Run from Ruin Read online

  Nick wondered—no, feared is the right word—that Jimmy might be gay. Outwardly, Nick felt like he was supposed to think it was okay. To each, his own. Live and let live, and all that stuff. But inwardly, he hated the idea. It wasn’t because they were related; they didn’t share any of the same blood, just step-parents. The idea, Nick knew, would mean Jimmy would be further tormented by kids at school, more than he was already. And besides, it was gross. Nick couldn’t stand to think the thought, couldn’t visualize the reality.

  Nick watched Jimmy’s eyes grow heavy as he drifted away to sleep, his phone still dancing light and images into the otherwise dark corner of the room. Jimmy seemed okay. . . for now, at least. This nightmare of events would be hard for anyone; it was certainly hard for Nick. And Jimmy, being the way he was, would struggle with it more than most. But the real reason Nick was concerned about his little brother was that he was a prescription drug user. No, not an abuser of prescription drugs—although Nick was pretty sure Jimmy smoked pot sometimes. His doctor gave Jimmy anti-depressants, and wouldn’t you know it—Jimmy’s mom was supposed to refill his prescription the day of the update. That meant this was the end of day three since Jimmy ran out of medication.

  Nick didn’t know what to expect, really. When he first realized the situation, he figured it meant Jimmy would get more sullen than normal, but then he read the back of the bottle and did an internet search on it. Anti-depressants weren’t supposed to be stopped cold-turkey. You were supposed to get weaned-off gradually. One of the possible side-effects of a sudden stop in medication was psychotic breaks and an increased risk of suicide. As if Nick didn’t have enough on his plate. As if just staying alive wasn’t hard enough. Now he felt like he was a prison warden on suicide watch.

  CHAPTER 4

  “NICK, WAKE UP!”

  Nick felt the accompanying tug on his shirt, his sleeping bag having already been partially unzipped. He carefully opened his eyes, bracing himself for a room full of light. But what he saw was Jimmy standing over him with a pen light clipped to his t-shirt collar, light spraying Jimmy in the face like some weird psychedelic music video.

  “What is it? What time is it?” Nick asked.

  “The lights are off, Nick.”

  The tugging continued as if Nick wasn’t really awake. “I can see that. What are you doing? Let go of my shirt.”

  “No, you don’t get it,” Jimmy said. “The power’s off. The lights won’t come on.”

  Nick reached for his phone. It was sad how he was still utterly dependent on the one piece of technology that was responsible for the end of civilization.

  It said 9:14 a.m.

  Nick had the strange vertigo-like sensation, not knowing whether he was up early—going to bed at three-in-the-morning usually meant he was up closer to noon—or whether he’d pulled a rip-van-winkle and had skipped a day.

  Nick stood up sharply. He and Jimmy were alone in the dark minus Jimmy’s flashlight and their phones. “I knew this would happen,” Jimmy said.

  Nick didn’t respond but, instead, reached for the penlight he’d placed on the cellar wall-shelf three days earlier. He clicked it on, not really shining at anything in particular, but using it for the ambient light it added to the room.

  On the same shelf lay other items he and Jimmy had grabbed that first day: candles, all of the canned food from the house, and their dad’s pistol, a Springfield DX9. It was a nine-millimeter, and it looked brand new, shiny black. It wasn’t new, Nick understood, just barely used. He still remembered when his dad had gotten it —right before Jimmy and his step-mother came along.

  Nick’s dad had said it was for home protection. And after he took Nick to the range a couple of times—twelve is pretty young to shoot a pistol in that caliber, but Nick was always big for his age—Nick’s dad had put the handgun in one of those quick-access vaults beside the bed and left it.

  Quick-access—it even said that on the side of the vault—was an oxymoron. Nick and Jimmy had spent an eternity trying to get inside it. It had been an obvious reaction; after hearing and then seeing the violence that was breaking out, they had believed it was just a matter of time before they had to defend themselves. They felt like idiots after they realized the key code their dad had set was ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR.

