The Resurrected Compendium (46 page)

“…I was going to suggest we stop for lunch,” Kelsey said after a few seconds of silence. “But now I think maybe I’d rather just find a place to get clean.”

“Whatever you need.” He’d have hugged her again, but now he had blood on his hands. Not his own. Dennis tossed the can into the bushes and scrubbed his fingers with an old towel he then also tossed aside. “Can you ride?”

They both could, though slower than before. Around the curve in the road, they came to a gas station and convenience store. It didn’t look like it had any gas left, not by the way all the pumps had been wrecked and the metal plate covering the tanks had been tossed to the side. Broken glass scattered the pavement in front of the store, but lights flickered on and off inside.
 

“The power’s still on.” Kelsey pointed.

It had been on in lots of places they’d passed. Off in many others. Dennis studied the store from a distance before turning to Kelsey.

“There will probably be running water.”

“Oh, thank God.” She was moving before he could stop her.

“Wait!”

She looked over her shoulder at him, then bent to pick up a crooked piece of pipe from the sidewalk. She hefted it. “Anyone or anything that gets in the way of me washing up is going to get a face full of this.”

He believed her.

Inside, there wasn’t much left to scrounge. A few packages of beef jerky, some bottles of power drink. He followed her into the bathroom to make sure nothing was in there, waiting, then headed back out to the rest of the store to see what he could find. In the store room, boxes of oil were too big and basically useless. The bags of bread and rolls had gone mushy from condensation on the inside of the plastic, but disturbingly had grown almost no mold. They weren’t hungry enough to eat that. Not yet. In a few months, in the cold of winter, maybe then. But for now Dennis left them and returned to the main part of the store.
 

Along the front window, next to the cash register, was a rack of pamphlets and brochures. The maps, unsurprisingly, were gone. There might still be power in some places, but the internet was gone and smartphones with their map apps were useless. But something else caught his eye.
 

UNDERGROUND STORAGE FACILITY

Dennis pulled the brochure from its place, the paper slick in his fingers. It was advertising tours of a place that had once been a mine and that now featured vehicle storage as well as server storage for big corporations to back up their data. It also had a food court and indoor park and a small “village” complete with high end shops. It was only a few miles away.

“Take a look at this,” he said to Kelsey when she came out of the bathroom with her hair dripping and her clothes changed.
 

She did. Then at him. He didn’t have to explain why he was showing her. She got it.
 

Kelsey beamed. “What do you think? Betcha there’s lots of stuff in there.”

“My mother used to tell me about a place where people could buy…like timeshares. In the event of the apocalypse. She was pretty derogatory about it, figuring that people needed to be able to stand on their own rather than do an a la carte type survival deal. But I’m pretty sure the place she talked about was here.”

“Which means…there’s a group in there?”

“Yeah.” Dennis looked at her. “Might be okay to hook with them, if we can. I mean, rather than trying to go it totally alone.”

She frowned. “What if they’re like the last group?”

“Then we don’t stay.”

“But we didn’t pay the timeshare fee.”

“If they’re not the group that’s there, or they don’t want to let us in, it’s still worth checking out. Don’t you think?”
 

“Yeah,” she said, but sounded hesitant. “I guess so. How long do you think it will take us to get there?”

He studied the map on the back of the brochure, then checked it against the one he pulled from his backpack. “A couple hours. We could be there before nightfall.”

“I say we do it.” She looked around the store. “Nothing else here?”

“Maybe a few things.We should take what we can. If they’re hesitant about taking us in, maybe having something will sweeten the deal.”
 

“Dennis…why, though?”

He took her hands and pulled her close. “I trust people who were prepared in advance more than I do the ones who’ve just gone power crazy in the aftermath. You know? These people were invested in this place. It’ll have everything we need to survive. And I want you safe.”

It was right thing for him to say. Kelsey beamed. She kissed him. And then again. They forgot about packing up the store for a while, their attention taken up with other things.

