Chapter Text
It takes just over three weeks for Lottie’s pills to run out and a week and a half after that for her food to run out too.
Four and a half weeks ago was the last time she saw another person – Linda, her housekeeper. Two days after that was the last time she heard from her parents, who were vacationing in Austria when it all started. They told her to stay put, and when she voiced her concern about Linda, who called Lottie to tell her she was too sick to come in the day before, they promised her everything would blow over soon.
So, Lottie turned the TV on and watched the news, until it got too depressing, so she watched Saved By the Bell reruns instead. A week before her pills ran out, the cable turned to static, and Lottie had to resort to her extensive VHS collection for entertainment instead. Maybe she should have kept the news on while she had the chance.
She is lucky, and she knows that. She had more food in her house than she thought she could ever possibly need. It made staying put easier than it must have been for most, but it wasn’t easy .
She grows antsy a few days after her parents’ last call. At first, she paces holes into the carpet since it’s too cold outside to enjoy the pool.
After a few days, she starts to utilize her father’s gym in the basement, running for hours on the treadmill. It makes her feel something – a burn in her lungs, an ache in her legs – that she can’t get from her TV, or books, or her Nintendo 64. That burn and ache also distracts her brain from forming any halfway coherent thoughts. All she can focus on is her breathing and putting one foot in front of the other. For so long, she hated running, even though she played soccer. It’s why she chose to play in defense, aside from her height advantage, because it meant less running. Suddenly, with the world ending, running becomes her one solace. She can’t think about how Linda and her parents are definitely dead while she runs on the treadmill.
Before things got really bad, before Linda came down with the illness, things had been less quiet, even if they had been almost just as solitary. When Rachel Goldman becomes the first to pass away from it at their school, they all are sent home for the foreseeable future. Van calls a few days after that to tell her Coach Martinez had passed now too. For a week or so, these types of calls continue. Taissa, Jackie, Shauna, all calling her to “catch up,” as if they all hadn’t been sitting at their houses with nothing to do, and therefore nothing new to share, besides the latest death in town.
Then the calls stop coming. Lottie wonders if she is the only person left now. She’s scared to go outside and find out. That’s probably why, when her pills run out, she doesn’t immediately venture out to a pharmacy to find more. Because leaving means confronting the very real possibility that she is alone in the world now.
With her diagnosis, she wasn’t even sure if it all was real. Maybe her pills stopped working a month ago. It felt a little bit like relief to tell herself that maybe she was just in another fancy, overpriced psych ward, that this was all in her head and one of these days she would wake up and everything would be the way it was before.
If the pills had been working and all of this was real, Lottie doesn’t notice much of a difference without them at first. If anything, she feels a little bit better after the first few days, once the pills leave her system. She no longer feels like she is going to pass out every time she stands up from the couch or her bed, and she has more energy, but maybe that has more to do with the whole world ending – no school and no alarm clocks situation.
Yesterday, she started noticing a difference and not in a good way. For the first time since she spoke to Shauna and found out Javi Martinez had died a few days after his father, the phone rings. She’s playing Super Mario when she hears it. She tosses the controller so quickly she thinks it must have broken but she doesn’t care. Her feet carry her over to the phone on the kitchen counter faster than she ever ran for any soccer match.
“Hello?” Her voice is raspy and unfamiliar from underuse.
No one answers.
“Hello? Is anyone there?”
Faintly, like it’s coming from another room, she thinks she hears the sound of the dial tone. Still, she grips the phone like a lifeline, hoping someone might say something from the other side. Maybe they are just as scared as she is.
She must hold the phone to her ear for a solid minute before she hangs up. She is halfway back to the couch when it starts ringing again.
“Shauna? Is that you?”
No answer.
It goes on like this another five times. It doesn’t stop ringing when Lottie decides to just ignore it. She turns the TV speakers up and she can still hear it. It rings and rings and rings, but no one is ever on the other line. Finally, when the sun starts to set, she unplugs the phone and it stops.
She is halfway up the stairs when it starts ringing again.
She lays in bed, covering her ears with a pillow, but she can still hear it. Tears prick the corners of her eyes. This feels like bullying. Her brain is bullying her. All she wants is for someone to be on the other end of that phone but she knows it isn’t real. She knows that. That’s the worst part. People act like psychos don’t know they’re psychos and maybe sometimes that is true, but right now Lottie knows what she is. She just can’t do anything to change it.
Halfway through the night, after tossing and turning for hours, she walks to the bathroom and shakes two pills out of a bottle of Tylenol PM. She swallows them with a handful of water from the sink and sleeps till noon the next day.
By the time she wakes up the next day, she knows she only has a few hours of daylight left to go and find her medication. For a while, she debates going or not. When she first opened her eyes in the morning, there was no ringing. It seemed her brain had to wake up, slowly booting up like a computer, before it could play tricks on her. She’s eating a bowl of cereal, bags under barely awake eyes and still dizzy from the Tylenol PM, when the phone starts ringing again.
She grabs the landline and the keys to the Mercedes-Benz her dad bought her for her sixteenth birthday, making her way to the front of the house. She opens the door, not even waiting to step outside before she chucks the phone as far as she can throw it. Distantly, she hears it ringing still.
It isn’t until she’s sitting in the front seat of the car that she realizes she is outside. She looks side to side, out her windows and in her rearview mirror. Things look… mostly normal.
She knows she is sick and crazy, but what if she is crazier than she realized? A phone ringing was one thing, but she couldn’t have imagined all of this. There were reports on the news, she showed the note from school to Linda, asking everyone to stay home. If that wasn’t real, someone would have called her parents, and they would have sent someone to check on her, to take her to the doctor again.
No, this was real. It was real. Unfortunately.
