“Another thing that’s going to change is the way we are using electricity. Alex has worked hard to make an energy plan that conserves our resources as much as possible, and we need to put it into action right away.”
Alex stood up.
“Yeah, um, so during the day, we’ll have the lights on here in the kitchen and also in Living Room area—”
“The school,” Josie corrected.
“And besides that,” Alex continued, “the other parts of the store will be dark.”
“Dark?” asked Caroline.
“Like how dark?” said Henry.
“It will be pretty dark, I think. But don’t be scared because, remember, this store is completely sealed off from the outside. So nothing can get in here. Everything in the store is a known quantity,” Alex said.
He was half talking to himself, I knew. Telling himself not to be scared.
“Plus we can each have a flashlight,” Josie added.
Batiste, Ulysses, and Max seemed excited about having flashlights, but Henry and Caroline looked scared.
Chloe was just scratching her head. Scratching hard and with purpose.
Niko laid out the work plan for the day.
The big kids would be helping to consolidate the frozen food in the kitchen freezers, to save on power.
I could see the planning behind the big change in routine. We couldn’t waste the energy to have the kids scattered all around the store working. Niko wanted them in one place so we’d only have to light a certain area of the store.
It made sense. But the whole thing made me irritated and what I realized was that I was pissed that Alex hadn’t told me about it.
He knew the power was giving out and he didn’t tell me. He told Niko instead.
Niko had him off and running the store while I was stuck in the Kitchen. He and Niko were becoming best buddies while I was stuck hanging out with the kindergarteners.
I didn’t like Niko spending more time with Alex than I did. It didn’t feel right to me. We were brothers. I should know everything he knew and vice versa.
Now that I was aware of not hanging around with my brother, it was all I could think about. At afternoon free period I tried to get him to play Monopoly. He had a game of Stratego going with Niko. And at dinner Alex asked Niko to go with him off to look at a set of video walkie-talkies he had found and was working on in our Living Room area. So I cleaned the Kitchen.
I went to my hammock in a huff, determined to talk to Alex the next day.
It felt like I’d only been asleep for a moment when I was shaken awake.
It was Jake.
“Get up!” he whispered. “There’s a woman outside at the loading docks. She wants us to let her in.”
Niko, Josie, Brayden, Jake, and I all stumbled into the common hallway of the Train. Jake motioned for us to be quiet and to follow him.
Once we were out of earshot of the kids, Niko turned to Josie.
“Josie, please stay here and make sure the kids stay safe.”
“I want to come,” she whispered. “They’re asleep. They’ll be fine.”
“We need you here,” Niko said.
“Come on, dude, she wants to come,” Brayden argued.
Trying to win points with his new girlfriend.
“The answer is no. I need to know that the kids are safe and here,” Niko said. “The rest of you come on.”
Niko took off toward the storeroom, I followed with the other boys and Josie crossed her arms and stayed behind.
Niko had authority, there’s no denying.
“You’re so sexist,” Josie hissed after him. He sort of was, I guess.
In the storeroom we heard an electronically transmitted voice. A woman.
“Hello? Are you back? Please! You have to hurry.”
Jake pointed and we saw something we’d not seen before—there was a video intercom, right on the wall.
A woman’s face, head wrapped in a shawl, face covered by layers of material, took up the frame.
“I was doing my rounds and I saw her,” Jake said. “I didn’t even know there was an intercom.”
“Please let me in,” she begged.
Niko pressed a button on the intercom.
“Hello. We see you. How many of you are there?”
“Just me! Just me!” she whispered. You could see she was craning her neck to look behind her.
Niko took his finger off the button. He turned to us.
“Listen,” he said. “I want to let her in, but we can’t. We physically can’t. We don’t know how to retract the security gate and we don’t have keys to the door.”
“I don’t trust her anyway,” Brayden said. “See how she’s looking behind her all the time? She’s got people with her. No question. It could be a trap.”
“I think she’s alone,” Jake said. “But Niko’s right. We couldn’t get the door open if we wanted.”
“Please!” she said, pleading. “Please hurry!”
