Текст книги "The End Is Nigh"

Автор книги: Jack McDevitt

Соавторы: Nancy Kress
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Текущая страница: 7 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

“You said it yourself, Em. You said, ‘I love you.’ You were just told that your life was over. Goodbye citizen, in six months you will be dead. And the only thing that mattered to you was telling me that you loved me.” She takes my hand. “Don’t you get it? I love you, too. With all my heart. With all my

life

. All I want is for us to be together. Fuck this asteroid. Fuck the lottery. Let’s just get married and be happy for whatever time we have left.”

There are tears in her eyes and I know they are tears of joy. How can they be tears of joy?

“It doesn’t matter how long my life is,” she says. “I just want to end it with you as my wife.”

She looks directly into my eyes. And I understand.

• • • •

It took us a long time to get to the Davis Mountains in West Texas, but we made it. It is cold, but the sky is clear. My mom is there. Lynn’s parents won the lottery, and we are happy for them even if they have to miss our wedding. Dad’s girlfriend won the lottery, too, and after a quickie wedding before it was made illegal, dad stopped returning my calls. It’s for the best. Lynn’s friend Max is officiating. He’s a Baptist minister, and I rather think that a lesbian wedding is on his bucket list, but I’m not crass enough to ask him.

Lynn is resplendent in her dress. My mom cries as she walks me up an aisle of wild grass and stone. She hugs Lynn very tight and then kisses me. Lynn and I say our vows; we exchange rings; and Max declares us married. We kiss, and I can’t help but cry.

“I’m so sorry,” I whisper, and Lynn shakes her head.

“No, no no. Don’t be. I wanted to live the rest of my life with you as my wife.” She touches my cheek with her hand. “Now I will, and I’m so incredibly grateful.”

I pull my wife close. Our cheeks touch, and I am grateful, too.

There is only one other guest at the wedding. The sky is dominated by a streaking ball of fire that looks nothing like the ugly rock I saw on TV. Today it looks glorious, a celestial benediction that couldn’t be more beautiful.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jake Kerr began writing short fiction in 2010 after fifteen years as a music and radio industry columnist and journalist. His first published story, “The Old Equations,” appeared in

Lightspeed

and went on to be named a finalist for the Nebula Award and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. He has subsequently been published in

Fireside Magazine

,

Escape Pod

, and the

Unidentified Funny Objects

anthology of humorous SF. A graduate of Kenyon College with degrees in English and Psychology, Kerr studied under writer-in-residence Ursula K. Le Guin and Peruvian playwright Alonso Alegria. He lives in Dallas, Texas, with his wife and three daughters.

Tananarive Due – REMOVAL ORDER

Tiny black dots speckled Nayima’s white-socked feet as she shuffled across the threadbare carpet in her grandmother’s living room. Gram’s four cats were gone, but the fleas had stayed behind. Nayima had learned to ignore the itching, but the sight of so many fleas made her sick to her stomach. The flea problem had seemed small compared to Nayima’s daily ever-growing list of responsibilities, but she would not keep her Gram in filth.

“Shit,” Nayima said to the empty living room, the fleas, and the slow, steady whistling of Gram’s sleep-breathing in the next room.

Gray morning light beckoned her. Nayima flung the front door open and sat on the stoop, breathing fast to try to beat the nausea, which felt too much like death. Fledgling panic gnawed the rim of her stomach. She could make out the headline of the bright electric pink flyer Bob the groundskeeper had dutifully posted on the community bulletin board across the green belt from Gram’s house: REPORT TO THE NEAREST HOSPITAL IF… and the litany of symptoms. Stomachache was high on the list, beneath persistent headache and double vision.

