Aurora(37)

“OK, so there are no rules anymore,” Scott said, his tone flat and declarative. He turned, disgusted, and went back to his room, closing the door behind him.

Rusty turned back to Aubrey. “I’ll leave it to run for about an hour. Should give you time to charge your stuff, cook something if you want. Then I’ll pack it up and take it. I can bring it back day after tomorrow.”

“I thought you said you were leaving it.”

“I changed my mind. I don’t trust shithead to get it in the basement every night, and you’re not strong enough.”

Aubrey shook her head. That was enough. “Could you wait outside while things charge, please?”

“Suit yourself.” He headed for the door but stopped, thinking. “So, with the gas and my time and everything, two hundred seems fair.”

Oh, for Christ’s sake, how could she not have seen this coming? How could she possibly have thought this trip to supposedly check on his son and ex-wife could have been rooted in anything other than a scheme to squeeze more cash out of them? With a liar, it didn’t matter how many times you made the vow never to fall for their act again; they kept coming up with new ways.

“Two hundred dollars?” she asked. “For a couple gallons of gas?”

“For a couple gallons of gas when there’s about to not be any gas, yeah. And for the trip over, and the wear and tear on the generator, and my expertise in hooking it up. Fuck, Aubrey, are you actually negotiating with me, the guy who brought you power? When you didn’t even have to ask? What is wrong with you? Seriously, you’ve changed.”

Aubrey refused to engage. “Wait here,” she said and went upstairs. Rusty waited, listening, and heard her go into her room, or what had been his room, he thought. If she hadn’t closed the door, he might have even been able to tell which dresser drawer she opened to get the cash out. But the location was good enough. It was a start.

A few moments later she came back down the stairs and held out a hand with two hundreds in it. He took them from her without making eye contact.

“I’ll be in the truck.” He left the house and stalked across the front walk, the victim of a great offense. She watched as he ripped open the door of his truck, got inside, and slammed the door.

Exactly fifty-four minutes later, he shut off the generator without warning, packed it up, and roared away with it.

As soon as his truck turned the corner on the block, Aubrey went into the kitchen, yanked her useless cell phone out of the charger, powered it down, and threw it in a drawer, pissed at herself. The goddamn thing wouldn’t even have worked with the towers down.

She went upstairs and found a new hiding place for their thinning stack of cash.



A few minutes later, Scott thundered down the stairs, cleaned up and dressed.

“Can I take the car?” he asked, without looking at her.

“Where are you going?”

“I have to check on someone.”

It was only mid-morning, and she was already tired of fighting. “We only have half a tank. Is it less than a couple miles?”

“Yep,” Scott said, with the patient air of one summoning every bit of noblesse oblige they had inside in order to deal with the idiot in front of them.

She handed him the car keys, graciously declining to mention that he only had a learner’s permit, and he left without saying thanks. Aubrey was still in day-to-day mode, she told herself, and the idea of Scott feeling a sliver of freedom and possibly containing his geyser of resentment for a little bit seemed like a price worth paying in gasoline.

She went back out front and sat down on the steps again. She kicked herself for allowing Rusty’s distraction. She needed to get serious. She needed to plan for a future, a long future that did not include electric power.

Counting everything she and Scott had bought, they had maybe seven days’ worth of food. If they ate sparingly. And if they didn’t? Well, if they didn’t, they’d go hungry, and if they went hungry long enough, they’d die.

She had Rusty to thank for one thing. He’d pissed her off. Shown her the danger of slipping back into old ways of thinking in a world that had fundamentally changed.

Her eyes focused across the street, where Phil was out in front of his house as usual, sitting in a webbed lawn chair, trying to conceal the one-hitter he was taking occasional hits from while he read an old paperback in the morning sun. He seemed to be taking a break from some yard work, a newly furrowed dirt row to his left and a long-handled, flat-bladed tool of some kind leaning against his lawn chair.

Aubrey squinted her eyes, staring at Phil, thinking. She looked up and down the block, at all the yards, filled with rock gardens and perennials and the odd trampoline or two. An idea was trying to form in her head when her eyes fell on Norman’s house, two down and across the street from hers.

His front porch lights were on. She blinked, trying to register that. Why were Norman’s lights on?

OK, maybe he had a generator too. But it was 9 a.m.

Why were Norman’s lights on?





13.





Somerset County, Pennsylvania

Earlier that morning, Perry St. John had been headed west on the I-80, about a hundred and fifty miles outside of Bethesda, when he too had thought of Norman Levy.

After his initial flight instinct in the parking lot at NOAA, Perry had tried to develop some counterintuitive strategizing. Fleeing the cities was what everyone was thinking, he realized, and the gossip around the courtyard of his apartment building in Bethesda was that all roads out of the major eastern cities were already packed, traffic crawling if it was moving at all. People were running out of gas and water on the roadsides, and Perry was determined not to be one of them.