After, together they stripped the store bare of anything useful, then packed up the bikes and headed off. The roads were bigger, becoming highways. It was easier to ride them than it had been on the rural routes, even when they had to weave in and out among the stalled or wrecked cars.
 

“It’s getting cold,” Kelsey said when they stopped for a break. She shivered, looking at the sky, then into the distance. They’d reached the edge of a bridge leading into the city, which put them higher than everything else.

Staying in the south would’ve made winter easier to bear. It had been his idea to head north. Dennis had some idea that tornados weren’t as common there, though thinking of it now as they entered the suburbs of Pittsburgh to find nothing devastation, it hadn’t mattered much. The whole point was that the storms weren’t normal. Whatever had come through here had been big. And bad.

“Jesus,” Kelsey breathed from beside him. She put a foot on the cracked asphalt to steady herself. Under her feet, dead brown vines crunched. Even in the few months since everything had begun, the bridge had been overtaken by brush and growth, proof that what his mother had said was true. The earth would always take back what it wanted to. “What the hell happened?”

“The end of the world.”

She looked at him, brow raised. “Ya think?”

Dennis, to his surprise, because it always surprised him that he could find any humor in this, laughed. “Something like it, anyway.”

“The city.” She pointed. Smoke colored the air in several dirty plumes. Someone, somewhere, was burning something. “Let’s go the other direction, I guess? Bypass it? Go around?”

In the distance, there came a sound like a low hum. A throb. They looked at each other.

“I don’t know what that is,” Kelsey said, “but I vote we stay the fuck out of Pittsburgh.”

65

“It’s ridiculous!” The shout came from the back of the line, but echoed through the entire room.

Maddy had her roller skates on, and she twirled in a circle. Arms out, she went slower. Arms in, faster. She was getting dizzy.

“Who put this kid in charge? What kind of —”
 

Maddy snapped her fingers, and the guys who hadn’t been Dad’s friends before but were now, they all were now, if Maddy wanted them to be, grabbed him by both arms. He kicked and struggled, that old man, ugly old man, Mr. Porter his name was. Maddy didn’t care, really. He was a jerk.

Everyone who knew him stared without saying anything. The new people, the ones who’d come not long ago, they stared too, but with wider eyes. They wouldn’t say anything. Dad had told them it was their rules here, and if they didn’t like it they could get the hell out.

“What kind of place is this, where a kid’s in charge of everyone else? I paid my money the way everyone else did!” Mr. Porter screamed, kicking. “I paid my money and why should I have to wait in line for rations? Why should any of us --”

“Shut up,” Maddy said serenely, spinning. Spinning. “Take him to see my mother.”

The men who had not been Dad’s friends but who now did whatever Maddy said, took Mr. Porter out of the lunch room. A few other people had acted mad, too, but when they saw what happened to Mr. Porter, they got quiet. The other ones, the ones who’d already been to see her mother, didn’t say or do anything. They would, they could, if Maddy let them. If she told the wiggle worms with the whispering voices to make them do or say something, whatever she wanted. They would.

For now, it was enough to watch them staring in silence.
 

“If you’re good,” she announced, “we can all have ice cream!”

That was kind of a lie. The only cream they could have was the freeze dried pellet kind the astronauts ate, but it was, like her mom used to say better than nothing. Thinking of it now, she twirled again and again until the room moved even faster around her. She almost felt kind of sick, but with a twinkle of her inner thoughts, everything settled into place.
 

Maddy stopped twirling.

“I think,” she said, “it’s time everyone went in to see my mother.”

8

They’d talked idly about the end of the world, their fingers linked, sweaty thighs stuck to each other. Their heads on one pillow. It had been fantasy, something to distract them from the fact that their world was going to come to an end, no matter what they wanted. Yet here it was, the end of everything, and they were together.

Somehow, they’d found a way to be together.