The Matthews didn’t have neighbors, anyway. Of course everything looks normal on the five acres that made up their property. The truth of it all would become clear when she got on the main road, and it did.
It takes her a few minutes to settle her mind enough to start the car. And it takes a few more minutes after that for her to get out of her expansive driveway, but once she does, she sees how real it is.
Abandoned cars line the streets, haphazardly parked, some pushed into the shoulder or ditches. Sometimes she thinks she sees bodies in some of them but she tries not to look. She doesn’t trust her peripheral vision. It probably is real – it definitely is real – but a part of her wishes it’s just another hallucination. Whole families, trapped in their cars, waiting for an escape that was never going to come, because they died before they could get help. If there ever was any help.
What would normally take fifteen minutes, turns into a forty-five minute drive. Every road she turns down seemed to be blocked at some point by a traffic jam of abandoned vehicles or military blockades. She gets lost on more than one occasion, not familiar with all the backroads she’s forced down. Thank God, her gas tank is nearly full at least. By the time she pulls up to the grocery store, it’s already down by nearly a quarter tank.
This was where Linda usually got her medicine refilled. She never complained about them taking a long time to fill it, so hopefully they keep a large stock in the back. If they had to get it delivered from somewhere else, Lottie wasn’t sure what she would do. Keep driving? She could, but a part of her really just wants to go to sleep and never wake up. What was the point if she was the only one left anyway? Was she supposed to live out the rest of her days, alone, with a phone perpetually ringing in her ears? God knows what kinds of things would start happening the more time passed without her meds. For now it was just a phone ringing, and that was bad enough. Soon, there would probably be real hallucinations — people, animals, and who knows what else.
She gets out of her car and wonders if she should have brought a weapon. If she really is the only one left, she has nothing to worry about. Unless the illness didn’t affect dogs – with all the people dead, pets are probably hungry. She’d much rather get her hands on a bunch of pills than go out being mauled by a dog.
It seemed too little, too late, though, with her feet planted on the gravel of the parking lot, her lungs breathing fresh air, rather than the same stale air inside her house she’d been surrounded by for over a month.
The automatic doors of the grocery store still work and for some reason that makes Lottie smile.
In truth, she has only been inside this grocery store, or any grocery store for that matter, a handful of times. Linda did the shopping. The only times Lottie had a reason to go herself was on the weekends, when Linda was off. Most weekends, Lottie already had whatever she could possibly need in her house. The majority of the times she had come were during sleepovers with the Yellowjackets, when Shauna or Mari would get a craving for something and insist Lottie drive them all to the store in her huge Mercedes.
Even with her unfamiliarity of the place, it doesn’t take Lottie long to notice the huge PHARMACY sign on the other side of the store.
She crosses the line of registers and the bathrooms, halfway to the pharmacy when she hears what sounds like the sliding of a glass door and rustling. She stops walking.
Behind the customer service counter, climbing the case of cigarettes, reaching for a pack of Camel Crush at the top, is Natalie Scatorccio.
A smile spreads across Lottie’s face. It’s impossible for her not to. She can’t begin to describe what she’s feeling, some mess of shock, relief, and joy. For a moment, she just stands there and watches. She would recognize Natalie anywhere — her black jeans, ripped at the end, revealing a pair of weathered Doc Martens she’s had since she was in the seventh grade, that leather jacket, and of course, the recently dyed bleach blonde hair.
Without thinking, she walks up to the desk, coming up behind Natalie and reaches an arm up to grab the pack of Camel Crush.
There’s a scream in Lottie’s ears, which causes her to flinch and squeeze her eyes shut. She doesn’t see her fall, but she does hear the thump as Natalie lands on her ass.
“Jesus Christ!”
Natalie sits on the floor, her elbows propping up the top half of her body and her mouth hanging open, closer to her ass than the brown roots on the top of her head.
Lottie stares back at her, her big brown eyes even bigger than usual, and eyebrows raised nearly into her hairline.
“Lottie?”
She hears her name, but it doesn’t register immediately. She keeps staring at Natalie, wondering if she would prefer this be a hallucination, or for it to be true that she and her crush since ninth grade are seemingly the only two people left alive in Wiskayok, and possibly the world.
“Are you real?”
If the store had been open and full of people like it had been not two months ago, Lottie doesn’t think Natalie would have heard her. Instead, Nat laughs and says, “Yeah, are you?”
Lottie can’t help but join her in laughing. She offers her a hand to get up, which Nat takes. Lottie pulls her up and suddenly they are inches apart, face to face, though not quite eye to eye.
“You’re the first person I’ve seen in five weeks.”
“And you thought sneaking up behind me wouldn’t be creepy at all?”
“Well, I got your cigarettes down, didn’t I?” She offers the pack to Natalie, who takes them without hesitation. Lottie isn’t sure how to broach the question itching her brain, so she just says it bluntly. “Have you seen anyone? Is your mom…”
“She’s dead. About three weeks now.”
“I’m sorry.”
Natalie shrugs like it doesn’t make a difference one way or the other, though Lottie can see behind her gray-blue eyes that she feels something. It’s the same look Lottie imagines she has in her eyes, when she thinks about the fate of her parents.
“I saw Randy Walsh walking down Main Street.”
Lottie scoffs, “Of course he would survive.”
“It’s an unjust world.” Natalie starts peeling the plastic wrap off her pack of cigarettes. “You’re the first person from the team I’ve seen. I tried calling Van a couple weeks ago, but my phone stopped working.”
“Yeah, my phone is…” Lottie begins, “broken. I heard from her maybe three or four weeks ago. Shauna and Tai too. But nothing since.”
“What are you here for?”
“Oh, you know, food. I’m pretty much out,” Lottie’s eyes wander elsewhere, anywhere but on Natalie’s face. “I needed some medicine too.”
