Impetus (9 page)

CHAPTER
10
 

The theater grew distant, but Mick’s thoughts of Solomon did not. These treks of his had been going on for years without running into another person for long enough to hold a conversation. Not that what he’d had with Solomon could ever be construed as such. Not by yesterday’s standards, anyway.

Living with the same seven people
for the past ten years, Mick had come to know their traits, how they acted and spoke, what made them happy and sad. He adapted and became comfortable with all of them. And life did not volunteer as many opportunities to meet new people as it once had. Not that he was complaining. But speaking with Solomon, for however brief a time it was, had sparked something inside him that seemed to punch a tiny hole in the darkness he had blanketed over his will to socialize. Given enough time, maybe that hole would grow.

Mick
walked for two or three lonely miles, following the street as it twisted and turned, before he came upon a bend in the road.

That
has to be the place
, he thought, veering left at the bend.

The house a couple up on his right
was the first hint of yellow he had seen. The shade reminded him of the paper sun on his billboard. And like his billboard, this house stuck out like a beacon against the grim backdrop the neighboring houses provided. The yellow house was well maintained, as if it had not been there during Impact, but rather gently placed there afterward from the sky above.

A large number eighty-
eight had been painted in black paint with crude brushstrokes on the front of the bottom step of a short flight of concrete steps. The number was fading and dust covered but still noticeable.
That about settles it
, he thought, looking up from the steps and back to the house. This was definitely the place.

A second-story porch hung over th
e front entryway to the house. However, only a single screen remained in place above, and it was now more hole than screen. A few of the others were strewn across the tiny fenced-in front yard, bent and broken, one folded completely in half and off to the right.

A
set of footsteps, barely noticeable under the newly blown dust, led up the steps and toward the front door.
I wonder who made those.
Did he want to find out? He should go back and get Greg. That’s what he
should
do. But he was already there, and dragging Greg back for what could be an empty house did not seem like the most efficient use of time. Was the house empty? His thoughts came and went quickly, leaving him a bit frustrated. There was only one way to find out. And he had come this far. He would need to suck it up and see what the yellow house held within its walls. He owed it to the herd to check inside. He owed it to his children.

The first step
he took was onto one of the previous footprints. His boot was much larger than whoever had come before him. That gave Mick a tiny bit of solace. At the very least he had the height advantage over some would-be attacker. Then again, it could just be a large man with small feet. It was not out of the question.

His
buddy Jake was like that: very tall with disproportionately small feet. Jake stood close to six foot four, and he had size-ten feet. Mick would give him crap about that all the time. He could not for the life of him figure out how such a large man, both in height and ever-increasing circumference, could stay upright with such tiny feet.

Ah, Jake.
He had not thought about him since the impacts. The thought brought a quick smile to his face. Mick missed his boisterous laughter and his spice for life. Jake also happened to be a drunk—a happy drunk, but a drunk nonetheless.

S
eeing the bright-yellow house coupled with his thoughts of Jake reminded Mick of the time that Jake had dressed up as Santa for a Christmas party at a bright-yellow house like this one in the South Shore. Unfortunately for Jake, and really everyone else at the party, Jake had tied one on a bit too early in the unseasonably warm day. Somehow, in Jake’s drunken stupor, he’d forgotten that Santa tended to wear pants with his big red suit. When he showed up and Mick pointed it out to him, amid cackles of delight from the other partygoers, Jake’s response had been, “I thought this suit was a bit drafty.” Mick laughed, remembering the funny times. The world could sorely use some of the laughter that his large friend used to bring.

Mick
’s next few steps brought him up onto the small wooden deck that spanned the short length of the front of the house. The deck had not fared as well as the rest of the exterior. Bulging and warped wooden boards ran the deck’s length. Protruding nails forced their way free; a few had wiggled completely out and now rested beneath the blown dust like dried earthworms in a shallow grave. The two front windows to the right of the front door had their shades drawn. Mick wished they were not. If they were open, then at least he could sneak a quick look inside without offering his safety as collateral. Now he would be forced to enter blindly to satisfy his curiosity.

The
footprints stopped at the closed front door. Against his better judgment, Mick shouldered his rifle and reached for the doorknob, pausing as he grabbed hold of its surprisingly chilly metal.

I
could still head back to the shelter.
It was not too late.

The voice inside his head begged him to listen.
As much as he wanted what was in there, if there was anything to begin with, he hesitated to take the chance. Nobody from the shelter knew where he was. And even if Greg came to find him, it would be next to impossible. The city and its suburbs were vast. And, like all other footprints before his, the dust was sure to erase Mick’s path before nightfall. He would be no more findable than an Internet connection.

Mick turned to leave.

When he did, he was face-to-face with Solomon, a mere two inches separating them.

“
Whoa!” Mick said, stumbling back in surprise. He fell backward into the door, pushing it open and tripping over the threshold into the home’s interior. “Solomon,” he said angrily after he ended up on his back. It was the situation, not Solomon, that burned him. But he was caught up in the moment. His nerves were already on edge. Why hadn’t he heard Solomon come up behind him? Over squeaky floorboards nonetheless. That bothered him. He was losing focus.

Solomon
did not speak. He walked over and picked Mick up off the floor. For a man his size, Solomon was as strong as a bear. It was a deceiving trait considering he was much shorter than Mick and had no discernible muscle mass.

