Brad worked through the night, finishing with the skylights before his normal breakfast time. Instead of sealing the skylights completely, Brad built a small frame to hold the plywood several inches below each skylight. He cut the plywood extra large and painted it white, hoping to reflect some sunlight down into the room through the gaps on the perimeter. As the dawn light filtered in, he discovered his blockade let in plenty of illumination for him to move around comfortably, and enough to read at close distance.
For most of the outside doors, Brad removed the handles and boarded them up completely. For the front door and the door to the garage, Brad constructed sturdy, removable blockades.
Brad flopped down on couch with a box of cereal. He snacked and enjoyed his gloomy cave. His eyelids started to drift shut when he heard a noise at the door. The handle turned and the door pushed in a quarter inch before hitting the wooden bracing. Brad smiled. The edges of the door let in bright morning sun, and in the thin band of light Brad saw a small note push through the crack between the door and the frame. The door was pulled shut, holding the note a few inches over the height of the door knob.
Brad pushed to his feet and shuffled over to grab the note. He turned on the kitchen light so he could read the handwritten text.
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Dear Mr. Jenkins,
We’ve done our best to find you a variety of food this time. We also took the liberty of providing you several days of supplies, so you won’t have to “unlock” your door too often for us. If you need anything, don’t hesitate to leave a note or send us an email.
Thanks,
Herm
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Brad crumpled the note and tossed it in the garbage can under the sink. He looked at the close-to-full basket and pulled out the trash bag before going back to the living room to remove the barricade from his door.
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Dear Karen,
I’ve disconnected everything. You’re my only connection with the outside world. Yes, I realize it’s an imaginary connection, but still. I downloaded tons of information first. I filled the whole server with as much information about survival and whatnot I could find. I’ve stockpiled most of the food they’ve given me. I just eat the fresh stuff that would go bad anyway and ask for more dried food and canned stuff each time.
I found three of their bugs. I don’t know why they wanted to listen in on me, it’s not like I talk aloud much. When I found the first one, I didn’t move it or try to break it or anything. Instead, I rigged up a RF sensor to detect what frequency they were using. With my homemade bug finder, I was able to find the other two. I don’t think think they have any video surveillance, which is weird. They might be tracking me through the walls with thermal imaging, but there’s not much I can do about that.
Speaking of heat, the furnace has started coming on at night. It must be getting cold outside. I wish I hadn’t cut the cable TV. I really wish I could watch the news just to find out if the world’s still turning. Sometimes I hear the casual soldiers through the walls—digging next to the garage or backing a truck up the driveway. I had one camera pointed out front, but last week they painted the window black. I tried drilling a hole through the wall to the garage, but Herm was telling the truth. They’ve hung tarps around whatever they’re doing in the garage. I couldn’t see a thing through my hole. It didn’t last long. Somebody filled it in during the night.
Maybe I’ll go outside the next time they drop off food. I’m sure they’ll just usher me back inside, but at least I might get a chance to talk to someone for a few minutes. I’ve lost track of the days, but I think it’s been at least a month. My phone says it’s October 18th, but they might be messing with it.
Much Love,
Brad
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The house was still shaking when Brad fully woke up. He reconstructed the event as he rubbed his eyes. A giant “boom” jolted him upright, and he threw off the blankets, ready for action. His closet light gave the room an amber, pre-dawn feel. He’d slept with the closet light on for several weeks.
Three dusty coins vibrated off his bureau and bounced on the floorboards. The shaking died away slowly, until Brad wasn’t sure if it had stopped or if he just couldn’t sense it anymore. He put on his clothes quickly, but as quietly as possible. The closet light flickered twice. On his nightstand, Brad’s notebook sat flipped open to a page with a couple quintets of tick marks. He added one to the collection before shutting off his closet light.
In the dark, Brad moved to the doorway and pushed away the blanket he’d hung over the doorway. His hand found the door knob and he held his breath as he pushed the door open a quarter inch. When he saw no light from the hallway, he exited his bedroom as quietly as possible and slipped past the blanket hanging in the doorway to the kitchen. All his rooms were now divided by blankets in the doorways.