That had been a month ago. Bob was gone, and the hospital’s doors were chained. Even the bright flyer was nearly obscured in the gray-brown haze that had settled over her neighborhood like a sepia camera filter. The San Gabriel mountain range that stood a few blocks from Foothill Park was nearly hidden beneath a sheet of brown clouds. Sunlight bled through the sky in a fuzzy ball, but less light than yesterday. So much for Southern California sunshine. Nayima had gotten used to the smell, the eye and sinus irritation, the coughing at bedtime, but she hated the way the smoke had changed the daylight. Each morning she hoped the day would be a bit clearer and brighter, but the sky was always a little worse than before, like eyesight slowly going dim.

But she could manage the flea problem.

That

she could do.

The irony wasn’t lost on her: she had only remained because she didn’t want to move Gram. Now she would have to move Gram after all, without the help of neighbors, soldiers or police officers. The infestation was too far gone for insecticides—and she’d already emptied a can, making it harder to breathe in the house. Gram had taught her how hard fleas were to kill, with her menagerie of pets in the house Nayima had been raised in since she was four. Nayima had felt like just another of Gram’s adopted creatures.

The street spread before Nayima with its alien coloring and emptiness, her neighbors’ windows dark and sleeping. Most of the driveways were clear except for a few vandalized cars left behind. The week before, a daytime marauder had come through on a loud motorcycle, raising a racket and tossing clothes into the trees. Kids, she guessed, but she’d stayed out of sight, so she wasn’t sure. A long-sleeved shirt and ratty blue jeans still hung from high fronds in the neat row of palm trees in front of the green belt.

Nayima used to walk her neighborhood for exercise, rounding the green belt and pool area, the basketball court, the rows of stucco exteriors in carefully matched paint. This day she scouted for a new home—testing the door-knobs, sniffing the air inside, assessing the space. She had visited them all before. Most had been damaged beyond usefulness by looters.

She chose the house on the opposite corner from Gram for its proximity and the bright yellow roses blooming in front, lovely and clueless. Mr. Yamamoto’s house. Inside, its Spartan decor had given looters little to muss, although broken glass glittered in the kitchen. But the house had double doors large enough to push Gram’s bed through. The lock was intact. No windows broken. No terrible odors. No carpeting to hide nests of biting fleas.

Sanctuary.

“Thank you, Mr. Yamamoto,” she said.

Mr. Yamamoto had offered to drive her and Gram to the high desert in the back of his SUV, though she’d seen relief flicker in his hollowed eyes when she’d refused. He’d had a carload already, with his daughter and grandchildren from Rancho. Instead, he had given her a box of spices, most of them characteristically useless: every Halloween, he’d handed out clementine oranges instead of candy. Before Gram got sick, she and Mr. Yamamoto had walked their dogs together. Like Gram, he was retired. Like everyone, he had left most of his belongings behind.

Gram’s old digital wristwatch told her it was 7:30 in the morning. From the dark sky, it could be evening. The day had already wearied her, and the hard part had not yet begun.

Gram was asleep. She lay slanted on her side where Nayima had left her at 4 a.m., after her careful ritualistic padding of pillows to keep her from slumping on to her back. Studying Gram’s quiet face, Nayima marveled again at how the cancer had stolen the fat from her cheeks, shrinking her grandmother to a smaller husk each day.

The usual thought came:

Is she dead?

But no. Gram’s chest moved with shallow breaths. In the early days, when cancer was new to them both, she had fretted over every moan, gasped at every imitation of a death mask on Gram’s brown, lined face. Gram was nearly seventy, but she had never looked like an old woman until the cancer. Her white hair was still full and springy, but now her face looked like she would not last the day, which was how she always looked.

But Gram always did last the day. And the next.

The bell was always on Gram’s mattress, though she had not had the strength to ring it in a long time. The hospital-grade bed had cost a fortune, equipped with an inflated mattress that was gentler against Gram’s breaking skin. It didn’t work as well without its electric pump, but Nayima kept it inflated with an old bicycle pump. Not enough, maybe, but it was inflated. The county had shut off the power to the entire area after the evacuation.

Nayima felt the magnitude of her impending tasks. Should she dress and treat Gram’s sores before or after the move? Damnation either way.

