THIRTY-FOUR

Watching Seth walk out of the bedroom, carrying the bottle of whiskey, had been like watching a metaphor for her marriage playing out in real time. It seemed impossible Natalie had ever given her heart to this man, and maybe that was part of the problem. Maybe she never really had. Maybe Seth, subconsciously, had always known the truth it had taken her a lifetime to discover.

Maybe you loved me, he’d said, but you didn’t really like me.

It was true Natalie longed for security, that since her father’s death she’d been trying to reestablish equilibrium in her story. But she was no gold digger. She had loved Seth for his humility and his devotion toward her. In a way she was like a prize to him, a victory he finally secured over lifelong self-doubt. She had loved being his prize.

Hadn’t she?

Or had Natalie convinced herself she loved it in order to restore balance? Balance that was impossible to achieve because of her denial about who she really was and who she could really love. She wondered, for the first time, how many lives and relationships had been strained or destroyed because a person was either in denial or purposefully hiding who she was.

While Natalie had sat in bed, listening to the ringing in her ears, she heard voices again. Loud voices. Someone else was in the house.

She found her clothes near the bed. When she pulled a shirt over her head, the smell of smoke and body odor struck her in the face. Why hadn’t she noticed the rank stench of her clothes before then?

Eventually Natalie had walked out of the room and toward the voices, toward the kitchen. There she found Skylar and Thomas and a man she’d never seen before.

“Think about it,” said the man. “A million square feet of food just sitting there. Imagine how many people it could feed.”

“So what’s the catch?” Thomas had asked.

“The building is guarded by employees with guns, which is why Blaise needs our help. His friends have already scoped the warehouse, but they need better weapons and ammo to make an approach. If we help carry it all, Blaise will make sure we’re well rewarded.”

“This sounds like a way to get ourselves killed,” said Thomas. “It sounds like suicide.”

“As if we have a choice,” Skylar said angrily.

“Blaise says there’s a thousand people already waiting outside. He thinks whoever is guarding the place will back down if presented with a real threat.”

Natalie had trouble following the conversation. She didn’t see why any of them would go anywhere with a stranger and his friend when there was already plenty of food here to eat.

“Excuse me,” she’d said. “But what are y’all talking about?”

“We’re talking about our only chance to survive,” said Skylar. The way she had looked at Thomas made it clear something had gone wrong between them again. “Now that all our food is gone.”

“What do you mean our food is gone? There’s a whole room of—”

Thomas looked at her gravely.

“Someone broke in last night,” he said. “They took everything.”

“He left the safe room unlocked,” Skylar offered, pointing at Thomas.

And that’s when Natalie understood what had happened. In another time she might have covered for Seth, might have lied for him. But he had betrayed her too many times. Guilt washed over her, threatened to push her to the floor. The key. The key.

“No, he didn’t,” she said.

“The door was unlocked,” Thomas replied. “When I woke up they were already in the process of carrying it all—”

“It was Seth.”

“What do you mean? How did he—”

“Seth has your key. He went into the safe room for whiskey last night. Seth left the door unlocked.”

* * *

After Thomas confronted Seth in the bathroom, the only thing left to do was decide whether or not to go with Larry and Blaise. But there was little room for debate. Thomas offered to turn on his generator, which meant a working pump and a steady supply of fresh water. He could even run the air conditioner. But the idea of dying a slow, comfortable death enchanted no one. Eventually, Thomas agreed going with Blaise was their only realistic chance to survive. He found two backpacks and two large green grocery sacks that had come, ironically, from Walmart. All these bags were stuffed with empty water bottles Thomas had recovered from the trash. Larry claimed Blaise had means to fill them.

Natalie feared for her children. She feared for herself. Every day in Dallas had been hotter than the last, and she didn’t see how they could walk so far under the blistering sun.

“Why don’t we take the car?” she asked Thomas.

“It would draw too much attention from desperate people on the roads. And we can’t all fit. And the gas tank is nearly empty.”

After this Natalie went to the boys’ room and told them what had happened.

