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reduce the harshness. After a
minute or two, I kicked it open. It barely swung. A few of the
hinges were bent, so I was happy that it moved at all. We could
have been trapped in there, but maybe that would have been for the
better.
    I turned around and saw Jelly. He was
staring at me, and the burnt room behind me. There were goggles on
the floor next to his feet, and for a second I wondered if he had
worn them while we were in the void. I hoped not. I really hoped
not.
    “We didn’t die,” he said, his voice sounded
like gravel.
    I smiled. “No, we did not. The sun is
shining.” I pointed up to the hole in the ceiling and the roof
above it. The walls all around us were black.
    “Yeah.” He smiled. He looked relieved and
burdened, burdened by something I knew he wasn’t going to tell me
about.
    My stomach grumbled, using its weird
digestive speech. “Did we eat yesterday?”
    “I don’t want to remember yesterday.”
    I nodded. That was fine, I guess. “Well, we
need to eat today at least. Probably nothing left upstairs, but the
neighbors might have something.”
    He turned around and grabbed a granola bar
from a shelf. “And the Apocalypse Room. There’s lots of food in
here.” He tossed me the bar.
    I caught it, unwrapped it, and started
munching away.
    Jelly walked over to Tortilla, bent down,
and shook his shoulder. “Hey, dude. Wake up.”
    “No thanks,” Tortilla said, then rolled to
his side, facing the wall.
    “All right, suit yourself.” Jelly attempted
to wake Jacob, but he didn’t stir. “He’s still breathing.”
    I nodded. “Good. You want to look
around?”
    “I guess so, not really, though; I don’t
want to see what’s out there.” His eyes told me that he wanted to
stay in the Apocalypse Room for the rest of his life, where it was
safe. Safe. As safe as one could be in that cozy little box of a
room.
    “That’s fine, I can go myself.” The granola
bar was in my belly now, so I grabbed two knives and headed to the
adjoining room, a long hall that ended with stairs on one end and a
sliding glass door at the other. The stairs were wrecked,
impossible to climb up them, so I went and checked outside. Water
pooled in the house, signaling that it had rained last night, which
must have extinguished the fires from the propane tanks. Jelly was
behind me, but it didn’t seem like he was paying attention, almost
as if he was dazed or something.
    The air outside was cool. It felt nice on my
lungs as they expanded. None of us had used the inhalers last
night, and my chest had been tight, my throat had closed, for most
of the time. Now I could breathe.
    “Looks the same,” Jelly said. He sat down in
a black patio chair. The sun briefly smiled past the clouds then
disappeared.
    “Doesn’t feel the same, though. Feels like
it’s dead out here.” The air was calm, no animals . . . where had
all the animals gone? I plopped down into a chair next to him.
“What should we do next?”
    He cleared his throat. “You’re the idea
maker. The planner. I’ve got nothing.” He unscrewed a lid to one of
his water bottles and took a huge gulp. He started to unwrap a
granola bar when he twitched in his chair.
    “You see something?”
    He eyed me, disturbed. “I always see
something these days. Whether or not they’re there, now that’s
something I don’t know.”
    I surveyed the area, but I didn’t see
anything, so I seated myself again and drank some water. “I guess
we don’t have to search for the stupid telescope anymore. I don’t
know why we did after we knew they were here.” I heard a noise at
the sliding glass door, and I whipped my head around and saw
Tortilla bump into the frame. My blood instantly warmed at the
sight of him.
    “Hey,” Tortilla said, his throat was dry and
raspy. “Can I get some water?”
    I offered him the bottle. He drank what was
left of it in a hurry. “Good?”
    “Real good,” he replied. He dragged a third
chair around to the door, so that he could