Later, she decided. She didn’t want to face the sores with the move still waiting. The move would irritate Gram’s sores with or without a cleaning and dressing first, but maybe after was best. She wished her cell phone worked, not that there was anyone to call for advice. An internet search would have felt like a miracle. The lack of advice wearied her.

As if her loud uncertainty had awakened her, Gram’s eyes flew open. Gram’s eyes had once been the brightest part of her, though they were milky now.

“Baby?” Gram said.

Nayima stepped closer to the bed. She could smell that the wounds needed cleaning—the dead flesh odor she hated. She slipped her hand over Gram’s dry palm. Gram squeezed, but did not hold on.

“I’m here, Gram,” she said.

Gram stared with the same eyes that had probed Nayima when she came home late from “movies” with her first boyfriend smelling of weed and sex. But this time, the questions were too big and vast for words, with answers neither of them wanted to hear. Nayima hadn’t let Gram watch the news or listen to the radio in weeks, so Gram didn’t know how many others were facing illness. She didn’t know the neighbors had left.

“We have to move to Mr. Yamamoto’s house,” Nayima said. “Too many fleas here.”

“The… cats?” Gram said.

“They’re fine,” Nayima said. That was probably a lie. She had stopped feeding Gram’s four cats and locked them out after the evacuation, so the cats had left too. She’d cried about it at the time, but at least cats could hunt.

“Tango too?” Gram’s eyes grew anxious. Maybe Gram had heard the lie in her voice.

“Tango’s still mean and fat,” Nayima said.

Was that a smile on Gram’s face? Gram had asked her to keep a single framed photo displayed on the table beside her bed, snapped the first summer Nayima came home from Spelman: the overfed black cat, Tango, was in Gram’s lap while Nayima hugged Gram from behind in her powder blue college sweatshirt. Nayima’s best friend, Shanice, had taken the photo. The glowing pride on Gram’s face haunted Nayima now.

Gram’s eyes started to flutter shut, but Nayima squeezed her hand and they opened again, alert. “I’m going to push you in the bed, Gram,” she said, “but it will hurt.”

“That’s okay, baby,” Gram said. That was Gram’s answer to every piece of bad news.

Nayima had stockpiled pain pills with help from Shanice, who was an R.N. and had raided the meds as soon as she caught wind of how bad things were going to be. Thanks to Shanice—who had moved next door when they were both in the sixth grade—Nayima had a box of syringes, hundreds of oxy pills, saline packs for hydration, ointment and dressing for bedsores, bed pads, and enough Ensure to feed an army. But Gram hadn’t been able to swallow anything on her own since before the neighbors left, so all Nayima could do was crush the pills in water and inject them. Gram’s arms looked like a junkie’s.

The smell was worse when Nayima leaned over Gram to inject her crushed pill. Nayima’s throat locked. How would she clean her and scrape away Gram’s dead skin later if she could barely stand the smell now?

Gram’s eyes were flickering again, ready to close.

“Are you hungry?” Nayima asked.

Gram’s lips moved, but she didn’t say anything Nayima could hear.

Nayima didn’t smell feces, so she would postpone the rest—the changing of the urine-soiled bed pad, the gentle sponge cleaning, the bedsores, the feeding. All of that would wait until they had moved to Mr. Yamamoto’s flea-free home.

He always had been meticulous, Mr. Yamamoto. Even his roses were still on schedule.

“I love you, Gram,” Nayima said, and kissed her grandmother’s forehead. She allowed her lips to linger against the warm, paper-thin skin across the crown of Gram’s skull.

Gram’s breath whistled through her nose. She whistled more now, since the smoke.

Luckily, the cancer wasn’t in Gram’s lungs, so breathing had never been a problem. But breathing would be a problem for both of them soon. It hadn’t occurred to Nayima to ask Shanice for oxygen, not back then. She hadn’t known the fires were coming. Even the dust masks Nayima wore outside had just been in a box left untouched for years in Gram’s garage. She wore them until they fell apart; she only had twenty-two more.