  Some of that sense, the need to defend themselves from impending doom, had abated in the last three days. Now, they knew that the crazies didn’t come knocking on your door. They had to see or hear you. You had to do something to get their attention. Then it was blind rage and hatred that was unleashed upon you, like the DataMind app hadn’t ever helped people deal with stress or aggression in the first place but had, instead, bottled it up for later. It was a less comical version of Serenity Now, the joke from Nick’s dad’s favorite show, Seinfeld.

  Nick stroked the Springfield, still in its holster, and admired the two magazines and half-empty box of ammo beside it.

  “What are we going to do?” Jimmy asked.

  “Right now?”

  “Yeah, right now,” Jimmy said sounding even more squirmy.

  “Right now, I’m going to pee.”

  Jimmy exhaled in frustration, and Nick walked clumsily to the door. Against the corner stood the old Stevens single-shot sixteen-gauge. He grabbed it, opened the breach to make sure it was loaded, and snapped it back together. He didn’t pull back the hammer. He didn’t expect to use it. Not if their luck held out.

  “Be back in a second.”

  “Here. Take this with you,” Jimmy said handing him a two-liter bottle filled with his own urine.

  Now it was Nick’s turn to exhale in frustration. He threw the sling of the Stevens shotgun over his shoulder, grabbed the two-liter, grabbed the roll of toilet paper hung on a nail on the wall, and headed out the door quietly.

  This was always Nick’s least favorite part of the routine. Anytime he or Jimmy were outside was a precarious situation. Danger was always right around the corner, literally. But coming up the steps from the basement was his least favorite part. He had no way of looking out or listening before opening the basement door. There was no window to peek out of. For all he knew, some crazy could be crouched down, sleeping at the bottom landing of the stairs. Do they sleep? Nick wondered. He didn’t know the answer. It was always stupid stuff like this that crowded his mind, grabbed for his attention when he ought to be focusing on his surroundings.

  He stopped after climbing three or four stairs, right when his head was about to pop up over the top and he could see out onto the street. He listened. The wind blew in intermittent gusts, making scrapes and scratches against the street and sidewalk with paper and other litter. How quickly Nick had learned the difference between these sounds and real crazy activity.

  He headed up and over, not stopping at the top to check his surroundings. Once you were exposed, the important thing was limiting how long you were out there. Get it over with, was what he told himself.

  He turned his back on the street and passed through the alleyway between the house and the garage, leading to the small backyard. Besides being inside, this was the safest place to be, Nick believed. The small backyard—his dad hated to mow—was enclosed with tall evergreen shrubs. His dad had told him they were impenetrable, the kind that were grown in parts of Europe as hedgerows that unintentionally stopped tanks. That wasn’t why Nick’s dad had grown them. It wasn’t his dad’s choice at all; it was Grandpa Joe who had planted them long before Nick was born. And here they were, thick, mangled, out-of-control wild and alive. Nothing about the last three days had phased these shrubs. They made him feel safe, not just from the cover they provided while he relieved himself boy-scout style but from their intrinsic strength. Who knows? Nick thought. Maybe I’m going crazy too. When did I become an animist?

  Nick did his business in a little hole dug with the shovel they had left in the corner of the yard on the first day. He poured in the contents of the two-liter. It made a disgusting soup which he quickly covered back up. These micr
o latrines he and his brother had been digging had marked up a surprising amount of the backyard, like giant moles or groundhogs systematically destroying someone’s greenery.

  He leaned the shovel back up against the hedge. He did so carefully. Another quickly learned skill was taking care with anything that could fall, anything that could make noise and draw attention. He looked at the shovel head. He could see the beginnings of a light bead of rust starting to form. His dad would have killed them for leaving this tool out in the rain to rust. Nick chuckled at the insanity of his idea: now my Dad would kill us just because he went broke.

