Blight 22/?
They wake late the next morning to heavy, dreary skies, and Tyler knows they aren’t going out. There’s a bite to the air, a humid chill that makes his ears ache even as he sweats as he helps move refrigerators to the garage, trying to beat the rain. Jamie is pale, his cheeks blotchy red as they get the brushed steel water-holder up on a pair of desk chairs, wrestle them over the threshold of an apartment door.
“You look like shit,” Alfonse says when they get out to the garage, maneuver their load into place with Loui’s help. “You sure you ain’t bit?” He says it with a touch of teasing, a little bit of fuck you buddy.
Jamie shakes his head. “I’m okay.”
Alfonse watches him for another moment, and then goes on with his work, trying to get a piece of aluminum gutter fitted into the gap the water will come down
The sky opens up close to noon, according to the battery-powered clock in the kitchen. They aren’t ready, but they catch what they can gushing out of the cut in the pipe, trying to direct it into the refrigerators. It’s sloppy work, wet and cold, constant splashing that soaks them to the skin.
Tyler is shaking when the rain slows to a drizzle.
“We ain’t gettin’ much more today,” Alfonse says, frustrated with the little they caught. As erratic as Dallas gets rain, they need at least a month’s water at a time, and they didn’t get near that in this storm. There was too much splash, too much overflow, too much water running down the sloped floor of the garage, wasted.
They go in, defeated, and Jamie is absolutely not-okay, feverish and trembling. Tyler gets him naked and dried off and then wrapped in as many blankets as he can put around him. There’s no hot anything. Not water or anything to drink.
“Put him in bed,” Kara tells him, “And you get in there with him. Warm him up.”
There are worse things than snuggling Jamie in the middle of the day, but Tyler sure as hell wishes the circumstances were different. He strips down to his boxers and climbs in. Kara puts another blanket over them, goes and gets a toque to put over Jamie’s wet hair.
“I’m okay,” Jamie tries to tell him.
Tyler scoffs. “Sure you are.”
=============
Tyler lies with Jamie until Jamie is warm and Tyler can’t deal with the boredom anymore. There’s hammering coming from the master bedroom, or the apartment past the master bedroom, where Loui is nailing a door to the hole in the closet wall.
Tyler helps out moving all of Jamie’s old stuff out of the closet and carries a new mattress in there. Dion starts working on the lights that’ll warm the place up some for Mikaela and the kids. They nail a quilt over the hold in the wall to stop drafts from coming in around the gaps, and then they hang a sheet horizontally over the space at waist-height to keep the warm air from rising and being wasted.
“Here,” Eduardo says, and passes in one of the smoke detectors they’d pulled down for the battery. Tyler gets a hammer and nail and hangs it just under the fabric ‘roof’.
=============
Jamie is sick. He gets that. There’s just so much that needs to be done. They can’t afford to have one of their strongest guys scratched.
Kara keeps bringing him gross red stuff in a little plastic cup though, and he sleeps. Wakes up and Ofelia has water for him, another plastic cup. It gets dark, and Tyler slips into bed with him again, a plastic cup in hand, and Jamie drinks, grimacing at the thick medicinal flavor of it.
He huddles in against Tyler’s body, so warm and lean. “You shouldn’t get sick too,” he says, but he can’t find the willpower to pull away.
============
It rains a second day, and they make a better catch on the water, get a little less than completely soaked this time.
“We’re going to need more bleach,” Alfonse says. Even at a couple teaspoons per container, they’ll run out of it before they get a sustainable clean water source.
“I’ll see what I can find when we hit the store,” Tyler promises. That’s…not something he can do right now, not alone. Not until the rain stops and Jamie is strong enough to go with him. When they stop for lunch, he looks out the window of Jamie’s apartment. He can’t see the store from there, but the dead below are worked up, a seething mass of hunger, trying to find what’s making that noise and eat it.
==========
Jamie wakes up alone, thin yellow light coming in the windows. The bed he’s laying on is the only one left in the room, a cup of water and a bottle of the red stuff beside him. He drinks the water but leaves the other
He feels…better. Light-headed and hungry, but not freezing cold anymore, not burning with fever. He wraps a blanket around his shoulder and slips his feet into a pair of fuzzy slippers by his mattress. He tucks the empty cup under his arm and pushes himself up with his free hand.