Mick
rose to his feet without much of his own doing. Solomon then began to pat the dust off Mick’s clothes.

“
Thank you,” Mick said, stopping Solomon. “But I can handle that.”

Solomon backed away slowly but stayed on t
he front porch. He looked nervously down the street.

Mick
finished the job that Solomon had started and patted the new layer of dust off his clothes. He did not know why he even bothered. His pants were sure to get dusty in another minute or two. Another habit formed in his youth, he figured; one that seemed impossible to break no matter how little it mattered.

Then, out of the blue,
and again at the strangest of times, Mick thought of his father. It was of a saying his father loved to repeat, especially to someone from out of state. It worked best when they lived in a sunny state like California or Florida. He would say, “If you don’t like the weather in New England, just wait a minute.” It was never funny. And rarely did anyone laugh out of anything other than a sense of obligation. Of course, it may have been pity, too. But his father used it whenever he could. As unfunny as it was, his joke was borderline accurate. At least it used to be. Mick looked to the filthy sky. He would love to see the weather change to anything other than cold and colorless. Thankfully his father had died before the meteorites hit. He would have hated to have nobody to tell his awful jokes to.

Mick
reached out for Solomon, to grab his arm in a humanistic way, to assure him that all was well. He regretted yelling when he had. The moment had gotten the better of him. And Mick tended to feel comfort when accompanied by touch. He had always been a tactile person. And he assumed, sometimes incorrectly, as in this case, that others felt the same way.

Solomon backed away
a few steps.

Mick
held up his hands. “Okay. Fair enough,” he said. “Did you follow me here?”

Solomon nodded.

“Why?”

Solomon
said nothing. He strode past Mick, gently brushing against him as he did in the alley, and straight through the open door of the house. Mick went to stop him, to warn him of the dangers this world posed, but he did not think Solomon needed him to explain that. Solomon had survived just like the rest of them up until that point. And for all Mick knew, he’d done so on his own.

“
You sure you want to go in there?” Mick asked. But Solomon had already vanished into the darkness beyond the door’s threshold.

I guess so.

Mick cautiously followed Solomon into the house. What else was he going to do at that point? He now felt a sense of obligation to protect Solomon if need be. To the best of Mick’s knowledge, Solomon would not have even been there had Mick not asked about the rations. He felt as though he’d drawn him there. And Mick could not allow more misery to occur because of his poor decisions.

“
Solomon?” he said in as close to a whisper as he could muster. The inside of the house was dark and musty. A very fine coating of dust had settled on everything that Mick could see. Despite the dust, the house looked maintained in a way. As if it had a post-Impact cleaning service.

“
Solomon?” he said again, looking into the room to his right.
Where did he run off to?

This room was relatively clean
like the rest of the house. A large brown couch rested solidly against the wall to his left. A floral-patterned chair, with dull browns and blues, sat between the two front windows that had their blinds drawn. But it was the far wall that instantly caught his eye. Almost every inch of the wallpapered wall was plastered with pictures of varying sizes and shapes. Some of the pictures had fallen to the ground and left rectangular squares of clean, yet yellowing wallpaper behind them. All the pictures were of children, but they all had a constant variable to them: a short woman with the most genuine of smiles. In some of the pictures, she looked to be in the later parts of her life, well aged, the dark-brown hair turned white, but still with some lingering youth in her eyes. Mick figured she was the owner of the house—that, or someone had a strong affection for her.

After l
eaving the picture room, Mick passed through a narrow doorway into the kitchen.

“
Solomon?” he said again.

The kitchen was tiny and run
-down, much more disheveled than the other parts of the house he had seen. A few of the cheap white cabinet doors that lined the space above the countertop hung down by their hinges, broken and splintered, almost as if they had been torn down in a fit of rage. The shade over the tiny kitchen sink was drawn like all the others, but its cheap aluminum slats were bent and contorted in the center, allowing Mick to briefly view a messy back porch.

Mick
walked through the rest of the kitchen, which took all of a few more steps, and into the small room adjacent to it.
There you are
, Mick thought as Solomon came into view. He stood still, swaying ever so slightly as gravity appeared to play with his balance.

“
Is everything all right?” Mick asked.

Solomon nodded
, keeping his eyes trained on the floor in front of him. He then reached down and tossed the oval red-and-black area rug off to the side. There, at their feet, was a trapdoor, like something out of an old pirate movie. A large black latch rested within the carved-out circle on its surface.

“
How did you know about this, Solomon?”

Solomon
paused, still staring down at the floor. He then looked to his right and put his feet in motion, disappearing out of sight down the hall. He quickly returned with one of the pictures from the many that hung on the wall. Solomon rubbed the dust that coated the glass cover of the frame off on his belly, then handed it to Mick. The photo had the same white-haired woman in it that all the others did. She looked to be maybe in her early fifties.

“
Is this you, Solomon? In the picture with this woman?”

Solomon nodded.

The nose on the boy in the picture was unmistakably Solomon’s: thin on the bridge with wide, flaring nostrils. Mick also noticed the distinct arch to his eyebrows on the boy, maybe in his early teens at that time. He was a handsome boy. Probably about the same age in this picture as Nate and Kathryn.

“
Is this your house?” Mick asked, looking up.

“
N-n-no,” Solomon said.

“
Is this her house?” Mick said, pointing to the woman.