Todd (8 page)

Inside, the smell of exhaust was
powerful, but not overwhelming; most of it was escaping outside. Crown had a
lot of food and they couldn't afford to lose it, but it wouldn't do them any
good if they died of carbon monoxide poisoning, either. He stood for awhile,
breathing, to make sure it was safe.

Crown had a smaller entrance on
the far end of the building's front, which hadn't been damaged. They went in
that way and started shopping. The sunlight from the storefront dwindled away
quickly, forcing them to break out their lanterns. The storm had wreaked havoc
on the aisles, throwing boxes, cans, and empty clothes everywhere. Their
lantern light bobbed over it all like the world's last lighthouse.

Midway to the meat department, the
smell hit them.

Todd's nose wrinkled. "
Ugh.
"

"Yeah. That's the meat, going
bad."
Damn it.
Alan had known it was a long shot, but he'd been
hoping—

"Do we still have to go over
there?"

"Well, yeah. The bakery's
over there." He'd be damned if he was going to miss out on the world's
last doughnuts, even if they were a couple days old.

The refrigerated meat was a total
bust, the stench nearly overpowering. It turned out to be too close to the
pastries, after all; there was no way he could eat anything that had the stain
of that stink on it.

They grabbed as much fresh produce
as they could, loading up five bags' worth of veggies and fruit, and then hit
the bread section, tossing loaves into the cart by the armload. Alan wanted to
grab as much of the fresh stuff as possible while they still could. Now that
they had a working freezer, maybe they could make it last—and he figured the
canned and boxed stuff would last just as long here as it would at home.

"Remember when I found that
flashlight on the wall?" Todd asked as they headed toward the bottled
water.

Alan felt a flash of irritation.
Yeah,
that was yesterday.
Was it really so great that they had to start
reminiscing about it immediately? He opened his mouth to say something terse,
and Brenda stopped him.

Calm down. He's eight. He
probably only has three or four years of real memory. Of course he starts
reminiscing faster. Why get all bent out of shape about it?

That was a good question. Most
people would find it endearing, not annoying. But Alan wasn't most people. He
couldn't just parent the right way without thinking about it. Everything had to
be a titanic struggle.

"Dad, remember when—"

"
Yes,
" he
snapped, then tried to cover his tracks: "Yeah, of course." He bit
back
that was just yesterday,
and belatedly added: "That was
awesome."

Todd grinned in the lantern light.
"I just felt along the wall and it was right there! I couldn't believe
it!"

He looked so goddamned
proud
.
The urge rose automatically to take him down a notch, but Alan recognized it.
Fought it.

"That was awesome," he
repeated. Todd's smile broadened. Despite himself, Alan felt an answering grin
tugging at his own lips. He even ruffled his son's hair.

It was getting pretty dirty. The
kid needed a bath. Alan wondered if the water was still running at home.

They'd finished up and started
angling toward the exit when Todd jerked to a stop. "Hang on," he
said. "Don't we have to pay for this stuff?"

Alan halted, struck dumb.
He
doesn't get it,
he realized.
He really doesn't get it.
"Todd,
there's... there's no one to pay."

"Oh," he said.
"Yeah." He resumed walking, and Alan stared at his back. Should he
say something else? Force a reckoning of some kind? Finally he just shook his
head and kept going.

On the way out, they passed a claw
machine game: one of those big glass contraptions loaded with stuffed animals
that no one ever won. Todd stopped again, enthralled by it as always. How many
times had they rushed past one of these things, too busy to let the kids give
it a shot? Being a parent meant feeling guilty all the time, that was something
Alan had realized quickly, but he suddenly wished they could've stopped for
them more often—for Todd, but especially for Allie.

Todd put his hands on the
glass—another thing his parents always told him not to do. Even now, Alan felt
a knee-jerk impulse to tell him not to smudge the glass.

"I guess it'll never work
again," Todd said.

