“Now,” Mack continued, “let me explain how I think we should approach the DC.”
As the day wore on, I wondered if my stomach would digest itself. The hunger pangs were like earthquakes flattening whole city blocks of internal machinery. And I wasn’t alone.
“I am fucking starving,” Keri finally said. “Don’t you have any food around here, man?”
“I hadn’t been to the store in more than a week,” Mack said. “And I’ve eaten all the junk in my pantry over the past couple of days.”
“So your speech about being prepared, that was all bullshit?”
“I’ve got weapons. I’ve got a shitload of ammunition. But I’ve been out of a job for five months, and when I got low on funds I ate my supplies.”
Keri looked at me and smiled ghoulishly.
“A survivalist who can’t afford the apocalypse,” she whispered. “Now there’s the economy sticking it in your eye.”
Since evening was still hours away, there was a lot of time to kill. Mack taught us offensive maneuvers and how to split our attack into separate formations, which would force anyone in the DC to divide their defense. When he was done, Keri and I walked outside, where we sat in a bench swing on the front porch.
“I don’t know about you,” she said, “but I’m glad this got pushed back until later.”
“I thought you were starving.”
“I am, but I’m also scared. Aren’t you?”
I could have told her about God’s plan to end the world, about my special role in the new order, but I don’t think she would have understood.
“Of course I’m scared,” I said. “But if you think you’re hungry now, wait until tomorrow or the day after that.”
“Why don’t we climb into the truck and drive somewhere else? Where there’s less people and more food. Like a farm or something.”
“You think a farmer will be thrilled with ten people who want to squat on his land and eat whatever he’s growing?”
“I don’t know. But two days ago there was enough food to feed everyone. It can’t all be gone already.”
“It’s not gone. It’s just far away. We already talked about this.”
Keri abruptly stood up and marched off the porch. The loss of balance pushed the bench’s gentle pendulum motion into disarray.
“I know we already talked about it!” she cried. “I was hoping you could make me feel better and not rattle off more depressing facts. I’m scared, Aiden! I’m scared this isn’t going to work and maybe some of you will get hurt or killed.”
The frustrating thing was Keri understood what we were up against. That she wanted me to supply her with bogus platitudes made her seem like a child.
“I don’t like this any more than you,” I lied. “But we have to take risks if we want to live. And it’s not like you’ll be on the front lines. You don’t have to worry about anything.”
“I’m worried about losing you, Aiden. Can’t you see that?”
“I thought you were more concerned about running out of painkillers.”
At this Keri smiled a bitter smile.
“I have problems same as you,” she said and stepped onto the porch again. As she stood over me, I was sorry for what I had said, only because she might never wrap those killer legs around me again.
“But at least I’m willing to talk about them. If you keep your problems bottled up long enough, eventually you’ll explode.”
She marched away, into the house, and for a while all I did was contemplate the loneliness of a nearly-empty world. The way Mack talked, it was like he had wanted something like this to happen. Why? Because the old world made him feel ostracized? Or because, in this new one, he had been promoted to the top of the food chain?
I closed my eyes and imagined empty cities overgrown with trees and vines, freeways crumbling, bridges collapsing, the disappearance of all Man had wrought. My mind shrieked like a tea kettle. I wondered how much longer I could go on like this.
When I finally went back inside, the rest of the men were standing in the living room, guns in hand.
“Aiden,” Jimmy said. “Nice of you to join us. It’s time to go.”
“I thought we were going after dark.”
“While you were outside swinging,” Mack said, “we decided to gather recon while it’s still light out. We’ll drive past the DC on the way to Chelsea’s mother’s and see how closely the building matches our expectations. Then we’ll go back there after dark to execute the plan. Sound good to you, Colonel?”
“Sounds great,” I said, wondering how it would feel to shoot Mack in the face. “Let’s go kick some Walmart ass.”
CABIN FEVER
TWENTY
Before the pulse, Skylar had endured her fair share of personal disaster, and the way she preferred to suffer was in the familiar topography of her own mind. When Roark moved out, she inverted her days, popping Ambien to sleep the light away and sitting all night in front of the TV watching childhood favorites like Pretty Woman and Big. Not to cheer herself up, but to remember that life was not art, that life was wonderful and messy and, most of all, unpredictable.
But now she wished the opposite. She wished yesterday had comprised the first two acts of a film. She hoped today was a newly-written third act, that a studio executive had ordered Thomas to replace his original dark ending with a sappy one where the effects of the pulse were erased.
She couldn’t stop thinking about her parents and specifically her father. Over the past several years his health had deteriorated, starting with the quadruple bypass that robbed him of vitality that never fully returned. A year later his right knee was replaced, then a hip, and now he made jokes about Terminators and Bionic Men. But Skylar wasn’t amused. Every time she drove past a cemetery, every time she saw a funeral procession, she found herself fighting back tears. Because one of these days it would be her turn to sit in a dark limousine, staring down the barrel of a life in which her warm-hearted father was no longer a part.
Now, for all she knew, her parents were already dead. A plane could have gone down in Manhattan or her father could have collapsed trying to make it home or anything. Anything could have happened and there was nothing she could do about it. Nothing but sit here at the kitchen table and watch Thomas and Seth argue about the boys playing outside. It was Saturday afternoon, the day after the pulse.
“I already explained why we shouldn’t go out there yet,” Thomas said, closing the back door. This confrontation was taking place not ten feet from where Skylar was flipping through a recent issue of Entertainment Weekly, which so far had contained four mentions of her.
“I’m sorry I don’t share your anxiety,” Seth said. “We didn’t see any neighbors.”
“But I told you Larry is nosy. I hardly ever see him without those stupid binoculars around his neck.”
“And I’m telling you we didn’t see any Larry. We didn’t see anyone.”
“But what if he saw you? Maybe he comes over here with a gun, or maybe he tells someone else and we end up with twenty people outside.”
“If that happens,” Seth said, “we deal with it. We have weapons, too.”
Natalie was in the adjacent living room, holding a book in her lap Skylar had never seen her open. She was staring out the window and didn’t seem to care that guns and potential violence were being discussed in front of her young sons.
“Look,” Thomas said. “I don’t enjoy telling anyone what to do—”