Todd
Authors: Adam J Nicolai
Todd
Adam J Nicolai
Also by Adam J Nicolai (Click to view)
A Season of Rendings (Coming 2016)
Todd
Adam J Nicolai
Published by Lone Road
Publishing, LLC for Amazon Kindle
Copyright © 2015 Adam J
Nicolai
All rights reserved. No
part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written
permission from Adam J Nicolai, except for brief, properly credited quotations.
"Little Cosmic
Dust" in News from the Glacier by John Haines ©1982 by John Haines,
published by Wesleyan University Press. Used by Permission.
Cover Design by Kit Foster
and Adam J Nicolai
Cover Image © 2015 Adam J
Nicolai
All characters appearing
in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead,
is purely coincidental.
Table of Contents
Out of the cold and fleeing dust
that is never and always,
the silence and waste to come—
this arm, this hand,
my voice, your face, this love.
John Haines (1924-2011)
1
He was in the front yard when it
happened.
A car swerved lazily around the bend,
lurching over the curb and onto his neighbors' lawn. It chewed up the grass
before rearing over their yew bushes and into their picture window. The glass
shattered, sparkling like confetti in the summer sun.
Alan fell still, frozen between
investigating the car or retreating to his front door, until his tongue broke
the paralysis.
"Oh my God!" He ran to
the car window. "Are you—?"
The words died in his throat. The
car was empty.
No one in the car?
His mind
grappled with this.
But how could it have turned—?
"Dad?" Todd's head poked
from the front door.
"Get back in the house."
Todd hesitated, and Alan snapped. "In the house, Todd! Now!" Todd
disappeared, the screen door banging shut behind him.
The car's engine was still idling,
the tires grinding uselessly against the bushes. As Alan reached through the
window to kill the engine, he saw empty clothes in the driver's seat, riddled
with pinholes. He stared, trying to make sense of them, but his mind couldn't
process the information. The last time he had felt this shaken was on 9/11,
when he'd heard about the first plane.
At the time, he'd assumed it was a
drunk pilot. Weird, a little scary, but nothing earth-shattering. When the
second plane hit, his understanding of the situation had tilted ninety degrees,
dumping him into a freefall.
That's how it felt when he heard,
from beyond the nearest row of houses, the crash of another car.
Then another.
Then another.
"Brenda!"
The
instants flashed past him like a stuttering video: the screen door banging closed,
the glimpse of Todd's alarmed look as Alan tore past him toward the stairs.
"Brenda!
"
He took the steps two at a time, bounding up like a kid half his age.
"Something's going on! Are you—?"
Her jeans and t-shirt were on the
top step, flecked with holes. He grabbed them. They felt thinner than they
should have, like linen instead of cotton or denim. His thoughts snagged on
this fact, the wheels spinning and going nowhere.
"Dad?" Todd sounded
scared.
Alan called his wife's name again,
stupidly, waiting for her to come out of the bathroom or around the corner. He
scrambled up the last stair and into his daughter's bedroom. There was a spray
of Legos on her floor, with a few of her favorite dolls and an empty dress. It
was her favorite one, green and white, the hem growing just a tad short for her
father's tastes. Pockmarked, fluttering in the breeze from the window.
Through the open window he heard a
roar that could have been thunder: the cars on highway 610—miles of
them—slamming into each other, their coiled energy grinding slowly down to
silence.
"Get in the basement,"
Alan said as he came back to the ground floor. He was clutching Brenda's and
Allie's clothes. They were pulling apart like tissue paper.
Todd darted off. No hesitation
this time.
Alan went to the window and peered
out, expecting to hear sirens going off or jets overhead. Maybe spot a distant
mushroom cloud—anything
that would help make sense of this. Was it an
attack? Some North Korean weapon no one had seen coming? But the sky outside was
blue and unstained. There were no sirens, no jets.
He ran after his son.
Todd stood at the bottom of the
steps, chewing his bottom lip, his eyes wide and his hair wild. He was waiting
for Alan, expecting him to know what to do. Alan came down and grabbed him. The
boy was glowing with sweat from his play; he was solid and real. "Are you
okay?"
"Yeah."
