The door was wide open, and Aubrey laid eyes on the trouble right away. It was a small, red Honda generator, the kind you could wheel around from place to place, that had been set up just a few feet back from the open garage door. It was running, and when Aubrey put a hand on the side, she could tell it was hot enough to have been on for quite a while. Her eyes widened, she realized at that same moment that her lungs were constricting, and she looked up, to the air vent that was at the top of the nearby wall, almost directly over the top of the generator.
“Norman!” she shouted, and in three quick movements she snapped the generator off, shoved it out of the garage so it could vent in the driveway, and threw open the door that led into the house.
She came inside, coughing from the accumulated CO2 that had shot through the place, and ran down the short back hallway that led to the kitchen.
“Norman!” she yelled, and tore around the corner from the kitchen and into the living room. The old man was sprawled on the couch in flannel pajama bottoms and a T-shirt. His head was back, his mouth open in a gasp, arms and legs splayed. Aubrey could tell in a second what had happened. Norman had gotten out of bed before sunup, felt a chill in the house, and turned on the generator for what he thought would be a quick burst of heat. Having parked it in the wide-open garage door, he probably figured the CO2 would just blow outside, but then the wind must have shifted, trapping the gas in the garage, and therefore letting it seep into the house, following a swirling draft inside through the vent. And there the invisible poison set upon the professor, settling into his lungs, clouding his mind, and putting him to sleep.
The only question was how long ago he’d succumbed. Aubrey raced across the floor, grabbed him under the armpits, and dragged his body off the couch. He was still warm. She pulled him down the kitchen hallway, inadvertently banging his head off a door frame. He moaned. He was alive.
Aubrey dragged him down the garage steps, across the cement floor, and laid him out over the wood bark, fifty feet from the house. There, she moved the old man’s arms and legs up and down, like she’d seen in an old movie where somebody had almost drowned, until Norman finally gasped, choked, and gulped fresh air.
A few hours later, after the house had been aired out and Norman had good-naturedly listened to a ten-minute lecture from Aubrey that could have gone by the title “Carbon Monoxide: The Silent Killer,” he smiled at her.
“Aubrey. Of course it’s Aubrey who saves me.”
“Why of course?”
“Because Aubrey takes care of everybody. But who takes care of Aubrey?”
“Aubrey takes care of Aubrey.”
“Well, she does a lousy job.”
She waved off that tedious line of conversation and looked around the place. “You rearranged the furniture.”
“Every six months. Keeps things fresh. You’d know that if you still came to dinner.”
“I don’t belong at those dinners, Norman.”
“Horseshit. You’re smarter than ninety percent of the people I ever taught. Why didn’t you go to college?”
“No school would have taken me.”
“Oh, right. Your so-called tragedy.”
She looked at him, pissed off. “That is the most insensitive thing I’ve ever heard you say, and I’ve heard a lot of offensive shit from you.”
“Honestly, who gives a goddamn about what happened a hundred years ago? You are wasted potential.”
“I forgot. I don’t actually like you that much.”
“There is no time, Aubrey. For any of us. Look around. Could the hour possibly be any fucking later?”
“I should be getting back. I was in no way prepared for this.”
He shrugged. “Some people prepare. Some people don’t. Both get in the grave just the same.”
“Yeah, but some get in the grave a lot sooner. I really gotta go.”
“I want to show you something first.”
He led her into his den, with its desk that held his home radio setup.
He turned to his nineteen-fifties-era Zenith Trans-Oceanic radio setup, a truly gorgeous museum piece that dominated most of the space, its silver microphone sitting alertly on a stand in front of it.
“Your radio’s OK?” Aubrey asked.
“Newer setups would be fried, but this thing’s a warhorse. I was even on it when the CME hit. Vacuum tubes are very resistant to EMP—arcing, surges, no damage at all.”
“Scott’ll be glad to hear that. He loves that radio.”
“Tell him to come over, we’ll talk to some people.”