[fic] from a great height, rain down [brendon/spencer, r]
from a great height, rain down
Brendon/Spencer. R. 31,493 words.
Warning: Violence, the death of billions, various disturbing and upsetting situations, zebras, some stuff that’ll bother emetophobes. Just about what you’d expect from the apocalypse.
Endless thanks to narceus for being an epic beta and saving the cat.
I listened to a bunch of stuff while working on this. If you're interested, you can download the soundtrack.
Brendon looks around, guilty-eyed, before picking up the bell and smashing it through the glass countertop. With his fingers wrapped tight around it, the bell doesn't even ring. There's a convenient hole in the glass now that Brendon reaches through, gingerly grabbing part of the strap as he pulls the pair of goggles back up through the hole.
"It's like playing Operation," he says. The glass is sharp-edged and has broken into large pieces. Cracks splinter through the rest of the countertop. He ties the goggles around his neck quickly before tapping at the rest of the glass so it falls into the display case.
He considers the other objects in the case, and scoops up a couple of medals, pinning them carefully onto his shirt. He's already got an old World War II style flight helmet on, Soviet in origin, and the leather flaps cover his ears. He's clipped a canteen onto his belt, and has a good solid pair of leather boots on. Hopefully they'll last a long while. He's got a good knife, and a cute little multi-tool he picked out, and a bedroll all packed nicely into a big canvas backpack he found.
The shadows are getting longer, twisted around backwards. He hears something crunching through the gravel out back of the store, and drops to the ground so he won't be seen through the windows. Whatever it is out there keeps walking. He lies there, eyes closed and listening. It sounds like whatever it is has four legs, but it's big, so maybe a horse or deer. He stays down anyway, until the sound has faded out into nothing. He gets back up and looks around.
He's not sure what else he'll need. Probably he can get by with just this. He picks up a bomber jacket, though, feeling jaunty, and pulls it on, testing the fit. It's nice and warm, and probably unnecessary in June, but he doesn't take it off. He wishes there were a mirror somewhere in the store.
The goggles fit snugly around his eyes and give everything a slight greenish cast. He tightens the knot on the old cotton strap before tying it again.
Brendon looks around one more time and then hefts the backpack up onto his shoulders. He feels brave, like an explorer.
He's about to leave and go back to the basement he's been hiding out in, but he turns, takes one last look around. He walks back over to the cash register and reaches out, very gently, and presses the cashier's eyelids shut.
-
Brendon's pretty sure he's the last to leave. He hasn't seen anyone else who's able to move since Tuesday. His watch says it's Sunday now. The Lord's Day. He should be resting. It's ten miles to the next town. Fifty to the city. He'll just follow the highway, because he doesn't trust a car not to break down.
Brendon eats an apple and a can of beans that he heats up over a fire he's set up right in the middle of the street. Out here in the middle of the street, sitting on the asphalt, the only thing that could catch fire is Brendon himself, and Brendon knows better. He remembers, from elementary school, how he's supposed to stop, drop and roll.
He goes back to the basement, which belongs to his next-door neighbors and has a big steel door, and clumps down the stairs in his brand-new boots. It's Sunday, so he sits there by candlelight and plays Solitaire, then he reads to himself from the Old Testament, and then he goes to sleep.
He wakes up to his cat meowing insistently at him, so he yawns and sits up, scratching behind the cat’s ears.
His grandparents never bothered getting rid of their old terrier’s collar and leash after the dog died, so he takes both of those and buckles the collar around his cat’s neck. This is one of the very last things he does before leaving, even after flipping off all the light switches. The power's been off for days, but just in case it comes back, he doesn't want to waste electricity.
"Colonel Jiffy," Brendon says solemnly, holding the cat's head so it's forced to look at him. "I want you to listen to me, soldier. You're coming with me. If I die, you go on without me. You hear me? I said do you hear me?"
Colonel Jiffy mewls plaintively, before twisting his head to bite at Brendon's wrist. "Ah, ah!" Brendon bops him in the nose. "Oh, no you don't, Mister. Come along, now, let's go to the big city."
-
Brendon reaches the next town a little after noon on Monday, if his watch is telling the truth. It's empty, but he takes care to put the empty tin of his breakfast into a recycling bin, once he finds one. He hasn't seen anyone, but he doesn't want to throw trash around a stranger's town. He cleans up a little - there's some litter on the streets. No one is outside.
"Hello," he shouts a few times. "Is anyone there? Is there anybody out there?"
He doesn't get an answer. He hears some rustling from time to time, but all he ever sees is squirrels and rabbits.
He sits down on someone's front porch, kicking off to let the porch swing sway gently from its chains. They squeak, and Brendon thinks about finding some WD-40, for when the owners come back.
He gets up after a few minutes, and ties Colonel Jiffy's leash to the front porch. The cat strains against it, and tries to twist his way out of the collar. "Shh, shh," Brendon says. "Come on, Colonel, what would you do without me? We're in this together. Wait for me here. Let me know if you see anybody."
The cat meows long and loud, scraping its head against the railing. Brendon crouches down and scratches at the base of his tail before turning around to go through the house. There are dirty dishes in the sink still, so Brendon washes those. Water's still running here, at least.
The gas isn't, though, so Brendon builds a fire in the fireplace. He gets some dry twigs from outside to help start it, and just uses the logs the owners left there. They'll burn a while. He boils water over the fire, and cooks himself some pasta sitting on this anonymous family's living room floor. Rather than sit there waiting for the water to boil, Brendon hops up and goes to untie Colonel Jiffy. He figures the cat deserves some time off the leash, and lets him off only once he's sure the doors are closed.
Then it's back to waiting for his food. There's no butter for the pasta, but he borrows some seasoning from the cabinets. A little basil, he's sure, won't be missed too badly. While he's eating, he pens a little note to whoever lives here - I'm sorry for burning the wood in your fireplace, but I wanted someplace inside to cook lunch for myself. I used some of your seasonings, too; please forgive me for this transgression. I hope you don't mind terribly. He scribbles down his name and address, and offers to pay them back for what he's taken, then cleans up after himself and leaves.
-
There are big dark clouds on the horizon. Colonel Jiffy has finally gotten used to the leash, and is leading the way down the empty two-lane highway. The only people Brendon has seen on the road have been dead in cars pulled over by the roadside; he's closed their eyes and gone through their wallets to find out their names. Maybe when he gets to the city, he can go to Temple and baptize them all. There's other people left, Brendon knows, even though he hasn't seen any yet. A lot of his friends left for the city when it started. He’s been told the hospital there is really good. Brendon's never had to go to the hospital, not out here or back home. He doesn't have any frame of reference.
Brendon thinks he should have gotten a tent, maybe. He has a big blue tarp, which he figures he can toss over some big sticks or something, but a real tent would make things easier.
The city isn't too much farther, he knows. It's a long way downhill. He'll make it by tomorrow afternoon, if it's not still raining. It's getting dark now, though, clouds hiding the sunset, so he stops.
He manages to get the tarp held up with a stick he jabs into the ground right in front of a tree trunk, and sets his bedroll out after tying Colonel Jiffy to the tree. He opens up a tin of cat food for the Colonel, and eats a can of peaches and some white bread for himself. He doesn't want to cook tonight, because he cooked for lunch and thinks one hot meal a day's about as much as he needs.
Brendon and his family used to go camping a lot, either up north or out in the desert, but they usually had a real tent. They'd go fishing and catch wild hares, too, but Brendon's vegetarian now. He's glad for the other things he learned, though. There's some poison ivy not far from where he's set up, for example. He wonders if cats are allergic to it too, but he's not going to risk it, so he keeps Colonel Jiffy's leash shorter than he would have otherwise.
-
Brendon wakes up warm and dry in the early morning, staring a dead mouse in the face. Colonel Jiffy is sitting there licking his paws clean, looking smug. He'd slipped out of his collar in the night, and Brendon shakes his head. "Come on, Colonel, don't be like that."
The cat tilts its head to the side, staring at him.
"You know what I mean," Brendon says. He puts the collar back on, which Colonel Jiffy seems resigned to by now.
The sky is grey this morning, the clouds still heavy on the horizon. The air is warm, and Brendon's walking with the wind at his back. He keeps walking, knowing the city is hidden down in a valley and that it won't come into sight for a while. He's alright with that.
A stray dog comes sniffing around, growling at Colonel Jiffy, and Brendon scares it off with the stick he'd used to hold up the tarp. He's keeping the stick in case he needs it again and can't find another one. It makes a nice walking stick.
He's got a list fifty names long by mid-afternoon. There's something strange in the air. He opens his nostrils up wide, and looks down at Colonel Jiffy. The Colonel is getting a little ornery at having to walk so much, so Brendon picks him up and carries him for an hour or so.
The asphalt is hard under his feet, so he spends a while walking in the dirt along the edge of the road.
Brendon sings old songs to himself to pass the time. He’s tired, and looking forward to getting into town so he can rest for a while. Hopefully the people in town won’t mind taking on another stranger.
He sets Colonel Jiffy down again and lets the cat lead the way for a little while.
Brendon’s not sure how long he’s been walking by the time he crests the final hill overlooking the city.
The clouds hanging so thick and heavy are squatting just above the city, getting blown slowly eastward.
The city is burning.
All Brendon can smell is smoke. Fires lick at random buildings, and the old church is already a charred wreck.
Down on one of the main roads, though, he sees a truck still moving. The city may be burning, but it's still alive. Brendon knew it would be. "Keep close to me, Colonel Jiffy," he says, and begins the long, long walk down the hill and into town, through the abandoned outskirts.
He stops, staring, in front of one yard with a wrought-iron fence. The gate is swinging loosely in the wind, squeaking a little like something out of a horror movie. The path to the door is lined in flowers. There's an apple tree out front, too, with a toy wagon and shovel resting beneath it.
Brendon stands there, staring, his hands in his pockets. The two iron spikes on each side of the gate are topped by eyeless heads.
Brendon's not sure coming to the city was such a good idea.
He puts his goggles on again because the smoke - just the smoke, just the smoke - is making his eyes water, and feels bad he doesn't have anything for Colonel Jiffy.
At least he knows there have to be people alive to have done that. He doesn't want to meet them. He came looking for other people, and he'll keep doing that, but he's going to be careful.
As he walks further down the road, he feels eyes watching him. Out of the corner of his eye he catches movement behind curtains at one house, but he leaves them alone. They probably think he's. He doesn't know what they think. He thinks they're scared, though, probably.
Brendon's just glad he's got his knife.
-
Once it starts getting dark, he heads into an open house. The first house he enters, he accidentally wakes up a raccoon that's been rooting through the pantry; he leaves that place alone. He doesn't want anyone to blame him for what the raccoon did.
The next house smells of death, so he gives it a wide berth. He stops at a little yellow house with white shutters and a white picket fence. The back door is unlocked. Once inside, he checks around, Colonel Jiffy following close at his heels, and makes sure no one's here. There's a note on the table, parent to child, saying that Dad's driven up to Washington to see what he can find out and that if they stop by and he's not back yet, they should head on up to Grandma's place.
Brendon doesn't think he wants to go to Washington.
He eats dinner cold, taking some fruit that's just starting to go off and some stale biscuits. There's cat food in the pantry that he gives to Colonel Jiffy, before writing an addendum to the note the parents left. It's dark, but he doesn't want to turn any lights on. Just in case.
He heads down to the basement and closes the door before turning on a flashlight he found in the kitchen, and heads down the creaking steps to the old sofa sitting in one corner. He curls up there, and with Colonel Jiffy curled up next to him, falls asleep quickly.
He hears a few cars go by on the street above, and at one point late in the night he's woken by the sound of a semi truck rolling past.
-
He wakes up later than planned. There's a light rain falling outside that he doesn't feel like walking in, so he explores the house a little more. He leaves scrapbooks and photo albums alone, doesn't read diaries or letters. He respects this family's privacy, wherever they are. The kids are off at college somewhere down south, judging from all the university paraphernalia in their rooms. Brendon thought most schools were out by now, but maybe some colleges are different. He's pretty sure that the spring semester is already over at the school he's going to next fall, though.