When Nayima fitted a new dust mask across her grandmother’s nose and mouth, Gram didn’t even open her eyes.

The first scream didn’t come until they were well beyond the front door, when Nayima had lulled herself into thinking that the move might not be so bad. One of the wheels wandered off the edge of the driveway, rattling Gram’s bed. Her scream was strong and hearty.

“Sorry,” Nayima whispered, her mantra. “I’m sorry, Gram.”

Gram’s eyes, closed before, were wide and angry. She glared at Nayima, then turned her gaze to the sky. Even with pain lining her face, Nayima saw Gram’s bewilderment.

“It’s smoke,” she said. “Brushfires.”

The bewilderment melted away, leaving only the pain. Most of Nayima’s life with Gram, there had been wildfires every other summer. They both had grown accustomed to the sirens and beating helicopters that were still Nayima’s daily and nightly music. She heard a far-off helicopter now, and a choppy, angry voice from an indistinct loudspeaker. She braced for popping gunshots, but there were none. Not this time.

“Mr. Yamamoto took a trip with his grandchildren, so he said we could use his house,” Nayima said, trying to distract Gram, but a bump elicited a shriek. “I’m sorry, Gram. I’m sorry.”

At the edge of the driveway, it occurred to Nayima that she could pull the car out of the garage instead. She’d packed the passenger side and trunk solid, but she’d left the back seat empty for Gram, layered with blankets. She could wash, dress and feed Gram right outside and then carry her into the car. Would the screams be any worse? What difference would it make if Gram was screaming in Foothill Park or screaming somewhere down the smoky interstate?

Nayima’s tears stung in the smoke. She had to stop to wipe her eyes dry with a section of her thin shirt. When she looked at her clothing, she realized she was only wearing a black tank top and underwear, the clothes she slept in. And white socks. She had so much laundry to do.

Gram’s shriek melted to a childlike, hopeless sob.

Nayima gave Gram’s hand another squeeze and then carefully, very carefully, pushed the rolling bed across the bumpy asphalt, toward the beckoning yellow rose blossoms.

“Look, Gram,” she said. “Mr. Yamamoto’s roses are blooming.”

Gram coughed a phlegmy cough behind her dusk mask. And screamed in pain again.

Gram was crying by the time Nayima finally brought the bed to rest in its new home beside Mr. Yamamoto’s black sofa and artificial palm tree.

Nayima cursed herself. Why hadn’t she found a way to kill the fleas at Gram’s house instead? What had possessed her? A fierce headache hammered Nayima’s temples, bringing paralyzing hopelessness as bad as she’d felt since the 72-hour flu took over the news.

So they were both crying while Nayima pulled Gram’s bandages away to reveal the black and red angry stink of her wounds, the yawning decay that cratered her back. Nayima could nestle a golf ball in the cavern that grew above her grandmother’s right buttock. Infection had found the sores despite Nayima’s steady cleanings.

“Fuck,” she said. “Fuck.”

Her hands were shaking as she debrided the wound in a clumsy imitation of what Shanice had tried to teach her—the cruel, steady scraping of Gram’s most tender flesh.

And, of course, Gram screamed the whole while.

But Nayima carried on despite the lump clogging her throat, despite her smoke-stinging eyes. Then the infected flesh began to disappear, the smell turned more sterile, the ointments began their healing, the bandages sealed the mess from sight.

And Gram stopped screaming. Stopped whimpering. Only moaned here and there to signal she needed a moment to rest, and Nayima let her rest whenever she could.

Nayima retrieved her jug of boiled water, dipped her sponge in it, and gently washed Gram between her legs, water running in streams down the wrinkled crevices of her thighs. Washed Gram’s downy, thin patch of pubic hair. Checked her for signs of skin irritation from urine, and was thankful to find none. That, at least, was going right.

