by Patten, Sean
David raised his big, meaty palms.
“Now, hold on,” he said. “First thing’s first. Amy, how the hell did you get here? Last I heard you were with your band in Europe or something.”
The mention of “Europe” brought to mind Sarah, how right at that moment my daughter was there, scared and alone. I still swore I’d see her again, though between the power and my heart, I knew it wasn’t likely.
But I wasn’t about to give up hope.
I turned my attention back to the conversation at hand.
“I was,” said Amy. “But that was a while ago.”
“Just going by what your mother told me,” David said. “Not like you kept her up on your business.”
“Mr. Simms,” Amy said, her tone stern. “David. I don’t need you giving me the third degree.”
“I know, I know,” he said. “Just going by the info I had.”
It was weird as hell listening David talk. One second he’d been booming at me with a gun pointed in my face, and now his tone was a sweet as could be, like Amy was still some eight-year-old in pigtails.
“I was playing Dead Air,” she said. “Me and the band.”
“And you didn’t stop by to see your mother?”
“I was going to,” she said. “Really, I was. But when all the shit went down—”
“Language,” he said.
Amy’s eyes narrowed slightly, as if she was debating whether or not to address the point.
“When the power went off it kind of threw a wrench in my plans.” She nodded towards me. “And like I said, if it weren’t for Ed I wouldn’t be here right now.”
“Then we owe you some thanks,” David said to me.
“Don’t mention it,” I said. “But we’re not out of this yet.”
“No kidding,” he said. “What a nightmare this has been.”
“Looks like you’ve all been sitting pretty,” I said. “Nice and safe and secure.”
“For now,” said Paul. “And likely only because no one knows that we’re here. When they do…”
“It’s going to take more than a shitty gate and some decent weapons to keep them out,” I finished.
David’s eyes flicked over to me, and I could tell he wasn’t crazy about my language either. But he let it slide. Instead, he sighed and ran his hands over the silver stubble on the top of his head.
“I know,” he said. “It’s what we’ve been all trying to figure out over the last twenty-four hours. We’ve got secrecy on our side, but it’s not going to last forever.”
“And I’d love to stick around and help you guys figure it out,” said Amy. “But I need to find my mom. We’ve got a car, and all we need is some gas.”
“Amy,” I said. “You don’t—”
She didn’t hesitate.
“If you don’t want to come with me, you don’t have to,” she said. “You’ve done enough. But I’m not going to be sitting around while my mom wanders into LA all by herself.”
“Kid,” said David.
“I’m not a kid,” Amy shot back.
“Fine,” he said. “You’re not. But there’s no way you’re going into LA. I don’t know what you two went through at Dead Air, and I’m sure it wasn’t pretty, but however awful it was I’ll bet you anything that LA’s going to make it look like a pleasant weekend out.”
They sounded like words that could’ve come out of my own mouth. And I was happy he was speaking some sense.
“Millions of people,” said Paul. “All without power, all of them scared…it’s got to be hell on earth.”
“And you want me to sit around while Mom just waltzes right into the middle of it?” Amy cut in. She shook her head, but I could tell just from her slightly deflated body language that we were talking some sense into her.
“Listen,” said David. “Your mom’s stubborn as they come. But she’s not stupid. She’s going to get to the outskirts of LA and realize that she made a mistake. And then she’ll come right back.”
Amy sat back, a brief, faraway look on her face as if she was trying to process it all.
“It’s so strange, though,” she said. “Mom would know better than to do something dangerous like that. She’d know that if she wanted to see me again the best thing would be to stay put and wait for me to come. And she gets that with touring I’m barely ever at my apartment anyway.”
There were other questions, too, like how the hell did Lori leave without any of them noticing? Did she drive? Did someone take her?
It all seemed…off. But I wasn’t about to jump in the middle of it. Not to mention my brain and body were wrecked with exhaustion. Out through the kitchen window I could see the first beams of sunlight breaking over the horizon, which meant that, like I’d figured, I’d barely gotten a couple hours of sleep.
“Listen,” said David. “This is a lot to process—for all of us. Even if we didn’t have the matter of your mother I’m sure you’d still be feeling overwhelmed just from coming home after all these years.”
He leaned forward, clasped his big hands together, and went on. “So, here’s what I’m proposing: you both get some sleep. I can tell you’re both worn out from your trip here, and truth be told my mind’s a little muddy from getting woken up in the middle of the night.”
“What’re you thinking?” I asked. “Stop by in the morning for a little kaffeeklatsch? Maybe bring some donuts?”
A brief look flashed on David’s face that made it clear he wasn’t too thrilled about my wisecrack.
“No,” he said. “Tomorrow we’re having a neighborhood meeting—everyone’s going to be there. We’ve all been trying to process what’s happened over the last couple of days, and we’re going to decide on a game plan. And if you two have some information about what’s going on at Dead Air…”
He stopped himself. “I’m getting a little ahead of things,” he said. “But we’re going to be discussing matters tomorrow, and Lori’s disappearance is going to be one of them. You both need to come.”