“Medicine? I still have a little weed left if you’re just looking for a high.”
“You must really be rationing it out.”
“Well, it helps that the alcohol supply is pretty endless,” Nat nods over to the distant liquor section.
“Of course.”
They stand in silence for what feels like several minutes to Lottie but is only a few seconds. Cracking jokes is a hard thing to maintain in the apocalypse. The gravity of their situation weighs on the back of her mind like a headache that won’t go away, like that time she blocked a shot with the side of her head. She had to sit out for the rest of the game but there's no sitting it out now.
“Do you want help? Looking for your medicine,” Natalie says finally.
“Sure,” Lottie nods. It’s not like Natalie would know what it was for just by the name.
Lottie opens the door which leads to the back of the pharmacy, looking behind her and not seeing Natalie anywhere. She hears a thump of feet hitting the ground and turns around. Natalie had jumped over the desk, foregoing the door altogether.
“What’s it called?”
“Loxipene.”
They begin searching in silence. The only sound in the whole store is the rattle of pill bottles.
“I think I found it,” Lottie hears Natalie call.
She walks around to the other shelf where Natalie has been searching. In Natalie’s hands is the biggest medicine bottle Lottie has ever seen. It’s comical, looking like a newborn baby in Natalie’s arms.
“How many is that?”
Natalie turns the bottle around so she can read it. “It says one thousand pills, but I think there’s a few missing.” She shakes the bottle with both hands — it’s probably half empty. It would still last Lottie a year or more. Natalie passes the bottle to her.
“Thanks.”
Natalie shrugs, “No biggie.”
“You should come back to my house with me.” The words are out of her mouth before she can stop them but Lottie feels like this was an inevitable conclusion anyway. There is no point in going their separate ways. It’s only been a few minutes since Lottie found out she wasn’t the only person left alive. Still, she already has a feeling it would be like leaving without one of her legs if Nat didn’t come back with her. “We should stick together, we can protect each other from…”
“Randy Walsh?”
“Yeah, Randy Walsh,” Lottie laughs. It was easy to joke but realistically, if he is alive, there are probably others. Others, who might want to take advantage of the lack of any authority left in the world. The fear went unspoken between the two of them but they are both well aware of it.
“Sure, your house beats my trailer, anyway,” Nat agrees. “You said you needed food, right?”
A few minutes later, Lottie sits in a shopping cart, her knees up to her chest, while Natalie pushes the cart and throws everything she ever desired but could never have into it. It’s mostly junk food, but piled around Lottie are also cans of caviar, top shelf liquor (which really isn’t necessary with Lottie’s parents’ extensive collection, but she’s not about to tell Nat no), and top dollar hair products. After a while of watching Natalie fill the cart, laughing at her choices, Lottie is forced to get out from a lack of space.
They pile bags of groceries into the back of the SUV afterwards. Natalie quickly makes herself comfortable, propping her feet up on the dash after slipping the Cranberries’ No Need to Argue into the CD player. They drive in comfortable silence, just taking the music in, occasionally singing along together to “Zombie” and “Ridiculous Thoughts.” The ending of “Dreaming My Dreams” is blasting through the stereos when they pull up to Lottie’s house.
If you want me, I’ll be here. I’ll be dreaming my dreams with you, and there’s no other place that I’d lay down –
Lottie turns the key, shutting the car off and cutting short the end of the song.
They unpack the groceries together and later that night they cook together. The kitchen is left messier than Lottie has ever seen it and she fears the cleanup they will have to embark on in the morning. But the food is good and it’s nice to have someone else around, someone to talk to and laugh with, someone to distract from the noise in her head. It doesn’t hurt that that someone is Natalie.
Lottie remembers the first time she noticed Nat. In a small town, Lottie knows she’d probably seen Natalie around before freshman year. It wasn’t until the first day of high school that she really noticed her, though, and after that day, Lottie felt a strong pull towards her. It was this urge, like an itch, to be around her, to get to know her, to pick her brain, and know her every thought and desire. She was the coolest girl Lottie had ever seen, so authentically and unapologetically herself. She appeared fearless in Lottie’s eyes. Natalie walked around school not like she owned the place but like she didn’t give a shit who owned it. Her nonchalance and indifference made her all the more attractive to Lottie, who has always been surrounded by people who cared too much and tried too hard.
At first, Lottie thought she just really wanted to be friends with Natalie, even though they couldn’t be more different on the surface. However, as more time passed and Lottie gained new friends, who described their crushes on boys in a familiar manner, Lottie realized that’s what it was — a crush.
Despite the crush, Lottie resolved to never act on it. Natalie was certainly alternative, but Lottie had heard the rumors and knew there was at least some truth to them. Lottie would never call another girl a slut — it was none of her business who someone slept with — but Natalie never denied the accusations that Taissa or Mari often threw at her. Natalie liked boys, that much was obvious.
Even though there is no hope of anything happening between them, Lottie isn’t unhappy with the company. She’s content to just be in Natalie’s vicinity. In fact, crush or no crush, she would’ve chosen to be stuck with Natalie over most of the girls on their team. Taissa was too high strung, she would insist on having a plan for every scenario, for not sitting still for too long. Van was funny and a favorite of everyone on the team, but she didn’t know how to sit still with herself, in silence. Jackie was overwhelmingly optimistic and fake. Laura Lee would be incessantly praying, asking God for forgiveness and two minutes later raving about how it’s all a part of his grand plan. The list went on.
