I Overpacked for the Apocalypse, So My Daughter Invited the Street novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Spare Capacity
Floyd regresses eleven days and packs sealing tape and plastic for the cold lodge beside his family-trip binder. His plan has five empty seats and a blank Others tab; Lucy takes the chart to retired nurse Elspeth, whom he drove past in his first life.
I came back from the end of the world eleven days early, and the first thing I did was laminate.
The printer in my kitchen jammed on page nine of the seating chart.
I could have kissed it.
I remembered my father's lodge chair and a window gone white.
The fridge calendar said Monday, October 6.
That gave me eleven days.
On Friday the seventeenth, a little after one in the afternoon, eight tanker cars would split open.
The Harlan rail yard is forty miles up the river.
The news would call it the plume.
Everyone who lived through it would call it the Low, because it lay low.
It was a colorless gas, heavier than air, and it poured down the river valley.
It filled our town of Cutler's Ferry up to the nine-hundred-foot line.
Cutler's Ferry sits at five hundred and twenty feet.
The Low reached us an hour after dark.
Anyone who breathed it for an hour went to sleep, and most of them did not wake.
It sat in the valley for nine days.
I watched it from my late father's hunting lodge, which stands at eleven hundred and eighty feet.
I had driven my daughter up there that Friday to keep her safe.
I buried her on the seventh day.
I did not leave the lodge chair after that until I died in it, on the twelfth.
So I fixed the jam, and I printed the rest, and I laminated it.
By six o'clock I had the Beldon Family Trip Binder, with twelve tabs.
I'd put sealing tape and plastic sheeting beside it, ready to keep the lodge's cold air outside.
Tab 1 was the itinerary, Tab 2 was the seating chart, and Tab 3 was snacks.
Tab 12 was titled Others, and I hadn't put anything in it yet.
At twenty to seven the side door opened.
My daughter came in with her bus keys on a lanyard and her braid still wet.
Lucy is twenty-five, and she lives in the apartment over my garage.
She drives Bus 14 for the school district, and she treats my coffee maker as her own.
She stopped in the doorway and looked at the table.
"Dad," she said. "Why does the kitchen smell like a copy shop?"
"I'm planning a trip," I said.
"With a binder?"
"With a binder. Sit. You're in it."
She sat, because she was holding her coffee and had nowhere else to go.
I opened to Tab 1.
"Friday week, the seventeenth," I said. "Departure is six-thirty a.m. sharp."
"I'm driving Bus 14 on the seventeenth," said Lucy.
"Take the day. We are going to Grandpa's lodge."
"The lodge is thirty-five minutes away."
"Correct," I said. "Rest stops are every ninety minutes."
Lucy turned a page and found the schedule.
"There are no rest stops on this," she said. "Thirty-five minutes is less than ninety."
"There's one. Stop Zero. It's in the driveway, before we leave."
She put her coffee down.
I turned to Tab 3.
"Snacks," I said. "Fourteen per person per day. One for every waking hour of a fourteen-hour travel day."
"We aren't traveling fourteen hours," said Lucy.
"We might."
"To a place thirty-five minutes away."
"Roads close, Lucy," I said.
She read the snack table with her pen out.
"I'm down for fourteen," she said. "No pretzels. Why no pretzels?"
"Pretzels are loud in a van."
Lucy looked up at me.
She has her mother's way of waiting.
She doesn't argue, she just stops talking until you hear yourself.
I heard myself, and I went on anyway, because there was no way to say the real reason.
If I told her a cloud was coming, she would take me to a doctor, and the doctor would be right.
Eleven days was not long enough to be a man who had been right.
So I was a man with a binder.
"Tab 2," I said. "The seating chart."
It was a diagram of my seven-seat minivan, with every seat numbered.
Seat 1 said Floyd, driver.
Seat 2 said Lucy, window, because she gets carsick.
"I don't get carsick," she said. "I drive a school bus."
"You used to," I said.
"I was six, Dad."
She studied the diagram for a long time.
Seats 3 through 7 were empty rectangles.
"There are five blank seats," said Lucy.
"Spare capacity."
"For what?"
"Luggage," I said.
"Five seats of luggage."
"Good luggage."
She turned to the last tab.
It said Others, and under that, nothing.
"So nobody else is coming," she said.
"It's a family trip."
"We are two of the family."
"The rest are in the lodge," I said. "Spiritually."
Lucy stood up and took the page with the diagram.
Her hands were warm and steady, with a pen-callus on the right one.
I couldn't stop looking at them.
The last time I had seen those hands, they were folded under a blanket.
"Where are you going?" I said.
"Across the street," said Lucy. "Five empty seats is a lot of empty seats."
"It's seven in the morning."
"Mrs. Crowl is always up."
She was out the front door before I had my glasses on.
I followed her as far as the porch, holding the binder against my chest.
Across Birch Street, in the gray light, Elspeth Crowl's front door was already opening.
She was a retired county nurse, sixty-six, holding a glass dish in both hands.
It was the casserole.
I knew it by the blue stripe on the lid.
It was the one she had been holding in the road, eleven days from now, while I drove past her with my window up.
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