“It’s okay, Astrid,” he said.
She melted into his arms.
“Don’t you care?” she choked out. “Isn’t it driving you crazy to think of what is going on out there?!”
He held her in his big football-player arms and she wept.
I was up on my feet. I had propelled myself to my feet and I started walking to the Home Improvement aisle, without even knowing where I was going.
Alex followed me.
I stormed off into the Pet aisle, kicking some fallen doggie treat boxes out of my way.
“Dean?” Alex asked. “Do you know what type Mom and Dad are, by chance?”
I shook my head.
“I’m sorry that I have B and you got O,” he said.
“That’s stupid,” I said. “I’m glad you are type B. It’s the least scary of them all.”
“Sterility is definitely the best one,” he replied. “Because it’s highly unlikely that I would be a father, anyway. It’s highly unlikely I would ever want to, even if I could, after all of this.”
I looked at him. Sometimes the way his brain worked just amazed me. He could deal with anything, as long as he could look at it scientifically.
“Anyway, I just wanted to say I’m sorry you got the worst type.”
And satisfied with our discussion, he walked away.
* * *
Alex, I will tell you, was just like our dad. Looked like him, thought like him, hiked up his pants the same way.
Our dad was an engineer and a land surveyor, employed almost exclusively by Richardson Hearth Homes. He loved his work but hated the developments he helped build. All the houses with their customizable elements—countertops, appliances, façade colors—he said they were for people who were mall-minded. It was a phrase of his. Similar to small-minded, but mall-minded.
Mall-minded people were people who’d grown up working at one national chain store to earn a paycheck they’d spend on crappy products and bad food from other national chain stores.
It was kind of revealing about my dad. He looked down on his neighbors, but built the very homes they lived in. A weird paradox. And we lived, always, in one of his developments. Apparently we couldn’t afford not to—they gave my parents such a steep discount.
What my dad did love was the technical aspect of his work. Surveying, measuring, working with machines and computers—all that stuff he was great at.
Alex was like that, too. He thought in terms of numbers and figures and trends.
When he was a little kid he was scared of everything. Dogs, trucks, the dark, Halloween; you name it, he was scared of it.
Our dad had taught him to analyze the things he feared.
So going trick-or-treating with him, when he was little, was like listening to a technical debriefing:
“That’s not a real witch, it’s a plastic figurine with LED lights for eyes and a prerecorded screech track. Those are not real gravestones; they are PVC molded into the shape of tombstones, with creepy sayings on them that were written by a gag writer. Those are not real demons coming down the street, those are the high school kids dressed in costumes they got at Walgreens or possibly ordered online…”
And all the while Alex’d be squeezing my hand like it offered his last link to sanity.
I had liked being his protector—the one who made him feel safe. Which was why I felt even worse about having attacked him.
Before, we had always made a good team—he was super-smart. I was super-stable. Kind of like our parents, actually.
Where our dad was brilliant and angsty, our mom was grounded and optimistic.
She loved books. That was one thing she and I really shared. Our house was full of old books. She’d buy them by the boxful, especially as people started using their tabs more and more for reading books.
Our mom had started buying books with a mania, as if she was afraid people would stop printing them at all.
She had multiple copies of her favorite books. I think she had eight copies of A Room of One’s Own (sort of indecipherable to me) and five Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (a great read).
Mom was always telling me about her ideas for novels but never started writing any of them.
Once I asked her why she never wrote the books she told me about.
“Oh, sweetie,” she had said. “I try. But, somehow, after I tell you about the idea, it’s like the air is out of the balloon and I don’t need to write it anymore.”
So instead of being a writer, she took care of us.
And worked retail during the holidays.
* * *
Alex and I foraged for some snacks and eventually went back to the Media Department.
Little Caroline woke up crying and Astrid went to her. She picked her up and hugged her.
“I had a nightmare,” Caroline sobbed. “I want my mommy.”
“I know, I know,” Astrid said, holding her close.
“Hey, thanks for waking me up, Cryoline,” Chloe teased. “Now I need to go pee. Who’s going to take me?”
“Saying Cryoline is name calling, Chloe,” Batiste noted. “That’s a you-know-what.”
“No, it’s not!” Chloe countered.
