Lockdown

by Nick Kolakowski

  I asked if she’d noticed who posted the list.

  “No. Who?”

  “Someone from the official POA account.”

  “Janice.”

  “Brooks?” I asked, refilling my bourbon.

  “Yes,” Nancy said, reaching for my glass, finishing it off (hairball, again) and handing me back the empty. “Her stupid brother works for the stupid air marshals.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. Don’t you remember at the harvest BBQ last year, she made such a big deal out of how her stupid brother could shoot a stupid dime from hundred feet?”

  I said I didn’t remember.

  “Really? And then you said ‘Well, we’ll know who to call if we’re ever attacked by small coins?’”

  I laughed. “It does sound like something I would say.”

  “God. Sometimes I wonder why I married you.”

  I said, “No, you don’t,” and leaned over to kiss her forehead before I refilled my glass.

  Through the front window, I saw Brayden and the dogs coming up the drive in a hurry.

  I went to the door, let them inside.

  “Did you hear?” he asked. “Did you hear the sirens?”

  We said we hadn’t.

  “What sirens?” his mother asked.

  “On Gadwall,” he said. “The fire. The whole house is on fire. Looked like one of the cars, too. Man oh man.” He took the leashes off the dogs, who raced to fight over the water bowl.

  “Which house?” I asked.

  “Where you turn the corner. Right across from where they have those soccer nets in the front yard, you know?”

  The soccer nets belonged to the Wallaces, the twin girls who played travel ball, though no one was playing much of anything now.

  And the house across the street, the house on fire.

  Nancy and I said it at the same time. The Mitchells.

  “Where are the girls?” I asked.

  “Basement,” Nancy said.

  We went on full lockdown that night, no leaving the house for neighborhood runs or dog walks or taking the trash to the curb. Open the back door to let the dogs out. Open the front door for packages. That was it. For three days, that was it. That was all I could take.

  “I’m taking the dogs out for a walk,” I said.

  Nancy said like hell I was, but I was already gone, down the driveway and away from the Mitchells’ house, away from Dave and Rachel, away from the cul-de-sacs and loops, towards the entrance to the neighborhood. I wanted the newspaper and a Milky Way bar and, more than that, I wanted to get out.

  Jeff usually worked days at the gas station, and he could tell me what was going on. Everyone would stop there at some point, either going in or out of the neighborhood. Even if most people were trying to lock down, I knew Jeff would have heard something. And he was fine with my small dogs poking their heads into his store, if that’s what I needed. A fifteen-minute walk to the store, grab the paper and a snack and some intel, and I’d be back home in time for another drink before this one wore off, I thought.

  Turns out, I was wrong.

  I nodded along the way at the county’s prosecuting attorney and his son, who were riding their bikes up and down the wrong side of the road. They nodded back, keeping their hands on the handlebars at all times.

  I passed a middle-aged woman with her phone on her arm, running at a walker’s pace and singing softly to herself. I couldn’t make out the song, but she nodded and I nodded as the dogs stretched their leashes.

  When I crested the hill and saw the entrance to the neighborhood, I stopped in the middle of the road. Two SUVs, one red and one black, were blocking the entrance. A couple people were standing there, while a couple more were sitting in lawn chairs next to the Adams Creek sign.

  I had a joke planned for when I got back. I’d tell Nancy our property values just went up and she’d ask why and I’d make a joke about how we were living in a gated community now.

  Instead, when I got close to the house, I saw two men walking from our yard to the Thompsons’ next door. The dogs and I picked up the pace, took the shorter route through the yard instead of the drive.

  I had to unlock the deadbolt and the doorknob lock to get in. I let the leashes drop as the dogs dragged them across the hardwood to the water bowls.

  I called my wife’s name three times before she answered.

  “We’re in the basement,” she said.

  They all were.

  “Let’s talk upstairs,” she said, leaving the four kids in the basement watching one of the Harry Potter movies.

