Todd (3 page)

He froze, suddenly certain.

The human species doesn't.

"No," he said aloud.
"Come on."
Even if it was something alien, we would've seen it
coming.
We have the Hubble, the ISS, we have tons of telescopes aimed at
the sky at every hour of the day. We aren't Neanderthals anymore. We'd know.

He went back to Google, his
fingers hovering as he debated what to search for. "Unidentified space
object" summoned a slew of conspiracy theories and corny pseudoscience,
none of which was very recent. "Hubble strange object" revealed more
clickbait links, all of which led to sites that were down or eventually
explained the object as an unusual asteroid. Abruptly, he felt stupid.

"Did you check on the
internet?" Todd asked.

Alan started and glanced up.
"Yeah. I can't find anything." He opted to keep his crazier ideas to
himself for now. "Why don't you keep watching TV for awhile?"

"That channel went off.
There's nothing else good on."

"All right. Just..." He
didn't want Todd here while he did this. He wanted to be free to think out loud
without scaring the kid.

The look on Todd's face said it
was too late for that.

When Todd was first born, Alan had
felt inadequate all the time. He never seriously considered leaving—he could
never do that to his family—but he had been a child himself not long before. Nothing
changed when he became a father. He didn't get any special insights, no magic
power-ups. But now there was this being, his own flesh and blood, who looked to
him for everything. He was responsible for his survival every hour of every
day.

It had made him want to demand of
the universe,
What the hell were you thinking? Who the hell am I? I can't do
this.

He
was supposed to know
what to do?
He
was supposed to be in charge?

Thankfully, Brenda had done a
better job of feigning competence than Alan could, and the feeling had faded.
By the time Allie was born, Alan had almost tricked himself into believing he
could handle it.

But the look on Todd's face at
that moment brought it all back. Suddenly his son wasn't eight years old but
eight
hours,
defenseless and naïve, looking up at him like he was a god.

You used to love that look,
Dad
Alan reminded him.
You used to scoop him up when was two and three, carry
him around like a trophy. You both loved it. You used to kiss him on the head.
What happened to that?

Sure, as Todd had gotten bigger,
Alan's back had started to twinge, and his ability to carry him had slipped
away with the years. But pawning it off on that was a copout. It wasn't Todd
that had changed. It was Alan.

His depressive episode, his failure
with
THE GAME
,
the
fighting with Brenda, the unspoken battle lines that forced everyone
in the house to pick a side. And it was all stupid, it was all so stupid and
pointless.

He'd meant to send him back to the
living room, maybe tell him to watch a DVD. Instead he said, "Are you
scared?"

Todd nodded like a bird, his chin
bobbing, his eyes looking away.

Come here,
Alan thought to
say. Why couldn't he say it? What had changed? "I'm still here," he
whispered. "You're still here. We'll be okay."

"I miss Grandma."

"I miss her too."

"How could everyone just
disappear?
"

"I don't know."

"I miss Allie and
Mommy."

"I miss them too."

"I should've let Allie play
Mario yesterday. She wanted to and I didn't let her. I should've let her."

"Yeah." Alan's chest
tightened. "I know."

9

As night came on, the TV channels
flickered out like dying stars. When the last one went, Todd started asking
again about Allie and Grandma and Mommy. Where had they gone? How could they find
them? Alan had no answers, so he found a deck of cards and taught his son to
play blackjack.

In one game, Todd stayed on a 19.
Alan, playing the house, matched it and won on the tie.

"That's not fair," Todd
said.

"Well... who has to pay if
you
win?"

Todd screwed up his face,
thinking. "The house?"

"Yeah, the house. So they
take a risk every time."

Todd shook his head. "It's
still not fair."

Alan shrugged. "Why do you
say that?"

He had always tried to challenge
his kids to explain themselves, to justify their gut reactions. Allie had
always gone along with it, but Todd hated it. He preferred his mom's easy
rationalizations and simple answers.

