by Lucin, David
“How come?”
“It’s late,” Gary said. “Nothing will be open.”
“Not like it will be open tomorrow morning anyway,” Jenn countered. “The Go Market was already closed when I walked by today.”
“I agree with Gary,” Maria started. “Even if Carla’s pharmacy is closed, we have a better chance of getting her help in the morning.”
Gary crossed his arms. “Right. Who knows? Maybe she’ll be there tomorrow.”
“She’s just as likely to be there now,” Jenn argued, trying to keep calm. “She’s not the type to walk away. That place is her life.”
Sam and Gary remained quiet. Had that done it?
“Probably,” Maria said. “But that’s not the point.”
“What is?” Jenn asked.
“You need to rest. I understand you’re worried about me, but I’m fine. I’m not going to run out of oxygen tonight.”
Jenn, outnumbered three to one, flopped into her chair. “Fine,” she conceded. “But we’re leaving at the crack of dawn tomorrow.”
Ice on his jaw, Sam crossed his legs. “We can do that.”
“That settles it.” Maria planted her palms on the table to push herself up. Gary rushed over to help lift her from her seat. “I’ll fix us some dinner.”
“Good idea,” Gary said. “There’s plenty of propane in the barbecue. Maybe we should have that soup you made the other night.”
Sam perked up at the mention of food. “Soup, you say.”
Maria grabbed her oxygen cart. “Yep. We should eat it now, before it goes bad.”
Jenn hoped Sam liked potatoes, onions, and watered-down chicken broth, because thanks to the war, that was pretty much all Maria had for the soup. Thinking about it made Jenn’s mouth water, though, and she realized she hadn’t eaten since breakfast. “Sounds great,” she said. “I’ll set the table.”
* * *
Jenn rolled over in bed and stared up. In the dark, she could barely make out the popcorn ceiling, which reminded her of her room at home. She saw the faint outline of the brown heart-shaped stain, too, but that was unique to the Ruiz house. It might be water damage. Jenn’s father never would have tolerated a stain like that. He’d have torn the ceiling apart and replaced it long before the stain grew half this large. In Phoenix, though, he wouldn’t have had to fight with water damage, since it only rained there six or eight times a year.
Sleeping on his side and facing away from Jenn, Sam snored as if nothing happened today, the power across Arizona wasn’t down, and five nuclear bombs hadn’t exploded above Phoenix. He’d fallen asleep a few minutes after he and Jenn went to bed. How could he do that? Maybe that was how he coped with stress. She’d seen it before. For a week after Jenn’s older brother Jason died, her mother slept for twelve or more hours a day. When Andrew was killed six months later, she didn’t leave the bedroom for three full days.
She took her phone off the nightstand. Before coming to bed, she asked Gary if she could charge it in his Kia. He warned her not to and said they needed to conserve all the battery they could. She didn’t argue with that. After all, she’d made the same case when Sam offered to drive to the Ruiz house from the university.
Knowing the phone wouldn’t turn on, she tapped the screen anyway. Sam was right: old habits indeed died hard.
She swallowed the lump in her throat and lay down. Wide awake and with no technology to keep her mind busy, Jenn thought about home. Maybe that was why she couldn’t sleep in the first place. She didn’t know. This was a chicken and the egg debate. Either way, lying here with Sam and waiting until morning felt wrong. Her parents hadn’t come to meet her. The drive took less than three hours, and more than twelve had passed since the lights went out.
Jenn dwelt on what Gary had said about the fallout: “not from Phoenix.” It hung in her mind and pestered her like an itch she couldn’t reach. Talking with Liam did little to scratch it, so she dissected the words and broke down their meaning. The mention of Phoenix implied fallout from somewhere else, which meant other cities were hit, too, a reality Jenn surmised at the kitchen table but refused to consider further. Now, with a dead phone, unconscious boyfriend, and no distractions, she began speculating.
Again, why Phoenix? Something in metro Phoenix threatened China or Russia or Brazil enough to invite a nuclear attack. The air force base in Glendale? Jenn visited that part of the city last summer to tour the old aquarium near the base. In her father’s Nissan, she drove there in under half an hour from her place in Peoria. If her average speed was, say, thirty miles per hour, then that put the air force base around fifteen miles away.
