Monument 14

^{CHAPTER SIXTEEN} A LADY

The next morning, I could hardly look Jake in the eye. Caroline and Henry were my helpers for the day, and their chirpy good cheer was an excellent distraction.

Scrambled eggs sandwiched between chocolate chip waffles. Wow.

Niko had a change in plans for us. He rapped on his tray, to get our attention.

“You all did an excellent job of restocking the shelves and taking inventory of our assets and I want to thank you,” Niko said. “I know that you’re not all completely finished with your assignments, but we’re going to shift our routine a bit now.

“The big kids will work together on projects that we need to attend to and the little kids will be attending school.”

A rising chorus of awwwws and no ways drowned out Niko’s voice for a moment.

School. That was what the card tables and folding chairs in our new “living room” were about.

“Josie will tell you all about it.” He gestured for Josie to rise and address us.

“Now, listen, you guys,” she said. “It’s not going to be a drag, like real school. We’re going to learn fun things and do lots of art projects. Maybe Jake will even teach us some football, right, Jake?”

“Most probably, maybe,” he said, toasting her with a half-eaten waffle sandwich.

Josie sat down and Brayden put his arm around her. He tried to nuzzle her neck, but she shook her head slightly. A not-in-front-of-the-kids shake.

Niko took back the floor. He seemed steely now. Cold and efficient.

“Another thing that’s going to change is the way we are using electricity. Alex has worked hard to make an energy plan that conserves our resources as much as possible, and we need to put it into action right away.”

Alex stood up.

“Yeah, um, so during the day, we’ll have the lights on here in the kitchen and also in Living Room area—”

“The school,” Josie corrected.

“And besides that,” Alex continued, “the other parts of the store will be dark.”

“Dark?” asked Caroline.

“Like how dark?” said Henry.

“It will be pretty dark, I think. But don’t be scared because, remember, this store is completely sealed off from the outside. So nothing can get in here. Everything in the store is a known quantity,” Alex said.

He was half talking to himself, I knew. Telling himself not to be scared.

“Plus we can each have a flashlight,” Josie added.

Batiste, Ulysses, and Max seemed excited about having flashlights, but Henry and Caroline looked scared.

Chloe was just scratching her head. Scratching hard and with purpose.

Niko laid out the work plan for the day.

The big kids would be helping to consolidate the frozen food in the kitchen freezers, to save on power.

I could see the planning behind the big change in routine. We couldn’t waste the energy to have the kids scattered all around the store working. Niko wanted them in one place so we’d only have to light a certain area of the store.

It made sense. But the whole thing made me irritated and what I realized was that I was pissed that Alex hadn’t told me about it.

He knew the power was giving out and he didn’t tell me. He told Niko instead.

Niko had him off and running the store while I was stuck in the Kitchen. He and Niko were becoming best buddies while I was stuck hanging out with the kindergarteners.

I didn’t like Niko spending more time with Alex than I did. It didn’t feel right to me. We were brothers. I should know everything he knew and vice versa.

Now that I was aware of not hanging around with my brother, it was all I could think about. At afternoon free period I tried to get him to play Monopoly. He had a game of Stratego going with Niko. And at dinner Alex asked Niko to go with him off to look at a set of video walkie-talkies he had found and was working on in our Living Room area. So I cleaned the Kitchen.

I went to my hammock in a huff, determined to talk to Alex the next day.

It felt like I’d only been asleep for a moment when I was shaken awake.

It was Jake.

“Get up!” he whispered. “There’s a woman outside at the loading docks. She wants us to let her in.”

Niko, Josie, Brayden, Jake, and I all stumbled into the common hallway of the Train. Jake motioned for us to be quiet and to follow him.

Once we were out of earshot of the kids, Niko turned to Josie.

“Josie, please stay here and make sure the kids stay safe.”

“I want to come,” she whispered. “They’re asleep. They’ll be fine.”

“We need you here,” Niko said.

“Come on, dude, she wants to come,” Brayden argued.

Trying to win points with his new girlfriend.

“The answer is no. I need to know that the kids are safe and here,” Niko said. “The rest of you come on.”

Niko took off toward the storeroom, I followed with the other boys and Josie crossed her arms and stayed behind.

Niko had authority, there’s no denying.

“You’re so sexist,” Josie hissed after him. He sort of was, I guess.

In the storeroom we heard an electronically transmitted voice. A woman.

“Hello? Are you back? Please! You have to hurry.”

Jake pointed and we saw something we’d not seen before—there was a video intercom, right on the wall.

A woman’s face, head wrapped in a shawl, face covered by layers of material, took up the frame.

“I was doing my rounds and I saw her,” Jake said. “I didn’t even know there was an intercom.”

“Please let me in,” she begged.

Niko pressed a button on the intercom.

“Hello. We see you. How many of you are there?”

