Taylor struggled to keep his eyes open. He took turns watching his brother and then Tina, and then turned his attention to the windows at the front of the store. He rubbed his eyes. He unfolded a corner of the canvas drop cloth and removed one of the water bottles. Sprayed some water onto his hand and rubbed his eyes. It helped. Not much, but it was better than nothing.
Quietly, he stood and stretched. He walked to the front of the store, coming close enough to the glass to be able to look up at the sky and see the moon and the stars. Wispy clouds were scattered sparsely throughout the sky as if they had been added there as an afterthought.
The street outside was vacant. If not for the incessant pounding, the place could have been a ghost down; each building a tombstone whose contents told the story of their owners. So easy, he thought. He wrapped his hand around the door handle. The keys were in his other hand, and he considered how easy it would be to unlock the door and make a run for it. In fact, he entertained the idea of doing just that. Wake the others and they could make a break for it. Forget the car. They were bound to find another one sooner or later.
Taylor turned on his flashlight and started down one of the aisles, more thorough in his inspection of the store’s merchandise.
His mind wandered. The pounding became nothing more than white noise, like the sound of a television or radio playing in the middle of the night.
Don’t get too comfortable, he thought. Shit starts to go bad the minute you forget it stinks.
In stressful situations, the mind narrows and focuses in like the zoom feature on a camera. The brain crops away superfluous information, zeroing in on a single situation at the expense of the surrounding environment. Depending on various factors, this compressed view of things can be useful or detrimental. An ability, when applied to an endgame scenario, can be the difference between death and survival. Taylor figured the odds were around fifty-fifty. Presently, he liked to think their chances were better than that. Put the three of their heads together and find a solution to the problem. That was a drastic simplification of a complex problem, but there was some relief when he contemplated it in those terms. You had to be resourceful. Maybe Carl hadn’t been too far off; maybe you had to be like MacGyver.
He was standing three feet from the store windows, staring out at the town, when he heard footsteps behind him.
“Couldn’t sleep?”
“Not really. I tried, but it’s a lost cause. I keep thinking about my dad. Whether he’s okay or not,” Tina said.
“What does your gut tell you?”
She stood next to him. Taylor thought she was a good five or six inches shorter than he was. Her eyes shiny in the dim light, and he wondered again if she would start to cry. He didn’t like to see a woman cry; had what his mother had called rescuer-syndrome, which meant he was attracted to women that were in some kind of trouble and felt the need to save them. That was, according to his mother, why all of his relationships failed. What he needed to do, she said, was to find a woman that was strong enough to stand on her own. A girl that had her shit together (his mother hadn’t used the word shit, but that’s what she had been getting at).
“He isn’t dumb. I think he could have seen what was happening and left town, but he was one of those people that always had to lend a helping hand. If he was all right, he would have found a way to call me. Make sure I was safe. He does that all the time. Checks up on me. He still calls me his little princess.”
“Well, I’m sure you are.”
“Right. He’s the stereotypical overprotective father. In high school, I was the girl with the nine o’ clock curfew.”
“Maybe he couldn’t call you. Does the store have a phone?”
She led him to the front checkout. There was a phone situated next to the cash register. She picked up the receiver and held it to her ear. “No dial-tone.” She held it out so that Taylor could listen for himself.
“Some of this just doesn’t make sense,” Taylor said. “Those things aren’t that smart. They may have been geniuses in life, but whatever has happened to them has turned them into cavemen.”
“So?”
He held the phone up as if that explained everything. “So how come the phones don’t work? Those things have been pounding on the back door for how long now? If they had any brains left in them, they would have figured out to come around front and break the glass. That means they aren’t responsible for the phone lines being down.”
Tina reached into her back pocket and took out her cell phone. Taylor snatched it from her. “How come you didn’t say you had a cell phone?” He started dialing.
“Because it doesn’t work. Not in town. No reception. That’s why most people don’t have cell phones here. They can’t get a signal.”
Taylor looked at the signal indicator and saw that there were no bars. He dialed his parent’s number anyway and pushed SEND. He waited. Nothing happened.
“See? Told you. You can’t get service here in town. Take the interstate for ten minutes in either direction and you can get a signal. But that doesn’t help us very much at the moment.”
“Okay. It’s a small town. Lots of places like this don’t get cell phone coverage. No mystery there. I don’t see how the land lines could be down, though. Something tells me that if we stopped in any of the towns around here and picked up a phone we’d have the same problem.”
“You can’t know that.”
That scared her, Taylor thought. Don’t make it any worse for her than it already is.
“You’re right. I was thinking out loud. It’s just a theory.” He lifted the handset of the phone again and held it firmly to his ear, holding his breath as he listened, hoping to hear even the faintest of sounds; the familiar buzz of the dial-tone. Nothing. “Seems too coincidental to me.”
“The sky is cloudy.”
“Clouds don’t affect the phone lines.”
“But it looks like it could storm some time soon. A storm could knock out the phone lines.” She gazed at him hopefully, but she recognized the doubt in her own voice. Of all the people she had ever lied to, it was always easiest to lie to herself, but in this case even she couldn’t buy her own flimsy story.
“I doubt it. A storm could knock out the phone lines, but if there’s one coming, it’s taking its time. The lines wouldn’t go until the storm was right on top of it.”
“I hope it doesn’t storm,” she said.
“I kind of hope it does. In fact, I hope it rains cats and dogs.”
“Why?”
“Cover. We’d be harder to see in the rain. We could make a break for it.”
Tina said, “It would be harder for us to see them, too.”
“That’s true, but rain would drive those things bonkers.”
Tina jumped up onto the counter and sat down, feet dangling a few inches above the floor. “How do you think they found us here? None of us were making that much noise. Not enough for them to hear it from outside anyway.”
“I’ve been wondering about that too. I haven’t figured out an explanation for it yet.” But he had an idea. It was based on a helluva lot of assumptions, but it was also the simplest explanation. Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. Occam’s razor. Of two or more explanations, the one which uses the fewest suppositions is usually true. Or at least Taylor thought it went something like that.