Todd (14 page)

"Look out for all the crap in
there."

"The crap? What crap?"

"The... boxes, and batteries
and stuff, in the dining room."

"Oh, yeah. But you actually
can
break Darklaser, but to do it you need a Megaclaw, and I only had one and
that stupid guy with the
meladion
stole it."

Alan brought the milk in and set
it down. He was actually following what Todd was saying, more or less. He
didn't know the particular game that well, but he was a game lover. He knew his
Zeldas
and
Metroidvanias
.
Some basic game tropes were timeless.

Todd would be perfectly content rambling
on with no engagement from his father. Brenda had often needed to shush him to
get a word in through his monologues. Alan jumped in anyway.

"Well, is there a way to get
it back?"

"Probably, but I don't know
how, and the bad part is, now I can't even find out."

"Why not?"

Todd's look said,
Seriously?
"The
internet is down."

Alan's tongue moved like it was
possessed by the ghost of grandpas past. "Oh, poor you. You'll have to
figure it out yourself, like I did when I was growing up. There wasn't always
an internet, you know."

My God.
He felt like he'd
just vomited words all over the table.
Did I really just say that?

"Well I've
tried
but I
just don't know where he is!"

"All right." Alan forked
up some pancakes and tossed them on his son's plate. "Well, what do you
know about him? Is he a good guy, a bad guy...?"

"The guy with the
meladion
?"

"Yeah. Okay, first, what's a
meladion
?"

"It's a circle thing, like a
necklace, that he wears." Todd's hands were always moving: grabbing the
napkin, twisting it, tossing it aside, grabbing the fork. It had always driven
Alan crazy, but suddenly, he wondered if Todd was even aware he was doing it.

"Is it magical or something?
Did he use it against you?"

"Yeah, he gets like, some
kind of powers from it, I think." Todd waved it off. "But it doesn't
matter. He got the
meladion
from
Shorso
and he's basically a bad guy."

Alan frowned. "You mean
medallion
?"

"Yeah, medal-un?
Medal—?"

"Medallion?"

"Me
dall
ion."

Better. This was something he
could understand. "All right. Well, your dad knows a thing or two about
games, man. I may not know your medallion guy, but believe me, I've seen plenty
like him."

"Yeah."

"Sometimes two minds are
better than one. I can try to help, if you want."

His son looked at him seriously.
"That would be amazing."

You should be looking for other
survivors,
Alan's dad scolded
. Storing up supplies. His stupid game
doesn't matter.

But Alan wasn't sure that was
right. He thought maybe it was the only thing that did.

44

After breakfast Alan tried to take
the garbage out, but the bin in the garage was full. So was the recycling
container. He tossed the garbage on the garage floor and turned to go back
inside, but a vision stopped him: the garage, packed to the rafters with trash
bags, reeking so badly they could smell it from the house.

He cursed, then called for Todd.
When he came, Alan nodded at the trash bag. "We're out of space for
garbage. We're gonna do something kind of weird."

"Why?" Not
what
,
which is what a different kid might have asked, but
why.
That was Todd.

"Well, the garbage truck
obviously isn't coming, and we can't just start throwing trash on the floor in
here. We'll smell it in the house; it'll be disgusting."

"Oh, yeah. We could throw it
in the basement, maybe."

"That's close to what I was
thinking, but I was thinking maybe we throw it in a
different
basement."

He peered at Alan. "Oh, yeah,
like a different house?"

"Right." Alan waited to
see if he'd catch on.

"Like the Davises' house!" He grinned, and Alan
laughed.

The Davis family had been a bunch of bona fide
jerks. They'd had one son, Jason, who was a couple years older than Todd and
had bullied him on the school bus: stealing his hat and throwing it out the
window, twisting his fingers, calling him names. When Brenda and Alan had gone
across the street to talk to them about it, they'd accused Todd of lying and
refused to address their son. Eventually Brenda had gone through the school to
get the bullying stopped, and Mr. Jason Davis had ended up with a bus
suspension.

After that, the kid and his little
friends had adopted a policy of sustained juvenile vandalism. One night they
had tee-peed Alan and Brenda's yard; another, they'd stuffed their mailbox with
snow. In warmer months they would play Ding Dong Ditch after dark, or, if it
was an election year, steal their lawn signs. Alan and Brenda tried again to
talk to Jason's parents, but came away with the impression that the Davises not only knew what
their son was doing, but were probably feeding him ideas.