The rain keeps up all day. Brendon eats cold Pop-Tarts for lunch and breakfast, and falls asleep before eating anything like dinner.
The next day, he starts walking again.
Brendon passes a few convenience stores because of shattered glass and trash littering the streets in front of them. So far, he’s only seen two other people, who have ducked around corners and out of sight. He hasn’t called out or tried to follow. That they don’t trust him isn’t surprising, because Brendon doesn’t trust them either.
He managed to find a few good cans of food - peaches, pineapple, a lone can of mango - and a couple cereal boxes. He’s been reaching into the box with his hands as he walks, enjoying the crinkle of plastic as he crunches loudly on Froot Loops. The city is louder than the towns up in the mountains, with the crackle of fires and occasional shouting that, so far, has always been a few blocks away. The smell here is a lot worse, the smoke combined with bodies at last beginning to rot.
Once, he hears gunshots a block or two away, and hides in an electronics store. The TVs and video games are left mostly untouched, the glass not even broken though the door is unlocked. He has to write down the names of a few people in the back - Brendon isn’t going out of his way to collect names anymore, because there’s too many for him alone to carry. There’s so many, he thinks maybe God will understand if he can’t do this alone.
Now, walking down the central street of the city, Colonel Jiffy wending a serpentine path before him, Brendon is singing. He’s singing an improvised marching tune, not with any words, just imitating the instruments and how he thinks the melody should sound. A few times he drops down to harmonize even though there’s no one else to sing the melody.
Because of his own voice, he doesn’t hear the car come up behind him until the horn honks, once, loudly. Brendon jumps to the side, to get out of the way, only the car’s slowed to a stop. Colonel Jiffy growls menacingly at it, the fur on his back raised and tail puffed into an angry brush.
The car is dark green, only two doors; the backseat, though minimal, is piled up with what looks like food. The guy in it looks to be about Brendon’s age, maybe a few years older despite the pale pink hoodie and unicorn t-shirt. He looks really serious, but he’s not driving on. He’s just sitting there in his car, staring at Brendon. Brendon stares back.
Then Brendon pulls up his goggles so they rest on his forehead and waves, for lack of anything better to do. He smiles, just in case, and hopes he won’t get run over or shot.
The guy rolls down the window. “Hey, do you know how to get to New York?” he asks.
“Uh, you just take I-81 north, then get onto -“
“No, no,” the dude says. “The interstates are no good. Do you know where I can get a map?”
“Uhm,” Brendon says. “I have one.”
“Can I see it?”
“You’re not going to … kill me and steal my food or anything, are you?” Brendon asks, shoving another nervous handful of cereal into his mouth.
“No,” the guy says. “So can I see your map? I want to figure out what state I’m in. I think I’m lost.”
“This is Virginia, but I don’t really want to be in the middle of the street right now, having this conversation,” Brendon says, looking around. There’s someone watching from a window across the street.
“Fair enough,” the guy says. “Get in.”
“What? No,” Brendon says. “Dude, no, I’m not just - let’s find an empty house. Neutral ground. Okay?”
“Sure,” the guy says agreeably, getting out of his car.
“Not right here, though - hey, hey, can you - drive back to the edge of town. Western edge.”
“Yeah, I guess?”
“Can we - there’s a place.”
“Okay.”
Brendon says, “I’ll show you how to get there. And you can give me - something. What’s a good trade? Do you have anything?”
“I can give you a bottle of Dasani.”
“Water?” Brendon asks. “Right?”
“Yeah.” The guy raises his eyebrows.
“You never know,” Brendon says. He gets in the car, picking up Colonel Jiffy and carrying the cat in his lap on the way back. The Colonel’s always been tolerant of car rides. He closes his eyes until he figures they’re close, then says, “Here, this driveway.”
“Was this your house?” the guy asks, because they haven’t talked at all yet.
“Was it - no. I stayed here for two nights, though. The basement’s pretty nice.” Brendon gets out, hoisting the garage door open. The guy closes it again once he’s out. The noise of the metal hitting the ground is louder than Brendon likes, but probably not as loud as his singing earlier so he can’t complain.
They sit down at the dinner table. The guy peers curiously at the note, and at the little addendum Brendon wrote, before looking up and grinning. “Did you seriously apologize for taking these people’s stuff?”
“Well, yeah, dude,” Brendon says. “Who knows when that dude’s coming back. And what if his kids show up and are all pissed there was a robber?”
“I really don’t think -“ the guy starts, then laughs. “Seriously, so many places have been looted already. I mean, most people are still working on the grocery stores and shit, but I’m sure this isn’t the only home that’s been broken into, and no way is it going to be the last.”
“That doesn’t make it right,” Brendon says. “And I’m not - it’s not breaking in. The door was unlocked. I was just using what I needed and keeping safe from, from the weather and from wild animals. There are bears here.”
“Bears,” the guy says, shaking his head incredulously. “Shit.”
“I’m serious. Black bears. They’re meaner in the fall, though. Still don’t want to run into a mother and her cubs or whatever.”
“Right,” the guy says. “So you’re Brendon. I’m Spencer. Nice to meet you, I guess.”
“Right, yeah,” Brendon says. He reaches out to shake Spencer’s hand. “I’ve had Colonel Jiffy to keep me company the last few days, but you know.” He let the Colonel off his leash a little while ago, and he’s not sure where in the house the cat is just now.
“Yeah,” Spencer says. “Fine, whatever. So, right, New York’s up here, and we’re - somewhere around here?” he asks, stabbing a finger at the map.
Brendon shakes his head. “Oh, no, you’re further west than that. Roanoke’s like an hour northeast of here.”
“Okay, so I can take …”
Brendon says, “Alright, see, you’re on this road already. This is the one that goes through town. There was - I was looking around earlier, though, there’s a big accident blocking the road for a ways, and some of the buildings there were still kind of burning, so you’ll want to go around.” He looks up. “Why are you going to New York?”
“My friend,” Spencer says. “Ryan was there. He - like, before things - I was talking to him on the phone, he was there for the summer doing an internship with some magazine or whatever. Summer after freshman year and the guy’s got a fucking internship in New York.” Spencer smiles fondly, shaking his head. “But, no, okay, so he was. Yeah. He was there. And I was talking to him, and he’d been helping out at some, like, hospital near where he lived. All the hospitals were overcrowded, because of. Well. I guess you know. But yeah, so he was … he was there, and I just - I’m going to find him.”
“Huh,” Brendon says. “Okay.”
“He’s my best friend,” Spencer explains.
“No, no, I totally - yeah, man, you’ve gotta find him. So where are you from? Like, Raleigh or something?”
“Vegas,” Spencer says.
Brendon whistles. “Shit.”
“My car gets good mileage.”
Brendon laughs. “I’ll say.”
Spencer adds, “Plus I’ve been siphoning gas from other cars, but you know.”
“Right, yeah, so you. You drove from. Las Vegas.”
“Yeah.”
“Nevada.”
“Wow,” Brendon says. “You’re really blessed. It’s amazing you’ve made it this far.”
“Mm.” Spencer nods slightly, making a noncommittal sound.
Brendon says, “There’s a rest area not too far north of here; they’ve probably got a national highway map we could borrow. Why don’t you have one?”
“The interstates were okay most of the way,” Spencer says. “I looked it up before I left. But there’s - a lot are blocked off. There’s a lot of - things are fucked up.”
“Yeah.”
“So yeah,” Spencer says. “I’m going to find Ryan, then we’re going to head to … he knows some guys in Jersey or something, or he did. So if they’re still alive, me and him are probably going to hook up with that family and just. Take it from there, I guess. I don’t know. First I’ve got to find Ryan, though.”
“Right,” Brendon says, hitting his fist against his palm. “We’re gonna find Ryan.”
Spencer stares at him. He blinks slowly, like if he opens his eyes too fast maybe Brendon’ll be gone. “You’re coming with me?”
“Well,” Brendon says. “I don’t have anything else to do.”
“I’ve only got so much food, man,” Spencer says. “And it’s like -“
“There’s still stuff all over the place. There are houses to borrow from.”
Spencer rolls his eyes. “Will you be able to pay back that many people?”
“God willing.” Brendon shrugs, easy. He figures he can do some work, travel around a bit if he has to, to repay all the people who’re helping him on his way. One kind act to repay another. It might take a while, once he starts school.
Spencer lowers his head, resting his elbows on the table and rubbing at his eyes with the heels of his palms. He says, “You know how to drive?”
“I can drive stick,” Brendon says. “Not sure about automatic.”
“Yeah, this car has manual.”
Brendon tilts his head to the side, remembering. “Nice car.”
“I took it,” Spencer says. Brendon frowns at him, so he goes on. “My car broke down, and I couldn’t very well walk across the desert.”
“Right,” Brendon nods. “Yeah, no, okay. As long as. As long as you know whose it is.”
“Mm.” Spencer shrugs. “That stuff’s probably in the glove compartment. Look, I - this is probably the stupidest - would you be willing to drive? I haven’t slept for like two days.”
“Oh hey, hey,” Brendon says. “You should sleep. The basement here is really nice. Cozy, no rats, you know. I’ll cook you dinner.”
Spencer stares at him, brow creasing in some combination of thought and consternation. Brendon’s pretty sure he’s being sized up, judged for usefulness. He sits back in his chair and smiles benignly at Spencer, who sighs heavily.
“It’s nice to see another person,” Brendon says. “One who isn’t, you know, shooting at me or hiding. Or sticking heads on gates.”
“Yeah, I saw that,” Spencer says. “What the fuck?”
“I don’t know.” Brendon tries to smile. “I don’t know if I want to. Like, when I understand what would make somebody do that - I don’t - yeah.”
Spencer makes a noncommittal noise, going quiet in thought.
Brendon waits a few minutes for him to say something else, and when he doesn’t, gets up to start cooking. Somehow the gas is still on here, practically a miracle. The little whoosh when the fire comes on makes Spencer jump, startled, and he topples over with his chair.
Brendon grins. “You okay there?”
“Yeah,” Spencer says. “Yeah, no, that - I’m fine. The stove works?”
“Mmhm,” Brendon says.
Spencer rights the chair, and sits back down, folding his hands on the table. “I’ve been living off, like, Doritos and pretzels. Shit.”
“You’ve been up for two days straight eating junk food.”
“And Red Bull,” Spencer adds. Brendon finally notices that his hands are jittering a little. Maybe they weren’t, earlier.
“Hmm.”
Spencer falls quiet again while Brendon cooks, and by the time dinner - just spaghetti and some canned vegetables - is ready, he’s asleep with his face on the table.
Brendon tests the oven, and it turns out that it works, so he sits and eats his meal while Spencer’s keeps warm in the low heat. Colonel Jiffy comes begging, so Brendon gives him a couple peas, which seem to placate him.
After a short while, he gets up to open a tin of cat food and put it in a dish on the floor. He goes back to the pantry, and manages to find a tin of condensed milk, a little of which he pours out into a saucer. The rest, he sort of puzzles over before deciding to improvise some biscuits. He makes a big batch, periodically licking little bits of dough off the tip of his finger to make sure it tastes all right.
He’s just finishing shaping the dough into biscuits on the cookie tray when Spencer wakes up disoriented.
Brendon says, “So you know you shouldn’t just be asking random people here for directions.”
Spencer says something sharp under his breath, reaching for his pocket as he stands, shoving the chair back with the backs of his legs.
Brendon says, “No, no, hey, hey, calm down, chill, I’m not - I’m just letting you know, okay? There’s a lot of - people aren’t really talking to each other anymore. And there’s. Just. A lot of selfish people in the world, especially now.”
Spencer stays silent, still on edge.
“Like, I wouldn’t have, but it’s lucky that you didn’t get shot and have your car stolen by somebody or whatever.”