The father in Alan wouldn't accept
that answer. "Are you okay?" he repeated, pushing his son to arm's length
and looking at him. The boy's eyes were still brown, his two front teeth still
missing. The only holes in his clothes were the ones he'd put there, scooting
down the stairs on his butt and sliding through the house on his knees.
"Yeah. Is mommy upstairs?"
"No." Her clothes were
in his hands, flaking.
"Where's Allie?"
"I don't know." Alan
closed the door, shutting out the light from the ground floor. The basement was
finished, but it was a mess of prototype playing cards, customized dice, stacks
and scraps of paper. Alan's workshop, where he'd labored on
THE GAME
for the last two years with nothing to
show for it. The thrill he'd used to feel every time he entered this space had
turned to a familiar shock of guilt months ago. Even right now, even in the
middle of the emergency, he felt it. In contrast, the terror and urgency in his
veins was almost a relief.
He led his son through the chaos
to the little furnace room: a glorified storage area for mountains of old
boxes, game consoles and outdated TVs. He plugged one of these in and turned it
on.
It was two in the afternoon on a
Saturday, so most of the stations were playing reruns or syndicated shows. One
of the 24-hour news stations was running some canned feature about self-driving
cars with a bemused voice-over. The crawl at the bottom of the screen said
someone had won a sports game, a missing child in Arkansas had been found, and Republicans
were threatening to impeach the president. When the feature ended, the camera
cut to a glitzy, hi-tech news room.
The anchor's desk was empty.
"Oh, gods," Alan
breathed.
"Is it a tornado?" Todd
asked. Last night, the weather guy had been talking about possible severe
weather in the next couple days; now, they'd gone to the basement. What else
would it be?
"No. I don't know." Alan
spoke without thinking, hypotheses leaping off his tongue like suicide jumpers.
"A weapon, I think. Some kind of attack."
Todd's eyes widened in alarm.
"An attack?"
"I don't know, Todd."
Alan stared at the screen, trying to think. "Okay? Just... wait."
"Are we gonna be okay?"
I don't know!
he nearly
snapped.
Just shut up and let me think!
He clamped it down. He was done
with that; he'd promised. Even now.
Breathe in, breathe out.
"Yeah. We're fine. Whatever
it was, I think it missed us."
He pushed out of the furnace room
before Todd could ask anything else; waded past the stacks of his stillborn
ideas to the patio door and peered out through the curtains. The sky was clear,
the neighbors' backyards empty. But there was a column of smoke coming from
610, and a plane winging its way southeast toward Bloomington, its nose tilted dangerously low.
He didn't want to watch it go
down, but he couldn't escape the stupid hope that it wouldn't.
Maybe there
are still people inside. Other survivors. Maybe we can go up to the airport and
meet them, find out what's going—
The plane disappeared in the
distance behind the neighbor's house. The roar from the crash came a few
seconds later.
He ventured upstairs for a few
supplies—bottles of water, bags of chips, a flashlight—and took Todd back into
the furnace room. That was where they'd go if there was a tornado; it was
probably where they'd go if there was a nuclear bomb coming. He took him there
because he didn't know what else to do.
They sat on the cold concrete with
the door closed while Alan fiddled with the radio. He jumped from station to
station, hoping to hear an authoritative voice, maybe the grating buzz of the
Emergency Broadcast System. All he found was dead air.
Todd kept asking questions; Alan
kept putting him off. Suddenly, crackling through a haze of static, came the
synthetic chords of The Safety Dance. Alan felt a thrill of relief. Then he
realized he was on 104 FM, a fully automated station, and the hope died.
That was when his phone buzzed.
From:
Unknown
where
are you
His heart jumped all over again.
Maybe Brenda had survived. Her name was in his contacts list, of course, and
should've shown up in the
From
field,
but maybe there was something wrong with the satellite network. He could've
wept, he was so relieved.
In basement,
he thumbed.
Who
is this?
"Is it Grandma?" Todd
asked.
"I don't know," Alan
said yet again. If Todd had spent his first eight years with the assumption
that his father knew everything, he was surely questioning it today.
"What did she say?"
The phone buzzed again.
stay
there
A ball of ice knotted in his
stomach.
Stop answering,
something told him.
Stop now.
