And I know that’s probably the main reason Alex is dead.
I have to live with that.
“I’ll tell him,” I say.
Deirdre nods, and we get out of the car. She heads to her apartment and I head to the one I share with Jared and Struz. It’s a two-bedroom and military furnished, which means everything is taupe and gently used, but it’s dry and sturdy and we have cases of bottled water stacked up in every closet, which is more than a lot of other people have. For the past hundred and fifteen days, we’ve been calling it home.
“Dude, I’m starting to feel like a neglected housewife,” Jared says with a smile when I get inside. The room is dark, but he’s got a paperback in his lap and a candle lit on the corner table next to the La-Z-Boy that he’s started to refer to as his chair. Electricity is scarce; brown-outs are common, and as a result everyone is only supposed to use it when they have to—luckily the base has a wood-burning stove.
“Did you make me dinner, at least?” I say, joking right back, even though the irony of the situation twists a little like a rusty knife in my gut. After I tried so hard to keep him from having to grow up too fast, the past few months have forced it beyond my control.
“There are cold SpaghettiOs on the counter.”
Food is rationed and handed out once a week, one of my many jobs. Right now we’re dealing with nonperishables, because that’s all we’ve got. Things like fruit, vegetables, dairy, and meat are already all gone. Anyone on a farm is working to rebuild, but I don’t know how long that will take. And I’m not sure we have a plan for when the nonperishables run out.
Water is the worst. Anyone with a well can boil water to purify the effects of the wildfires, but tap water in most of Southern California is undrinkable. The military has been doing supply runs, bringing in cases of bottled water that had been stockpiled by FEMA. Struz keeps saying things will get better, but they’ll get worse before they do—the rest of the winter will be hard, harder for people in colder climates, harder for people in poorer communities. It’s a different kind of aftershock.
“Gotta love SpaghettiOs,” I say with a sigh. I’m hungry, but I go to Jared first and ruffle his hair. “Did you get enough to eat?”
He picks up his book and rolls his eyes. “Don’t even try to give me your dinner again.”
I don’t respond, because that’s exactly what I’m trying to do. Instead I say, “How was school?”
“Lame,” he answers. “I don’t know who decided it was okay to have school on Sunday, but they should be abducted by aliens.”
Schools shut down when the quakes happened, but they’ve opened up again—large, auditorium-style, and organized by accessibility instead of grade, and they’re open every day. Jared walks to the old Mira Mesa High School each morning with the other kids who live on the base. Grades seven and up have classes in the gym, and everyone else is in the cafeteria. I went the first few weeks, but Jared’s right, it was lame.
The truth is, organized school keeps kids out of trouble. It’s a mild sense of normalcy to hold the hysteria at bay. That’s why there’s school on Sundays. Instead of that, I say, “Got to make up for that lost time.”
Jared frowns, but he doesn’t bother voicing his opinion about my absence at school. It’s a discussion that was considered closed a long time ago.
I put in to take my GED and effectively graduate early. So did most of the people I knew from Eastview. A lot of them got involved with the Red Cross to help the reconstruction effort. That’s what Kate and Nick are doing. Anyone a little more hard-core took the ASVAB, the military entrance exam, and joined the military.
I got where I am now because of Struz. After I “graduated,” I went one step further with the tests and firearms qualifications. Then Struz signed off on my employment with the FBI—so I’m essentially a cross between an apprentice and a temp. He paired me with Deirdre because of her experience and told me he expects me to pick up and go to college once things get back to normal.
We have no idea when that will happen, though, and I don’t know what else I would want to do with my life, anyway. I didn’t really ever have concrete plans, but I wanted to go to college, travel, and study abroad. I wanted the chance to figure out what my dreams were. Alex wanted to follow in my dad’s footsteps. With both of them gone, I feel like I owe it to them to do what they can’t—to fight the bad guys and all that.
Jared’s stomach growls but I ignore it. “How’s the leg?” I ask.
“Fine,” he says, but his face scrunches up a little and I know it’s not. He broke it during the quakes, and even though it’s healed now, it’s not as strong as it was before.
I lean into him and remind myself it could be worse. Deirdre’s son lost his arm, and her daughter hasn’t spoken since the world changed.
“What are you reading?” I ask, but focusing on the book makes me think of Ben’s lookalike and how maybe I should have helped him pick up the books I made him drop—maybe I should have talked to him—and I have to shake him from my head.
Jared’s eyes light up. “It’s super cool. Struz found it somewhere. Some of the pages are water-damaged, but it’s all still readable. It’s about this guy who just got out of prison and goes hiking up in Alaska and he finds this downed airplane that had the president’s wife on it, and she’s dead.”
“Because of the crash?”
“No way, people totally murdered her,” he says, standing up. “I’m only like fifty pages or so in. It’s pretty awesome. You’d like it.” Then his face gets serious. “You’re really not hungry? Because if you are, you should eat, but if you’re not …”
I shake my head. “Go for it. Struz out back?”
“Yeah, he’s doing the whole walkie thing.”
I nod and head out through the sliding glass doors to the porch and the five square feet of lawn that we call a yard. Struz is sitting in one of the two folding chairs and his legs make him look like he’s too big for the chair, like it’s a kiddie chair or something. He doesn’t pay me much attention as I shut the sliding door behind me. He’s got a walkie-talkie to his ear and a high-powered flashlight trained on a map of San Diego on the patio table.
“President’s new orders,” a voice crackles through the walkie, followed by a bitter chuckle, and I wonder what orders these are. And what part of the conversation I’ve missed.
Struz sighs and says, “I’ll see what we can do.”
The real president, the one who was elected and in office when the world changed, is in a coma, and the vice president is dead. The speaker of the house is now the president, and apparently he’s sort of a joke. It’s supposed to be an election year, which means that in less than a year we could elect a new president, but that would require getting voting methods under control before then, and I doubt that’s going to happen.
It doesn’t matter, though. The government we had doesn’t work for this kind of large-scale crisis. If San Diego had been the only city affected, or even if it had just been California, the rest of the country would be sending us aid and going on with life as usual.
But everyone was affected. No one—no matter who they were or where they lived or what they believed in—was spared.
The first thing the acting president did was suspend habeas corpus and declare martial law. Since then he’s passed temporary acts to give the military the power to absorb every able-bodied member of local law-enforcement agencies in order to keep peace and maintain some sort of structure.
Struz looks at me and says, “False alarm?”