When Life Turned Purple (9 page)

Lia’s eyes widened, but she didn’t say anything.

Steve opened his window wider to bring in the stuff that Russ brought down.

“Thanks, man,” he said and handed Russ a cardboard box. “These are extras,” he added. “Special bolts and stuff to make the door stronger.”

“Hey, thanks,” said Russ.

“Listen, Russ,” said Steve. “I didn’t have time to get a bug-out group together. I didn’t know it would happen so fast like this. Anyway, survival is better in a good group than out on your own. If you need to bug out, you always got me. You’d be good to have around in hard times.” He held out an index card with a map and directions scribbled on it.

Russ looked from the card to Steve. “It’s not just me anymore; I just got married.”

“Oh, yeah?” Steve pulled the card back in through his window. “Well, congratulations,” he said as he tore up the card, “and enjoy what’s left of your honeymoon.” He started to roll up the window. “I don’t know her, Russ. I don’t know how it would work out. With you, no problem, but her … I just can’t know—ya know?”

By then, the window was up and Russ just gave him a nod. He knew. He’d pretty much said the same thing to his own brother.

Russ went back up to where Lia was waiting. “I’ll get started on the door now,” he said in a low voice. “I don’t know what’s up with the neighbors and what will be tonight. We’re one flight up, so the windows can wait a bit.”

Lia nodded.

He had her help him. It took a lot of instructions and telling her exactly what to do, but she did it and she did it well. Russ saw that Steve had given him exactly the hinges, strike plates, and jamb reinforcements he needed. It took a while, but finally, it was up.

They closed and bolted it. It worked fine.

“You gave him a lot of high-quality stuff just for a door,” she said.

“Nah. A door like this costs around two grand.”

Lia’s eyes widened.

“I got off cheap. He didn’t need this door, so he was happy to get rid of it in exchange for some good survival gear.”

By now, the sun was setting and the sparkly purple bubble appeared in all its vibrant purple sparkliness.

As they gazed at it, Russ thought of Emma again. And a baby. Their baby? It had barely been a baby, but still.

With his hands resting in his pockets, Russ took a deep breath and rolled his shoulders to free up the tension.

Lia looked up at him.

“Does it make you—does it make you think of things?” he asked.

She looked away from Russ and back up at the sky. “I hadn’t made the connection, but…yeah, I think it does.”

“Like what?”

“God. It makes me think of God.” She turned her face back to Russ. “What does it make you think of?”

Russ didn’t answer right away. He wasn’t sure if he should. But Lia had been so understanding until now, so not jealous....

“It makes me think of Emma,” he said. “And the baby.” He shifted his weight. “And not something that looks like a clump of tissue, but a tiny nugget of a baby.”

Lia gazed at him without speaking.

Finally, he looked back at her.

“Did you ask Evan what he thought?”

“No. It didn’t really occur to me until now.”

“I think we need do some research of our own,” she said. “Let’s check this out.”

“You think this thing affects our minds?”

Lia shook her head. “I don’t know what it does. No one knows. But we can’t leave anything unexplored.”

“Telepathy isn’t very scientific.”

“Not true,” said Lia. “What’s
not
scientific is ignoring clues and indications because your ego dismisses them as unimportant, or because they don’t fit in with all the neat little theories you’ve held close to your heart until now, or because they challenge your tidy rational belief system.” She glanced at him with arched eyebrows as she continued. “Which means that scientists are often not so scientific.”

“What about all that stuff about keeping an open mind and just focusing on, well, the actual science?”

Lia smirked. “The ivory tower sounds so pretty and clean, doesn’t it? In reality, it’s splattered with blood from the cutthroat pursuit of funding and ego-gratification.”

Now Russ raised his eyebrows.

“Oh, there are some good people,” Lia said. “People who care just about the science and the truth of the outcomes. But there’s a lot of coal hiding those diamonds.”

Now Russ smirked. He’d always thought that most of those Too-Good-to-Breathe-the-Same-Oxygen-as-You academics were pansies—and here was Lia saying he’d been basically right.

They sat down to eat the simple dinner Lia had cooked up—frozen string beans and some salmon steaks.

“I figured I’d better use what’s in the freezer first, before hitting the pantry,” she said.

“Good thinking.”

They ate in companionable silence. Halfway through, Russ said, “Did you hear from your family?”

“Sure.”

“They called?”

Lia gave a wry laugh.

“No, I got a couple of
r u ok???
texts from family members who barely acknowledge I exist—you know the kind where they say they’re thinking of you, sign off with “love” and other brief expressions of trauma-drama?—and a pseudo-caring email from my mother basically fishing for insider information.”

“That’s it?”

“I don’t think they’re really aware of what’s going on. Maybe they’re in a kind of shock.”

“Aren’t we?”

Lia twirled her fork against her lips, then said, “Yeah, but we’re still responding as sensibly as we can. Picking up supplies, reinforcing our home, and everything else we’ve done is a good way to respond.” She waved her fork to the side. “Watching TV and waiting to see what will happen, and passively waiting for the media to tell you what to do is not a good way to respond.”

“What about ‘party till you die’?”

Lia shrugged. “Well, the problem is that you may not die, but you may have reduced your quality of life by spending your time and money on booze and drugs. Or you may die painfully and unnecessarily because you haven’t done a darn thing to protect yourself.”

“You’re a real little smarty, you know that?”

Lia smiled. “Takes one to know one.”