  She closed the basement door behind her when we reached the kitchen.

  “Who was here?” I asked.

  “The POA.”

  “The what? The Property Owners’ Association? What?” I seemed to be floating out of my body at that point, seeing myself speak like a moron.

  “I didn’t know either of them. They had a list of everyone in the house.”

  “What did they want?”

  “Our temperatures.”

  “Our what?”

  “They had those scanners,” she said. “Like in the Chinese cities. They scanned our foreheads for fever.”

  “They what?”

  “We all passed.” Nancy, hands shaking, took three tries to put a pod in the Keurig.

  “You let them scan the kids?”

  She turned quickly and I stepped back. “You’re goddamn right I did and don’t you ever question me like that again.”

  “What?”

  “They had guns, Will. What the hell was I supposed to do?”

  “Guns?”

  “Pistols. On their hips. Holsters. They had guns, Will. They had guns.”

  I reached my arms around her as she pulled her arms up between us and sobbed.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry I went out.”

  I held her so tight I thought I’d pressed us into one person, so tight until I heard a trickle dripping on the floor and I thought I’d squeezed the pee out of us both.

  “Scheisse,” she said, turning back to the counter. “I forgot the goddamn cup.”

  We were laughing, standing in the pool of coffee when Brayden came up from the basement. “You know,” he said, staring at us and the floor, “they make very comfortable adult diapers these days. We can have them shipped to your nursing home if you want.”

  “Help your mother clean up,” I said, taking that opportunity to head to the den, turning off the desk lamp and staring out the front window.

  The next morning, I found a man who would deliver to me, or close to me. No one was delivering anything through the roadblock at the end of the neighborhood.

  That afternoon, we turned off the first-floor lights, and Nancy and the kids went to the basement. I took what cash we had from the fireproof box in the cabinet, then put on a low hat and a bandana and walked through the woods behind the house.

  Down the ridge, crossing Adams Creek itself, then up the ridge to the church that backs up the woods behind our section of the neighborhood. For a second I worried that I’d show up and it would be Sunday morning, but people don’t go to church buildings and days have no meaning now. I came around the sheds behind the church to see the man in the Jeep, one leg dangling out the side, listening to a jazz piano tune I couldn’t place.

  “Mr. Hawkins?” I asked.

  “You Will?”

  I said I was.

  “Had me worried with that bandana on. Thought I was going to have to use this myself,” he said, pulling the shotgun from behind him.

  I was paying the man $800 for a sawed-off 20-gauge I could probably get arrested for possessing if times were normal.

  He and I made a little small talk, and I walked back through the woods with the shotgun and two boxes of shells.

  I crossed through the woods and it kept getting darker as I went. I made it to the creek, then worked my way up the hill, but managed to put myself about seven or eight houses too deep into the subdivision, so I w
alked the tree-line, trying to place myself.

  Lost in my own locked-down neighborhood. What a way to spend an evening.

  I was only about a dozen feet deep into the woods, walking along the backs of the lots, when I saw the fire pit of the next house, Dave and Rachel sitting in Adirondack chairs.

  I hit a patch of twigs and Dave stood and turned. “Who’s there?” he asked, unsheathing a fixed-blade knife from behind his back.

  “Just me. Just me. It’s Will,” I said, stepping out into the twilight, the fire’s glow.

  “Jesus, you scared us,” he said, sitting back down, flicking his knife five inches deep into the ground at his feet, then reaching over and taking Rachel’s hand. “What are you doing back there?”

  I showed him the shotgun. “Just doing some squirrel hunting. You know, since they won’t let us go to the grocery store.”

  “Like hell you are,” he said. “What are you really doing back there?”

  I said “squirrel hunting” again and he let it drop.

  “You can sit with us if you want,” Rachel said.

  “Thanks, but I need to get back home.” I turned to step back into the woods.

  “How much longer you think this is going to last?” Dave asked me.

