“I’m surprised they kept you late for that,” I say.
“Oh, they let me go at eleven on the dot. I just had some stuff to do.”
I think about what sort of stuff there is on Timmer’s to-do list: rescuing damsels in distress, stealing gas, sniffing the wind, saving the world. I’m surprised he got done so fast.
“I worked with Kral in the Great Outdoors.”
“Ah . . . Kral. Kral hates birds.”
“Why didn’t you warn me?”
“About what?”
“About Kral.”
“Kral’s harmless. As long as you aren’t a bird.”
“He called me a zombie.”
“We’re all zombies to Kral.”
“He asked if I had a bugout bag. I told him I did.”
“That probably impressed him.”
“He wouldn’t be impressed if he knew I was talking about a plastic bag full of old stories and underpants.”
“Still, you are more prepared than most zombies, right?”
“For when it hits the fan.” We both say it at exactly the same time, like it’s a joke. It isn’t a joke, but we giggle like raccoons anyway while we slink around the Dumpsters and through the parking lot toward the Warren.
Crawl: “Breaking news! Special report! With Chad Manley and Sallie Lee!”
Sallie Lee: We have an important weather update.
Chad Manley: We have a haboob warning, folks.
Sallie Lee: The storm is approaching from the southwest. Wind gusts up to sixty miles per hour. Dust reducing visibility to zero. Everyone in the region is advised to find a safe place to park. Do not try to outrun the front. If you can see it, it is too close. And folks, this is a big one. Don’t count on it being a ten- or thirty-minute storm. This will last longer than an hour. It’s a gigantic haboob. Extremely dangerous.
Chad Manley: We all know how dangerous gigantic haboobs are. . . . (Wink.)
(Quick zoom to Sallie Lee’s décolletage.)
It’s getting cold.
“It’s bad,” says Timmer. He is covered with dust. “I wanted to check on Pineapple and Luck, tell them it isn’t a good night to sleep in the car. It’s cold. And the wind is moving some big stuff around. There’s all kinds of wrecks. Look!” He points at the front door. The world is dark and orange. If there are wrecks, I can’t see them through dirt in the air. The lights flicker and dim. The television dies. The last dryer stops tumbling. All I can hear is the roar of the wind and the sound of distant thunder, or maybe crashing cars.
Some rain falls, drops as big as toads. The wind dies. Timmer showers in the dark.
In the morning, we go outside to look at the world after the storm. Smoke is still rising from some of the wrecks piled up on the freeway. Little dunes of driven sand have formed in the gutters. The chiminea is tipped over and the ashes of our fires have blown away.
The lights aren’t on at AllMART. There are customers waiting for the doors to open, but I’m not sure they will. The electricity is still out. According to the Channel 42 emergency bulletin on my phone, it’s a vast failure. The storm caused local outages, attempts to reroute power caused overloads, and the grid fried. It’s feedback runaway, just like satellite rain.
When I enter through the employee door, there are black-uniformed special agents in charge. The Retail Rescue Rangers have arrived. Now I know what a commercial disaster looks like. I’m seeing one happening thanks to the Rescue Rangers’ flashlights. Most human resources are being directed to the frozen-foods department. No power, no refrigeration. The entire frozen-foods inventory has to be scrapped.
We stand shoulder to shoulder, lifting soggy cartons and slippery plastic-covered gobs of meat.
The lights flicker and brighten.
The surveillance screens glow. The security cameras come online. The cooling units rumble back to life.
Three strong Rescue Rangers push a steel warehouse ladder into place at the front of the store. Dawna Day climbs to the top, even though that is a dangerous risk wearing such high heels.
“AllMART family,” she says in a voice that carries. “In thirty minutes the front doors will open. And that isn’t a minute too soon. There are customers out there who need stuff. And we are going to serve them. Because that’s what we do. Haboob or no haboob. Power outage or no power outage. We do our part.”
Right on cue, the AllMART jingle rings out through the aisles:
Each does a little part,
But all of us are AllMART.
clapclapclap clapclapclap, AllMART!
clapclapclap clapclapclap, Let’s start!
We raise our hands in the air as one and cheer. A drop of cold blood trickles down my arm.
The cheer is over. We all bend back to work, throwing ruined meat into big wheeled trash bins.
As Dawna Day walks past, I can’t help overhearing her private conversation on the phone. “Yes,” I hear her say. “Things are orderly, and we will be open within the hour. . . . My opinion? . . . Middleman really isn’t management material.”
Rumors hatch and slither through the aisles: No gas for the backup generators. It was his responsibility. Was it stolen? Maybe he stole it. Middleman. Middleman. Middleman. We worked like dogs cleaning up his mess. And he didn’t even show up. Middleman. The jerk.
“It won’t make you happy,” Timmer says.
“You don’t know what makes me happy.”
“True. I never saw you happy.”
I don’t even know what happy means anymore. Far as I know, it’s just the physical reactions in my body caused by assuming the posture, doing the cheer, and smiling like a doormat. As soon as I scan out, I stop smiling. I’m not on the clock anymore.
