Packed up high in Toni’s wardrobe were two bottles of vodka, which she would never touch herself, but would keep just in case a guest wanted some.
He then found his way to Dustin’s room, wondering if he had missed anything. He paused, turned and surveyed the room. He knelt beside his youngest boy’s bed and let his head fall into the white pillow cover. He inhaled deeply through his nose, smelling deeply. In his adult life, Jess estimated that he had cried three times. One after an accident in which he thought Dustin was going to die; once when Michael was born and once after the divorce. And each time the tears came, it felt like a battle of wills – like a torrent of water throwing itself at a man-made dam, trying to overpower the concrete barrier designed to hold the water back.
Jess wiped the tears away on his shirt as he heard a noise outside his window.
There was something visible outside. The boy’s room faced an entirely different direction than the others. He saw what looked like a beacon in the blackness and it flickered oddly. As he peered out the window for a minute and then two he realized that the light was growing in size. It flickered in such a way that it could only be a fire and soon after another one appeared two streets over. As his eyes got accustomed to the darkness, he could see faint streams of smoke snaking up into the sky from fires pockmarked all over the city. Sirens and car alarms were honking incessantly in the distance, so many of them in fact that it was difficult at first to tell them apart. Together they just created a bizarre kind of hum – steady and unending.
He put some bottled water in Dustin’s backpack along with a couple cans of food. Though the place wasn’t a disaster, the supplies of long-lasting food were scarce. He almost tripped over Michael’s gym bag (about three feet long with two carrying straps) and emptied it by unzipping it and turning it upside down. A horrible smell of cheese and sweat rushed up to his nose as shoes and clothing fell out. He filled the bag with clean items – jackets and socks. He would squeeze himself into Michael’s things if he had to.
He checked the bathroom and found that a weak but clean supply of water came from the shower-head, permitting him just enough to wash his body and shave his days’ old growth of beard. He opened the vodka and drank a quarter of it all at once. He paced the apartment, taking chugs and talking to himself, becoming increasingly nonsensical.
The empty bottle broke as he threw it against the mirror. He fell asleep in Michael’s bed, upon a Buffalo Bills pillow. He only meant to lie down enough to catch his breath and to figure out his next move. When he woke, the windows were black, much darker than before, as though the world outside had been swallowed up by spilled black ink.
But all was not still. There was a gentle sound coming from somewhere nearby. The sound of something hard hitting something equally hard, but soft enough in volume to be barely noticeable. Jess scoured the apartment to find the source. He wound up in Dustin’s bedroom. The melody was coming from the wall, repeated with short breaks between the taps. It was something with a definite rhythm to it, like Morse code.
Three quick taps and a space of silence lasting about 20 seconds or so, and then three more taps and then the sequence repeated itself.
After a minute of listening Jess braved himself a reply. Four taps back:
I hear you
.
There was silence that seemed to last a long time.
Then came the answer again: four taps.
Jess followed up with five.
And five came back.
Jess decided he would not answer again. He didn’t have to.
There was a sound outside the window. A voice.
“Hello? Hello?”
Jess looked out the window and couldn’t see anything. He went out the balcony and heard the voice again, softly, searching for an answer.
“I’m here,” Jess said. It was all he could think of to say. “Who’s there?”
A white piece of cloth dangled over the edge of the balcony, jittering like a fishing lure in the moonlight.
“You alone?”
“Yes,” Jess said. “I was hoping to find my family.”
“I don’t recall a man living there. Just that broad and her two sons. You a new boyfriend?”
“I’m her ex-husband.”
The flag retreated and in its place appeared a head, or at least half a head, one part hidden behind the dividing brick wall between their balconies.
Jess vaguely recalled the man who lived next door. They had only seen each other in passing; one going into the elevator as the other left it. He was not an old man, exactly. He certainly wasn’t of retirement age but his hair seemed all white. His style was dichotic: He wore dress shirts with slacks and the kind of shoes that people used to wear while doing the twist on the dance floor. He wore suit jackets that had holes in the elbows.
The man lived in a single bedroom apartment and was always quiet. Not a sound could be heard from his place. He recalled Toni saying that his only annoying trait was that he sat on his balcony and smoked. Jess could smell the familiar odour.
“You the transit guy?”
“Yeah. What have you heard?”
“Ah, she badmouths you a bit. A lot actually. I’ve never heard someone talk so much about someone that they supposedly hate.”
There was silence again. The man’s half-head fell out of view.
“Have you fortified your doors?”
“What do you mean?”
“They’re out there, you know. Loose in the building. They’ve been scratching at my door for days. Like bloody untamed dogs. There’s still a few of us alive, I think. But there seems to be less every day. People let their guard down, or run out of food. They think they can creep downstairs without getting caught. All I hear after that are screams, every time. You and I might be the last ones now.”
“Do you know what happened to my family?”
“They’re not with you there? No sign of ‘em?”
“No.”
“I was wondering what was going on. It was quiet for a while and then I thought I heard the key turn. Someone was making noise in there for a bit, moving things around, dropping the odd thing and then it got quiet again, until now.”
Without the man’s face to look at, Jess felt that he was talking to something not real; like his conscience or something otherwise intangible.
“Listen,” Jess said. “I just got in, took me a long time to get here. I’m starving. I really need something to eat. You mind if we meet back here in an hour? I might have some more questions before I leave.”
“You have food? What are you eating?”
“I don’t know. I think I saw some cereal bars in the kitchen. You need something?”
The man’s reply was forthright – any withheld sense of shame he may have had over begging has been overtaken by real hunger.
