“See if you can hear me,” Alex said.
Alex sat on the ground next to the walkie-talkie.
“Can you hear me, Jake?” he said into it.
“Yes. Jesus, it’s loud in my ear,” Jake complained with a grin. “Man, this is awesome. I feel like an astronaut!”
Niko stepped forward.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” Niko said. “We know it’s dangerous out there, Jake.”
“Dude,” Jake said. “I got it all under control, Niko Knacko.”
“Niko Knacko,” Max echoed with a smile.
Jake was back. Fun-loving Jake.
This was what he had needed, I thought to myself. Jake needed a chance to be a hero again.
Astrid appeared.
“Brayden’s temperature is rising,” she said. “I don’t like how he looks. He’s thrashing around.”
“Then there’s no time to waste,” said Jake. “Let’s get this thing going.”
Astrid looked away.
“I’m going to go sit with Brayden,” she said.
“I’ll keep you company,” Sahalia said.
Sahalia seemed subdued and quiet now. The two girls went off together.
Astrid couldn’t meet Jake’s eyes.
“See you soon, Astrid,” he said.
“Yeah,” she said.
“Let’s get your head wrapped,” Niko said to Jake.
Alex and Niko had figured out a system of an air mask, with several of those fleece ski masks with the eyes and nose cut out, over the top of the whole thing.
Niko brought the heavy rubber air mask down over Jake’s face.
Jake put his hand up and futzed with the earpiece and the microphone, getting them in a comfortable place under the mask.
“Jake, can you hear me?” Alex asked as Niko began putting the ski masks over Jake’s head. It was hard to get them over the air mask.
“It’s okay,” Jake said, trying to wave Niko off.
“No,” Niko said. “Just give me a second.”
So Jake stood still while Niko fitted the fleece balaclavas into place.
“Can you say something?” Alex repeated.
“Testing, testing, one-two-three,” Jake said. His voice came muffled—both through the mask and through the small speakers of the walkie-talkie.
Alex looked at all of us.
“It’s a go,” he said. “We’re a go.”
“Okay, let’s go,” Niko said.
Everyone started to walk toward the storeroom to see Jake off.
“Wait!” I yelled. “You guys can’t all go back there.”
“Why not?” Niko asked.
“There’s stuff back there,” I said, willing him to remember that Jake and I had stowed Robbie’s bloody, destroyed body back there.
“Oh yeah,” Jake said, the sound muffled through the mask.
“And the compounds.”
“You’re right,” Niko said. “Alex can help Jake up onto the roof.”
This meant Alex needed to outfit himself with a gas mask and a couple of layers of clothing, too.
“Guys,” Chloe said to the kids. “Let’s get chairs and popcorn and treats for the show!”
The other kids ran, giggling and excited, to go bring over comfy furniture from the Living Room.
Ulysses was the only one of them who still seemed sad about Robbie and Mr. Appleton. The rest of them were psyched to be watching TV.
“Good luck, Jake,” I said, while we waited for Alex to gear up.
Jake shook my hand, then Niko’s.
“Hurry back,” Niko added.
* * *
The kids were still off foraging for snacks, when, on the screen, Jake walked past Robbie’s body on the air mattress. I stood in front of the monitor to block it, just in case one of them came back.
On the bigtab, I saw as Jake and Alex walked up the metal staircase leading to the hatch.
Alex pulled a big metal pin out of a socket and the hatch swung down.
Jake must have gone first. Then on the monitor, I saw Alex’s masked face. Alex handed up to Jake a bundle of chains and rungs. The safety ladder, I realized. Then Jake extended his hand and helped Alex onto the roof.
Just the thought of Alex being up on the roof scared me.
Jake clipped the safety ladder to the side of the building and then the rungs fell down away from the camera, into darkness.
Jake turned back to Alex and shook his hand.
“Hey, little man, don’t worry.” Jake’s voice came through the walkie-talkie. “I’ll be fine.”
Alex said something we couldn’t hear.
“You got it,” Jake answered.
The kids came running back with pillows and beanbag chairs. Chloe came from the opposite direction with a big bag of popcorn, a bag of miniature candy bars and a six-pack of Mountain Dew. Yikes.
The image moved as he went rung by rung, down the ladder, but it was very dark.
“I can’t see anything!” Chloe complained.
“Me either,” echoed Max.
“Make it lighter!” demanded Chloe.
