Thomas didn’t seem to comprehend this. Meanwhile, Natalie was staring at Skylar as if her presence was impossible.
“I know this is difficult to hear,” Thomas said, “but the world out there is ending. There’s a huge fire moving this way. The smoke is so thick you can’t see the sky.”
“You should see his safe room,” Skylar said to Natalie. “It will take your breath away.”
“Pretty soon there won’t be any more groceries to buy,” Thomas explained. “Running water will be gone in a day or two. What will you do then?”
It was impossible to read the emotions on Seth’s face. He might have been defiant or distraught.
“Honey?” Natalie said.
“We’ll go to my parents’ house in Edmond. They live on the edge of town and my dad has plenty of guns. We can hunt for food if we have to.”
“That’s the next logical step,” said Thomas. “But you have to know everyone with a gun will do the same thing. How long will small game last with thousands of people hunting?”
“We can plant a garden—”
“You’ll starve to death before anything grows. And if you don’t already have seeds, where will you get them?”
Seth’s hands opened and closed. Skylar looked at the vodka bottle, which was standing uncapped, and wondered just how drunk the two of them were.
“Unless your safe room is the size of a Walmart,” said Seth, “there’s no way you can feed us indefinitely.”
“No. Not indefinitely. But in three months there will be options for whoever is left.”
The terrible reality of this statement halted the debate between Thomas and Seth.
“Dad?” said a voice from behind her. Skylar turned and saw two young boys standing at the front of the living room. They were seven or eight years old and sandy-haired.
“What’s going on?” one of the boys said.
“Nothing,” Seth answered. “Go back to your room and we’ll come get you in a little while.”
“We’ve been in the hallway listening. Why are we going to starve? Is it because the electric is out?”
“Brandon—”
“It’s all dark outside. It smells smoky. Something really bad is happening, isn’t it?”
“Brandon. Ben. Please go back to your room. Your mom and I will take care of you. You don’t have to worry.”
“We should go with them,” said Brandon, who pointed in the direction of Thomas and Skylar. “They came here to help, right?”
“Brandon, I’m not going to tell you again.”
“Fine! We’ll just play board games and starve to death!”
When the boys were gone, Seth looked back at Thomas, and it was obvious his will to refuse had evaporated.
“Look,” he said. “Even if we go with you, how are you going to fill up with gasoline to get back?”
“I have twenty gallons in the trunk. We’ll refill the tank before we go.”
“And you have enough room for all of us in your sports car?”
“It won’t be comfortable. But if the boys sit in your laps, we’ll all fit.”
“What can we take with us?” asked Natalie.
“I’m afraid not much of anything,” Thomas said. “It will be cramped as it is. We need to get on the road soon, anyway. There’s still that fire to contend with, and it’ll be dark in a few hours.”
“But what about my grandmother’s wedding dress? It’s been in my family for seventy years. What about our pictures of the boys?”
“Most of our pictures are on the computer,” Seth said. “They’re lost anyway.”
“We can’t just leave everything behind.”
Seth turned to his wife and put his hands on her shoulders.
“Natalie. We have to make some tough choices here.”
“I don’t see why—”
“If we leave now, we may never see our families again, never see any of our friends. If we can do that, we can live without a few pictures.”
Natalie stared at him a long moment before she answered. Then she looked over his shoulder and met Skylar’s eyes.
“I guess you’re right,” she said. “I guess I need to remember what’s really important here.”
Skylar held Natalie’s gaze for a long moment and then looked away. The reality of being in this unfamiliar place, under circumstances that were impossible to believe, returned to her with such force that she nearly lost her balance. This was really happening. Her old life was over and this was her new one, whether she wanted it or not.
She was not the kind of woman who took the world as it came to her. She had fought off the hormones of teenage guys, who first pretended she was a boy and later wanted her to be a slut. She battled her parents when they tried to separate. When her own agent called Skylar an “ungrateful feminist brat” during Darkest Energy contract talks, when he took the side of the studio executive (who turned out to be a fraternity brother), she had publicly fired him. A stunt like that could have killed her career, but she would rather have quit altogether than cash in her dignity.
Today she had convinced Thomas to get off his ass, to drive here and save this family. If everything went well, the six of them would roll into Dallas after dark, hungry and ready to eat. This felt good. It felt right.
But she wasn’t so sure what came next. Would the six of them hunker down and wait for the world to end? What would happen when other people, thousands of people, ran out of things to eat? Would the world, as it had in the screenplay, break into desperate groups who fought over declining food stores and clean water and whatever gadgets survived the pulse?
Ever since she had been snatched from teenage obscurity, since her face had begun to appear on billboards and magazines and televisions across the world, Skylar had wrestled with the meaning of it all. The amount of money she earned was ludicrous, embarrassing, yet there were assholes with a hundred times more. A thousand times more. She refused to accept less than she was worth but could not reconcile these amounts with the abject poverty that millions or billions of people endured every single day. Didn’t that qualify existence itself as absurd? As basically pointless?
But luxury wasn’t just about things. It was also a freedom of mind, the time and comfort to explore deeper concerns like science and philosophy and love. She was a reader of Feynman and Hawking and Brian Greene. She was a student of the mind. She was fascinated with the hard problem of consciousness, of why a human could be sentient when a supercomputer was not. At least yesterday she had been fascinated with it.
Today she was simply trying to survive.
THIRTEEN
My Diary, by Natalie Black
May 16, 202-
It was nearly midnight by the time we reached Dallas, and I seriously have never seen darkness like that. Beyond the beams of our headlights, basically nothing was visible, except the sky, which was both black and bright with stars. So many stars.
The first thing Thomas did after he pulled into the garage was grab a bunch of candles from the safe room. Not long after, we sat down to a quick and gloomy dinner of hamburgers and tater tots that had been in the freezer but were nearly thawed. Thomas cooked everything on his propane grill, which he was afraid would be stolen while he was away. After we ate, he rolled it into the garage.
Later, while Seth kissed the boys goodnight, I asked Thomas for a pen and paper. It was late, but my mind was racing, and I wanted to write down everything that happened on the drive while it was still fresh. Maybe you know this by now, but candles aren’t really that bright. I feel like I should be writing with one of those pens you dip in a jar of ink.