The Go-Bag
The front closet was fourteen steps from the nursery. Dave knew this because he'd made the walk a thousand times: to grab a jacket, to hang up his keys, to fetch the umbrella Sarah insisted on keeping by the door even though Dave had never once used an umbrella in his life.
Fourteen steps. He'd never thought about them before.
He thought about them now, because six of them were across a hallway floor that had a crack running down its center like a zipper, and two of them required stepping over a section of ceiling that had decided to become floor.
Emma rode on his hip. She'd gotten quiet after the glitter, the way she sometimes got quiet after something exciting. Taking it in. She had one hand on his shirt collar and the other wrapped around Raf, who was still sparkling like a disco ball and would probably continue sparkling until the heat death of the universe, because that was what glitter did.
Dave reached the closet. The door was jammed, the frame had shifted when the house dropped. He pulled.
The door came off its hinges.
It just came away in his hand, frame screws and all, like he'd pulled a picture off a wall. He stood there for a moment, holding a door in one hand and a baby in the other, and thought about how much force it actually took to rip a door off its hinges.
More than he'd ever had before. That was certain.
He set the door against the wall and looked into the closet.
Sarah's go-bag was on the top shelf, right where she'd put it the day they brought Emma home from the hospital. It was a sturdy grey backpack, the kind hikers used, and it had a label on the zipper pull in Sarah's handwriting: EMERGENCY KIT - CHECK CONTENTS QUARTERLY.
She had, in fact, checked the contents quarterly. Dave had watched her do it three times now, sitting on the hallway floor with everything spread around her, updating the formula as Emma aged out of each stage, swapping onesie sizes, rotating the water bottles. He'd teased her about it once. Something about the zombie apocalypse. Sarah had not laughed.
The memory landed differently now, in a house that was falling down around him after he'd thrown his neighbor through a ceiling. The word prescient came to mind.
He pulled the bag down and unzipped it on the floor. Sarah had packed it with the terrifying efficiency she brought to everything: field trips, grocery runs, household projects. She'd once organized a kindergarten outing for thirty-two children, four parent volunteers, and a bus driver named Carl who was afraid of squirrels. Every single child came home on time with all their belongings. Dave had seen Fortune 500 project managers who couldn't match her logistics.
Diapers. A sleeve of ten, she'd updated the size. Wipes, sealed. Two bottles, empty, with a container of pre-measured formula powder. A small first aid kit in a red pouch. Two water bottles. A change of clothes for Emma. A change of clothes for Sarah. A thin emergency blanket, the foil kind. A flashlight. Batteries.
And Emma's yellow blankie, folded neatly at the bottom. The soft one with the ducks on it. Her comfort object, the thing she reached for when the world got too big.
It wasn't packed for an apocalypse. But it was something.
"Your mother," Dave told Emma, "is the smartest person either of us has ever met."
"Muh," Emma said.
He swung the bag onto his back. It sat well. Balanced, not too heavy. Sarah had thought about that, too. Of course she had.
The house shuddered. A sound like a moan came from somewhere in the walls, low and drawn out. The hallway light fixture, which had been hanging at an angle since the first crack, finally gave up and crashed to the floor in a spray of glass and dead bulb.
"Kitchen," Dave said. "Then garage. Then we're gone."
He moved. Faster now. The hallway floor was getting worse, the crack had widened to about two inches and he could see down into the crawl space, which was not a thing you wanted to see in your own hallway. He stepped over it and kept going.
The kitchen was mostly intact. Given the last fifteen minutes, that qualified as a miracle. The fridge had slid about a foot from the wall and the spice rack had emptied itself onto the counter, but the cabinets were closed and the floor was level.
Dave worked fast. He pulled a grocery bag from under the sink and started filling it. Formula, two extra cans. Cheerios, the big box. Puffs, the kind Emma could feed herself. A jar of baby food, sweet potato, her favorite.
He paused. His hand had reached for the dish soap. He was standing in front of the kitchen sink, fingers closed around the blue bottle of Dawn, and he didn't know why. His body had just done it, same as in the nursery when the beam fell.
