Aurora(68)

She looked around the room, which was mostly closed off against the sun, since Phil’s front windows faced south. There were shafts of light coming through the slats of the blinds though, illuminating the dust that floated in the air. Phil didn’t keep a very tidy house, but he could be forgiven that. None of them did, not anymore. There was too much other work to be done.

“Phil?”

She didn’t hear an answer, but some clunking sounds came from the basement, and she walked over to the open doorway and looked down the stairs. She could see him down there, working at the canning station they’d built where his hydroponic beds had once been. He was lost in work, and hadn’t heard her come in, so she modulated her voice, careful not to scare him. Phil could spook easily.

“I don’t have all day, mister.”

Phil turned, looked up at her, and smiled. She put her hands on her hips and stared down at him, feigning impatience.

“I’m quite sure I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, but Phil wasn’t a very good actor, and he knew exactly what she meant. Aubrey turned and walked off. Phil came up the stairs and followed her, as she knew he would.

Phil had a poster of Yoda over his bed, which at first had been a bit of a turnoff, until Aubrey realized that of course Phil had a poster of Yoda over his bed. Anything else would have been un-Phil-like. She’d tried to convince him that, perhaps, having the line “There is no try, only do” over one’s bed carried certain other connotations and perhaps suggested just a hint of erectile disfunction, but that had only made him like the poster more.

She pulled her shirt off as she came into the room, tossed it over the chair, and unsnapped her bra. Phil watched from the doorway as she unbuckled her shorts and pushed them off. Naked, she moved toward the bed and stopped, realizing he was staring at her. She feigned offense. “Uh, excuse me, sir, can I help you?”

Phil shook his head. “What do you think, I’m some kind of machine? That you can just come over here and demand sex anytime you want?”

“Yes.” She pulled back the covers on the unmade bed and lay down.

“Yeah, you’re probably right.” He slipped out of his clothes and joined her on the bed. Aubrey wasn’t the only one who had lost weight, and Phil didn’t so much take his pants off as undo his belt and release them, to fall to the floor.

“I’ve been doing water jugs all morning. I kinda stink,” Aubrey said as he slid up beside her.

“Once again, you are the most romantic person I’ve ever met,” he said, kissing her neck.

She rolled toward him, reaching down to his crotch. If Phil had ever had a problem in bed, it wasn’t an issue anymore. He hadn’t smoked pot, to her knowledge, since his supply had run out in late June, and she could tell the difference.

She moved on top of him.



An hour later, Aubrey came back out on the street. Scott and Celeste had, as usual, spent the morning foraging in the surrounding area. Today’s emphasis had been on firewood. Buddy Lomax’s open-bed pickup, which they all took turns using for wood collection, was parked in the middle of the block, and residents were busy unloading. The few wooded lots around Aurora had given up their supplies early on in the event, and Phil had pointed out that moving into the parks was difficult and relatively fruitless—the trees there were healthy and green. They’d be an enormous amount of work to bring down, even with chain saws, and their sap-filled wood wasn’t likely to burn well anyway.

Cannibalizing the abandoned house on Sycamore was Celeste’s idea. It was an old two-story on a tiny lot whose owners had defaulted on the loan, and the bank had been unable to resell it after the real estate crash of 2008. It had sat, derelict, for the past dozen years, and had fallen into such disrepair that even the COVID-based buying boom was unable to move it off the market. Since it was bank-owned and needed to come down eventually, Celeste had pointed out, why shouldn’t they help things along a bit? Take it apart, pieces at a time, until there’s nothing left that can be burned. The idea had worked like a charm, and when the skeleton of the house stopped giving up burnable fuel, in late July, the young couple had just cruised around until they found another house in similar disrepair.

It wasn’t the only good idea Celeste had come up with. Aubrey had decided that the initial impression Celeste gave, that of a slightly beaten dog, was either an act or a bad habit or both, because it bore no relation to the actual young woman she’d come to know. Celeste had ingenuity, guile, and reserves of strength that were sometimes almost frightening to Aubrey. Whatever she’d been through at home—and Aubrey knew better than to ask—it had put steel in her spine. She was a survivor and knew how to make difficult decisions. Tearing down houses she didn’t own was only one of her suggestions, and if there was a community strategy meeting, it was usually Celeste who would propose taking a step the rest of them weren’t entirely comfortable with. Like when she said they should loot the Best Buy, even though all its goods would be useless, and in fact because all its goods would be useless—they’d have the place to themselves and could stock up for the day when the power came back on, ready to cash in. The others had demurred on that one, and Celeste had just shrugged. She had more where that came from, and she was happy to wait.

Today, though, as Aubrey came out of Phil’s house and went to the truck, Celeste looked rattled, more like the wild-eyed young thing that had shown up at her house back in April. Scott had an arm around her shoulders and was holding her tightly.