The world shifts around as he stands up, and he puts a hand to the wall to steady himself.
He’s still thirsty, so he heads for the bathroom, turns the knob and stares down at the nothing that comes out of the tap. So that’s changed while he was too fucked up to know about it. He goes back to the bedroom and stands for a long moment, listening, trying to figure where everyone has gone. His bat (not the one he gave Tyler, one he found later, in a closet with softball equipment) is by the door so he takes it in one hand, holds his blanket around his shoulders with the other. He goes through the hole in the wall, through the bedroom the women were sleeping in. Half the mattresses and pillows are gone from there too.
The dogs are in that apartment’s living room, and he stops to give pets. “Where is everybody?” he asks them, but they just jump up on him and nuzzle under his hands and lick his fingers.
He goes through the closet and into a bedroom piled high with blankets and pillows, sheets and towels. The next apartment is quiet too, full of tables and shelves from all over. Kara and Ofelia have used a dining table with a coffee table on top of it, end tables on top of those, to use all the vertical space possible.
Under the table are plastic crates labeled “flour etc,” “baking misc,” “Pasta Rice Beans.”
Neat rows of cooking oil fill this apartment’s kitchen counters. The appliances are gone and more shelves in their places, one of peanut butter, one jelly, one the maple flavored corn syrup they eat down here. The back wall of one counter is covered with cans on their sides stacked to the underside of the cabinet, the ends labeled with a weird code to show what’s in them at a glance.
Rolls of toilet paper make a tower in one corner, as high as a short-person can reach. Four bookcases are along another wall.
Jamie was never really excited about school, but he remembers a presentation, one day in May. There had been a series of photos, from one of the concentration camps, from the Holocaust. A mountain of suitcases. A room full of shoes. A pile of so many eyeglasses that he couldn’t even figure out what they were at first. Each item a life lost, a person dead.
One of the shelves here has toothpaste. Packed and stuffed to the bottom of the next shelf, some in their boxes, others squished and almost empty. Above it is toothbrushes, some of them still packed, the used ones in a big jar of purple fluid. Mouthwash. Deodorant. Dental floss. Shaving supplies. On another bookcase, a shelf of Ibuprofen. Two shelves of first aid. Bandaids. Peroxide. Too little. Not nearly enough, and the grocery store sure to be cleaned out.
Through the other open bedroom door he can see stacks of boxes, clothes and shoes. Things they’ll need. Things their owners will never need again.
This is what it looks like. The way the end of the world looks in one small building in one city. His mind can’t take it in, how many shoes, how many baseball hats there are now that’ll never be worn again. He remembers rush hour traffic and thinks how many coffee cups? How many keychains? How many cell phones?
He’s tired, and he sits down in the middle of the floor.
Kate is the one to find him there. Comes in with a box of mixed items. She freezes for just a second as she comes in, but then moves again.
He looks up, and she puts the box on the island, steps over and kneels next to him, puts her head on his shoulder.
“You see,” she says, and he nods. Doesn’t know how to deal with the loss, with the enormity of it all.
They stay there until Kara comes looking for Kate. She takes one look and comes back with Tyler.
“Jamie?” Tyler’s voice is soft, and he walks slow and careful to Jamie, crouches down next to Kate. “You guys okay?” he asks, and Jamie nods.
“I. Yeah. I woke up and you were gone.”
Tyler nods, reaches out to put the back of his hand on Jamie’s forehead. “We’re still moving stuff. Still organizing.” His hand moves to Jamie’s cheek, and he looks relieved. “You’re feeling cooler.”
Jamie swallows. Wishes he’d found another water. “Did you go already? To the store?”
Tyler shakes his head, lowers his eyes like he feels bad, guilty. “No, I. They needed a go-between. Inside team and outside, the people I brought and yours. Keeping it all on track.”
Jamie isn’t sure if he’s more proud of Tyler for picking up his slack or relieved that he hasn’t been outside. “Oh. That’s good,” he says, to both.