“Just me! Just me!” she whispered. You could see she was craning her neck to look behind her.

Niko took his finger off the button. He turned to us.

“Listen,” he said. “I want to let her in, but we can’t. We physically can’t. We don’t know how to retract the security gate and we don’t have keys to the door.”

“I don’t trust her anyway,” Brayden said. “See how she’s looking behind her all the time? She’s got people with her. No question. It could be a trap.”

“I think she’s alone,” Jake said. “But Niko’s right. We couldn’t get the door open if we wanted.”

“Please!” she said, pleading. “Please hurry!”

She removed the material from around her face, maybe so we could see she was honest. There were dark circles under her eyes and they were rimmed red. She looked like someone’s mom.

“Please! I am begging you!”

Niko grabbed his hair and pulled. He was in agony.

“What about the hatch?” I said. “We open the hatch and throw a ladder down!”

“Yes!” Niko said. “Yes!”

But then the woman screamed. And her face disappeared from the monitor.

And we heard a voice that was low and menacing. A voice that was familiar.

“You. Get. Away. From. My. Store.”

He was talking to the woman and his speech was interrupted by heavy sounds. The sounds, I think, of him hitting her.

“This. Is. MY. STORE.”

It was the monster from the front gate.

He was “guarding” our store.

Which explained why we hadn’t had more people trying to get in, to get food and water.

I looked at the screen in shock, expecting at any moment to see the face of the monster, but it did not appear.

I guess he was too deranged to notice the camera.

We could hear what was going on outside, the last sounds of a scuffle, and then it was quiet. Then we heard what I imagined to be the sound of the man dragging the woman’s body away.

After a few moments of inactivity, the intercom shut off automatically.

We were frozen in a moment of horror, I think is the best way to describe it.

There had been a woman there. Right outside the door. And now she was dead.

And then Niko roared.

He balled his hands into fists and started striking his own head. Bam, bam, bam!

“Niko, stop!” I shouted.

He turned to the nearest shelving unit and started pummeling the boxes.

I stepped forward to try to help him. To restrain him, somehow, so he wouldn’t hurt himself.

“Let him be,” Jake said. “He’s just working stuff out.”

Niko destroyed the aisle, ripping, punching, tearing, throwing, cursing, spitting, shouting. Crying.

Slowly, he started winding down.

“All right, man,” came Jake’s drawl. “It’s gonna be okay.”

“It’s not okay,” Niko shouted. “She’s dead and if I’d just thought faster, I could have saved her!”

He drove his head into a heavy, wooden crate.

“You’re pissed!” I shouted. “You’re so angry you want to burst!”

My volume and intensity surprised him (and me), and he stopped what he was doing.

“We could’ve saved her and we failed! You could have saved her and you failed!” I shouted.

It seemed like he needed me to push back at him with the same weight of his own anger and despair.

“She’d dead! They’re all dead and we can do nothing to save them!”

Niko crumpled to his knees and rested his forehead on the linoleum. Now I could stop yelling. He could hear me.

“It’s not your fault, Niko,” I said.

“But I could have helped her.”

“It’s not your fault,” I repeated.

“You didn’t cause the tsunami, man,” Jake said quietly.

“It’s not your fault.”

“It’s nobody’s fault,” Brayden said.

Niko’s body relaxed.

Jake, Brayden, and I just watched him for a while as his chest heaved and he regained his usual composure.

Niko drew his sleeve across his face.

He sat up and looked around.

“Shoot,” he said. “Look at this mess.”

We laughed a little when he said that.

“Come on, man,” Jake said. “Let’s go get a drink.”

Jake hauled Niko to his feet and we left the storeroom.

But I gave a backward glance at the monitor.

It was black and silent.

One more lady was dead. Add her to the millions dead outside and she figured pretty small. But to us, she was big.

^{CHAPTER SEVENTEEN} RUM

We gathered in the kitchen. Jake had a bottle of rum and was pouring liberal shots into Dixie cups.

Jake held his cup aloft. “To Niko, a really good guy, even if he is a Boy Scout.”

“Here, here,” I said, tapping my cup with them.

I took a sip. Straight rum. It burned. But it felt good to feel something strong besides failure.

Brayden knocked his down without a grimace.

“You know,” Jake said, after he drained his cup. “I love Boy Scouts. You know why?”

“Why?” Niko asked.

“They give a real good hand job.”

We cracked up.

“No, really. All that time up in the mountains with nothing to do. They always come prepared, too, with little lotion bottles.”

“Ha-ha,” Niko said. But he didn’t seem mad at all. “We get a lot of those jokes. But back in Buffalo—”

“You’re from Buffalo? New York?” Brayden interrupted him. “I have an aunt from there.”

All this time we’d been surviving the end of the world together and I’d never even asked Niko where he was from.