She hadn’t driven in a straight line, though. First, she went south from home, then due west along Olive Avenue. That made the distance between her house and the air force base, the hypotenuse between points A, B, and C, less than fifteen miles.
Maybe she drove faster than thirty miles per hour. In fact, because of the long stretches with no traffic lights, she probably went fifty or more on Olive, so the trip might have clocked in at more than twenty miles, putting the air force base a little farther from her house.
But what was the blast radius of a hydrogen bomb? And how far did radiation spread? It hadn’t come up here and Gary said there’d be no fallout, at least not from Phoenix, but she’d seen pictures of radiation victims after Hiroshima. How close were they to ground zero? She hadn’t asked Gary about that. Regardless, all her calculating meant nothing if she couldn’t find answers to these questions. Her phone would have known. Gary might know, since he knew everything about World War Two and, Jenn decided, more than the government of Arizona, which had apparently put out those safety videos without researching nuclear weapons first. But he went to bed over an hour ago and she didn’t want to wake him. For tonight, her best hope was that her parents lived in the suburbs, far from the city center and, she prayed, far enough from the air force base in Glendale.
The door squeaked open. “Sorry,” Maria whispered. “I know you’re trying to rest.”
“It’s all right.” Jenn threw off the sheet and sat up. “I can’t sleep anyway.”
“How’s Sam?”
Jenn poked his shoulder. He wouldn’t have woken up if she fired one of Gary’s guns in here. “Dead to the world.”
“Oh, okay.” Maria paused and tightened the belt of her housecoat. “Mind if I sit with you for a bit?”
Jenn patted the sheets and slid closer to the head of the bed. Maria eased herself down with a groan as Ajax jumped up to join them. He rubbed his cheeks against Jenn’s knee, so she scratched his neck. Ajax knew how to push Jenn’s buttons, but she happily obliged, especially now, when any distraction was a welcome one.
“It’s been a tough day,” Maria said quietly to avoid waking Sam, who continued snoring.
“Yeah.” Jenn didn’t know what else to say. Tough didn’t quite describe it. Exhausting? Terrifying? Exhilarating? Frustrating? All of those worked better than tough, but Maria’s choice of words wasn’t strictly wrong.
“Are you doing okay?” Maria asked.
“I’m fine.”
Maria snapped her fingers, drawing Ajax over. “You’re a terrible liar.”
“Fine considering,” Jenn clarified. Maria petted Ajax but didn’t follow up. She knew when to give Jenn time to process her feelings, a patience Jenn envied. It reminded Jenn of her mother. Her father, too, showed patience, in his own way. Even her brothers did. Patience, she reasoned, must have been genetic, since Jenn had next to none. “I’m scared, I guess. Feeling guilty more than anything else.”
“Why on Earth would you feel guilty?”
“I’m worried, you know?” Jenn laughed at herself. “Stupid. I’m such a moron.”
“What? No! Why do you think that?”
“I actually thought they were coming up here to get me.”
“They still might come. Don’t give up so soon.” Maria picked up Ajax and set him on her lap. He snuggled in, shut his eyes, and let out a rh
ythmic purr. “I felt the same way after Camila stopped emailing us.”
Jenn flinched at Camila’s name. Maria hardly talked about her daughter. Jenn feared offending her, so she tried saying something safe, something she already knew wasn’t controversial or dangerous. “Where is she deployed?” she asked, careful to use the present tense.
“India. Well, she never actually told us, but that’s our best guess. She always complained about the humidity. But it’s humid in Mexico and Panama, so we don’t really know. I’m surprised we got any clue at all.”
Jenn decided to keep the mood light. “Censors took that day off, hey?”
“I guess so.” Maria smiled and rubbed her eye. “I still think she’s okay, and I’ll believe that until someone proves I’m wrong. Gary—God bless him. He’s a good man, but he gave up on her so soon.”
Maria had a point, but ten months had passed since they’d heard from Camila. Her emails stopped as the Chinese launched their last major offensive into India, which nearly threw Allied armies into the Bay of Bengal. That was an ugly coincidence. Gary recognized that.
“Anyway,” she continued. “What I’m saying is, you don’t know until you know. Don’t assume the worst, because you can’t change it either way.”