  Nick edged to the other side of the backyard to a corner between the hedgerow and back of the house. From this corner there was a gap allowing him to spy on the road with little chance of being spotted. He pressed his head against the gap until he felt some of the oversized thorns threaten to poke him. He waited and watched. He looked at the power poles that, until hours ago, had carried kilowatts of electricity through the city. Now what were they? Fossils, he figured. Something his descendants, if he lived that long, would have trouble believing in. The story of invisible power traveling through these poles and lines would seem more incomprehensible than the building of the pyramids or Stonehenge. And eventually the poles would rot and the lines on the ground would slowly get covered with grass and dirt. If mankind ever rebuilt, centuries from now, they would one day discover these strange formations during archeological digs: asphalt roads and wires. It wouldn’t make sense. Too many of the pieces of the puzzle would have been removed for anyone to understand what they were for, or so Nick believed.

  The other houses across the street didn’t look that different. If anyone was still alive there, anyone unaffected by the update, they wouldn’t have their lights on or be making a commotion anyway. Electricity had become a secret commodity, something to be used and enjoyed in one’s most inner sanctum. For the boys, it had been the basement. He was sure Mrs. Lambert, before she lost her marbles and her life, probably had some closet or bedroom with blacked out windows. Some place she watched old home videos, looked at all the people she’d lost forever. No wonder she lost it, he thought.

  He could see part of Mrs. Lambert’s house. When the wind blew, it moved her still opened front door, making it squeak. He had gotten pretty good at blotting out unpleasant memories; like a gag reflex, they came upon him quickly, and he had to fight them back down before he spewed.

  What happened to Mrs. Lambert was worth remembering, Nick decided. Not the gory details. But the reality that there were still crazies out there, and even though they had avoided them, hadn’t been attacked—it didn’t mean that it wouldn’t happen, that it couldn’t happen to them. Just because you don’t see them doesn’t mean they weren’t there. They were. Over a half-million of them in the state of Alaska alone. Tens of thousands in Fairbanks.

  He had figured by what he’d seen on the news before it went down, what he’d seen on the street, and what he’d heard on shortwave that the crazies weren’t capable of taking care of themselves any longer, at least not beyond eating some scraps out of the garbage or drinking water from a puddle. Most of the time, they lay dormant, slowly roaming the streets until they were provoked—an easy task. They attacked anyone and everyone including other people affected by the update, though they seemed to preferentially go after the unaffected. Nick, in his mental-plan-to-survive-the-apocolypse-version-1.0, had hoped that the crazies would wear themselves out quickly, that it was a game of attrition, and that if he and his brother just stayed-put, eventually there wouldn’t be any crazies left.

  He still might be right, but the lights going out added to the reality that they were going into the deep end, that this was for real stakes. Even more worrisome to Nick was their food supply, or lack thereof. His stomach growled just thinking about it. How were they supposed to go restock their supplies without getting attacked? Going to the supermarket downtown seemed like suicide. He thought about checking out their next-door neighbors’ pantries, but all the extra noise involved in breaking into locked homes would be just as dangerous as waltzing downtown. There were no easy answers.

  CHAPTER 5

  WHEN NICK RETURNED to the basement, it looked like a different place entirely. Jimmy, a regular Martha Stewart, had lit all the candles and carefully placed them around the room for proper fengshui.

  “What are you thinking?” Nick said more than asked as he went to several of the candles and blew them out.

  “Hey, what are you doing?” Jimmy shrieked.

  “Thanks for inviting me to a romantic candle-lit dinner, but I don’t think this is the time or place for it, Nancy.” He caught himself too late. He knew Jimmy hated that nickname and it would only invite trouble. But Jimmy had made his bed and would have to lie in it, Nick told himself.

  “The lights are out. What are we supposed to do?” Jimmy asked.

  “How about conserving our precious resources, for starters?”

  Jimmy had that dumb look on his face, the one that Nick had seen a hundred times. It wasn’t the look of genuine stupidity; it was the one he wore before he started getting really mad.

  “While you were out for a stroll, I had to make decisions,” Jimmy said. “And I, for one, don’t want to live down here like some rat in the dark.”