Kara talks soft to Kate and offers her a hand. Kate hugs Jamie’s shoulders and then takes it.
“You okay?” Tyler asks, cocking his head, frowning like he’s trying to see past Jamie’s physical condition to figure out what he’s feeling.
Jamie shakes his head, gestures around. “It’s…”
“A lot,” Tyler finishes when Jamie can’t find the words. He reaches down and takes Jamie’s arm, and together they get Jamie back on his feet.
“Come on. Let’s go back home, get you something to drink. Eduardo is working on the solar ovens. There might be warm soup later if the sun cooperates.”
It doesn’t seem fair. Doesn’t seem right to go and let himself be taken care of, when so many are beyond that slight mercy.
Jamie can’t find the strength to resist Tyler’s gentle hand, his worried eyes.
He goes, back through to his old apartment. Lets Tyler lead him back to his mattress, lets him put a glass of clean water in Jamie’s hand.
“I get it,” Tyler says, while Jamie drinks. “It comes and goes, but we all get it. We all feel it. That room. I know it would be dumb to not organize stuff, but. Yeah. It’s a lot.”
“I don’t understand,” Jamie admits. “How we got so lucky. Why we’re alive when…”
Tyler shrugs. “Who the fuck knows. But. This is a good place. You get that, right? Us? Everybody? It’s. We’re making something good.”
Jamie nods. It’s not a hard thing to believe.
“All we can do is keep going,” Tyler says, sits down next to Jamie and rests their shoulders together.
Jamie can’t think of it as honoring the dead or some sentimental bullshit like that, but. Quitting sure as hell won’t bring anybody back. Won’t make the world whole again.
“Yeah,” he agrees, and Tyler quirks a smile at him.
“Tomorrow,” Tyler says, firm. “At the earliest. For now, you’re going to stay in bed the rest of the day. If you could see how pale you are right now…”
Jamie doesn’t feel exactly sick anymore, but even his short walk has worn him out.
“Tomorrow,” he says.
Tyler eases him down onto their bed and covers him up.
“I’ll wake you up with soup later. I hope. You need anything else?”
Jamie shakes his head, his eyes already closing.
Tomorrow he’ll be stronger. Strong enough to at least fake being well enough to work.
There’s still so much left to do.
==============
“You look like shit,” Alfonse says when they get out to the garage, maneuver their load into place with Loui’s help. “You sure you ain’t bit?” He says it with a touch of teasing, a little bit of fuck you buddy.
Jamie shakes his head. “I’m okay.”
Alfonse watches him for another moment, and then goes on with his work, trying to get a piece of aluminum gutter fitted into the gap the water will come down
The sky opens up close to noon, according to the battery-powered clock in the kitchen. They aren’t ready, but they catch what they can gushing out of the cut in the pipe, trying to direct it into the refrigerators. It’s sloppy work, wet and cold, constant splashing that soaks them to the skin.
Tyler is shaking when the rain slows to a drizzle.
“We ain’t gettin’ much more today,” Alfonse says, frustrated with the little they caught. As erratic as Dallas gets rain, they need at least a month’s water at a time, and they didn’t get near that in this storm. There was too much splash, too much overflow, too much water running down the sloped floor of the garage, wasted.
They go in, defeated, and Jamie is absolutely not-okay, feverish and trembling. Tyler gets him naked and dried off and then wrapped in as many blankets as he can put around him. There’s no hot anything. Not water or anything to drink.
“Put him in bed,” Kara tells him, “And you get in there with him. Warm him up.”
There are worse things than snuggling Jamie in the middle of the day, but Tyler sure as hell wishes the circumstances were different. He strips down to his boxers and climbs in. Kara puts another blanket over them, goes and gets a toque to put over Jamie’s wet hair.
“I’m okay,” Jamie tries to tell him.
Tyler scoffs. “Sure you are.”
=============
Tyler lies with Jamie until Jamie is warm and Tyler can’t deal with the boredom anymore. There’s hammering coming from the master bedroom, or the apartment past the master bedroom, where Loui is nailing a door to the hole in the closet wall.
