My mom once told me never to eat from a dented can, because what was inside might be bad. Brandon hadn’t believed me at first, but a couple of weeks back, he got good and sick from a can of wieners that looked like a giant had stepped on it, and after that, he’d been as careful as I was only to pick up the good cans.
Getting sick was a “prime survival emergency,” according to Brandon.
There just better be some good cans left at the mall. Brandon said there would be for sure, but the only store Brandon cared about was the Mountain Trading Post. He said we’d be able to get snow boots and cold weather gear there, but what Brandon really wanted was a gun.
He yapped on all the time about his dad taking him hunting. According to Brandon, the three of us would live off the land “to preserve supplies.”
Would Brandon really shoot a deer or something? Did any of us know how to actually turn a big old, dead deer into food? Brandon seemed to think he did, but just ‘cause Brandon thought a thing, didn’t make it true.
I watched as Brandon helped Jake to open his can of tuna fish, and wiped his chin clean for him on a big handful of leaves afterwards. On the rare occasions when Brandon wasn’t being Captain Lightning, he was almost human. And what choice did I have but to stay with him? Where would I even go if I went off on my own?
Brandon liked us to bury the cans after we ate so no “hostile outsiders” could track us, but Jake twisted the lid—all shiny with tuna fish oil—off his can, and slipped it into his pocket.
“Don’t, Jake. The edges are sharp,” I told him.
Uh oh.
The same way he didn’t cry if he cut himself, Jake didn’t throw tantrums like a regular little kid either. Instead, he got a funny, hard look on his face like there was no one inside him, and when he got like this, he wouldn’t walk, wouldn’t eat, wouldn’t do anything until the mood passed. I dug frantically through my pack, hoping to find something to distract him with, but Brandon was already pulling something out of his pocket.
“Here, Jake, old buddy, this is better than a dumb old tin can lid.”
Brandon held out a quarter.
“This is from Massachusetts. Can you guess who was born and raised in Massachusetts, Jake? Well, I’ll tell you, it was yours truly. Gracie, too,” he added, grudgingly. “Give me that dirty old lid and you can carry my quarter for me. It’s extra special because it’s from home. A home quarter is a good luck quarter.”
Cautiously, Jake dropped the lid into Brandon’s hand and closed a little fist around the quarter.
“Take good care of it, buddy,” said Brandon, winking at Jake.
It looked like Jake smiled at Brandon the tiniest bit, but Jake wasn’t big on expressions and it could just as easily have been a burp from the tuna.
“That was pretty nice of you,” I told Brandon as we started walking again. Jake strutted proudly in front, fist closed around the Massachusetts quarter.
Brandon shrugged. “It’s just a lousy quarter.”
“It was yours, though. From home.”
“It wasn’t from home,” said Brandon. “You can get Massachusetts quarters any old place. I just picked it up once.”
“Why’d you keep it, if it’s not important?”
“I thought it might come in handy is all. And it did. Stopped the crazy little booger-snot from screwing everything up for us. Now, pick up the pace.”
Brandon
unfolded the big map of New Hampshire, tracing our progress with the tip of one finger, which left a smear on the paper. The mall was farther than I’d guessed.
“Well, shit,” I said, trying to wrestle the dumb thing back into its cover. Gracie gave me one of her looks. She got mad when I swore in front of Jake, but that crazy-ass kid was hardly going to repeat any swears, and there was no one around to hear him even if he did.
“What’s the problem?” she asked.
“No problem. I just figured we be there by now.”
Gracie sighed. “You read the scale wrong again.”
“Jeez! I didn’t read anything wrong. You read it, if you’re so smart.”
Gracie snatched the map out of my hand and smoothed it flat on the ground. Man, she pissed me off sometimes. Didn’t she trust me? She’d still be sitting on her big front lawn, crying, all alone in Newton, if it weren’t for me. We’d been back there after the Center, looking for her family. I could have told her they were history, but when did she ever listen to me? I owed her one for hauling my ass out of the Center, but when you looked at it in the cold light of day, the kid and her both were useless. They surely held me back more than they helped me out, so you’d have thought they’d be grateful. Sure, Gracie was smart about things like maps and finding good places to hole up at night, but someone had to be in charge, and that someone was me. I was the oldest, and I had the plan. It was for their own good.
