Todd (12 page)

Alan tried to get his thoughts
together. His mind felt like an open sore.

It was them. They took
everything.

The darkness outside the front
door was endless. Impermeable. He suddenly felt very small. A speck of dust
hurtling through infinite black. His eyes started playing tricks, creating
blobs of red and smears of yellow.

Maybe those aren't tricks.
Maybe those are real. Maybe they've always been real, maybe those things have
always been here.
His panic was heating up again, melting the layer of ice
that had glazed over it.

A lantern clicked on, spraying
cold light through the entryway. It jerked him out of the dark and planted his
feet on the ground. He blinked, coming back to himself, then turned his own
lantern back on and slammed the door.

"Daddy?" Todd's voice
sounded like broken glass.

Alan nodded and tried to say
something, but his tongue wouldn't move. Todd threw himself at his father like
a survivor leaping out of a burning building. Awkwardly, slowly, Alan wrapped
his arms around him.

"What are they?" Todd
sobbed. "Why are they at our house?"

Maybe it's not our house
anymore,
Alan thought.
Maybe it's their house now. Maybe everything is
theirs now.
"I don't know. I'm sorry. I don't know."

His son was hysterical. "Do they
want to
hurt us?
"

Of course they want to hurt us.
They destroyed most of us.
But, at the same time... "If they wanted to
hurt us, they would've done it. I don't know what they want. They're gone
now." He was slowly coming back to himself, his own horror receding as he
felt the current of raw terror in his son's body. He went through the motions,
doing his best to calm Todd, but inside he was numb.

"Do you think they'll come
back?"

Of course they will.
"I
don't know. They're gone now. Let's just... let's just focus on that."

"Can we just stay here? Can
we please stay here? I don't want to go outside, I don't want to, I'm just
scared of those... those... those blurry things."

"Yeah. Of course. We'll stay
inside. It's okay. Shhh. We'll stay inside." Suddenly he was sure it
didn't matter where they went. There had been three of them. There could be
more anywhere, and probably were.

Everything is theirs now,
he
thought again.

They ended up going upstairs, to
the bedroom Alan used to share with his wife. They pulled the shades and closed
the door, then turned on every lantern they'd scavenged, flooding the room with
light. Alan remained on edge, expecting at any second to see that distinctive
flash of blue, but Todd seemed comforted. He curled up on the bed next to his
father, clutching Pinky Wing like a talisman.

Alan was desperate for the news or
the internet; he would've killed to hear the monotonous drone of a reporter
talking about this problem.
The military has mobilized, and researchers at
MIT have announced promising new technologies that might be able to trace the
vanished,
they'd say.
The stock market fell again today on reports of
mysterious blue blurs that can only be seen in the dark.
Then the President
would come on, and talk about how they were going to survive this as a nation.
He and Todd would huddle in their little bedroom and watch, sequestered and
frightened, thinking it couldn't possibly get worse.

But there were no armies
mobilizing to fight The Blue Menace. There was no stock market to crash, and
MIT was a ghost town.

They didn't have the President.
They only had each other.

Was it even worth it to keep
scavenging, if they were the only ones left? What kind of life could Alan make
for his son in a world with no other people? Were they destined to start hating
each other, to go crazy as everything slowly collapsed around them?

He had the sudden, brutal
realization that they weren't survivors: they were
remnants
. There was
no fighting those blurs; there was no war. The fight had ended with the first
shot fired. Now, the world was moving on. Whatever those things were here for,
they were going to do, and all Alan could do was watch.

For the first time in four years,
he thought about suicide.

It might be the only sane
answer. The only humane
answer.
He couldn't end his own life and
leave Todd here alone, though. It would have to be both of them. It would be
easy to get the boy to drink something, if Alan could find it. To save his son
from this hell in the only way he knew how.

"Daddy, could we read?"

Alan blinked. Todd was looking at
him.

"The Big Cabin book? Could we
read some more?"

He swallowed, mortified at what he
had just been thinking, waiting for his son to realize he had been sitting
there planning to kill him. "
Little House in the Big Woods?
"
It might have been a phrase from a foreign language.

"Yeah. Please?"

"Of course," he said,
nodding. "Of course. That sounds great."

37

The Ingalls butchered animals and
gathered woodchips, getting ready for the winter. This triggered a vague alarm
for Alan; winter was on the way for them, too. He tried to ignore it. His mind
couldn't process any more alarms tonight.

Alan would've expected Todd to
lose interest in the book's painstaking detail—to start kicking the wall or
find something in the room to play with—but he didn't. He stayed curled against
his father, following the words with his eyes, happy to escape. Alan's arm
turned slowly numb from the weight of his son's head, but he didn't move him.
When he finally heard the gentle rasp of the boy's snores, he set the book
aside and stared at the ceiling, hoping to fall sleep. Instead, his mind picked
up where it had left off.

Suicide? No.
No.
You've
already been down this road.

When he'd considered killing
himself four years ago, it had been the capstone to the darkest years of his
life. He'd spent days at a time on the couch. His appetite had vanished; Brenda
had had to force him to eat.
Motives
and
reasons,
the things that
always made him get out of bed in the morning, had just disappeared.
Eventually, he'd realized that he was simply no good to anyone. If he was gone,
he'd figured, Brenda could marry someone better. Allie had barely been a
toddler, and Todd had only been four. They wouldn't have been scarred; they
would have forgotten.

By the end it hadn't been a matter
of self-pity or a cry for help. It became a cold, reasoned decision that would
secure the best result for his family. Of course, he'd wished he hadn't been so
pathetic. It had still hurt that their lives would be better without him. But
the pain had been buried beneath a mountain of logic. In his own mind, he had
practically painted himself as a martyr.

