Run from Ruin Page 4

  “Well, maybe. But what do we do in three weeks after all our neighbors’ food is gone. We can’t…” Jimmy startled. His head jerked as he squinted in the dim light towards their containers of food and water on the shelf on the far wall. “Nick, what about water? How long will the water run?”

  Nick hadn’t even thought of water. He scrambled to come up with a quick-fix answer, some way to maintain his high-ground and appear to have all the answers.

  “We’ve experienced power outages before,” Nick said. “The pump station maintains pressure even when our house loses power.”

  “Yeah, but they’ll lose power too at some point. If they haven’t already.”

  “Then we’ll fill up all the bathtubs and sinks.”

  “Eww! No way am I going to drink water from where you washed your butt—”

  “We don’t have to do that if it snows,” Nick interrupted. “It won’t be that long before it starts snowing again. Then we’ll have an endless supply of water right outside our door.”

  Jimmy shook his head. “This is getting ridiculous, Nick. We can’t…I can’t live like this. You know how cold it gets here after the snow starts falling. Even in the basement. I can’t do it.”

  “Alright, then,” Nick said sounding a bit perturbed. “Let’s hear your solution.”

  “You already know what I want. Deadhorse.”

  “And how are we going to do that? And don’t just tell me we’re going to drive there. If you can’t think through more of the logistics than that, then I don’t want to hear it.”

  “I don’t know how,” Jimmy said. “But just think of it. We’d be miles from here. Miles from trouble. Bob said he had generators and food to last for years. And he’s Grandpa Joe’s friend. He might as well be extended family. As far as we know, he’s our last living relative.”

  “That’s it? That’s all you got?” Nick asked with obvious insincerity. His patience for Jimmy was running thin.

  “Yeah, that’s it. I described the most stable, safe place to be, and you ask me if that’s all.”

  “Then why don’t we go to Fiji while we’re at it? Or Boca Raton? I hear it’s beautiful this time of year.”

  “Shut up. You know this is different.”

  “I don’t know it’s different. Deadhorse is over four-hundred miles from here. And given our present situation, it might as well be two million miles.”

  “So you’d rather live here like two rats in the gutter? That’s your plan, big brother?” Jimmy was holding his hands on his hips. Nick hated that gesture.

  “Yeah, Nancy. That’s right. I plan to live. Did you catch that? There were two parts. I plan.” He drew the word out sarcastically. “That means I actually think about what I want and how to get it. And I plan to live. You don’t seem to care about either.”

  “I care how we live,” Jimmy said with a higher tone.

  “No, that’s not it at all. You just want to be comfortable. You want out of a jam because you don’t like it. You don’t want to go to Deadhorse because that’s what’s best, you want to go because you think it’s some panacea, some mirage that if you were to get there—and we wouldn’t. We’d die trying—you’d realize it was just as crappy as this place. The whole world went broke, Jimmy. Get it through your thick head. This isn’t fantasy land. This is reality.”

  Jimmy stood there steaming. Nick knew what was happening, but he didn’t care. Jimmy was short circuiting. Nick had seen it a hundred times. There was no use trying to prevent it now. It was going to happen eventually anyway. Who knows? Nick thought. Maybe this will be good for him. Maybe he’ll snap out of it and grow up.

  “So that’s it?” Jimmy asked with tears welling up.

  “Yeah, Nancy. That’s it.”

  “Nothing I can do or say?”

  “No, there’s not. Some things aren’t up to you. We’re not going anywhere. We’re staying right here until I see there’s good reason to move. You’re not in charge around here. I am.”

  Jimmy sunk into himself, almost expressionless. Nick knew there were two ways it could go from this point forward. Either Jimmy would implode or explode. He hoped for both of their sakes it wasn’t the latter.

  Jimmy seemed to take a labored breath in, then he moved past Nick, brushing against his shoulder. “Where do you think you’re going?” Nick demanded as Jimmy reached the door.

