When the Sky Fell on Splendor(85)

“I’ve got enough,” I said.

Sofía pressed a palm to her forehead, rolling circles against it. “Franny . . .”

“I’ve got enough to cut their power,” I repeated. “I’ve got nothing to stop bullets.”

Levi gave a half-formed shrug. “They won’t fire on us. They need us.”

“There’s a lot of them,” Arthur said. “Even without electricity, we won’t be able to get through all of them.”

“So we need a distraction,” Nick said. “Get them busy before we make our move.”

“The only thing that’s going to get those soldiers out of that compound,” I said, “is me.”

“And if your electrical blast is on the other side of town,” Sofía added, “then it’s not here, cutting the compound’s power.”

“So we’ve got to Ferris Bueller them,” Levi said.

“Say what now?” Nick said.

“Oh, come on. You guys have seen Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. John Hughes at his best? Matthew Broderick has an epic day skipping school?”

“If you have a point, you should make it before Nick pulls your underwear over your head,” I warned.

“He sets up a fake Ferris to trick his parents. A complicated system of pulleys and recordings and a Ferris dummy, so that when his parents come in, they think he’s in bed sick, like he told them he would be.”

“Levi, I love your zeal,” I said. “Truly, it’s inspiring. But I suspect a Franny doll won’t fool Agent Rothstadt.”

Arthur snapped his fingers and pointed at Levi. “We need a fake light show. We need to make a blackout.”

“There’s no way,” Sofía said. “Unless someone in this cave has access to five hundred vacuum cleaners and the world’s longest power strip—”

“I do,” Nick said.

At first I thought he was joking, and Sofía’s and Arthur’s matching expressions of irritation suggested they did too.

But Nick wasn’t smiling. “My mom, you know. She keeps stuff.” He cleared his throat. “Like Arthur mentioned last night.”

“She’s a hoarder,” Levi volunteered.

“Thinks we need to be prepared for the apocalypse,” Nick said. “The point is, a few months back, you could barely move. It was disgusting. Cat hair all over everything. Cat turds you couldn’t get to because they were shoved so far back between towers of L.L.Bean catalogues and jumper cables and generators—mostly broken or expired junk she buys on eBay. So I started cleaning it out when she was sleeping. Only I couldn’t really get rid of anything in case she noticed it was gone. So Remy loaned me his car, and I put it all in storage.”

“He let you drive his car?” Levi said. “Am I the only one who hasn’t?”

“If you’ve got a storage unit, I guarantee the FBI already has someone sorting through it,” Sofía said.

“Then it’s a good thing I didn’t put it in a storage unit, Sherlock.”





THIRTY



WITH REMY’S CAR, IT would’ve taken seven minutes to get to the derelict-but-still-functioning movie theater across from Walmart. As it was, skirting through the shadows on bruised ankles and empty bellies, it took an hour and a half.

The CINEMA sign glowed an ugly orange, mismatched to the shade that ran in a thick stripe down the otherwise Barbie-skin-colored building, and the pockmarked asphalt was slick with oily puddles that rippled when the sticky wind blew over them.

“Back when Ma was an owner/operator, she worked out a deal with the guy who owns this theater to park her truck here when she was home. He made the mistake of telling her she could keep it here as long as she wanted, when he sent his condolences,” Nick explained as he led us to the semi parked in the back row of the lot.

“It was supposed to be a temporary break, a bereavement leave of absence.” Nick leapt onto the tailgate and fumbled with the padlock. “Only her bereavement wasn’t temporary, so the break wasn’t either.”

He tossed the lock onto the asphalt and slid the door up, ducking into the shadows. Arthur and Sofía followed, but even though my pain and nausea had let up enough that I could hide them, I was far from jumping into truck trailers and hauling equipment around.

I stayed with Droog and Levi to keep watch as the others sorted through the mess packed into the truck.

On the way over, Nick had explained the way his mom’s collecting had started as a sort of doomsday preparation. She filled their cellar with first aid kits and water jugs, soup cans and batteries. She didn’t want to go back to work until she could be sure Nick and his sister, Clarissa, would have everything they’d possibly need at home.

It had gone on for months: researching, visiting thrift shops and big-box stores for supplies. “The more she prepared, the less safe she felt,” Nick had said.

And then there was her husband’s stuff. All she had left of him: the receipts and styrofoam cups in his car, the torn work shirts he’d stuffed in a bag to patch or donate. His favorite old movies, the collectible bobbleheads he had believed would make them rich someday.

She’d asked Nick to handle selling the truck. Instead, he’d gotten a job and secretly kept paying the lease. He was planning to drive it someday. He’d keep taking care of her, bring her everything she needed, but he’d have a bed in a dark, empty truck cab to climb into at night. He’d have windows that weren’t blocked by stacks of coupon books and newspapers and postcards from local political candidates from the past five years.