“I just want to go home for one night. Please take me home. I know I can’t stay. I get that, but I forgot some things — useful things.”
“What useful things?”
I don’t answer that because it is unanswerable. I’m not going to tell Timmer I forgot to bring tampons.
This morning, my phone background was a single pink rosebud. See this, Zoëkins? When you see this flower, it means you need to be prepared. That was what AnnaMom said when she installed the Rosie Reminder on my phone years ago. She didn’t want me to be surprised and embarrassed. And I never was. When the pink flower opened its little rosebud mouth, I went straight to AnnaMom’s bathroom and got supplies out of the monthly drawer.
But now the flower is yawning, and I am not prepared.
I could slide my name tag through the vending machine in the employee changing room, but the vending machine prices are premium prices — the sort of prices only a desperate person will pay. I do not want to be a desperate person digging myself deeper into debt one premium-priced cotton wad at a time.
I know Timmer has money in his pocket, but I’m not going to beg him for tampons. I’m just not.
So I want to go home.
Home.
When I get home, I want sleep in my own bed all alone. I want to touch the doorknob on my own door and shut it.
“You went back to Terra Incognita a bunch of times,” I say. “I should get to go back at least once.”
“And leave 5er alone through the night?”
I think about that, about 5er waking in the night, scratching in the dark and touching only air, his strangled, gurgling screaming getting no answer, no shushing voice he doesn’t hear but is there anyway.
“We could bring him with us. Why not?”
Timmer knows he’s lost. After all, he used to leave 5er alone all the time, which makes him a worse person than I am. All I want to do is go back to my house and pick up some useful things. He turns his attention to 5er. “Hey, guy, we need to go for a little while. You should come with.”
5er looks at Timmer and squints.
“I’ll leave a note, so they know to wait until we get back.” So Timmer does that. “We got 5er. Back on Thursday morning.”
My house on Terra Incognita Circle still says FOR SALE.
The front door is still locked. And there is junk mail in the box; not much — the profitability of direct-mail sales was finally not worth the trip — but collecting the Super! offers feels normal. I’m home.
I enter 1 -2 -2 -6 A -2 -Z into the security pad on the front door. It doesn’t unlock.
“No electric. The lock was electric. You want me to break a window?” Timmer is yelling through the open car window.
“No!”
“What about the garage door? There’s a door to the kitchen, right?”
“There’s a passkey in the sprinkler box,” I say. I kneel beside the step and open the box. The passkey is there, behind a spiderweb.
“You won’t need that,” says Timmer. He’s walked up the sidewalk.
I step off the porch and go around the corner to where he is standing.
I can’t pretend that everything is normal anymore.
The garage is ripped apart. The automatic door is gone; there is only an open wound with splinters around the edges. Behind it, the garage is a hole scattered with ruined and discarded things. AnnaMom always kept that space so tidy. It would kill her to see it like this.
I don’t want to go in the garage. It looks so broken.
“Come with me?” I reach out to Timmer.
“I need to stay here where I can keep an eye on 5er. He’s sleeping.”
“Just stay close enough where you can see me too?”
“If there is a raccoon in there, don’t mess with it,” Timmer says.
“The kitchen door will probably be locked too,” I say, but then I see that the wall between the kitchen and the garage is just another hole.
“The kitchen door, it’s convenient access to plumbing,” says Timmer. “The garage door is good scrap. These guys were efficient.”
I am not prepared to appreciate the efficiency of the people who broke my house.
“Seen enough?”
I wish. What I can see through the hole into the kitchen should be plenty. Being efficient is destructive. The skin of the walls is ripped open, jagged tracks running where the electricity used to hide. The floor is covered with tufts of yellow fluff and broken glass.
“I’m going to my room.”
“Be careful. I was serious about the raccoons. And watch for holes in the floor. And it still isn’t a good idea,” says Timmer.
Shattered dishes crunch under my feet. The living room isn’t as ruined as the kitchen. There is less worth taking, less stuff worth breaking. The wire that was in the walls is gone, but the uncomfortable couch and the acrylic table are still there, positioned with psychological precision by Jyll the stager.
I climb the stairs slowly, pausing on each step to listen for raccoons and the aching sound I imagine the floor will make before it falls out from under me. I love you twelve stair steps, whispers imaginary AnnaMom.
The hall looks safe. It looks unchanged. I reach out and turn the knob on my bedroom door.
My bed has a new, fuzzy blanket of dust. Behind it, the wall is cracked wide open from the ceiling to the floor. I look out; there is nothing but wind between my eye and the sky. I shut my door and walk the few steps to AnnaMom’s room.
The covers on her bed are wrinkled where Timmer slept. In every other way, it is ready to show, just the way Jyll insisted. The walls are smooth and perfect as an eggshell. Beyond, I can see myself in the bathroom mirror.
My phone hums. I see the pink rosebud, yawning. I swipe it away.
“Hey,” says Timmer. “You okay? You . . .”
I thumb the phone to end the call. I can’t have what I wanted. I can’t sleep in my own bed, but I can have what I need. I go to AnnaMom’s bathroom and open her tampon drawer.
