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1. Memories
None of them had realized that film had an expiration date. Reggie had gone out and stockpiled Polaroid film, raided camera stores for cases of it. She had packs of it in every bag she carried. The crinkly silver packaging that sealed the packs seem to cling to Reggie, rolling in her wake like tumbleweeds of silver litter. Brian could be seen following after her, grabbing little pieces, scrunching them in his hands, stuffing silver plastic shreds in his pockets to be found on laundry day.
None of them noticed the film expired, not until one especially hot day in summer, when the pictures were all pinks and blurry shadows, the green of Sam’s dress an off-yellow smear. Reggie didn’t take it well. It took her less than a day to reorganize her stash by expiration date, but she spent two more weeks in a spiral, taking pictures of absolutely everything .
“We need to document ,” Reggie hissed, when Danny Mason Keener (she still called him by his full name, at that point) asked why, exactly, he needed to drive her downtown. “We need pictures of everything as it is, before it starts--I don’t know, rotting or whatever.”
“There are already pictures of the Chinese Theater,” Danny Mason Keener replied. “Hundreds of them. Why would you waste your film taking pictures of that?”
Well, then Reggie decided that the pictures they really needed was pictures of them. She’d already taken dozens, but now she had hundreds. Hector swore that she had nearly enough pictures of him, every part of him, to make a full-size puzzle, to lay out one picture for each fingertip, each eye, every angle of his shadow.
Hector took Sam aside one evening. Hector liked talking to Sam about Reggie; for all that their relationship was often fractious, Sam knew Reggie best. Sometimes Hector wanted confirmation on his instincts, on what to do with Reggie, and Sam had answers.
Sam expected to be paid for her information in cigarettes. Reggie had forbidden cigarettes for all of them, citing the example they needed to be for Sarah and Brian; and she mother-henned Sam about them, looking through her pockets, her purses. Reggie pretended not to see that Hector still pocketed a pack whenever he could--she seemed to hesitate to scold him, maybe sensing that she wouldn’t get anywhere. Anyway, Sam expected Hector to share his goods.
It was a small price to pay. The air in Los Angeles had started clearing up the very day after the comet. Hector suspected that he and Sam missed the feeling of toxicity in their lungs, the way it felt like home.
“So,” Hector said, after a few minutes. “I don’t think your sister knows that Polaroids degrade over time. Like, even if you put them in albums and stuff.”
“Oh, yeah, no, she has no idea.” Sam leaned against the balcony; her kick these days was to act like a Hollywood ingenue, to try to look sophisticated, no matter what she was doing. She held her cigarette artfully over the balcony, adjusted her weight on her feet, trying to find her angle. “No, I don’t think you should tell her. She’d flip her lid if she knew. She’d start painting . She’d make us sit for portraits .”
Hector grimaced. He breathed in the night air, so frustratingly and beautifully clear. “I guess. I just...I don’t know. She acts like they’re going to be some sort of historical record, one day. She wants to ‘ document ’ all of us with something that’s gonna degrade even if she uses it before it expires.”
Sam pursed her lips. “Well...Thing is, she thinks that’s what she wants. But I think she just wants something to hold onto, of all of us. Something that can’t be turned into ash by a fucking comet.”
“I didn’t think of it that way,” Hector admitted.
“Yeah, well, that’s my job. You owe me another cigarette for that kind of heady insight. Give it here.”
The next Christmas, they turned the silver shreds of the packaging into tinsel for the tree; Brian and Sarah used the spent film cartridges as building materials for walls and forts and houses for their toys. Reggie actually ended up using the film, even after it expired, until it was truly messed up and wouldn’t even eject. They got used to seeing themselves in pinks and yellows, in faded blurs, with black splotches and discoloration--and in occasional, brilliant clarity, an accident of time, of light.
Reggie treasured the pictures, perfect and imperfect, even when they started to sun-bleach and fade away.
2. Power
It turned out that most big buildings, skyscrapers and office buildings and apartment blocks, were on automatic timers. At night, Los Angeles still lit up brightly, covered in the lights of ghosts. The freeways and highways were still automatically lit with streetlights, but there were no bright veins of moving cars running along them, the heart of the city now vacant.
The power stayed on for a long time--a long time. They’d expected the infrastructure to collapse in a few months, but it had soldiered on. Danny Mason Keener was the one to finger the most likely theory--mostly, that Los Angeles had been built to create and store and funnel power for millions, and they were...not millions. Even with all the automatic processes that drew power, they weren’t draining the reserves nearly so much as a whole city.