Critical thinking might not have
been the most common skill among eight-year-olds, but it had taken Alan a long
time to realize its value, and he'd never wanted either of his kids to suffer
the same wait. He'd never been the breadwinner in the family—even less so since
his colossal failure at self-employment—but he always figured he could at least
get his kids ready for the constant barrage of scams the world would throw at
them.

Scams?
He felt an instant
of freefall, like the world had been yanked out from beneath his feet.
What
scams? There's no one left to run them.

"Well, 'cause it's not
fair..." Todd grabbed the next card and flipped it: the five of spades.
"See? You win on a tie and if I get a card again you
still
win.
There's no way for me to win." He was wounded and angry. "It's not
fair! Why even play this stupid game?"

Life's not fair,
Alan
thought to say, but he'd always felt like his kids deserved better than tired
platitudes. He thought about arguing the point, and decided against it.
"All right." They put the cards away and pulled out Grandma's
checkers set.

The first explosion came around 10
PM.

A car, probably—one of the ones up
on 115th, its spilled fuel somehow igniting. The fire silhouetted the trees, a
billowing cloak of rage. Todd was dumbstruck as Alan debated whether they
needed to run.

He wasn't surprised that something
had exploded; he was surprised that more things hadn't. There were crashed cars
everywhere. Even if he took his son out on the road, the risk would still be
high. At least from Grandma's house, they could see the fire.

He decided to wait. If the fire
spread toward them, they could always run then.

Another explosion came an hour
later, this one farther away. More followed, punctuating the night like cracks
of thunder.

The games stopped. They huddled in
the living room with the lights on. Todd dozed in fits and starts. Alan stepped
outside once, scanning the nearest streets for cars that might be leaking gas,
and concluded the street was as safe as it was going to get.

As he turned to head back in, he
caught a glimpse of a blue star in the sky, glaring like an LED headlight. He
was no astronomer, but the star's brilliance struck him as exceptional.
A
satellite,
he thought.
Maybe it's coming down.

The clouds hid it, and he went
inside. Sometime after 3 AM, he passed out on the couch.

10

He dreamt of the Earth: a ball of
rock hurtling around a naked fire.

Four and a half billion years old,
the product of a grand melee of smashing dust, gas, and boulders, it was
bombarded on all sides by lethal radiation and surrounded by an infinite
expanse of lethal, frozen vacuum. A fragile sheen of gas and some lucky
magnetism were the only things that kept it from succumbing to the black.

Its core was as hot as the surface
of the sun. Its crust, nearly 4,000 miles removed, was where his entire species
lived: ants swarming on a chunk of decaying bread. Every nation, every
religion, every story and every life had happened there, suspended precariously
between the lethal darkness of space and the crushing heat of the Earth's
interior.

It was a delicate balance, and it
wouldn't last forever.

Eventually the sun would get too
large, or the Earth's core would cool and die. A striking asteroid would turn
the planet into an instant hell. A shift in the biosphere would create a system
that absorbed oxygen without returning it, transforming the atmosphere into
poison, or stupidity and arrogance would roast everyone in an oven of their own
creation. At any minute, a gamma ray explosion from a nearby star could
annihilate all life on Earth with casual brutality. And those were only the
threats he knew; the universe had trillions of deadly mysteries.

The Earth had had five mass
extinction events, each wiping out more than 50% of the planet's species.

Such events, he realized with the
clarity of dreams, were actually routine.

11

He woke to dead silence.

No hum of the refrigerator or air
conditioning, no background chatter from the TV or his children. No birdsong;
no whine of car engines. Todd was still asleep, but even he was breathing so
quietly Alan could barely hear it. The silence was so deep, so profound, it may
actually have been what woke him.

Power's out
. He got up,
neck stiff from a night spent on the couch, and crossed to the kitchen. His
first instinct was to check the faucet and make sure the water was still
running. It was. Then he went to the fridge and made sure the food was still
cold. It also was, for now. Without power, it wouldn't be for long.

