August Ansel - The Attic

“So you knew them, your group,” Arie said.

“Only two of them, but yeah. When the pox first hit and things went south so quick, I didn’t know what to do. I hid out at home for the first couple of days, trying to make the internet work, flipping channels on the TV and looking for something on the radio. I lived on the west side, in one of those shacky little three-room places with apartment buildings all around.” He gazed into the shadows while he talked, his fingertips moving gingerly around the bandage on his head, picking at the dried blood in his hair. “It was a shit show. Three days, I guess, where you kept hearing yelling. Screaming. But a little less every day. Somebody in the building right behind my place kept crying and crying, the most awful sound I ever heard come out of a person. I think it was a woman, but I don’t know. It would die down, and I’d think, finally. Thank God, finally. Then it would start again. Sometime on the third day it stopped. Stopped right in mid-howl. I knew what it meant.” He pulled a little harder at his crusty hair and grimaced. “I didn’t care. I was happy. The screaming stopped.” His hands dropped into his lap.

There was movement in the corner of her eye, and Arie saw that Renna had gathered a blanket around her. The girl still watched Curran, but she had pulled her feet up and under the blanket so that only her head was visible. “How did you find your friends?” Arie asked. His face had gone a bit slack while he talked, and she was afraid he would try to fall asleep.

He looked at her. “Friends? At first. At least I thought we were. Two of them found me. I hadn’t left the house at all. It was totally weird out there—you must have seen it.”

“I did.”

“People were looking for help, I guess. We all just expected somebody to come along and fix it. But nobody could. After the first day when it was nutjobs in the street, hollering and pounding on doors, gunshots—like every end-of-the-world movie you ever saw—I barricaded myself. Shoved furniture up against the two doors, put a bookcase and my box spring and mattress in front of the windows. Before everything went down, that little house always made me stir crazy. I wanted out.” He shook his head. “Man, when it all hit the fan, I wanted to pull those walls in around me. I don’t remember exactly when Darius and Little Mikey showed up. Two weeks, maybe. All I remember is being hungry. I knew enough to cook up what little I had in the fridge before the power went out, but that wasn’t much, and I didn’t have a lot in the cupboards, either. By the time those guys came and hauled me out, I was trying to ration some old hot dog buns and a jar of green olives. Oh, and some steak sauce.”

Handy stepped forward and pulled Curran’s hands away from his head by his bound wrists. “If you don’t tell us about your group right now, I’m going to haul you up on that roof and throw your ass in the street.”

“Okay,” Curran said, voice placatory. “Sorry, yeah. When Darius and Mikey got me out, they told me they had a place, and it was good, safe, so I went. Who wouldn’t? They were carrying weapons, and I knew both of them. They were good guys. It felt like a…like a good thing.”

“Someone in charge again,” said Arie.

“Right. I didn’t know guns. I wasn’t that guy. I was the guy with a phone in my pocket, not a gun. Or a Taser. Hell, I used to carry around one of those little emergency pepper spray keychains and hold it in my hand when I was walking home from the bowling alley.”

“I guess you learned a little about knives later,” said Renna. “About how to cut old women.”

“Let him finish,” said Handy.

Curran threw another miserable glance at Arie, at her bandaged hand. “They had a shopping cart of stuff, and they told me we couldn’t go straight back. They were scavenging. When they got into my neighborhood, Little Mikey remembered my place, and they stopped. As soon as they got me to open the door, it was like a done deal, like of course I was coming with them. So I did. I wanted to. They ransacked my place for usables, added them to the cart, and after they fed me some peanut butter crackers and fruit snacks, we hit it. I didn’t have a weapon, so it was my job to push the cart. We stopped at a lot of places. Darius would wait outside with me while Little Mikey went in. Once he knew it was secure, he’d whistle, and Darius would go inside while I stayed by the cart. They gave me a golf club to use if anyone came around. Whatever they could find, they’d load up, and we’d take off again.”

“You didn’t see anybody else?” said Handy.

Curran kept his face averted. “There were a couple of times. I heard them…” There was a struggle on his face, as if the words were a physical thing he had to expel. “Yeah, there were people. They never did let me come in with them,” he said, “and if there was any sort of trouble from inside, they’d come out with a story—how someone came at them with a knife, or how they tried to help someone who refused to leave and it got heated.”

“And you believed them,” said Arie.

“I wanted to,” Curran said. “I knew them from before, from doing roofing and shooting pool, so yeah—I wanted to believe them. I started wondering why no one else would want to come with us. Hadn’t anyone else run out of food? Didn’t they want to get somewhere safe with other people? But these guys had an answer for everything. Finally somebody was calling the shots, and that’s what I wanted, for someone to take charge of the mess. It took us until way after dark to get there, even though it was only three miles from my house.”

Outside, the sun must have finally broken through the overcast. A long trapezoid of yellow appeared through the pebbled window at the far west side of the attic, lighting the space even into the narrowest spots under the eaves. It fell directly on the place where Arie sat.

“Curran,” Arie said. The incandescent brightness bounced off the floor and lit her face, made her white-gray hair luminous. Curran stared at her. “Where did they take you?” she said, quite sure she knew.

“The high school. They’ve taken over the whole place.”

“What’s your name?” said Renna. The blanket had dropped from around her head and shoulders. She stared at Curran, leaning forward on the Packard seat, mouth open slightly. Arie had expected her to react with revulsion or fear, but this was something very different, expectant and intense.

For a long moment the two of them stared each other down. “My name is Curran,” he said finally.

“You said you built houses before the sickness. You worked on roofs, right?”

Curran nodded.

“Joe,” Renna said. She sat back, nodding. “You were a Joe.”

There was a long pause as they continued to look at each other. The understanding passed between them was palpable. “My name,” he said again, “is Curran.”

“My name is Renna,” she said. She turned to Arie. “We need to untie him.”

Handy looked around at her. “No.”

She lifted her chin in a defiant gesture. “Yes,” she said. “He’s not going to hurt us.”

“He already did hurt you.” He turned to Arie. “He cut you and tied you and threatened you. What is this?”

Arie stood. The bar of sunlight was still there, but already retreating across the floor. She was sorry to see it go, but the day was on its way out. It was the full moon tonight, and if the sky stayed cloudless, it would be fat and yellow when it rose. “I believe they know each other,” she said. “We’re going to trust her instinct and his promises.” She studied Handy’s good face, the internal battle to believe her clear on his features. “Cut him loose.”

It was about an hour before Curran could trust his balance. Before Handy would agree to untie him, he made a deliberate sweep to secure their weapons—knives, short spear, slingshot. He even dug back in the corner of the attic after the rock he’d used to hit Curran and put it on the top of Arie’s supply shelf.