And when the power started failing, they started moving around. Danny had gone downtown to the clerk of court, found maps of utilities. Danny tried to explain it to the rest of them--they only got the gist. Certain areas got their power and water from different types of power generation, and some were gonna last longer than others without human maintenance. They moved from a coal-powered suburb, to hydro-powered, to solar.
They tried to rough it in a ranch house in Acton, because it had well water, and theoretically they could stay there longer. Didn’t last long. Sam and Danny weren’t fans of rambling, wide-open spaces, and they’d defected back to the city. Reggie held out a few days, quietly furious, before she broke down, hustling them into the car to speed back to the city. They met Sam and Danny on the interstate, heading back to them. Reggie forgot to even be mad, when she saw that.
Thing was, these days it felt sort of unthinkable to go without each other, more than power or water or natural gas. As far as they knew there were the six total people in all of California, you know. How the fuck were they supposed to justify spending time apart, not knowing what was happening, miles away, whether they’d reduced down to five or four or three without even knowing?
Luckily, by the time the power did fail, Sam had gotten into stockpiling candles. So they lit them, and held them up to the dark skyline, and struggled to remember what a glittering city used to look like, why it had meant so much to them to hold onto it.
3. Clothes
The thing about fashion was, without a fashion industry to tell you what the new style was, you didn’t notice or miss it. They went a long, long time without feeling like they were missing out on anything. They could fill closet upon closet with clothes, clothes, clothes; there were malls everywhere, after all, and all these clothes, tags still on, just for them.
Their tastes, however, went through some phases. At first they kept going to the stores they’d always gone to, eyeing the security gates and cash registers, feeling strange thrills as they simply walked out the door. It was Reggie who first started beelining for the high-end stores.
“Well, why not?” she’d asked Hector, her eyes twinkling as she tried on a thick diamond bracelet. “We inherited the earth, and that includes the luxury of the earth.”
At their peak, they were staying in a place in Beverly Hills, and Reggie was wearing silk all day, every day, for every single layer of clothing. There was a long summer of a strange euphoria, for all of them; their memories of the comet, of life before, had started to go fuzzy at the edges. It felt like they’d woken up for the first time and looked around and realized just how good they had it, having all of this to themselves, that they could take and take and take everything they’d never had.
Hector had known rich people had it good, but not this good. Even Danny--who would admit that he’d been well off, but kept the rest of his past behind his eyes--looked surprised sometimes, at things they found, at how the other half lived. Hector found a good pair of leather boots at a store downtown, and they lasted years. It took ages to wear down the soles, the uppers didn’t peel away, and they became softer and better over time. That was what surprised Hector the most--what the rich had wasn’t just excess, showy wealth. They could afford shoes that didn’t let the damp in, pillows he’d only ever dreamed of, espresso machines that ran themselves.
Eventually, they figured out that it made the most sense to go to sports and camping stores for their everyday clothes. That was when roofs started collapsing, when they weren’t always guaranteed complete shelter from the wet, when they started walking more, riding horses more. Silk wasn’t so attractive, then; better to have a raincoat and long pants, so you could walk miles and miles, over hills and crumbling Wal-Marts.
Hector kept his boots, though, and Reggie slept in silk pajamas.
4. Family
Family could mean two things, depending on context: what they’d had before (what they lost), or what they had now.
For Sam and Reggie, “family” in the past tense generally meant their dad, whose legend only grew as time wore on. Doris was rarely “family;” but sometimes she was. You could always tell the difference.
For Hector, “family” existed only in the past tense, to refer to his brothers and sisters, his mom, his abuela. It also meant tamales and holidays and screaming, joyful, thunderous feet, a group around a table. It meant a feeling and a time and place that was gone, gone, gone. Sam and Reggie and Danny and the kids; they got close, so close, and Hector understood when they called it family. It wasn’t the same, though, so he could never bring himself to say it quite the same way.
Sarah and Brian’s sense of “family” was confused. As time went on, their memories of their old lives became disconnected and jumbled. Brian often said it felt like a world he’d read about in a book, not like a proper memory. Sometimes the kids called their group of survivors a “tribe,” just for want of a distinction, a way to separate something that was no longer real from the lives they had.