Suddenly, there was no more time
to dwell on what had happened. The power would not be coming back on. That
meant it was only a matter of time until this food rotted, and Alan had no idea
how far the catastrophe extended. With the highways clogged, travel would be
difficult, if not impossible. They had to salvage what they could in their
neighborhood, and they had to do it fast.

"Todd." Alan shook his
son's shoulders. "Hey. Morning time."

Todd's eyes slipped open. He gave
his dad a sleepy glare. Then he bolted upright.

"I forgot." He craned
around to look out the window, where a shirt blew down the empty street like a
tumbleweed. "I thought I dreamed it."

"I know." Alan searched
for something else to say, some word of encouragement or promise that he hadn't
said yet, and found nothing. "Come on. We're going to the grocery
store."

When they opened the front door,
the silence gave way to the distant roar of fire.

It wasn't on 115th, though. At
115th they saw the blackened remains of the car that had burned last night. The
fire had guttered out in the middle of the street, ten feet or more from the
nearest lawn, but if it had reached the grass—

Alan looked back, took in the long
line of adjacent yards with their towering trees. His mind filled in the
flames, rushing up the trunks and into the branches, chasing the boughs over
the shadow-dappled street and jumping easily to the trees on the other side.

"What's that weird
noise?" Todd said.

Alan forced himself back to
reality. "I think it's fire." The sound was coming from behind them,
and he could just make out a column of oily black above one of the houses. The
fire must have been deeper in the city, maybe at Northview junior high or even
in Crystal. He
had no idea how quickly it would spread without anyone to fight it.

Were they safe in Brooklyn Park? He knew
wildfires could engulf hundreds or even thousands of square miles, but those
were usually forest fires, weren't they? The car fire had died in the middle of
the street. All the concrete in the city would make a natural barrier to
spreading flames.

Wouldn't it?

He felt a nearly physical longing
for his smartphone. He should have been able to get the answer to this question
in a matter of minutes. An old episode of
Star Trek: The Next Generation
flared in his head, in which a Borg—an alien who was part of a collective
mind—had been severed from his people. He'd had no name, no identity; he felt
divorced from reality, unable to make even the most basic decisions. The viewer
was supposed to empathize with the crew of the Enterprise, of course, who were trying to
help the alien rediscover his individuality, but at that instant, Alan
identified more with the Borg.

"Where is it?" Todd
craned his head back, trying to find some sign of the fire.

"Back there. It's all
right," Alan lied, and pointed at 115th. "Look, what did I tell you?
All the cars have stopped."

"That one's still on."
Todd pointed.

"Yeah. Bet it'll be dead by
tonight."

The words chased them up the
street, echoing like prophecy.

12

His car remained where he'd left
it. As they got in, Todd asked, "Why are we going to the grocery
store?"

"I want to get the food while
it's still cold."

"Can't they keep it cold at
the grocery store?"

Alan pulled around in a wide
U-turn and angled north, toward a bridge that crossed Highway 610. 610 was no
interstate, but it was busy for a state highway. His stomach clenched as they
approached it, bracing for the worst.

"The power's out. Did you
notice, at Grandma's?"

"No. Are we going to look for
Mommy and Allie after that?"

The question was a pointed
reminder of how powerless they were. Look where? What the hell was he talking
about?

"You said we'd look
today," Todd said.

Right.
Alan sighed.
I
did say that.
"Well, I don't know where to look, so we're going to
just do what we need to do, and keep our eyes open for clues while we do it.
All right?"

"All right." Todd gazed
out the window. "I wish I had my 3DS. Can we stop at the house—at our
house—to get it?"

And there it was, his son's
constant urge to check out of reality, reasserting itself.
How are you going
to look for Mommy and Allie with your face in a video game?
Asshole Alan said,
but Alan ignored it. It was a mean, pointless thing to say, and the truth was
that they weren't going to find Brenda and Allie at the grocery store. Besides,
if Todd was playing video games, maybe Alan could finally take stock of what
was going on without having to constantly play Twenty Questions.