The Two That Remained Read online

  “Crazy kid,” he mumbled at her, feeling his spirits lift for a moment.

  He went through the glove box. The feeling of bone deep unease hadn’t left him, but he was starting to rationalize this place. It was nothing to get worked up over. It was a vivid madness. His job situation had changed. He wasn’t getting enough rest. Lillian wasn’t acting like herself. And, hadn’t he taken a few doses of codeine cough syrup the night before to pass out quicker? Combined, that was more than enough to set anyone on edge.

  Items in the glove box were as he’d remembered. Papers from maintenance, the bills he’d gotten out of the mailbox when they’d left the house, even the two hundred dollars he’d crammed inside the manual in case his new debit card didn’t work.

  He set the messenger bag in the passenger seat and stuck his key in the ignition. He turned it with a snap, but nothing happened. He tried again. Nothing. No click-click-click of an engine attempting to turn over.

  “Super,” he groaned. “Paid nearly double for that battery.” A gel-style he could take back to Costco if it died in less than five years. Did him no good now—he needed a jump.

  Emily giggled from the back seat, finding a pair of toy bunnies and a set of necklaces that had been crammed into the side of her car seat.

  “Star!” she said, putting a pink necklace with a clear, orange star over her head. She lifted it and smiled, then began to talk to it.

  Ryan just sat there, transfixed, watching her in the rearview mirror, both hands on the wheel, both feet on the pedals. A five-year battery was dead. Just his fucking luck. The very reason he’d sprung for the better battery, after all. He didn’t want to be stranded. He hated being stranded.

  “No,” he told himself. “Just a dream. A bad, bad dream. A dream where the world is full of skeletons and Costco batteries turn out to be crap.” He tried the car again. Nothing. He gathered his will and told it to start. Nothing. He slapped the steering wheel and groaned, pushing down on the pedals at the same time as if that would make a difference. “Stay right here, baby. I’ll be right back.”

  “Right back,” she repeated.

  The jump-starter was as powerful as the five-year, too expensive battery required, but did nothing to make the engine turn over. Checking the jump-starter’s indicator light, he saw it too, was dead. He let out a breath. “Should’ve known.”

  Ryan spun to see a BMW parked beside him. A wolfish grin split his face. It was Lillian’s jackass boss, Peter’s car; a white, 6 Series BMW Gran Coupe. It was not the base model. Peter had come to Ryan and Lillian’s house on several occasions in this ostentatious prick’s version of an Accord, and while Ryan was covered in puke or feces or whatever food Emily had decided to finger paint his shirt with, he had whisked Ryan’s wife away to be arm candy at some Unified Biological Labs public event. Ryan knew nothing was going on between his wife and Peter, despite the fact that they’d grown increasingly friendly over the past few months, but at the same time…

  “I can’t suffer a man who drinks beer with a straw.”

  He yanked the jump-starter free and chucked it through the passenger window of the unoccupied BMW. It crashed onto the leather seats with a satisfying shattering of glass. Ryan grinned, realizing he actually needed to get in on the driver’s side, walked around the car, and chucked the jump-starter through that side next. It was no less satisfying the second time. He cackled as he peered around the parking lot, but there was no one to hear the noise. He reached inside the car and popped the hood. Perhaps he could jump his battery with Mr. Fancy Pant’s car.

  “I bet ten bucks my dad’s old Chevy would start right now.”

  He glanced back to the Matrix to see Emily playing quietly in the back seat. She’d be okay for another minute or two. He searched under the hood of the BMW but couldn’t locate the battery. Then a thought occurred to him and he slapped his forehead, laughing a little as he did. He might not know much about cars, but he knew this. BMW batteries were kept in the trunk.

  “Stupid idiot.”

  He reached inside and attempted to pop the trunk, but it wouldn’t open. He tried again and again, but no luck. The trunk release was an electronic, tactile button, not a lever on a cable. This led him to believe it needed power. Sure, if he had the jack ass’s keys he could just open the trunk to gain access to the battery, but he didn’t. He didn’t dare go back into the lab and look either.

  He plopped back down in the driver’s seat of the Matrix and put his face in his hands. Emily tried to hand him something but he hardly noticed.