Then it was time to feed her, so Nayima checked beneath the surgical tape that affixed Gram’s gastric tube near her navel. No infection there either, nothing out of place. Then she filled a bag with Ensure, hung it from the waiting hook on the bed, and watched the tube fill with nourishment as it crawled toward Gram’s stomach.

By then, Gram was already sleeping, as if the day had never happened.

The smoke seemed to clear from the air.

“Thank you, God,” Nayima said.

Mr. Yamamoto had running water, and a state-of-the art grill on the patio, if only she could find food worthy of it. He had cleaned out his kitchen cabinets before he left, she remembered; he hadn’t left a mess. No rotting odors from his fridge, no toilets left unflushed.

And no fleas. Mr. Yamamoto’s house was a vacation.

Nayima checked on Gram regularly, turning her every two hours. She moved her car to Mr. Yamamoto’s pristine garage, which looters had overlooked. She even found a flashlight and an empty gas can, which she squeezed into her trunk. She turned and fed Gram again.

The sky was dark long before sunset.

The coyotes were fooled by the dark skies and the sirens. Just before five o’clock, a coyote chorus rose, sharp through the house’s walls. There were more coyotes all the time. Maybe some left-behind dogs had joined the coyotes, howling their grief. They sang all around her, as if Foothill Park were ringed by wilderness.

Nayima decided she wasn’t afraid. Not yet. Maybe one day. Maybe tomorrow.

She sat on the front porch of Mr. Yamamoto’s house with a warm beer, her only indulgence, one of her last six in an eighteen-pack she’d found in a neighbor’s rec room. She’d rather have weed, but it still helped her forget what needed forgetting. A little. For a time. Nayima stared back at Gram’s narrow two-story townhouse across the street. Their jacaranda tree had showered the driveway with purple buds. Would her tree survive the fires? Would she come back and find beauty in the ruins to show her children one day?

She was ready to go back inside when a siren squawked close by, and a police cruiser coasted in front of her, so mud-caked she could barely see its black and white paint. Unnecessarily, the red flasher came on in a light show against the wall.

The man who climbed out of the car was stocky, not much taller than she was, with sun-browned skin and dark hair. She was glad when she saw his town police uniform, which seemed friendlier than a soldier’s. He looked about her age, as young as twenty-one. She had seen him before, perhaps during the evacuation. Like most cops, he wasn’t smiling.

Sanchez

, his name-tag read. Yes, he had been here before.

She expected him to say something about her sitting outside in her underwear, but he didn’t seem to notice. Maybe he saw people half naked on a regular basis.

“You cleaning this place up?” he said, incredulous.

A week ago, fast food wrappers and debris had covered the grass in the green belt, where she and Shanice and their friends had played until they were too old to play outside. She hadn’t meant to clean it all, but a little each day had done it, her therapy. She hadn’t risked hurting herself to climb the palm tree to take down the flapping shirt and jeans. But she might one day. Trash still hugged the fence around the pool. She hadn’t gotten to that.

“I grew up here. I want it to look right.”

“Don’t you have anything better to do?” he said.

“My car is packed with everything I need.”

“Then why are you still here?”

She suddenly remembered meeting him before. He had come with the team from the hospital that examined Gram to make sure she only had cancer and not the 72-Hour Flu. Mr. Yamamoto and other neighbors had reported that Gram had been sick for a long time. This cop might have said his grandmother had raised him too. Nayima couldn’t quite remember. Her memories that day had been frozen out from her terror that they would take Gram away.

“My grandmother’s got cancer,” she said. “Remember?”

Gunfire crackled east of them. Sometimes the rounds were from soldiers, sometimes random rage. Looters might come tonight.

“You have a gun?” he said.

The earnestness in his voice made her anxious. “Of course.”

“What kind?”

“A .38?” She tried not to say it like a question. It was Gram’s Smith & Wesson she bought in her old neighborhood, where Nayima’s mother had lived and died. A world away.

“Ammo?”

“A box. And what’s in… the chamber.” She’d fumbled, trying to remember gun terms.

