Todd (22 page)
Authors: Adam J Nicolai
The roar of the heater. His son's
scream. These noises echo in his ears like actors murmuring behind a stage
curtain. The only sound now, though, is the wind: a kind of white noise that
may as well be silence.
"Todd!" The boy is
sprawled across the center console, his head buried against Alan's side.
"Todd!"
"I'm okay." Todd's voice
is hoarse from screaming.
"Are you okay?"
"I—I think so."
The boy's leg hasn't been torn
off, and Alan doesn't see any blood. "Can you move?"
Slowly, Todd extracts himself from
his father's seat.
"Careful. There's—ah, fuck,
there's glass everywhere. Be careful."
"I can move." Todd
winces. "My neck hurts." He sees Alan's face, and his voice spirals
toward hysteria. "Is that
blood
on you?"
Alan puts a hand to his face and
it comes away sticky. "Looks like. I'm okay, though. It's okay. Did you get
your leg down in time? Is your leg okay?"
Todd feels his leg. His hand is
visibly shaking. "Yeah. I got it down. Yeah."
"Christ." Relief floods
Alan like a drug. "Oh, Christ, I thought you were gonna lose your fucking
leg." He wants to weep. He wants to laugh. His vision is swimming.
Turning his head carefully to the
left, he sees blood on the cracked glass of his window. "Looks like I
broke it with my head," he says, and cackles.
Todd laughs, too. They sound like
lunatics. When Alan realizes this, he sobers quickly.
"Okay," he says.
"Okay. Hit in the head. That's not good. I could be concussed, or
something."
"What's 'concussed'?"
"My head. Yeah." He
needs to get the first aid kit. They talked about a concussion in there.
Snow bites at his cheeks, gusting
through the ruins of the windows. Already, the tips of his ears are freezing.
"Shit. We need to go. It's cold, we need to go."
He tries to open his door, but
it's mangled beyond use. He glances toward Todd, sees his window is still in
one piece. "Can you open your door? Careful—the glass."
Todd turns—he is moving his head
too slowly, too gently—and swings the door open. He climbs out, leaning against
the car frame to support his ankle.
The car spins quietly around Alan
as he follows, trying to avoid all the broken glass. As soon as he gets out, he
remembers their winter gear is in the trunk, and climbs back in to use the
trunk release. He sprawls over the seats, reaching for the catch as the
dashboard looms above him.
I am fucked up,
he
realizes.
Too dizzy.
He needs to lie down, to rest. His fingers, not
quite numb yet, find the release. Mercifully, it works.
He and Todd put on hats, gloves,
and scarves, then he dumps his old suitcase and refills it with a lantern, the
siphon pump, a can opener, and their two blankets. Everything else has to stay.
No, wait. The first aid kit. He
tucks it in.
"Where are we going?"
Todd asks.
Alan slams the trunk. No need to
ruin their other supplies. Once the storm is over, maybe they can come back for
them.
He scans their surroundings, the
horizon tilting like a teeter-totter as he fights for balance. The storm is
everywhere, blinding him, but farther south he thinks he can make out an exit
from the freeway. There may be a building at the bottom of it. They'll have to get
there.
Todd won't be able to climb the
ditch, so if they can't skirt the wreck right in front of them, Alan will have
to leave the suitcase and carry his boy. If he even can. He's not so sure, but
the only other option is to freeze to death here. They
have
to move.
"We can't use your crutches
in this. Here." Alan takes the suitcase in his left hand and keeps Todd on
his right, favoring the boy's wounded foot. "Just use me to balance."
The ground spins beneath him, packing the words with irony. "All right?"
Todd nods and leans into him.
"Can you walk this way? Do
you need me to carry you?"
Todd takes a few tentative steps.
"I think I can do it."
They're able to skirt the wreck,
so there's no need to chance the ditch, and they reach the exit in good time. Alan
thanks the universe for these small reprieves, but his luck runs out there.
The exit slopes gently downward,
to a rural underpass. The building he hoped for isn't there, and the storm has
thickened so much that he can't scan their surroundings.
"Feet are cold," Todd
says. Alan's feet are cold, too. When they left their house, he packed gloves,
scarves, and hats. He didn't pack boots, because he is a fucking idiot.
In a normal winter, they'd be able
to stick to the car tracks or the plowed streets, but of course there are no
such things now. The snow is already an inch deep—not much, by the old
standards, but they have to walk through it, and it's enough to start soaking
through their shoes. His feet are already wet.