Amy and I glanced over at one another, both of us still not sure what to make of this.
“When’s this little powwow happening?” I asked.
“Clocks aren’t working,” said David. “So we decided on noon. Just look for when the sun’s highest in the sky and head over to the community center.”
David’s eyes appeared faraway for a brief moment, as if he’d zoned out. Then he shook his head, blinked hard, and came back to the present. The man was tired, that much was clear.
“Okay,” I said. “We’ll be there. Looking forward to getting some answers.”
“Don’t know about answers,” said David. “Because we’re just in the dark as you both are—pun not intended. But at the very least we can all get on the same page.”
“That’ll work, too,” said Amy.
David clapped his hands down on his thighs before nodding at the other two men.
“Then we’ll get a move on,” he said. “You both get some sleep. See you at the meeting.”
With that, he and the men headed out of the living room and then the house, their boots stomping on the carpet and rattling the picture frames and knick-knacks that had been placed around the room as decoration.
Then the door shut and it was just me and Amy once again.
“You okay over there?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “Fine. Just thinking how weird it was to be chatting with the neighbors about a homeowner’s association meeting. Last thing I thought I’d be doing after what we just finished dealing with.”
“No kidding,” she said softly.
It was a brief flashback to the kind of domesticity that I thought I’d left behind for good, back when me and my ex and Sarah all lived together in something approaching peace.
“Had a house like this once,” I said, looking around. “Long time ago.”
I realized that between the heat and the confusion I was getting delirious and on the verge of pouring my guts out to this poor girl. It was the
last thing she needed—Amy had enough to worry about already.
“Anyway,” I said. “David was right about one thing—we need to get some rest.”
“Yeah,” said Amy. “I feel like I might just fall asleep where I’m sitting.”
With a heave, she lifted herself up and started towards the stairs.
“Goodnight, Ed,” she said. “And…sorry about all that.”
I gave her a smirk to let her know I wasn’t too upset about it all.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “If getting a gun shoved in my face by geriatric suburbanites is the worst thing that happens to me today, I’ll consider that a win.”
She smiled over her shoulder before heading up the stairs.
Once she was gone, I took a few moments to adjust myself to the new quiet, listening to the creaks and groans of the house along with the soft howl of the desert wind outside. I laid back on the couch, resting my head on the pillow and folding my hands behind my back, ready for a few hours of sleep.
But as soon as I closed my eyes images of my old life, all those years ago, appeared in my mind. I remembered the old house, that little ranch home in the suburbs where me and Sarah and Steph, my ex, lived.
And they hurt like hell. I’d never taken to that kind of life. TV and chain restaurants and weekend trips to the big box stores—that was never for me. But Sarah…God, anyplace was heaven when she was there.
But if heaven was having her with me, hell was what I was living through knowing she was on the other side of the damn planet. My mind raced for a time, thinking about ways I could somehow get to her.
I could make my way across the country, stopping at pharmacies when I needed to stock up. Then once I hit the East Coast I could find some port town, maybe Baltimore, and see if any sort of transportation between the States—what was left of them—and Europe was still happening.
Maybe even the rest of the country was still functional, and that getting to Sarah was just a matter of getting out of the southwest and catching a flight. Maybe she was in some chic Paris apartment right at that moment, watching TV with a mug of coffee in her hands, wondering if I was all right.
My eyes were closed, but I knew I wasn’t going to get a damn bit of sleep. And as if my body wanted to send the message that rest wasn’t going to happen, a tinge of pain cut through my chest like a cold blade. My eyes shot open and I hopped up from the couch, ready to walk it off.
Nope, no sleep tonight. The body craved it more than anything, but the spirit wasn’t playing along. My muscles aching and my legs weary, I started toward the kitchen, ready to while away the hours until Amy and I could get some answers.
8 Amy
I woke up to the sound of something falling to the floor.
“Huh?” I said, rolling over onto my side in my bed. “What was that?”
No response.
Oh yeah, I was alone and in the room I’d grown up in. Like a morning after a hard night of drinking and partying, everything began to come back to me in flashes of images, like a slideshow playing at ten-times speed.
It was too much, and enough to wake me the hell up and get me up and out of bed. Once I was sitting up I rolled my shoulders and rubbed my eyes, the bleariness disappearing enough to allow me to take in the sight of beams of sunlight streaming through the blinds and onto the end of my bed.
Light on my bed. It was familiar and comforting, taking me back to being a kid, waking up on Saturday mornings to the scent of Mom making breakfast and the gentle din of whatever Motown music she happened to be playing. Dad would be down at the little kitchen table working through the paper or some historical fiction novel.
The source of the noise snapped me out of my nostalgia. Down near the foot of the bed, on the ground, was an overturned box, dozens and dozens of pictures spilled out and strewn over the floor. At first I was confused, thinking that someone had come in and plopped the box onto the ground while I was sleeping.
But as the sleepy grogginess faded away, I realized what had happened.