Natalie is different. They could talk about almost anything and say almost anything without the risk of hurting each other’s feelings. They both know how far they can take insults and jabs, whether it is towards each other or their peers. For her tough exterior, Natalie actually cares a great deal for others. Lottie found it obvious, even though others were usually too busy judging Natalie to notice. She only really talked shit about people when they talked shit about her first. She didn’t go out of her way to harass anyone or belittle them, despite everyone’s eagerness to do it to her.
It wasn’t just how she talked about people, though. It was also the silence, or more so how comfortable it was. Both of them were more than happy to sit in silence at times, over meals or while cooking, watching movies or reading books. Lottie feels more comfortable with Natalie than she does alone. She is something real, to ground Lottie to reality.
When the sound of dripping water starts the morning after Natalie arrives, Lottie feels even more grateful to have her around.
Over bowls of cereal, Lottie hears it. She tries to ignore it, her eyes instead focus on Natalie’s face, which gives no indication she hears anything. The sound continues though. Lottie’s shoulders tense, her cereal suddenly unappetizing, because all she can think about is the sound.
“Do you hear that?” She asks, eventually.
“Hear what?”
“Nevermind.”
She forces a spoonful of cereal into her mouth. Her gag reflex kicks in, wanting to reject the food, but she chews and chews, willing herself not to be sick.
It feels like a sick joke. Moments before they started eating, Lottie had swallowed one of the pills, digging it out of the laughably large bottle. It’s like her mind is laughing at her. Take your stupid pills, they won’t help , something says inside her. She will take them, though, and she will get better. It happened before, she knows they work. Still, the voice inside her head nags at her that they won’t work this time. Maybe going off them for a couple of weeks changed something in her brain chemistry.
Her only comfort is Natalie. She is real, and she will guide Lottie towards what is real or not real, even if Natalie herself doesn’t know she is doing that.
After breakfast Lottie looks at Natalie for the first time with some clarity. She has taken her leather jacket and Doc Martens off at some point the night before, but she is still in her faded band t-shirt and jeans.
“Did you sleep in that last night?”
Natalie shrugs, “Yeah.”
“I gave you a change of clothes.”
“Lottie… the shirt was pink.”
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, Natalie, but everyone is kind of dead. There’s no one left to judge you for wearing pink.”
“Well,” Natalie begins, thinking up another excuse, “it was all too big anyway. I might as well walk around in my underwear instead, cause those shorts you gave me were just gonna fall right off."
Lottie laughs because it’s better than blushing at the idea of Natalie Scatorccio walking around her house half naked. Once the laughter fades, she says, “I can drive us to your house, if you want to grab some things.”
Natalie’s face looks like she just bit into a lemon rather than Lucky Charms, causing Lottie to remember what Natalie said about her mom the day before. Did Natalie bury her, or is her body just sitting in the trailer, looking like Norman Bates’s mother?
“We could go steal some shit for you, if you don’t want to go back,” Lottie says.
“Yeah, sure.”
After breakfast, they take Lottie’s car and drive all over town. It takes a long time to navigate, especially that main state road that connects Lottie’s house to town, but once they reach the downtown area it’s not so bad. They get through all of Jeff Buckley’s Grace and most of Aimee Mann’s Whatever before Lottie parks the car.
They go into a thrift store first. The door is unsurprisingly locked when they try to go inside, so Natalie grabs a rock off the sidewalk and throws it through the window. Once inside, Nat starts to fill a bag full of jeans and black band t-shirts. With the weather getting colder, Lottie grabs a few plain hoodies and jackets, since Nat is too focused on the overwhelming selection of shirts.
They toss the bag of clothes into the back of Lottie’s car. It’s more than enough clothes to last Natalie a week or two.
“Ready?” Lottie asks.
“Can we go into one more place?”
Lottie nods. They’ve got all the time in the world. There’s only so much to do back at her house anyway.
Nat leads them down the street, stopping in front of the music store. Like the thrift store, Nat breaks the glass door, kicking the stray shards of glass hanging on with her boots before climbing through. Lottie follows behind her.
The store is full of records and CDs, with guitars and basses lining the walls above the stacks of music. Nat beelines behind the counter, grabbing the stool there and bringing it up back up front. She sets it down in front of the jazz section and climbs on top of it. She takes down the electric guitar hanging on the wall.
It’s blue, almost teal, with a lighter blue racing strip cutting across the corner of the body. It’s smaller than the rest of the guitars hanging along the wall but its colors make it stand out despite its size.
“Every time I’d come in here, I would look at this thing,” Nat says, carefully stepping off the stool with the guitar in her free hand.
She rips the price tag off, just a piece of paper and string dangling off the neck of the guitar. It falls to the floor, and Lottie watches it. It was definitely too expensive for Natalie to ever afford, though for Lottie, it could have just been one of many Christmas gifts if she’d asked for it.
“It’s electric, right? Don’t you need an amp?”
“Oh, yeah,” Nat says.
She walks around the store, grabbing things off the walls and off of counters. A couple of cords hang off her shoulder, and she shoves a handful of picks into her pocket. Under one of the stacks of records is an amp, which Nat picks up, the weight of it causing her to walk lopsided.
Lottie takes the amp out of her hands, holding it in her arms like she might hold a child.
“Ready?”
Nat nods but still takes one more look around the store, like she’s afraid to forget something. They walk out together and shove the amp into the backseat with Natalie’s clothes. The guitar sits up front with them, between Nat’s legs.
The days pass slowly. Nat plays guitar for hours, sometimes next to Lottie, while she plays on the Nintendo 64, other times she takes it into one of the guest rooms. Lottie distantly hears the sound of loud, angry strumming when Nat takes the guitar into another room, and she’s grateful the other girl only plays softer riffs around her.
Sometimes they take Lottie’s soccer ball outside, when the weather is nice. There’s no goal posts or outlines of a field, so they use two trees to mark the goal instead. It’s a free-for-all most times – no rules. They never get too aggressive but more than once they end up lying in the grass together, laughing with what little breath they can spare from their lungs.
