Page 12 of The Tomorrows After You
When I got home that evening it wasn’t quite six but I was ready to call it a night. I was looking forward to taking a shower, cracking a beer, and going to sleep.
My luck continued to dwindle when a bunch of crashing noises emanated from the storage pod that sat a few yards off our houses. What didn’t get ruined in the fire was ruinedputting outthe fire and the rest we kept in a storage pod.
“Brennan?”I called out a few feet away, so he’d know I was coming.
He had rifled through almost every box and was sitting on the ground with books and notebooks all around him.
“Wrong,”he muttered, ripping a page out of a Bible in his lap.
“What are you doing?”I asked.
“It’s all wrong,”he repeated scribbling something out. He picked his head up and cackled his signature robotic laugh.“Ha! Ha! Ha! Look at this, Riot. Mom circled this passage.”
He held the book up without looking at me. It was a passage from Genesis. A little heart was scribbled in the corner with my dad’s name,Scotty, inside. My heart twisted at the familiar handwriting.
“Did she really believe she was made from Dad’srib?”He shook his head in disbelief and took the book back from me.
“What are you doing in here, Brennan?”I asked gently.
“Did you know that there was a rare and powerful microchip built into the Snapmaster 700?”
I furrowed my brow.“The digital camera?”
Brennan had gotten one for his birthday when we were kids. I remember because he was so excited he wouldn’t open any more presents. I had asked my mom to get him Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots so we could play later. But he’d spent the rest of the weekend locked in his room, taking photos of his model action figures and posting them to online chat rooms.
He looked up, unblinking.“I was fourteen. It was a Thursday evening, and I had filled the entire memory card with the most wonderful images 1.4 megapixels could take,”he said wistfully.
“Did you find it?”
“No.”He snapped back to his hunched position.“No. I did not. No, I did not. Not. Not!”He threw the Bible on the ground.
“Okay, okay,”I said gently.“How about I make us some dinner and then I’ll help you look tomorrow after work?”
He gazed up at me with those open, blue eyes like I was offering him a kidney.
“Yes. Please.”
I offered a hand to help him up, but he somehow rose to his feet from a cross-legged position without so much as a twist. I used to tease him and tell him that he was an alien. Or a pod person.
Of course, he would then proceed to spend half an hour telling me all the reasons why extraterrestrials wouldn’t be able to survive in our atmosphere. But if they could, the pod person theory would be the most likely. However, if the aliens were discerning thenIwould be the one more likely to bebody-snatcheddue to my fuller physical stature and more symmetrical facial features.
I think he was trying to say I was good-looking. But it had been hard tounderstand at the time.
“What do you want for dinner?”I asked him, sliding the storage pod door closed with a grating sound.
Brennan halted his mechanical walk and turned to appraise me. He stared at me for a long time, expressionless, blinking in front of the setting sun.
“SpaghettiOs. Over the fire pit,”he replied before taking calculated steps toward his bunkhouse.
I smiled. SpaghettiOs started on a camping trip when we were kids. That camping trip was one of the few real memories I had of our dad, the firefighting hero.
He had taken us camping at Alum Creek State Park. We all slept in one tent and had the time of our very young lives. We hiked along a creek that led to some cave-like overhangs. It was like we’d stepped into a different universe. Each turn, a discovery. Brennan was overjoyed looking at the rocks, naming each layer of rock and sediment.
We planned to catch fish for dinner, but it had not been a successful session, hence the SpaghettiOs. We had been hiking and fishing all day and we were starving. I remember those cans of pasta and sauce with sliced hot dogs tasted like the best thing I’d ever eaten. I was happy. I was five.
Brennan got frustrated with the fishing. He had done all kinds of calculations with how far to cast the line, how deep to rig the sinker, but nothing was biting. My dad laughed, creating a distinct crinkle at the corners of his eyes when he smiled, calf-deep in the water.
“Sorry, kiddo, not a lot of logic and planning when it comes to fishing. You have to be patient andfeelthe fish.Willthem to come to you,”he had said. Brennan appeared confused, which was surprising because my big brother always hadallthe answers.