There is a paper towel spread across the tampons. It has my name written on it — in eyeliner, the blackest kind, in curving brushstrokes. There is no doubt who wrote this: AnnaMom always writes my name with a little heart for the o, and she is very particular about the .. over the e.
When I lift the paper towel, I find it is a stack, all accordion-folded together. . . .
There is a yellow-and-black SpeedyMed label taped to the final towel with adhesive bandages.
I touch myself behind the ear. I’m not supposed to fuss with that hard little button, but there are times when I do, in the dark. If I push on it, it moves a little under the skin. If I push on it hard, it hurts. Its job is to make me feel better. That’s what AnnaMom says. I should just leave it alone and let it make me feel better, but instead I scrape my nails across my skin and it hurts.
It’s Timmer on the phone again. I don’t answer.
I pull a pillow off the bed and shake it out of the case. Then I fill the case up with handfuls and handfuls of tampons. What else? What else do I need? Here’s a tube of toothpaste. I need that. Here’s cotton balls, fluffy as bunny tails. Do I need them? I don’t know. I don’t know what I need. I just pull out the drawers and dump them. A box falls on the floor. It’s open. I pick it up.
There are three kits left in the box.
I drop them on the floor.
I don’t need them.
I creep down the stairs, and over the broken glass, and into the garage. I can’t see Timmer until I step outside. He’s leaning against the hood of his car, staring at his phone.
“Hey!” I say. When he looks up, I drop the pillowcase full of useful things in the driveway and disappear back into the garage. I have one more thing to do.
I go to the cabinet where we kept the stuff for a barbecue AnnaMom promised we would have someday — when the weather was nicer or when she wasn’t so tired. We will have so much fun, ZeeZeeBee, but not today. I find what I need behind a half-full bag of Bats of Happiness guano fertilizer, the kind that grows more beautiful flowers naturally. The can of lighter fluid is full. The box of long fireplace matches has never been opened.
I spray the uncomfortable couch until it is crisscrossed with dark stains. I leave a long dribbling trail to the kitchen door. That’s where I light the match. It really is E-Z to Lite, just like it says. I throw the rest of the matches — loose — into the disaster that was our kitchen. Then I grab the pillowcase, run to the car, jerk the door open, climb in, and slam it behind. I’m not sure what to expect. Will the whole house explode?
5er lifts his head, shaky on his neck. I was noisy enough to wake him from his backseat sleep.
“What?” says Timmer when he gets behind the wheel and turns the key.
“Just go,” I say. I think I can see a strange light in the windows behind the drawn shades. Pretty soon it will all burn down. The virgin towels in the bathroom will burn. The dresses I wore when I was Zoë Z. in Room 2-B will burn. All of Terra Incognita Circle will burn. That’s what I want. When we reach the main arterial, I twist around in my seat and look behind me. There is smoke rising. It is very satisfying. This is how my face feels when my smile is my own.
Sunset comes while we’re on the road. For a minute, everything glows like AnnaMom’s favorite daylily, the one called Frilly Underpants. The sunlight’s petals have ruffled edges where the sky touches the naked rock of the mountains. Then that is over, and we are driving under a gray sky on a gray road. Nobody says anything.
Not even when we get to the Warren.
5er is squatting like a hot frog in the middle of the backseat. He might be asleep. He is surely sweating. His eyes are closed. Awake or asleep, he is peaceful. His drooping shoulders are rising and falling, just a little. He is breathing. He is alive.
Timmer walks to the door and takes down the sign we left. It isn’t Thursday mo
rning. It is still Wednesday. Then he opens the car door, unbuckles 5er, and carries him, sweat and bones, into the place we call home.
After Timmer is gone and 5er is asleep, I dig the paper towels out of the bottom of the pillowcase. The black letters are blurred now, smudged and rubbed when I crumpled the soft paper. The prescription label is still stuck on at the end of the message. I type the name of the medicine into my phone.
Need a consultation with Dr. Buzzy Bee?
Would you like to better know a SpeedyMed product?
Scan for product information now.
I hold the prescription code so my phone can read it.
Moody? Don’t bee! Every day can be smooth and sweet as honey.
What’s in this little wonder?
Dr. Buzzy Bee holds up the implant. It looks like a stretched egg.
Better grades! Mood modulation! Happiness!
Inject this teeny-tiny implant under the skin . . .
I reach up and feel the place behind my ear where I get my implant renewed every year on my birthday. It’s hardly even a little pinch when the insertion gun Pops!
. . . and enjoy these benefits:
• Better concentration!
• Mood modulation!
• Enhanced sexual responsibility!
I scroll down and down and down, until the print is tiny, tiny, tiny.
My implant is prescribed to reduce anxiety, oppositional behavior, and libido in girls.
I rub the place behind my ear until it hurts.
“Zoë?”
It is a very tender greeting, soft and personal.
I look up. My green hazard gloves are smeared and smelly. I’m sorry Dawna Day has to see this.
“Zoë, I came to see if you are okay. What happened is terrible. If you need anything, AllMART is here to help,” says Dawna Day.
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