Lottie keeps taking her pills. She keeps hearing things too, though not to the same degree as before Nat’s arrival. It’s not the abrasive ringing of a telephone, or the knocking of the door. The sounds appear more subtly, like whispers from another room. Sometimes she thinks she sees things in the corners of her eyes but when she turns, there’s never anything there. If Nat notices Lottie’s strange behavior — the way she jumps at those mysterious shadows, or her shoulders tense like she’s trying to hear something far away — she doesn’t say anything.
They drink more than they probably should but it’s not like there’s much else to do. It helps with the cabin fever they’re both starting to feel a couple weeks in, despite their best efforts to entertain themselves with books, movies, the guitar, and soccer.
Lottie watches Nat try caviar for the first and only time. She watches as Nat promptly spits it into a napkin after the first bite, and she washes the taste out with her whiskey and coke. Most days, they cook together, though Natalie usually takes the lead. Nat calls Lottie her sous chef, even though she just gathers the spices Nat asks for or gets her the pots and pans she needs. Dinner is almost always some Italian dish but sometimes they experiment, despite the fact that there are no cooking books in the Matthews household. Sometimes it’s a disaster, or they’re just feeling lazy, so they have cereal for dinner, like tonight.
The bowls, now empty of cereal, rest on the coffee table across from the couch. Lottie and Natalie are curled up on the couch, sharing a blanket large enough they don’t have to touch for it to cover them both. They’re in the middle of Terminator 2 – it’s the scene where Sarah Connor watches the Terminator and John, while she monologues about how the machine will never hurt John, how he’s the perfect father, who will never leave him like a human one would. Lottie’s eyes are glued to the screen, pretending not to notice the tears quietly streaming down Nat’s face, or the way Nat tries to pass off that she’s scratching her cheek instead of wiping the tears away.
Then, with a sudden whirring noise, the power shuts off and darkness surrounds them.
“What the fuck?” Nat says.
Lottie stands up, flicking the lightswitch on the wall on and off to no avail.
“Do you know where the breaker is?” Nat asks.
Lottie makes a face like Nat is speaking a foreign language, though neither of them can really make out the other’s reaction in the darkness anyway. When no reply comes, Nat says, “Let’s check the basement.”
With the guiding light of the moonlight coming in from the windows, Lottie finds a flashlight under the sink in the kitchen. It provides the smallest of comforts when they make the journey down the dark staircase leading to the basement, with Nat’s presence behind Lottie being the main source of comfort.
Nat finds the breaker and they both take turns flipping all of the switches at least twice. Nothing happens.
“Do you think electricity is just… gone?” Lottie asks.
“Seems like it.”
Lottie hadn’t considered the prospect of losing electricity. She never considered that it was probably someone’s job to keep it running and now that someone is probably dead. With that in mind now, she wonders how long it will be before they lose running water or gas.
They spend the rest of the night gathering all of the candles in the Matthews’ house. Neither of them wants to be alone and neither of them have to say it to know the other one feels the same way. Despite the fact that they’ve slept in separate bedrooms since Nat joined Lottie at her house, and despite the fact that those bedrooms are just as dark as the living room is now, they both don’t want to go up to them tonight. Something about traversing the stairs and being in a room alone is so intimidating now. The end of the world feels much more real when the lights go out and you can’t turn them back on.
They wordlessly settle under blankets on Lottie’s L-shaped couch, with Nat lying on the shorter side and Lottie opposite her.
“Do you think it’ll come back at some point? Like, someone can turn it back on?” Lottie wonders how it works – if there’s one big breaker for all the houses in Wiskayok or maybe all of New Jersey that someone just needs to flip.
Lottie watches Nat shrug in response. The moonlight coming through the windows casts a blue light on one side of Nat’s pale skin, her other side faintly lit up by the warm glow of the candles on the coffee table.
“Maybe, if whoever’s left gets their shit together and, like, restarts society or whatever.”
Lottie wonders what that would look like. Would it go back to the way it was? Would they be expected to repeat their senior year, or would they just get honorary degrees for surviving the plague? Maybe it would be something different, something new. She falls asleep thinking about what it might look like.
She doesn’t remember waking up, though she wouldn’t call what she does sleepwalking. She remembers hearing her name, distantly. It sounds like someone’s outside, calling out to her, so she follows it.
She doesn’t remember why or how she finds herself waist deep in her pool in the middle of December. She’s vaguely aware of doing it but she can’t explain why. It feels like she’s following the voice calling her name through a thick fog in the middle of the night, blindly waving her arms out like she might run into it if she keeps going. Instead, she just finds herself soaking wet, goosebumps covering her arms, and Nat calling her name.
“Lottie! What the fuck?”
It doesn’t even register at first, Nat calling out to her. The fog in her brain only clears when she’s hit in the head with an inflatable beach ball Nat must have dug out from the poolside closet. She finally turns around to face Nat.
“What the hell?”
“‘What the hell?’ What the hell is wrong with you?! It’s like thirty fucking degrees, Lot.”
Lottie looks around, her surroundings fully hitting her for the first time. A shiver runs up her spine as if she’s just stepped out into the cold. She looks at Nat, whose face is scrunched up in a mixture of concern, confusion, and frustration.
“Can you please get out now or do I need to throw something else at you?” Nat asks.
Lottie would usually laugh at something like that but it takes her too long to process what Nat is even saying. Everything feels so fuzzy, from her brain to her muscles. She can’t get any part of her body to communicate or cooperate. She feels like she has weights around her ankles, keeping her in place in the freezing cold pool. Mentally, she feels like she just woke up, and though she knows she wasn’t sleepwalking, it sure feels like it in a way.
