Todd (15 page)
Authors: Adam J Nicolai
He's been stupid. He should kill
himself tonight.
"The bread is getting all
blue," Todd says again, as if Alan didn't hear him.
"So eat something else,"
Alan snaps.
Leave me the fuck alone.
"There is nothing else!"
"Yes, there is. There's tons
of food."
"There's not! There's no
food!"
He
knows
there's food, they
brought home
trunkloads
of food. There is canned soup and powdered milk
and trail mix and potted meat and canned vegetables and every variety of jerky,
not to mention all the candy. There is so much food, it turns his stomach just
to think about it. When Todd gets hungry enough, he'll eat it.
"Daddy?"
There's enough food to last until
winter, at least. After that, it won't matter.
"
Dad?
"
"What?" he snarls.
"Are you just going to lay there?"
This is such a stupid question, it
strikes him mute. He answers by looking away from his son, back at the wall.
Can't you just leave me alone?
"What are you going to
do?" Todd presses.
"About what?"
"About the
food!
"
Something snaps, something Alan
didn't even know was there. He lurches upright. "Jesus Christ!" he
roars. "The food! You think the food fucking matters?"
Todd shrinks back, eyes wide. He
has no idea what he's done. No idea who his dad really is.
"
No one's coming, Todd!
Jesus
fuck, you fucking idiot,
no one's coming!
We're dead! We're fucking
dead! We're gonna fucking die here! We—" The words trip on the rust in his
throat, and dissolve into hacking.
Ruin him,
a voice from
inside the black car whispers.
Ruin him, and then it won't matter.
Fucking destroy him.
Todd's face has crumpled; his lip
quivers like a harp string. He's as pathetic as Alan.
Well done. Father of
the year.
This is the part where Brenda should burst into the room, pulling
the boy away, fixing Alan with a withering glare. Without her, it was only a
matter of time until Alan broke him.
The father in his head is
screaming, hurling himself against the bars of his cage, but the driver of that
black car is in charge here now, and he's smiling.
While his son is down, Alan stabs
him with words.
"There are two people left,
Todd. You and me." He's dropped his voice; the words are precise and
insidious. "We are going to wither away here until we die. No one is
coming, because there's no one to come. Mommy's not coming, and Allie's not
coming either. There's no police, no army." He gestures to the roof.
"I put that sign up there to trick you. That's it. No one's ever gonna see
it—it was just for you."
Todd starts to cry.
"And I don't know what's
happening, but I can tell you those blue things, those Blurs, that we've been
hiding from in the bedroom upstairs? They're
everywhere,
Todd. I've seen
them.
"And you know what I've been
thinking about, here on the couch this whole time, while you've been busy
playing video games and building forts and making a pile of shit in the next
house? I've been thinking about killing myself. Because it's either that, or
let them do it."
Alan is panting. "So you tell
me... why I should give a shit... that there's no food in the house."
He's never seen his son's face
like this: tear-streaked and horror-stricken. The boy is broken, hitching with
sobs, but around them he manages: "Because you... you have to eat food...
or you'll die."
His son's concern manages to touch
him; its light filters down through the cave, strangling in the darkness, until
the father inside sees the barest hint of it. That side of Alan wants to hug
the boy, to apologize and search for some reason to go on. He is defiant. The
echo of his screams clatter around in Alan's skull like pebbles in a pot.
Alan lies back down on the couch,
the energy he used to stay upright abruptly exhausted. "We're gonna die
anyway, Todd."
Todd cries for awhile more. Alan
ignores him until he goes away.
Around sunset Todd goes upstairs
alone. Alan doesn't get up to join him; that charade is over. Instead he
watches the colors seep out of the room, the darkness dragging everything
slowly to grey. Waiting for the Blurs to emerge reminds him of one of those
magic pictures obscured by colored dots, the ones you aren't supposed to be
able to see unless you wear special glasses. When full dark comes, the glasses
are on, and the Blurs emerge.
Suddenly that revulsion washes
back over him. Instead of flicking on the lantern, though, he closes his eyes.
The Blurs are silent, so this makes them vanish. Eventually, the rattling grind
of the generator follows, and he finds himself outside a cell, visiting a
prisoner.
It's the father he wishes he was.
He looks just like Alan. He's stopped screaming, but he's ragged with abuse.
"You're not fighting,"
he says.
Alan doesn't respond. He's there
to watch, not to talk. That's all he does when he's like this: observe. Maybe
the world's changed and he can't interact with it, but he can observe.
"You used to fight it. I know
you can't win, but you used to try. You used to put on a good face for Todd, at
least. Now you're killing him."
Alan scoffs silently. He's not
killing
him. All he did was speak the truth.
"You're killing him, and you
know it. I thought you loved him."
Alan shrugs. He does love him. He
might not feel it right now, but he can remember it. He can profess it the same
way he can say at midnight that the sun still exists.
"You screamed at him until he
cried."
Yes, he did.
"You said you'd never do that
again."
Yes, he did.
But that was
back when Brenda was here, when there were things to live for. There is nothing
now. Literally, nothing.
"Not nothing. There's still
the two of you. Don't do this to him. For God's sake, you're all he has."
But he hates that statement. He
hates
it. He didn't
ask
to be all Todd has. If the boy is relying on Alan,
that's his own fucked-up problem, because he's picked the wrong guy to rely on.
Alan is a worthless piece of shit, and if Todd relies on that, he'll end up the
same.
"He doesn't have a
choice," the father replies. "You're not hearing me.
You're all he
has.
"
Alan shrinks back from it. He does
love his son, and the horror is not that he's no good for him. The horror is that
the boy has no one else. The horror is that his son—his poor, beautiful,
brilliant son—is stuck with a black hole that will destroy him. The horror is
Alan.
