Todd Page 9

  Todd started sobbing.

  "Come on!"

  The boy yanked free of Alan's grip and spilled to the floor, scrabbling to get away. The lantern clattered and rolled. Alan wanted to scream.

  From the open door behind him, he caught a glimpse of flickering blue.

  35

  He whirled. In the lantern light he saw their front walk and the side of the garage; he could just make out the edge of the lawn. Nothing there, he thought, but he didn't believe it for a second.

  Todd was still crying, nearly hysterical, but he'd noticed Alan's sudden jump. "What?" The word leaked out between hitching breaths. "Did you see it again?"

  Alan picked up the lantern, his fingers pinching the power knob. He didn't want to turn it off, but he had to know.

  "Daddy?" Todd was regressing, his terror making him talk like a baby.

  "It's okay." Alan's own panic suddenly went cold. "Don't freak out, okay? I'm right here." If that matters for anything. He flipped off the lantern, and they plunged into darkness.

  There were three of them outside.

  Even this close, he couldn't make out a definite outline, but they gave him a vaguely humanoid impression: legs, a torso, possibly a head. Where there might have been a mass of writhing arms before (or two arms, moving impossibly quickly), there was nothing now. If they'd been people, they would've been victims of some congenital defect, born without arms.

  But they weren't people. The blurs were too tall, too thin: their legs were too long for their frames or, depending on the moment, too short. They might have been looking at Alan, or they might have been facing the other way. It was impossible to tell because they had no eyes. And he could see through them. In fact, he didn't feel like he was looking at them at all. He was looking at his front yard at midnight. There just happened to be a slight lessening of the darkness in three places. Trying to focus on them, to make out their features, was like trying to sculpt a handful of water.

  Todd gave a long, low moan: a horrifying sound that reflected the noise in Alan's head perfectly.

  "Leave us alone," Alan said.

  No response. They were inscrutable sphinxes, the tops of their heads nearly level with the garage roof.

  "We didn't do anything to you. Can't you just leave us alone?"

  Todd went silent, listening.

  "Did you—" Alan hesitated. The question was pointless, but he had to ask it. "Did you make everyone disappear?"

  While he waited, stupidly, for some kind of answer, Todd threw a shoe at one of them.

  The blur didn't waver, or ripple like a lake surface. It didn't do anything. The shoe sailed through it without slowing and hit the walk with a dull scrape.

  Then all three of the things turned sideways—Alan didn't know how else to think of it—and vanished.

  36

  "Turn on the light," Todd begged. When Alan didn't respond, he used his best polite voice, the words quivering. "Would you please turn on the light?"

  But Alan was still searching the night, trying to be sure they were really gone. He couldn't see anything, but they'd been so faint to begin with that he couldn't trust his eyes.

  Todd scrambled to his feet and into the black living room, his footsteps staccato jolts against the background hum of the generator.

  Alan tried to get his thoughts together. His mind felt like an open sore.

  It was them. They took everything.

  The darkness outside the front door was endless. Impermeable. He suddenly felt very small. A speck of dust hurtling through infinite black. His eyes started playing tricks, creating blobs of red and smears of yellow.

  Maybe those aren't tricks. Maybe those are real. Maybe they've always been real, maybe those things have always been here. His panic was heating up again, melting the layer of ice that had glazed over it.

  A lantern clicked on, spraying cold light through the entryway. It jerked him out of the dark and planted his feet on the ground. He blinked, coming back to himself, then turned his own lantern back on and slammed the door.

  "Daddy?" Todd's voice sounded like broken glass.

  Alan nodded and tried to say something, but his tongue wouldn't move. Todd threw himself at his father like a survivor leaping out of a burning building. Awkwardly, slowly, Alan wrapped his arms around him.

  "What are they?" Todd sobbed. "Why are they at our house?"

  Maybe it's not our house anymore, Alan thought. Maybe it's their house now. Maybe everything is theirs now. "I don't know. I'm sorry. I don't know."