“Somebody stole my first car,” Spencer says. “While I was at a gas station. They had a service center, though, so. Keys. You know.”
“Huh.”
“Yeah,” Spencer says. “Don’t try anything, okay?”
Brendon shrugs. “Sure. I don’t know what I’d try anyway. Dinner?”
Spencer frowns at the empty plate across from where he’s sitting.
“I put yours in the oven.” Brendon smiles, trying to put Spencer at something a little closer to ease. “And see, now that you’re up again, I can put the biscuits in.”
“Thanks, Martha Stewart,” Spencer says, looking baffled as Brendon sets the plate in front of him. He stares at the plate for a moment, then frowns, then looks up hopefully. “Can I, uh, have a fork?”
“Yeah, oh, sorry,” Brendon says, getting silverware to set out next to Spencer’s plate. “Sorry, of course. I’ll get you a napkin, too.”
“Thanks,” Spencer says, still awestruck.
“Not at all.”
Spencer looks almost reverent as he digs in, closing his eyes as he savors the first bite. “Oh my god, real food,” he says. “Seriously, thank you so much.”
“The vegetables would have been too much for one person anyway,” Brendon says. “And, you know. Waste not, want not.”
“Right.”
-
While Spencer eats, Brendon picks up his pack from next to the door, and goes downstairs to tidy up a little more - not that he left a mess or anything - and to lay out his bedroll. He lays out a scrappy looking towel next to it, for Colonel Jiffy to sleep on. The only light he’s got down here is from the one tiny window and from the flashlight, which he sets down on the steps so it’ll illuminate the room and he won’t have it tying up his hands.
He stands there for a few moments, arms folded as he surveys his work, and then thinks to check something. He crouches down in front of the couch, lifting up the cushions and groping around a little until he feels a metal bar and mesh. He shrugs, stripping off the bedding he’d put on the couch, removing the cushions. Then he realizes he has to move his bedroll out of the way, and Colonel Jiffy’s bed too, but he does, and pulls out the sofa bed. It’s made already, so he just tosses the throw pillows on it, as well as the pillow he took from upstairs.
He sort of wishes he’d known the bed was here beforehand, but he supposes Spencer deserves it a little more than he does. He’s pretty sure Spencer isn’t used to roughing it. Probably hasn’t even gone camping before. Brendon reminds himself to ask, later, just for small talk.
He heads back upstairs. Spencer’s about done eating, poking balefully at some broccoli with his fork.
“Hey, come on,” Brendon says, laughing a little. “You never know when the next time you’ll get broccoli is.”
“I don’t think canned broccoli’s going to be a hot commodity.”
“You never know,” Brendon says. “I hear some people really like it.”
“Those people can have it.”
“Thank you.”
Spencer is startled into laughter. “Okay. You’re welcome.”
Brendon hears Colonel Jiffy meowing somewhere else in the house, so he goes to find him, and ends up playing with the cat until it starts getting dark. He goes back to the kitchen, where Spencer’s now just sitting with his face in his hands, leaning against the table. Brendon wonders if he’s fallen back asleep, he’s so still, but he catches the reflection of light against the white of Spencer’s eyes. Spencer just stares at him.
“We should go downstairs,” Brendon says.
“Why?”
“Safer,” Brendon shrugs. “You know. So no one knows there’s people here and they don’t come in and try to rob us.”
“What if they come in because they think the place is unoccupied?”
Brendon shrugs. “We don’t want to have any lights on up here, at least.”
“Electricity isn’t even working, dumbass, we can’t have fucking lights on.”
Brendon bites his lip but stays friendly. “There’s these things made of wax called candles, maybe you’ve heard of them?” He looks down at his hand, realizing he’s still got the flashlight looped around his wrist. He takes it in hand, the nylon strap digging into his skin a little. “And I hear these make for some mighty fine light, too.”
“Right, right,” Spencer says. “Okay. Okay. Sorry. I just. I’m stressed.”
“Right,” Brendon agrees. “You miss your friend. Don’t worry; we’ll find him.”
“Okay.”
“It’s not too far. I’ll drive, and you can read the map, and we’ll get there by tomorrow and find your friend.”
“Okay.”
Brendon says, “Now, come on. I pulled the bed out downstairs - they’ve got a freaking sofa bed in the basement, this family is awesome. Just so you know. Like, I didn’t even figure it out until today, though? I slept here two nights and I didn’t know there was a sofa bed.”
“Huh.”
“Yeah, I know, right?”
-
Spencer says, “You’re okay with the floor?”
“Mmhm.”
“There’s a lot of room,” Spencer says. “If you want a mattress to sleep on. There’s room in the bed.”
“I’m fine.”
“Okay,” Spencer says, and his breathing evens out soon after. Brendon stays awake a while, petting Colonel Jiffy, who just lies there and purrs contentedly.
-
In the morning, Brendon gets up and makes oatmeal. He uses powdered milk to make it with, because he’s never liked oatmeal made with just water and the milk in the refrigerator is long since spoiled in the early June heat. He chops up some dried fruit to go in it and adds a little sugar, then stands staring at the pot a while wondering if Spencer even likes sugar in his oatmeal. Maybe Spencer likes oatmeal made with water. Maybe he doesn’t like dried peaches and would rather have raisins.
Maybe - Brendon will just offer to remake it, if he has to. Colonel Jiffy comes trotting up the steps, because Brendon left the basement door open a crack. The cat winds around his ankles while he works, carefully slicing apples to go along with the oatmeal. He finds a jar of peanut butter, too, and puts that in a little dish so they can dip apples in it.
Spencer, when he comes upstairs maybe half an hour later, laughs incredulously at the food spread out on the table. “You’re not trying to fatten me up for some crazy cannibalistic death cult, are you?”
Brendon stares at him.
“Are you?”
“No! No. Just - what?”
“Joke,” Spencer says. “It was a joke. I wasn’t being serious.”
“Okay.”
“Are there cannibal death cults?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.” Brendon pauses, then grins. “Not yet, anyway.”
“What?”
“Joke.”
“That’s kind of possible though. You know. I mean, once the food runs out.”
“There’s a lot of food,” Brendon says. “And it’s not hard to grow things.”
“A lot of people don’t know how,” Spencer says.
“They’ll have to learn. Or they’ll die.”
“Or eat each other,” Spencer says.
“I don’t think people are going to start eating each other,” Brendon says. “Humans aren’t - we’re above that. There’s a lot of food.”
“And not a lot of people,” Spencer says, nodding.
“Most of them just left.”
“Left?”
“A lot of the - like, some people got sick, I guess, but a lot of people left, so they’re still okay. I just don’t know where they are.”
Spencer stares at him.
“Just because they’re not here doesn’t mean they’re not fine.”
Spencer keeps staring.
“Like. My grandparents left. They went to. To the hospital. I don’t know where it is, though. I haven’t found it yet. I was going to find them.”
Spencer’s mouth narrows. He keeps not saying anything.
Brendon says, “And they’re okay, because - because there’s doctors here, at the hospital, so even if. So Grandma’s fine, because they’ve got medicine. And I know there were a lot of people to help, but - maybe they took some of them to Roanoke, because it’s bigger and they can help more people there.” Brendon says, “So they’re. They’re okay, they’re just not here.”
“Okay,” Spencer says.
“Okay.” Brendon nods. “So once everything gets sorted out again, I’ll go find them. Once things are okay again.”
“Once things are okay again,” Spencer repeats. He starts laughing. “Jesus.”
“I start school in the fall,” Brendon says, nodding.
“Oh, good, that’s great,” Spencer says. “Yeah, awesome, you have fun with that.”
“I will.”
“Good luck with that. I mean, you can go to school, I guess, but I really - well, good luck finding anyone there to teach you other than books.”
“It’ll … before the - I didn’t hear anything about Pennsylvania in the news,” Brendon says, sitting down at the table. He’s going to enjoy his breakfast.
“Okay.”
“So it’ll be alright.”
“Okay,” Spencer says, and starts eating.
Brendon eats a few spoonfuls of oatmeal, and scoops up some peanut butter on an apple slice. It crunches pleasantly sweet in his mouth. When he’s finished chewing, he says, “I hope you don’t - if you want, I can remake the oatmeal. If you don’t like peaches in it. Or if you want something else in it. Or whatever.”
“It’s fine,” Spencer says. “It’s really good. Thanks. Think you could brew some coffee?”
“Oh, I didn’t think of - I don’t drink caffeine,” Brendon says. “LDS.”
Spencer lets out a heavy breath - he seems prone to sighing - and rubs at his eyes with his fingers this time. He’s not bothering to put peanut butter on his apples.
“Are you allergic?” Brendon asks.
“To what? Mormons?”
“No. To peanuts.”
“Huh? Oh, no, no,” Spencer says. “Just, last time I had peanut butter and apple slices, I think I was in like third grade.”
“Oh.” Brendon says, “Well, I think they’re good.”
Spencer shrugs, and gets some peanut butter on his next apple slice. He chews contemplatively. “Yeah, okay. You’re right.”
“Told you so.” Brendon grins.
-
Brendon says, “Uh, okay, there’s a pile of dead chickens in the road.”
“Oh, great,” Spencer says. “Great.”
“I bet they thought it was bird flu. So they killed the birds.”
“Maybe,” Spencer says. “That’s stupid as fuck. If it was bird flu, by the time it was jumping from person to person it doesn’t matter what the fuck your birds are up to.”
“Yeah,” Brendon says. “I guess. I don’t know a lot about plagues.”
“Not even the Biblical ones?”
“Oh, I know those,” Brendon says. “But this isn’t boils or frogs or first born sons, so you know, I’m pretty much in the dark here.” He shrugs, grinning over at Spencer, before putting the car in reverse and turning around. They’re the only ones on the road, so he’s got room to do whatever he wants, so long as he avoids the occasional stopped car. The road here is clear enough. There’s a steep drop-off at the edge of the road, or else he would have just driven around.
“Okay, so we’re going to have to backtrack like three miles and go … we can take, here, this highway,” Spencer says, pointing at the map. Brendon brakes and leans over to look. “Oh, and it intersects with the road we were going for anyway.”
“Sweet,” Brendon says. “Alright. Let’s roll. Again.”
“Hold up, let me make sure of this,” Spencer says, examining the map.
Brendon catches movement in the rearview. Just a squirrel running down the road. He looks back at the map.
Then the rear window is spattered by a hail of shotgun pellets. Some break through the safety glass, dusting the backs of the seats, and some just leave the window darkened with lead. Colonel Jiffy lets out a yowl and bolts into the front seat.
“Fuck!” Spencer shouts, and Brendon slams on the gas. The car handles well, even burdened down with food, and Brendon whips it around a corner without ever seeing who shot at them. Colonel Jiffy is crouched at Spencer’s feet, so he has to shift his legs to avoid the hissing cat.
“Probably the chicken guy,” Brendon says, once they’re a ways away.
“Fuck,” Spencer says again, emphatically. He sits in the passenger seat clutching the door with one hand and the map with the other, breathing heavily. He puts his feet up on the dash. Colonel Jiffy keeps growling, at nothing in particular anymore.
“So hey, here’s our exit.”
“Great,” Spencer says. “Just great.”
“Mmhm,” Brendon says serenely. He pulls over so he can lean over and make sure Colonel Jiffy’s alright. “Hey, little guy, you didn’t get shot. You’re okay. It’s okay.”
Colonel Jiffy just glares up at him balefully.
“Yeah, okay, you just chill out there,” Brendon says. “Don’t kill Spencer.”
“I don’t think a cat could kill me anyway,” Spencer says. “I’m resilient.”
“That’s comforting.”
Brendon sits back up and checks the road, like he expects there to be traffic to deal with. There isn’t. He starts driving again.
A while later, Spencer says, “Maybe he thought we’d steal his chickens.”
“His dead chickens.”
“Hey, dead chicken tastes good,” Spencer says.