“It’s another three miles,” said Gracie, squinting at the map. “Not too far; we’ll get there before sunset.”
“Doesn’t matter if we get there before sunset if we don’t have time to get clear again,” I told her. “We don’t know how quick we’re gonna have to get away, and we can’t travel fast if it’s dark.”
“Well, we could camp out nearby and go in first thing,” said Gracie. “It might be safe,” she added hopefully.
“Maybe,” I said, but I was thinking about Drones.
If there was food, there would have been people, and if people had been there, there might still be Drones.
No, I couldn’t think that way. The plan was important. We needed to have a plan or we’d all be sitting around with our thumbs up our asses when the army guys came back for us. Still, walking down this part of the highway was making me feel twitchy. Usually there were trees and shit at the side of the road we could hide in if anything happened, but here it was all just roads coming together, then zooming apart again. The grass on the median strip had grown high and ragged—it might hide three people from someone on foot, but it’d leave us sitting ducks if anyone—or anything—came down from the sky.
But I was being dumb. Chickenshit. There was no point in us going to Maine in the first place if we didn’t make it through the winter. We needed the stuff in this mall, and that was the end of it.
This part of the highway was clogged with a pileup of crashed cars, so the going was slow. I tried not to get mad at Gracie and Jake as they picked their way around the cars, stepping carefully over the broken glass and metal. If they cut themselves, they’d be slower still.
The only good thing was the lack of bodies. We found a dead soldier, his helmet lying twenty feet away with most of his head still in it, but everyone else in the crash seemed to have walked off on their own, or been Taken, rather than killed.
What did the Space Men even want with all those people they took?
Once, I’d thought they wanted to take over the Earth or something, but the Earth was here for the taking now, and the Space Men didn’t seem to want it.
A flock of geese flew overhead. Their cries sounded like talking, and I realized how good it’d be to hear a voice that wasn’t mine or Gracie’s. There was a radio in Gracie’s backpack, and a couple of batteries, too, but we didn’t want to use up all the juice before we were sure of finding more. Probably just the emergency broadcast anyhow, and we’d all heard enough of that bullshit to last a lifetime.
“Stay in your homes. Await further instruction.”
Heap of good that had done anyone. The emergency Broadcast wasn’t much better than geese gabbling, and besides, the chant of “Stay in your homes. Await further Instruction.” would get stuck in my head for hours after I heard it. Earwormed by the voices of the goddamn dead.
One time, we heard a real song on the radio, or part of one at least. It sounded like what Dad called “Hippie music,” some guy singing about a “Tambourine Man’—whatever that might be—but it was kind of nice to hear it anyway. The signal soon faded, and we never heard anymore music after that.
Gracie
still messed with the radio most nights, and she’d pee her damn pants if she ever found a way to get the little tablet computer she carried in her backpack working.
Sure, I’d have liked the radio and the computer to work, too, but I didn’t obsess over it like Gracie.
I just knew she’d been queen of the nerds back before shit got real.
There were lots of Shinys in amongst the auto wrecks, but for once, Jake wasn’t acting like a loon. He trudged beside me, rubbing the Massachusetts quarter with his thumb as though it really was some sort of good luck charm. Gracie walked a little in front, stooping to pick up a magazine which she frowned at and dropped, then a cigarette lighter, which she pocketed.
“You don’t need that,” I told her. “We’ll get some real good fire-lighting stuff at the mall.”
Gracie shrugged. “It’ll be dark in there. We can save flashlight batteries this way.”
I sighed like I was doing her a big favor, but I was kind of mad I hadn’t thought of that myself. She always seems to think one step ahead of me. Probably went to some stuck-up snoot school, packed with fellow nerds. Coming from a big, fancy house like that, it had to be the case. People like me aren’t dumb, just because we never learned much in school. I’d actually kind of liked school, but Dad always said a real man never learned a single useful thing in a classroom. I let Gracie think she knew it all. I was the one with the plan and the map to the cabin.