The kitchen had a little light—some from a crack between the plywood and the top of a window frame, and some which seeped in from the living room skylights. He walked through the kitchen and living room quickly, finding his way past the blanket to the back hall. He spread his arms and trailed his fingers down both the walls, counting the doors so he’d know when to expect the door to the mudroom.
Brad let himself into the mudroom and closed the door behind himself. The french doors to the back deck normally let in a lot of light, but today they were black. Brad inched around to the door to the basement. On the wall, just next to the door, he kept a flashlight in case he needed access to the basement when the power was out. He pointed it towards the french doors and turned on the light. In the upper left corner the plywood didn’t make a good seal with the frame, but the glass there was dark.
Brad set the light down and moved to the door to the garage. All the other noises came from the garage area, so he assumed the boom that had woken him up had happened there as well. The door to the garage was barricaded much like the front door. Brad disassembled the brace and unlocked the door. He picked up the flashlight, put his hand on the knob, and then turned off his light before pulling it open.
Light streamed in, making Brad squint. Instead of the inside of his garage, Brad’s eyes were drawn to a dark gray sky spitting big flakes of snow through jagged holes torn in the roof of his garage. Tattered blue tarps pooled around a pit in the floor of his garage, where his truck used to be parked. From the hole, thick mud had vomited up, coating the interior of the garage. One of the garage doors had a huge splat of mud right in the center which had hit with enough force to punch the door halfway off its tracks and into the driveway.
Brad shut the door and locked it. He sat in the dark and replayed in his mind everything he’d just seen.
“They blew it up?” he whispered to himself. He clapped a hand over his mouth.
He put the bracing back in place to seal the door shut and turned off his flashlight.
Back in the living room, Brad crouched on the floor and peeked out the front door at his driveway. A box of provisions sat on the porch; the top was dusted with snow. A couple of vehicles were parked in the driveway, but he saw no soldiers and no footprints in the fresh snow. He got to his knees and opened the door enough to pull the box of supplies into the living room before shutting the door most of the way again.
Brad rose to his feet and took a deep breath. He slipped through the door and stood on his porch. Looking around for signs of life, Brad stuffed his hands deep in his pockets and shivered as the wind gusted. Snow swirled in the corner where the garage met the side of the house. Three steps led down to the short path to the driveway. Brad looked left and right as he rushed to the nearest car—a tan sedan might have been the same one Herm arrived in months before.
Brad tried the door. When it opened the warning chime told Brad the keys were still in the ignition, but he leaned in and verified they were there. After one more glance around, Brad turned the key. The sedan’s engine fired up immediately. Brad shut it off and pocketed the keys.
He glanced back at the house.
Out of nowhere, Grandpa Joe flooded back into Brad’s memory.
“They’re trees when they’re standing,” Grandpa Joe had told him. “That’s when they’re safe. You can never trust them once you put the saw to them. Do you know why?”
“Why?” young Brad had asked.
“It wakes them up,” Grandpa Joe had said. “Once they’re on the ground, they’re called lumber. You know why?”
“Why?” young Brad asked again.
“Because they walk,” Grandpa Joe had said. They were standing next to a felled pine. Grandpa Joe held his de-limbing axe over his shoulder and he motioned for Brad to back up. As Grandpa Joe worked his way down the tree, his sharp axe liberated the trunk from all the branches propping it up. With each swing, the trunk twisted and wriggled, working its way to the ground. “You take your eyes off this thing for one second and it’s gonna roll over your ankle and snap off your foot. You understand?”
“I think so,” young Brad had said.
Brad shook his head to clear away the memory and he dropped into a crouch next to the open car door. A loud “Tock!” came from the backside of the garage. Brad shuffled across the snowy driveway to the edge of the car as another “Tock!” sounded.