Alan thought their basement would
make a perfect garbage dump.

"Yeah. Come on. You bring
this"—he tossed Todd the bag he'd brought out—"and I'll wheel out the
cart."

The Davises' front door was unlocked, their
clothes in tidy piles on the living room furniture. "Hey, Carl," Alan
said to one of the empty shirts as he rolled the garbage cart through.
"Mind if I use your basement?" Todd chortled.

They made a little game out of
tossing the bags down the stairs, competing to see who could throw his farther.
Afterward, Todd ran upstairs to loot Jason's room.

Alan waited, sitting right on
Carl's shirt. "You lose, asshole," he muttered. He'd never been a
very vindictive person, but he wanted to try the words out. It was
disappointing to hear them ring hollow.

45

A week passed, then two.

They spent the evenings locked up
in the bedroom with the lanterns, reading about the Ingalls or hunting down Medallion Man.
Every morning Todd ran out to the driveway and stared at the roof, as if he
expected to find a helicopter had landed there overnight. Alan saw more blue
flashes, but never mentioned them to his son. And he had more dreams of rescue,
every one a kick in the stomach.

The grass in the neighborhood
started getting long. The lawns had never been pristine—most of the local
suburbanites had mowed and raked and that was about it—but they'd been
well-kept. No more. The
cul-de-sac
started to remind Alan of the
pictures he'd seen of Chernobyl,
years after everyone had evacuated: empty, overgrown, quiet.

Their final fresh meal was a good
one—steak and potatoes, the last of the meat. Todd didn't appreciate a good
steak, but he loved his baked potato. They didn't quite get to the last gallon
of cold milk in time. When Alan opened it, it had turned.

This made him think. Rotten milk
was just milk that had started growing bacteria, right? That—and the fact that
he could still digest food—had to mean that bacteria, at least, was alive. It
hadn't all vanished. So where was the line? How small was small enough to have
survived?

He tried to remember how many
insects he'd seen since everyone vanished. He would've sworn he'd at least
noticed a bee or a fly, but when he tried to pinpoint a specific memory, he
came up empty. Todd couldn't remember either. With the grass so high, bugs should
have been swarming everywhere. There was his answer, then: no bugs.

He picked at this information for
a week or so, trying to find a way that it might matter, that it might impact
them. Bugs were eaten by nearly everything, so the entire food chain would
probably collapse. That might've mattered if the food chain had had any links
left. As it was, he and Todd had their own personal food chain: it was called
Crown Foods.

No bugs would mean no pollination,
which might mean a lot of plants would die. Alan tried to remember what he'd
heard about the bees that were dying worldwide, and what the impacts to plants
were from that, but came up blank. For the most part he suspected many plants
would do just fine, even without pollination. The world still had sunlight and
water. Hell, they'd probably do better than before, now that there were no
humans to cut them down.

Plants exhale oxygen, though,
and everything that breathed oxygen is gone.
Too much oxygen was bad, he
remembered that, but why? What would it do to them? How long would it take?

This happened every time he tried
to figure something out about their circumstances. Too much oxygen, not enough
food, no shelter for the winter, eventual madness. All roads led to death.

46

After the fresh food ran out,
other modern conveniences fell one by one. The running water stopped the
following week. The natural gas went two days later. Each loss was a support
pillar getting kicked out from underneath them by a giant. Each left Alan
reeling, fighting against a growing sense of horror.

The toilets couldn't flush without
running water, which made it hard to keep the house livable. They started using
other homes to relieve themselves, filling first the toilets and then the
bathtubs. When those were full, they shut the doors and started on the next
house. In a final act of recognition of their old life, Alan shit in the Davises' living room
before moving on to their neighbors' place.

Todd stopped checking the roof
every morning. His game time expanded into every waking hour. If the machine
was charged, he was playing games; if it wasn't, he was talking about them.
Brenda had always said too much gaming was unhealthy. Alan even wondered if the
boy was losing touch with reality, but so what if he was? Wasn't it a mercy to
let him drift away, to let him find something he could hang on to and obsess
over?

If anything, Alan was jealous. He
tried losing himself in his own games or books or movies, but they couldn't
distract him, so he threw himself into preparing the house for winter instead.
It didn't work.