Eventually, Brenda had practically
dragged him to therapy. He'd started on meds, he'd talked through his daddy
issues, and he'd pulled through. A couple years later he'd even gotten stable
enough to convince her he could handle working at home alone all day chasing
his dream, and
THE GAME
had been born.

He never wanted to feel that way
again. He lived in terror of it. The memories of Brenda feeding him like he was
some sort of invalid—of his absolute abandonment of her—still stung.

But this is different,
he
told himself.
I'm not depressed this time.

This was about compassion.

He didn't want his son to slowly starve,
or go mad, or freeze over the winter. Even if they survived, what was the
point? There was no one else. How could he force his son to grow up in a world
like this?

His own suicide would essentially
be an afterthought. Everything he did, he'd be doing for Todd.

Don't you dare,
he answered
himself.
You are having a depressive episode. You need to go back on
sertraline.

Well, sure. That was an option.
They probably had plenty of it at the Crown pharmacy, and he had his old bottle
with the dosage information. But that wasn't it—it really wasn't. The problem
wasn't that he was depressed. The problem wasn't just in his
head.

No amount of drugs or
dream-chasing could make the world an acceptable place to raise his child. Not
now, not with those...
things
crawling around the walls outside.

Every parent in history has had
to make hard choices to spare their children suffering. This is no different.

No. Get back on your drugs.
They'll help you think straight.

He rubbed his temple with his free
hand and felt his son's weight against his arm. The boy was out cold, his face
the picture of relaxation.
He has his dad,
Alan realized.
He'll think
everything is going to be okay as long as he has his dad. He knows I'll take
care of him. Even after what a dick I've been, he knows.

But he wasn't the man Todd thought
he was. He was weak and depressed and pathetic. He knew nothing about survival.
His wife had kept him around out of pity; let him putter around in the basement
like some kind of mad scientist, constantly promising things he had no power to
deliver.

That's not true. Why are you
thinking like that again?

But it was true. He'd lied to her.
To convince her to let him quit his day job, he'd drawn up a spreadsheet—a
project plan, of sorts—laying out the kind of income he could expect from
launching a successful board game. It had consisted of horribly optimistic
income projections and release schedules. By this time, nearly two years into
his self-employment, he'd told her he'd have two finished products generating revenue,
and be working on his third. Instead, he wasn't even done with the first one.
His crowdfunding efforts had been an abysmal failure, transforming him into a
drain on the family budget and an absolute embarrassment. Now, whenever one of
their friends or relatives asked about
THE GAME
he
would put on a brave face and spin some bullshit, but inside he was cringing
like a fraud.

THE
GAME
was supposed to have been a victory story, the trophy that
demonstrated that he'd not only escaped from his pit of depression and a
lifetime of abuse, but had grown
wings.
He was supposed to be rubbing
his dad's face in it—every time he glimpsed his products on the shelves or the
Amazon website, every time he made another dollar, was supposed to be renewed
proof that his dad had been wrong about him. He wasn't a worthless piece of
shit after all—he was creative, and brilliant, and rich.

His heart quickened like he'd been
stabbed. It was a nightmare, thinking about himself.

But the worst part—ah, gods, the
worst part of all—was losing the games themselves. Growing up, they'd been his
only refuge from his dad's constant berating. When he got home from school he
would try to sneak past the man, aiming to lose himself for hours in Dragon
Warrior or Final Fantasy. When he got older, he started playing Dungeons and
Dragons with friends, and it kindled a love of miniatures and crazy dice that
would later manifest itself in a game library worth thousands of dollars.

I can't believe you waste your
money on that kid shit,
his dad would snipe.
It's a fucking
embarrassment! Get your head out of the clouds!

 But instead of proving him
wrong—instead of showing that he could make a living doing what he loved—he had
failed. As the first year had stretched into two with nothing to show for his
efforts, his love of games had grown stale. Instead of being a refuge, they'd
become a reminder of his failures. Lately, when he went downstairs to work on
THE GAME,
there was no excitement. No thrill of
a challenge he'd been born to master. Nothing but shame.

He had let his father destroy
everything that had ever brought him joy: his love for his children, his
relationship with his wife—even his fucking
games.

Am I really that pathetic?
he
thought.
Am I so pathetic that even now, even after what we saw earlier
tonight, I can still lie awake beating myself up? The
world has ended,
you
moron! None of this shit even matters anymore!
The layers—failing at the
game, failing at the relationship with his son, and then
failing even more
because he felt bad about failing—made him sick. They reminded him too much of
the worst months of his depression.

This,
he thought.
This
is exactly why you shouldn't hurt Todd or yourself. You say you have good
reasons for suicide, but you said that last time. You can't trust yourself.
Suicide is suicide.

Alan.
This time it was
Brenda's voice. He imagined it so clearly he could almost weep.
Do you love
your son?

The answer was yes. Even after all
of Alan's failings, the answer was yes.

Then be there for him. That's
all he needs.

A thousand arguments came up. Alan
tried to ignore them until he fell asleep.

38

The morning was better. Sometimes
daylight was all it took.

Todd had stolen half the blankets
and a pillow and ended up in a tangle on the floor. The sunlight snaking around
the blinds fell over him in two broad stripes. Alan left him sleeping and
sneaked downstairs to see if they still had running water and natural gas. All
systems go.

"
Daddy!
" Todd screamed
from upstairs.

"Todd!" Alan launched
toward the stairs, tearing up them two at a time. "
Todd?
"

Todd threw himself at Alan.
"I thought you were gone. I thought the Blurs got you."

"What—? No. No, I'm fine. Are
you okay?"

"Yeah." He was
quivering.