She’s not sure how much time passes before she’s able to get out of the pool. It can’t be too long, because Nat doesn’t throw anything else at her.
Once Lottie is out of the pool, the weights around her ankles seem to double. She’s sane enough to know it’s just her soaked clothes weighing her down now.
Nat helps her into the house, too impatient for Lottie to stumble in by herself and not entirely confident she’d even find her way back in if left alone. She helps Lottie upstairs, finds her dry clothes to change into. They’re both too tired and too cold to walk back downstairs and they’re already in Lottie’s bedroom after all. That’s how they find themselves crawling into the king sized bed in Lottie’s room. If either of them bring it up, they’ll blame the cold for why they leave so little space between themselves on such a large bed.
Nat doesn’t sleep the rest of the night. She holds Lottie, oddly comfortable being the big spoon to someone five inches taller than herself. She holds her because they’re both cold and because she knows if she’s holding Lottie, she can’t run off into the pool or God knows where if Nat does nod off.
When Lottie wakes up in the morning, they don’t talk about it. Lottie remembers it all – everything after the beach ball hit her in the head for sure – but if Nat isn’t going to bring it up, neither is she. She swallows another pill and tells herself they’ll start working soon.
The sun is almost set, the sky a canvas of light blues and purples. In only a few minutes, their only source of light in the house will be the candles and flashlights they’ve managed to find during their last trip to the grocery store. They filled a cart full of every candle and flashlight in the store, barely leaving space for non-perishable food. Now, candles cover every surface of the house. The warring scents give Lottie a headache. From an outside perspective, it probably looks like they’re holding a seance or something.
Without electricity, their days have gotten shorter. They fall asleep sooner, with their options for entertainment limited. Nat plays the guitar less, since the amp is all but useless now. Lottie can’t even read once the sun has gone down, not without wasting one of their sources of light, a now limited resource, even if they currently have plenty. Their evenings of dinner and a movie are gone. Microwaved popcorn, goodbye. At least they still have gas, for now, so they’re not just eating cold food out of cans.
Lottie closes her beat up copy of Orlando and tosses it onto the coffee table. The light is fading fast and her eyes are burning from how long she’s been reading anyway.
When she looks up at Nat, sitting across from her on the couch, Nat’s eyes are already on her and by the way she’s looking at Lottie, it seems they’ve been on her for a while.
“Do you ever miss it? Before?” Nat asks.
Of course she does, Lottie thinks at first. It seems like such a silly question. She bites her tongue, though, and takes a moment to consider the question. When she does, she realizes how it’s the small, material things she misses – fresh food, cable, electricity . She misses the team, too, and Linda. She doesn’t really miss her parents, though, but she can’t bring herself to admit that part out loud. It feels wrong, but in that one regard, not much has changed. They were never around before, and they aren’t around now. How could she miss them when it’s just like it was before?
“I guess I miss the routine,” Lottie says finally. “I miss waking up for school and having practice three days a week, games on Saturday, Seinfeld on Thursday nights. I’ll never find out if Ross will get fired on ER ,” Lottie laughs softly, and Nat soon joins her. “It’s stupid but I don’t know, I think the routine helped me feel sane.”
“It’s not stupid,” Nat says. “I mean, if missing Seinfeld is stupid then so is the stuff I miss. Like, weed and concerts and new music. There’s probably so many albums that were finished, and I’ll never hear them. They’re just out there somewhere. People are dead but I’m sad I’ll never hear a new Hole song.”
“That’s not stupid either.”
They’re quiet for a minute, thinking about their answers and each other’s.
“What about things you don’t miss?” Nat asks.
“French class,” Lottie says too quickly. “Running suicides. College applications, or just going to college in general. My dad wanted me to get a business degree, which I don’t even want, so at least I don’t have to do that anymore. What about you?”
Nat is quiet for a moment, playing with the threads of a blanket in her lap. “I don’t miss the way people thought of me. How everyone expected the worst of me. Teachers, guidance counselors, Tai and Mari and Jackie. Before, I always wanted to run away to somewhere that no one knew me, where they didn’t know about what happened with, you know… Where they wouldn’t just expect me to be a burnout like my parents. But running away requires some money, so I guess everyone dying is the next best option.”
Nat laughs quietly, bitterness in her throat, and she keeps looking down, playing with the blanket until Lottie speaks.
“I never expected the worst of you.”
It’s true. While Jackie and Taissa wouldn’t hesitate to point out when Natalie showed up drunk to practice, or made jokes about her sleeping around, Lottie kept her mouth shut. Nat was still better drunk than everyone on JV and who she slept with was no one’s business, if half the rumors were even true. She never hurt anyone with her actions – besides herself, anyway. Giving Nat shit for that, beating her down further, wasn’t going to do anything to help her stop it.
Nat looks up from her blanket and smiles. It’s a no-teeth smile that doesn’t reach her eyes but it’s there. “Yeah, I know, Lot,” she pauses, “Out of everyone who knew me before, I’m glad it’s you who survived.”
“I’m glad you survived too.”
Ever since they lost electricity and Lottie had her episode in the pool, Lottie and Nat sleep in Lottie’s bedroom, together. It’s a silent agreement that brings them both comfort – comfort from the dark, and comfort from what Lottie might do.
Lottie hasn’t heard or seen anything in a while, though. They both sleep through the night, so they keep doing it, sleeping side by side. With the weather only getting colder, and no central heating system available anymore, they inch closer throughout the night until they wake up burrowed into each other.