Just watch for the numbness.
After that comes frostbite. After that—
Bad. No need to review it. Just
bad.
At the bottom of the exit, Alan
picks a direction, and they limp into the blizzard.
One foot in front of the other. The
whining crunch of snow beneath their shoes. Constant, gnawing fear.
The world is a vast, white cold.
There is nothing else.
He imagines the surface of Europa,
one of Jupiter's moons: an endless expanse of frozen ice. Humans have always
thought of snow as a part of the weather, a natural consequence of the varying
temperatures, but he suddenly realizes this is a completely inaccurate way of
looking at it. Snow is the planet's water exposed to the deadly, infinite cold
of space. Nothing more or less. It's not some weird, alternate state; it's the
way water would be all the time if Earth weren't warm enough to prevent it.
Beaches and sunlight—these things are the exception. Winter is a glimpse of how
the world actually is, and one day will be again, when the vastness of space
gets its way.
Dangerous thoughts. The last time
thoughts like these started running through his head, he ended up on the couch
for months. But he can no sooner turn them off than he can turn the sun back
on.
Todd stumbles; Alan grabs him,
props him up. They don't speak.
You'd be faster without him,
Alan's
dad says, and Alan imagines leaving his son behind as the boy cries for him. He
imagines reaching shelter alone. He imagines life without the boy's constant
curiosity, his guileless grin. It is a thought of such bleak, unrelenting
horror that he speaks just to drive it away.
"I love you, kiddo." He
has to raise his voice above the wind. "I really do."
I'm sorry I
was a dick all those years,
and
I know I don't always show it,
and
Please,
please believe me
fight for purchase on his tongue, but he's said what he
needed to say.
If we die here, I want you to know that,
surges forward
and almost wins a vocalization, but he kills it. Instead, he says:
"Everything's gonna be okay."
"Love you t-t-too."
Todd's teeth are chattering. Actually
chattering,
like in a cartoon.
Alan puts his arm around him to share a little warmth, but they're both coated
in snow, and leaning to the side while he's still dizzy could easily cost him
his balance. If they fall, they might not get back up.
So he straightens out, and they go
on. Step after trudging step into the endless white, the drifting flakes
growing ever fatter. When they stumble, the snow will cover them. In minutes
they'll be just two more indistinguishable mounds, unmarked graves in a silent
sea of snow.
Will the cold slow the Blurs down?
Will it slow the sky worms? Maybe the snow will at least keep the moss from
taking hold.
He forces his head up and looks
around. The blue glimpses are there, so many they are practically a permanent
smear at the edges of his vision now. No, winter won't deter them.
Of course it won't,
he
realizes.
They come from space.
They drift around an asteroid, exposed
to absolute cold and deadly cosmic rays. A Midwestern winter? Please. They
probably don't even notice it.
When he and Todd drop, when the
snow covers them, the work of the Blurs will continue. Whatever end they're
seeking, they'll reach, and Alan won't be there to see it. Maybe that's for the
best.
But he's come this far. He wants
to know—he's
earned the right
to know.
We just need to survive until
the blue star gets here.
As soon as he has the thought, he knows it's
correct. Whatever the asteroid is, whatever load it's carrying, its arrival
will be decisive. Maybe it will be the last thing Todd and Alan see.
Following the thought to its
conclusion suddenly makes him doubt the premise. Do they really want to witness
that thing's arrival? Why? Why watch the end of the Blurs' grand design, when
it is almost certain to be horrific?
If they just lie down now, they
can go in peace. Fall asleep together one last time. It would be better—
Todd stumbles and pitches into the
snow. His scarf has come loose. His eyebrows are caked with frost.
"Todd?" The line of
thought Alan was just entertaining vanishes. "
Todd?
"
The boy doesn't respond. Already,
the world is moving on. The snow is covering him.
Alan drops the suitcase, scoops
his son into his arms, and runs.
Hang on,
he wants to say.
It's
gonna be okay. Hang on.
He is on the stairs again, going bump up and down.
The boy is a newborn, completely dependent on his father for survival.
But Alan's not in his twenties,
and the boy is not seven pounds. Between Alan's shoulders, his back creaks.
Every frozen breath is a fight. There's nothing to spare for whispered words of
encouragement.
They flit through his mind anyway.
Hang on. Hang on.
He is talking to himself. He doesn't care.
His dad does.
You know, you did this,
the
old voice sneers.
