The Survivor

“Huh.” Jason chewed his lip. He turned to Cielle. “Gimme your phone.”

She passed him her iPhone, and he clicked around. Nate watched in the mirror, irritated. Janie kept her thin arms crossed, doing her best to stop them from shaking. Cielle cried silently, tears slipping down her cheeks. The trauma catching up to them.

The gentle iPhone tapping continued, and finally Nate said, “What the hell are you doing?”

“Facebook, dude.”

“Do you really think this is the best time for-”

“I’m looking up my friends in the Los Angeles network. Well, it used to be a network, but now it’s listed as ‘current city.’ Lame.”

“Quiet would be good right now, Jason,” Nate said.

“Like this dude. Status update: ‘Can’t wait for two weeks in Maui.’ Then it links to his Twitter account for the real-time skinny. See? Cool. Here’s his latest tweet: ‘Rocking it with the Ps at the Grand Wailea.’ Ps stands for ‘parents.’”

“Yes. I figured.”

“Then there’s the location-map icon with the tweet. Here. Yup. Dude’s in Maui all right.”

“Fascinating, Jason. We just squeezed out of that house with our lives, and now you’re-”

“And I’ll scroll back a few tweets to find an old one. Like this. ‘Dear Funky Smell in my sock drawer. Please go away.’” He brayed a quick laugh. “Now I’ll click this location-map icon. And here.” He shoved the phone at Nate.

“What?”

“It’s a house in Silver Lake,” Jason said. “With no one home for the next nine days.”

Nate took the iPhone, glanced down at the screen. A neat little map. Janie looked across at the device, too, and then they looked at each other, and her eyes reshaped themselves with a touch of amusement, though they were still wet.

Cielle wiped her tears, leaned over, and kissed Jason on the cheek. He leaned back, crossing his arms, gangsta style. “Boo-yah!”

Janie, deadpan, her eyes still glassy: “He was kinda growing on me till the boo- yah.”

“I hope they have a hot tub,” Jason mused.

“I thought you said this was your friend,” Nate said.

“Don’t you know anything?” Jason snickered. “No one’s really friends on the Internet.”

* * *

They drove east in silence, Janie reading the electronic map and issuing directions in a flat, almost lifeless voice. Jason took Cielle’s hand, giving her knuckles a quick kiss, and Nate was surprised to feel not disapproval but a tremor of appreciation. His daughter had endured an edge-of-hell scare, and Shithead at least knew to offer a bit of comfort. Drinking in the silence, they tended their private worries, the thrum of the tires carrying them into the unknown.

Nate exited at Silver Lake. Home to hipsters, slackers, aspiring artists, indie musicians, and other redundancies, the hilly, tree-intensive neighborhood sits east of Hollywood and north of downtown. Nate navigated through a gauntlet of cafes, boutiques, coffee shops, Pilates studios, gay bookstores, and martini clubs, each crowded with a full rainbow of patrons. They drove past the famous flight of stairs where Laurel and Hardy had lugged that player piano up and ridden it down a time or twelve, and then they were winding up toward the reservoir and the address marked on Cielle’s iPhone by a virtual guitar pick.

The architecture varied, Spanish bungalows interspersed with sleek Neutra knockoffs and a few actual Neutras. They reached the house, a modern structure of glass and concrete, and Jason let out a whistle. Leaving the Jeep up the street, they zombie-shuffled back toward the front yard, bruised and bloody and hollowed out, dead on their feet. Circling like predators, they assessed the doors, windows, and gates for vulnerabilities.

In the side yard, Nate found an unlatched window letting into the laundry room and jiggled the pane up. No alarm. The smells of detergent and fabric softener wafted through the gap, a reminder of normal lives lived normally. Turning to call to the others, he found his voice missing. The circumstances had dawned, reality riding in on the household scents, rattling him into speechlessness. He swallowed hard, dried blood crackling at his hairline, and tried again.

Chapter 40

The sun broke the horizon, sending a plane of yellow through the floor-to-ceiling windows. Light crept across the great-room floor, claiming the Oriental rug, the paisley-shaped coffee table, Shithead Jason sleeping in a swirl of blankets, finally reaching the base of the couch, Nate’s bare toes, shins, knees. At last he was squinting into the glare rather than watching it stalk him. After a fitful few hours of sleep, he’d awakened as if jolted by a live wire, and sat silent watch as Jason snored at his feet and his wife and daughter slumbered in the bedroom up the hall. He’d left the house only once, creeping outside to swap the Jeep’s license plates with those from the Range Rover parked in the garage.

Now Jason stirred and rose, rubbing his black eye, his hair practically on end. Yawning, he regarded the furnishings. “Who knew MonkeyBiz12 came from serious dosh?”

Nate elected to interpret the question as rhetorical. He closed his eyes, breathed, tested his muscles. Left hand weak. Right hand tingly but functional. He raised his left foot and rotated it, as if stretching his ankle. It seemed to be back online, another morning semirecovery. Padding across the kitchen, he set down the Beretta on the counter, found a glass of water, and swallowed his pills. Antibiotics for the mostly healed stab wound in his shoulder. Riluzole to slow the ALS symptoms. Fat lot of good the latter were doing of late-not so much as a charitable placebo bump. If his condition worsened, it would be too risky for him to break cover and go to a doctor. He was over the crest already, the brake lines snipped; there wasn’t much he could do now but buckle up.

Cielle and Janie shuffled down the hall, hungover from stress. The four of them regarded one another, at a collective loss. Casper’s nails clacked against the floorboards next, a slight unevenness to the cadence as he favored one paw. Nate regarded him with empathy. Like father, like son. Given the fight in Cielle’s room, he considered what he owed this animal. Crouching, he scratched the dog’s underbelly, a hind leg springing into instinctive motion.

Janie spoke first. “Let’s get everyone cleaned up.”

They located towels and rotated through various showers, reconvening in the living room. With a nurse’s frank touch, Janie tended to the various injuries. A flashlight check of Jason’s eye for a corneal abrasion, then Advil for the swelling. Butterfly stitches from the Jeep’s first-aid kit for the gash at Nate’s hairline. She leaned over him, close, forehead furrowed with concentration, front teeth dimpling her puffy lower lip. The pinch of her fingers. Her soft breaths across his face. Those light freckles, stamping the bridge of her unimprovable nose.

Finally she leaned back. “That should do you till you run into the next Ukrainian.” Despite the joke he could see the dread in her eyes, hiding just beneath the surface.

“What now?” Jason asked, sounding an inappropriate note of adventuresomeness.

“I’m starving,” Cielle said.

Jason hugged her from the side. “You still freaked out?” he asked. “From last night?”

“If we get scared, the terrorists win,” Cielle said. She was joking in a Fox News sort of way, but also not. Nate couldn’t help but note the quaver in her voice.

“I checked the fridge already,” Janie said. “The cabinets. Looks like they cleared out most of the food before they left on vacation. Someone should go on a grocery run.”

“I will,” Jason said. Before Nate could protest, he held up his hand. “C’mon, man, no one’s looking for me, really. At least as much. Plus, I can go stealth. I took tae kwon do.” He put more into the pronunciation than seemed necessary.

“Yeah,” Cielle said. “A yellow belt.”

“With a green stripe!”

“Kids, enough.” Janie peeled a few bills from her wallet. “Be careful. To the store