Tyler helps out moving all of Jamie’s old stuff out of the closet and carries a new mattress in there. Dion starts working on the lights that’ll warm the place up some for Mikaela and the kids. They nail a quilt over the hold in the wall to stop drafts from coming in around the gaps, and then they hang a sheet horizontally over the space at waist-height to keep the warm air from rising and being wasted.
“Here,” Eduardo says, and passes in one of the smoke detectors they’d pulled down for the battery. Tyler gets a hammer and nail and hangs it just under the fabric ‘roof’.
=============
Jamie is sick. He gets that. There’s just so much that needs to be done. They can’t afford to have one of their strongest guys scratched.
Kara keeps bringing him gross red stuff in a little plastic cup though, and he sleeps. Wakes up and Ofelia has water for him, another plastic cup. It gets dark, and Tyler slips into bed with him again, a plastic cup in hand, and Jamie drinks, grimacing at the thick medicinal flavor of it.
He huddles in against Tyler’s body, so warm and lean. “You shouldn’t get sick too,” he says, but he can’t find the willpower to pull away.
============
It rains a second day, and they make a better catch on the water, get a little less than completely soaked this time.
“We’re going to need more bleach,” Alfonse says. Even at a couple teaspoons per container, they’ll run out of it before they get a sustainable clean water source.
“I’ll see what I can find when we hit the store,” Tyler promises. That’s…not something he can do right now, not alone. Not until the rain stops and Jamie is strong enough to go with him. When they stop for lunch, he looks out the window of Jamie’s apartment. He can’t see the store from there, but the dead below are worked up, a seething mass of hunger, trying to find what’s making that noise and eat it.
==========
Jamie wakes up alone, thin yellow light coming in the windows. The bed he’s laying on is the only one left in the room, a cup of water and a bottle of the red stuff beside him. He drinks the water but leaves the other
He feels…better. Light-headed and hungry, but not freezing cold anymore, not burning with fever. He wraps a blanket around his shoulder and slips his feet into a pair of fuzzy slippers by his mattress. He tucks the empty cup under his arm and pushes himself up with his free hand.
The world shifts around as he stands up, and he puts a hand to the wall to steady himself.
He’s still thirsty, so he heads for the bathroom, turns the knob and stares down at the nothing that comes out of the tap. So that’s changed while he was too fucked up to know about it. He goes back to the bedroom and stands for a long moment, listening, trying to figure where everyone has gone. His bat (not the one he gave Tyler, one he found later, in a closet with softball equipment) is by the door so he takes it in one hand, holds his blanket around his shoulders with the other. He goes through the hole in the wall, through the bedroom the women were sleeping in. Half the mattresses and pillows are gone from there too.
The dogs are in that apartment’s living room, and he stops to give pets. “Where is everybody?” he asks them, but they just jump up on him and nuzzle under his hands and lick his fingers.
He goes through the closet and into a bedroom piled high with blankets and pillows, sheets and towels. The next apartment is quiet too, full of tables and shelves from all over. Kara and Ofelia have used a dining table with a coffee table on top of it, end tables on top of those, to use all the vertical space possible.
Under the table are plastic crates labeled “flour etc,” “baking misc,” “Pasta Rice Beans.”
Neat rows of cooking oil fill this apartment’s kitchen counters. The appliances are gone and more shelves in their places, one of peanut butter, one jelly, one the maple flavored corn syrup they eat down here. The back wall of one counter is covered with cans on their sides stacked to the underside of the cabinet, the ends labeled with a weird code to show what’s in them at a glance.
Rolls of toilet paper make a tower in one corner, as high as a short-person can reach. Four bookcases are along another wall.
Jamie was never really excited about school, but he remembers a presentation, one day in May. There had been a series of photos, from one of the concentration camps, from the Holocaust. A mountain of suitcases. A room full of shoes. A pile of so many eyeglasses that he couldn’t even figure out what they were at first. Each item a life lost, a person dead.
One of the shelves here has toothpaste. Packed and stuffed to the bottom of the next shelf, some in their boxes, others squished and almost empty. Above it is toothbrushes, some of them still packed, the used ones in a big jar of purple fluid. Mouthwash. Deodorant. Dental floss. Shaving supplies. On another bookcase, a shelf of Ibuprofen. Two shelves of first aid. Bandaids. Peroxide. Too little. Not nearly enough, and the grocery store sure to be cleaned out.