“Yes, it is too!” Batiste said.
“You know, Batiste, you’re being very judgmental,” Astrid noted. “I think being judgmental is a sin.”
“That’s not a sin!” Batiste said, offended. “I know all about sinning, and being judgmental is not a sin.”“I guess,” Astrid said. “But do you really want to risk it?”
That gave him pause for thought.
I stifled a laugh at his perplexed expression.
Then Astrid said, “Okay, you guys, I’ll take you to the bathroom. Everyone uses the bathroom and everyone washes hands. Then we’ll go find something from the frozen foods aisle for dinner.”
Little Henry asked, “Are we going to the ladies’ room? I don’t want to use the ladies’ room. I want to go in the men’s room.”
“My mom once took me in the ladies’ room,” Max volunteered. “And there was this lady in there crying and she had a ice cube and she was rubbing it on her eye and she said, ‘If Harry hits me one more time, I don’t know what I’ll do,’ and then this other lady came out of a stall and she said, ‘If Harry hits you one more time, you give him the end of this to suck on!’ And she puts a real, actual gun down on the sink. Made of metal, I am not even kidding. And then my momma turns to me and goes, ‘Tell your daddy to bring you to the men’s room.’”
I was getting the feeling that Max had lived a very, very interesting life. I took out my journal to write down what he’d said.
Astrid got the kids organized. She told Henry that they were all going to stick together and go in the ladies’ room, which was good psychology, even if it elicited a round of groans from the boys.
CHAPTER EIGHT
WATER
I was minding my own business, writing some stuff down, when Brayden ambled over and kicked the beanbag chair I was sitting on.
“Jesus, Dean, are you a total reject? Are you from the Middle Ages?”
“Brayden…,” Jake said from his own beanbag, a “lay off” implicit in his tone.
“No, it’s just, I knew that Geraldine was weird, I just didn’t understand the total extremity of the situation.”
“I write stuff down,” I said. “I just like to write.”
“Bet there’s stuff about me in there,” he said and he grabbed the journal from me.
“Come on!” I said, jumping to my feet.
He held it behind his back, an arm’s length away.
When I tried to grab it, he’d switch it to the other hand.
It was a scene straight out of first grade.
“I bet there’s stuff about all of us,” Brayden taunted. “Especially Astrid.”
I would’ve killed him if she’d overheard that. But she was off with the kids.
You know, you’d think that being locked in a Greenway during the end of the world would bring out the best in everyone, but—surprise!—Brayden was still an a-hole and a bully.
Brayden tore a page out and squinted at it, keeping the rest held above his head and out of my reach.
“Jeez, man, this stuff is dark,” he said, reading to himself.
“You’re such a jerk, Brayden!” I shouted. “How can you still be this immature?”
“Brayden, drop it,” Jake commanded.
“Don’t you want to know what it says about you, Simonsen?”
“I SAID DROP IT!” Jake shouted.
Brayden jumped. We all did.
Jake was standing, squared off to Brayden, with his hands in fists. His good-natured smile was gone. He was pissed.
“Whatever,” Brayden said and tossed the notebook to the end of the aisle.
“You gotta learn when to lay off, man,” Jake said with a rumble.
“Dude, I apologize,” Brayden said to Jake, palms turned up in an appeal. He shrugged. “For real. Sorry.”
Did I call Brayden a dick under my breath as I scrambled over the fallen books to retrieve my journal?
Of course I did.
* * *
And then there came this thin, tinny sound. Like a fire alarm or a siren. But it was coming from inside and it was getting louder.
It was Ulysses.
He was screaming and running for us.
We ran toward him and then we could hear the melee from the bathroom. Shrieking and screaming and inhuman sounds.
Niko pushed the door open.
The little children had gone crazy.
The McKinley twins were hiding under the sinks.
Chloe was sitting on Max and had her teeth sunk into his scalp. There was blood on the ground.
They were screaming and crying and attacking each other.
But Astrid.
She had Batiste by the throat, up against the wall.
Her face was red. The veins in her throat were throbbing, huge. She looked like a bull.
And Batiste was getting killed. He was getting strangled to death and I hope you never see it because it is a horrible thing to see. His face was blue and his eyes were big and his legs were limp.