Todd (21 page)

"I love that crash! You see
that?"

Todd follows his finger.
"Yeah."

"You know what's great about
it?"

Todd shakes his head.

"It's in the fucking
ditch!
"
he roars, and hits the gas. The speedometer jumps to 50, 60, 70 miles per hour.
It might as well as read
Warp 8.
Todd has the armrest in a death grip,
his knuckles turning white, but his face is plastered with a giant grin. Blue
moss sprays out behind them like a speedboat's wake.

And then it doesn't. With no
warning, the road ahead is black again, the trees in their autumn splendor.
Alan looks into the rearview and sees the blue landscape vanishing fast behind
them.

He whoops. "We did it, man!
We fucking
made it!
" He high-fives his son, who is swept up by the
excitement despite not completely understanding it, and rockets toward Iowa.

74

Ten minutes out of the city a
Super Target looms on a hill to their left. They park on the highway and grab
their lanterns, then climb the hill and go in for dinner.

The store is moss-free, and they
haven't had this kind of selection in months. Alan goes for the canned beef
stew, while Todd rounds up some peanut butter and jelly with crackers. They
take the food to the little cafeteria area in the front and eat at a table by
the windows. Todd undoes the work of last night's bath in minutes, smearing
peanut butter into his hair with such efficiency that Alan can't help but
wonder if it's deliberate.

Neither of them care. Spirits are
high.

Alan is seized by a sudden idea.
"Hey, do you know what day it is?"

Todd is licking his fingers; a
streak of jelly stains his chin. "What."

"Halloween."

Todd's eyes widen, then his face
falls. "Oh."

"I thought maybe we could go
trick-or-treating," Alan says.

"Oh!" He sounds
pleasantly surprised, even thrilled. "Okay! But I need a costume."

The kid's aplomb never ceases. He
didn't question how such a thing was possible; he proceeded directly to making
it happen.

"Oh!" he says again.
"I know! I saw one by the cereal."

"You saw a costume?" It seems
hard to believe. Everyone vanished in the middle of the summer. Sure, they've
been putting Halloween stuff out earlier every year, but—

"Yeah! Come on!" Todd
scampers into the dim rear of the store, his lantern bobbing. Alan follows him
to the bedding section, where Todd rips open a plastic package with a blue
bedsheet in it. He finds a pair of scissors and cuts out a hole just big enough
for his head, then throws it over his shoulders.

Alan smiles. This is a classic.
"A ghost? That's great."

"I'm not a
ghost
."
Todd sounds put out.

"You're not? Then
what—?"

He figures it out just as Todd
says, "I'm a
Blur.
"

Absurdly, this simple change in
label completely shifts Alan's impression of the costume. It even sends a
ridiculous shiver down his spine. "All right," he says. "Yeah, I
see it. Nice one."

"Are you gonna dress
up?"

"Nope." He hands Todd a
plastic bag. "I'm gonna answer doors. Wait here."

Alan takes a pass down the candy
aisle, throwing a little of everything into a shopping basket, then takes position.
"All right," he calls. "My house is at the end of aisle
one!"

Todd gets scared in the dark, but
there's still enough daylight coming through the windows to make him agree to
this plan. He bursts around the corner at a dead run, sheet flapping. When he
reaches Alan, he holds his bag open. Alan looks at him expectantly.

"Candy!" Todd says.

"'Candy?'" Alan throws
back. "Don't you know how this works?"

Todd looks confused, then
thrilled. "Trick or treat!"

"That's more like it."
Alan tosses in a handful of candy, and Todd's face drops again.

"That's all?"

"Well, yeah. You gotta go to
the next house if you want more." Alan jerks his head toward aisle two,
and now Todd gets it. He starts to shove past, and Alan grabs him. "Ah,
ah, ah." He points back down the aisle. "The long way."

Todd grins. Something equal parts
excitement and annoyance flickers through his eyes. Then he's off.

Alan meets him at every aisle all
the way to the back of the store, acting a different role each time: the
exuberant soccer mom, the crotchety old man, the disinterested teen. Each role
gives different candy, and Todd loves it. By the end, his bag is nearly
overflowing.