“Yum, plague chicken.”
Spencer says, “How do you know the person who killed those chickens was a dude? How do you even know it was one person?”
“I don’t,” Brendon says. “Girls don’t like to shoot people as much, though.”
“Girls can shoot people just fine. Especially when they’re paranoid chicken-killers.”
“Maybe,” Brendon says. “Whatever. We’re fine. We might, uh. Want a new car.”
“This one works fine,” Spencer says. “You’re saying we should steal from someone else?”
“It’s not stealing,” Brendon says.
“Only if we find a car that handles better than this,” Spencer says.
“Or if this one gets too shot up. By chicken-killers.”
“Okay.”
Brendon rubs at the back of his head, right below where his flight helmet stops, and his fingers come away bloody. “Oh, huh.”
“Fuck,” Spencer says again. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, are you - shit, there’s not even a hospital to - shit. Thank you for. Everything.”
“What?” Brendon asks, cocking his head to the side. He brakes again, stopping the car so he can think.
“You’re fucking shot, man. If you don’t make it -”
“Yeah, I got hit by like one stray shotgun pellet.”
“You got shot by a fucking shotgun.”
“Uh, yeah,” Brendon says. “And the vice president shot someone in the face with one. That guy was okay.”
“What?”
“I’m not going to die,” Brendon says, “But if you’ve got some alcohol or something -“
“Yeah. Stop the car all the way. Put the emergency brake on, I’m gonna - I’ve got first aid shit in the trunk.”
“Oh, sweet, you did think ahead. Actually, I’ve got some in my pack, but yeah, let’s use yours.”
“Okay.”
Brendon gets out and sits on the asphalt and doesn’t even wince as Spencer rubs down the area - per Brendon’s instructions - with a cotton ball soaked in alcohol. Brendon takes his helmet off and sits there examining it while Spencer pulls out loose hair and lint and the little bits of lead with a pair of tweezers. Spencer’s paranoid enough that he puts some Neosporin on after he’s done getting everything out. It takes a while for Spencer to wrap some gauze around Brendon’s head so it’s not covering an eye or falling off, but once he’s done fussing, Brendon puts his helmet back on.
Brendon brushes his pants off, and shoves his hands in the pockets of the bomber jacket. He grins. “I look pretty tough, huh?”
“Yeah,” Spencer says. “Totally bad-ass.”
Spencer drives for a while, saying that Brendon needs time to rest after getting shot. Brendon naps in the passenger seat, waking up periodically to ask how far they’ve gone. It’s never as far as he imagines in his dreams.
Tired of the quiet and unable to get back to sleep, Brendon starts singing under his breath.
Spencer says, “What?”
“Nothing,” Brendon says. “I was singing.”
“Do it louder,” Spencer says. “There’s nothing on the radio.”
Brendon says, “Really?” and turns on the radio, tuning it through dead air. He finally finds one lone distant station on the AM side broadcasting Amazing Grace, and he and Spencer sit quiet listening. It loops three times without ever announcing a location, and so Brendon keeps going through stations and finding only a soft static hiss.
He turns the radio off. “Okay.”
“Okay,” Spencer says.
Brendon’s quiet again for a while.
“Don’t feel like singing?” Spencer asks.
“Not really,” Brendon says. “It was just too quiet. But everything’s too quiet now, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” Spencer says. “I guess so. We should see if we can find some CDs somewhere, later.”
“Okay.”
“Good,” Spencer says. “Cool, okay, we’ve got another plan. We’ll find some music before we get to New York, then we’ll find Ryan.”
“Yeah.” Brendon drops his voice very, very quiet. “I want to see the ocean.”
“You’ve never seen the ocean?” Spencer asks, incredulous.
“Not the Atlantic,” Brendon says. “Maybe the Pacific when I was little, but it’s been years and years.”
“Huh,” Spencer says. “Why’s it always - there’s always, in stories, when someone who hasn’t seen the ocean. When they get there.”
“What?”
“That’s when they die.”
“I won’t,” Brendon says. “We can find Ryan first. I don’t have to see the ocean.”
“Cool, alright.” Spencer nods, looking out ahead at the road.
Brendon toes his shoes off and pulls his knees up to his chest, toes curling over the edge of the seat. His legs are pressed up against the glove compartment, so he moves the seat back a little bit and puts one foot up on the dash. He wraps his arms around his knees as best he can.
“I should have brought some CDs with me,” Spencer says. “I had a bunch in my car but I didn’t think to grab them.”
“It’s okay,” Brendon says. “Hey, maybe.” He opens up the center console, and finds a few CDs in there. “Okay, okay, hey, this is good. We’ve got some Peter Gabriel. Some Mariah Carey. Some Britney - screw that,” he says, and rolls down the window to throw that CD out the window. The CD case flies out behind them and then hits the pavement, bouncing away down the road and shattering into hundreds of sharp plastic pieces.
“Not desperate enough for Britney?”
“We can find more CDs later,” Brendon says. “Okay, and - oh, Disney!” He looks up. “Are you down with Disney?”
“Sure, go for it,” Spencer says, so Brendon slips the CD in and turns the radio on and the volume up and sings along. From the backseat, Colonel Jiffy lends some out of tune yowls.
Between songs, Brendon says, “I wish I could roll down the window. You know, stick my head out and sing.”
“Why?”
“Just because.”
“So do it,” Spencer says. By this point, they’re talking over the next song.
“If somebody hears. They’ll know we’re here.”
“We’ve got a car,” Spencer says. “We can get away.”
“They could too. What if they drove us off the road and took our stuff?”
“I guess it’s possible,” Spencer says. “So don’t put the window down, then.”
“Okay.”
-
They skirt around Roanoke and stay a hundred miles west of DC, just in case. Brendon’s paranoid about the cities, and Spencer doesn’t fault him for it. They have to stop for fuel in the late afternoon, getting it from a Hummer parked near a grocery store. Spencer’s got a big gas can and a rubber tube and Brendon doesn’t watch how he does it because he’s already taken too much. He doesn’t want to know how to take anything else that isn’t his.
“We should stop soon,” Brendon says.
“We’ve got headlights. We can just drive on all night. It won’t be that much longer. We can switch off.”
“I don’t think it’s a good idea.”
“Maybe not,” Spencer says. “But what if - in the time we waste stopping -“
“Ryan won’t die just because you go to sleep,” Brendon says. “We can at least get some groceries, then decide if we want to go any further or whatever.”
“Okay.”
Brendon opens his mouth to start to stay something, but falls silent instead, hands in his pockets. Brendon ties Colonel Jiffy up to a railing outside the store.
The store smells foul because of rotting milk and meat and eggs and vegetables. There are flies everywhere, and other insects that crawl and writhe underfoot. Brendon skips the baking supplies aisle entirely because of an insect-ridden body slumped against a shelf, leeching black blood into the bags of flour it’s resting against. Judging by the spatters of blood down the aisle, and an exploded bag of sugar a little further down, the person was probably shot. Down the next aisle, he grabs a few cans of soup and stuffs them into his coat pockets.
“I don’t know how much more I can carry,” he says.
“We could get a bag,” Spencer says. “To put more food in. If you want to pick stuff.”
“That’s a good idea,” Brendon says, so they get a couple of bags and go through the grocery store bickering over what’ll be good and if they’ll be able to make it on the road.
Brendon picks up a few boxes of cereal to put in his bag.
-
Brendon says, “That place wasn’t even anywhere close to out of food.”
“Yeah,” Spencer says.
“So why’d that - why’d they shoot that person?”
“Because they could.”
“Awesome,” Brendon says. “Great, that’s good. Same reason the chicken guy shot at us, I guess, right?”
Spencer snorts. “Yeah.”
Brendon says, “God help us all.”
Spencer leans his head against the window, nose to the glass and eyes closed. His eyelashes flutter a little. Brendon doesn’t watch for too long because he’s focusing on the road.
Spencer says, “Thanks for not killing me.”
“Same to you,” Brendon says. “I appreciate it.”
“No problem.”
Brendon says, “I’m not starting college in the fall, am I.” It’s not a question, so Spencer doesn’t answer. “So we’ll just go find your friend, then head to Jersey.”
“We can go to Jersey Shore at some point if you want.” Spencer pauses. “Or just any beach, I guess.”
Brendon grins. “You want me dead now?”
“No, no!” Spencer says. “No. I’m just saying. You said earlier that you wanted to see the ocean, so I figured.”
“Yeah.” Brendon says, “Sure. I see how it is.”
“Stop it.”
“Okay.” Brendon says, “Sorry.”
Spencer says, “Look, it’s not like - I’m not even sure if Ryan is. I mean, I’m not sure where he is.”
“New York is pretty big, right?”
“You could say that,” Spencer says. “Pretty big. Sure.”
“We probably won’t be able to ask anyone where he is, either.”
“Probably not.”
Brendon keeps driving, even after night has fallen fully over the country. Except their headlights, the only light is from the moon and stars, so it’s slow going on the twisting country road. He has to slow down even further to let deer cross the road. He has to stop for a family of rabbits, once.
He sees a gravel driveway, and pulls off into it.
Spencer says, “What are you doing?”
“We should stop a while,” Brendon says.
There are lights on at the house. Brendon knocks, and keeps one hand in his pocket, on his knife.
“Well, hi there.” The woman who answers the door is old. “Are you from the cable company? You were supposed to come a week ago.”
Brendon laughs. “Uh, no ma’am. Sorry. I don’t think they’ll be coming.”
“Why not? That’s terrible service. I called them a week and a half ago. My antenna isn’t even working; I can’t watch the networks. What am I supposed to do?”
“Uhm,” Brendon says. “I don’t know. Do you - me and my friend, back at the car. We’re driving to New York, but it’s real late. Do you think we could stay the night?”
The lady clicks her tongue, shaking her head. “Should have planned ahead. You passed a town full of hotels just forty miles ago.”
“Little late to turn back now,” Brendon says, forcing a smile. “We’ll be happy to help out around the house, if you need. I can cook.”
“Oh, I just finished dinner,” the woman says. “You caught me washing up, actually.”
“I can help out with the dishes.”
The lady shrugs, and steps aside, gesturing into her small house.
Brendon turns, waving at Spencer, who turns off the car. The gravel is loud under his feet without the sound of the engine to mask his steps.
“I’m Brendon, by the way,” Brendon says, holding out his hand. “This is Spencer.”
The woman shakes both their hands, nodding. “Good to meet you.”
-
Spencer says, “We should change your bandages.”
“It’s only been, like, five hours or something.”
“More like eight. They’re pretty bloody.”
“Oh,” Brendon says. “Then yeah, okay.”
Spencer asks the old woman for a wet cloth and some alcohol, because he forgot theirs in the car; she agrees, grumbling all the way, but doesn’t ask why they need any of it. Then he heads back to the guest room she offered to the two of them.
Brendon takes off his helmet and goggles again, then slips out of his jacket, too, and the button-down he’s been wearing, so he’s down to just jeans and a bloodied white t-shirt. There’s one small bed and a cot she rolled in next to it, nowhere really good for the two of them to sit.
He sits down on the floor, and Spencer sits behind him, legs tucked under him.
“Dressed awfully warm for June, huh,” Spencer says, as he carefully unwraps the old bandages and folds them up.
“I guess,” Brendon says with a shrug. “It looks cool.”
“Oh, right,” Spencer says. “Right, of course. Good answer.” He wipes the injury - it’s not really a bullet wound, technically - clean again. Brendon’s hair is matted with blood and the skin around it looks pink and tender. He touches at it, lightly, with just his fingertips. “Does that hurt?”
“Yes.”
“Oh. Sorry.” Spencer’s touch is light as he finishes cleaning and re-bandaging it. “There.”
“Thanks,” Brendon says.
“Hopefully it’s not getting infected,” Spencer says.
Brendon just shrugs. “Well. Not a lot to be done if it is, I guess, except to pray.”
