She emerged with a box full of all the canned goods she thought she would need for the next few days—and the can opener, which she had almost forgotten.
It was dusk by the time she thought to turn on the radio. They hadn’t had a television since the last set broke beyond repair; its hulk sat in the foyer under the stairs, gathering dust behind boxes of old magazines. She pulled out the multiband portable her mother kept for emergencies and methodically searched the dials. She had once play-acted at being a ham radio operator, but of course the portable couldn’t send anything.
Not a single station played on AM or FM. She picked up signals on the short wave bands—some very clear—but none in English.
The room was rapidly darkening now. She agonized before trying to switch on the lights. If everybody was sick, would there still be lights?
When the shadows had filled the living room and there was no avoiding the dilemma—either sit in the dark, or find out whether she would have to sit in the dark—she reached up to the big reading lamp beside the couch and turned the switch quickly.
The light came on, strong and steady.
This broke a very weak dam in her, and she began to mourn. She rocked back and forth on her curled-up legs on the couch and keened like someone demented, her face wet, hands braiding and unbraiding her hair and using it to dry her face until it hung in damp strips down to her collarbone. With the single light casting a golden crescent over her face, she wept until her throat ached and she could barely keep her eyes open.
Without eating, she went upstairs, switching on all the lights—each steady glow a miracle—and crawled into her bed, where she could not sleep, imagining she heard someone coming up the stairs, or walking down the hall toward her door.
The night lasted an eternity, and in that time Suzy became a little more mature, or a little crazier, she couldn’t decide which. Some things no longer mattered much. She was quite willing, for example, to forego her past life and find a new way to live. She made this concession in the hopes that whatever was in charge would simply allow the lights to keep burning.
By dawn she was a physical wreck—exhausted, hungry but unwilling to eat, her whole body tense and wrung out from terror and watchfulness. She drank from the bathroom tap again… and suddenly thought of the roots leading into the plumbing. Wretching, Suzy sat down on the toilet and watched the water pour clean and clear from the tap. Thirst finally compelled her to take the chance and drink more, but she vowed to lay in a supply of bottled water.
She prepared a cold meal of green beans and corned beef hash in the living room, and was hungry enough to throw in a can of plums in heavy syrup for good measure. The cans stood in a row on the battered coffee table. She sipped the last of the plum syrup; nothing had ever tasted so good.
She returned to her bedroom and lay down, and this time slept for five hours, until awakened by a noise. Something heavy had fallen within the house. Cautiously, she descended the stairs and looked around the foyer and living room.
“Not the kitchen,” she said, and knew immediately that was where the sound had come from. She opened the swinging door slowly. Her mother’s clothes—but not her mother—lay in a pile before the sink. Suzy entered and looked at where Kenneth had been in the pantry. Clothes, but nothing else. She turned.
Howard’s jeans hung from the seat of the stool, which had toppled to one side. A glistening pale brown sheet hung down along the whole wall, neatly edged into the cornices, protruding slightly where it covered a framed print.
She took the mop from the opposite corner, behind the refrigerator, and stepped forward with the handle pointing at the sheet. I’m being incredibly brave, she thought. She poked the sheet gently at first, they drove the broom clear through it into the lath and plaster beyond. The sheet quivered but did not otherwise react. “You!” she screamed. She swung the handle back and forth over the sheet, shredding it from corner to corner. “You!”
When most of the shreds had fallen to the floor and the wall was covered with holes, she dropped the broom and fled the kitchen.
It was one o’clock in the afternoon, the ship’s clock said. She regained her breath and then went around the house, turning off the lights. The miraculous energy might last longer if she didn’t use it up immediately.
Suzy then took an address book from beneath the phone in the foyer and made a list of her supplies, and what she would need. There was at least five more hours of daylight, or light enough to see by. She put on her coat and left the snow porch door open behind her.
Down the street, lined with the same parked cars, to the corner, to the grocery, without purse or money, wearing her coat over her pajamas and sky-blue robe; out into the upside-down outside world to see what there was to see. She even felt vaguely cheerful. The wind was blowing fall-cool and a few leaves rattled along the pavement from the trees spaced every few houses. Vines crawled along the wrought-iron fencing between the steps, and flowerpots sat on ledges before the first floor windows.
Mithridates’ grocery was closed, iron bars across the front doors. She peered through the bars on the windows, wondering if there was any way to get in, and thought of the service entrance on the other side. The door there hung slightly ajar, a great heavy black metal-sheathed thing she had to heave with all her might to push open farther. She felt it catch and let it go, watching it for an instant to make sure it would stay open. In the service corridor, she stepped over another pile of clothes, topped by a grocer’s apron, and pushed through double swinging doors into the deserted grocery.
Methodically, Suzy went to the front of the store and pulled out a rickety shopping cart. A computer cash register ticket clung to the bottom of the basket with a leaf of very old lettuce. She wobbled the cart down the aisles, picking out what she hoped was a sensible array of foods. Her usual eating habits were not the best. Even so, she had a better figure than most of the health food and diet fanatics she knew– something in which she took solemn pride.
Canned hams, stew beef in tins, canned chicken, fresh vegetables and fruit (soon to be scarce, she imagined); canned fruit, as many bottles of spring or mineral water as she could fit into a liquor box and wedge into the cart’s lower rack, bread and some slightly stale breakfast rolls, two gallon jugs of milk from the still-cold dairy case. A bottle of aspirin and some shampoo, though she wondered how long the water would come out of the shower tap. Vitamins, a big jar. She tried to find something in the drug shelves which might fight off what had happened to her family—and the mailman and the grocer, and perhaps everybody else. Carefully she read and re-read bottles and instructions on boxes, but nothing seemed appropriate.
Then she pushed the cart up to the cash register, blinked at the aisle and the locked door beyond, and swung her load around. Nobody to pay. She hadn’t brought money anyway. She was halfway toward the back when another thought occurred to her, and she returned to the register.
Where rumor had said it would be, on a shelf above the bag storage bin, was a large heavy black pistol with a long barrel. She fiddled with it, carefully pointing it away from her, until she found a way to roll out a cylinder. The gun was loaded with six big bullets.
Suzy didn’t like holding the gun. Her father owned guns and the few times she visited, he always warned her to stay away from them, not even touch them. But guns were for protection, not play, and she didn’t want to play with it, that was for sure. Anyway, she doubted there was anything she could shoot effectively.