He stood there for three seconds, holding the dish soap, feeling stupid.
He put it in the bag.
Water bottles. Three more. A granola bar for himself. A banana. He looked at the kitchen and tried to think of what else he might need for a trip of unknown length across a distance he didn't yet know, in conditions he couldn't yet imagine, with a nine-month-old who would need to eat and sleep and be changed and comforted and kept alive no matter what was happening outside.
The knife block caught his eye. He pulled the big one, the eight-inch chef's knife Sarah kept sharp enough to shave with. It felt small in his hand. After what he'd done to Todd, a knife seemed almost beside the point.
He took it anyway. Whatever had happened to his body, he didn't trust it to last. He didn't trust any of this to last.
If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.
The floating text was still there. He'd been trying not to look at it, the way you try not to look at a stain on someone's shirt while they're talking to you. It hovered at the edge of his vision, patient, like a notification he hadn't dismissed.
~*~
NAME: Dave Thompson
TITLE: Protector of Emma
CLASS: Dad
LEVEL: 1
~*~
As he watched, new text appeared below it.
~*~
ABILITIES: ???
INVENTORY: ???
Tap to expand.
~*~
Tap. As if this were a phone screen. As if the air had a touch interface.
Dave, feeling profoundly stupid, reached out and tapped the word ABILITIES with his index finger.
Nothing happened.
He tried again. Nothing.
Emma reached out and swatted at the text.
It expanded.
~*~
ABILITIES (2):
- Strong Daddy — ACTIVE
You are strong. So strong.
Really, really strong.
Like, the strongest.
- Boo-Boo Fixer — ACTIVE
Kiss it better.
~*~
Dave stared at the descriptions. They read like they'd been written by someone who understood the concept of a user manual but had only ever seen one described by a child. No parameters. No cooldowns. No damage values. Just vibes.
He was a Level 77 Protector in World of Witchcraft. He knew what good ability descriptions looked like. These weren't it.
"'Kiss it better,'" Dave read aloud. "What does that—"
He stopped. Looked at his forearm, where Todd's claws had scraped white lines across the skin. The lines were still there, faintly. More like scratches that hadn't broken through. But they stung.
He felt ridiculous. He felt completely and entirely ridiculous.
He kissed his forearm.
The white lines vanished. The sting vanished with them. His skin was smooth and unmarked, as if nothing had ever touched it.
Emma giggled.
"Okay," Dave said. "All right. That happened."
He thought about it. He thought about how, if anyone had been watching, he would have looked like a man who had lost his mind. He thought about how, five minutes ago, he had thrown his neighbor through a ceiling and his neighbor had turned into glitter, and in that context, kissing his own arm was actually fairly tame.
The house groaned again. Longer this time. The floor in the kitchen shifted, and Dave heard something crack underneath, in the foundation, the deep structural part that was supposed to be the last thing to go.
Garage. Now.
The door to the garage was through the laundry room. Dave grabbed the car seat from the living room on the way. Emma's infant carrier, the one that clicked into the stroller base and the car mount both. He'd need it. He couldn't carry her and supplies and whatever he found in the garage. He strapped Emma in, clicked the harness, checked the straps. She looked up at him with her enormous brown eyes, Raf clutched to her chest, and made no complaint.
That bothered him. Normally she hated the car seat. Getting her into it was usually a three-act production involving tears, negotiations, and at least one dramatic arching of the back.
Today she sat quietly and watched him work, and the calmness in her eyes was too old for her face. She was nine months old and she was looking at him like she understood something he didn't.
The garage was dark. The power was out, had been since the first crack, probably. Dave set Emma's carrier on the workbench and felt along the wall for the emergency lantern. Found it. Clicked it on.
The garage was mostly okay. Some tools had fallen off their hooks. A shelf of paint cans had tipped over, and something blue was spreading slowly across the concrete floor. The ceiling had a crack, but a small one. Survivable.