  “You’re not the only one that needs to pee,” Jimmy said. On another day, that response would have been met with a smile from both of the boys. Today it was a surreal, emotionless, lifeless expression. What wasn’t said was louder than what was. Nick wondered if he’d ever see his brother again. But he wasn’t about to apologize.

  “Don’t forget the Stevens,” Nick said.

  Jimmy had a slightly confused look. Obviously, Nick’s words didn’t compute. Nick nodded towards the shotgun behind Jimmy. Jimmy grabbed it almost begrudgingly.

  “And Jimmy…”

  Jimmy looked at his brother with the tiniest inkling of hope in his eyes, like a dog waiting for a crumb from its master’s table.

  “Don’t get us both killed. Keep it down, will ya?”

  CHAPTER 6

  MINUTES LATER JIMMY returned, and the rest of the day was as Nick had predicted. Once Jimmy started down his spiral, there was nothing you could do for him. You certainly couldn’t pull him back up the slide. If there was any strategy to it all, Nick decided, it was to try to speed up the process, try to get Jimmy down and out of the doldrums. Nick figured it was like catching the flu. You could buy all the over-the-counter medicine the store had, but, in the end, the virus had to run its course. Simple as that. Nothing else to do but get through it. That fever was there to kill the virus, and jamming handfuls of Tylenol down your throat only delayed your agony. That was Nick’s theory. Only time would tell if he was right.

  Nick left the basement, deciding to fly solo and leave Jimmy sitting in the dark. Nick knew there were things to do besides moping around feeling sorry for himself. He didn’t understand his brother. He recognized all his quirks, could even diagnose some of the reasons why he’d ended up that way. But ultimately, he just couldn’t really empathize. Why expect life to be nice to you? Why wait around belly-aching about how things didn’t go your way? You weren’t entitled to a darn thing in this world. If Nick wasn’t sure of that before the update, he was now.

  Inside their house, Nick moved from room to room with new eyes. This place didn’t look like the home he remembered. It was full of artifacts, things from a bygone era. Joy dish soap, a Keurig coffee maker, a Wi-Fi router—all useless items to him now.

  After filling up all the bath tubs and sinks with water, Nick looked through the house for any items of food that he and Jimmy had missed on their initial pass through the house three days ago. He looked inside the refrigerator hoping to find some cheese or lunch meat in a drawer. But the only things left were some outdated yogurt and leftover meatloaf his mom had made almost two weeks ago. His nose told him what his brain should have: foods go bad with or without refrigeration.

  At this point, Nick had no more reason to be in the house. It wasn’t that dangerous, not like being outside in plain view. But he knew it was more likely for him to be seen or heard up there than down in the basement. Still, he didn’t want to go back down into that dungeon, now more of a torture chamber than a retreat with Jimmy’s insufferable drama. Nick couldn’t stand it, and he didn’t know why.

  To an outsider, Jimmy wasn’t that bad. All his teachers and guidance counselors had thought he had a lot of potential. They had felt like with the right attention, the right therapy, and the giant horse-pill Jimmy swallowed on a daily basis, he had a chance to be someone special. Their parents had been concerned when Jimmy first started the doom-and-gloom routine, but in the end, they bought him his antidepressants and forgot about it. They, like all the other working age professionals around them, were working more hours per day than they ever had in their entire lives. The DataMind app had done that to them all. Highly focused, over-achieving, dollar-centric workaholics. The whole lot of them. But that’s the problem with mass movements. It doesn’t leave anyone to dissent. No contrary points of view. Nick and Jimmy’s parents, their friends’ parents, all of their teachers—everybody over the age of eighteen and under sixty was addicted to the high of success.

  So in that sense, Jimmy was a pre-update casualty of DataMind. Probably one of thousands. But now, anyone alive was a victim, or at least could see themselves that way. Nick could see that Jimmy could have used more help, that he hadn’t adapted to their parents’ marriage as well as Nick had. Maybe it wasn’t fair to compare himself to his younger brother. Jimmy’s real dad had died when Jimmy was four, so there was that. Maybe the damage was done. Maybe that’s the kind of thing that does it to a kid. But Nick was certain there were people—successful people and long before the appearance of DataMind—who had grown up in harder spots than that and had come out the other side on top of life. They made it. Why couldn’t Jimmy?

