inch in diameter, the metal surface flattened all around except for one groove at the top. The ends of each ring fastened together with a tiny screw, like the plastic rings that held the shower curtain up.
Something was engraved on the outside surface of each, in cursive script. A single word starting with a C, but he couldn’t read it in the dark and he thought it might be written in another language. C-a-m… something. He had no idea what their purpose might be or why he had kept them, but the fact that he had kept them, along with the other things in the pack, suggested they had a purpose. He would need them at some point, or they might help him remember something.
He hoped there was a purpose in all of this.
Tired and sad in ways he didn’t understand, Adam closed up his pack and used it for a pillow. Stretching out on the towels, listening for any signs of movement overhead, he closed his eyes and tried to think of all the good food he would eat tomorrow. He tried to think of anything but The Nocturnal in the magazine, and the pale dead faces that were out there in the real world, hunting for him.
He slept peacefully for a couple of hours. When he woke up, the sun was rising, his long lonely night was almost over, and the people who lived here were screaming bloody murder.
7
The first few hours of morning and the last hour of night, that was all she had left.
Many years ago Geri Kavanaugh had thought it would be this way for only a few years, that when Josh grew out of his diapers and started school, she would have more of her waking hours to herself. But then the big round of layoffs came at Croswell-Anderson, their medical device division was sold off to that biotech firm in California (and no, we don’t want your remaining staff, thank you), and her husband Eric lost his engineering job. She had to go back to teaching full-time sooner than she’d planned.
Teaching history to tenth- and eleventh-graders wasn’t the worst job in the world, but it wasn’t easy or often inspiring. Then there was the grading of homework, meetings with parents, faculty meetings, and errands, cooking dinner, cleaning up the house while Eric worked the night shift as a facilities manager in the Quartet Corporate Complex in Broomfield, making sure Josh was fed and bathed and put to bed by nine (when he was still a little boy), then making sure he wasn’t out late doing bad things (when he was, well, ever since he crossed the wicked threshold of puberty).
Where had the years gone? What happened to all her happy days?
It was only a little after six in the morning and Geri had been up for nearly three hours. She had already run two loads of laundry, the only chore she didn’t mind, because she couldn’t stand having piles of dirty clothes laying around and the task required no mental effort. Folding everything was another story, so she left the last batch in the dryer, which had buzzed to a halt around five this morning.
Eric had just come home from his shift and was taking one of his long showers before seeing them off to work and school and then going to sleep. She was on her second ‘defibrillation’, Eric’s name for the huge mugs of latte she brewed for herself. She was reading the New York Times at the kitchen table, as much for the tactile and olfactory sensations real newsprint provided as for the content.
Geri didn’t dwell much on the front page, national, global, political, terrorism or financial sections. That swath of the world was too depressing to follow, and so far removed from her interests and ability to influence, it all might as well have been so much palace intrigue on Neptune. She usually skipped straight to the lifestyle, fashion, design, real estate and book review sections. She like reading the longer pieces about entrepreneurs, designers, artists, anyone who’d made the paper for the interesting life they were living, and who might inspire a few small changes in her own.
She fought the urge to
Something was engraved on the outside surface of each, in cursive script. A single word starting with a C, but he couldn’t read it in the dark and he thought it might be written in another language. C-a-m… something. He had no idea what their purpose might be or why he had kept them, but the fact that he had kept them, along with the other things in the pack, suggested they had a purpose. He would need them at some point, or they might help him remember something.
He hoped there was a purpose in all of this.
Tired and sad in ways he didn’t understand, Adam closed up his pack and used it for a pillow. Stretching out on the towels, listening for any signs of movement overhead, he closed his eyes and tried to think of all the good food he would eat tomorrow. He tried to think of anything but The Nocturnal in the magazine, and the pale dead faces that were out there in the real world, hunting for him.
He slept peacefully for a couple of hours. When he woke up, the sun was rising, his long lonely night was almost over, and the people who lived here were screaming bloody murder.
7
The first few hours of morning and the last hour of night, that was all she had left.
Many years ago Geri Kavanaugh had thought it would be this way for only a few years, that when Josh grew out of his diapers and started school, she would have more of her waking hours to herself. But then the big round of layoffs came at Croswell-Anderson, their medical device division was sold off to that biotech firm in California (and no, we don’t want your remaining staff, thank you), and her husband Eric lost his engineering job. She had to go back to teaching full-time sooner than she’d planned.
Teaching history to tenth- and eleventh-graders wasn’t the worst job in the world, but it wasn’t easy or often inspiring. Then there was the grading of homework, meetings with parents, faculty meetings, and errands, cooking dinner, cleaning up the house while Eric worked the night shift as a facilities manager in the Quartet Corporate Complex in Broomfield, making sure Josh was fed and bathed and put to bed by nine (when he was still a little boy), then making sure he wasn’t out late doing bad things (when he was, well, ever since he crossed the wicked threshold of puberty).
Where had the years gone? What happened to all her happy days?
It was only a little after six in the morning and Geri had been up for nearly three hours. She had already run two loads of laundry, the only chore she didn’t mind, because she couldn’t stand having piles of dirty clothes laying around and the task required no mental effort. Folding everything was another story, so she left the last batch in the dryer, which had buzzed to a halt around five this morning.
Eric had just come home from his shift and was taking one of his long showers before seeing them off to work and school and then going to sleep. She was on her second ‘defibrillation’, Eric’s name for the huge mugs of latte she brewed for herself. She was reading the New York Times at the kitchen table, as much for the tactile and olfactory sensations real newsprint provided as for the content.
Geri didn’t dwell much on the front page, national, global, political, terrorism or financial sections. That swath of the world was too depressing to follow, and so far removed from her interests and ability to influence, it all might as well have been so much palace intrigue on Neptune. She usually skipped straight to the lifestyle, fashion, design, real estate and book review sections. She like reading the longer pieces about entrepreneurs, designers, artists, anyone who’d made the paper for the interesting life they were living, and who might inspire a few small changes in her own.
She fought the urge to
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