One day, his fevered preparations
in the house just ceased. He laid down on the couch and stared at nothing.
It's
bad this time,
he thought.
Worse than before.
He knew,
intellectually, that his depression was taking no prisoners, that he wasn't
thinking clearly—but at the same time, he thought maybe he was thinking more
clearly than ever.

They were alone. They still had
plenty of food and water, but nothing else. No one had seen their sign, and no
one would; even Todd had stopped watching. When winter came they would probably
freeze to death, and if they somehow survived until spring, it was only a
matter of time until malnutrition or Blurs or any of the other thousand horrors
Alan had imagined killed them.

Of course I'm fucking
depressed. It would be abnormal
not
to be depressed.

But that was a dangerous thought.
It opened the floodgates. That night, Alan couldn't rouse himself enough to
eat, let alone feed his son. Todd woke him when it started getting dark, and
they went up to the bedroom.

The next morning, Todd fed
himself.

The next evening, he started
feeding Alan.

47

Everyone dies,
Brenda told
him in a dream.
Nothing lasts. You'll die, Todd will die, the planet will
die, eventually the whole galaxy will die. Everything in the universe is
spinning away from everything else; everything growing colder and more still as
the eons pass. Death is the universal constant.

Everyone dies, and nothing
matters.

(2)

Distort

48

It might be late August.

He doesn't know for sure, because
he's stopped tracking the days on the calendar. Even after all that
chest-thumping about how important it was, after all the bravado about
controlling time so it didn't control him, he couldn't do it. He couldn't
convince himself that it mattered. Eventually, Todd started marking the days
instead. Alan noted this fact with no small shame, but it was insufficient to
get him off the couch. He knows his son deserves better, but he didn't choose
this. He didn't choose any of it.

They are at the park. The air is
hot and heavy, broken only by the groan and squeak of the chains as he pushes
Todd on a swing. The boy's old enough to swing on his own, but he asked to be
pushed. It doesn't matter—nothing does—but Alan obliges him. If someone were to
ask, he wouldn't be able to explain why.

The boy's t-shirt is damp with
sweat at the hips. The swing shoves away with a long protest—
squeeeak
—and then comes back with a
squawk.
Squeeeak
, squawk.
Squeeeak
,
squawk.
The world's saddest donkey.

Alan has completely collapsed. He
recognizes that, as if he's staring at himself from the outside. He's a slug. A
waste of flesh. He's not drowning; he's already drowned.

Suicide is not an abstract concept
anymore. It's a black car in the distance, coming down a long, empty highway at
midnight. He can see its lights, growing brighter and closer every minute. He
was running away from it, then he was walking. Now he's stopped, and he's just
waiting.

Every night he falls asleep thinking
about those headlights. He wakes up thinking about them. They wash over
everything he sees during the day and soak into every thought. When the frozen
vegetables ran out last week, they grew brighter than ever.

But he still has to make a
decision about Todd. It is the only thing holding him back. Once he does, that
black car will reach him, and it'll be time.

God, I'm sorry!
A burst of
passion, erupting from the depths like a geyser.
It wasn't supposed to be
like this. Everything was supposed to be better for you!
But even this
feels false. He is, fundamentally, an emotional fraud.
I love you! You're my
son!
I wanted everything for you, I wanted friends and young love and a
happy life and money and success and now you'll have nothing and I'm
sorry,
gods, I'm so sorry.
The words scream in his skull, pounding mutely at
the windows of his eyes, but they don't make it out. His face doesn't so much
as twitch. Everything—every emotion, every desire—runs into this wall and dies
before it can reach expression.

He feels a flicker of regret. Then
the geyser ends.

Alan stops pushing. Todd glances
back and says, "Daddy?" The boy was enjoying the physical contact,
the connection between father and son. He believed it meant something.

Todd builds up speed, forcing Alan
to back away or get hit in the face. When the swing starts going so high that
it's trying to spin the pole, doing that weird little weightless flop at the
top of each arc, he jumps.

An old, paternal instinct shouts a
warning in Alan's head—
Be careful!
—but it hits the wall and dies. He
watches his son sail through the air as if in slow motion. The boy lands on his
feet but stumbles forward, arms flailing. Alan is sure he's gonna go down, but
he doesn't. When he catches his balance, he throws his arms up and spins back,
beaming like an Olympian. The father in Alan's head wants to smile, to feel
pride. He is pounding on those windows, but Alan can't hear him. He can't
manage a smile. The best he can do is a grudging half-nod.

