Threnody (014).

(This is a 500-word-a-day novel project.)

He was exhausted with being scared and of not understanding a single thing in the world anymore. He heard Maddy coughing into her arm to muffle the sound. Cigarettes were hard to find.

He was especially tired of her.

Ryan sat up, lowering the barbell to the floor. There were heavier weights stacked behind cobwebs; if they stayed here much longer he supposed he’d end up using them.

Well, that’s the best I got, he heard Maddy say, and then there was a snapping as she shook out stale blankets stored in plastic bins under the stairs. It’s too bad Tom’s not still with us. He was going to school to be a doctor, so he could have done this way better than me. She sighed again; she sighed a lot.

Ryan trembled; he squeezed his hands together, finger-bones creaking. Finally he could see again and rested his elbows on his knees, catching his breath. He was glad she hadn’t seen him like that. She got very afraid, and he didn’t have the strength right now to chase her down again.

But she was right about Tom McCloud and his twin, Tim: they were both cool. When he and Maddy were lost in the snow and things were chasing them that wanted to eat them, the identical brothers (though Tom had green eyes instead of blue) had saved them with nothing for weapons but wooden baseball bats. They took them to their camp, fed them, cleaned Maddy’s bite wound, and in bits and pieces shared their own story of how they had gotten lost: they claimed they were in their early forties, and twenty years ago they had been living in San Francisco, both of them going to med school; they said they had been traveling on a BART commuter train that stopped suddenly mid-line under the bay. I thought maybe we were getting hit with an earthquake, Tim had said, the four of them seated around a fire burning inside a ring of stones they had made. We went looking for help, but the train was totally empty. And when we got out it was snowing right there in the tunnel, like Narnia or something.

This had made Ryan laugh for the first time since their own encounter with the snow, a sweet relief that had brought tears to his eyes. I miss that dude so much, he thought, not turning away fast enough from the memory of him using the very bat that had saved his own life to end Tim’s. And then later, Tom’s.

He and Maddy had traveled with the brothers for days and days, though how many was something they debated often; at times it seemed both much longer and much less, and the unchanging weather they trudged through (endless snowfall and a sun that never rose, set, or ever broke through the gunmetal cloud cover that hung low overhead) made it impossible to guess. Time wasn’t broken when we got here, Tom told them.