"Maybe not."
Never
was
a big word. Alan didn't like those absolute words.
Never. Always. Everybody.
But
never
was the right word here, wasn't it? The machine might as
well have been a relic from a lost civilization. The last chance to play with
it had flashed past, and they hadn't even known.

Everything tilted sideways. What
the hell were they doing? What was the point of this—of any of this? Freezing
bread?
Why? So they could live in agonizing loneliness, without their family or their
friends or even any other members of their species? What was the point of that?

It's not forever. It's just
until—

The voice that trampled that
thought was his own, dripping with scorn.
Until what? Until
rescue?
You
know goddamned well there's no
rescue.
You tell Todd that to keep him
from going crazy. You tell yourself that to fucking coddle yourself. But it's a
lie. Everyone is gone. Everyone in the U.S., everyone on the continent,
everyone overseas.

He recognized that bleakness. It
had the power to shut him down. It had done it before, for weeks and months on
end: that stark realization that nothing mattered. He'd fought it the best he
could, by focusing on the things that mattered to him, by trying to live in the
present
instead of the terrifying possibilities, but the
present
was
pretty shitty now, wasn't it? The things that had anchored him—his daughter,
his friends, his wife (oh, gods, his
wife
)—were gone now. He was
standing in an abandoned grocery store, in an empty city, in an empty country,
on an empty planet, spinning through blackness with no end. He could scream,
and no one would hear him. He could kill himself, and no one would know.

The darkness was so deep, so
sudden, that it stole his breath.

Todd had dug a couple quarters out
of his pocket.

"That..." Alan started,
fighting a sudden clench of anxiety in his chest. "That's not gonna work,
pal."

"I know. But I just want to
try it." Todd hurried to get the coins in before Alan stopped him. The
quarters
thunked
, and nothing happened, because the machine was dead.

Todd was going to learn this
lesson. Eventually he would realize there's no point in trying the coins if the
machine is dead. That just because you're optimistic, or have a wild hope,
doesn't mean anything good will happen. He'd realize that all hope did was
delude you long enough to make it to the next day.

That vapid grin, that stupid,
pointless pride, would turn to ash and blow away.

In other words, he'll become
like me.

The thought seized him like a
heart attack. He fought it by saying, "Which one did you want?"

Todd glanced back at him, already
flinching, bracing for Alan's wrath. "That one." He pointed at a pink
pony with wings, its eyes taking up half its head and its snout sparkling.
"It reminds me of Allie."

"Back up." Alan grabbed
his arm and pulled him back.

"Sorry." He thought Alan
was berating him for not listening. Of course he did. That was their normal
mode of interaction: he tried to be vivacious and alive, and Alan tried to
grind him down. "I knew it wouldn't work, but—"

Alan smashed the glass open with a
grocery basket. Todd gave a shout of surprise, recoiling.

"Here." Alan shook the
broken glass off the pony, then ran his fingers over it to make sure it was
safe. "It reminds me of her, too. Take good care of it, okay? For all you
know, she's part of it now. Maybe she wanted us to find it."

Mumbo jumbo. Supernatural
hocus-pocus.

"But... how could she—?"

"I don't know, Todd. How
could everyone just disappear? Where did she go? We don't know. We know things
never really go away—remember I told you that?—so where did she go? Where did
they all go?" He was waving a torch, screaming at that darkness, beating
it back with sheer willpower. It was working for now, but it never worked for
long. "When you don't have any answers, sometimes you have to make some
up." Alan grabbed his son's shoulders. "And sometimes the only
meaning things have is the meaning we give them."

Todd didn't understand; Alan could
tell. That was all right. The boy had his pony.

Maybe the speech had been more for
himself.

27

That night Alan turned both
lanterns and the lamp on, keeping the living room brilliant as night fell. He
took a risk and ran the surge protector into the last open outlet on the
generator, where it drew power for the TV and the DVD player both. They'd had
some meat in the freezer already, as it turned out, and natural gas was still
coming to the stove.

They had hamburgers for dinner,
and watched
Frozen.