"Can I eat it tonight?"

"Sure. And I have another
idea, too." He leads his son farther into the back, toward the electronics.

The sun's nearly down, now, so the
back of the store has fallen dark. Familiar blue flickers dart at the edges of
Alan's vision as they reach the Nintendo display.

"I wish the power
worked," Todd laments, looking at the dead TVs in the demonstration
booths.

"Here. Stand back." Alan
smashes the glass, and starts looting 3DS boxes.

"Oh, yeah!" Todd says,
but then turns quizzical. "Wait. What are you doing?"

"Help me break these open.
Every one of these machines should have a charged battery in it. We're gonna
take all of them."

"Oh, and use the batteries in
my 3DS!"

"You got it."

"Can I take some extra games,
too?"

Alan fixes his son with a level
look. "Now you're talking."

75

It's a night of debauchery. Games,
toys, candy—Alan even sneaks a few beers from the little attached liquor store.
They spend the night in a model bed, surrounded by fresh lanterns.

In the morning, Alan's nose is
nearly numb with the cold.

He hustles Todd outside to find
the world coated in morning frost. They're wearing warmer clothes, looted the
night before, but they don't have any real winter gear save for what they
packed. Alan wants to get a new car—the old one has too much moss residue—but
the Target parking lot is a terrible place to try to find matching keys, so he
decides to stop at the next gas station he sees instead.

As they pick their way back down
the hillside toward the old car, Todd slips in the hoary grass. He plunges
sideways, trying to catch his balance, and instead lurches into a screaming,
head-over-heels tumble.

"Todd!" Alan drops to
his butt and slides after him. The boy hits the ditch at the bottom, wailing.
"Todd! Are you okay?"

"Yeah," Todd says, but
when he tries to regain his feet, he yelps and falls back.

"What's wrong?" Alan
finally reaches him, holds out a hand. "Is it your foot?"

"Yeah," he whimpers.
"It hurts."

"Let me see." But when
Alan goes to pull off the boy's shoe, Todd howls. Alan opts for the best exam
he can manage with the shoe still on.

It doesn't look bad. The foot
isn't twisted sideways or anything. "You must've sprained it," Alan
says. "Let's just get you back to the car and see how it does." He
helps his son to his feet, favoring the wounded ankle, but the boy can't walk.
Alan picks him up.

Shit,
he thinks.
Shit,
shit, shit.
He has been waiting for this since the first day, and here it
is. He can't diagnose the problem. He doesn't know how to dress the foot, or
whether it even needs dressing. He needs a book. Why the hell doesn't he have a
book?

He doesn't even have a first aid
kit.

The ditch is maybe seven feet
deep, but his son is a thousand-pound weight in his arms. With every step up
the incline he imagines slipping, falling backwards to hit his head on a rock;
he imagines Todd freezing to death in the ditch, alone.

It doesn't happen. He reaches the
car, slides Todd carefully into the front passenger seat.

"You okay?" The words
steam from his mouth. Todd nods. Alan slides the boy's seat back. Should he
have him elevate his leg? Is that the right thing?

He wants to hit himself, to berate
himself for being an idiot, but that wouldn't help anyone. There might be some
kind of medical book in Target—or, at least, a first aid kit that might include
some instructions. He glances back that way, and the hill they climbed suddenly
looks like a cliff face. Of course Todd slipped on it. It's not safe; it's way
too steep. How could he be so fucking stupid?

This is on him, all of it. Brenda
never would have let them get hurt this way. He can hear her now:
Don't you
dare go back up there. If you break your ankle next, you'll get both of you
killed.

"Keep your leg high," he
tells Todd. "Put it up on the dashboard. Okay?"

Todd nods, and Alan starts the
car.

76

He gets off on the next exit and
drives back up to Target the long way. Then—after a minute of furious internal
debate—leaves the car running by the front doors so his son can stay in the
heat while Alan runs in. Ten minutes of fevered searching by lantern light
finally reveals a stack of first aid kits near the pharmacy. He grabs one and
starts running back to the car, then turns back to grab two more.