  His son was hysterical. "Do they want to hurt us?"

  Of course they want to hurt us. They destroyed most of us. But, at the same time... "If they wanted to hurt us, they would've done it. I don't know what they want. They're gone now." He was slowly coming back to himself, his own horror receding as he felt the current of raw terror in his son's body. He went through the motions, doing his best to calm Todd, but inside he was numb.

  "Do you think they'll come back?"

  Of course they will. "I don't know. They're gone now. Let's just... let's just focus on that."

  "Can we just stay here? Can we please stay here? I don't want to go outside, I don't want to, I'm just scared of those... those... those blurry things."

  "Yeah. Of course. We'll stay inside. It's okay. Shhh. We'll stay inside." Suddenly he was sure it didn't matter where they went. There had been three of them. There could be more anywhere, and probably were.

  Everything is theirs now, he thought again.

  They ended up going upstairs, to the bedroom Alan used to share with his wife. They pulled the shades and closed the door, then turned on every lantern they'd scavenged, flooding the room with light. Alan remained on edge, expecting at any second to see that distinctive flash of blue, but Todd seemed comforted. He curled up on the bed next to his father, clutching Pinky Wing like a talisman.

  Alan was desperate for the news or the internet; he would've killed to hear the monotonous drone of a reporter talking about this problem. The military has mobilized, and researchers at MIT have announced promising new technologies that might be able to trace the vanished, they'd say. The stock market fell again today on reports of mysterious blue blurs that can only be seen in the dark. Then the President would come on, and talk about how they were going to survive this as a nation. He and Todd would huddle in their little bedroom and watch, sequestered and frightened, thinking it couldn't possibly get worse.

  But there were no armies mobilizing to fight The Blue Menace. There was no stock market to crash, and MIT was a ghost town.

  They didn't have the President. They only had each other.

  Was it even worth it to keep scavenging, if they were the only ones left? What kind of life could Alan make for his son in a world with no other people? Were they destined to start hating each other, to go crazy as everything slowly collapsed around them?

  He had the sudden, brutal realization that they weren't survivors: they were remnants. There was no fighting those blurs; there was no war. The fight had ended with the first shot fired. Now, the world was moving on. Whatever those things were here for, they were going to do, and all Alan could do was watch.

  For the first time in four years, he thought about suicide.

  It might be the only sane answer. The only humane answer. He couldn't end his own life and leave Todd here alone, though. It would have to be both of them. It would be easy to get the boy to drink something, if Alan could find it. To save his son from this hell in the only way he knew how.

  "Daddy, could we read?"

  Alan blinked. Todd was looking at him.

  "The Big Cabin book? Could we read some more?"

  He swallowed, mortified at what he had just been thinking, waiting for his son to realize he had been sitting there planning to kill him. "Little House in the Big Woods?" It might have been a phrase from a foreign language.

  "Yeah. Please?"

  "Of course," he said, nodding. "Of course. That sounds great."

  3
7

  The Ingalls butchered animals and gathered woodchips, getting ready for the winter. This triggered a vague alarm for Alan; winter was on the way for them, too. He tried to ignore it. His mind couldn't process any more alarms tonight.

  Alan would've expected Todd to lose interest in the book's painstaking detail—to start kicking the wall or find something in the room to play with—but he didn't. He stayed curled against his father, following the words with his eyes, happy to escape. Alan's arm turned slowly numb from the weight of his son's head, but he didn't move him. When he finally heard the gentle rasp of the boy's snores, he set the book aside and stared at the ceiling, hoping to fall sleep. Instead, his mind picked up where it had left off.

  Suicide? No. No. You've already been down this road.