Todd sang along with the songs, an
act of defiance nearly equal to all the lights blaring in the living room. Alan
couldn't bring himself to join him, but Todd didn't need him to. He let the boy
have his fun and tried not to think of how their noise was carrying in the
darkness across the empty city. He tried not to wonder if their house could be
seen from space: the brilliant network of Earth's old nervous system reduced to
a single, quivering point of light.

And it won't even last,
he
reminded himself.
The power will run out. The disc will get scratched. We'll
have to relocate.

But the old motto came to the
rescue. It was all here now. They had it
now
.

When the movie was over, they
watched it again.

28

Then he woke to darkness.

He could hear Todd on the living
room floor, breathing the breath of deep sleep. Otherwise the silence was
total, like it had been the other morning at Grandma's house.

Shouldn't be this quiet,
he
thought.
Generator must've run out.

He fumbled in the dark for the
lantern, shielding it with his body so the light wouldn't wake Todd. The boy
was a tangle of limbs and pillows, his cheek marred with drool. He'd be
terrified if he woke while Alan was gone checking on the generator, but he was
out cold, and the deck was barely twenty feet away. Alan decided to risk it.

The sliding door to the deck was
ajar, just enough to let all the extension cords snake through. He slid it open
and slipped out. As he suspected, the generator was dead. He couldn't risk
their food thawing, so he set the lantern on a deck chair and refilled the gas
in its dimming light.

The generator roared back to life.
A second later the fridge lurched back as well. He heaved a relieved sigh as he
sat back in the deck chair.

He looked up, and the night sky
seized him.

The comforting diffuse grey he had
always known had been replaced with an alien sky, livid with stars. The Milky
Way sprawled over his backyard like a scar of light.

He grappled with vertigo, feeling
suddenly that he was at the lip of a great fall. Far from being secure on the
ground, he was a microbe on a pebble hurtling through the nothingness. Only
laws he couldn't comprehend kept him from falling endlessly into the eternal
black, and he could fall for a thousand years into that bloated darkness and
its mysteries would be no closer. The view wouldn't change. He was nothing
against it; his entire planet was less than a speck of dust.

He blinked and forced his eyes
down, swallowing nausea. In another life, surrounded by his family and able to
return to the comforting light pollution of his
cul-de-sac,
he may have
appreciated the feeling of his own insignificance, even found it awe-inspiring.
Now it only brought him horror.

He stood and reached for the deck
door, but another sight snagged the corner of his vision, and he looked up
again despite himself. It was the blue star from a few nights ago, the one he'd
thought was a satellite. It was smaller than the North Star, but far more
vibrant—like someone had pricked the fabric of space with a needle, betraying a
glimpse of endless, brilliant blue beyond.

It's not a satellite.
Flush
with the revelations of finding the Milky Way in his own backyard, he was
suddenly certain.
It's this. It's everything that's happened.

It's coming here.

But that was madness: paranoia
brought on by the trauma of the last few days and his sudden confrontation with
the sprawling stars. He turned his back on it and went inside, telling himself
that his thin walls could shield him from the universe.

29

The roar of a flushing toilet woke
him.

He opened his eyes to sunlight and
the rattle of the generator; felt a vague sense of relief that the water was
still running. "Good morning," he said when Todd came back into the
living room.

"Morning." Todd ambled
into the kitchen and poured a bowl of cereal. He opened the fridge looking for
the milk, then made a face. "I forgot about this stuff," he said as
he grabbed a pitcher of reconstituted milk. Alan had mixed it up yesterday,
since all the normal milk had gone bad.

"
Bon appétit.
"

"What does
that
mean?"

"It just means... enjoy your
food."

"Oh." Todd took a bite,
grimacing at the thin milk. "I probably won't."

Alan joined him with a bowl of his
own. Todd was unusually quiet for breakfast. Normally Brenda had to tell him to
stop talking and finish eating so he could catch his school bus on time. Alan
supposed that since neither Brenda nor Allie were here, there really wasn't
much to say. Todd didn't talk to him like he talked to them.