Why couldn't Brenda have survived
instead? Even Allie would've been better. Letting Alan survive is like the
cosmos' final joke on the human species.
And God, again with the layers.
Even as he whines, he
hears
how whiney he is, and hates himself more.
Then he recognizes how pathetic that is, and reflects on how other people can
just
turn it off,
and hates himself even more.
The father watches, and Alan
thinks,
I was so much better when I was him
. How did he do it, those
first few weeks after the vanishing? How did he hold it together? It didn't
feel like horror yet, not then. Sometimes, it even felt like adventure.
"You can still fight,"
he says, but Alan can't believe that. He remembers fighting, sure: he remembers
seeing a doctor and taking a pill, seeing a therapist and carefully
constructing a mindset. Sometimes, he was able to look past the inevitable
destruction of everything because it hadn't happened yet.
Now it has.
"No, it
hasn't.
"
Dad Alan's not angry, just earnest—he leans forward, eyes flashing.
"You're still alive. Todd is still alive. The world is still here.
"Don't you get it? You only
lose
everything
if you throw it away."
His insistent bladder wakes him.
He sits up, taking in bleary sunlight and the chugging rattle of the generator,
then heads for the neighbor's place to relieve himself. He doesn't tell Todd
he's leaving.
The grass is well past his knees
now. It's sprouting in the street and driveways, shoving through the cracks,
taking over. The emptiness chases him to the next house, where the stink of
human waste hits him as soon as he opens the door. Todd has started using the
living room.
Fight?
he thinks as he
pisses in a stranger's sink. He hasn't bathed in weeks. He's surrounded by
reeking excrement. The idea of
fighting
is laughable. For what? For
Todd?
Why?
I shouldn't have yelled at him.
It doesn't matter, though. He can't
change himself now, not this time, not with no support and no drugs and nothing
to live for.
He finishes up and leaves. The air
outside is cool and pleasant. A good day for fishing or yard work. In other
words, a bitter joke.
I shouldn't have yelled at him.
And that damned, automatic
response:
I can't.
There's nothing. It doesn't matter.
He could go to Crown and get his
meds. They helped before. They might help now. But
why?
What's the point
of not being depressed? Everyone has vanished, the world is being choked to
death by invisible blue monsters, and he's supposed to be happy? He's supposed
to—what? Dance in the streets? Find the silver lining? It's bullshit, it's
always been bullshit, there's no reason—
I shouldn't have yelled at him.
Back in the house. Todd's still
asleep, or he's upstairs pretending he is. The couch beckons. It's the only
place that makes sense. There's an Alan-shaped groove in it now which, given a
few more weeks and a continued failure to eat, could turn into his grave.
He grabs a notepad and writes:
Then he stares at it, trying to
find a way it makes sense, trying to absorb what it means. He should crumple it
up and throw it away. He can't go. He can't fight, not this time.
He tricks himself by asking a
hypothetical: say he wrote the whole note. What would it look like? He can
still throw it away when he finishes. Just write it as a thought experiment.
Now it says:
Is it really this hard to write a little
note? Is he really this worthless, that writing a note to his son is a titanic
struggle? He should be on the couch. What is he doing?
There is one more thing the note
should have, something important, a lie that means everything. He debates the
longest over this last piece: whether or not to add it, whether it promises
more than he can give. Whether it's even true.
Then he remembers making his son
cry.
Like an archaeologist piecing
together some indecipherable hieroglyph, he adds two words before leaving.
He's never been carsick before,
but he is today.
It's been months since he drove.
The world ahead of the windshield is too fast, careening by like a fever dream.
He opens the window and gulps the fresh air. That stale mantra winds up again—
I
can't, I can't, I can't
—bombarding him with excuses to turn back.
Crown Foods is more or less how
they left it. All the cars are quiet now, and that stubborn grass is pushing
its way through the concrete here too, but otherwise little has changed. He
pulls onto the sidewalk by a little side door and gets out, then does a double
take.
A bluish moss has grown up the
building's brick wall, leaving a streak from the ground halfway to the roof.
There is more oozing from the cracks in the sidewalk and even more in a long
line along the curb.
It stops him dead. His eyes are
frozen to it. This isn't like the grass he keeps seeing, bulging through the
pavement at every opportunity. This is something else, something he's never seen.
It's an unnatural color, wisping and light, like cotton candy or Kool-Aid.
Or Blurs.
Suddenly there are blue glimpses
everywhere, clamoring at the edges of his vision in a shower of sparks. They've
been there the whole time; he had just grown too used to them to notice.
Revolted, he grabs a rock and
takes it to the moss on the wall, scrubbing. The stuff flakes away easily,
drifting in the breeze like a dandelion seed, but the brick it leaves behind is
stained blue. Some of the moss wafts onto the hair of his arm, and it feels
exactly how he imagined the wisping touch of the Blurs would. He hisses and
blows it off without touching it.
When the wall is cleared he turns
to the sidewalk and the curb, scraping the stuff away like a community worker
going after graffiti. The grating rock rattles in the silence.
Scrick
,
scrick
,
scrick
:
the only sound on Earth, chasing itself in
clattering circles through the wasteland of dead cars and concrete.
He
follows the line of moss down to the corner of the building, and his fanatical
cleaning abruptly dies.
Around the corner, the entire wall
of Crown Foods is blue.
He drops the rock and backs away,
then closes his eyes. He takes three blind, stumbling steps backwards, and when
he opens his eyes, the wall is out of sight around the corner. But his
whimpering brain is trying to make sense of it.
Jesus fuck what was that why is
it all blue oh gods why what was—
He feels an urge to retch, but
chokes it back. His longing for the couch has never been stronger. It's become
a force of gravity.