It'll be dark soon. They have to
go home.

49

The blue flickers are more common
now. Alan sees them at least once an hour, whether indoors or out, even in the
bedroom with all the lanterns blazing. He notices three of them just during the
20-minute walk home. He hasn't mentioned them to Todd, who is still pretending
they're not there. Maybe Todd thinks if he ignores them, they'll go away.

"Get ready for bed,"
Alan says as they get back to the house. He restarted this old tradition, not
because it matters, but because he got tired of Todd pestering him about it. He
couldn't care less whether the kid brushes his teeth or puts pajamas on, but
the boy's whining was driving him crazy.
Daddy, you never tell me to get
ready for bed anymore. Daddy, you never read anymore. Daddy, I really liked it
when we used to read those Ma and Pa books.

Daddy, Daddy, Daddy.
If
Alan had called his own father
Daddy,
the man would've kicked his ass.

The headlights draw closer.

"I'm hungry," Todd says
when he comes back. He's buttoned his pajamas wrong; one side of the shirt is
hanging longer than the other.

"Get something to eat."

He goes to the freezer, pulls out
a bag of bread, and takes one of the frozen pieces. Alan used to tell him to
let them thaw. He doesn't anymore.

"Do you want one?" Todd
sounds hopeful. Amicable. Alan remembers that he was a nice kid, back when
there were other people to be nice to. A good person. Alan used to be proud of
that.

He manages a small shake of the
head, and they go upstairs.

The boy still snuggles up at
bedtime, still burrows into Alan's chest, trying to find comfort. Alan has none
for him. The kid should know that by now, but he's just an organism, after all,
acting on instinct like a bird flying south. The bird wouldn't know that the
whole world is a wasteland now; it would fly south anyway. Alan watches the boy
curl up next to him like it's a scene from a nature documentary, and hates
himself.

If he thinks life is so worth
living, if he thinks there's actually anything left here for him, maybe I
should leave him here when I go. I'm probably just depressing him anyway. He
can feed himself. He'd be better off without me.

It makes sense. The black car's
lights grow brighter yet.

50

He needs you, Alan,
Brenda
says in a dream.
He looks up to you. He can't do it alone.

But Alan can't see her. He has no
idea where she is. He catches glimpses of her, but whenever he turns around,
she's gone.
Where are you?
he asks.

He's so much like you. He's
friendly like you are, he's inquisitive, he's withdrawn. He's got your
darkness, too, you know that. It's starting to take him just like it's taken
you.

You're going to criticize me?
he
demands. He still can't see her.
You left us! You left
me!

Whenever things got really bad,
Brenda could always diffuse the situation: she would give someone a sudden hug,
or crack a joke, or give his hand a special squeeze to keep him tethered.
Remembering those moments makes him ache. He can see himself in them, can
remember who he was: the best person it was possible for him to be.
I
need
you! Where are you? How are you even talking?

But she is gone.

51

He wakes staring at the ceiling.
Todd has rolled away, one arm hanging off the edge of the bed. The room is
bathed in lantern light, and Alan is wondering why he's still here.

Something or someone decided
humanity's time was over. He and Todd were leftovers, somehow missed in the big
purge; they should be gone, but they're not, and instead they have to mark time
until the end.

Fuck that
, he thinks. If
there is anything he has control over, it's that. He doesn't
have
to
mark time. Nothing can make him.

He gets up, grabs a lantern, and
opens the door. He has a vague notion of killing himself tonight, and maybe
Todd, too. He hasn't decided. If he wants what's best for his son, does that
mean he leaves him here or takes him with?

He closes the door and starts down
the stairs. He makes first for the kitchen, thinking of the steak knives, but
he doesn't want Todd to find him in a pool of blood. He changes course for the
bathroom, his lantern light bobbing like the ferryman's torch on the Styx.

There's a bottle of sleeping
pills, he notices with surprise. Brenda must've gotten sloppy, convinced that
he was okay. And he is. He really is. It's different this time.

He dumps a pile of pills into his
hand and stares at them; becomes Vincent Vega, mesmerized by the shining
contents of the mysterious briefcase.

His mind fast-forwards to the
morning. Todd finds him on the bathroom floor. The boy screams and tries to
wake Alan up. He runs to the phone and calls 911, even though he knows full
well it won't work. He's mad with panic. Alan fast-forwards some more, but the
recording ends; he can't see what Todd does when he calms down.