  The battery in their car was dead. The battery in the car beside him was dead. If this was the case, instinct told him that the battery of every car in this deck was dead.

  What did that mean then? He’d been asleep for five years? Had it been longer than that? How had it happened at all? Was he really alone? Was Lillian really dead? Was Emily all he had left?

  This was worse than the time he’d taken acid back in college, and that night, he’d fought a demon crawling out of an AC/DC poster at his cousin’s pad. “Okay, so let’s just go with it. Let’s imagine this isn’t a madness or whatever. Let’s imagine that anything I do could kill me or Emily. That the world is dead and that we have no other option than to live on. What would I do in a situation like that?” He sat for a moment in silence. Emily tried to hand him something again. He ignored her.

  “Okay. It’s eleven, maybe twelve miles home. It’s hard to tell what time of day it is as grey as it is outside. I can carry Emily most of the way, she can walk some. We’ll take the most direct route over the bridge and back through the city. If we hurry, we’ll make it back to the house by dark. I’m thirsty, we’re both thirsty. I can stop by the convenience store at the corner and get a couple bottles of water. We can keep them in the messenger bag, in Lil—” He cut himself off, choking on his words like a bitter pill. He stared over at the bright, happy, Hello Kitty bag in the passenger seat and frowned. “We’ll get back to the house and figure it out from there. Get a good night’s rest.”

  Emily pushed against his arm once more with an open hand. “What?” he snapped, and spun around. She held proudly before her a tiny, closed fist, wrist turned up.

  Between the crevices of her chubby fingers were stuck crumbling, paper-thin black wings. He scrambled to his knees on his seat, and peeled open her clenched fist.

  “No,” she protested. “Mine!”

  He worked harder, hooking an index finger through her fist, forcing her fingers loose.

  He saw half a dozen dead cockroaches, crushed nearly to the point of dust, collected in her damp palm. He brushed them out of her hand and onto the seat, nervous sweat beading on his hairline.

  “No,” Ryan growled, his heart rising into his throat. He surveyed her hands to be sure he’d gotten them all. These insects were diseased. Unclean. They carried dysentery, cholera, parasitic worms, and even y-pestis, aka, the Black Plague. Lillian had been militant about keeping roaches out of their house, and they’d just been in Emily’s hand, something she puts in her mouth. She needed to be scrubbed from head to toe, disinfected, cleaned and hung out to dry just to be sure she was safe from all dangers and infection-free.

  And Ryan couldn’t even get her out of a parking garage.

  Emily cocked her head into view and he noticed something even worse than the crushed roaches in her hand. A large wing, nearly three inches long, protruded from Emily’s closed, grinning lips.

  There was no time for Mr. Nice Dad, no time to prep for surgery. He carefully, but roughly, unhinged her teeth and swept a finger to the back of her mouth, across her tongue, to the other cheek, raking the chalky, moist remains out of her mouth and onto the rear of the driver’s seat. She gagged for an instant as Ryan forcibly removed the insectile debris from her maw, his knuckle having come millimeters from touching her uvula.

  “No like!” she shouted, mouth now cockroach-free. “Mine!” Her tiny, sharp teeth snapped down in rapid succession like an Amazonian piranha as soon as R
yan’s fingers were free. “Mine! Mine!”

  “Not yours, baby. Those are yuck. Bad for you. Danger.” He did his best to get all the roach parts out of her mouth, cold shivers shooting through his body at the thought. God, he hoped these didn’t have the Black Plague.

  He took her around the middle and set her in the front seat, checking her again to be sure she didn’t have any more roaches in her possession. She was clean. He used a tiny squeeze bottle of hand sanitizer, like it would prevent the spread of plague. He let out a breath, itching wildly at the phantom skitters on his shoulders, forcing himself not to scratch everywhere.

  “Baby, don’t eat roaches. Those are yucky. Okay?”

  Emily looked sad and shook her hands until they were dry.

  His fingers brushed over the side of the messenger bag, forcing a swallow. He couldn’t stay here.

  “Alright, wanna go for a walk?”

