maybe.