“Close to it, I think.”
“That’s enough to get us where we’re going. There are a few small towns like this scattered along the way once we hit the Nebraska border. Some of them have gas stations. If one of them looks safe, we can stop off and fill up. That’s
if
it looks safe. Otherwise we keep going. I’m not taking any chances.”
Carl looked up at him inquisitively. “Imagine that.
You
not taking any chances? That’s a first.”
Taylor waved a dismissive hand at his brother and then turned his attention to Tina. “What he really means is that I’ve learned more than one lesson the hard way.”
“Do the two of you bicker like this all of the time?” Tina asked.
“Situations like this bring out the best in us,” Carl said. “I’m just giving him shit and he knows it.”
“I read this book not too long ago,” Taylor said. “It was about survival. Like who lived and who died in bad situations, but mostly about
why
certain people were more likely to survive than others.”
Carl glanced at Tina, cocking his thumb toward his brother. “He reads a lot. A real bookworm.”
“Anyway, a lot of the book spent its time dealing with the ingredients of survival. How you could take the same situation and the same circumstances, and one man might die while another might come out of it. Some of the prerequisites were obvious. You know, staying calm, being a leader, setting goals, stuff like that. The part that caught my attention was the one that said having a sense of humor can be a tool for survival.”
“That’s not surprising,” Tina said. “A lot of people use humor as a coping mechanism.”
“So,” Carl said, “is this the part where we go around the room taking turns telling knock-knock jokes?”
Taylor looked at Carl sternly and then continued. “Say what you want, but you’re doing it right now without knowing it. We’ve both been doing it since we’ve been stuck in this mess.”
“Okay. Maybe. But what’s your point?”
Taylor shrugged and stared at the kerosene lamp. The flickering orange flame performed its own kind of hypnotism, lending a certain degree of peacefulness to the situation. “Sharing knowledge? I don’t know. I’m not sure I was trying to make a point. Talking to talk I guess.”
“I think it’s cool,” Tina said. “I like learning stuff like that. It seems like I have my nose crammed in school books all the time lately. It’s nice to hear something different.”
Taylor smiled at her.
Carl said, “He’s a closet geek. You wouldn’t know it because he plays Mr. Cool Guy most of the time, but when you get to know him you find out he’s a big nerd. He even used to collect comic books. Go on, tell her about the stuffed animals.”
“Shut up.”
“C’mon, tell her.”
“Stuffed animals?”
“Fine. I’ll tell her. So Taylor had this collection of stuffed animals. Different kinds of cats. Leopards, tigers, lions, panthers. You name it, and he probably had a stuffed animal to go with it.”
“I was a little kid,” Taylor said. “What kid doesn’t have stuffed animals when they’re that age?”
“When he used to go to sleep at night he’d line them up around himself in the bed. Build a fortress of stuffed animals to keep the monsters out. He
still
believes in monsters.”
“I don’t believe in them,” Taylor said. “I acknowledge that they could exist.” He turned to face Tina and smiled uneasily. “It’s kind of a superstition of mine. I used to figure if I admitted to believing in them that they would leave me alone. It’s silly, but I was afraid of the dark for a long time. An overactive imagination or something. So part of the ritual when I was a kid was to line up my stuffed animals around me on the bed. That and I’d put the thought out there to any monsters that I
believed
that they were out there. It sounds stupid now, but it worked back then.”
“I think it’s kind of cute,” Tina said. She patted him on the arm. “I had a bunch of stuffed animals, too. Dolphins mostly.”
“I haven’t even gotten to the really fucked up part yet,” Carl said.
“You just can’t leave it alone can you?”
“Don’t be a poor sport, bro. You were the one who was just saying humor is a survival mechanism. So I’m being humorous. Besides, she wants to know. Don’t you?”
“I’m hanging off the edge of my seat.”
“Right. So ask him where those stuffed animals are now?”
“Where?”
“In our parent’s attic. My mom has brought up selling them at the garage sale every year, but Taylor refuses to get rid of them. They’re all up in the attic in this big black garbage bag.”
“I’m sentimental,” Taylor said. “Thought I could pass them on to my kids some day. Assuming I ever have kids.”
Tina smiled at him. He wondered if she was just being polite. She looked so beautiful yet vulnerable sitting there on the floor.
Another hour passed. Conversation was sporadic, and after a while they grew tired of raising their voices over the pounding on the door. For brief periods, the pounding would change tempo, alternating between loud and fast to soft and slow. Were they taking turns out there?
Without proper treatment, rabies was almost always fatal. If he remembered right, there was only one case of a person surviving the disease without treatment, and even that had been a long and drawn out affair. How long could those things outside last? If the radio had it right and the disease was related to rabies, shouldn’t they start to keel over? At some point, he hoped. And he hoped it was soon.
He was tired and hungry.
“If either of you want to sleep,” he said, “now would be the time to do it. I can keep watch for a little while. We can rotate if you guys want. Take shifts.”