The garage doors rattled. The one which bulged out looked like it was about to fall. Brad ducked even lower, with just his eyes above the edge of the hood. As he watched, the roof of the garage—what was left of it—began to shake and rattle. A sound like giant rocks scraping together came to him through the snowy air. “TOCK!”
Brad felt reality swimming away and another memory of Grandpa Joe tried to surface. He shook his head and pushed away from the sedan, sprinting for the house. The “TOCK!” sound came once more before he slammed the door shut behind himself. As soon as the door was shut, and the next echoing TOCK was muffled, Brad felt the intrusive memories start to fade. He pressed his back to the door and reached up over his left shoulder to turn the lock.
The next TOCK sounded like it came from the driveway. Brad scrambled away from the door and put all the bracing back into place—locking the door tight. The living room windows near the driveway began to rattle in their frames. He moved to the couch and pressed his hand against the plywood covering the windows. The whole wall was shaking. The picture frame next to the door bounced against the wall. Brad tiptoed away from the couch and crouched over near the bookcase on the far wall. He watched from across the room as the undulation moved slowly down the wall, towards the kitchen.
The plates in his kitchen cabinets began to rattle when the rumbling suddenly stopped. Brad took a deep breath and waited. Just as he exhaled, a new sound began. This one was less of a rattle, and more of a movement of air; like his house was a big violin, and something was moving a giant bow across it.
Brad covered his ears. The luffing sound hurt his ear drums, like driving around with just one back window open. Brad moaned, but couldn’t hear his own voice. He doubled over on the floor. He thought his head might implode with the pressure, and he was beginning to have trouble inhaling. Brad crawled on hands and knees, under the blanket-barrier to the hall, and down the long hall to the back of the house, while the noise in the living room slowly faded.
He stopped at the door to the mudroom, and sat in the absolute darkness as a mixture of new sounds rang out from the front of the house. One noise lasted several minutes and sounded like a giant hunk of metal being dragged across concrete. Brad felt the next sound in his teeth, like he’d bitten into a big chunk of styrofoam. Brad cringed and plugged his ears again.
He squinted and curled into a ball for several minutes until the noises stopped. Brad removed his hands from his ears and laid on the floor, relieved by the silence. He crept back to the living room, stopping frequently to listen for any distant sign that the sounds were returning. When he’d heard nothing for a while, he peeked past the blanket into the living room. Based on the intensity of the sounds, he expected to find destruction, but his living room looked normal in the soft glow from the partially-blocked skylights.
One picture next to the door was slightly askew, but even the kitchen seemed intact. In the hall to his bedroom, the crack between the plywood and the window frame looked bigger—more light seeped in. Brad approached cautiously, but eventually pressed his eye right to the crack. Once his eye adjusted, he had a pretty good view of the driveway.
The car he’d crouched behind just minutes before—maybe Herm’s car—had turned ninety degrees, leaving big sweeping tire-streaks through the fresh snow. Whatever turned the car left no tracks at all. Brad scratched an itch on the side of his head and found his fingers sticky with fresh blood. He turned his fingers slowly in the light coming in through the crack and wondered about the dark red blood.
Brad made his way back to his bedroom. The light in the closet was still on. In the bathroom mirror he found the source of the blood. A small trickle escaped his right ear, and ran down to his cheek before ending in a smear. Brad sat on the edge of the tub and dabbed at the blood with a glob of wet toilet paper. He gently brushed his fingers together next to each ear. He could still hear okay, but felt a low throb from the right side of his head.
“Just the essentials,” Brad said to himself.
He jumped up and moved with purpose over to the closet. From the top shelf on the left, he pulled down a backpack. Back in the bathroom, he shoved in various pills and a few toiletries. At his bureau, he dressed himself and then stuffed a few extra socks, shirts, and underwear into his backpack. Most of the space in the backpack he filled in the kitchen. He added easily portable food and bottled water to his stash. Brad finished his preparation in the living room, where he kept his hiking boots next to the wood stove. He took a deep breath and listened for any more driveway sounds before he un-blocked the door.