August Ansel - The Attic

He made a full circuit of the L-shaped living room and dining room. There were four windows; he cleared a trail to each one, using his feet and a mildewed throw pillow to push the mess aside, flinching a little at the sharp rattle and clatter it raised. Talus whined and scratched at the closed door of the bedroom, and he shushed her. Her claws made a fretful circuit away from the door, then back, but she stopped whimpering.

As he reached each window, he paused and looked out with the binoculars Handy had left him when he’d turned over the watch. On the east side of the house he paid special attention to the end of the street, looking for Arie to come out of the woods. His mind kept trying to create her out of nothing, but all he saw was the place where the cul-de-sac fell away, dark and more dark.

A low-grade nausea worked on him, partly from the persistent ache in his head and face, but watching for Arie was making it worse. When Handy shook him out of a profound sleep, the first thing he told him was that she was out there again, alone this time. He hadn’t explained a thing, Handy, and his tone of voice made it clear that Curran would do best not to ask. He didn’t.

Returning to his makeshift broom, he swept a path from the dining room into the kitchen, where the back door was. He barely glanced at the demolished garden window over the sink. So high above ground level, no one could access it without first finding something the size of a pickup truck to climb on, and even then they would have to navigate through a massive amount of glass and rubbish. The other window showed him only a corner of the wildly overgrown backyard.

Satisfied that he’d made it safe enough, he let Talus out of the little bedroom. She wandered into the hallway, nose to the floor, getting her bearings by smell as she always did. The only thing to see out the bedroom window was a rotting board fence, but he took a quick look anyway. The closet door stood ajar, and he knew the hatch in its ceiling was open, but there was no sound from up in the attic. Satisfied, he followed Talus. She stayed next to him as he made a second circuit of the windows, but when they passed the front entry she veered off. The ruined hulk of a steel tool chest lay on its side, blocking the door; bent posts, where its rolling casters had once been, stuck out to the side like the legs of a dead thing. Talus rose on her hind legs, braced her front paws against the toolbox, and sniffed vigorously. Then she dropped back to the floor and growled quietly as she paced, intermittently whining and scratching around the edges of the metal cabinet.

“Hey, knock it off,” Curran said. The entry smelled of urine, but it was essentially bare, and he didn’t hear anything. Just to be sure, he ducked down and looked out the peephole in the door. Nothing but a shadow-riven front stoop and the haggard street beyond it. “Come on,” he told Talus. “Stay by me.” She obeyed but still seemed agitated, and it made Curran jumpy. Still, he felt safer by far in this remnant of a house than he had for weeks in his own snug camp.

He could still hardly believe they had let him stay. Handy, especially, who’d been so recently angling to kill him. Without Arie, it wouldn’t have mattered what Renna said—he’d likely be lying dead in the woods now if Arie hadn’t said otherwise. Handy’s esteem of her was palpable, and—despite her small stature and her age—Curran already felt an answering deference.

He positioned himself at the east window again, resting the uninjured side of his head against the wall. The shattered upper panes of the double-hung sash allowed in a cool breath of night air, most welcome in the fetid stink of these lower rooms. The funk was heaviest near the closed door in the hallway. Handy had explained that the windows in there were boarded shut and covered with vegetation on the outside anyway, of no use to their watch. Curran took him at his word. Since the world had ended, the smell of a dead thing was more than familiar, and as far as Curran was concerned, whatever was dead in that room could remain so in peace and privacy.

Talus sat close and leaned against him as she always did. He stroked her silky head with his free hand, and they waited. Something was bound to come out of the woods.

Renna’s dream began the same way every time. She was in her office, next door to the principal’s. The tall windows were open, the aluminum blinds fully raised, and afternoon sun shone in. Final bell had just rung, so the shouts and laughter of kids leaving for the day drifted up, along with the ubiquitous hum of Utiboards and the air brake sigh of buses lining up in the roundabout next to the cafeteria. She loved this part of the day, when the phone rang infrequently, the final touches were already added to the next morning’s bulletin, and she could actually drink a whole cup of coffee before it went cold on her desk.

She was putting things in order, as she did every day before she left: lingering inbox items few and neatly ordered, outbox full. As she poured a fresh batch of paperclips into a pretty ceramic holder, someone outside screamed. She dropped the holder and the small red box. The ceramic dish shattered, and paperclips flew, bouncing silver reflections all over Renna’s little office. It was awful, that scream. When she tried to run to the window, her feet wouldn’t move. But somehow she was already looking out. Dead teenagers lay in perfect, uniform rows on the green lawn, arms crossed over their chests, bodies as far as she could see, like a vast cemetery that had arranged corpses but forgotten the burial. Their eyes were closed, and their faces were radiantly pink. All of them looked asleep, except that a great many had bled from the nose and eyes. Packits and Utiboards and Solareads were tumbled around them like confetti.

She turned from the window. When she tried to lock her office door, her hands couldn’t remember the trick. She rotated the thumb bolt, but no matter how many times the bolt clicked into place, the door fell open. She got to her knees and crawled across the cheap carpet into the little supply alcove. The paperclips she’d scattered clung to her sweaty palms. There were no windows in the alcove, no door either.

“Posie.” A man’s voice bellowed out in the hallway. “Where the fuck are you?”

A storage cupboard took up most of one wall. It had large sliding panels in the bottom third. Renna opened one of the panels. There were banker’s boxes in there in stacks of two, marked with the relevant school years: 2047-48, 2048-49, 2049-50. Still in slow motion, she pulled the boxes out, stacked them neatly next to the wall.

Something slammed repeatedly in the hall, something heavy hitting the metal lockers that still lined both sides of the corridor. “Posie, answer me!” The banging got closer. Renna crawled into the bottom of the storage cupboard. She slid the little door all the way closed, shutting herself into complete dark. The cupboard smelled like cardboard and copier toner. She pulled her knees to her chest and wrapped her arms around her breasts. The office door that wouldn’t lock crashed open. She held her breath.

Handy spread blankets on the floor next to the Packard seat. When he’d gotten too tired to watch anymore, he secured the rope ladder and went down into the house to wake Curran. He had explained about Arie, hoped hard that Curran would watch, would see Arie when she returned, and would let her in downstairs. But in case she had to call up to Handy, he propped the sky panel open a few inches. The setting moon shone in at the crack and transected the attic in a thin band, offering just enough light to see without a candle.