  After stalling for as long as he could stomach it, Nick ran out of rationalizations and went back down into the basement. It was getting late in the p.m., but the boys had many hours of night left before they would naturally get sleepy. Nick had planned for this, grabbing the melatonin bottle he found by his stepmother’s bedside table. With any luck he could shut off the world, and maybe tomorrow Jimmy would have completed his mope-about exercises. Maybe they could get back to living life.

  Even with the low-light of the one candle Jimmy had burning and the glow from Jimmy listening to music on his phone, Nick wasn’t feeling the effects of the melatonin. He should be, but it was that nagging impulse to jump up, grab Jimmy’s phone out of his hands, and lecture him about how foolish and wasteful he was using it, to l
isten to music when there would be no easy way to recharge it. Their phones, Nick realized, were the true artifacts, the relics from a lost time. Nick planned to use his battery life sparingly. He had pictures of his parents, his friends on his phone—all things he would never see again. And he wasn’t about to squander those by ‘getting his jam on’ as Jimmy liked to say when he was in a joking mood.

  Something else nagged at him, something he couldn’t clearly articulate. He experienced it as a general sense of anxiety, and now the melatonin was starting to kick in ushering in the beginning of the race between his subconscious and his physiology—the former trying to surface the source of his unseen concern, the latter letting the sandman into the room. Can’t be that important, Nick thought, as his eyes closed. I’ll figure it out in the morning.

  CHAPTER 7

  MORNING NEVER CAME. Not like Nick had planned, anyway. Long before the update, the boys had moved their wake-up time closer and closer to noon, and now that there was no bedroom window with screaming sunshine to wake them, there circadian rhythm was on a forward slant, waking up later and later, losing another slice of the day until someday they would have slept through an entire working day and would have to endure the vampire routine.

  But these weren’t the thoughts in Nick’s mind as his consciousness swam to the surface for air. Instead, there was a general alarm off in his head, knowing something wasn’t right. He was hoping he was just having a bad dream. Heaven knew he’d had plenty of those lately.

  He gasped air as if he’d been holding his breath all night. Eyes open, the room was completely dark. The candle had burned out sometime while he was asleep, and apparently, Jimmy wasn’t still getting his jam on. He thought about turning over and going back to sleep. A false alarm, he thought.

  Then he heard it: a low unmistakable rumble.

  A car. But not the sound of a motorist passing by erratically as they had on the first day after the update. This was the sound of an idling vehicle.

  Nick’s body responded before his mind was even sure what was happening. He stood up in the darkness, groped for his blue jeans and thrusted his legs and feet through. His mind, still playing catch-up, had the sense to turn on his penlight, the one clipped to his t-shirt collar.

  Although the little light seemed piercingly bright, it shined little light on the situation. Except for one thing: Jimmy was gone.

  As Nick scrambled toward the door, he did a one-eighty. His feet almost slipped out from under him as he pounced on the Springfield nine-millimeter. He shoved one magazine into his pants pocket, slammed the other into the pistol. He didn’t know why, but he grabbed the half-empty box of rounds and shoved them into his other pants pocket. He racked the pistol which clanged loudly in the dark room.

  He’d played the part before, pantomiming this action, but this time it was real, and the sound of the gun’s action slamming forward, cocking it, and turning it from an object of potential into one of deadly action was too real. His hand shook a little as he ran toward the door.

  After stepping into tennis shoes with no socks, Nick went out the door, this time without any care for the sound. He wasn’t the one making sound, but he had a pretty good idea who was.

  At the top of the stairs, Nick tried to get his bearings. He was light headed from the quick acceleration up the staircase with a still half-sleeping heart.

  Nothing outside looked amiss. And thankfully, he didn’t see any crazies. Not yet, anyway.

  The sound was coming from the garage, just like he’d suspected but was too afraid of being right to acknowledge. He grabbed the door to the garage to open it, but his hand slipped as he tried. Locked.