Danny’s old “family” was a closed book, a subject inaccessible. Sam and Reggie and Hector each had theories; that they’d been assholes, that they’d been emotionally distant. that they’d turned into zombies after the comet. “Family,” for him, was a sort of perfunctory word, a word used reluctantly, to describe something that had no easy name. At first, he stifled at being called “family,” by the others; he made a face, like it was something sour. It was years, before the word sounded right in his mouth. They all remembered when it first sounded right; it was a warm night during a cold winter. In the candle light, their smiles seemed brighter, more precious, as Danny called them family, and sounded like he meant it.
5. Survival
Surviving was less about doing the surviving, and more about figuring out what, exactly, qualified as survival.
Reggie kept thinking like they were going to rebuild society, go back to normal. At first, she talked like they’d find another think tank or bomb shelter, that there’d be thousands of people, enough to seriously rebuild. She talked about it like their circumstances were a temporary setback.
After a while, she shifted her ideals onto the future; one day, things would be back to normal, maybe not for them, but someday. People would live again in the city, and they needed to steward it, to keep it for those future generations.
Reggie taught the kids about ideals, about history, about ethics, which was nice, sure, but not practical. Hector was big on teaching the kids basic skills, things they could use to be self-sufficient when the rest of them were gone.
Reggie and Danny had been really reluctant about the idea of hunting, right up until they ran out of ready-butchered meat. Danny got over his reluctance after a week or two meat-free. Reggie, though, stayed in denial. She acted like it was all a temporary setback; when they went camping, she’d go scavenging, coming up with frostbitten TV dinners, triumphant. It took her a while to start eating what they caught, and she outright refused to eat rabbit.
The survival of the human species was even more fraught. They all struggled with that one. Did romance matter anymore? Did it, actually, matter more? Were they obligated to have children, carry on the race?
“But--we don’t have enough people,” Sam argued, reasonably. “We can’t rebuild the human race with six people, especially when two of us are blood relatives.”
“But if we were to swap--”
“Oh my god, Danny, please stop talking before Hector smacks you again.” Sam pursed her lips. She’d read a book about counting to ten to keep your temper under control. It didn’t work, but she was trying, you know. “Even if we swap it doesn’t work, ‘cause, like, everybody would be first cousins of some kind and all their kids would be weird mutants.”
Hector had gotten good at going to the local library, doing research, helping them fill in the gaps of the many, many things they didn’t know before the comet. As far as he could tell, Sam was right. They didn’t have enough people.
And, well, Hector was the settling-down type, but then that came back to Reggie. Reggie liked parenting Sarah and Brian, and claiming Hector as hers. But, the first time Hector sat snug against her on the couch, tried to lean in, she had stiffened, uncomfortable. She hesitated to so much as hold his hand, sometimes.
“I don’t know if I like you or if you’re the only guy left that’s even close to my age,” Reggie confessed, eventually. “I feel like I don’t have a choice. I’ve got you or nothing. It’s not very romantic, honestly.”
Hector had no right to feel like his heart was broken, but, well. He felt pressure too, felt obligated in some bizarre way, but he missed human intimacy more than he stifled at the pressure. And Reggie was amazing--he didn’t have any choice, sure, but what he had left was pretty good. It stung, that Reggie found the idea of liking him so difficult.
There was a period when Reggie left them. This was after Reggie broke down and deigned to learn to hunt, but before the move to Acton. She didn’t leave a note--but Sam had known, of course.
“She’s looking for survivors,” Sam said simply, shrugging, shrugging again, absolutely not worrying. “She said she’d be back soon.”
“And you let her leave?” Danny was overprotective, in those days.
Sam rolled her eyes. “No, I didn’t let her. She left anyway. No sense yelling about it until she gets back.”
It took months. Sam, for all her bluster, began fearing for the worst. Hector was the one to propose making trips to all their old haunts, making a circuit each week, in case Reggie stopped at any of their known caches, in case she left a message.
It was Hector who found Reggie, riding a horse south on the highway, just on the outer edges of the city. The horse had seen better days, and so had Reggie. Her clothes looked lived in; her hair was shorn close to her head.
Reggie launched herself at Hector, pulled him close, breathed him in. She held him without hesitation, and that frightened Hector more than anything.
“What happened?” Hector asked. “Did you find survivors? Or more zombies?”
Reggie laughed wetly into Hector’s jacket. “Depends on what you mean by ‘survivors.’”
“Well, what did you find?”
Reggie pulled back to look at his face, for a long moment. “Homo sapiens, I think.”
“You think?”
“Hector.” Reggie stood straighter, patted his shoulders. Studied his face. Then, very seriously: “I went out there to try to feel less alone. You know what I figured out?”
“What?”