They watched the news some more and surfed alternative media sites. There wasn’t anything informative, just some grand theories that weren’t based on anything that Lia knew to be fact. And they ran into a lot of 404 pages. But in some cities, people were breaking into the supermarkets. Staff hadn’t shown up and the people wanted food and other goodies. The police didn’t stop them. Russ wondered where they were. Had the police shown up to work? Or were they around, but not intervening because it wasn’t worth the risk? He and Lia talked it over, then they went to sleep.

Russ woke to the sound of Lia’s phone ringing and felt for his gun. He wanted to train himself to go for his gun first thing upon waking up at any time. He heard Lia groping for her phone, then her sleepy voice said, “Hello?”

Russ heard the caller—a man—speaking, but couldn’t make out the words.

Lia bolted into sitting position. “What? Where?”

She twisted around, squinting in the city darkness. Russ sat up also, still holding his gun. Lia wrestled herself out from under the bedclothes and stumbled out of the room, Russ hurrying after her. She leaned against the window Russ had already barred and peered out between the arms of the X.

“Oh my gosh,” she whispered.

Russ ducked his head to look, too, and he froze.

There were two large purple bubbles sparkling in the sky now.

“What’s going on?” Lia whispered into her phone. “Haven’t they found out anything else? What do the astronauts say?”

A sigh of exasperation popped out of her mouth as she listened.

“But I don’t see—what? Come in for what?”

Russ’s head jerked around to catch her eye. He tightened his lips at her and shook his head no.

But Lia lowered her eyes and moved away from him.

“Lia!” he whispered and took a step toward her.

“Well,” she said, “if you genuinely think it would help shed some light on things, then—”

Russ grabbed her phone and jerked it toward his mouth. “Lia isn’t
going
anywhere! You want something, you can always Skype!” he said, even though he knew Skype wasn’t working so well. Then he hung up.

Lia stared at him wide-eyed.

He handed her the phone and growled, “We don’t know how people are going to react.”

She blinked.

He took a deep breath and ran a hand through his hair. “Listen, baby—we can’t go out. Not me, not you. Not until we see what’s going on and how people will react.”

Lia crossed her arms and cocked her head to the side as she listened to him.

“I’m not telling you to quit your life—in fact, I think it’s good that you have something worthwhile to do here.” He gave her a rueful smile. “I don’t have that. I mean, after I finish reinforcing our home, what will I do with my time?”

She gave him a wan smile and nodded. “I get it,” she said.

“I’m sorry I got so mad,” he said. “But I was so afraid you’d go out—or that I’d have to take you out, and leave the apartment unguarded, and come back at night....”

Lia nodded again. “No, you’re right, actually. It’s better in a room full of thinkers, but it can still be done through email and Skype.”

“What do they want you to do?”

“They want to put all the information together and then sketch out different scenarios. It can be done mathematically, of course, but visuals are even better—even for the most left-brained.” She grinned. “The thing is, they can do everything through computer simulations. Why do they need me?”

Russ shrugged.

“Anyway, those bubbles are still holding steady. They’re at similar coordinates to the first ones and still no emissions of any kind.”

“And what do the astronauts say?”

“What I just told you.”

“Can they see them?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Did they see where they came from?”

Lia slowly shook her head. “No, they just appear.”

“From another dimension?”

Lia shrugged. “That’s the only thing we can figure.”

“Still knocking out GPS satellites?”

“Yep.”

Russ went over to where he left his tools and metals. He put the gun in its holster on his waistband and sat down to work.

“You’re doing that now?” Lia asked.

“Do you feel like going to sleep?” he asked.

“No.”

“Well, me neither.”

Lia ran her tongue along her teeth and picked up her phone.

As Russ worked, he listened to Lia’s end of the conversation. She explained why she wasn’t coming in, then she sat down at her computer and started typing, frequently pausing to check the screen and discuss coordinates and scenarios with the person on the other end.

Russ half expected whatever neighbors were left to call down to him to stop with all the noise in the middle of the night. But no one did. It wouldn’t have stopped him, but he still expected them to try.

The sky turned grey-pink near the horizon and Lia was still on the phone while Russ finished the last window. The whole time he worked, he strained to hear Lia’s conversation and to think of how he could reinforce the porch doors. He also put a piece of iron vertically in the middle of the windows, in the middle of the X. Maybe some hard muscle and a crowbar could still break through, but that would be hard to do suspended one floor up. And Russ would hear them trying.

Russ finished up, but Lia hadn’t. He opened the fridge for some eggs and saw they were running low.

“Man,” he said. “I’m sure going to miss eggs.”

He wondered if he could get more. He wondered if it was worth the risk. And was there really even such a risk? Aside from inconveniences, nothing had happened so far in their area, except for some angry people around the supermarkets.

He turned on the coffee maker and put some butter on the skillet, careful to use just enough so the egg wouldn’t stick. Then he scrambled it. He made some toast. Then he got to work cutting up fruit. Lia liked fruit in the morning and he thought she might enjoy a good fruit salad. He tried to cut everything small, even mincing the grapes into quarters. Then he made some hot lemon water for her.

She was still on the phone in front of her computer staring at complex diagrams—well, they looked complex to Russ, anyway. He held out the salad and the drink toward her, and her face came alive with a wide smile. She mouthed,
I’m coming!

He brought everything to the table and in another twenty minutes, she joined him.

“You are the most
amazing
husband....” she said as she sat down. After her first spoonful of the fruit salad, she closed her eyes as she inhaled and exhaled deeply as if she was enjoying a rich chocolate mousse. “Mmmmm,” she murmured. Then she opened her eyes, looking right at Russ. “How did you do all this? You were also up all night—and working harder than me.”