Aurora(22)

Shit. That’s low, man.

After another heated back-and-forth, Rusty saw Aubrey dip into the doorway, heard her feet bang down a few stairs, then stop, turn around, and come back up. She marched across the living room and came back toward him, carrying something in her right hand. She extended her arm as she drew close.

“That from Scott?”

“None of your business. Do you want it?”

“Yeah, you got everything under control here.”

“Do you want it or not?”

He looked down. She was holding three bills in her hand. But they weren’t twenties. They were hundreds.

Rusty controlled his reaction as best he could, but his right hand shot up pretty quickly, wanting to secure the money before she changed her mind. He closed his hand around the bills and shoved them in his pocket. Far down, as if he was afraid she might come after them.

“Tell him his old man says—”

But the front door was already closing. “Please don’t ever come in this house when I’m not here again.”

“You left the goddamn door open. I was worried.”

She stopped, the door still opened a foot or two. “And to answer your question, no. You never hit me. I got you out before you had a chance.” In her pocket, Aubrey’s cell phone rang. She closed the door without another word.

Rusty turned, trying not to smile. The kid, for God knows what reason, had just forked over three hundred dollars in cash, at a time when those two chuckleheads were obviously convinced the world was about to come to a crashing end. That meant the little shit had, at a minimum, at least three times that much cash that he had not given over. Why on earth his moronic ex-wife had put a teenager in charge of their finances was beyond him, and unimportant.

This was a fascinating development that needed a good, long think.





8.





4:26 p.m.

Inside the house, Aubrey let out a breath of air and tried to lower her shoulders, which had been cranked up around her ears. She rolled them back once, pulled her phone from her pocket, and answered.

“Hey, Thom.”

“Heeey.”

It was funny how a single word out of her brother’s mouth could drive Aubrey right up the fucking wall and down the other side. Just the way he’d say “Heeey” in that low, sympathetic register one uses when speaking to someone they pity. It was a hey that said, “Sister, I get it, you’re broke, divorced, loveless, pushing forty, and presiding over a failing business, but I do not judge you at all.”

She played past it. “I was just thinking about you,” she said.

“Don’t worry about me. What about you?”

“I’m fine,” she said. “Just laid in a bunch of groceries.” She felt her initial irritation with him easing. They’d been through hell together, and his personal faults, annoying ways, and galactic ego aside, she knew he only wanted to help. It was just the way he did it that was maddening.

“Did you fill the freezer?”

She headed into the kitchen, glancing at the still-opened door to the basement and pictured the enormous freezer now maybe ten percent filled.

“Yep. I can hardly get the lid closed.”

“Good. Don’t open it unless you have to. But don’t overreact and throw everything out too soon either. Aside from meat, almost everything frozen can be eaten unfrozen.”

Aubrey wondered how to prevent a discussion of her failure to plan for disaster, as Thom had repeatedly implored her to do. He’d gone so far as to send a team of three handsome and muscular men to her house one day, offering to assess her wants and needs and return in three days to Take Care of Everything. They were from some sort of Chicago-based concierge apocalypse-supply firm, but she’d sent them away. No, she hadn’t filled the freezer, no, she hadn’t let the survival warriors stock her house, and, no, she hadn’t filled the fucking rack in the fucking basement, OK?

“Where are you?” she asked, trying to change the subject.

“On the plane.”

“On your way to the Fuhrerbunker?”

“May I ask once again that you please not compare me to Hitler?”

“I don’t compare you to Hitler, I compare your bunker to his. But I take it back. I’m sure yours is much nicer.”

“This is serious,” he said. “This is happening. I was on the phone with the National Science Board not twenty minutes ago.”

“What did they say?”

“Ninety percent outage worldwide. Four-to-eighteen-month repair time.”

“Do you believe that’s true?”

“It doesn’t matter what I think. I believe they believe it.”

On that she knew he was right, and it was one of the things she’d always admired about him. Her brother’s ego was the iceberg into which his ship would one day crash and sink, but, intellectually, he was able to put it aside when he was in the presence of people who knew more about their own field than he did. The ability to admit ignorance, to shut up and actually listen, was something Thom had acquired early in life, and it was, to Aubrey’s mind, the single greatest reason for his enormous success. But he was the last person she’d admit that to.

“Please let me send for you.”

“No, thank you.”