“You might be the most well-adjusted man on the planet. Can we go out to dinner?”
Hector laughed. He didn’t mean to laugh, but something inside him felt bubbly and hysterical. “I outrank Danny? He knows how to tie a tie, you know.”
Reggie rolled her eyes. “Of course you outrank Danny. Now come on, I want to put the past behind me. Although, ooh, please tell me you didn’t do anything to my Polaroid stash.”
They held hands as they walked back into the city.
+1: Movies
With everything that they lost, slowly, over the years, it felt like a small miracle that Reggie knew how to run a film projector.
It wasn’t something they’d missed, at first. Similar to taxes and really big crowds and elevator music, it felt like something they’d never really needed, something they could do without. It felt like there were a thousand new things to do, every day. Life was busy enough just figuring out how to survive, right?
But as it turned out, real life could still be boring.
Reggie had resisted at first. It was weird, for her, going back to movie theaters, remembering how young and innocent she’d been that night, the different world she’d walked out to. She outright refused to go back to the theater where she used to work. They went to other places, instead, mall theaters, Grauman’s Egyptian, Beverly Cinema. Usually they all sat in the theater, with Reggie (or eventually Sarah) manning the projection booth. Sometimes they all sat together on a couch and watched VHS tapes, but it was easier to rig a projector to run without electricity.
Of course, there weren’t any new movies. It was hard to define why, but they didn’t miss them; it was hardly like any of them had seen even a tenth of all of the movies ever made, and it felt strange to consider what might have been, if the world hadn’t stopped in its tracks. They were just as likely to re-watch something as to put on something new.
As time got on it felt weirder, to look in on these old lives and stories, to see scenes set in crowded dance halls, vast armies--more than six people? How weird! They sometimes winced and laughed at how easy the characters in movies had it. It was easy to heckle the people on the screen for not knowing how to change the oil in their car, for working dead-end jobs, for choosing to be alone. It was fun, reminding themselves that they’d become better, stronger, than they had been in the world before.
At first they couldn’t have said why they were so drawn to movies, to the last few automated television broadcasts, to the home theater departments in department stores, still playing fifteen minute loops for shoppers who were now dust. Music, books, board games--they still held an appeal. But movies drew them back, time and again.
“I like getting to see people,” Danny once said, and maybe that was it. They saw five other faces, these days; and a photo in a book of someone you didn’t know, well, that paled in comparison to seeing them come to life, projected in full color and sound on the silver screen. It felt like people, people , not just the human race, were still there, when they watched movies. Something of the everything they had lost was still kept, was still just as good as it had been.
As Sarah and Brian got older, it got harder for them to tell what was real and what wasn’t, apart, what movies were based on fact or on fiction. For the rest of them, it got harder to explain. Hector could say that Gone With the Wind was nothing like the real Civil War, but he hadn’t been there, had he? They tried to teach the kids, raise them to know history and civics and Reaganomics and whatever, but none of them were good at teaching it, and the kids had little room for it. They could dig a well and brush out wool into yarn, and they could tell their story, the story, of what had happened, how the world became the way it was. Those things were important; it was hard for them to remember why the other things mattered.
One night they all crammed themselves into the projection booth; the theater’s roof had leaked in the last storm, and the plush cloth seats had gone moldy and foul. The screen, though, was okay, even with black streaks across it. So they all crowded around the warm, humming machine, and they watched the lights through the small square.
Reggie had a game she played sometimes, when she was in the projector booth. Well, not a game. Her mind chose to play it, not her. When she manned the booth, after a while, she’d begin to hear things; the hum of whispers, the creaking shifts of dozens of seats being adjusted, the crunch of popcorn. She’d swear she could hear footsteps behind her, walking down the hall. If she turned, there never was anyone there. The spell would break, and she’d be alone, foolish, tricked by the past.
That night, Reggie turned, and Sam moved her head just slightly. Sam watched Reggie cast keen eyes over the shadows, looking for the sounds. There was no one there, of course.
Reggie gave her sister a rueful smile. It was hardly an unusual habit, for them. It was almost a healthy sort of thing to do, to jump at shadows.
Sam shrugged, and reached out her hand. Reggie put her free hand in Sam’s, and after checking that the film reels were looking alright, she leaned back, into Hector’s close warmth, glancing at Danny and Sarah and Brian, still looking out the little window
They all kept watching the movie. There were ghosts on the screen, and ghosts, down there, in the theater. But in that little room, the were six people, and there was warmth and light in a lonely world.