An image dawned in his head, like
the curtains pulling back in a dark theater, of a drone hovering over the city
and hunting for survivors.
The phone buzzed again.
help
is coming
And again:
stay
"What did she say?"
"It's not her." He
grabbed Todd's hand, pulled him out of the furnace room and back toward the
stairs. "Come on."
"Who was it?"
"
Shhh!
" His heart
was in his throat, pounding like a time bomb. He hauled his son through the
minefield of junk in the basement. A wall of dusty sunlight, thin as a laser
beam, lanced from the dark curtains. He snapped a glance that way, expecting to
see something horrible in his backyard, but the gap was too narrow to spot
anything.
They made the stairs, emerged into
the living room, and cut around toward the front door. The curtains in the
kitchen were wide open. No drones in the backyard.
But his wife's smartphone, sitting
on the kitchen counter, was glowing. The screen read:
where are you
He stared at it, his heart crawling
up his throat, and Todd said, "Where are we going?"
The boy had always been a bit
heedless, so wrapped up in his own head that he wouldn't notice what was
happening right in front of him, but no one could be this oblivious.
Do you
see
the message on Mom's phone?
Alan wanted to snap.
Do you see what's
going on? Do you understand that I have no idea what to do?
But Todd had been calm so far. If
he started freaking out, everything would get more complicated. Better to
answer his questions, try to keep him from panicking. "I'm not sure it's
safe here. We're going somewhere else."
"Where?"
"Just—!" Alan whirled,
took his shoulders, looked him in the eyes. "Todd, I need you to be quiet
right now. Okay? Like in the car, when we ask you to stop fighting with Allie.
Trust me. Okay?"
"Okay."
"Can you do that?"
"Yeah. But Dad."
"What?"
"Where are Mommy and
Allie?"
The question was a gaping chasm, a
pit of horrors. Alan slapped a lid on it. "I don't know right now. We'll
try to find them." He squeezed Todd's shoulder, a token effort to calm him
that probably felt as unnatural to the boy as it did to him. "Look, I'm
scared too. Quiet, now."
It doesn't even matter.
A
mantra of dread started up in his mind:
They're all dead. They're all dead.
They're all dead.
It was the apocalypse he'd been
expecting in one form or another since he'd been Todd's age. He didn't know
what had happened, but it was really all the same, whether you called it some
god's judgment or the sun exploding or a tiny change in the atmosphere's
composition that triggered mass death. He'd always been waiting for it, and
today, it was here: the catastrophic failure of all life on Earth. Game over,
man.
He ignored the mantra, ignored his
wife's glowing phone, and opened the front door.
The car that had crashed earlier
was still there, halfway through the neighbor's window. Beyond the houses in
the
cul-de-sac,
columns of smoke were drifting skyward. Car and house
alarms blared in the distance; between their discordant screams, he thought he
heard fire. But the
cul-de-sac
itself was deceptively normal, a bubble
of eerie silence.
They ran across the yard to the
Ngs' place, the next house over. Alan knocked on the front door, and there was
no answer.
"Brian?" he called
before knocking again. "Is anybody in there?" His fingers shivered,
his ears straining for any sound.
Please answer. Please, someone.
He gave the door a full-on
pounding. "
Hello?
"
"Maybe they're not
home," Todd supplied.
Right,
Alan thought.
Yes.
Definitely not home.
He tried the knob, and the door
swung open. He rushed Todd in, then shut and locked it behind them.
"I don't think we should be
in here," Todd said. Alan shushed him.
"Hello?" he called
again, stupidly, because he knew there was no one here. "Is
anybody—?"
There were two sets of empty
clothes on the stools at the center island. He didn't have to touch them to
know they'd be paper-thin.
"Dad, look. They left their
clothes on the chairs."
"Yeah." On the kitchen
counter, the Ngs had set up a little charging station, where everyone could
plug in their smartphones. The three currently charging all had the same
question:
where
are you
His mind whirled. He wanted to sit
down.
How many people had gotten the
text? Why?
Easy,
he answered himself.
To
see who responded. Find out who they missed.
"Shit." He hadn't told
them where he was, but they could trace the location of his phone, couldn't
they? Triangulate it or something, like
CSI?