  When he'd considered killing himself four years ago, it had been the capstone to the darkest years of his life. He'd spent days at a time on the couch. His appetite had vanished; Brenda had had to force him to eat. Motives and reasons, the things that always made him get out of bed in the morning, had just disappeared. Eventually, he'd realized that he was simply no good to anyone. If he was gone, he'd figured, Brenda could marry someone better. Allie had barely been a toddler, and Todd had only been four. They wouldn't have been scarred; they would have forgotten.

  By the end it hadn't been a matter of self-pity or a cry for help. It became a cold, reasoned decision that would secure the best result for his family. Of course, he'd wished he hadn't been so pathetic. It had still hurt that their lives would be better without him. But the pain had been buried beneath a mountain of logic. In his own mind, he had practically painted himself as a martyr.

  Eventually, Brenda had practically dragged him to therapy. He'd started on meds, he'd talked through his daddy issues, and he'd pulled through. A couple years later he'd even gotten stable enough to convince her he could handle working at home alone all day chasing his dream, and THE GAME had been born.

  He never wanted to feel that way again. He lived in terror of it. The memories of Brenda feeding him like he was some sort of invalid—of his absolute abandonment of her—still stung.

  But this is different, he told himself. I'm not depressed this time.

  This was about compassion.

  He didn't want his son to slowly starve, or go mad, or freeze over the winter. Even if they survived, what was the point? There was no one else. How could he force his son to grow up in a world like this?

  His own suicide would essentially be an afterthought. Everything he did, he'd be doing for Todd.

  Don't you dare, he answered himself. You are having a depressive episode. You need to go back on sertraline.

  Well, sure. That was an option. They probably had plenty of it at the Crown pharmacy, and he had his old bottle with the dosage information. But that wasn't it—it really wasn't. The problem wasn't that he was depressed. The problem wasn't just in his head.

  No amount of drugs or dream-chasing could make the world an acceptable place to raise his child. Not now, not with those... things crawling around the walls outside.

  Every parent in history has had to make hard choices to spare their children suffering. This is no different.

  No. Get back on your drugs. They'll help you think straight.

  He rubbed his temple with his free hand and felt his son's weight against his arm. The boy was out cold, his face the picture of relaxation. He has his dad, Alan realized. He'll think everything is going to be okay as long as he has his dad. He knows I'll take care of him. Even after what a dick I've been, he knows.

  But he wasn't the man Todd thought he was. He was weak and depressed and pathetic. He knew nothing about survival. His wife had kept him around out of pity; let him putter around in the basement like some kind of mad scientist, constantly promising things he had no power to deliver.

  That's not true. Why are you thinking like that again?

  But it was true. He'd lied to her. To convince her to let him quit his day job, he'd drawn up a spreadsheet—a project plan, of sorts—laying out the kind of income he could expect from launching a successful board game. It had consisted of horribly optimistic income projections and release schedules. By this time, nearly two years into his self-employment, he'd told her he'd have two finished products generating revenue, and be working on his third. Instead, he wasn't even done with the first one. His crowdfunding efforts had been an abysmal failure, transforming him into a drain on the family budget and an absolute embarrassment. Now, whenever one of their friends or relatives asked about THE GAME he would put on a brave face and spin some bullshit, but inside he was cringing like a fraud.

  THE GAME was supposed to have been a victory story, the trophy that demonstrated that he'd not only escaped from his pit of depression and a lifetime of abuse, but had grown wings. He was supposed to be rubbing his dad's face in it—every time he glimpsed his products on the shelves or the Amazon website, every time he made another dollar, was supposed to be renewed proof that his dad had been wrong about him. He wasn't a worthless piece of shit after all—he was creative, and brilliant, and rich.

  His heart quickened like he'd been stabbed. It was a nightmare, thinking about himself.

  But the worst part—ah, gods, the worst part of all—was losing the games themselves. Growing up, they'd been his only refuge from his dad's constant berating. When he got home from school he would try to sneak past the man, aiming to lose himself for hours in Dragon Warrior or Final Fantasy. When he got older, he started playing Dungeons and Dragons with friends, and it kindled a love of miniatures and crazy dice that would later manifest itself in a game library worth thousands of dollars.

