We All Looked Up

by Tommy Wallach

  “What is that?” he asked. 94 percent. 95 percent. “Give it to me!”

  “What? This?”

  96 percent. 97 percent. He was only a couple of feet away now. She tossed the phone as hard as she could, straight up. 98 percent, and then it was flipping too fast to read, up and up, then plummeting down toward the cement. She looked back to Seth just in time to see him squeeze the trigger. A strange flickering sound, like one of those old film projectors, and then her whole body was pumped full of fire. She blacked out.

  Peter

  PETER HAD KNOWN FAILURE BEFORE. He’d flunked a couple of math tests here and there, choked at the line at state championships (going three-for-twelve, to his eternal shame), and worst of all, he’d cheated on Stacy, which was the sort of failure he’d never even imagined himself ­capable of. But all of it was nothing next to watching Misery and Eliza disappear behind that line of riot cops, as implacable and impassable as a row of pawns on a chessboard. If he hadn’t let himself get distracted by Bobo, he might have found Misery in time. If he hadn’t secretly wanted Eliza to stay by his side, he probably could have convinced her to leave the park once the riot started. But he’d made all the wrong decisions, and now both of them were gone.

  As a sort of punishment, he sat up in his bedroom doing exactly nothing. He didn’t try to call Cartier or any of his old friends. He didn’t exercise. He didn’t check the web to keep up with Ardor’s murderous progress through the heavens. His circadian rhythm capsized; the night teemed with too many terrors for sleep. Unconsciousness came only in fits and starts during the pale, misty days, when that toxic star was swallowed up in the brightness of the sun. His ­parents started leaving food outside his door; he ate just enough to keep the hunger pangs away. Once, in the middle of the night, he snuck downstairs and grabbed a handful of trash bags from under the sink. He wanted to get rid of all of the junk in his room: the trophies and the ribbons celebrating a bunch of victories that counted for nothing now; the love letters and keepsakes from a relationship that he’d sacrificed on the altar of a delusion; the old toys and stuffed animals left over from more innocent days. He didn’t want to look at any of it anymore. When the bags were full, stacked on the floor of the closet, there was hardly anything left in the room but the furniture. That’s what my life adds up to, Peter thought. Nothing at all.

  Four days disappeared in a fog of depression and regret. Then, late on a Thursday morning, there was a firm knock on his bedroom door.

  “What?” Peter was in bed, and though he was only half-asleep, he didn’t get up.

  “I’m giving you ten seconds to get out of there,” his father said. “Ten, nine, eight, seven—I’m not kidding around here—six, five . . .” But Peter still didn’t move. Part of it was the paralysis of despair—he found it hard to build up the energy for any sort of movement right now—but there was more to it than that. Deep down, he knew he needed whatever it was that his dad had planned for the end of the countdown—the grand gesture that only ever came at zero. “. . . four, three, two, one. That’s one, Peter! All right, then. Zero.”

  With a crash, the door flew open, sending a slim shard of wooden frame sliding across the floor. His dad stepped into the room with the majestic air of a knight who’d just slain a dragon. Did that make Peter the fair maiden?

  “Your mom and I have come to a decision,” he said.

  “Good for you.” Peter turned over, toward the window.

  “We spent most of the past few days down at the police station, screaming along with all the other parents, but there’s nothing we can do. It looks like your sister threw a beer bottle at a cop, or at least they’re saying she did, and that means they can basically hold on to her for as long as they want.”

  “That’s your big decision? You’re giving up?”

  “The police promised us that Samantha is being held only with other juveniles, and that the facility is very safe, but they’re not saying where it is. I think they’re afraid that if people knew where their kids were, they’d go blow a hole in the wall or something. Given the circumstances, they’re probably right.”

  “I could have brought her home, Dad. She could be here right now. We could be on our way to California, like you wanted.”

  “Peter?” The squeak of old coils as Peter’s dad sat down on the other side of the bed. “Peter, look at me.”