In the dark of the night I hadn’t noticed a box of photos that had been sitting on the end of the bed. And somehow I’d managed to get through the whole night—or what was left of it, anyway—without knocking it over.
I crawled out of bed, realizing that while the few hours of rest I’d gotten had done me some good, they hadn’t been nearly enough. I needed a whole damn day to recover, and maybe a few days after that just to bum around and let my mind catch up.
But I wasn’t going to get that.
As I made my way over to the box I glanced out of the window, guessing from the position of the sun that it was around eleven in the morning. And that meant the meeting that Mr. Simms—uh, David—had told us about was nearly on.
My attention was on the pictures, however. Everything else could wait.
I dropped into a cross-legged position in front of the photos, a smile forming as I glanced at them. Pictures had always been a quirk of Mom’s—actual, physical ones, that is. In a time when everything was digital, she always insisted on actually printing them out.
“I just like things you can hold in your hands,” she’d said. “That’s how you know they’re real.”
And…she was right. I sat back on my hands, realizing how many millions and millions, maybe billions, maybe trillions of photos that had only existed on people’s phones or tablets or computers or in the cloud had vanished in the blink of an eye. All those memories, gone, just like that.
I imagined things going back to normal over the course of the next few decades, if that were even possible, and there being this two-decade gap in history when everything had been wiped away. No one owned anything physical anymore.
No one except Mom, that is. Maybe these physical pictures would be relics in time, valuable collectibles for people looking to understand the world as it was before the power went off.
My trip into the future faded, however, as I laid my eyes on the pictures, nostalgia taking me in the opposite direction, back to my past.
The first few pictures I thumbed through were of way back, of a trip when I was no older than five. It was me and Mom and Dad at Disneyland up in Anaheim, me dressed up like Cinderella back when I was actually girly, back before puberty hit and I became the tomboy to end all tomboys.
I went through more of the pictures, shaking my head and smiling that Mom had managed to capture all of the awkwardness of my teenage years in perfect order. You could see the smile fade from my face as I turned from a happy-go-lucky kid to a pissed-at-the-world teenager, my hair changing from blond to blue to purple to red to blond again.
And then college.
Then the boys.
I stopped at a picture taken my first semester of college, one I didn’t know Mom had gotten ahold of. It was of me and Ty and Chris and Elliot, the four of us standing outside the Red Chateau the night of our first show. The four of us stood side by side, our arms wrapped around one another’s shoulders, big, stupid grins on our face.
We looked like kids. Kids who had no idea that within a year we’d be opening for some of the biggest bands in rock, then headlining tours of our own soon after that. It was before the drugs and the girls and the producers and the fighting and everything else that had come to define the last few years of our lives. It was back when everything was simpler, back when music was fun.
And back when my friends were still alive.
A small splash of water appeared on the picture, and I realized that I was crying. Part of me wanted to go with it, to let the tears flow and just wallow in the overwhelming nostalgia and longing that I felt at that moment.
But I didn’t have time for that.
“Ah, fuck!” called out Ed from downstairs, his curse followed by a banging noise.
As if on cue, the real world called out to me. I turned my attention back to the photos, wondering for a moment if I should take some of them with me. But I realized that where they were was likely the safest place for them. After all, they�
�d survived for more than two decades where Mom had stored them. What was a few decades more?
I took one last look at the photos before hurriedly scooping them up into little stacks and depositing them back into the cardboard box, replacing the lid before sticking the whole thing into the closet. As I made my way down it hit me why they were out: Mom had been in my room looking at the photos, thinking of me…
No time.
I rushed down to the first floor to see that Ed was already up. His bid body moved through the kitchen, commotion sounding out as he did whatever he was doing.
“Morning,” I said.
He glanced back over his shoulder, and I saw that he was busy at work filling empty plastic jugs with as much water as he could.
“Morning,” he said. It was clear from his ragged voice that he hadn’t gotten anything approaching a good night’s sleep.
I went for the cupboard, taking out the same box of snack crackers that I’d been working on last night and opening them up.
“There’s a little water left,” Ed said. “If you want to take a quick shower.”
“And I see you’re helping yourself to the rest,” I said, noting the many bottles along the counter.
“Use it or lose it,” he said. “Before too long this shit’s all going to break down, and that means perfectly potable water’s going to be going to waste.”
He glanced at all the bottles. “And don’t worry, I’ll leave some for your Mom if that’s what you’re worried about.”
Honestly, I didn’t know what I was worried about. Ed was right—it only made good sense to store up what water we could.
“How…how are you doing?” I asked.
“Fine,” he said. “Don’t you worry about me. I just want to get this meeting over with.”
“No kidding,” I said.
But Ed looked back, like he’d gotten worse than just a bad night’s sleep.
“Tell me you’ve at least eaten something,” I said.
“Nah,” he said. “Focusing on getting us ready if we need to hit the road.”
“Come on,” I said. “I’m not a doctor, but even I know that you’re going to need something in your belly.”