“I knew that man wasn’t his friend,” Ben said.

“Which man?” asked Natalie. “You saw a man?”

“I woke up when he was in the house. Thomas told me he was a friend.” “You’re a smart kid, Ben. Both of you are. And now I need you to be the biggest boys you’ve ever been. We have a long way to walk today. It’s going to be very hot. Can you be big boys for Momma?”

She could see the two of them imagining the walk as a great adventure, but their enthusiastic nodding threatened to break her heart into little pieces.

When Natalie returned to the kitchen, Seth was there. He seemed to have composed himself, but he was clearly still drunk.

“I’m here to help this family however I can,” he said. “Even if we aren’t exactly a family anymore.”

There were many things to say, but now was not the time.

* * *

“Daddy, I’m hot,” said Ben, who had been glued to his father ever since they left the house. The boys were always drawn to Seth in times of stress and it drove Natalie mad with envy. Only the young could love so blindly. What if they knew their father was to blame for this sudden, desperate turn of events? Would they still believe he walked on water?

“How much farther is it?” said Brandon.

Seth looked at Larry, who was on his left, walking next to Skylar.

“Just a few minutes to Blaise’s house,” said Larry. “But after that we have another, much longer walk.

“Does Mr. Blaise have anything to eat?” asked Ben. “I’m hungry.”

“He might have some bacon left,” said Larry. “We’ll ask before we leave.”

“I still don’t know how the boys are going to walk thirty miles,” Natalie said to Seth in a voice that was meant to be a whisper, but which everyone heard anyway.

“Thirty miles!” Brandon squealed. “How far is that?”

“It will take all day,” said Seth. “But we’ll stop and drink water and rest so you don’t get tired.”

“I probably haven’t walked thirty miles in my whole life,” mused Ben.

Natalie noticed how Larry kept looking at Skylar, as if he wanted to say something to her. Natalie wondered if it ever got old, always being seen, always being noticed; she wondered what it felt like to be so universally desired.

But if the world stayed this way, if no one came along to fix the broken things, being famous would become a relic of the past, just like the Internet and electricity and air travel.

Her stomach growled and her ears rang. Her feet already hurt. But Seth’s failure had opened a vacuum of security left for Natalie to fill, and she hoped like hell she was up to the task.

“I think I know who this guy is,” Thomas said when they veered away from the road and into the woods. “I saw him at a town hall meeting a few months ago. Were you there, Larry?”

“No.”

“Apparently he owns quite a bit of land, and a real estate developer offered to buy it for a couple million dollars. But this guy thought he was being chased off the peninsula by the wealthy elite.”

“Blaise does own a lot of land,” Larry conceded.

“Is he from the northeast? Like Rhode Island, I think?”

“That’s him.”

In places the trees were so dense and choked with vines that they were forced to travel in a single-file line. But eventually the seven of them approached a white fence, which Larry explained was the border of Blaise’s property. A few minutes later the shape of a roof emerged among the canopy of trees, and finally they stepped out of the forest and onto a wispy Bermuda lawn.

“Nice of you folks to come by,” said a voice that Natalie located to a back porch and more specifically a chair. The man’s accent was a harsh Northeastern drawl.

“These people have agreed to accompany us to the warehouse,” said Larry.

“That’s good news. Are we ready to go, then?”

“My boys are hungry,” Natalie said. “Do you have anything they could eat before we go?”

She was close enough to the porch now that Natalie could see Blaise roll his eyes at this request.

“Sure,” he said. “Let’s throw a party all day and leave tomorrow. Or maybe Friday.”

“Please,” Natalie said. “If the boys don’t eat, they won’t have the energy to walk so far.”

“Oh, all right. I’ll cook a batch of bacon. But wait much longer and we’ll be walkin’ after dark.”

A few minutes later Natalie found herself in a tiny kitchen, where Blaise stood over an old white stove, peering through a cloud of steam at an enormous cast iron skillet. She guessed Blaise was thirty-five, his head and face covered in stubble that might have been a week old. The boys and Seth were sitting on an ancient sofa in the living room while everyone else stood in a wide arc around Blaise and watched him cook. The smell of frying meat made Natalie’s mouth water.