  Peter turned back over. He wasn’t ready to accept the forgiveness in his dad’s eyes; he wanted someone outside his head to berate him, so he could stop doing it to himself. “It’s my fault. Don’t try to tell me it isn’t.”

  “Fine. Then I’ll just tell you that it doesn’t matter whose fault it is. Blame is just a way to keep score, and adults don’t play games like that. So grow up, Peter. Get your butt out of bed.”

  With a groan, Peter lifted himself to a seated position.

  “Hey!” his dad said, noticing the state of the room. “You cleaned up in here! I like it. Very spare.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Now come on. It’s grocery day. You’ll feel better with a little bit of fresh air.”

  But Peter did not feel better with a little bit of fresh air.

  “Grocery day” meant a day spent waiting in lines. At the gas station, cars had to alternate with men and women filling up iron jerry cans, plastic jugs, and, in one case, an empty beer keg. The air was rife with angry shouts and the raucous honk of car horns.

  “Why do they want extra gas?” Peter asked.

  “Generators,” his dad said.

  “Do you think the power’s going to go out?”

  “It’s already gone out twice. Didn’t you have the computer on in your bedroom?” Peter shook his head. “Honestly, I’m surprised they’ve kept the juice flowing this long.”

  Almost an hour passed before it was their turn at the pump. The price of gas had jumped again and again in the last few days; it hovered now at twenty-three bucks a gallon.

  “What a racket,” his mom said. “If the world doesn’t end, remind me to buy some Exxon stock.”

  After filling up the tank, they drove over to Safeway, where the line stretched across the parking lot and a block and a half up the street. It moved at a grass-growing, paint-drying, watched-pot-of-water-­boiling pace, while the winter sun hovered at just that angle where it seemed to slice straight into your brain. You could try to turn your back on it, but then you wouldn’t notice when the line moved, and everyone would yell, as if that next two or three feet were the only thing standing between them and a miraculous rescue from cataclysm. At one point, a fistfight broke out near the front of the line, and nobody bothered to break it up; the fight ended when one of the guys went down and stayed there.

  A couple of hours of pained familial conversation later (“How’s Stacy doing?” his dad innocently asked), they passed through the double doors and the suspicious stares of four armed National Guardsmen. A small bald man in a red T-shirt and chinos greeted them. MANAGER was stenciled onto his name tag.

  “Welcome to Safeway,” he said, while the rest of his face said, I’m no happier to be here than you are. “Please be aware that we’re asking everyone to limit themselves to fifteen minutes inside the store, so we can keep the line moving. Now, you’re a family of three, so—”

  Peter’s mom interrupted. “We’re a family of four.”

  The manager counted them with one nod of his head each. “I’m seeing three.”

  “Usually we’re four,” Peter’s dad explained, “but today we’re three.”

  “Then that makes you three, doesn’t it?”

  Peter wondered if he could punch the manager hard enough to shatter his blanched, egg-shaped skull and make the golden yolk spill out.

  “Families of three are allowed up to two hundred and fifty percent of the individual limit listed on any item, rounded down. So, if the card says one each, you’re only allowed two, ok
ay? Not two and a half.”

  “That doesn’t seem fair,” Peter said.

  “Fairness is a matter of opinion, sir. We’re trying to ration. Now please move along. You’re slowing everyone down.”

  “You’re slowing everyone down!” Peter said, but his dad already had him by the arm and was pulling him through the second set of doors.