You knew the winter would be a problem for
months,
and
did nothing. Too depressed. Too pathetic. Too many excuses. And then after
screwing around that whole time, you fuck up one last time and leave too late.
You saw a problem months in advance and decided to drive right into it.
Fuck you!
Alan screams.
Fuck
you!
When he dies, it'll be your
fault.
SHUT THE FUCK UP!
The rage
drives him forward, loans him strength he doesn't have.
I fucking hate you!
For a second, it works. Then:
My
son, folks. Last hope of the human race.
He is pushing with everything he
has, but the snow slows his sprint to a sort of lazy, jogging trudge. He tries
to lift his feet higher, to get more distance in each step by clearing the
snow, but this only makes him slip and nearly fall.
Hang on.
The words are
getting desperate, like a TV doctor who won't stop zapping her dead patient
with the defib.
Hang on. Oh, Christ.
There is a car in the ditch, its
front windshield shattered, its seats buried in snow. He pushes past it and
shifts the burden, looping Todd's body over his shoulder. His left shoulder
crackles with relief; his right groans beneath the doubled weight.
Left foot. Right foot. Both numb.
Snow in his face, his eyes; his moustache tickling his nose with ice. Left
foot. Right foot. He can't feel his ears. His shoulder is screaming. A stitch
in his gut is slowly tearing his abdomen open.
He wants to cough, to vomit. Every
breath is a frozen dagger scraping his throat. Left. Right. Left.
Hang on.
Hang on.
It'll be okay.
He slips, and goes down.
He huddles in the corner of a
closet, terrified. Light leaks through the slats on the door, painting stripes
on his face.
"It knows you're here,"
Brenda tells him. She doesn't whisper. "It can come in any time it
wants."
The monster moves outside. Alan
can hear it.
"Why is it doing this?"
He barely recognizes his own voice. It is decades younger, trembling with a
deep, miserable fear.
"Ask it." She nods at
the phone in his hands. It's his—the one he smashed.
"There's no signal." But
when he looks, the connection is live. His last received text—
help
is coming
stay
—glares up at him, daring him to
defy it. He glances at Brenda. Her face is like stone. "Go ahead."
He thumbs in the question, the one
that has haunted him for months.
why
are we still here
The answering buzz is nearly
instantaneous.
because
you don't matter
Brenda's expression softens. She
nods encouragement at him; reaches out to squeeze his knee.
Todd is dying,
he
wants to tell her, but somehow he knows that this version of Brenda doesn't
care about that. She wants him asking questions. She wants him to understand.
He turns back to the phone, thumbs in the last question he cares about.
why
did you do this
And again, the near-instant
answer:
hunger
"It's time." Brenda gets
to her feet, moves to open the closet door.
"Don't," Alan starts,
but he can't stop her. The door slides open, revealing empty air: a drop of a
hundred miles into clouds flickering blue.
"I'm sorry," she says.
He reaches for her, but his hand passes through hers. Then she is falling as he
screams her name.
The light dims as he watches her
plummet. When the clouds swallow her, the world has nearly gone dark.
Something is eclipsing the sun.
His heart gives a jolt, starting
him awake. He struggles to his knees. Through the dwindling curtain of snow, he
now sees a building. It is less than half a mile away.
Todd,
he tries to say, but
his tongue fails him. The boy has curled into a ball on the ground. Snow coats
his face. His lips are blue.
The building could be anything. It
doesn't really matter. Any shelter will be warmer than this.
They don't have to die here.
He grabs his son, forces himself
to his feet—and staggers, falling hard to one knee. A wild scream of pain
shoots up his leg. He tries again, but he's too weak, and Todd... ah, God, Todd
is too heavy to lift.
So he grabs him by the arms, and
drags him.
Left. Right. Left. The cadence
starts again. There is no internal monologue this time, no silent cheering
section. No goal, even. Just empty repetition. Right. Left. He will stop,
eventually. When he does, he'll be in either the building or the storm.
The last living being on Earth,
dragging his son's body through the peril of a raging planet. An analogy for
the entire human species—for life itself. A cosmic accident that will
nevertheless rage until the final, bitter moment. Survive. Keep going. Save the
bloodline.
He wonders if he is dragging a
corpse behind him.
Left. Right. Left. Right.
The sign says:
Jericho
Diner
Fine
Dining
Pasta,
Steak, Seafood
He drags his son inside.
The wind stops. Oh, Christ, the
wind
stops,
and the snow is gone.