She moved to touch the walkie-talkie.
“Nobody touches that but Alex!” Niko shouted.
Chloe jumped.
“Where is he, then?”
“He’s pulling the ladder back onto the roof and then he has to wipe down. Now shut up and watch!”
I’d never heard him so stern. But I was glad. I just wanted to watch Jake TV.
It was hard, actually, to make anything out. Every step Jake took made everything shaky, and it was so dark.
“Can you stand still for a moment so we can see what you’re seeing?” Niko asked softly into the walkie-talkie.
“All right, what you’re seeing here is the sky and the horizon.”
Jake stopped and we saw, well, not much, really. A dark sky and a dark ground and a glowing strip of light between them.
To me, it looked like black-and-white footage of the sky before dawn. But I knew it was at least eight a.m. Maybe ten.
“We’re not seeing much,” Niko said. “Are you able to see?”
“It’s dark,” Jake said. “But I can see. I don’t want to turn on a flashlight because I feel like it would attract attention. But I’ll tell you, it’s darker than I expected out here.”
So now we knew something. It was darker out there than we were expecting.
The image jounced with his footsteps. We could see faint spots of color and different areas of grayness, but we couldn’t make out anything.
“I’m in the parking lot. The cars are still here from the storm. They’re all beat to heck. Check this out.”
He brought his torso close to a car. In the light reflected from the walkie-talkie, we got a close-up of the surface of the car. It looked rough and pitted. Wafers of paint sat atop the rusty, flaky surface.
“I think the compounds are eating away at the metal.…”
We could tell he started walking again by the loping bounce of the image.
“Just picking up the pace a bit,” Jake said. “My eyes have sort of adjusted out here. Don’t want to waste any time.”
According to the route we had all worked out, Jake was now heading through the parking lot and across Old Denver Highway. He had maybe a quarter of a mile to go to reach I-25.
Just past it, on the other side of Struthers Road, was the Lewis-Palmer Regional Hospital.
“Okay, now. I can see the highway,” Jake said. “There’s lights, actually.”
“Oh my God!” Josie said, excited.
Alex came running back.
His face was red, fresh-scrubbed, and he wore new clothes.
“Did I miss anything?” he asked us. He went right to the walkie-talkie and took his place in front of it.
“He’s walking through the parking lot,” Niko said. “There’s lights near the highway.”
On the screen we could see circles of light, the size of a Tic Tac, bouncing in the distance.
“There’s the lights!” shouted Henry.
Jake’s footfalls sped up for a moment, and then they slowed.
Suddenly, the image went black.
“Someone’s coming,” he whispered.
“What’s happening?” Chloe said. “Why can’t we see?”
“I think he’s crouching down,” I said.
We waited.
“Ask him if he’s okay,” Alex said to Niko.
“No,” Niko said. “If he’s in danger, they could hear the sound from his earpiece.”
Finally Jake spoke.
“They’re gone,” he said.
“Who was it?” Niko asked. “Could you tell?”
“It was two people. Walking together. They have suitcases. The rolling kind.”
Two postapocalyptic nomads with rolling suitcases. Surreal.
“They were all bundled up so I couldn’t see if they were women or men or anything.”
“Jesus,” Josie moaned. She looked stricken. “They could be anybody.”
It was true. They could be people we knew. But Jake couldn’t stop them and ask them. They might rob him or kill him or God knows what.
But they could have been people we knew (and loved).
Like our parents.
* * *
I looked behind me and caught sight of Astrid. I guess she’d left Brayden in Sahalia’s care.
Astrid was sitting cross-legged on the floor at the back of the group. Luna had her head in Astrid’s lap and Astrid was rubbing the old dog’s head absentmindedly.
On the screen, the lights got steadily bigger. Every few moments they would dip or blink off, as Jake’s motions took his torso away from them, but then they would come back.
“The ground’s real boggy,” Jake said. “The plants are all dead and everything is, like, rotting.”
He slowed.
We could hear his breathing, amplified by the face mask he was wearing.
We all shifted in our seats. Caroline and Henry were gripped on to each other like they were a life raft.
“Here’s what I’m seeing,” Jake whispered to us. “The highway is mostly clear. There are cars every once in a while, but at least one lane is clear. There are some kind of military-looking lights at the side of the road in intervals of, I don’t know, fifty yards apart, maybe.