“You know how to shoot one?”

“Is this a test?”

She was sorry as soon as she’d said it. His face deflated; maybe he thought they’d been having a friendly conversation. “A gun’s no good if you can’t use it,” he said. He ripped an orange page from his pad, stuck it to Mr. Yamamoto’s window. Ugly and permanent.

REMOVAL ORDER

, it read.

“Forty-eight hours,” he said. “Anyone still here… it won’t be pretty.”

“Are they burning J next?” she said. The county had divided neighborhoods into lettered sectors. Foothill Park was in Sector J, or so all the notices kept saying.

“Yes. Anyone in J better be gone in forty-eight.”

“Is it working?” she said. “Does burning stop it?”

“If it lives on things we touch, why not?” he said. “Don’t ask me. I pass out stickers.”

But that wasn’t all he did. She noted the handgun strapped around his waist, the semi-automatic slung across his chest.She wondered how many people he had killed.

“I listen to the car radio,” she said. “People say it’s not working.”

“So we should sit on our asses and do nothing?”

“Maybe you could teach me,” she said. “How to shoot.”

He stopped and turned slowly, profile first, as if his body followed against his will. A sneer soured one side of his face, but it was gone by the time he faced her. “Does it look like I have time for private lessons?”

“You brought it up.”

“Are you playing rich princess out here?” he said. “None of the rules are for you?”

He’d been fooled by the mountains close enough to walk to and the estates lined up a quarter-mile up the street. He’d been fooled because Bob had made sure everyone kept the detached townhouses military neat, with matching exterior paint. But Foothill Park had been home to some of the county’s poorest residents, the few who had dark skin or spoke Spanish at home. She and her friends used to call it “Trailer Park,” although she couldn’t understand why.

“This is my grandmother’s house,” she said. “She moved into a tiny little two-bedroom she could barely afford so I could go to school here. I was her second chance to get it right, and she changed my life. Gram bought this house when they were cheaper. She never went to college, but I’m in grad school. When Gram got sick, I took a year off to move back in. Plain old cancer—nothing fancy. Old-fashioned dying takes time. So here I am.”

He stared at her with pale brown eyes, the color of the houses’ walls.

“Hold on a minute,” he said.

He went back to his car, ducking out of sight. His sudden absence felt menacing, as if she should run and lock the door rather than waiting. But Nayima was not afraid of the cop, though she probably should be. What scared her more was the tasks waiting for her: the tedium and horror of her days.

He returned with a plastic shopping bag, heavy from its load. When he gave her the bag, she found two packages of whole chicken parts, frozen solid.

“Do you have electricity where you live?” she said.

He shook his head, a shadow across his brow. “Nah. Bunch of us were sweeping some houses on the hill. Guy up there had a generator and a subzero freezer. Food’s hard as a rock.”

The magnitude of the gift suddenly struck her: She had not had meat in a month, except a chunk or two in canned soup. She hoped the man on the hill had given up his food voluntarily, or that he had left long ago. But if he had left, why would his generator still be on?

“Thank you,” she said. “I’m Nayima. What’s your name? I mean… your first name?”

He ignored her question, just like he ignored her underwear.

“Don’t ruin it,” he said. “I don’t have time to cook. I’ll be back tomorrow for lunch.”

• • • •

After Nayima had cleaned and fed Gram in the morning, she grilled chicken on Mr. Yamamoto’s patio Grillmaster instead of washing clothes like she’d planned. The chicken had mostly thawed overnight, so she started cooking first thing. She retrieved the spices from Mr. Yamamoto’s gift box and rolled the chicken pieces in sage, garlic, and paprika the way Gram had taught her. She spent an hour looking for salt—and found it in a hidden, unruined corner of Shanice’s kitchen. She’d had a memory of Shanice’s mother keeping a box of salt in that exact spot. She could almost hear her friend’s laughter.