"Todd." The word is
sludge in his mouth, mumbled past numb cheeks and the dead worm that used to be
his tongue. "Todd."
The boy doesn't respond. Alan
leaves him and stumbles deeper into the shelter. It's done up in a log cabin
motif. Wooden walls, wooden tables. Heavy white tablecloths. He tears one of
these away—table settings clatter to the floor—and lays it out flat by his son.
Carefully, he pulls Todd's sodden hat off, then starts working at the neck of
his coat so he can check for a pulse.
The seconds tick by. He feels
nothing, and the boy's lips are still blue. Alan took one CPR class nine years
ago. He will fake it if he has to.
He changes position, skirts around
the neck, and tries again. He is about to start chest compressions when he
feels it. The boy is alive.
A savage, choked sound bursts from
Alan's throat, like a drowning man gasping at air.
"Okay." He unzips his
son's coat. "Get you out of this." He works his son's arms out,
trying not to jostle the boy's neck, but it's hard. His fingers have all the
utility of frozen sausages. When he finally pulls the coat loose, he tosses it
aside. The boy's boots are next.
"This is all soaked," he
says to the empty room. "All right. Gonna get you dry. Then we're gonna
get you warm."
Once the boy is stripped, he rolls
him onto the tablecloth and wraps him up, then he sweeps through the dining
room and pulls several more tablecloths. He covers him with three or four of
these, then stalks into the kitchen and grabs the biggest roasting pan he can
find. Back in the dining room, he snaps the legs off a chair.
He doesn't care about smoke
anymore. He doesn't care about risks. He finds a book of matches and a couple
old newspapers, puts it all in the pan, and starts a fire. The wood is slow to
catch, but the newspapers help. When the heat hits him, he nearly weeps.
His own body is nearly as ruined
as Todd's. As he strips, he sees the smoke from the fire drifting up and out
through two open windows set high on the walls. A little luck, finally. He
wraps himself in tablecloths, then lies down behind his son.
The fire sears the backs of Alan's
closed eyelids, painting them in smears of red and yellow. Its unrelenting heat
accosts his face like dragon's breath. Beneath the onslaught, his frozen flesh
starts to thaw. In the wake of this glorious pain comes the deepest drowsiness
he's ever known.
Can't sleep. Might have
concussion. Have to watch fire.
When he wakes, it's almost dark.
"Dad." Todd is shaking
him. "Daddy."
The fire has guttered out, the
ghost of its heat fading as quickly as the sunlight. Todd is a shadow in the
gloom. Alan sits up.
"Todd?" Alan grabs him.
"Todd? Oh gods, I thought you—" He pulls him into a tight hug, kisses
the top of his head. "Are you okay? Can you feel your feet?"
"Yeah. I can feel my feet,
yeah."
Alan peers at him, but can't make out
the boy's face in the dim light. He remembers Todd's face turning pale, his
lips blue. "How about your cheeks? Your face?"
"My cheeks kinda hurt."
"They kinda hurt? Can you
feel them?"
"Yeah. But Dad. Where are
we?"
"I don't know. Iowa, somewhere. Some
restaurant."
"I don't remember coming
here."
"Yeah, I dragged you in. You
passed out in the snow." Alan climbs gingerly to his feet, wincing. Every
part of his body hurts, but he needs to restart the fire while he can still
see.
Once it's going, he sees Todd's
cheeks are mottled red and purple. Frostbite. His heart catches because he
doesn't know what to do about that, but then he remembers the boy is
alive.
Some
frostbite may be a fair price to pay.
Todd is quiet as they rummage
through the kitchen for food. The canned goods tend to come in giant,
industrial-sized containers, and most of them are condiments. Eventually they
settle on heating up some baked beans over the fire.
As the last of the daylight dies,
the snow has slowed but not stopped.
"Where is our stuff?"
Todd asks when they finish dinner. When Alan tells him, Todd says, "We
should go get it."
"Not in the blizzard. We need
to wait it out."
"But when it stops?"
"We'll see." Alan
actually agrees; he does want the basic supplies they packed, especially the
first aid kit and the siphon pump. There aren't enough supplies in the
restaurant to last them for the whole winter. They need to keep moving, and
they'll need their things to do it.
But this is a problem for
tomorrow. Wrapped in a white tablecloth like a Greek toga, Alan drapes their
clothes over several chair backs and arranges them around the fire to dry. His
feet sigh as he sits back down.