Bill had never paid much attention to disaster preparedness, but to Maggie’s surprise he’d taken Jake’s advice about what was coming and how they needed to get ready for it. The men had gone into town with Bill’s truck and come back with it filled to overflowing with canned goods. Tools. Plastic tarps and bundles of rope and electrical wire. A generator. They’d filled the shed and the basement with shelves of supplies and spent hours boarding up the windows and the door. Making barricades.

“I maxed out every credit card, and so did he.” Bill said this into the quiet of the night as they shared a bed.

Not a pillow, though.

Not touching each other, either. The distance between them had been there for a long time, but hadn’t felt so vast before. Maggie thought about reaching to take Bill’s hand, and then she made herself do it. Their fingers didn’t link. His hand was sweaty, and after a few seconds, she let it go.

“If this all blows over, we’re going to be in sad shape,” Bill went on. “I’ll go to my grave paying off that card.”

Maggie blinked into darkness.
 

“I wish the kids were here,” Bill said.

“They want to be with their families.” Maggie too wished their children were with them.
 

Her daughter Rachael, Rachael’s partner Samantha, their twins Hayley and Josiah. Her son Danny and his girlfriend Mia, soon to be his wife, were living with her parents until the wedding, half a year away. Maggie had called them. Caught up on their lives, made sure the storms hadn’t done any damage to them. She’d warned them carefully to stock up on food and supplies, knowing that Samantha would take her seriously and none of the others would. But she hadn’t asked them to come home.

“They should be here,” Bill said.

“They’re adults, Bill. They haven’t lived here for years, and they want to be with the people they love the most.”

“And that’s not us?”

Maggie swallowed tears, throat closing. She would never see her children again, not ever, not one time. She was convinced of that. “I didn’t want them traveling to get here. I don’t want them on a plane. Or on the road, my God, Bill. You think I don’t want to see my kids again? But I want them to be as safe as they can be!”

He said nothing, after that, one more thing they’d disagree on but not discuss.

Bill coughed and shifted, shaking the bed and tearing the covers off her. “Just because a lot of shit’s going down on the news and some preacher keels over during his sermon, that doesn’t mean that somebody’s not going to get this under control. I mean…shit, Mags. Aliens? We’re talking about aliens? Do you know how long it will take to pay everything off, if this all turns out to be some kind of temporary —”

“It’s not temporary,” Maggie said.

“You can’t know that,” Bill began, but she cut him off sharply.

“If he’s here, it means that it’s not going to blow over.” She drew in a soft breath, trying and failing to keep her voice steady.
 

Beside her, Bill said nothing.

She waited for him to ask, but he didn’t, and in a few minutes after that, the slow, uneven stutter of his snoring breaths began. She listened for awhile, remembering the days, in the beginning, when she’d thought the way he sounded as he fell asleep was endearing. Now, it meant she wouldn’t be able to fall asleep without the help of a sound machine, or earplugs, or simple, sheer force of will.

She tried, she really did, to drift into dreams next to her snoring husband, but there was no way. Even if he hadn’t been snoring, how could she sleep with a basement full of riot gear and canned ravioli? How could she let herself fall into unconsciousness when there was no guarantee there’d be a world to wake up to?

Her stomach twisted, as it always did when her mind was awhirl. Maggie got out of bed, slipping into the silk kimono her grandparents had brought back from Japan when she’d been in high school. She found her way in the dark, needing no light, down the stairs with her hand gripping the railing carefully, so that if she happened to trip she wouldn’t plunge to her death.

In the kitchen, the light from the fridge was bright enough to blind her momentarily. When she turned with a small container of yogurt in her hand, just before the light went out she saw him. She knew it was Jake, but screamed anyway, biting it back before it could shoot out of her and wake the whole house.

“Sorry,” he said. “I couldn’t sleep.”

“Me neither.” Maggie grabbed a spoon and took a seat across from him at the table.

He’d helped himself to a glass of whiskey, though in the faint light coming from the appliances and a nightlight in the hall, it was hard to see how much emptier the bottle had become. The glass itself stayed in front of him. He touched it lightly as she took a seat, but didn’t drink.