Todd (24 page)
Authors: Adam J Nicolai
"Hey. Even better," Alan
says, and without warning the black highway beyond his high beams comes alive,
the snow glowing with ghostly blue light. "Holy shit," he breathes.
"What—?"
The question dies in his throat.
Through the parted clouds above the fields to their right, the blue star looms
as large as a gibbous moon. Alan can make out its rocky surface with his naked
eye, including the ragged scar across its middle. Its azure silhouette flickers
at the edges like fairy fire.
It's so close. God, how fast is
it moving? It's
so close.
Suddenly, questions of shelter and
surviving the winter become academic. It—whatever it is—is nearly here. How
long do they have? Days?
Hours?
His leg muscles turn to water, and
his foot slips off the gas pedal. The world seems to spin lazily around him as
a scream fights for purchase in his chest. Somewhere in the truck cabin, Todd
has begun moaning.
Then the clouds retake the sky.
The highway plunges back into monochrome: white in the truck lights, black
beyond.
"Daddy?" Todd's voice is
shot through with terror.
It's okay,
Alan thinks, but
his tongue won't move because it's not okay. There is nothing he can say that
will matter. His mind is blank with horror, reeling from the barest glimpse of
the thing in the sky.
He parks the truck and Todd crawls
into his arms, shivering and small.
Dawn, and they are still alive.
When he realizes this, Alan
resumes driving.
It's a fight to keep his speed
down. Some crazy instinct keeps telling him to jam down the gas pedal, that maybe
he can outrace the death he saw in the sky last night. But the sane part of him
knows the opposite is true: that in fact, driving an unloaded pickup faster
than 20 miles per hour through three inches of snow is nearly guaranteed to
crash them, especially if they run into any surprises.
So he manages his speed. Todd is
quiet as they drive north. When Alan steals sidelong glances, he sees the boy's
face is ashen, his eyes deadened. The wire bunny head lies on the floor,
forgotten. Alan wants to comfort him, but no words can suffice. He keeps his
eyes on the road.
He's just starting to fear he
passed the place when he sees the sign:
HORIZON
CHASERS
LUXURY
& FAMILY RVs
NEXT
EXIT
In ten minutes they're crunching
through the snow into the RV dealer's parking lot. The place is huge, far
bigger than he expected, with lines of vehicles of varying sizes just like the
sign promised.
He pulls over and they go into the
sales building. The place is bright, its floor-to-ceiling windows letting in
plenty of grey winter light. The sales floor has some of the smaller trailers,
but most of the space is given to diagrams of the RVs and sales brochures.
At the far end, near the
bathrooms, are a couple vending machines. Alan helps Todd limp over, who
surveys the options and says, "Oh, they have blueberry Pop-Tarts!"
Alan breaks the glass, and they help themselves to breakfast.
"It says there's a model RV
just outside." Alan points at a sign on the wall as he tears through a
Slim Jim. "I think we should check that out first."
"What's an RV?"
"Stands for 'recreational
vehicle.' It's basically... it's kind of like a house on wheels."
Todd's eyebrows furrow.
"Like you can drive it?"
"Yeah. Though I don't really
think we should, not with all the snow on the ground. I was thinking more a
place to ride out the winter." He remembers the asteroid they saw last
night and how close it was.
Assuming we have that long,
he starts to
think, and forces the thought away.
Todd chews his bottom lip.
"Do we have to start a fire?"
"No." Alan answers
instantly. "No. In fact, it should—I mean, I assume it will have heat
built in. Like cars do."
The boy considers this. "Will
it have a bed?"
"Well, I hope so. Let's take
a look."
The model RV on display outside
the sales building is a luxury unit with a price tag of nearly one million
dollars. It has a bed.
It also has a designer kitchen
with a microwave and flat-panel electric stove, a water heating unit, a massive
diesel generator, and a solar panel array with battery backup. The bathroom is
a piece of art that might have been torn from a Hilton penthouse. There is a
leather reclining couch and a hideaway flat-screen TV bigger than the one they
had at home. The kitchen table and surrounding built-in benches are mounted in
some kind of airtight expanding room that actually extends the wall of the
vehicle to make the already-massive living area even larger.