“Schrödinger’s cat,” Jenn said.
Maria eyeballed Jenn like she’d spoken Latin. “What?”
Jenn smiled. “It’s this stupid physics thing.”
“Tell me.”
“Schrödinger, he was a physicist. German, I think. Maybe Austrian. Whatever. He did this thought experiment with a cat in a sealed box with poison. The box had some system that could either kill the cat or not. Because the box was sealed, you wouldn’t know if the cat lived or died until you opened it and checked.”
Maria put both hands on Ajax. “That’s a little morbid, isn’t it?”
“He didn’t actually do it! Other physicists, they said subatomic particles could exist in more than one state until we observed them. Schrödinger said that was wrong. The cat couldn’t be alive and dead at the same time. The universe doesn’t work like that. The whole cat thing was a way of showing them how ridiculous their ideas were.”
“Bear with me,” Maria said, looking Jenn in the eye. “I was a journalist, so you’ll have to explain to me what quantum physics has to do with your parents.”
“I’m agreeing with you,” Jenn said. “My mom and dad are like the cat in the box—or subatomic particles, if you want to get technical. What happened has happened, so worrying won’t change anything. I can’t know until I see them, and I can’t wait here. I’ll have to go find them.”
Jenn doubted that the metaphor resonated with Maria. Admittedly, she stretched it a little thin, and the more she thought about it, the less it made sense. In one breath, she compared her parents to a cat in a box and to electrons in an atom. She was just glad Sam hadn’t woken up. If he’d heard that, he would never let it go. He still poked fun at her for cooking some expired eggs for dinner and then spending the rest of the night with her rear end attached to his toilet. The last thing she wanted to do was serve him another gem on a silver platter. But after putting him through hell today, maybe she owed him one.
“Exactly,” Maria said. “Try to control what you can control. You’ll get there soon enough, but tonight, you need to sleep.”
She patted Ajax on the rear, and he jumped off. When Maria went to stand, Jenn held out her arm to help, but Maria waved it off.
“Thanks for the chat,” Jenn said.
“Of course. Now get some rest if you can. Tomorrow’s another big day.”
Maria followed Ajax and left the room.
Jenn lay down and pulled the sheet over her. Sam had stopped snoring. Then he cleared his throat.
“Dork,” he said.
8
Seated in the back of Gary’s car, Jenn readjusted the belt across her chest. Last night, Sam promised they’d leave at dawn, but when Gary finally woke up around 7:00, he said they should at least wait until Carla’s regular opening hours. Sam agreed, which sparked ire in Jenn. Still feeling the guilt of storming off at Minute Tire and blaming herself for Sam’s bloody lip, she resisted arguing. They left the house at 8:55 a.m., according to Gary’s wristwatch.
“It’s hazy out,” Sam said from the front seat. He leaned his head out the window and looked up. The sky was a muted blue-gray. But no clouds.
“Might be smoke,” Gary said.
“Smoke?” Jenn echoed. She rolled down her window and sniffed the air, but she didn’t smell smoke. Not really.
“From the city. There are probably fires. That’s what happened after Hiroshima.”
Even if a bomb exploded above the air force base in Glendale and spared Jenn’s home in Peoria, fires could spread. What if her parents thought there was fallout and had holed up somewhere to ride it out? Would they leave and try to escape if a fire threatened them? And what about the smoke? If it had already wafted up to Flagstaff, how bad would it be in the city? Would they be able to breathe?
Then again, this wasn’t Hiroshima, and it was 2062, not 1945. Things could be different here. The houses in Phoenix all had stucco exteriors, not that paper and wood she’d seen in old pictures of Japan. Larger structures, like the ones downtown, were made of concrete and glass. The Twin Towers didn’t burst into flames on 9/11. There were fires, yes, but only because the jet fuel ignited. They never spread to adjacent buildings or to the rest of New York City.
Maybe the smoke had come from wildfires. Every spring and summer, forest fires sprung up across the western United States and Canada. Sometimes, the smoke blew into Arizona. In fact, when Jenn first moved into the Ruiz house two Septembers ago, smoke from a fire in Utah found its way to Flagstaff. It was so thick that people on campus wore masks. Maria, because of her COPD, wouldn’t even go outside. “What about wildfires?” Jenn asked. “It’s about that time of year.”