They needed me.
It hurt to think of Dad, so instead, I thought of the mall, packed with treasures, ripe for the taking. And the gun. Once I had the gun, no-one would mess with us.
The mall stood at the center of its own maze of highways and slip roads, far outside the nearest town. Not a soul around, human or otherwise.
It was too late to go in there today. Already, the October sunlight was slipping away. We’d have to find somewhere to lie up for the night after all.
There was a Happy Burger joint in the next lot over from the mall, which looked as good a place as any. Time for a scouting mission—“reconnaissance,” the army guys called it. Gracie rolled her eyes like she always did when I used proper words for stuff, but I was too tired to give her shit for it.
There was a sign on the door that read “closed until further notice,” but I guessed this particular Happy Burger had served its last Fun Fries combo. I broke the glass in the door with a trashcan shaped like a grinning clown face. It vomited sticky burger cartons and dribbles of mold-spotted cola all over the foyer where it landed.
I ducked inside, my battered sneakers crunching on glass. Jake hovered doubtfully outside the door.
“Come on, buddy, we talked about this,” I told him. “You promised you’d step up and be brave so’s we can get supplies.”
“You don’t have to come all the way in yet,” said Gracie. “Just sit here by the door. You can be lookout.”
Jake stepped gingerly through the shattered door panel and squatted on the floor, right by the door, where any hostile force could see him clear as day. His head was hanging low, the lucky quarter turning over and over in his dirty little fingers. I guessed it was a start.
“Stay right there,” I ordered. “If you see anything, come get us, but be quiet.”
As if the kid was ever anything but quiet.
The lobby of the restaurant was dim, but the big windows let in enough light to see by. Frolicking clown decals made dark silhouettes on the glass. The chairs were still stacked neatly on the tables. A mop rested in a bucket, long dried up. The registers were closed and shrouded in plastic covers. No sign of anyone being here since the shit hit the fan, which was A-okay with me.
The back room was darker than a tomb, and Gracie had to flick the lighter before we could go in.
The grills yawned open like mouths, and the scent of spoiled meat hung in the air. The little hopper freezers in the kitchen dripped greasy water onto the cheerful yellow and red tiled floor. The big walk-in freezer was locked shut and most likely anything edible had gone over long ago with the power outage. Nothing useful here unless we fancied eating ketchup for the rest of our lives, but no Drones either.
It would be a safe place to spend the night, so long as we were careful. We couldn’t camp out in the lobby where we’d be easily visible to anyone who cared to look in through the big floor-to-ceiling windows, and there was no way I was spending the night in that creepy—not to mention stinky—kitchen, so we dumped our shit in the narrow strip of floor behind the counter.
The floor was kind of gross back here where the customers couldn’t see. I had to sweep withered French fries and greasy dust bunnies aside so we’d have a clean spot to lay out our sleeping rolls.
A portrait of employee of the month, “Dean Blanco” stared down reproachfully from the wall.
“Don’t look at me like that, Dean, old buddy,” I muttered “You need to keep things cleaner in here if you want to make manager.”
Jake didn’t want to come any further into the restaurant at first, but Gracie found a carton of Happy Burger toys in a corner. Jake didn’t give a crap about toys, but one of the figures was a robot in shiny silver plastic, and when we set up a silvery kick-line of robots on top of the counter, Jake couldn’t resist coming over to rearrange them into a better pattern, adding bullet casings and dimes, ring pulls off soda cans, and other junk, until he’d created a strange grid of boxes and circles that wound around the three cash registers from one end of the counter to the other. I was pleased to see that he kept the lucky quarter tucked away in his pocket. He’d check it was still there every now and then, but he didn’t add it to the rest of the junk on the counter.
The kid looked up to me, maybe. I wasn’t doing such a bad job.