Back in the heat of the car, he
opens one. It has an instruction book, but it's all choking, heart attacks, and
amputations; nothing about sprained ankles. He heads back in, this time aiming
for the book section in the back. There are shelves upon shelves of bestsellers
and kids' books. When he finally finds a little non-fiction section,
First
Aid For Your Pet
makes him spit a stream of curses.

He's about to give up and start
hunting for a library when he spots a camper's guide to first aid, which has
what he needs. Twenty minutes later, he's wrapped Todd's left foot in gauze. It
doesn't look exactly like the picture, but hopefully it's close enough.

The kits, the book, and a pair of
crutches all get shoved in the trunk, the contents of which are growing more
indispensible by the day.
It's gonna start getting harder to change cars,
he
thinks, and just as quickly tries to put the thought away.

"Keep that foot up," he
tells Todd again as he climbs back in, this time with an air of authority.
"It'll keep the swelling down."

"Okay." The boy's face
is buried in his 3DS.

For the first hour or so, the plan
to shoot south on highway 35 works perfectly. The highway stays mostly clear,
and he's able to skirt the few minor accidents they do encounter. Then there's
a big one: three overturned semis have made a wall in the road that cuts off
all four lanes, including the grass divider between north and south. Alan
realizes with a sick sense of foreboding that cutting around the crash on foot
will be impossible. Todd's ankle prevents him from taking a hike through the
ditch, and even if it didn't, there will be no readily-accessible gas station
cars on the other side of the wreck like there always were in the metro. He's
forced to turn back and retrace to the last exit. The rural roads are wide
open, at least, but he nevertheless manages to get lost twice before finding
the highway again.

Setbacks like this one dog him the
rest of the day, each costing another hour or more. In the old world, sundown
should've seen them halfway into Arkansas;
instead, they barely reach Albert Lea, ten miles
shy of the Iowa
border.

It could be worse,
he
reminds himself
.
They've yet to see another sky worm or any more
moss-covered cities, and it's far more progress than they made the first day.
He exits toward town and finds a little house to hole up in for the night. They
pile into a bed with as many blankets as they can find, their breath steaming
in the lantern light.

77

The next morning an ugly purple
bruise mars the outside of Todd's foot, and the ankle has swollen
significantly. Alan re-wraps it as gingerly as he can, while Todd winces. The
wound is extremely tender. He would apply an ice pack if he had one, but he
doesn't, so again he has Todd keep his foot settled on the dashboard for
elevation.

The car's heater is a welcome
friend, better than all the blankets from the night before. He turns it up full
blast, shivering as his ears and cheeks start their slow thaw.

They've gotten a nice, early
start, and they hit Iowa
while the sun is still low on their left. The countryside flashes past:
farmland, rest stops, a sign for an RV lot. The highway is cooperating, but
even if everything stays clear, they'll reach Des Moines—a new metro area—by noon.

Alan has no plan for that. If they
have to get off the highway again, it'll probably cost them another couple
days. Based on how cold it is this morning, he's worried they don't have those
couple days to spare.

As he has this thought, the first
few snowflakes fall.

His heart clenches like he just
found a corpse in his freezer.
Too late,
he thinks, but he doesn't know
that yet. It might only be a flurry. A timely reminder of the stakes. He eases
into the gas pedal, pushes them south a little faster.

But in the next twenty minutes,
the flurry thickens. The grass and the blacktop disappear, melding into a
single, still plane of white.

Well, you fucked that up.
He
hasn't heard his father's voice in his head for weeks, but it's here now,
louder than ever.
Left too late. Could've stayed at the house, if you were
just planning to freeze to death out here anyway.

Fucking idiot.

He flinches from the words, but he
can't fight his dad this time, because he's right. God damn it all, he's right,
Alan has screwed this up and now—

A wreck looms suddenly ahead of
them, bursting from the white landscape without warning. Alan hits the brakes,
and the car starts to slide, drifting slowly clockwise.

"Shit! Todd, get your leg
down!"

"What?"

"Get your leg—!" he
screams, and the world becomes screeching metal and shattering glass.