“Maybe,” Gary said, sounding unconvinced. Sam didn’t weigh in.
The car jerked as Gary turned off Route 66 and onto Leroux Street. He’d kept the autodrive off, of course, and drove in manual. His driving was never as smooth as the AI’s.
On their left was an old brick building from at least the early 1900s. Blue signs reading “FOR LEASE” hung in most of the windows. The building across the street was a century newer and had a place called Pawndemonium on the bottom floor. Pawn shops, Jenn noted, might be the only truly depression-proof business.
According to Gary, downtown was a lot livelier before the giant new Go Market, Flagstaff’s second, opened by the university a decade ago. After that, he’d said, the stores here stopped trying to compete. Many of the bars and restaurants survived a little longer, but America’s declaration of war on China and Russia sent the cost of food skyrocketing. The government’s failure to impose rationing or price controls was the nail in the restaurants’ collective coffin, and most closed within two or three years. A couple of the swankiest remained, but only a privileged few—and certainly not Jenn or the Ruiz family—could afford to eat there.
Every time she helped Gary refill Maria’s oxygen tanks, downtown was quiet. Today, though, it felt eerie. Not a soul walked the streets, not even on Milton. Most of the town was probably still hiding from imaginary radiation. Jenn just hoped Carla decided to hide out in her shop and not at home.
Gary weaved between a white SUV and a red hatchback and rolled through Aspen Avenue, then pulled off to the right and stopped the car across from Carla’s. Floor-to-ceiling windows flanked either side of the front door. The windows on the left were broken. The lights were off, obviously, so the interior remained dark, but Jenn made out the till and some of Carla’s larger inventory: wheelchairs and walkers, mostly.
She stepped out of the car. Gary and Sam followed as Jenn went to retrieve Gary’s wheelbarrow from the trunk. Bringing it was smart thinking on his part; what they came for would be heavy. Extra oxygen tanks would help Maria in the short term but wouldn’t do her much good if
the power stayed off for more than a few days. She needed a compressor, and Carla supplied mobile, battery-powered ones. If they survived the EMP and Gary could find a working solar panel somewhere in town—the police station, maybe, or the hospital, since both had backup electricity, according to Liam—he could keep the batteries charged and Maria would be okay. Otherwise, they’d take as many tanks as they could, buying them enough time to come up with another plan.
The wheelbarrow was too big for the trunk, so Gary had secured it with two bungee cords. Jenn unlatched them and gripped the wheelbarrow’s handles. Sam, bags hanging underneath his eyes, appeared from the passenger side, took hold of the front wheel, and helped Jenn heave it out and onto the road.
“Thanks,” Jenn said.
With a yawn, Sam slammed the trunk closed.
Anxious about the broken window and eager to see if Carla was here, Jenn pointed the wheelbarrow at Carla’s shop, then checked, almost by reflex, her right and left before crossing the street. She felt stupid doing it, since no cars would drive past. On the opposite sidewalk, she parked the wheelbarrow and stepped to the front door. The handle didn’t budge. She tried a second time for good measure.
“It’s locked,” she said.
Gary and Sam watched her from the middle of the street. Jenn inspected the building’s face. The concrete wall between the window and the sidewalk stood less than two feet high, low enough for Jenn to hop over without cutting herself on any remaining glass shards. She’d have to do it quickly, though, or else Gary would try to stop her.
She brought her feet together and bent her knees but then second-guessed herself. Yesterday, she’d tried something similar. Without a second thought, she took a chair and banged it on the bay doors in Minute Tire. In the end, she wound up pinned to the floor while Sam received a fist to the jaw. What if the cops hadn’t shown up? Would that man have hit Sam again—or worse? Jumping into Carla’s place might put her and Sam, and now Gary, at risk. Whoever had smashed the window could still be inside.
Clicking her tongue, Jenn looked to Gary and Sam, who shrugged at her with his hands in his pockets. He’d follow Jenn to hell and back without thinking twice about it, so it wasn’t his opinion that interested her. She focused on Gary, who offered her a nod and a thumbs-up. “Just be careful,” he said. “Watch out for glass on the inside.”