He said his name was Aaron. Said he was a musician.
Jess checked the cabinets. Aaron was right about someone knocking things over, although he hadn’t noticed it at first, someone had also rifled through the shelves quickly. Things were uncharacteristically knocked onto their side, and a salt container had fallen from its lofty perch onto the counter below, a single explosion of white particles spread out like a dried up wave of ocean water.
Things were defrosting and smelling badly in the freezer. There were some packaged granola bar snacks and some of Dustin’s canned pasta on the shelves. He took two of each and the other bottle of vodka and went back out to the balcony, handing some of the food out in the open-air space between their apartments.
A hand snatched out, quickly grabbing the proffered items.
Jess could hear Aaron eating from the other side of the wall. They handed the can opener back and forth and it seemed like Aaron drank the entire contents of pasta in one go, including the little pasta figures that were inside. Jess was certain that Aaron was fingering the wall of the can and licking his fingers with unmistakeable pops at the length of each digit.
He had stopped scraping the inside of the can just long enough to ask a question: “So you were outside? How bad is it? I thought they’d be everywhere.”
“They’re not everywhere, but I did run into some of them. They’re slow. Dumb almost. Very single-minded. They’re easy to escape if you don’t get yourself cornered. The real danger isn’t them – it’s us. There are a lot of nuts out there who think this is some opportunity to re-make the world.”
Something made a noise below them on the street level. It sounded like a garbage can or something metal being knocked over.
“What the hell was that? Racoon?”
“Doubt it. It’s more likely that we’re talking too loud.”
“What do you mean? They can hear us?”
“Let’s put it this way: When I started seriously running out of food I stood here and started yelling into the night. ‘Help, help! Somebody fucking help me!’ Shit like that. Those damn goblin people showed up two minutes after I started screaming, like a gang of drunks, shuffling around the sidewalk out front the building. I swear they were trying to figure out where the sound was coming from. One or two made it to the front door of the lobby, and possibly got in.”
“Do you have any idea what is happening? Have you got anything on the radio or TV, anything?”
Aaron must have stood back up because all Jess saw was the end of his arm, throwing the empty can as far as he could across the street in front of the building. There was a relatively small grocery store out there, only vaguely noticeable now as a square grey building amidst the grey streets and grey sky.
“Check this out,” Aaron said.
The can clanked against the ground and rolled to a stop midway across the street. Just as Jess was about to ask what they were looking at, he saw what Aaron wanted him to see. From the camouflaged ground below them came the forms of three different creatures, hobbling and crawling towards the spot of Aaron’s tossed soup can in the middle of the darkened street.
“They’re simple but they’re not stupid.”
“God damn! So do you have any idea what they are or what kind of mess we’re in?”
“There were radio broadcasts for a few hours after the explosion. I didn’t see what happened but I was practically thrown out of my bed. The radio guys were all saying that they weren’t sure if we had been attacked or if some accident had happened. I was so fucking stupid. I stood at the window and watched as the clouds moved towards the building. They told us to move away from the outer walls of the building and to move towards the deep insides. I took the radio in the bathroom and sat in the tub for a few hours. I even considered making a hat out of aluminum foil like they instructed. Some guy on the radio said it was better to look stupid than to be sorry. Fuck that, I thought. Wackos.
“It was just horseshit for a long time. Like 9/11. We’re not sure what’s happened but it’s big – it’s serious. Fucking assholes. They didn’t have a clue. The last thing they said was that we had to lock ourselves up and fortify wherever we were. All the stations went dead about 12 hours after. I got bits and pieces here and there just scanning through the dial – guys with personal radios looking for other survivors and stuff. As clueless as the rest of us. All of us heard crazy shit outside our doors and windows but we weren’t going to go investigate.”
They sat quietly for about an hour watching the things below them manoeuvre about mindlessly like dumb and blind rodents in search of food.
Aaron must have heard the pop of the bottle as Jess opened a second bottle of booze. He had barely touched the lid to his lips when he was being probed for information.
“What is that?”
“Vodka,” Jess said. He tipped it again and let it burn down his throat. “Russian.”
“Can I have some?”
“How old are you?”
“Old enough.”
“You got ID?”
“Fuck you, just hand it over!”
Jess laughed and took one more drink before extending it out into the darkness of the sky. Aaron’s hand took it away quickly.
It took them about 10 minutes to down the bottle, having passed it back and forth. It created a warm spot in Jess’s belly. He knew that there was at least one other bottle. Perhaps also some small bottles from one of the weddings that Toni had attended recently. She stopped drinking around the time that their marriage ended but kept a small supply for guests.
There might even have been some cans of beer hiding under the kitchen sink, he thought. The last guy Toni dated drank expensive imports – had an image to keep up and Jess drank them down with venom when he stayed with the boys.
He’d normally balk at warm beer, but given the situation, he figured he’d welcome the find.
Toni would not approve.
Jess gave Aaron a temporary goodbye and went back inside to see if he could get any other clues about what had happened to his boys. He knew he couldn’t stay here forever but he also had to try and figure out what his next move would be.
Toni’s smartcard was gone from its usual spot on the coffee table. The network was still dead. His son’s beds were unmade – a rare happening when Toni was looking after them.
The sunless sky outside the windows had made it impossible to tell what time of day it was. Jess wasn’t sure if an hour had passed by or an entire day. He fell asleep again – this time on the sofa where he had so often sat wordlessly watching movies and quiz shows while holding the remote control in one hand and a beer in the other after babysitting for one of Toni’s dates.