Sometimes Lottie wakes up to find Nat’s front pressed into her back, Nat’s arm wrapped around her waist. Lottie pretends to be asleep for a while longer when she wakes up like this. On other days, she wakes up, and Nat’s face is tucked into her neck, an arm slung across Lottie’s stomach and a leg stretched across Lottie’s own. When Lottie wakes up like this, she holds her breath, trying to do everything in her power to not wake Nat, if only for a few minutes longer.
Lottie wakes up now to an empty bed, for the first time in what must be weeks. Her hand reaches out, like Nat is just hiding somewhere under the sheets in this huge bed. The sheets are still warm on Nat’s side and a few moments after Lottie wakes up, she registers that it’s still dark. It’s night time still. She starts to settle back into the bed, assuming Nat just went to the bathroom, when she notices a weird smell and the sound of heavy footsteps outside her room.
The bedroom door bursts open just as Lottie is piecing together where she recognizes the smell from — it’s the same smell that creeps into the house when neighbors have summer barbecues, or teenagers have bonfire parties in the nearby woods.
“Lottie, get the fuck up!” Nat shouts.
She’s got an open backpack slung on one shoulder. Her hair is sticking up at odd angles, like she just woke up and hasn’t had time to fix it. She doesn’t wait to see if Lottie gets out of the bed, her back turning towards the closet and ripping it open so violently Lottie thinks the door might have broken off the hinges. Nat pulls out a couple of Lottie’s hoodies, one pink and the other lavender, and Lottie knows something must be wrong when Nat wordlessly puts one of them on. She tosses the other one to Lottie.
“Put that on, and get the fuck up, Lot!”
“What happened?” Lottie asks as she picks up the hoodie.
“Don’t you smell it? The fucking house is on fire.”
Nat shoves a couple more things from the closet into the backpack, not really looking at or caring what it is she’s grabbing, as long as it’s something extra.
Lottie finally gets out of her bed, hoodie on, and Nat grabs her by the hand and drags her out of the bedroom. When the bedroom door opens, the smell hits Lottie a hundred times harder. It’s no longer a distant, neighboring fire. Now, it’s very much right under her own feet.
When they reach the balcony of the stairs, Lottie can see flames have engulfed much of the living room and kitchen. It seems to be the worst by the sliding glass door that leads to the pool. Lottie doesn’t remember leaving any of the candles burning but it seems like the most realistic thing to have started all this.
Nat, hand still gripping Lottie’s, leads them down the stairs, and Lottie feels a little bit like she’s being led down to the depths of hell, like the reverse of that story about Orpheus and his wife her drama teacher had them read about.
They make it to the front door, sidestepping the flames along the way. Nat opens it and takes one step out into the cold before she stops.
“Shit, I’ll be right back,” she says. She shoves the car keys into Lottie’s hand.
“Nat, wait!”
Lottie reaches out for her but Nat has always been quicker. She’s back in the house before Lottie can stop her.
“Go, I’ll be back in a second!”
Lottie rolls her eyes but does what she’s told, she steps outside and decides if Nat isn’t out in thirty seconds, she’ll go back inside to get her.
Lottie paces across the expanse of the driveway, back turned towards the front door because she’s afraid of what Nat might look like when she comes out. She’s counting to thirty in her head, on fourteen, when she feels cold metal press against the back of her head.
“Hands in the air,” a man’s gruff voice says.
Lottie does as she’s told again and wonders if the man really has a gun, or if it’s some other weapon like a pipe that just feels similar from behind. She could probably take him if it was just a pipe, could definitely hold him off until Nat came back and they could handle it together. She decides it’s probably not worth taking the risk that it is a gun and getting her brain blown out. For now, she keeps her hands in the air and hopes it’s not a real gun.
Lottie smells alcohol and gasoline on the man, hears the side of him licking his lips, and realizes this guy started the fire just to drive them out of the house. Like smoking out a bee hive. He’s probably with others. Her chest starts to feel tight, wondering if one of them got ahold of Nat.
The answer to her fears comes quickly. She and the man both don’t hear any footsteps approaching. Nat is not only quick but she’s light on her feet too.
There’s a loud thwack from behind and then Lottie gets her first glimpse of her captor. He’s lying at her feet now, skull split open, a puddle of blood already forming on the pavement around what’s left of his head. The body of Nat’s guitar, split off from the neck, rests next to his head and a gun rests near his right hand. She can’t tell what color his eyes are but she can describe what his brain looks like. She hears Nat throwing up behind her.
Lottie grabs the gun off the ground and turns around to find Nat still hunched over, one hand on her knee and the other with a white knuckle grip on what’s left of her guitar. She grabs the splintered neck of the guitar and tosses it on the ground.
“Come on, we need to leave,” Lottie tells her.
When Nat remains hunched over, breathing heavy, Lottie grabs her arm and drags her to the passenger side of the car. Nat’s eyes are wide, staring at the man’s body a few feet from the car while Lottie unlocks the door with shaking hands. There’s blood splattered across her face, like someone flicked a handful of red paint at her. Lottie brings a hand up to the side of her own face and finds it coming away red as well.
She finally gets the door open and shoves Nat inside. Lottie walks to the driver’s side and sees a shadow coming around from the other side of the house. She rips the door open and gets inside, turning the ignition just as the shadow turns into a fully formed man. She puts the car in reverse and watches the man raise a shotgun up.
She looks down at the gun still in her left hand for the first time, unsure of what to do with it. She doesn’t know how to use it even if she wanted to, and she doesn’t have any time to consider it. Without any hands on the steering wheel, her foot stomps on the gas, her gun-free arm reaches across to Natalie, and she shoves the other girl’s head down and ducks behind the steering wheel. The car goes flying backwards at the same time that they hear the sound of the shotgun going off. Glass shatters and they both flinch.