  Even in Emily’s state of utter dejection for not being allowed to feast on diseased remains of long dead cockroaches, she nodded. She always liked to go on walks.

  He shoved the diapers from Emily’s diaper bag into Lillian’s messenger bag, along with a few napkins from the glove box, and the two hundred dollars in the car manual. When the messenger bag was full to bulging, he slung it over his shoulder.

  “I’m sorry, Lillian,” he said as they walked out of the deck and onto the street. “Please tell me what to do. Please tell me how to get out of this nightmare.”

  The wind howled its way through the quiet streets as an emptiness worked its way through his shoulders and arms, settling into his heart. It was getting harder to believe this wasn’t real.

  The two that remained, father and daughter, headed off into uncertainty in search of home.

  Chapter 3

  They set off for home, heading north on Illinois-3. The grass to either side of the highway was tall and brown, but appeared to be springing back to life with the change of season. Gradients of green were bursting among the mix of foliage the farther they traveled, and in the few trees alongside the verge, the shades of chlorophyll rustled furiously on the branches. The air, however, was still cold. It wasn’t yet high spring. It was no warmer than the mid to low sixties and with nothing but grey skies, the day wasn’t getting any warmer. The breeze coming up off the Mississippi was damp, yet had a cleaner quality than Ryan had known in his life. No scent of oil or petrol, of dead fish or rotten eggs—just muddy waters.

  They made their regular stop, a now-empty convenience store at the corner, went to the coolers in back and grabbed four bottles of water. Emily took off at a sprint, circling the aisles. Normally he would have raised his voice and chased after her, but what was the point?

  The store appeared to be in good order, just as it had any other day, except now there was no power. All the merchandise, Snickers Bars and cans of pop, quarts of Valvoline, White Owl Blunt Rolls, or Rough Rider Condoms, were covered in a thick dust. Motes of it danced in the air where muted sunlight filtered in. A dead place disturbed by a change in air pressure when the door swung wide, heralded by a tinkling chime.

  Ryan and his daughter stopped here often for waffle cones and 7-Up before heading home across the bridge and back into Missouri. The clerk had been a single man in his fifties, Carl, who loved to talk baseball and was about as big a Cardinals fan as you’d ever seen. In fact, he only drank Busch beer for this very reason, and his paunch reflected that clear enough. He sometimes had a sucker or two for Emily. The first time he’d offered Ryan one for her, Ryan sensed a subtle aura of creep coming off the man. But over time, visiting Lillian at UBL and stopping here again and again, Ryan realized Carl was just a lonely guy that never got the chance to have a family of his own. Maybe it was his sometimes abrasive personality? His poor hygiene or lack of drive in regard to anything in life besides baseball?

  No one would ever get the chance to find out.

  A pile of bones lay behind the counter, curled up against a display for last year’s season opening. Atop these bones was a pile of slack, moth-ridden clothing, a collared red shirt with strips of green and orange running down the zipper. Engraved in san serif font upon his nametag was Carl.

  Emily approached the counter and tried to peer over, but only her nose reached the edge. She groaned, stretching to stand on tiptoes, putting her hands above her head.

  “Want! Give, Dada!”

  “Hang on, hang on. We’ll take care of that.”

  “Man?”

  “Yeah. He’s eh, off work today.”

  “Work?”

  Ryan took a hand full of Tootsie Pops from a candy shelf, inspected once, then shoved them in his pocket.

  “Come on, let’s go. Don’t pout, baby. Everything is just fine.” He lowered his voice and mumbled, “Right, Carl?”

  But the protection of disbelief was faltering.

  As he opened the door, leading Emily out, he glanced back to see three other piles of bones of varying size, swathed in decaying clothes. His gaze fell to the ground as he let the door shut, the sound of a tinkling bell signaling its completion.

  Emily walked beside her daddy for about another mile, occasionally getting side-tracked to pick the flowies.

  She held a purple blossom up to him.

  He stared at it and sighed. “That’s a pretty flowie, but don’t take them all. You, well, never mind.”

  “Hold. Hold,” she said, reaching, and Ryan scooped her up, handful of flowies and all.