“Where did you get the bacon?” asked Thomas.

“Cured it myself. Beverly was her name. I got bread, too, as long as you take it dry.”

“I think I saw you at a town hall meeting once. Your name is—”

“Blaise Bailey Finnegan III. My friends call me BBF. Where your visitors from?”

“Tulsa,” Natalie said. “Thomas brought us here.”

“So I’m curious,” said Skylar to Blaise. “How do you know what’s going on at a warehouse thirty miles away? Did you just come from there?”

“Nah. Spoke to my friend, Tim, on the radio.”

“The radio?”

“It runs on tubes and batteries. I seen this comin’ for a while, don’t you know. Lots of us did.”

“Have you talked to anyone else?” asked Skylar. “About what’s going on in other places?”

“Couple of hams on the East Coast and one guy in Washington State. It’s the same everywhere. The fellow in Boston said half the city was on fire. The guy in Washington saw a mushroom cloud in the direction of Seattle.”

Natalie took in a hitch of breath.

“Like an atomic bomb?”

“Maybe. An even worse problem is nuclear reactors. If you don’t have water to keep the rods cool, they melt down. And if you don’t have working pumps, you don’t have water. Since the pumps are run by electronic controls …well, you can see where this is going.”

“Like Chernobyl,” said Larry.

“Probably worse, because at least the Ruskies sealed their place with concrete. Down the road from here, about a hundred miles, sits Commanche Peak. If no one stops it from melting down, it’ll probably explode and send fallout all over the place.”

No one said anything for a moment. They all stared at the floor.

“If that’s true,” said Skylar. “Why bother with the warehouse?”

“Maybe the wind will blow the fallout away from us. Or maybe they got some failsafe I’m not aware of. Either way, we can’t just sit around and wait. We gotta act as if we’re going to live. Which is why we need to get the heck on the road.”

Blaise transferred bacon from the skillet onto a heavy yellow plate. The bacon had been cooked so thoroughly it looked more like strips of wood than food. While Natalie made a plate for each of the boys, Blaise pressed more bacon into the skillet.

“Do you have anything to drink?” asked Brandon. “With this bread it’s hard to swallow.”

“All’s I got is water,” Blaise said. “In this here jug. It may taste funny but it’s clean. Came out of my pond.”

Natalie found cups in a cabinet above the jug. She half-expected the water to be tinted brown, or contain solid pollutants, but it was as clean as Blaise had promised.

“Just so all of you knows,” he said as the second batch of bacon began to fry, “this whole thing is one systematic conspiracy.”

“What whole thing?” asked Skylar.

“That light in the sky isn’t no star. It’s some kind of weapon built by the government. They did this to us because they didn’t like the way things was going.”

“Blaise,” Larry said. “We talked about this. The supernova is not a local event. It’s—”

“They’ve been working toward this for years,” said Blaise. “We’re supposed to be the richest country in the world and the roads are like the Middle East. When I moved here from Providence I busted two tires on the way. The government is sneaky and liars and they rip the people off. Where the heck you think our taxes go? To the military and fat cats who run the companies. They got some fancy city in the tropics and right now rich people from all over the world are going there while the rest of us starve to death. From all over the world. It’s always been rich against poor. Then came the Internet and us poor saps could talk to each other like no other time. They knew a revolution was brewing, so the fat cats had to kill social media and all that. They had to make it so we was in the dark again.”

Natalie got the feeling Blaise had been rehearsing this speech for a while, and as crazy as it sounded, there was a certain paranoid logic to his theory.

“You’re talking about neoliberalism,” said Skylar, who always behaved as if she knew something about everything.

“Am I?”

“The counterculture in the 60s rocked the foundation of power. Everyone knows the wealthy elite don’t care for democracy. Their solution was to destabilize education, because poorly-informed citizens can be tricked into voting away their livelihood. Even social media was a tool to separate us. They mined our data and turned our posts into battlegrounds.”