Lottie raises her head just enough to see her house in flames and the man reloading his gun. She shifts the car to drive and steers them down the driveway with one hand. Once they’re a comfortable distance away, Lottie slows the car down and turns to face Nat. She still looks just as shell shocked.
“Can you… Do you mind holding this?” Lottie asks her, pushing the gun in Nat’s direction. “It’s hard to drive with one hand.”
Nat’s eyes widen at the sight of the gun, like she just realized Lottie picked it up. Her mouth opens and closes a few times before she shakes her head.
Lottie looks in her rearview mirrors to make sure no one’s following behind them before she hits the brakes. She reaches across the car and opens the glove compartment, tossing the gun inside. Nat makes a sound, something close to a gasp but that also sounds like she’s choked on a sip of a drink.
“Um, the safety,” Nat mumbles, reaching into the glove box and flicking something on the side of the gun before dropping it back in. Her touch on the gun is featherlight, using as little of her hands as possible, as if the gun caught on fire with the rest of the Matthews house and she’s trying to spare her hand from any injury.
“Thanks,” Lottie breathes.
Lottie lets her foot off the brake and they fall into silence while she drives. She has no idea where she’s going. As fate would have it, she doesn’t end up having to decide on a destination. Lottie was aware of the lack of gas left in her car after their last trip to the store. With her house burning down and being held at gunpoint, that prior knowledge seemed to escape her. It returns to her as the car comes to a slow, rolling stop twenty minutes into their drive.
“We’re out of gas,” Lottie says. It’s said like an announcement but she’s not sure if it’s more for herself or for Nat.
“What do we do?”
“Walk?”
“Where?”
Lottie looks over at Nat, who’s looking at her with wide eyes. Lottie’s eyes wander across Nat’s face, from her still messy hair to her cheeks and lips and chin, where the splattered blood has now dried.
“Somewhere we can clean up,” she says after a moment.
Lottie grabs the gun from the glove compartment and slides it into the backpack before they climb out of the car. The sun should be setting soon, so at least they have that going for them. The road is dark for now, though, and they stay on the shoulder in case anyone has followed them.
It takes them almost an hour to reach the downtown area and it only feels right that they stop at the place it all started for the two of them – the grocery store.
The automatic doors are still pried apart from the last time they came after the electricity died. When they walk in, the stench of rotten meat and dairy hits them. They both flinch like they’ve been physically struck by the smell. It wasn’t this bad last time they came.
They walk into the bathrooms at the front of the store and thankfully the smell is less strong inside. Like Lottie’s house before the fire, the store still has running water. They stand side by side as they scrub their faces with soap and water.
Lottie finishes first and dries her face with a paper towel. When she looks back at Nat through the mirror, the blonde is scratching at bits of dried blood with her nails. There’s significantly more on her face, which has started to turn red from the ferocity with which she’s trying to scrub the blood off with.
“Here, let me help,” Lottie says.
She grabs a few more paper towels and wets them under the water. She takes Nat’s hands, which haven’t slowed down their assault on her face, pushing them down to Nat’s side. Nat finally turns to face her, and Lottie instinctively grabs Nat’s chin with her free hand, wiping the blood away gently with her other hand.
“I can’t believe you went back for the guitar,” Lottie says. She cracks a smile, trying to lighten the mood and shake Nat out of her shocked state.
Lottie is rewarded with a small smile from Nat.
“Saved your life, didn’t it?”
Lottie nods, “It was very chivalrous of you to give up your dream guitar for my life.”
“Just call me your knight in shining armor.”
“Kind of feels like you’re flirting, Natalie,” Lottie says. She tosses the paper towel in the trash.
No response comes and when Lottie looks back over at Nat, she finds the blonde staring at her, lips slightly parted. Her face is now blood free, though her cheeks are still as pink as the too-big hoodie she’s wearing. Ignoring the fact that she killed a man not two hours before, she looks cute, Lottie thinks.
“Would it be a bad thing, if I was?” Nat asks.
Lottie shakes her head, throat too tight to speak. Nat’s eyes, the color of a late afternoon sky before a storm hits, flick down to her lips. She’s not sure which of them leans in first but they meet somewhere in the middle.
The kiss starts out chaste, tentative and searching, like a child trying to piece together a puzzle. They get to know the feel of the other’s lips against their own, and Lottie learns that Nat’s lips are just as soft as she always thought they would be. She doesn’t think it’s possible to have a bad kiss if Nat’s lips are involved.
Nat deepens it first, pressing closer into Lottie until she’s backed into the bathroom wall. It’s Lottie who allows the kiss to deepen, though, hands coming to rest on Nat’s waist and leaning into the kiss so Nat doesn’t have to tiptoe. Once Lottie leans into it, Nat’s hands find a residence in her dark curls, and Lottie thinks Nat wouldn’t let her stand back up to full height even if she wanted to.
There’s a desperation to the kiss as it grows deeper but it still remains just as soft as it started. Lottie wonders how long Nat has wanted to do this, if she wants to do this because of Lottie, or if it’s because Lottie is one of the only people left in the world.
They break apart for air after a couple of minutes. Nat is smiling and it reaches her eyes for once, and Lottie can’t help but smile back. She rises back to her full height, a slight burn in her neck that she doesn’t exactly mind. Nat’s arms remain stretched upwards, hands still tangled in her curls.
“Come on, Amazon, I need a new pack of cigarettes,” Nat says.
Her arms finally drop down from Lottie’s neck but Nat’s hand quickly finds Lottie’s, threading their fingers together. They walk out of the bathroom, towards the customer service desk where the stash of cigarettes resides. That’s when Lottie sees it – the pharmacy – and it hits her.
Her pills were in the kitchen, the kitchen that was engulfed in flames.
She’s out of pills again. The only difference is this time she knows the pharmacy doesn’t have anymore either.