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view the backyard and
beyond. I don’t think anyone wanted to put their back to it, I sure
didn’t. “What are we going to do now?”
    “Not sure . . . but we should probably wait
for Jacob to wake up,” I said. For some reason, all I wanted then
was for Tortilla to hold me, to say that it was going to be all
right. I needed that, but I knew he wouldn’t do that in front of
Jelly.
    Tortilla glanced over at Jelly. “You okay,
bromigo?”
    I saw that Jelly’s face was upset. He
actually appeared to be angry, as if he were about to clench his
fists. He didn’t, though.
    “Yeah, I’m fine. Just a lot to take in, you
know.”
    “Yeah, I know,” Tortilla said, smirking. “I
think we should be dead, there were a lot of those propane
tanks.”
    “But we’re not,” I reminded them. “We have
to make a plan.”
    “Uhrm. You do that,” Jelly replied in a
heated tone. His face was changing to the color of chili peppers,
red hot, maybe even hotter than that.
    “You sure you’re all right, you look like
something is bothering you,” Tortilla said.
    “No, I’m not all right. Everyone is dead,
and we’re not. I thought I was going to die, but I didn’t, now I
have to live another day like a rabbit.”
    “You want to die?” I asked him.
    “I can’t do this. Can you do this? Fuck, I
don’t even know what we’re doing!” he yelled, springing to his
feet. “Uhrm. I . . .” He was struggling to breathe. He gulped in
air. “I—I don’t want to live like a rabbit. Uhrm.” He wobbled
around on the grass.
    I bolted to my feet. “Get an inhaler!” I
screamed.
    Tortilla sprinted down the hallway and came
back with an inhaler, shaking it the entire way. He put it in
Jelly’s right hand.
    Jelly pumped the inhaler once, sucking in
the medicine in a deep inhale. He let it out and did it a second
time. “I’m okay . . . I’m okay.” He looked up at the sliding glass
door, surprised.
    I turned. “Jacob.”
    Jacob was staring at Jelly. “Darrel?” He
staggered, wiping his nut-brown eyes. His longer brunette hair was
as messy as the ruined house.
    “Yeah, man. It’s me. You look pretty
bad.”
    “I bet. I feel pretty damn bad.” Jacob
examined us. “Félix?”
    Tortilla nodded at him.
    Jacob looked at me again. “I don’t remember
you, do I know you?”
    “Not really. We went to Squalicum together,
but that’s it,” I answered.
    “That’s Maggy Li,” Tortilla introduced
me.
    He stumbled back, almost fell over, but
Tortilla caught him and guided him to a chair.
    “You need water badly, I’ll grab you some,”
Tortilla said. He came back from the Apocalypse Room with a few
bottles and a giant bag of turkey jerky.
    “Thanks, I needed that,” Jacob said after he
drank his fill. “What the hell happened? How did you get here?”
    “We walked here,” Jelly told him. “Well, we
also ran and boated across the lake.”
    “Didn’t take a car?”
    Jelly shook his head. “Didn’t want to make
any noise, draw any needless attention on to us. I don’t know how
to turn off those fake engine sounds the cars make.”
    “But you boated across the lake?”
    “That was a last resort situation. We had no
other choice. Aliens were gonna kill us,” Jelly responded.
    “Alions,” I corrected.
    “Right. Alions were gonna kill us,” he
said.
    “What are you talking about?”
    “They’re here,” Tortilla said. He sat down,
and Jelly and I followed suit. “Aliens that look like lions, that’s
what’s taken all the people. You haven’t seen them? We thought that
was why you drank yourself to death.”
    “I drank myself to death because there was
no one else around. Everyone was gone, vanished, poof, you know. I
drank because I didn’t have a gun.”
    We all looked at him, his green face, bowls
for eye sockets, stringy hair that looked as if it was falling out.
He was in bad shape.
    Silence overtook the patio.
    “So what are you doing here?” Jacob asked
after a while.
    “We first saw the