His car, the Honda Civic Sarah had been trying to replace for two years, sat in its spot, and for one sweet moment Dave thought, We can drive.
Then he walked around to the driver's side.
The oak tree. The one that had tripled in size, the one with the bark that looked like handwriting. One of its new branches, thick as a telephone pole, had punched through the garage wall and through the hood of the Civic. The engine block was split in half. Coolant dripped onto the floor in a steady green trickle.
Dave looked at the car. The branch. The car again.
"Of course," he said.
Emma made a sound that, in a different context, might have been sympathy.
They were walking. With a nine-month-old, a go-bag, a grocery sack, and a kitchen knife. Twenty minutes by car to Serenity Springs. On foot, through whatever this was, with stops for bottles and diapers and the roughly eleven thousand other things a baby needed on a constant rotating basis…
He didn't finish the thought. There wasn't any point in finishing it. The math was bad. He'd do it anyway.
Dave turned to the tool wall. He took the crowbar. Solid steel, good weight, a tool that had utility beyond violence and wouldn't run out of ammunition. He took a box cutter and put it in his pocket. He took the roll of duct tape, because duct tape was always the answer, even when you didn't know the question. And he took the baby carrier, the hiking-style backpack they'd bought for trail walks and used exactly twice because Emma had screamed the entire time.
She wasn't screaming now. He transferred her from the car seat into the hiking carrier, and she settled against his back without a sound. Raf went in with her. The blankie from the go-bag went around her legs. She put her thumb in her mouth, a habit they'd been trying to break, but today was not the day, and rested her head against the back of his neck.
The weight of her settled onto his shoulders. Twenty pounds. Twenty pounds that he'd carried for nine months in a hundred different ways. On his hip, against his chest, over his shoulder during the 2 AM walks when she wouldn't stop crying and he'd pace the hallway like a sentry. He knew this weight. It was the most familiar weight in the world.
Dave stood in his garage with a baby on his back, a crowbar in his hand, a go-bag and a grocery sack hanging from his shoulders, and a kitchen knife wedged through his belt loop. He looked, he imagined, like a man who had packed for every emergency simultaneously and was prepared for none of them.
The floating text pulsed gently at the edge of his vision.
~*~
LEVEL: 1
~*~
"Yeah," Dave said. "I know."
He walked to the garage door. Hit the manual release, the electric opener was dead, and pulled.
The door went up with a screech of metal on metal and the sound of something outside skittering away from the noise.
Light poured in. Orange light, thick and warm, like the whole world was lit by a heat lamp. The driveway was cracked but passable. The street beyond it was not.
The road had buckled in three places, pushed up into ridges of asphalt and dirt like something underneath had tried to get out. The Johnsons' house (Todd's house, he thought, and then tried not to think) was leaning hard to the left, most of its first floor collapsed. Across the street, the Petersons' place looked untouched, except for the fact that their lawn was blue. Blue. Pool-water blue. The color of a swimming pool, all the way to the property line, where it stopped in a perfectly straight edge and became normal brown grass again.
Dave looked left. The road curved toward the elementary school, and beyond it, downtown.
He looked right. The road climbed toward the highway overpass, and beyond that, out of town. Toward Serenity Springs.
Something moved in the Petersons' yard. In the blue grass. A shape, low to the ground, that Dave couldn't identify and didn't want to.
Emma shifted on his back. Her hand found the collar of his shirt and held on. Pat, pat, pat.
I'm here. You're here.
"Okay," Dave said. "Let's go find Mama."
He turned right and started walking.
Behind him, the house he'd brought his daughter home to nine months ago settled another two inches into its foundation, and a section of the roof caved in over what had been the nursery.
Dave didn't look back. There was nothing in that direction he needed anymore. Everything he needed was on his back, and everything he wanted was twenty minutes away by car. He didn't have a car. He had a crowbar, a kitchen knife, a go-bag, a bag of groceries, a bottle of dish soap he couldn't explain, and a baby.
He turned right and started walking.
Emma, on his back, chewed on Raf's ear and watched the orange sky with wide, curious eyes.