Every surface is smooth and
immaculate. It smells of equal parts new house and new car.
Todd is over the moon, bouncing on
the bed and tumbling over the couch as if his sprained ankle never even
happened. Alan's mind cramps as it tries to comprehend the beauty of the
place—light-years beyond any temporary shelter they've taken since leaving
home, light-years, even, beyond the home they left.
As Todd celebrates, Alan makes his
way to the driver's seat. It feels on the verge of sacrilege to entertain the
hope in his mind. This gift from the universe has already shattered every
expectation he held as he walked in—surely it is asking too much to expect this
incredible machine to work. He finds the keys in an empty uniform (the shirt
reads,
HORIZON CHASERS!
) and brings them to the front cabin, where he
pushes the power button.
With a gentle, rumbling hum, the lights
come on. Heat starts to pour from the vents.
Todd's cry is ebullient. "
It
works?
Oh my gosh, it
actually works!
"
As the boy whoops and screams,
Alan sinks against the steering column and weeps.
A little more research reveals
that the water supply is connected, apparently to an on-site well. The toilet
doesn't work—it's covered with a plastic sign that reads
Not For Customer
Use
—but the bathrooms in the sales building are only a minute away, and the
other amenities in the bathroom function perfectly.
An hour later, when Alan steps
into a hot shower for the first time in months, the sensation drives him to his
knees. There is no soap or shampoo, but it doesn't matter; the water alone is
ambrosia. The bone-deep cold in his flesh slowly thaws. Muscle tension he
didn't even realize he had drains away. He hogs the experience, relishing the
heat until Todd finally calls through the door to ask if he's okay.
And the wonders don't end there.
Horizon
Chasers
spared no expense to sell their fantasy of complete self-reliance.
The solar batteries are fully charged, the two tanks of diesel gasoline
completely filled. While Todd takes his shower, Alan rifles through the kitchen
cabinets and finds cans of soup and stew, fruit cups, even pasta and spaghetti
sauce. When Todd emerges, pink and clean, from the steaming bathroom, Alan
welcomes him to a lunch of fried Spam and spaghetti, with drinks from the
vending machines and dessert of actual, toasted Pop-Tarts. They eat until their
stomachs hurt, then collapse into bed.
There is nothing on live TV, of
course, but there is a small collection of DVDs, and Alan puts in some old
romcom. Human voices—even canned ones—are like salve on a burn. He doesn't care
what the actors are saying, doesn't care about the storyline. He sets the
machine to repeat and they doze off, the comforting drone of voices in their
ears.
He wakes to notice the sunlight
waning, but the shadows that would normally creep up the walls are blunted by
all the glorious, artificial light. When he realizes they once again have the
power to keep the darkness away, a feeling of omnipotence, of imperviousness,
washes over him.
"Can we stay here?" Todd
asks, snuggled against Alan's shoulder. He sounds resigned and wary, frightened
of the answer.
"Yeah."
The boy's head shoots up, a
face-splitting grin on his face. "Really?"
Alan coughs a laugh. "Yeah,
really. Why the hell would we leave? We're never finding anything better than
this."
"I just thought—" He
shakes his head, stops himself. "Thank you."
"We need to keep it gassed
up, but I think I saw a tank on the way in here that they must have used just
for that. If it's diesel, we'll be in business—otherwise, we'll have to figure
something out." Alan ruffles his son's hair. "This is good as it
gets, man. I know that. I see it."
Todd relaxes. They watch the
movie. Alan is starting to drift off again when Todd says, "Dad."
"Yeah, pal."
"You want to play Chose
Victor?"
Alan opens his eyes. "'Chose
Victor'? What is that?"
Todd jumps up, excited. "Wait
here." He throws on his shoes and is out the door. Alan feels like he
should stop him, but doesn't; he can't bring himself to tamp down the boy's
enthusiasm. Two minutes later, Todd is back at the door, lugging his suitcase
from the truck through the snow.
"Todd!" Alan grabs the
case and hauls it into the RV, then lifts his son inside, too. "You've got
to watch that foot—" he starts, but the words dry up, because Todd has
opened the suitcase and pulled out
THE GAME
.