Slowly, the fact that they
actually survived the storm sinks in. For what must be the first time in several
hours, his heart rate slows. They're both alive. They're both safe—for now, at
least. This is not how he expected to spend their first snow day, but it beats
the alternative.
"It smells bad." Todd
crinkles his nose at the fire.
"Yeah. The chair wood is
probably treated—it's not really meant to be burned like this."
Probably
spewing a million carcinogens straight into our lungs,
he thinks, but
unless they're going to develop and die of cancer in the next eight hours, this
too is a problem for tomorrow. "It's all right, though. We're using it as
firewood, not incense."
"What's that?"
"Incense? Just something you
burn to make things smell good."
The smoke is still flowing up to
the windows, so he's not worried about suffocation. This is what passes for reassurance
now, and it's enough. He snuggles with his son, each drawing warmth from the
other, and they talk in the dark until sleep comes.
As if part of his mind has
appointed itself the task, he wakes every hour or so to check on the fire. He
broke down several chairs before bedtime, which makes tossing in a new chair
leg so easy that at times he barely remembers doing it.
During one of these intervals, as
the snow patters ceaselessly against the window panes, he notices the Blurs.
The fire light is not as complete as the lantern light was; it leaves too many
dark patches behind the tables and around the dining room's distant corners. In
these black places he's been seeing the shift and eddy of Blurs all night, but
that's not what catches his eye now.
Again, two of the forms are not
moving. He returns their eyeless stare while their brethren flash through and
around them. Their mute appeal could be a symptom of anything. A sinister
intent. Simple curiosity.
Empathy?
He is seized by a sudden longing, as
futile as it is desperate.
"Brenda?" he whispers,
and the two shapes dissolve.
In the morning, he dresses and
steps outside to find the world has vanished.
A handful of white mounds mark the
vehicles in the parking lot. In the distance, the 35 overpass is a blank arch
over the road. Everything else is endless, perfect white. The street, the
ditch, the fields: these distinctions mean nearly nothing.
The snow has stopped, for now, but
the sky is still iron-grey, and he can't see the sun. He can't rule out another
storm.
His damaged cheeks are burning in
the cold, and he can't stay out long. Inside, as he stamps the snow from his
shoes just inside the door, Todd screams for him.
"
Todd?
" His
fight-or-flight instinct activates instantly; the grizzly bear that saved his
son from certain death rears up, roaring.
Todd pops up from behind the
reception desk, eyes alight. "They have activity books!"
"They...?" Alan
struggles not to scream.
Don't
do
that!
"What?"
"Look!" Todd hobbles
away, and Alan chases him.
"Todd, you need to get off
that foot. I told you—"
"
Look!
" The boy
points at a forgotten corner of the restaurant foyer, where a display shelf is
filled with rows of dust-covered coloring books, road atlases, and car games.
It's the kind of obsolete stuff no one would need if they had a working
smartphone. As a kid, Alan always felt weirdly discomfited by these sorts of
things; even now, he feels vaguely embarrassed on Todd's behalf. But Todd has
never felt that way. Naked excitement shines in his eyes.
"This one has mazes and
riddles. I was looking under that"—he points at the host's
desk—"because you know how sometimes at the restaurant they have crayons?
I was looking for crayons." He grabs the book and starts flipping through
it.
Something about Todd's excitement
pricks him, and Alan suddenly reels under the loss of their suitcases. The
supplies were feeble, but at least they were
theirs.
Without that
they've truly lost everything—their home, their family, their
stuff
.
And Todd is so excited. What the
fuck is he so excited about?
A monstrous grief rears in Alan's
chest. He turns away so Todd won't see it, limping toward the kitchen as Todd
talks at his retreating back: "I'm tall when I'm young and short when I'm
old. What am I?"
Alan shakes his head. "I'll
be right back."
"A candle!" The pages
shuffle, followed by a breathless report: "There's lots of these."
Is this it, now? Is this all Alan
has to give his son—shitty activity books that no one wanted and pathetic
overtures at trick-or-treating and freezing his fucking face off? Where are
they going?
Where are they
going
?
He reaches the kitchen and slides
to the floor, gasping, panicking, the weight of this responsibility—this
despair
—crushing
him. He sobs and moans. He wishes he believed in a god—he is nearly ready to
pretend he does, just to have someone to beg. A refrain winds up in his head, a
low, desperate denial that whips itself into a frenzied shriek:
This can't be all.
This can't be all.
This can't be all!