Aurora(49)

“Nothing. I’m fine. Everything’s fine.”

“Are Ann-Sophie and the kids OK?”

“They’re great. Everybody’s fine. Everything is fine here.”

“You’re saying fine a lot.”

“Rosy. Top-notch. What do you want? This is a perfect, high-functioning intentional community. I’ve been planning this for a decade, and I have a place here for you, if you would just accept it. It’s you and me, remember?”

He waited, but she didn’t fill in the rest of the line. So he did, morosely. “Because everyone else is dead. Will you please just say you’ll call me when Brady gets there with the money?”

“You want to save me. I don’t need saving.”

“Then fucking send it back!” he shouted, so loud it hurt her ear. She yanked the phone away from her head, and by the time she put it back to her ear, he’d hung up. She stared at the phone for a moment, trying to remember if he had ever hung up on her before, and fairly certain he had not. She had always been the elusive one, the pursued, the one who was called and the one who moved things along with “Well, I should probably let you go.” Not this time.

“You guys have a fucked-up relationship.”

She turned. Scott was standing in the doorway behind her, having heard the last of the conversation and witnessing its abrupt end.

Aubrey turned the satellite phone off and dropped it on the step beside her. “Where’s Celeste?”

“Upstairs. You weirded her out a little bit.”

“I was polite and welcoming.”

“Yeah, well, she’s not used to that.”

He came outside and sat down on the step beside her. Aubrey looked away, putting her hand to her mouth. The conversation with Thom had shaken her, and a pointless adolescent argument was the last thing she was interested in at the moment.

Scott stared at her for a long moment, taking her in. “When did your guys’ parents die?”

“Could you please just go practice the fucking piano or something?”

“C’mon. When do I ever ask about you? Seize the day or whatever. I’m not gonna be interested for that long.”

She looked at him and half smiled. He could charm when he wanted. She couldn’t decide if she liked that about him or not. “Fifteen years ago. My mom first with cancer, Dad six months later.”

“Wow. What’d he die of? Broken heart?”

“You’re very sentimental. Suicide.”

“Jesus Christ. You never told me that.”

“It’s the first time you’ve asked.”

He thought about that for a moment. “Fuck. Suicide, after the dude’s beloved wife goes. How Rilke can you get?”

“Rilke wasn’t married, and he didn’t kill himself. He had leukemia. It’s not at all Rilke. You can’t get any less Rilke.”

“Whatever. Your dad died of a broken heart, Aubrey. That’s as romantic as a person can possibly be.”

“I guess.”

Scott nodded and gave it some more thought. He looked back at her. “Is that why you and your brother have such a fucked relationship? Like you both thought your dad killing himself was the other person’s fault or something? Should’ve noticed—that type of shit? ’Cause people think that all the time.”

Aubrey turned and looked at him. “You’re not going to sell Phil’s weed anymore.”

“Wait, what? Whose weed?” It was terrible acting. Aubrey ignored it.

“Instead, you’re going to help Phil plant food we can eat. It’s not going to be easy work. We start tomorrow.”

Scott turned and looked across the street. Phil was hard at it already, turning the sod in his front yard with a physical energy Scott had never seen in him before. Phil looked up, saw Scott looking at him, and turned away quickly, going back to work.

Scott turned back to Aubrey. “OK,” he said.

Aubrey nodded and got up to go back in the house. “Celeste can help, too, if she’s going to be staying here.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

“What’s her last name, by the way?”

“Zielinski.”

Aubrey hesitated, thinking that sounded familiar. But she couldn’t place it.

She went inside, the screen door banging behind her.





19.





Aurora

Brady’s goal had been to arrive before dark the day after he left, and the sun was still a half hour from setting when he pulled around the corner onto Cayuga Lane. The drive had gone better than he’d expected. So good, in fact, that he’d stopped and gotten some sleep the night before in Custer County, Nebraska. There weren’t a whole lot of places more remote than Custer County, Nebraska, and when he’d turned onto NE-40 just outside Broken Bow, the expanse of long, dark, single-lane road had given him the comfort to pull over, lock the doors, and close his eyes for a while. The incident at the Arco station in Nevada had sharpened him, snapped him back into fighting shape. Four and a half hours later, he’d awakened from a deep and peaceful sleep, his arms cramping, still wrapped around the duffel that held the $250,000. It was the best sleep he’d had in months.

Gassing up along the way had proven to be no problem. The reports he’d gathered before leaving Sanctuary tended toward the dire, but they were more assessments of the state of the country as a whole, not the remote and lightly populated states he’d be driving through—Wyoming, Nebraska, and Iowa. The combination of low population with the sheer vastness of the Great Plains meant the power lines in those states were long, with dozens or hundreds of miles between major transformers, and the damage had been somewhat mitigated by those factors. Albany County, Wyoming, in fact, had looked to Brady’s eye to be completely unaffected, and he was shocked to find not one but two open truck stops still pumping gas. The price gouging had been horrible, but Brady had paid happily, both times, and by the time he crossed the Illinois border he still had one full battery charge and five-eighths of a tank of gas.