Blaise turned to face Skylar directly. Bacon grease dripped from his spatula to the floor.

“So the actress is a thinker,” he said. Natalie bristled and tried not to be jealous.

“What I’m saying is the wealthiest families already had complete control. Why destroy technology that took thousands of years to produce?”

“Okay, but look here: With a thing like this they got rid of pollution and overpopulation in one bold stroke. The planet couldn’t take two billion Chinese and Indians driving cars and running factories. So the fat cats built themselves cars and planes and boats that wouldn’t be fried by this pulse deal. All of us coulda had shielding built into our shit, but we didn’t. You think that’s an accident?”

It was all a little much for Natalie to consider, especially when they were about to walk thirty miles toward a warehouse she knew nothing about, carrying weapons she hoped would never be fired.

“But like I said,” Blaise explained, “some of us prepared. Some of us are ready to fight back.”

“How would you, though?” asked Thomas. “If they’ve already set sail for paradise and we’re on foot?”

“Because they gotta come back for the food. All over the world are these giant warehouses where they keep the supplies. They store it under our noses, in broad daylight, and when they come for it we’re gonna be ready. I own a high-powered assault rifle, I own a 12-gauge double barrel shotgun, I own a regular shotgun, I own a regular hunting rifle, I own a 9mm, a .357, a .45 handgun, a .38 Special, and I own an M-16 fully automatic ground assault rifle.”

Blaise smiled proudly, but for Natalie it was too much. The ringing sound rushed into her ears again. The force of it snapped her neck.

“We can’t do this,” she said to Seth, to all of them. “We can’t. Our boys will be in danger. All of us will. We can’t do this.”

“Nat,” said Seth.

“Don’t you ‘Nat’ me, Seth! You left the door unlocked! You doomed us!”

“Nat—”

But she couldn’t stand there any longer. She marched out of the kitchen and into the living room. Natalie was suddenly sure all this was a joke, that it couldn’t be real. She felt certain, if she ventured away from this movie set, she would find a hidden crew that had been filming them all along.

Across the living room stood a dark doorway. Beyond it loomed a long hall that stretched away on her right. From there she walked until she reached another doorway, this one on her left. It opened to a bedroom that was more shadows than light, drapes covering the only window. In front of that window stood a desk. A large rectangular box sat on the desk, a piece of equipment with knobs and dials that made Natalie think of the ancient stereo in her parents’ living room. The cylinder of a microphone stood before it.

So this was the radio. It looked real enough, but it couldn’t be. It was a set piece. A prop.

Natalie had never accepted the reality of this awful new world. Not really. The journey from Tulsa to Dallas had been a rush of blind fear and adrenaline; afterward, during the quiet days in Thomas’ house, she’d been so consumed with personal drama that she barely considered what would happen if and when his supplies ran out.

She heard a footstep behind her. If Seth tried to placate her with more bullshit, Natalie thought she might—

“Mommy?”

Standing in the doorway was her baby boy, little Ben, a quiet child who opened his mouth only when there was something important to say.

“What is it, honey?”

“I’m scared.”

“I know. I’m scared, too.”

“Are you going to leave us alone?”

Natalie leaned down and looked her son in the eye. She was so consumed by her inability to face reality that she was failing this child and his twin brother.

“Ben,” she said. “There’s not a chance in the world I would leave you alone.”

“But you don’t want to go with us to Walmart. Where will you go instead?”

“I’m coming with you. Of course I am.”

“Will it be dangerous?”

Natalie stared into Ben’s blue eyes. The idea of lying to protect his feelings seemed hopelessly obsolete.

“Yes,” she said. “It will probably be dangerous. But your dad and I will make sure you are far away from any of that danger. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“I need you to be as brave and as strong as you can. We have a long walk ahead of us today.”

“I will,” said Ben. “You will be so proud of me. I will be so brave and strong.”

Natalie took his small hand in hers and hoped she could be the same.