  I lifted the shotgun, laid it across my shoulder. “Not much longer,” I said.

  By Gemma Amor

  It was while we were in lockdown that we found the diamond.

  The size of a man’s thumbnail, it was a deep, bloody crimson in color. According to the internet, this was because of a defect that meant light passed through the diamond’s deformed internal structure in an odd way, bending and exhibiting as red. We still had the internet, then. We’d been in lockdown only four weeks, and the world still functioned, to a certain extent. We had food, electricity, Wi-Fi, cellphones. We had each other. At that point in time, we considered this a good thing.

  The diamond changed that.

  There are some people who just can’t quit each other. Even though it hurts, even though it makes them both miserable, they just can’t sever that tie.

  That was Lou and I. It wasn’t a question of love; we had plenty of that. But sometimes, love isn’t enough. No matter how hard we tried, we couldn’t seem to make a relationship stick. And boy, did we try. Each encounter did more damage, each attempt to make it work only served to make us more tired, more stressed, more miserable. We had an idea in our heads of how we thought we should be: Lou and Mike, in it for the long haul. This idea dominated everything, led us to ignore all the red flags that told us we were not compatible. Eventually, desperate for a solution, we did what all idiots in love do: we moved in together, or rather, Lou moved into the house I rented with my friends, all of whom were men: Pete, Tom, Chris and Adam. The lads were not pleased to welcome a female into the house, but I didn’t care. I wanted her with me, despite everything. I wanted to make it work. I just couldn’t let her go.

  But it was no use. Over time, we became a sad, ragged duet, singing an off-key song of regret.

  We admitted defeat three days before Pete came home from his trip to Europe. We’d had a good run: two years, this time around. It hurt, but we agreed it was for the best. We would break up, and Lou would move out. I would stay where I was, renting with the lads.

  That was the plan, anyway.

  The plan went to shit when the contagion started.

  Pete returned from his ill-timed Euro trip with a sore throat and a stomachache, and went rapidly downhill from there. We didn’t take his symptoms very seriously at first. We jeered as he took himself off to bed with a fever, chills, a headache, and a tight chest. In those early days, you see, we hadn’t been warned about the virus. We hadn’t been told what to look out for, and so Pete’s symptoms didn’t present as anything too intimidating.

  Within days, however, he became a textbook case. And when his test results came back positive, our lives changed forever.

  We were told to stay indoors, to ‘self-isolate’ or else risk infecting others. We did as we were told, begrudgingly. We found quarantine hard. We missed the pub, the gym, working, sports, and decent coffee. I missed my freedom, and space to think away from Lou. Chris missed his boyfriend. The others missed Tinder and chasing skirt. We stopped caring about clothes and slobbed about in our underwear. We watched a lot of porn, and after day five, stopped using cutlery: Using a knife and fork felt so unnecessary, somehow, like an affectation of an era gone by, like wearing a top hat and tails to dinner.

  Our resentment died when we realized the scale of the catastrophe taking place outside our comfortable walls. The contagion was voracious. Within two weeks it had gone global. People died by the thousands. The country closed down. Schools, bars, restaurants, shops, cinemas… everything shut, overnight.

  It was shocking because we lived in the center of a large city. Seeing the commerce and bustle grind to a halt within the space of a few hours was brutal. The streets we could see from our windows stopped funneling cars and became wide, empty promenades upon which the occasional lonely ghost wandered. The population was allowed one walk per day, exercise acceptable as long as everyone kept a strict six feet apart from each other. Policemen patrolled in cars with Orwellian diligence, watching, always watching, ready to enforce the rules.

  And we stayed indoors, stewing in each other’s company like ripe fruit stewing in the harsh sun.