  I can't believe you waste your money on that kid shit, his dad would snipe. It's a fucking embarrassment! Get your head out of the clouds!

  But instead of proving him wrong—instead of showing that he could make a living doing what he loved—he had failed. As the first year had stretched into two with nothing to show for his efforts, his love of games had grown stale. Instead of being a refuge, they'd become a reminder of his failures. Lately, when he went downstairs to work on THE GAME, there was no excitement. No thrill of a challenge he'd been born to master. Nothing but shame.

  He had let his father destroy everything that had ever brought him joy: his love for his children, his relationship with his wife—even his fucking games.

  Am I really that pathetic? he thought. Am I so pathetic that even now, even after what we saw earlier tonight, I can still lie awake beating myself up? The world has ended, you moron! None of this shit even matters anymore! The layers—failing at the game, failing at the relationship with his son, and then failing even more because he felt bad about failing—made him sick. They reminded him too much of the worst months of his depression.

  This, he thought. This is exactly why you shouldn't hurt Todd or yourself. You say you have good reasons for suicide, but you said that last time. You can't trust yourself. Suicide is suicide.

  Alan. This time it was Brenda's voice. He imagined it so clearly he could almost weep. Do you love your son?

  The answer was yes. Even after all of Alan's failings, the answer was yes.

  Then be there for him. That's all he needs.

  A thousand arguments came up. Alan tried to ignore them until he fell asleep.

  38

  The morning was better. Sometimes daylight was all it took.

  Todd had stolen half the blankets and a pillow and ended up in a tangle on the floor. The sunlight snaking around the blinds fell over him in two broad stripes. Alan left him sleeping and sneaked downstairs to see if they still had running water and natural gas. All systems go.

  "Daddy!" Todd screamed from upstairs.

  "Todd!" Alan launched toward the stairs, tearing up them two at a time. "Todd?"

  Todd threw himself at Alan. "I thought you were gone. I thought the Blurs got you."

  "What—? No. No, I'm fine. Are you okay?"

  "Yeah." He was quivering.

&n
bsp; "God, you scared me, screaming like that. Almost gave me a heart attack."

  "A heart attack?" he wailed.

  "Hey—no, it's just an expression. No. I'm fine. I'll be fine." God, he reminded Alan so much of himself: always expecting the worst, always flinching. "I didn't mean it literally."

  "That was just figurative?" He only stumbled a little over the big word, and Alan felt a secret—but fierce— surge of pride. He was a smart kid.

  "Right. Just figurative. Come have some breakfast."

  They spent the day on the basics: storing up supplies and tracking down spray paint for a sign on the roof. Alan saw the blue flashes twice: once at the hardware store, and once as they got home. If Todd saw them, he didn't comment.

  That afternoon Alan took advantage of their running water and working gas line to make spaghetti, figuring such extravagant meals wouldn't be available much longer. His mind tried to linger on this; he tried to force it past.

  When it started getting dark, he and Todd migrated upstairs without speaking. Alan pulled the shades, closed the door, and turned on all the lamps. If there were Blurs in the bedroom, at least the light kept them invisible.

  39

  The next day he hauled out the ladder and climbed onto the roof. He hated using ladders alone and almost asked Todd to spot him, but the thought of the boy fidgeting and knocking it over kept his mouth closed. "Why don't you play DS for awhile," Alan said, "right there where I can see you? And don't touch the ladder."

  It was harder to spray paint a message on the roof than he would've expected. He couldn't see it from the sky, so he had to guess at the scale. Worse, with every step on the sloped shingles he imagined falling and breaking a leg or an arm. Todd would run over in these visions, but was little help; Alan would need to drag himself inside and after a failed effort to splint the break, slowly die from some kind of infection. That was bad enough, but it left Todd alone, the last human being on Earth, and he—

  All right, Alan told himself more than once. That's enough.