  “Calm down,” Nick countered.

  “No. You came in here guns blazing. You made all the hot-headed decisions, blowing out the candles I lit. You’re the one acting hastily. How about you try to slow down and talk to me before you go behind me and change what I’ve done.”

  The two boys were face to face, looking like they were about to shove each other. It was mostly Jimmy who presented the aggressive signs. Nick realized what was going on, that he needed to diffuse Jimmy before things got worse. But at the same time, he didn’t want to back down.

  Jimmy spun off toward some of the smoldering, snuffed out candles on the wall shelves. He carefully, as if he dared Nick to defy him, lit half of the candles that were out.

  That was Jimmy’s pattern. As wimpy as he seemed to Nick, he did have a level of aggression, a push-back impulse. But he wasn’t brave. He was more inclined to regain part of what he lost, some mental compromise he’d made with himself. That as long as he got some back, some portion of whatever was taken from him—he could live with that. Nick thought it was pathetic. But he also knew that if he pushed Jimmy’s buttons further that there was an even more childish, ridiculous version of his brother waiting to come out.

  “Now, we can see each other,” Jimmy said.

  “Look, we need to talk for real,” Nick said.

  “I tried earlier. You just talk with me when it’s convenient for you. When are you going to listen to me? I mean, I know I’m your younger brother. But you’re not that much older than me. Give me some credit.”

  Nick had to hold his tongue. What he felt like saying and doing would only make things worse. “You’re right. I’m sorry.” He almost couldn’t believe the words coming out his mouth.

  Jimmy made a different face, like he was ready to listen but wasn’t convinced Nick was sincere.

  Nick went on. “The lights going out doesn’t change things that much. I mean, it makes things suck down here. I’ll give you that. But we’re not in more physical danger than we were yesterday. If anything—the way I see it—the crazies are killing each other. So each day there are less of them out there to face.”

  “You think we should just carry on? Stay calm and starve to death?”

  “I didn’t say that,” Nick answered. “I’m just saying the power going out doesn’t necessarily mean we have to change plans. But food is a concern of mine.”

  “So, let’s go to Deadhorse then.” Jimmy’s voice changed. The very mention of Deadhorse made him sound ten years younger like a kid wanting to go to Disney.

  It took every fiber of Nick’s inner-being to keep from smashing this weak, childish side of Jimmy. He hated it. Not just because it was annoying. There was something el
se about it. If they weren’t riding out the end of the world together he would have relished delivering a snarky blow to his brother’s ego.

  “Slow down,” Nick said. “Let’s deal with things one at a time. You’d agree—I think—that the biggest risk to our future, besides crazies, is food.” Nick waited for Jimmy to affirm.

  “Yeah, but…”

  “Then the first thing to figure out is how to find something to eat, a way that doesn’t involve running into crazies.”

  Jimmy nodded his head sheepishly. Nick knew if you mentioned enough crazies and the idea of being attacked, Jimmy would cower a little.

  “The way I figure, the grocery store is out,” Nick continued. “It’s in a busy part of town and it’s too big. Too easy to run into crazies. But what if we case a house out, determine it’s empty, and rob their pantry?”

  “What? Are you serious? That sounds like a terrible idea,” Jimmy said impulsively. “You think sitting outside, exposed all day while we watch a neighbor’s house to be sure it’s empty is less risky than quickly going to the store and back? We might as well go to Deadhorse.”

  Nick ignored that last part. “We don’t have to sit outside to do it. We have a perfectly good house above us we can spy from.”

  “But you said it wasn’t safe up there. That the basement was the only place we should stay.”

  “That was before we ran out of food, little brother.”

  He could tell Jimmy didn’t like it, but he was starting to budge. He was going to cave in to Nick’s plan—he knew it. It wasn’t that they were completely out of food. But the diminishing supply and—just as importantly—the dwindling options had already hampered their appetites, enough to recognize what was coming if they didn’t find more supplies.