  Confused, Nick grabbed at the keys about his neck.

  Not having a holster for his pistol and needing both hands to sort out the keys, Nick hunched over and held his Springfield between his knees. A precarious position regardless, but Nick felt even more exposed knowing that at any moment some crazy would hear and catch wind of the commotion. They don’t announce themselves or their intentions from what he’d seen. Besides a lunatic’s battle cry, he wouldn’t know they were there until it was probably too late.

  He tried the wrong key, cursed himself for his stupid mistake, and then found the right one. The door opened. Nick let go of it, grabbed the keys, his gun, then shouldered his way into the garage.

  Almost instantly, he began to cough from the exhaust fumes, but he didn’t dare leave the door open. He slammed it shut and locked it. Then he turned and really looked at the situation for the first time. The lights were out here too, so Nick had to shine his petite light around the room. He found himself acting out his pantomime bit yet again: he held his flashlight underneath his gun the way he’d seen cops do it on TV.

  If Jimmy’s sleeping pad hadn’t been empty, Nick would have worried that some crazy or even an unaffected person had broken into the garage and started up Grandpa Joe’s old Dodge Ram hi-top conversion van, the kind that Nick had seen on the A-team reruns.

  Instead, Nick knew to look for his brother. He wasn’t in the driver’s seat, and, although it was difficult to see through the smoke, Nick didn’t see him standing around the van either. As he swept the room, he caught the first glimpse of his brother: feet lying on the ground sticking out from behind the van.

  “Jimmy!” he yelled. There was no answer and no movement from his brother.

  Bang! A pounding sound came from the garage door. Nick knew all too well what that was. He cursed himself again for not turning off the motor when he had first come in. That’s what I get for worrying about Jimmy, he told himself. And it’s liable to be my last mistake.

  He rushed to his brother who was face up, unconscious with his head next to the exhaust pipe.

  More bangs from the garage door. It sounded like more than one of them now.

  “Jimmy, wake up!” Nick said while grabbing and shaking his brother like a rag-doll. He didn’t know where his strength came from. Adrenaline, he guessed. He pulled Jimmy upright, up against the back of the van and continued shaking him. If he hadn’t been unconscious to start with, the amount of head banging against the van door would have likely caused the condition.

  Jimmy’s neck and head were limp and hung grotesquely from his collar bone. The sight only angered Nick more and he shook and yelled at his brother for dear life.

  Like he’d been a million miles away, Jimmy suddenly opened his eyes with the same level of confusion that Nick had experienced moments before. More so. “What? What’s happening?” Jimmy said raising one hand to his head.

  “There isn’t time. Can you walk? Can you move?” Nick asked.

  “Yeah, I think so.”

  More banging from the garage door. Jimmy stood upright, alert. “What’s…”

  “They’re here,” Nick said. “We gotta get out of here.”

  CHAPTER 8

  MORE POUNDING CAME from the side door to the garage, the one that Nick had entered through. Nick knew it was only a matter of time before they kicked through that weaker door—he hoped they couldn’t bust through the main garage door—or, if they had any brain cells left to think with, they might bust out the windows in the back and try to climb up and over.

  “Come on,” Nick demanded as he walked around the van.

  “Where are we going?” Jimmy asked.

  “Nowhere, just yet. Not until we load this van. Grab anything you think could be useful.”

  Jimmy started going to work, to Nick’s surprise. Maybe he’d lost enough brain cells to be more agreeable, Nick thought. Then he squashed the notion, frustrated with himself for wasting time thinking about something other than getting out of the situation, preferably in one piece.

  Both boys had pen lights on their lanyards. Jimmy’s was brighter than Nick’s and between the two lights they could just make their way through the boxes upon boxes of storage. Things that would ordinarily go in someone’s attic if they didn’t mind cannibalizing their garage. Still, the two lights weren’t enough to see everything. Not before the crazies would break through.

  Nick had an idea. He moved to the driver’s side door and opened it. Jimmy saw him and followed after. “Shouldn’t we turn off the engine? It’s getting really hard to see…” He coughed. “Or breathe in here.”