“Yeah. Back in Buffalo there were ninety-eight guys in my troop. And you know why I joined? Because it was fun. I mean, I learned so much. But mostly I just did it because we were laughing all the time.”

“You must have really missed them, when you moved here,” I said. He shrugged.

“I will tell you guys something you’re probably not going to believe, but back in Buffalo, I had a lot of friends. I really did,” Niko continued. He brushed his hair out of his eyes. “I know it will strain your imaginations, but I even had a girlfriend.”

“What’s her name?” I asked.

“Is she hot?” Jake said at the same time.

“Lina and… yeah,” Niko said.

We all laughed again.

“She’s very pretty. She was a senior last year. Now she’s at Sarah Lawrence.”

“Wait a minute, you’re telling me last year, when you were a sophomore, you were dating a senior?”

Niko shrugged. “Yeah.”

After a moment, Jake said, “Cool.”

Brayden squinted at Niko. I could tell he was thinking what I was thinking (and probably Jake, too): No. Way.

Niko was making up a girlfriend.

But after what he’d just been through, not a one of us, not even Brayden, called him on it.

“All right, I got a question for you boys,” Brayden said. “Where’s the craziest place you ever did it?”

“Oh God.” Jake rolled his eyes. “Not this again.”

“What?” Brayden protested.

“This is like his favorite question,” Jake snorted. “And anyway, man, not all the present company can answer this one.” He nodded toward me.

I don’t think he was trying to be mean.

“Oh yeah,” Brayden said. “No speakee the nookie, eh, Dean?”

I felt my stupid face going red.

“Why do you all assume that about me?” I said. Trying to play cool and failing, I’m sure.

Jake reached across the table and poured us all another big shot.

“Dude,” Jake said. “We only assume it about you because it’s true.”

They laughed good-naturedly.

“You guys are a-holes,” I said, playing it off.

“Hey, Brayden,” Jake said. “Speaking of the nooks, how’s Josie treating you?”

I shot a look at Niko. What was Jake thinking?

Maybe he didn’t know that Niko liked Josie. Was that possible?

Brayden took a swig from his drink. He avoided looking at Niko, but grinned.

“It’s all right,” he said. “Very nice girl.”

“Ha!” Jake laughed. “That means she’s not putting out.”

Niko studied the cup in his hands.

“We do a lot of cuddling,” Brayden said.

Niko looked so relieved, I had to laugh. Jake clapped me on the shoulder. I was really feeling the rum.

“Oh man, getting laid is so awesome,” Jake said, scratching his head. “It’s just absolutely the best thing ever. Once you get it, all you can think of is getting it again. Sometimes I’m having sex and I’m worried about the next time I’m gonna have sex!”

I slugged back the rest of my rum.

I really hoped he’d shut up soon.

“You’ll get there, in time, Dean. You’ll discover for yourself the beautiful, beautiful world of the hot little clam.”

It was so base. So vulgar.

He was talking about Astrid.

He didn’t love her. He just wanted her for her body.

It wasn’t fair.

“It must be so easy for you,” I said. My face was hot.

“How so?”

“You come to our school, you’re immediately popular. You’re the best player on the football team. You get the hottest girl in school. The best girl, without lifting a finger.”

I was loose. I felt big, like I could say what I really felt. I was drunk.

“And who are you, really?” I said to Jake, pouring myself another drink. “I mean, what do you have, besides charm and some muscle?”

“All right, settle down, Geraldine,” Brayden said.

I drained my paper cup.

“That’s a lot of rum for a lightweight like you,” Jake said.

“You don’t deserve her.” I stood up. “She’s so smart, so beautiful. She’s wild and funny and kind, and you’re just a dumb jock. You don’t even love her. You just want her so you can get your rocks off.”

Jake got up, sending his chair crashing down behind him. “You’re out of line, Dean.”

My blood was pounding and I laughed.

“Out of line! Yeah, I know. If I ever speak up. If I ever stand up for myself or draw attention to myself, I’m out of line, right? Because I’m not as good as you? Is that it?”

Niko came toward me, hands out, like he was going to calm me down.

I pointed at Jake. “HE DOESN’T DESERVE HER. She’s a goddess and he’s named her body parts after Disney princesses!”

Jake roared at that, of course.

And launched himself at me, of course.

And started beating the crap out of me, of course.

After he got in some good punches, they pulled him off me.

I lay on the ground, panting. Blood was on my face and on the linoleum.

Jake gasped, trying to catch his breath, as they held him back.

“He’s a sneak,” Jake said, pointing to me. “He’s a pervert.”

“What is going on here?” Josie’s voice came.

She rushed to my side.

“What happened?”

Niko and Brayden looked guilty. Jake stormed away.

“Brayden?” Josie said.

“Josie, it just got out of control,” he said.

Josie shot Brayden and Niko an angry look.

“Well?” she said. “Is someone going to help me get him up?”

I curled on my side and puked.