It's like being at a party, and
finding himself suddenly alone with an ex. The sight of it stuns him.
"You—?" he starts, then
tries again: "You brought that?"
"Yeah!" Todd opens the
box. Inside are all the dice and cards Alan worked on for the last two years,
strewn helter-skelter.
"Why would you bring
that
,
Todd? I told you to pack important stuff." He is fighting a surge of
irrational anger. So Todd brought
THE GAME
—so
what? Why does it feel like a personal attack? Why—
"I know, but it's really fun.
I figured out how to play when you were sick on the couch. At least I think I
did. I couldn't find the instructions."
"They're in a file on my PC.
I haven't finished them."
Todd upends the box, and the
components spill out. "The decks are all messed up," he laments.
"I built a bunch of different decks. But I can make one for you real
quick. The way you play is—"
"I know how to play, Todd. I
made the game. You—"
You weren't allowed in my workshop. You weren't
supposed to touch this.
It would be a painfully irrelevant thing to say,
now, but it still nearly comes out of his mouth.
"Oh, yeah," Todd
answers, as if this has just occurred to him. "Well, anyway, I built a
deck of Andions, and a deck of Devilspar. They were really good against each
other, because the Andions can pull in extra Realms, but the Devilspar can
devour Realms."
Alan always envisioned that
matchup—Andion versus Devilspar—would be one of the archetypes if the game
caught on.
How did it go? Were they evenly matched?
The man who spent
two years working on the game wants to ask these questions, but the rest of him
hasn't caught up yet. "You—you played this?"
"Yeah, I played it all the
time. I told you. I love Chose Victor."
"It's 'Chaos Vector.'"
"Oh, yeah."
"How did you play it? It's a
two-player game."
"I pretended one deck was a
CPU." Todd glances at his father. "Do you know what I mean by
that?"
"Yeah." Alan nods, still
in a daze. "Yeah, I think I do." Alan has playtested the game for
hours, playing against himself.
"But I have one question. I
don't know if I did this right." Todd holds up one of the cards, which
reads,
Advance one Realm
and
Devour one Mortal.
The two
statements are separated by a horizontal line. "Is this like, if you play
the card, you get to do both? Or you pick one, or—?" Todd looks at him
expectantly. When Alan doesn't answer, he finishes: "Or what?"
"I..." The honest answer
is embarrassing. Alan isn't sure. It was one of the key elements of the game
that he couldn't make a decision about. He had all these cards that had two
effects listed on them, but he hadn't decided how to employ them. "I was
trying it a few different ways."
"Oh, yeah. 'Cause I thought
it would be cool if the enemy gets to pick."
Alan nods. Ridiculously, Todd's
enthusiasm is pulling him in. "I had the same idea, when I was sick. But I
figured..."
I figured it didn't matter, because we're going to die, and
there are no other people on the planet.
"I don't know."
"I never really got to try
it, because I was playing a CPU, but I always know what the CPU is thinking, kind
of. So it was hard to do it that way. Do you think it would work?"
"I don't know." Alan
shakes his head, half-expecting the game pieces to vanish, and comes to a
decision that shocks him. "We could try it and see."
Chaos Vector was designed
originally as a Collectible Card Game. The players Alan envisioned would
acquire packs of 10 or 15 cards and combine them in different ways to make
decks of 60 cards or more, then play those decks against each other. It wasn't
a new idea—games like
Magic: The Gathering
had been doing it for
decades—but it was still a cool one. A great CCG could be addictive, and
addicted players would spend a lot of money. Best of all, the CCG format
presented several unique design challenges that, when he started, Alan had
looked forward to surmounting.
He had even developed the idea
further by bringing in the concept of custom dice, a notion he'd thought was
original when he'd come up with it, but had since been incorporated by other
games. Seeing that idea get usurped before he could get it to market had been
the killing blow to his dwindling morale. Afterward, he had questioned
everything down to its foundation: whether the dice had only been a gimmick,
whether he should come up with a different gimmick to replace them, whether the
game had any redeeming qualities at all. He'd begun spinning his wheels, each
day consumed with doubt and self-accusations.