  Her bare arms were cold in the wind like chicken skin. He’d dressed her for a warm summer day in the park, open flowy dress and jelly shoes, not a cool, early-spring riverside stroll. Ryan set her back down, to much objection, and removed his collared shirt. He slipped it around her and awkwardly cinched the far too long sleeves at her middle like a belt, then folded the tail between her legs. This left him with nothing but a plain, white undershirt and no sleeves, but it was far better for him to be the one with chicken skin than her. She could catch her death out here and he didn’t see St. Mary’s ER being much help if she did.

  He scooped her back up and plodded onward, the air turning ever cooler the closer they came to the riverbank and ascended onto the ramp of I-64, “the Sixty Far,” heading west. He tried to get Emily to sit on his shoulders but she refused, which made him even more tired. He was out of shape and this wasn’t easy. The lower sections of his arms began to cramp and stiffen.

  A sign on their right warned them that the interstate was for motorized vehicles only. “Good thing I’m a programmer. We aren’t bothered with warnings, only errors,” he joked, but no one was there to appreciate it. Lillian would have laughed. Lawrence, his best friend, would have merely stared at him.

  The interstate was a mess. Car accidents proliferated the tangle of the raised concrete junction. As with the cars in the deck, these too were filthy, though maybe less so for having been exposed to the rain. For every car, there was at least one body.

  Wind gusted across the river, howling like a specter, bringing with it the palpable scent of water and mud, free of petroleum. Emily’s hair blew back into Ryan’s face and he pushed it away, reaching into a pocket out of instinct to clip on a red bow matching the flowies of her dress. Emily nodded and twisted her head side to side, showing off her new accessory to the empty city.

  The arch of Gateway Park rose thunderously before them on the right but brought forth no joy, no sense of home in an alien place. This was not Ryan’s St. Louis, the one he’d grown up and lived in most of his life—the one of excitement, Cardinal’s baseball, Provel cheese and toasted ravs—this was something else. This was the space between living and death, purgatory, a nightmare, a lie.

  Having carried Emily this far, his arms were already hurting. He opened several of the forgotten cars, checking to see if keys were within easy access. They were, still in ignitions. He forced himself into a blackish sedan, using a foot to ease its skeletal operator into the passenger side. The car stank of old rot and sickness, bucket seat brownish red an
d sticky.

  “Ugh, my God.” Ryan gagged on the stench, taking care to lean forward in the seat. “Emily, stay where you are. Keep a hand on the door.” She did as she was asked, oversized shirt flapping in the chilly breeze. “Come on. Work.” He turned the key and waited. “Come on, damn it.”

  No result, just like his Toyota.

  He slammed his head against the steering wheel several times. It came back sticky where the previous driver’s hands had been. He frantically hopped out of the car and scrubbed the decay from his forehead with a wet wipe, catching sight of a car seat in back filled with near clothing.

  “What tiny bones,” he hissed and clutched Emily. “Okay. Okay. We walk. We can do this. We don’t need a car, right? You’re here, you’re okay. Daddy needs you.”

  She squeezed him in return and nodded. Ryan’s forehead itched.

  There was nothing in all the world that could cause millions of people to just stop living. Not even a virus. But the people he’d seen here were like pocket watches, wound down to nothing until they slowly collapsed right where they were. Life had not been taken forcefully from this place, it merely dissolved, left of its own accord and moved on without anyone’s permission.

  “Go!” his wife’s voice echoed in his mind, and he thought of the note and video messages hidden on her cell phone. If this wasn’t a dream he would have to face those things again, but for now, he had only to face nine more miles of humanity's wasteland while his toddler clung on for dear life.

  “One step at a time.”

  She began to grow restless in his arms. He set her down, gave her a sip of water—for which she screamed for juice he didn’t have—and handed her a sucker. He checked her diaper to be sure it didn’t need changing, but with as little as they’d eaten, which was nothing, and as little as they’d drank, which was only a dribble, she was dry. That wasn’t a good sign. In fact, Ryan hadn’t peed either. He was sweating, mostly from where Emily had been against him, and that was good, but he needed to keep himself hydrated. It was a long way yet to the next pit stop.