I sipped a beer and smoked another cigarette. The only thing that was pulling me through was the idea of sunrise. When the world was bright, there might be hope and I was clinging to that.
“Anything out there?” I said to Iris.
“It’s quiet, real quiet.”
I went over to her and looked out into the night. Most of the fires had died down to coals, but a couple were still burning. The light they threw showed me a world of abandonment. Lots of tree limbs down from the wind, beer and pop cans blown out into the street, garbage in yards. Other than that, it looked like some kind of primordial jungle out there with all the cables hanging down like vines. I could see dozens upon dozens of them just waiting to trap the unwary.
“I wonder what comes next?” I said pretty much under my breath, but Iris heard me.
“Either they pack up and go away or they step things up,” she said.
I watched with her for some time, knowing she was right. The tension inside me had not lessened; it was worse, if anything. The waiting, the wondering, it was eating at us but there was nothing to do but let things play out. The lot of us were so juiced up, you could have plugged us into the wall. Just as I was about to leave and go back to the couch, Iris made a funny sound in her throat like a sudden intake of breath.
I didn’t need to ask what caused it, I saw just fine.
That weird blue orb that I had seen downtown was now drifting in our direction. I watched it hover lazily over distant rooftops, seeming to sweep back and forth like the eye of Polyphemus seeking out Odysseus and his men. I didn’t know what it was, but the sight of it filled me with terror because I knew without a doubt it was looking for us. Maybe it wasn’t an eye exactly, but I had a pretty good idea it served roughly the same purpose. It moved off to the east and disappeared and I started breathing again.
“Like a searchlight,” Iris said.
“Yes.”
“What are you two blathering on about over there?” Billy asked us.
Did I tell him the truth? One look at Iris and I knew the answer to that. They were all better off not knowing. No sense in increasing their anxiety, which I figured had to be approaching dangerous levels. I went and sat back on the couch, pulling from my beer, which seemed to have absolutely no flavor. I watched the others, trying to gauge what was going on in their minds.
Over by the window, Iris was grim and determined. Despite her age, she was watching not only the world outside but the world inside. We were her flock and she was mothering over us. It was the only thing she really could do and she did it obsessively.
Ray was coming apart at the seams and I knew it. Gone was the public speaker and politico, the great debater of forgotten causes, the perpetual thorn in the foot of the city council. The last time I’d even seen the old Ray was when he and David Ebler had picked apart the story Bonnie and I told of the cables. He waited over there in the corner, chewing his nails, his eyes wide and glassy. It was unnerving.
Billy was just Billy. He drank his beer and made with the small talk, bitched about the world in general and told stories of a workingman’s life. It was business as usual with him. He was just one of those guys you couldn’t shake. At least outwardly. Inside, I suspected he was just as scared as the rest of us but he was too practical, too blue collar, and too tough to show it.
And Bonnie? What did one say about Bonnie? Nervous? Yes. Scared? Yes. She kept tapping her long nails on the end table. Her eyes were bright and wet in the darkness. She was complex. Around the neighborhood she was known as a flirt, but like all women who acted that way there was a deep inner reason, some trauma or fear that cried out in pain from her depths. She was a very attractive woman and had used her looks to get attention her entire life. My rejection of her in the basement had thrown her for a loop. She had probably never been rejected by a man and she was having trouble handling it. She kept staring at me as if she had no idea what to make of me.
And me? I was just scared and confused. I didn’t know what to think about anything. I had these very unpleasant images in my head of us still hiding like this six months from now. That was the most terrifying prospect of all, that there was no end in sight, that this nightmare would just keep going on and on like the plot of a crappy postapocalyptic novel.
Anyway, that was our group.
Good, bad, or indifferent, it was all we had.
The five of us. It made me think of that terrible old 1950s B-movie, The Last Woman on Earth. Two guys and one woman survive the end of the world and, of course, the men fight over her. I wondered if Ray and I would be fighting over Bonnie in six months. I doubted it. Billy could have easily kicked both our asses. Besides, Ray was no lover boy. He was divorced and had no time in his life for anything but politics. And I would have a hell of a time getting over Kathy.
So there we waited.
12
“This is crazy,” Ray said, startling us all. “What’s the point of us being bottled up like this?”
“I think it has something to do with dying,” Billy told him, smart-assed as always.
Apparently, Ray had snapped out of his fugue. No one was more surprised than I was.
“My point is,” he said, “this is getting us nowhere. We need to come up with some kind of plan. The rest of the world is out there even if we can’t contact them. What we need to be thinking is how we’re going to get word to them about what’s going on here.”
“If they haven’t figured it out by now,” Iris said, “then they’re either blind, stupid, or dead.”
Bonnie nodded. “It’s probably going on everywhere. Even our cells are down and there’s no Internet. I checked. Nobody out there can help us any more than they can help themselves. We need to face that.”
“So we should just give up?” Ray put to her.
“I didn’t say that.”
“But that’s what you implied.”
“Just shut up, Ray. Okay?”
“Frightened little pill bugs that roll up when they’re scared,” he said, meaning all of us. “I expected better. Maybe not from you, Bonnie, but from the rest of you people.”
Bonnie was getting pissed and I could sense it. “Tell you what, Ray,” she said, almost too calmly. “Why don’t you just crawl back into your corner and shut the fuck up?”
Ray shuddered. I could hear him grinding his teeth. “You don’t talk to me like that! Maybe your husband isn’t man enough to slap your little whoring mouth but I sure as hell am and I sure as hell will!”
Billy set his beer down. “Nobody’s going to be slapping anybody’s mouth, Ray. Not even Bonnie’s whoring mouth. I’m going to give you a pass on this because you’re stressed-out and my wife has a way of blurting out the first stupid thing she can think of. But if you threaten her again, I’ll have to knock your teeth down your throat. I won’t enjoy it, but I sure as fuck will do it.”
There was something about Billy’s smooth, easy manner that was frightening. He never lost his temper, never went into theatrics shouting and stomping his feet, but when he said he would hit you, you could be sure he would. It shut Ray up. Bonnie said something else I didn’t catch and Billy told her to quit while she was still ahead.