Through the other open bedroom door he can see stacks of boxes, clothes and shoes. Things they’ll need. Things their owners will never need again.
This is what it looks like. The way the end of the world looks in one small building in one city. His mind can’t take it in, how many shoes, how many baseball hats there are now that’ll never be worn again. He remembers rush hour traffic and thinks how many coffee cups? How many keychains? How many cell phones?
He’s tired, and he sits down in the middle of the floor.
Kate is the one to find him there. Comes in with a box of mixed items. She freezes for just a second as she comes in, but then moves again.
He looks up, and she puts the box on the island, steps over and kneels next to him, puts her head on his shoulder.
“You see,” she says, and he nods. Doesn’t know how to deal with the loss, with the enormity of it all.
They stay there until Kara comes looking for Kate. She takes one look and comes back with Tyler.
“Jamie?” Tyler’s voice is soft, and he walks slow and careful to Jamie, crouches down next to Kate. “You guys okay?” he asks, and Jamie nods.
“I. Yeah. I woke up and you were gone.”
Tyler nods, reaches out to put the back of his hand on Jamie’s forehead. “We’re still moving stuff. Still organizing.” His hand moves to Jamie’s cheek, and he looks relieved. “You’re feeling cooler.”
Jamie swallows. Wishes he’d found another water. “Did you go already? To the store?”
Tyler shakes his head, lowers his eyes like he feels bad, guilty. “No, I. They needed a go-between. Inside team and outside, the people I brought and yours. Keeping it all on track.”
Jamie isn’t sure if he’s more proud of Tyler for picking up his slack or relieved that he hasn’t been outside. “Oh. That’s good,” he says, to both.
Kara talks soft to Kate and offers her a hand. Kate hugs Jamie’s shoulders and then takes it.
“You okay?” Tyler asks, cocking his head, frowning like he’s trying to see past Jamie’s physical condition to figure out what he’s feeling.
Jamie shakes his head, gestures around. “It’s…”
“A lot,” Tyler finishes when Jamie can’t find the words. He reaches down and takes Jamie’s arm, and together they get Jamie back on his feet.
“Come on. Let’s go back home, get you something to drink. Eduardo is working on the solar ovens. There might be warm soup later if the sun cooperates.”
It doesn’t seem fair. Doesn’t seem right to go and let himself be taken care of, when so many are beyond that slight mercy.
Jamie can’t find the strength to resist Tyler’s gentle hand, his worried eyes.
He goes, back through to his old apartment. Lets Tyler lead him back to his mattress, lets him put a glass of clean water in Jamie’s hand.
“I get it,” Tyler says, while Jamie drinks. “It comes and goes, but we all get it. We all feel it. That room. I know it would be dumb to not organize stuff, but. Yeah. It’s a lot.”
“I don’t understand,” Jamie admits. “How we got so lucky. Why we’re alive when…”
Tyler shrugs. “Who the fuck knows. But. This is a good place. You get that, right? Us? Everybody? It’s. We’re making something good.”
Jamie nods. It’s not a hard thing to believe.
“All we can do is keep going,” Tyler says, sits down next to Jamie and rests their shoulders together.
Jamie can’t think of it as honoring the dead or some sentimental bullshit like that, but. Quitting sure as hell won’t bring anybody back. Won’t make the world whole again.
“Yeah,” he agrees, and Tyler quirks a smile at him.
“Tomorrow,” Tyler says, firm. “At the earliest. For now, you’re going to stay in bed the rest of the day. If you could see how pale you are right now…”
Jamie doesn’t feel exactly sick anymore, but even his short walk has worn him out.
“Tomorrow,” he says.
Tyler eases him down onto their bed and covers him up.
“I’ll wake you up with soup later. I hope. You need anything else?”
Jamie shakes his head, his eyes already closing.
Tomorrow he’ll be stronger. Strong enough to at least fake being well enough to work.
There’s still so much left to do.
==============