Thom dragged himself up off the floor. He looked at Scott, still standing there, gun in his hand, too stunned to speak or move.
Thom looked over at Aubrey, breathing hard, streaked with Zielinski’s blood. “Anybody hit?” he asked.
They all muttered no.
Thom looked back at Scott, still holding on to the gun he and Celeste had practiced with months earlier. Thom looked at Zielinski’s body. He turned his head, hearing sounds from outside—voices, shouts, people on their way.
Some decisions take forever. Others are instantaneous. Thom felt like this one had been made before he even knew it. He went to Scott, took the gun gently from his hand, and turned the boy to face him. “Listen to me and do exactly as I say.”
Scott looked at him.
“Go into the bathroom right now and wash your hands. Thoroughly. Don’t ask why. Just do it.”
Scott stared, uncomprehending, but Thom didn’t have time to explain. The shouts from outside were getting closer. “Go.” He gave Scott a push in that direction, and the boy went.
Thom looked down at the gun he was holding, still warm from the shot Scott had fired. “Cover your ears,” he said to the room. He raised the gun, pointing it in the direction Espinoza had fled, and fired three shots out the open back door. Aubrey and Celeste turned and looked at him, trying to understand.
“I shot them,” he said. “Both of them. Got it?”
Aubrey looked at him, quizzical. Thom turned to Celeste. “Go tell Scott. Make sure he gets it right. Don’t let him come out ’til he’s got it. I shot them. Me. Not him.”
Celeste nodded, understanding, and ran after Scott.
Aubrey looked at Thom. “You don’t have to do this. It was self-defense.”
“There’s two dead bodies, Aubrey, and the gun that killed one of them just ran out the back door. It’s not gonna look right.”
“We can explain.”
“Whatever happens, let it happen to me. Not him. He’s only fifteen years old.”
The shouts from outside were in front now; hands pounded on Aubrey’s front door.
Thom looked at his sister, his eyes welling with tears.
“Fifteen years old.”
35.
Aurora
Sometime after 7 a.m. on October 6th of that year, Aubrey was on her front step drinking a morning glass of water when she heard a familiar sound. It was a sizzling, like a piece of bacon dropped in a hot pan, coming from somewhere just above her. She looked up.
The light over the front stoop was flickering.
Aubrey stared at it. She furrowed her brow and worked to make her brain register what was happening. The light, which had been switched on the night that it all began, back in April, was once again receiving a trickle of electrical power and was trying its goddamnedest to do what it had been made to do.
As abruptly as it started, the sizzling stopped, and the light flickered off again. For a long while, Aubrey just stared at the darkened lightbulb, trying to decide if she felt relief, excitement, or even, God help her, a faint tinge of disappointment.
The power was restored, not all at once, but bit by agonizing bit over the course of the next eight weeks. By early November, ninety percent of the country was electrified again. Since it happened much faster than had been expected, it was widely considered a triumph of recovery and ingenuity. Those who had managed to keep their spirit and virtue intact when things were dark wept and prayed. Those who had not, also wept, and they also prayed.
The official death toll for event-related fatalities of all causes in the United States was somewhere over a million three hundred thousand, though exact numbers were impossible to calculate. Of those, normally preventable medical emergencies took something over half, starvation claimed about one-quarter, and the remainder were estimated to be victims of violent crime. The general consensus among the scientific and medical communities was that, all things considered, we got off easy. Had powerlessness persisted into winter, there was no telling how widespread the loss of life might have been.
Norman Levy hadn’t lived long enough to see the return of normalcy, which he would have insisted was not so normal at all. Things and people had been changed forever by the experience, and some aspects of life would never be the same. That, Norman would have said, was the good news. Fingers crossed they were the right things, the ones that had needed to go anyway.
Scott, who had successfully avoided Norman until his death and then angrily regretted his choice, had gone quiet for weeks after the old man’s passing.
Aubrey unlocked the front door of Norman’s house just after eleven on a morning in mid-November. She was wearing the dark blue dress with the bright yellow stripe she’d last worn three years earlier, the day her fledgling conference business had its formal launch and her PR person had managed to wrangle a local television interview. It seemed so long ago now it might as well have been the Cretaceous Period; before COVID, before Black Sky, as the world had taken to calling it, before she’d seen and done things she never would have dreamed she would say or do. But she remembered, as she went through her closet that morning, that she’d always felt good in that dress, so she picked it. She spent half an hour putting on makeup, the first time in at least six months, and it now seemed like one of the more useless things she’d ever done. She couldn’t for the life of her imagine why anyone had ever bothered with it, until she came downstairs and Scott said, “What the fuck? You look great.”