  He would have kept arguing, but his anger evaporated as soon as he saw the state of the supermarket. Here was the real apocalypse, missing only a few tumbleweeds and a cow skull bleaching in the sun to complete the image. One glance at the decimated produce department shattered a childhood fantasy—it turned out that those huge pyramids of fruit, which Peter had always assumed were solid all the way through, rested on hollow wooden skeletons that gave them their shape and the illusion of abundance. The display stand of bananas had been picked clean but for a few lime-green pygmies that probably wouldn’t ripen by the time Ardor came. The apples and pears had been just as savagely culled. All that remained were the most obscure fruits and vegetables—kiwis and kumquats, bok choy and chard. And if you didn’t grab something the moment you saw it, you wouldn’t get another chance. This wasn’t a leisurely day at the grocery store; it was mortal combat. Like the doomed minor characters in a slasher movie, Peter and his parents split up, grabbing the maximum allowance of anything remotely edible—bacon-flavored potato chips, wasabi soda, off-brand animal crackers, gluten- and dairy-free oven-bake pizzas. The glass case in front of the butcher counter was empty, but there were still some weird-looking layered cheeses up for grabs.

  They ended up with a pretty serious haul of second-rate food, lugging it back to the car with a mixture of triumph and disappointment, like Vikings who’d just conquered a village of penniless pacifists.

  “That wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it would be,” Peter’s dad said. He set his bags down on the pavement and reached into his back pocket for the car keys.

  A rustling sound from a nearby hedge, followed by a burst of color—the three kids had grabbed a bag each before Peter even realized what was happening. He took off after them, a massacre on his mind.

  “Peter, no!” his mom shouted.

  “But I can catch them!”

  “Please!” The note of desperation in her voice was just enough to stop him. “I bet they need it more than we do anyway.”

  Peter sighed. She was probably right.

  “Let’s get home,” his dad said. “These bacon-flavored potato chips aren’t going to eat themselves.”

  The Internet was still technically around, but whole swathes of it had gone down in the past week. You could no longer spend the day skimming videos on YouTube. Facebook gave up a single, strangely cheery error message: Uh-oh, seems like something’s gone wrong on our end. We’re looking into it. Peter’s e-mail account was still active, but he hadn’t checked it since the day of the riot.

  There were only two unread messages in his in-box, both of which had come in earlier that day, and both of which had been sent by a certain ApocalypseAlready@gmail.com.

  To Whoever’s Getting This:

  This is Eliza Olivi, of the blog Apocalypse Already. Attached is a picture taken from the window of the detention center where I and a few hundred other juveniles are currently being held. None of us know where we are, but hopefully this picture will mean something to someone out there. Don’t bother writing back (I won’t get your response), just bust us out, okay? I have a party to plan.

  Eliza

  Peter checked out the second e-mail before opening the attachment. Unlike the first message, this one was addressed only to him.

  Dear Peter,

  Hello from sunny jail!

  If all has gone well, I’ve just blasted out a message to every e-mail address I could remember. Hopefully it’ll help someone find us. But I wanted to send this message just to you, because there’s something I wanted to tell you that’s been eating away at me in here. Except I’m not going to say it, because you should already know what it is. And you should also know that I wish I’d told you when I had the chance. Okay. That’s the best I can do. Hope to see you sometime.

  —xE

  Peter felt bubbly and out-of-body, capable of flying into space and stopping an asteroid with his bare hands. He opened Eliza’s attachment with an unshakable faith that he would recognize the location. Otherwise, how could he rush in and save her, as the universe so clearly wanted him to?

  Or not. The photograph was pixelated and dark. All Peter could make out was a nondescript road and a chain-link fence topped with coils of barbed wire. It could have been taken anywhere. For now, the best he could do was drag it into iPhoto, raise the brightness and contrast a bit, and print it out.

  And it was a good thing he did. Just a couple of hours later, the power finally died for good. The timing couldn’t have been worse: only a handful of people were likely to have downloaded Eliza’s attachment, and probably none of them had bothered to print it. Which meant it all came down to him. He needed to show the picture to someone who really knew Seattle, down at the street level. And there was only one person he knew who fit the bill.

  “I think I’m going to turn in early,” he announced.

  His mom was running around the house, lighting candles and putting batteries in flashlights. “Really? You haven’t even had dinner.”

  “I’m just super tired all of a sudden. I’ll see you in the morning, okay?”

  “Okay. Sweet dreams.”

  He gave it half an hour or so, then stole quietly out the front door.