Jake
he sun went down and a fat silver moon came up. Brandon fell asleep first, Gracie an hour or so later. Their sleep wasn’t easy and both of them tossed and turned on the hard floor.
Jake watched and waited.
Gracie had tried to talk to him about the Shinys she called “Robots.” Jake had wanted to answer her, but the sounds got tangled somewhere between his tongue and his lips. If he did it wrong, the talking, then what would they think? Would they still take him with them? Until Jake knew he could do it right, it was better to be silent. To watch.
The lobby was lit up blue with moonlight. The Shinys on the counter gleamed like a galaxy.
When he was sure the Big Kids were sound asleep, Jake gathered up the Shinys and crept out through the broken door panel, stooping low to avoid the wicked little splinters of glass that clung to the door frame like crooked teeth in a gaping mouth. The landscaping around the Happy Burger consisted of a few thin hedges, too dry and stunted to have grown wild in the months they’d been left untended.
The tan bark around the bushes was easy to dig through, but the soil beneath was hard and grudging, and snarled through with roots. Jake’s fingers were ragged and throbbing by the time the hole was large enough.
The robots were the nicest Shinys, so they went in the hole first, then the bullet shells, the twists of foil, the coins, the ring pulls, and a handful of push pins. Soon, the Massachusetts quarter was all that was left.
Jake put it in the hole, then took it out again.
He rubbed the metal with his thumb. There was a picture of a man with a gun on the quarter. Sometimes bad guys had guns, but the Big Kids weren’t bad guys. They wouldn’t have given him a bad guy Shiny. The quarter made Jake think of something but he didn’t know what, the same way he didn’t know why he needed to see the sky, why he needed to make the patterns of the shapes he saw when he closed his eyes, or why he needed to hide the Shinys afterwards.
Something to remember.
Something to keep secret.
Jake didn’t know what it was yet, but perhaps it would come back to him in time. Lately, he’d begun to sense that it wasn’t the Shinys themselves he needed to hide, but the patterns. Until he remembered all the way, though, it was safest to keep doing what felt right.<
br />
Jake pushed dirt over the Shinys until the hole was filled, then raked bark over the dirt. When he was done patting it down, the patch where the secret was buried looked no different to the flat bark around it.
The only sound was the song of what Brandon called “Crickets singing.” Jake didn’t know who Crickets was, or why he sang all night, but since Crickets never came closer, Jake didn’t think he had to fear him. Jake cocked his head to one side at a new sound, coming from the bushes beside the big building Brandon and Gracie said was called the “mall.”
A whispery, metallic sound.
There was something moving over there. A shape, both strange and familiar; a squat, bobbing body with a cluster of black arms trailing beneath. Jake watched it, and it watched him, then it turned and drifted away into the night.
Jake fell asleep under one of the stunted hedges, the quarter closed in his muddy fist.
Gracie
he first thing I did when I woke up was look for Jake, whose sleeping bag was empty as usual. Luckily, Brandon was still snoring away, so this morning, at least, there would be time to find the crazy kid before Brandon woke up and got mad.
Brandon was kind of right—Jake shouldn’t just go on sleeping outdoors like he did.
Even though it was only September, it was already pretty cold at night. One morning we were going to wake up and find a Jake-flavored Popsicle outside.
It took a while to spot him, but eventually, I caught sight of a small, sneaker-clad foot poking out from under a bush near the drive-thru lane. I gave the foot a yank, and Jake was awake all at once, making the whistling voice in the back of his throat which is the closest he gets to a yell.
“It’s okay, Jake, I didn’t mean to scare you.” I held out a hand, and eventually, he took it, clambering awkwardly to his feet. His fingers were cold, so I rubbed them between mine, the way Mom used to when I came in from playing in the snow. I’d always pull my hand away after a while, remembering I was too grown-up for Mom to baby me, but Jake just watched me, his hand limp in my grip, like a doll’s or a corpse’s. There was dirt under his fingernails—burying treasure again—so it was kind of a surprise when he pulled the quarter from his pocket as I led him back inside the Happy Burger. He’d never held on to a Shiny like that before.
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