“Yeah,” Spencer says.
part two
Brendon/Spencer. R. 31,493 words.
Warning: Violence, the death of billions, various disturbing and upsetting situations, zebras, some stuff that’ll bother emetophobes. Just about what you’d expect from the apocalypse.
Endless thanks to narceus for being an epic beta and saving the cat.
I listened to a bunch of stuff while working on this. If you're interested, you can download the soundtrack.
Brendon looks around, guilty-eyed, before picking up the bell and smashing it through the glass countertop. With his fingers wrapped tight around it, the bell doesn't even ring. There's a convenient hole in the glass now that Brendon reaches through, gingerly grabbing part of the strap as he pulls the pair of goggles back up through the hole.
"It's like playing Operation," he says. The glass is sharp-edged and has broken into large pieces. Cracks splinter through the rest of the countertop. He ties the goggles around his neck quickly before tapping at the rest of the glass so it falls into the display case.
He considers the other objects in the case, and scoops up a couple of medals, pinning them carefully onto his shirt. He's already got an old World War II style flight helmet on, Soviet in origin, and the leather flaps cover his ears. He's clipped a canteen onto his belt, and has a good solid pair of leather boots on. Hopefully they'll last a long while. He's got a good knife, and a cute little multi-tool he picked out, and a bedroll all packed nicely into a big canvas backpack he found.
The shadows are getting longer, twisted around backwards. He hears something crunching through the gravel out back of the store, and drops to the ground so he won't be seen through the windows. Whatever it is out there keeps walking. He lies there, eyes closed and listening. It sounds like whatever it is has four legs, but it's big, so maybe a horse or deer. He stays down anyway, until the sound has faded out into nothing. He gets back up and looks around.
He's not sure what else he'll need. Probably he can get by with just this. He picks up a bomber jacket, though, feeling jaunty, and pulls it on, testing the fit. It's nice and warm, and probably unnecessary in June, but he doesn't take it off. He wishes there were a mirror somewhere in the store.
The goggles fit snugly around his eyes and give everything a slight greenish cast. He tightens the knot on the old cotton strap before tying it again.
Brendon looks around one more time and then hefts the backpack up onto his shoulders. He feels brave, like an explorer.
He's about to leave and go back to the basement he's been hiding out in, but he turns, takes one last look around. He walks back over to the cash register and reaches out, very gently, and presses the cashier's eyelids shut.
-
Brendon's pretty sure he's the last to leave. He hasn't seen anyone else who's able to move since Tuesday. His watch says it's Sunday now. The Lord's Day. He should be resting. It's ten miles to the next town. Fifty to the city. He'll just follow the highway, because he doesn't trust a car not to break down.
Brendon eats an apple and a can of beans that he heats up over a fire he's set up right in the middle of the street. Out here in the middle of the street, sitting on the asphalt, the only thing that could catch fire is Brendon himself, and Brendon knows better. He remembers, from elementary school, how he's supposed to stop, drop and roll.
He goes back to the basement, which belongs to his next-door neighbors and has a big steel door, and clumps down the stairs in his brand-new boots. It's Sunday, so he sits there by candlelight and plays Solitaire, then he reads to himself from the Old Testament, and then he goes to sleep.
He wakes up to his cat meowing insistently at him, so he yawns and sits up, scratching behind the cat’s ears.
His grandparents never bothered getting rid of their old terrier’s collar and leash after the dog died, so he takes both of those and buckles the collar around his cat’s neck. This is one of the very last things he does before leaving, even after flipping off all the light switches. The power's been off for days, but just in case it comes back, he doesn't want to waste electricity.
"Colonel Jiffy," Brendon says solemnly, holding the cat's head so it's forced to look at him. "I want you to listen to me, soldier. You're coming with me. If I die, you go on without me. You hear me? I said do you hear me?"
Colonel Jiffy mewls plaintively, before twisting his head to bite at Brendon's wrist. "Ah, ah!" Brendon bops him in the nose. "Oh, no you don't, Mister. Come along, now, let's go to the big city."
-
Brendon reaches the next town a little after noon on Monday, if his watch is telling the truth. It's empty, but he takes care to put the empty tin of his breakfast into a recycling bin, once he finds one. He hasn't seen anyone, but he doesn't want to throw trash around a stranger's town. He cleans up a little - there's some litter on the streets. No one is outside.
"Hello," he shouts a few times. "Is anyone there? Is there anybody out there?"
He doesn't get an answer. He hears some rustling from time to time, but all he ever sees is squirrels and rabbits.
He sits down on someone's front porch, kicking off to let the porch swing sway gently from its chains. They squeak, and Brendon thinks about finding some WD-40, for when the owners come back.
He gets up after a few minutes, and ties Colonel Jiffy's leash to the front porch. The cat strains against it, and tries to twist his way out of the collar. "Shh, shh," Brendon says. "Come on, Colonel, what would you do without me? We're in this together. Wait for me here. Let me know if you see anybody."
The cat meows long and loud, scraping its head against the railing. Brendon crouches down and scratches at the base of his tail before turning around to go through the house. There are dirty dishes in the sink still, so Brendon washes those. Water's still running here, at least.
The gas isn't, though, so Brendon builds a fire in the fireplace. He gets some dry twigs from outside to help start it, and just uses the logs the owners left there. They'll burn a while. He boils water over the fire, and cooks himself some pasta sitting on this anonymous family's living room floor. Rather than sit there waiting for the water to boil, Brendon hops up and goes to untie Colonel Jiffy. He figures the cat deserves some time off the leash, and lets him off only once he's sure the doors are closed.
Then it's back to waiting for his food. There's no butter for the pasta, but he borrows some seasoning from the cabinets. A little basil, he's sure, won't be missed too badly. While he's eating, he pens a little note to whoever lives here - I'm sorry for burning the wood in your fireplace, but I wanted someplace inside to cook lunch for myself. I used some of your seasonings, too; please forgive me for this transgression. I hope you don't mind terribly. He scribbles down his name and address, and offers to pay them back for what he's taken, then cleans up after himself and leaves.
-
There are big dark clouds on the horizon. Colonel Jiffy has finally gotten used to the leash, and is leading the way down the empty two-lane highway. The only people Brendon has seen on the road have been dead in cars pulled over by the roadside; he's closed their eyes and gone through their wallets to find out their names. Maybe when he gets to the city, he can go to Temple and baptize them all. There's other people left, Brendon knows, even though he hasn't seen any yet. A lot of his friends left for the city when it started. He’s been told the hospital there is really good. Brendon's never had to go to the hospital, not out here or back home. He doesn't have any frame of reference.
Brendon thinks he should have gotten a tent, maybe. He has a big blue tarp, which he figures he can toss over some big sticks or something, but a real tent would make things easier.
The city isn't too much farther, he knows. It's a long way downhill. He'll make it by tomorrow afternoon, if it's not still raining. It's getting dark now, though, clouds hiding the sunset, so he stops.
He manages to get the tarp held up with a stick he jabs into the ground right in front of a tree trunk, and sets his bedroll out after tying Colonel Jiffy to the tree. He opens up a tin of cat food for the Colonel, and eats a can of peaches and some white bread for himself. He doesn't want to cook tonight, because he cooked for lunch and thinks one hot meal a day's about as much as he needs.
Brendon and his family used to go camping a lot, either up north or out in the desert, but they usually had a real tent. They'd go fishing and catch wild hares, too, but Brendon's vegetarian now. He's glad for the other things he learned, though. There's some poison ivy not far from where he's set up, for example. He wonders if cats are allergic to it too, but he's not going to risk it, so he keeps Colonel Jiffy's leash shorter than he would have otherwise.
-
Brendon wakes up warm and dry in the early morning, staring a dead mouse in the face. Colonel Jiffy is sitting there licking his paws clean, looking smug. He'd slipped out of his collar in the night, and Brendon shakes his head. "Come on, Colonel, don't be like that."
The cat tilts its head to the side, staring at him.
"You know what I mean," Brendon says. He puts the collar back on, which Colonel Jiffy seems resigned to by now.
The sky is grey this morning, the clouds still heavy on the horizon. The air is warm, and Brendon's walking with the wind at his back. He keeps walking, knowing the city is hidden down in a valley and that it won't come into sight for a while. He's alright with that.
A stray dog comes sniffing around, growling at Colonel Jiffy, and Brendon scares it off with the stick he'd used to hold up the tarp. He's keeping the stick in case he needs it again and can't find another one. It makes a nice walking stick.
He's got a list fifty names long by mid-afternoon. There's something strange in the air. He opens his nostrils up wide, and looks down at Colonel Jiffy. The Colonel is getting a little ornery at having to walk so much, so Brendon picks him up and carries him for an hour or so.
The asphalt is hard under his feet, so he spends a while walking in the dirt along the edge of the road.
Brendon sings old songs to himself to pass the time. He’s tired, and looking forward to getting into town so he can rest for a while. Hopefully the people in town won’t mind taking on another stranger.
He sets Colonel Jiffy down again and lets the cat lead the way for a little while.
Brendon’s not sure how long he’s been walking by the time he crests the final hill overlooking the city.
The clouds hanging so thick and heavy are squatting just above the city, getting blown slowly eastward.
The city is burning.
All Brendon can smell is smoke. Fires lick at random buildings, and the old church is already a charred wreck.
Down on one of the main roads, though, he sees a truck still moving. The city may be burning, but it's still alive. Brendon knew it would be. "Keep close to me, Colonel Jiffy," he says, and begins the long, long walk down the hill and into town, through the abandoned outskirts.
He stops, staring, in front of one yard with a wrought-iron fence. The gate is swinging loosely in the wind, squeaking a little like something out of a horror movie. The path to the door is lined in flowers. There's an apple tree out front, too, with a toy wagon and shovel resting beneath it.
Brendon stands there, staring, his hands in his pockets. The two iron spikes on each side of the gate are topped by eyeless heads.
Brendon's not sure coming to the city was such a good idea.
He puts his goggles on again because the smoke - just the smoke, just the smoke - is making his eyes water, and feels bad he doesn't have anything for Colonel Jiffy.
At least he knows there have to be people alive to have done that. He doesn't want to meet them. He came looking for other people, and he'll keep doing that, but he's going to be careful.
As he walks further down the road, he feels eyes watching him. Out of the corner of his eye he catches movement behind curtains at one house, but he leaves them alone. They probably think he's. He doesn't know what they think. He thinks they're scared, though, probably.
Brendon's just glad he's got his knife.
-
Once it starts getting dark, he heads into an open house. The first house he enters, he accidentally wakes up a raccoon that's been rooting through the pantry; he leaves that place alone. He doesn't want anyone to blame him for what the raccoon did.
The next house smells of death, so he gives it a wide berth. He stops at a little yellow house with white shutters and a white picket fence. The back door is unlocked. Once inside, he checks around, Colonel Jiffy following close at his heels, and makes sure no one's here. There's a note on the table, parent to child, saying that Dad's driven up to Washington to see what he can find out and that if they stop by and he's not back yet, they should head on up to Grandma's place.
Brendon doesn't think he wants to go to Washington.
He eats dinner cold, taking some fruit that's just starting to go off and some stale biscuits. There's cat food in the pantry that he gives to Colonel Jiffy, before writing an addendum to the note the parents left. It's dark, but he doesn't want to turn any lights on. Just in case.
He heads down to the basement and closes the door before turning on a flashlight he found in the kitchen, and heads down the creaking steps to the old sofa sitting in one corner. He curls up there, and with Colonel Jiffy curled up next to him, falls asleep quickly.
He hears a few cars go by on the street above, and at one point late in the night he's woken by the sound of a semi truck rolling past.
-
He wakes up later than planned. There's a light rain falling outside that he doesn't feel like walking in, so he explores the house a little more. He leaves scrapbooks and photo albums alone, doesn't read diaries or letters. He respects this family's privacy, wherever they are. The kids are off at college somewhere down south, judging from all the university paraphernalia in their rooms. Brendon thought most schools were out by now, but maybe some colleges are different. He's pretty sure that the spring semester is already over at the school he's going to next fall, though.