  We could hear Pete coughing through the walls of his bedroom at night, a dry, hacking cough that went on and on and ruined everyone’s sleep. We became paranoid, disinfecting every surface in the house with bleach and wipes and washing our hands dozens, if not hundreds of times a day. Time passed. Our anxieties progressed. We tried to be kind to Pete, tried to make sure he stayed hydrated and fed, but his room stank like sickness, and we found it hard to stay in there long with him.

  We drew up a roster, took it in turns to share ‘Pete Duty,’ to take him food and water, and wipe down the toilet, shower and sink after he’d used it. He was too weak to clean up after himself. Pete stared at us with listless, red-rimmed eyes for the few moments of every day we allowed ourselves exposure to him. We could tell he was hurt by our ostracization. Eventually, I felt so guilty that I moved the TV in my room to his, so he could distract himself in a way that didn’t involve staring at the ceiling for twelve hours a day in-between coughing fits. I showered for a full forty minutes after I’d done this, convinced I was covered in deadly germs.

  Lou, who hadn’t moved out before the pandemic hit, was not impressed by my generosity. But Lou was rarely impressed by anything I did anymore, and as the days wore on, she became more and more vocal about it.

  I didn’t blame her, not at first. We had been trapped in an odd limbo state. No longer in a relationship, but still living together in the most intense fashion, we had to talk to each other every day, share a bed in a small room, maintain our separation amidst our isolation. She stopped smiling, and I missed it. When we first met, she would smile all the time. I was blown away by that smile, which always started small and then grew slowly, as if she was constantly on the verge of some profound realization.

  Unable to socialize with her own friends, she found mine poor company. Our banter seemed harsh and childish to her. She started to roll her eyes every time one of us opened our mouths to say even the most innocuous of things. The lads grew frustrated with her in equal measure, although most of them tried to disguise it for my sake, knowing that her behavior was not my fault, and also knowing that I still cared deeply for her. Most of them, except for Tom, who did little to hide his distaste whenever Lou spoke.

  It all came to a head the day we found the diamond.

  We were sitting around in the living room in silence. I was trying to read a book, Chris was sketching in his pad, and everyone else stared at their phones, mindlessly thumbing back and forth through social media feeds. There was a heavy, bored silence amongst us that Lou broke with an enormous sigh.

  “Someone burned the kid’s playgroun
d down in St. Paul’s,” she said miserably, gaze locked on her screen. She was beginning to get phone-jowls from staring at the thing so much, and I didn’t like it. I could see a glassy-eyed fragility to her that hadn’t been there at the beginning of quarantine. I realized, with a sinking heart, that depression was setting in, starting to eat her up. I had no idea what to do about it, and this frustrated me more than anything, because it made me feel futile, defunct.

  She continued, her voice low and loaded: “Four garages, three warehouses and the children’s playground at St. Paul’s community center were set alight last night by arsonists, according to this.”

  Nobody replied, because there wasn’t much to say in response to this cheerful update.

  She carried on, like a dog with a bone, not reading the room at all: “Oh, and the corner shop on Broadway was looted, too. They took everything that wasn’t nailed down, apparently.”

  The quiet in the room deepened as we tried to steel ourselves against her doom-merchantry.

  “Looks like there won’t be much of the world left when we get out of quarantine,” she said, looking up from her phone to see if anyone was listening.

  I weakly tried to offer some encouragement.

  “I know it’s hard, Lou,” I said, as gently as I knew how. “But we have to try and stay positive. We can’t let it get to us. It’ll be over at some point. We just have to wait it out.”

  Lou’s melancholy turned to anger, lightning quick.

  “I don’t want to wait it out any longer, Mike! I want to go outside! I want to see my friends! Hug them!”

  I tried again, not wanting this to escalate any further, especially not in front of the lads. “I’m your friend. You can hug me.”

  She snorted. “You’ll never be my friend, not really. You’ve been inside me too many times. Kind of precludes friendship, don’t you think?”

  I snapped my mouth shut, because that stung. Then, I tried again. I don’t know why, but I always felt like there was something salvageable between us, even when she was being like this.