Nayima hadn’t had much practice on the grill—meat had disappeared fast, even before the supermarkets shut down—so she hovered over the chicken to be sure she didn’t burn it. The patio smelled like a Fourth of July cookout. She didn’t mind the new smoke, since it carried such rich, tasty scents.

She tested a wing too soon. It was too hot, meat bloody near the bone, but her mouth flooded with saliva at the taste of the spices. Such flavor! She wanted to eat the food half raw, but she waited, turning carefully, always turning, never letting the skin burn black.

At noon—the universal lunchtime—he still had not arrived.

Nayima’s stomach growled as she turned Gram from the left side to the right, pulling her higher in the bed beneath her armpits, supporting her against the pillows. Gram moaned, but did not scream. Nayima changed the bag for Gram’s feeding tube and kissed her forehead. “I love you, Gram,” she said. But Gram was already sleeping.

By one o’clock, Nayima stopped waiting for the cop. She ate three pieces of the chicken: a thigh, a leg and a wing, sure to leave plenty in case he brought friends.

He came alone at three-fifteen, coasting up to her curb in the same filthy cruiser. In brighter daylight, earlier in the day, his face looked smudged across his forehead and cheeks. He might not be bathing. All of him smelled like smoke.

“The chicken’s ready,” she said.

“J gets burned in twenty-four,” he said, as if in greeting. His voice was hoarse. “You understand that, right?”

“I’ll fix your plate,” she said.

They ate at Mr. Yamamoto’s cedar patio table beside the grill. Nayima offered him one of her precious beers, but he shrugged and shook his head. She had found paper plates in the kitchen, but they ate with their fingers. It might have been the best chicken she’d ever cooked. She had another leg, stretching her bloated stomach. They studied their food while they ate, licking their fingers even though all the new protocols said

never

to put your fingers in your mouth. She hoped it wouldn’t be too long before she would have chicken again.

“What’s going on out there?” she said.

“Bad,” he said mournfully. “All bad.”

She knew she should ask more, but she didn’t want to ruin their meal.

The question changed his mood. He wiped his fingers across his slacks, standing up. She wondered if he would try to make a sexual advance, but that thought felt silly as she watched him stride toward the glass patio door to the house. She was invisible to him.

“Be right back,” he said.

“Bathroom’s the first left.”

She decided she would explain herself to him, present her case: how a jostling car would torture Gram, how anyone could see the dying old woman only needed a little more time.

A gunshot exploded inside the house.

Nayima leaped to her feet so quickly that her knee banged against the table’s edge.

Looters

. Had looters invaded the house and confronted the cop? Her own gun was far from reach, hidden beneath the cushion on Mr. Yamomoto’s sofa, where she’d slept. Her heart’s thrashing dizzied her.

The glass patio door slid open again, and Sanchez slipped out and closed it behind him again. He did not look at her. He went to the grill to pick over the remaining chicken pieces.

“What happened?” Nayima said.

Sanchez’s shoulders dropped with a sigh. He looked at her. His eyes said:

You know

.

Nayima took a running step toward the house, but her knee pulsed with pain. Instead, she plopped down hard on the bench. She held the edge of the table to keep her balance when the bench teetered, nearly falling.

Sanchez sat on the other side of the bench, righting it beneath his weight. He planted both elbows on the table, stripping meat from the bones with his teeth.

The smell of his sweaty days, the smell of the smoky sky and the cooking bird, the smell of Gram’s hair on hers from Gram’s hairbrush, made Nayima feel sick. Her food tried to flee her stomach, but she locked her throat. Her grasping fingers shook against the picnic table’s rough wood. She could not breathe this thick, terrible air.

“It’ll be dark soon, so it’s best to get on the road,” Sanchez said. “The 210’s pretty clear going east. Then you’ll want to go north. They say the Five is still passable, for now. You don’t want to be anywhere near here tomorrow.”

She wanted to float away from his voice, but every word captivated her.

“Where?” she whispered.

“Anywhere but San Francisco. My family headed to Santa Cruz. I’ll be going up there too when all this is done.”