The rain keeps up all day. Brendon eats cold Pop-Tarts for lunch and breakfast, and falls asleep before eating anything like dinner.
The next day, he starts walking again.
Brendon passes a few convenience stores because of shattered glass and trash littering the streets in front of them. So far, he’s only seen two other people, who have ducked around corners and out of sight. He hasn’t called out or tried to follow. That they don’t trust him isn’t surprising, because Brendon doesn’t trust them either.
He managed to find a few good cans of food - peaches, pineapple, a lone can of mango - and a couple cereal boxes. He’s been reaching into the box with his hands as he walks, enjoying the crinkle of plastic as he crunches loudly on Froot Loops. The city is louder than the towns up in the mountains, with the crackle of fires and occasional shouting that, so far, has always been a few blocks away. The smell here is a lot worse, the smoke combined with bodies at last beginning to rot.
Once, he hears gunshots a block or two away, and hides in an electronics store. The TVs and video games are left mostly untouched, the glass not even broken though the door is unlocked. He has to write down the names of a few people in the back - Brendon isn’t going out of his way to collect names anymore, because there’s too many for him alone to carry. There’s so many, he thinks maybe God will understand if he can’t do this alone.
Now, walking down the central street of the city, Colonel Jiffy wending a serpentine path before him, Brendon is singing. He’s singing an improvised marching tune, not with any words, just imitating the instruments and how he thinks the melody should sound. A few times he drops down to harmonize even though there’s no one else to sing the melody.
Because of his own voice, he doesn’t hear the car come up behind him until the horn honks, once, loudly. Brendon jumps to the side, to get out of the way, only the car’s slowed to a stop. Colonel Jiffy growls menacingly at it, the fur on his back raised and tail puffed into an angry brush.
The car is dark green, only two doors; the backseat, though minimal, is piled up with what looks like food. The guy in it looks to be about Brendon’s age, maybe a few years older despite the pale pink hoodie and unicorn t-shirt. He looks really serious, but he’s not driving on. He’s just sitting there in his car, staring at Brendon. Brendon stares back.
Then Brendon pulls up his goggles so they rest on his forehead and waves, for lack of anything better to do. He smiles, just in case, and hopes he won’t get run over or shot.
The guy rolls down the window. “Hey, do you know how to get to New York?” he asks.
“Uh, you just take I-81 north, then get onto -“
“No, no,” the dude says. “The interstates are no good. Do you know where I can get a map?”
“Uhm,” Brendon says. “I have one.”
“Can I see it?”
“You’re not going to … kill me and steal my food or anything, are you?” Brendon asks, shoving another nervous handful of cereal into his mouth.
“No,” the guy says. “So can I see your map? I want to figure out what state I’m in. I think I’m lost.”
“This is Virginia, but I don’t really want to be in the middle of the street right now, having this conversation,” Brendon says, looking around. There’s someone watching from a window across the street.
“Fair enough,” the guy says. “Get in.”
“What? No,” Brendon says. “Dude, no, I’m not just - let’s find an empty house. Neutral ground. Okay?”
“Sure,” the guy says agreeably, getting out of his car.
“Not right here, though - hey, hey, can you - drive back to the edge of town. Western edge.”
“Yeah, I guess?”
“Can we - there’s a place.”
“Okay.”
Brendon says, “I’ll show you how to get there. And you can give me - something. What’s a good trade? Do you have anything?”
“I can give you a bottle of Dasani.”
“Water?” Brendon asks. “Right?”
“Yeah.” The guy raises his eyebrows.
“You never know,” Brendon says. He gets in the car, picking up Colonel Jiffy and carrying the cat in his lap on the way back. The Colonel’s always been tolerant of car rides. He closes his eyes until he figures they’re close, then says, “Here, this driveway.”
“Was this your house?” the guy asks, because they haven’t talked at all yet.
“Was it - no. I stayed here for two nights, though. The basement’s pretty nice.” Brendon gets out, hoisting the garage door open. The guy closes it again once he’s out. The noise of the metal hitting the ground is louder than Brendon likes, but probably not as loud as his singing earlier so he can’t complain.
They sit down at the dinner table. The guy peers curiously at the note, and at the little addendum Brendon wrote, before looking up and grinning. “Did you seriously apologize for taking these people’s stuff?”
“Well, yeah, dude,” Brendon says. “Who knows when that dude’s coming back. And what if his kids show up and are all pissed there was a robber?”
“I really don’t think -“ the guy starts, then laughs. “Seriously, so many places have been looted already. I mean, most people are still working on the grocery stores and shit, but I’m sure this isn’t the only home that’s been broken into, and no way is it going to be the last.”
“That doesn’t make it right,” Brendon says. “And I’m not - it’s not breaking in. The door was unlocked. I was just using what I needed and keeping safe from, from the weather and from wild animals. There are bears here.”
“Bears,” the guy says, shaking his head incredulously. “Shit.”
“I’m serious. Black bears. They’re meaner in the fall, though. Still don’t want to run into a mother and her cubs or whatever.”
“Right,” the guy says. “So you’re Brendon. I’m Spencer. Nice to meet you, I guess.”
“Right, yeah,” Brendon says. He reaches out to shake Spencer’s hand. “I’ve had Colonel Jiffy to keep me company the last few days, but you know.” He let the Colonel off his leash a little while ago, and he’s not sure where in the house the cat is just now.
“Yeah,” Spencer says. “Fine, whatever. So, right, New York’s up here, and we’re - somewhere around here?” he asks, stabbing a finger at the map.
Brendon shakes his head. “Oh, no, you’re further west than that. Roanoke’s like an hour northeast of here.”
“Okay, so I can take …”
Brendon says, “Alright, see, you’re on this road already. This is the one that goes through town. There was - I was looking around earlier, though, there’s a big accident blocking the road for a ways, and some of the buildings there were still kind of burning, so you’ll want to go around.” He looks up. “Why are you going to New York?”
“My friend,” Spencer says. “Ryan was there. He - like, before things - I was talking to him on the phone, he was there for the summer doing an internship with some magazine or whatever. Summer after freshman year and the guy’s got a fucking internship in New York.” Spencer smiles fondly, shaking his head. “But, no, okay, so he was. Yeah. He was there. And I was talking to him, and he’d been helping out at some, like, hospital near where he lived. All the hospitals were overcrowded, because of. Well. I guess you know. But yeah, so he was … he was there, and I just - I’m going to find him.”
“Huh,” Brendon says. “Okay.”
“He’s my best friend,” Spencer explains.
“No, no, I totally - yeah, man, you’ve gotta find him. So where are you from? Like, Raleigh or something?”
“Vegas,” Spencer says.
Brendon whistles. “Shit.”
“My car gets good mileage.”
Brendon laughs. “I’ll say.”
Spencer adds, “Plus I’ve been siphoning gas from other cars, but you know.”
“Right, yeah, so you. You drove from. Las Vegas.”
“Yeah.”
“Nevada.”
“Wow,” Brendon says. “You’re really blessed. It’s amazing you’ve made it this far.”
“Mm.” Spencer nods slightly, making a noncommittal sound.
Brendon says, “There’s a rest area not too far north of here; they’ve probably got a national highway map we could borrow. Why don’t you have one?”
“The interstates were okay most of the way,” Spencer says. “I looked it up before I left. But there’s - a lot are blocked off. There’s a lot of - things are fucked up.”
“Yeah.”
“So yeah,” Spencer says. “I’m going to find Ryan, then we’re going to head to … he knows some guys in Jersey or something, or he did. So if they’re still alive, me and him are probably going to hook up with that family and just. Take it from there, I guess. I don’t know. First I’ve got to find Ryan, though.”
“Right,” Brendon says, hitting his fist against his palm. “We’re gonna find Ryan.”
Spencer stares at him. He blinks slowly, like if he opens his eyes too fast maybe Brendon’ll be gone. “You’re coming with me?”
“Well,” Brendon says. “I don’t have anything else to do.”
“I’ve only got so much food, man,” Spencer says. “And it’s like -“
“There’s still stuff all over the place. There are houses to borrow from.”
Spencer rolls his eyes. “Will you be able to pay back that many people?”
“God willing.” Brendon shrugs, easy. He figures he can do some work, travel around a bit if he has to, to repay all the people who’re helping him on his way. One kind act to repay another. It might take a while, once he starts school.
Spencer lowers his head, resting his elbows on the table and rubbing at his eyes with the heels of his palms. He says, “You know how to drive?”
“I can drive stick,” Brendon says. “Not sure about automatic.”
“Yeah, this car has manual.”
Brendon tilts his head to the side, remembering. “Nice car.”
“I took it,” Spencer says. Brendon frowns at him, so he goes on. “My car broke down, and I couldn’t very well walk across the desert.”
“Right,” Brendon nods. “Yeah, no, okay. As long as. As long as you know whose it is.”
“Mm.” Spencer shrugs. “That stuff’s probably in the glove compartment. Look, I - this is probably the stupidest - would you be willing to drive? I haven’t slept for like two days.”
“Oh hey, hey,” Brendon says. “You should sleep. The basement here is really nice. Cozy, no rats, you know. I’ll cook you dinner.”
Spencer stares at him, brow creasing in some combination of thought and consternation. Brendon’s pretty sure he’s being sized up, judged for usefulness. He sits back in his chair and smiles benignly at Spencer, who sighs heavily.
“It’s nice to see another person,” Brendon says. “One who isn’t, you know, shooting at me or hiding. Or sticking heads on gates.”
“Yeah, I saw that,” Spencer says. “What the fuck?”
“I don’t know.” Brendon tries to smile. “I don’t know if I want to. Like, when I understand what would make somebody do that - I don’t - yeah.”
Spencer makes a noncommittal noise, going quiet in thought.
Brendon waits a few minutes for him to say something else, and when he doesn’t, gets up to start cooking. Somehow the gas is still on here, practically a miracle. The little whoosh when the fire comes on makes Spencer jump, startled, and he topples over with his chair.
Brendon grins. “You okay there?”
“Yeah,” Spencer says. “Yeah, no, that - I’m fine. The stove works?”
“Mmhm,” Brendon says.
Spencer rights the chair, and sits back down, folding his hands on the table. “I’ve been living off, like, Doritos and pretzels. Shit.”
“You’ve been up for two days straight eating junk food.”
“And Red Bull,” Spencer adds. Brendon finally notices that his hands are jittering a little. Maybe they weren’t, earlier.
“Hmm.”
Spencer falls quiet again while Brendon cooks, and by the time dinner - just spaghetti and some canned vegetables - is ready, he’s asleep with his face on the table.
Brendon tests the oven, and it turns out that it works, so he sits and eats his meal while Spencer’s keeps warm in the low heat. Colonel Jiffy comes begging, so Brendon gives him a couple peas, which seem to placate him.
After a short while, he gets up to open a tin of cat food and put it in a dish on the floor. He goes back to the pantry, and manages to find a tin of condensed milk, a little of which he pours out into a saucer. The rest, he sort of puzzles over before deciding to improvise some biscuits. He makes a big batch, periodically licking little bits of dough off the tip of his finger to make sure it tastes all right.
He’s just finishing shaping the dough into biscuits on the cookie tray when Spencer wakes up disoriented.
Brendon says, “So you know you shouldn’t just be asking random people here for directions.”
Spencer says something sharp under his breath, reaching for his pocket as he stands, shoving the chair back with the backs of his legs.
Brendon says, “No, no, hey, hey, calm down, chill, I’m not - I’m just letting you know, okay? There’s a lot of - people aren’t really talking to each other anymore. And there’s. Just. A lot of selfish people in the world, especially now.”
Spencer stays silent, still on edge.
“Like, I wouldn’t have, but it’s lucky that you didn’t get shot and have your car stolen by somebody or whatever.”