Tina said, “I don’t think I could sleep with all this commotion. Every time I close my eyes I see Mr. Sullivan and that squirrel.” Despite this, several minutes later she leaned her head back against the wall and closed her eyes. Whether she managed to find sleep or not, Taylor couldn’t tell, but she seemed momentarily at peace with the situation.
Carl yawned. The machete still rested across his lap and he tapped his fingers against the blade, his fingernails making faint clicking sounds against the cheap metal.
“That goes for you, too. If you want, get some sleep. You can fight it for a while, but you’ve got to do it some time. Might as well be now. If I feel myself start to drift off I’ll wake you up.”
“I’m hungrier than I am tired. We haven’t eaten anything since breakfast. That was how long ago? Sixteen hours now?”
“Something like that.”
“We could still sneak out the front.”
“And what good would that do? The only car we’ve seen so far is behind that door. At least for the time being we’re relatively safe in here. As long as their attention is back there instead of up front. If we go out there?” Taylor shrugged his shoulders. “Who knows?”
Carl stared at him wearily. The light from the kerosene lamp cast moving shadows across his face. “Who would have thought, huh? You see TV shows about stuff like this, but who knew it would actually happen? When you think about it, it’s some crazy shit.” He yawned again, this time covering his mouth with his fist. “I could understand an asteroid or another terrorist attack. But this? This isn’t your ordinary crisis. This is a cluster fuck. I keep thinking about Angie and Mom and Dad, but I’m trying to put it out of my mind for now. It could drive you nuts thinking about it like that.”
Taylor rubbed the palm of his hands along the legs of his jeans. He could envision the scene outside the door; could see the car only a few feet away, the keys in hand, and thought about how close they had gotten.
Carl went on. “Where’s the Army or the Air Force when you need them? Some guys with a little bit of firepower could turn those things to mince meat in no time.”
“Maybe they are, but I don’t think a backwoods place like this ranks very high on their list. If it’s going on everywhere then the big cities are probably getting their attention first. Get some sleep. I’m not going to be able to keep my eyes open indefinitely. At least do it for my sake.”
Carl moved the machete from his lap and put it down on the floor next to him. He lay down on the floor, bringing his knees up and using one of his arms as a pillow. He pulled his cap down, staring at the illuminated swathe of linoleum at the front of the store. He closed his eyes. “I can’t believe I’m doing this,” he said, his voice a breathy whisper. “It’s like falling asleep in the middle of a war.”
Taylor struggled to keep his eyes open. He took turns watching his brother and then Tina, and then turned his attention to the windows at the front of the store. He rubbed his eyes. He unfolded a corner of the canvas drop cloth and removed one of the water bottles. Sprayed some water onto his hand and rubbed his eyes. It helped. Not much, but it was better than nothing.
Quietly, he stood and stretched. He walked to the front of the store, coming close enough to the glass to be able to look up at the sky and see the moon and the stars. Wispy clouds were scattered sparsely throughout the sky as if they had been added there as an afterthought.
The street outside was vacant. If not for the incessant pounding, the place could have been a ghost down; each building a tombstone whose contents told the story of their owners. So easy, he thought. He wrapped his hand around the door handle. The keys were in his other hand, and he considered how easy it would be to unlock the door and make a run for it. In fact, he entertained the idea of doing just that. Wake the others and they could make a break for it. Forget the car. They were bound to find another one sooner or later.
Taylor turned on his flashlight and started down one of the aisles, more thorough in his inspection of the store’s merchandise.
His mind wandered. The pounding became nothing more than white noise, like the sound of a television or radio playing in the middle of the night.
Don’t get too comfortable,
he thought.
Shit starts to go bad the minute you forget it stinks.
In stressful situations, the mind narrows and focuses in like the zoom feature on a camera. The brain crops away superfluous information, zeroing in on a single situation at the expense of the surrounding environment. Depending on various factors, this compressed view of things can be useful or detrimental. An ability, when applied to an endgame scenario, can be the difference between death and survival. Taylor figured the odds were around fifty-fifty. Presently, he liked to think their chances were better than that. Put the three of their heads together and find a solution to the problem. That was a drastic simplification of a complex problem, but there was some relief when he contemplated it in those terms. You had to be
resourceful.
Maybe Carl hadn’t been too far off; maybe you had to be like
MacGyver
.
He was standing three feet from the store windows, staring out at the town, when he heard footsteps behind him.
“Couldn’t sleep?”
“Not really. I tried, but it’s a lost cause. I keep thinking about my dad. Whether he’s okay or not,” Tina said.
“What does your gut tell you?”
She stood next to him. Taylor thought she was a good five or six inches shorter than he was. Her eyes shiny in the dim light, and he wondered again if she would start to cry. He didn’t like to see a woman cry; had what his mother had called rescuer-syndrome, which meant he was attracted to women that were in some kind of trouble and felt the need to save them. That was, according to his mother, why all of his relationships failed. What he needed to do, she said, was to find a woman that was strong enough to stand on her own. A girl that had her shit together (his mother hadn’t used the word
shit
, but that’s what she had been getting at).