Alan recognizes how futile their
situation is, but Todd doesn't, and Alan's too pathetic, too cowardly, to do
what should really be done.

The pills spill into the sink. He
watches them from a hot-air balloon, floating hundreds of feet above, and a
thought occurs to him. If he's too chicken to do it himself, maybe he can find
a Blur to do it for him.

He reaches for the lantern but
hesitates, surprising himself. A moment ago he was on the verge of suicide. If
he's not scared of that, how could he possibly be scared of whatever waits in
the dark?

The logic doesn't matter. His
fingers pinch the knob but won't turn it. He wrestles with them, assaults
himself with reasoning.
Maybe I can see what they're up to. Maybe I can
communicate with them if Todd's not here to throw a shoe. If they can send text
messages, maybe they can talk too.
When that fails, the assault turns to
insults:
Listen, you fucking coward, turn off the goddamn light.

He twists the knob and plunges
into darkness. The lantern clatters from his hand, echoing like thunder.

They're everywhere.

52

The darkness is not black, but
blue: comprised of hundreds or thousands of morphing impressions that glimmer
azure like the rainbow in a puddle of gas. He can't tell what they're doing,
but they're
busy.
They remind him of a cloud of minnows, furious and
intent, no single entity distinguishable for more than an instant. He feels he
should be terrified, but if there's any emotion cutting through the blackness
in his head, it's annoyance.

"Hey." The cloud of
Blurs gives no sign it heard him or even knows he's there. "Hey!"

He feels his way along the doorframe
and steps into the hall. "You said help was coming. Right? In the text,
that was you?" They flow around and over him, a swirling, infinite mass of
blue darkness, unwitting. "I just want to know what's going on." He
shoots out a hand, trying to grab one, and manages to knock over a lamp.

"Listen to me! You killed
half my family, you can
fucking listen to me!
"

But they don't. He falls silent
and starts watching, back in documentary mode, but he can't make any sense of
their churning. He should be screaming, should feel his mind breaking apart—
Oh
God, what are they? Where did they come from? What do they want?
—but even
his brief flicker of annoyance has faded now, and he's left with only bland
curiosity: same questions, different tone.

He slices through the swarm to the
window and peers outside. It's the same there—Blurs everywhere—with one
difference. They are thickest at the ground, coagulating on it like a layer of
writhing blue snow. There is a constant stream of them coming from that layer,
and an equally constant influx of them returning.

They're moving through the
ground?
The sight is so unexpected, it actually tricks him into caring. For
a heartbeat, he almost gets scared.
Is there anywhere they can't go?
They're
in the air, too, drifting and blowing and flying, and above them, that bizarre
blue star gleams larger than ever. A harbinger, maybe. Maybe a progenitor.

Coming closer,
he thinks
sickly.
Coming here.

Suddenly he feels repulsed, like
he's just discovered a carpet of cockroaches beneath a couch cushion. He
lurches back to the bathroom, stumbling through the blue. He can't feel the
Blurs but he suddenly imagines he can: wisping over the hair on his arms,
snaking into his nose and ears and throat. He is batting at his face when he
finally rounds the corner back to the bathroom, sinks to the floor, and
switches on the lantern.

The darkness vanishes, and the
blue with it. He is alone again, shuddering on the bathroom floor, wishing he
had the courage to kill himself.

53

More weeks pass. The summer heat
breaks. The leaves start changing color.

The black car has caught up to him
and is idling at the side of the road, its passenger door gaping with darkness.
Todd and simple cowardice are the only things keeping him from climbing inside.

"We're out of bread,"
Todd announces one morning. Alan is on the couch, reeking to high heaven,
staring at the wall: his standard MO.

"We're not out of
bread," he says.

"We are. All that stuff
melted."

"Did the generator
stop?" He doesn't think it has; its drone has been unceasing for months.
He told Todd how to fill it just before he stopped caring.

"No. I keep it gassed
up."

Alan hunts briefly for a reason to
respond, and fails. He stops talking.

"But it's like everything in
the freezer just melted. The bread is getting all blue."

How can he make him go away? Is
there any way to make him stop talking?

How can he care enough that he
doesn't want to leave his son here alone, but he can't stand talking to him?
How could it possibly be worse for Todd if Alan weren't there?