“Somebody stole my first car,” Spencer says. “While I was at a gas station. They had a service center, though, so. Keys. You know.”
“Huh.”
“Yeah,” Spencer says. “Don’t try anything, okay?”
Brendon shrugs. “Sure. I don’t know what I’d try anyway. Dinner?”
Spencer frowns at the empty plate across from where he’s sitting.
“I put yours in the oven.” Brendon smiles, trying to put Spencer at something a little closer to ease. “And see, now that you’re up again, I can put the biscuits in.”
“Thanks, Martha Stewart,” Spencer says, looking baffled as Brendon sets the plate in front of him. He stares at the plate for a moment, then frowns, then looks up hopefully. “Can I, uh, have a fork?”
“Yeah, oh, sorry,” Brendon says, getting silverware to set out next to Spencer’s plate. “Sorry, of course. I’ll get you a napkin, too.”
“Thanks,” Spencer says, still awestruck.
“Not at all.”
Spencer looks almost reverent as he digs in, closing his eyes as he savors the first bite. “Oh my god, real food,” he says. “Seriously, thank you so much.”
“The vegetables would have been too much for one person anyway,” Brendon says. “And, you know. Waste not, want not.”
“Right.”
-
While Spencer eats, Brendon picks up his pack from next to the door, and goes downstairs to tidy up a little more - not that he left a mess or anything - and to lay out his bedroll. He lays out a scrappy looking towel next to it, for Colonel Jiffy to sleep on. The only light he’s got down here is from the one tiny window and from the flashlight, which he sets down on the steps so it’ll illuminate the room and he won’t have it tying up his hands.
He stands there for a few moments, arms folded as he surveys his work, and then thinks to check something. He crouches down in front of the couch, lifting up the cushions and groping around a little until he feels a metal bar and mesh. He shrugs, stripping off the bedding he’d put on the couch, removing the cushions. Then he realizes he has to move his bedroll out of the way, and Colonel Jiffy’s bed too, but he does, and pulls out the sofa bed. It’s made already, so he just tosses the throw pillows on it, as well as the pillow he took from upstairs.
He sort of wishes he’d known the bed was here beforehand, but he supposes Spencer deserves it a little more than he does. He’s pretty sure Spencer isn’t used to roughing it. Probably hasn’t even gone camping before. Brendon reminds himself to ask, later, just for small talk.
He heads back upstairs. Spencer’s about done eating, poking balefully at some broccoli with his fork.
“Hey, come on,” Brendon says, laughing a little. “You never know when the next time you’ll get broccoli is.”
“I don’t think canned broccoli’s going to be a hot commodity.”
“You never know,” Brendon says. “I hear some people really like it.”
“Those people can have it.”
“Thank you.”
Spencer is startled into laughter. “Okay. You’re welcome.”
Brendon hears Colonel Jiffy meowing somewhere else in the house, so he goes to find him, and ends up playing with the cat until it starts getting dark. He goes back to the kitchen, where Spencer’s now just sitting with his face in his hands, leaning against the table. Brendon wonders if he’s fallen back asleep, he’s so still, but he catches the reflection of light against the white of Spencer’s eyes. Spencer just stares at him.
“We should go downstairs,” Brendon says.
“Why?”
“Safer,” Brendon shrugs. “You know. So no one knows there’s people here and they don’t come in and try to rob us.”
“What if they come in because they think the place is unoccupied?”
Brendon shrugs. “We don’t want to have any lights on up here, at least.”
“Electricity isn’t even working, dumbass, we can’t have fucking lights on.”
Brendon bites his lip but stays friendly. “There’s these things made of wax called candles, maybe you’ve heard of them?” He looks down at his hand, realizing he’s still got the flashlight looped around his wrist. He takes it in hand, the nylon strap digging into his skin a little. “And I hear these make for some mighty fine light, too.”
“Right, right,” Spencer says. “Okay. Okay. Sorry. I just. I’m stressed.”
“Right,” Brendon agrees. “You miss your friend. Don’t worry; we’ll find him.”
“Okay.”
“It’s not too far. I’ll drive, and you can read the map, and we’ll get there by tomorrow and find your friend.”
“Okay.”
Brendon says, “Now, come on. I pulled the bed out downstairs - they’ve got a freaking sofa bed in the basement, this family is awesome. Just so you know. Like, I didn’t even figure it out until today, though? I slept here two nights and I didn’t know there was a sofa bed.”
“Huh.”
“Yeah, I know, right?”
-
Spencer says, “You’re okay with the floor?”
“Mmhm.”
“There’s a lot of room,” Spencer says. “If you want a mattress to sleep on. There’s room in the bed.”
“I’m fine.”
“Okay,” Spencer says, and his breathing evens out soon after. Brendon stays awake a while, petting Colonel Jiffy, who just lies there and purrs contentedly.
-
In the morning, Brendon gets up and makes oatmeal. He uses powdered milk to make it with, because he’s never liked oatmeal made with just water and the milk in the refrigerator is long since spoiled in the early June heat. He chops up some dried fruit to go in it and adds a little sugar, then stands staring at the pot a while wondering if Spencer even likes sugar in his oatmeal. Maybe Spencer likes oatmeal made with water. Maybe he doesn’t like dried peaches and would rather have raisins.
Maybe - Brendon will just offer to remake it, if he has to. Colonel Jiffy comes trotting up the steps, because Brendon left the basement door open a crack. The cat winds around his ankles while he works, carefully slicing apples to go along with the oatmeal. He finds a jar of peanut butter, too, and puts that in a little dish so they can dip apples in it.
Spencer, when he comes upstairs maybe half an hour later, laughs incredulously at the food spread out on the table. “You’re not trying to fatten me up for some crazy cannibalistic death cult, are you?”
Brendon stares at him.
“Are you?”
“No! No. Just - what?”
“Joke,” Spencer says. “It was a joke. I wasn’t being serious.”
“Okay.”
“Are there cannibal death cults?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.” Brendon pauses, then grins. “Not yet, anyway.”
“What?”
“Joke.”
“That’s kind of possible though. You know. I mean, once the food runs out.”
“There’s a lot of food,” Brendon says. “And it’s not hard to grow things.”
“A lot of people don’t know how,” Spencer says.
“They’ll have to learn. Or they’ll die.”
“Or eat each other,” Spencer says.
“I don’t think people are going to start eating each other,” Brendon says. “Humans aren’t - we’re above that. There’s a lot of food.”
“And not a lot of people,” Spencer says, nodding.
“Most of them just left.”
“Left?”
“A lot of the - like, some people got sick, I guess, but a lot of people left, so they’re still okay. I just don’t know where they are.”
Spencer stares at him.
“Just because they’re not here doesn’t mean they’re not fine.”
Spencer keeps staring.
“Like. My grandparents left. They went to. To the hospital. I don’t know where it is, though. I haven’t found it yet. I was going to find them.”
Spencer’s mouth narrows. He keeps not saying anything.
Brendon says, “And they’re okay, because - because there’s doctors here, at the hospital, so even if. So Grandma’s fine, because they’ve got medicine. And I know there were a lot of people to help, but - maybe they took some of them to Roanoke, because it’s bigger and they can help more people there.” Brendon says, “So they’re. They’re okay, they’re just not here.”
“Okay,” Spencer says.
“Okay.” Brendon nods. “So once everything gets sorted out again, I’ll go find them. Once things are okay again.”
“Once things are okay again,” Spencer repeats. He starts laughing. “Jesus.”
“I start school in the fall,” Brendon says, nodding.
“Oh, good, that’s great,” Spencer says. “Yeah, awesome, you have fun with that.”
“I will.”
“Good luck with that. I mean, you can go to school, I guess, but I really - well, good luck finding anyone there to teach you other than books.”
“It’ll … before the - I didn’t hear anything about Pennsylvania in the news,” Brendon says, sitting down at the table. He’s going to enjoy his breakfast.
“Okay.”
“So it’ll be alright.”
“Okay,” Spencer says, and starts eating.
Brendon eats a few spoonfuls of oatmeal, and scoops up some peanut butter on an apple slice. It crunches pleasantly sweet in his mouth. When he’s finished chewing, he says, “I hope you don’t - if you want, I can remake the oatmeal. If you don’t like peaches in it. Or if you want something else in it. Or whatever.”
“It’s fine,” Spencer says. “It’s really good. Thanks. Think you could brew some coffee?”
“Oh, I didn’t think of - I don’t drink caffeine,” Brendon says. “LDS.”
Spencer lets out a heavy breath - he seems prone to sighing - and rubs at his eyes with his fingers this time. He’s not bothering to put peanut butter on his apples.
“Are you allergic?” Brendon asks.
“To what? Mormons?”
“No. To peanuts.”
“Huh? Oh, no, no,” Spencer says. “Just, last time I had peanut butter and apple slices, I think I was in like third grade.”
“Oh.” Brendon says, “Well, I think they’re good.”
Spencer shrugs, and gets some peanut butter on his next apple slice. He chews contemplatively. “Yeah, okay. You’re right.”
“Told you so.” Brendon grins.
-
Brendon says, “Uh, okay, there’s a pile of dead chickens in the road.”
“Oh, great,” Spencer says. “Great.”
“I bet they thought it was bird flu. So they killed the birds.”
“Maybe,” Spencer says. “That’s stupid as fuck. If it was bird flu, by the time it was jumping from person to person it doesn’t matter what the fuck your birds are up to.”
“Yeah,” Brendon says. “I guess. I don’t know a lot about plagues.”
“Not even the Biblical ones?”
“Oh, I know those,” Brendon says. “But this isn’t boils or frogs or first born sons, so you know, I’m pretty much in the dark here.” He shrugs, grinning over at Spencer, before putting the car in reverse and turning around. They’re the only ones on the road, so he’s got room to do whatever he wants, so long as he avoids the occasional stopped car. The road here is clear enough. There’s a steep drop-off at the edge of the road, or else he would have just driven around.
“Okay, so we’re going to have to backtrack like three miles and go … we can take, here, this highway,” Spencer says, pointing at the map. Brendon brakes and leans over to look. “Oh, and it intersects with the road we were going for anyway.”
“Sweet,” Brendon says. “Alright. Let’s roll. Again.”
“Hold up, let me make sure of this,” Spencer says, examining the map.
Brendon catches movement in the rearview. Just a squirrel running down the road. He looks back at the map.
Then the rear window is spattered by a hail of shotgun pellets. Some break through the safety glass, dusting the backs of the seats, and some just leave the window darkened with lead. Colonel Jiffy lets out a yowl and bolts into the front seat.
“Fuck!” Spencer shouts, and Brendon slams on the gas. The car handles well, even burdened down with food, and Brendon whips it around a corner without ever seeing who shot at them. Colonel Jiffy is crouched at Spencer’s feet, so he has to shift his legs to avoid the hissing cat.
“Probably the chicken guy,” Brendon says, once they’re a ways away.
“Fuck,” Spencer says again, emphatically. He sits in the passenger seat clutching the door with one hand and the map with the other, breathing heavily. He puts his feet up on the dash. Colonel Jiffy keeps growling, at nothing in particular anymore.
“So hey, here’s our exit.”
“Great,” Spencer says. “Just great.”
“Mmhm,” Brendon says serenely. He pulls over so he can lean over and make sure Colonel Jiffy’s alright. “Hey, little guy, you didn’t get shot. You’re okay. It’s okay.”
Colonel Jiffy just glares up at him balefully.
“Yeah, okay, you just chill out there,” Brendon says. “Don’t kill Spencer.”
“I don’t think a cat could kill me anyway,” Spencer says. “I’m resilient.”
“That’s comforting.”
Brendon sits back up and checks the road, like he expects there to be traffic to deal with. There isn’t. He starts driving again.
A while later, Spencer says, “Maybe he thought we’d steal his chickens.”
“His dead chickens.”
“Hey, dead chicken tastes good,” Spencer says.