She removed the material from around her face, maybe so we could see she was honest. There were dark circles under her eyes and they were rimmed red. She looked like someone’s mom.
“Please! I am begging you!”
Niko grabbed his hair and pulled. He was in agony.
“What about the hatch?” I said. “We open the hatch and throw a ladder down!”
“Yes!” Niko said. “Yes!”
But then the woman screamed. And her face disappeared from the monitor.
And we heard a voice that was low and menacing. A voice that was familiar.
“You. Get. Away. From. My. Store.”
He was talking to the woman and his speech was interrupted by heavy sounds. The sounds, I think, of him hitting her.
“This. Is. MY. STORE.”
It was the monster from the front gate.
He was “guarding” our store.
Which explained why we hadn’t had more people trying to get in, to get food and water.
I looked at the screen in shock, expecting at any moment to see the face of the monster, but it did not appear.
I guess he was too deranged to notice the camera.
We could hear what was going on outside, the last sounds of a scuffle, and then it was quiet. Then we heard what I imagined to be the sound of the man dragging the woman’s body away.
After a few moments of inactivity, the intercom shut off automatically.
We were frozen in a moment of horror, I think is the best way to describe it.
There had been a woman there. Right outside the door. And now she was dead.
And then Niko roared.
He balled his hands into fists and started striking his own head. Bam, bam, bam!
“Niko, stop!” I shouted.
He turned to the nearest shelving unit and started pummeling the boxes.
I stepped forward to try to help him. To restrain him, somehow, so he wouldn’t hurt himself.
“Let him be,” Jake said. “He’s just working stuff out.”
Niko destroyed the aisle, ripping, punching, tearing, throwing, cursing, spitting, shouting. Crying.
Slowly, he started winding down.
“All right, man,” came Jake’s drawl. “It’s gonna be okay.”
“It’s not okay,” Niko shouted. “She’s dead and if I’d just thought faster, I could have saved her!”
He drove his head into a heavy, wooden crate.
“You’re pissed!” I shouted. “You’re so angry you want to burst!”
My volume and intensity surprised him (and me), and he stopped what he was doing.
“We could’ve saved her and we failed! You could have saved her and you failed!” I shouted.
It seemed like he needed me to push back at him with the same weight of his own anger and despair.
“She’d dead! They’re all dead and we can do nothing to save them!”
Niko crumpled to his knees and rested his forehead on the linoleum. Now I could stop yelling. He could hear me.
“It’s not your fault, Niko,” I said.
“But I could have helped her.”
“It’s not your fault,” I repeated.
“You didn’t cause the tsunami, man,” Jake said quietly.
“It’s not your fault.”
“It’s nobody’s fault,” Brayden said.
Niko’s body relaxed.
Jake, Brayden, and I just watched him for a while as his chest heaved and he regained his usual composure.
Niko drew his sleeve across his face.
He sat up and looked around.
“Shoot,” he said. “Look at this mess.”
We laughed a little when he said that.
“Come on, man,” Jake said. “Let’s go get a drink.”
Jake hauled Niko to his feet and we left the storeroom.
But I gave a backward glance at the monitor.
It was black and silent.
One more lady was dead. Add her to the millions dead outside and she figured pretty small. But to us, she was big.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
RUM
We gathered in the kitchen. Jake had a bottle of rum and was pouring liberal shots into Dixie cups.
Jake held his cup aloft. “To Niko, a really good guy, even if he is a Boy Scout.”
“Here, here,” I said, tapping my cup with them.
I took a sip. Straight rum. It burned. But it felt good to feel something strong besides failure.
Brayden knocked his down without a grimace.
“You know,” Jake said, after he drained his cup. “I love Boy Scouts. You know why?”
“Why?” Niko asked.
“They give a real good hand job.”
We cracked up.
“No, really. All that time up in the mountains with nothing to do. They always come prepared, too, with little lotion bottles.”
“Ha-ha,” Niko said. But he didn’t seem mad at all. “We get a lot of those jokes. But back in Buffalo—”
“You’re from Buffalo? New York?” Brayden interrupted him. “I have an aunt from there.”