  His street was darker than he’d ever seen it; the houses looked derelict and dead. He was already sitting in the driver’s seat of the Jeep when he remembered the curfew. Crap. The last thing he needed was to get hauled off to prison himself.

  It was nearly an hour later when he let his old twelve-speed drop onto the lawn outside the ma-in-law. It didn’t look like anyone was home. The doorbell only clicked—no power. He knocked. Silence. He knocked again. This time he thought he heard something. Or maybe that was just the wind in the trees. He put his ear to the door. No, there was definitely someone moving around in there . . .

  The door swung open, and Peter found himself face-to-face with the barrel of a gun. “Don’t shoot!” he said.

  Andy squeezed the trigger.

  A bright orange Nerf dart bounced off Peter’s forehead and landed, suction cup down, on the tile walkway.

  “Got you,” Andy said, then turned and retreated into the house. “Come in, I guess.”

  Andy

  ANDY HAD ALWAYS SUSPECTED THAT Peter might be a member of his karass, so he wasn’t completely surprised to find him standing out on the doorstep in the dark. The only problem was that he didn’t really like Peter. They’d always inhabited different dimensions of the social universe, seeing each other not quite as people, but as blurry people-shaped shadows floating around the periphery of classrooms and dances and parties. More to the point, they were obviously competing for Eliza, and Peter, having already made out with her once, was winning.

  “So you know what happened at the riot, right?” Peter asked, stumbling around the underlit room (just a single flashlight on the coffee table, pointed straight up) until he fell into the beanbag chair.

  “Yeah. They got Eliza.”

  “Not just her. My sister, too.”

  “And Bobo,” Andy said, while we’re talking about people other than the one we’re really talking about. “So what?”

  “Well, I got an e-mail from her. From Eliza, I mean. Just a few hours ago. I thought you might have gotten it too.”

  “I didn’t check my messages today,” Andy lied. He felt as if someone had poured a cold glass of water directly into his chest cavity.

  “Well, I don’t know how she managed it from inside, but she attached this picture. I brought it with me.”

  Pe
ter flattened a piece of paper out on the table next to the flashlight. It was a photograph of a nondescript street, probably unrecognizable to anyone without a deck.

  “That’s the old navy base, out at Sand Point,” Andy said.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Definitely. We used to go out there to skate, before they fenced it off.”

  “Holy shit! This is great!”

  “How so? You planning a jailbreak?”

  “I was thinking more like a protest.”

  “And who’s coming? The web’s down, yo.”

  Andy enjoyed the look of disappointment on Peter’s face, his heroic locomotive stopped in its tracks.

  “But you’ve got friends, don’t you?” Peter asked. “Maybe you can talk to that Golden guy, who put the rally at Cal Anderson together.”

  Andy laughed. “If you want to talk to Golden, you can do it yourself.”

  “I can’t. He hates me.”

  “Well, he doesn’t like me much either. Bobo’s his point guy.”

  Peter threw up his hands. “So you just wanna do nothing? Do you even care that our friends are locked up?”

  It was a reasonable question, but it only pissed Andy off more. Why had Eliza reached out to Peter, of all people? They weren’t even friends! In fact, considering the whole Stacy slut-shaming fiasco last year, Eliza should have hated him. It was so unfair. Life was so unfair.

  And maybe that was why Andy did what he did next—to strike a blow against the injustice of the universe. He sighed theatrically. “Maybe you’re right. I mean, I wouldn’t really be much of a boyfriend if I didn’t at least try to get her out.”

  Someone with a little more cunning in him might have played it cool, but Peter wouldn’t have known cunning if it came up and stabbed him in the back. He looked dumbfounded and perplexed and rejected all at once. Andy crumpled the guilty feelings up and kicked them into a dark corner of his brain. Even though Eliza wasn’t his girlfriend, she was his friend. And the important thing here was to keep his friend from wasting her last few weeks on the planet with some cookie-cutter jock moron.