“Yum, plague chicken.”
Spencer says, “How do you know the person who killed those chickens was a dude? How do you even know it was one person?”
“I don’t,” Brendon says. “Girls don’t like to shoot people as much, though.”
“Girls can shoot people just fine. Especially when they’re paranoid chicken-killers.”
“Maybe,” Brendon says. “Whatever. We’re fine. We might, uh. Want a new car.”
“This one works fine,” Spencer says. “You’re saying we should steal from someone else?”
“It’s not stealing,” Brendon says.
“Only if we find a car that handles better than this,” Spencer says.
“Or if this one gets too shot up. By chicken-killers.”
“Okay.”
Brendon rubs at the back of his head, right below where his flight helmet stops, and his fingers come away bloody. “Oh, huh.”
“Fuck,” Spencer says again. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, are you - shit, there’s not even a hospital to - shit. Thank you for. Everything.”
“What?” Brendon asks, cocking his head to the side. He brakes again, stopping the car so he can think.
“You’re fucking shot, man. If you don’t make it -”
“Yeah, I got hit by like one stray shotgun pellet.”
“You got shot by a fucking shotgun.”
“Uh, yeah,” Brendon says. “And the vice president shot someone in the face with one. That guy was okay.”
“What?”
“I’m not going to die,” Brendon says, “But if you’ve got some alcohol or something -“
“Yeah. Stop the car all the way. Put the emergency brake on, I’m gonna - I’ve got first aid shit in the trunk.”
“Oh, sweet, you did think ahead. Actually, I’ve got some in my pack, but yeah, let’s use yours.”
“Okay.”
Brendon gets out and sits on the asphalt and doesn’t even wince as Spencer rubs down the area - per Brendon’s instructions - with a cotton ball soaked in alcohol. Brendon takes his helmet off and sits there examining it while Spencer pulls out loose hair and lint and the little bits of lead with a pair of tweezers. Spencer’s paranoid enough that he puts some Neosporin on after he’s done getting everything out. It takes a while for Spencer to wrap some gauze around Brendon’s head so it’s not covering an eye or falling off, but once he’s done fussing, Brendon puts his helmet back on.
Brendon brushes his pants off, and shoves his hands in the pockets of the bomber jacket. He grins. “I look pretty tough, huh?”
“Yeah,” Spencer says. “Totally bad-ass.”
Spencer drives for a while, saying that Brendon needs time to rest after getting shot. Brendon naps in the passenger seat, waking up periodically to ask how far they’ve gone. It’s never as far as he imagines in his dreams.
Tired of the quiet and unable to get back to sleep, Brendon starts singing under his breath.
Spencer says, “What?”
“Nothing,” Brendon says. “I was singing.”
“Do it louder,” Spencer says. “There’s nothing on the radio.”
Brendon says, “Really?” and turns on the radio, tuning it through dead air. He finally finds one lone distant station on the AM side broadcasting Amazing Grace, and he and Spencer sit quiet listening. It loops three times without ever announcing a location, and so Brendon keeps going through stations and finding only a soft static hiss.
He turns the radio off. “Okay.”
“Okay,” Spencer says.
Brendon’s quiet again for a while.
“Don’t feel like singing?” Spencer asks.
“Not really,” Brendon says. “It was just too quiet. But everything’s too quiet now, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” Spencer says. “I guess so. We should see if we can find some CDs somewhere, later.”
“Okay.”
“Good,” Spencer says. “Cool, okay, we’ve got another plan. We’ll find some music before we get to New York, then we’ll find Ryan.”
“Yeah.” Brendon drops his voice very, very quiet. “I want to see the ocean.”
“You’ve never seen the ocean?” Spencer asks, incredulous.
“Not the Atlantic,” Brendon says. “Maybe the Pacific when I was little, but it’s been years and years.”
“Huh,” Spencer says. “Why’s it always - there’s always, in stories, when someone who hasn’t seen the ocean. When they get there.”
“What?”
“That’s when they die.”
“I won’t,” Brendon says. “We can find Ryan first. I don’t have to see the ocean.”
“Cool, alright.” Spencer nods, looking out ahead at the road.
Brendon toes his shoes off and pulls his knees up to his chest, toes curling over the edge of the seat. His legs are pressed up against the glove compartment, so he moves the seat back a little bit and puts one foot up on the dash. He wraps his arms around his knees as best he can.
“I should have brought some CDs with me,” Spencer says. “I had a bunch in my car but I didn’t think to grab them.”
“It’s okay,” Brendon says. “Hey, maybe.” He opens up the center console, and finds a few CDs in there. “Okay, okay, hey, this is good. We’ve got some Peter Gabriel. Some Mariah Carey. Some Britney - screw that,” he says, and rolls down the window to throw that CD out the window. The CD case flies out behind them and then hits the pavement, bouncing away down the road and shattering into hundreds of sharp plastic pieces.
“Not desperate enough for Britney?”
“We can find more CDs later,” Brendon says. “Okay, and - oh, Disney!” He looks up. “Are you down with Disney?”
“Sure, go for it,” Spencer says, so Brendon slips the CD in and turns the radio on and the volume up and sings along. From the backseat, Colonel Jiffy lends some out of tune yowls.
Between songs, Brendon says, “I wish I could roll down the window. You know, stick my head out and sing.”
“Why?”
“Just because.”
“So do it,” Spencer says. By this point, they’re talking over the next song.
“If somebody hears. They’ll know we’re here.”
“We’ve got a car,” Spencer says. “We can get away.”
“They could too. What if they drove us off the road and took our stuff?”
“I guess it’s possible,” Spencer says. “So don’t put the window down, then.”
“Okay.”
-
They skirt around Roanoke and stay a hundred miles west of DC, just in case. Brendon’s paranoid about the cities, and Spencer doesn’t fault him for it. They have to stop for fuel in the late afternoon, getting it from a Hummer parked near a grocery store. Spencer’s got a big gas can and a rubber tube and Brendon doesn’t watch how he does it because he’s already taken too much. He doesn’t want to know how to take anything else that isn’t his.
“We should stop soon,” Brendon says.
“We’ve got headlights. We can just drive on all night. It won’t be that much longer. We can switch off.”
“I don’t think it’s a good idea.”
“Maybe not,” Spencer says. “But what if - in the time we waste stopping -“
“Ryan won’t die just because you go to sleep,” Brendon says. “We can at least get some groceries, then decide if we want to go any further or whatever.”
“Okay.”
Brendon opens his mouth to start to stay something, but falls silent instead, hands in his pockets. Brendon ties Colonel Jiffy up to a railing outside the store.
The store smells foul because of rotting milk and meat and eggs and vegetables. There are flies everywhere, and other insects that crawl and writhe underfoot. Brendon skips the baking supplies aisle entirely because of an insect-ridden body slumped against a shelf, leeching black blood into the bags of flour it’s resting against. Judging by the spatters of blood down the aisle, and an exploded bag of sugar a little further down, the person was probably shot. Down the next aisle, he grabs a few cans of soup and stuffs them into his coat pockets.
“I don’t know how much more I can carry,” he says.
“We could get a bag,” Spencer says. “To put more food in. If you want to pick stuff.”
“That’s a good idea,” Brendon says, so they get a couple of bags and go through the grocery store bickering over what’ll be good and if they’ll be able to make it on the road.
Brendon picks up a few boxes of cereal to put in his bag.
-
Brendon says, “That place wasn’t even anywhere close to out of food.”
“Yeah,” Spencer says.
“So why’d that - why’d they shoot that person?”
“Because they could.”
“Awesome,” Brendon says. “Great, that’s good. Same reason the chicken guy shot at us, I guess, right?”
Spencer snorts. “Yeah.”
Brendon says, “God help us all.”
Spencer leans his head against the window, nose to the glass and eyes closed. His eyelashes flutter a little. Brendon doesn’t watch for too long because he’s focusing on the road.
Spencer says, “Thanks for not killing me.”
“Same to you,” Brendon says. “I appreciate it.”
“No problem.”
Brendon says, “I’m not starting college in the fall, am I.” It’s not a question, so Spencer doesn’t answer. “So we’ll just go find your friend, then head to Jersey.”
“We can go to Jersey Shore at some point if you want.” Spencer pauses. “Or just any beach, I guess.”
Brendon grins. “You want me dead now?”
“No, no!” Spencer says. “No. I’m just saying. You said earlier that you wanted to see the ocean, so I figured.”
“Yeah.” Brendon says, “Sure. I see how it is.”
“Stop it.”
“Okay.” Brendon says, “Sorry.”
Spencer says, “Look, it’s not like - I’m not even sure if Ryan is. I mean, I’m not sure where he is.”
“New York is pretty big, right?”
“You could say that,” Spencer says. “Pretty big. Sure.”
“We probably won’t be able to ask anyone where he is, either.”
“Probably not.”
Brendon keeps driving, even after night has fallen fully over the country. Except their headlights, the only light is from the moon and stars, so it’s slow going on the twisting country road. He has to slow down even further to let deer cross the road. He has to stop for a family of rabbits, once.
He sees a gravel driveway, and pulls off into it.
Spencer says, “What are you doing?”
“We should stop a while,” Brendon says.
There are lights on at the house. Brendon knocks, and keeps one hand in his pocket, on his knife.
“Well, hi there.” The woman who answers the door is old. “Are you from the cable company? You were supposed to come a week ago.”
Brendon laughs. “Uh, no ma’am. Sorry. I don’t think they’ll be coming.”
“Why not? That’s terrible service. I called them a week and a half ago. My antenna isn’t even working; I can’t watch the networks. What am I supposed to do?”
“Uhm,” Brendon says. “I don’t know. Do you - me and my friend, back at the car. We’re driving to New York, but it’s real late. Do you think we could stay the night?”
The lady clicks her tongue, shaking her head. “Should have planned ahead. You passed a town full of hotels just forty miles ago.”
“Little late to turn back now,” Brendon says, forcing a smile. “We’ll be happy to help out around the house, if you need. I can cook.”
“Oh, I just finished dinner,” the woman says. “You caught me washing up, actually.”
“I can help out with the dishes.”
The lady shrugs, and steps aside, gesturing into her small house.
Brendon turns, waving at Spencer, who turns off the car. The gravel is loud under his feet without the sound of the engine to mask his steps.
“I’m Brendon, by the way,” Brendon says, holding out his hand. “This is Spencer.”
The woman shakes both their hands, nodding. “Good to meet you.”
-
Spencer says, “We should change your bandages.”
“It’s only been, like, five hours or something.”
“More like eight. They’re pretty bloody.”
“Oh,” Brendon says. “Then yeah, okay.”
Spencer asks the old woman for a wet cloth and some alcohol, because he forgot theirs in the car; she agrees, grumbling all the way, but doesn’t ask why they need any of it. Then he heads back to the guest room she offered to the two of them.
Brendon takes off his helmet and goggles again, then slips out of his jacket, too, and the button-down he’s been wearing, so he’s down to just jeans and a bloodied white t-shirt. There’s one small bed and a cot she rolled in next to it, nowhere really good for the two of them to sit.
He sits down on the floor, and Spencer sits behind him, legs tucked under him.
“Dressed awfully warm for June, huh,” Spencer says, as he carefully unwraps the old bandages and folds them up.
“I guess,” Brendon says with a shrug. “It looks cool.”
“Oh, right,” Spencer says. “Right, of course. Good answer.” He wipes the injury - it’s not really a bullet wound, technically - clean again. Brendon’s hair is matted with blood and the skin around it looks pink and tender. He touches at it, lightly, with just his fingertips. “Does that hurt?”
“Yes.”
“Oh. Sorry.” Spencer’s touch is light as he finishes cleaning and re-bandaging it. “There.”
“Thanks,” Brendon says.
“Hopefully it’s not getting infected,” Spencer says.
Brendon just shrugs. “Well. Not a lot to be done if it is, I guess, except to pray.”
“Yeah,” Spencer says.
part two