Free Todd by Adam J Nicolai

the lamp on, keeping the living room brilliant as night fell. He
took a risk and ran the surge protector into the last open outlet on the
generator, where it drew power for the TV and the DVD player both. They'd had
some meat in the freezer already, as it turned out, and natural gas was still
coming to the stove.
    They had hamburgers for dinner,
and watched Frozen.
    Todd sang along with the songs, an
act of defiance nearly equal to all the lights blaring in the living room. Alan
couldn't bring himself to join him, but Todd didn't need him to. He let the boy
have his fun and tried not to think of how their noise was carrying in the
darkness across the empty city. He tried not to wonder if their house could be
seen from space: the brilliant network of Earth's old nervous system reduced to
a single, quivering point of light.
    And it won't even last, he
reminded himself. The power will run out. The disc will get scratched. We'll
have to relocate.
    But the old motto came to the
rescue. It was all here now. They had it now .
    When the movie was over, they
watched it again.
    28
    Then he woke to darkness.
    He could hear Todd on the living
room floor, breathing the breath of deep sleep. Otherwise the silence was
total, like it had been the other morning at Grandma's house.
    Shouldn't be this quiet, he
thought. Generator must've run out.
    He fumbled in the dark for the
lantern, shielding it with his body so the light wouldn't wake Todd. The boy
was a tangle of limbs and pillows, his cheek marred with drool. He'd be
terrified if he woke while Alan was gone checking on the generator, but he was
out cold, and the deck was barely twenty feet away. Alan decided to risk it.
    The sliding door to the deck was
ajar, just enough to let all the extension cords snake through. He slid it open
and slipped out. As he suspected, the generator was dead. He couldn't risk
their food thawing, so he set the lantern on a deck chair and refilled the gas
in its dimming light.
    The generator roared back to life.
A second later the fridge lurched back as well. He heaved a relieved sigh as he
sat back in the deck chair.
    He looked up, and the night sky
seized him.
    The comforting diffuse grey he had
always known had been replaced with an alien sky, livid with stars. The Milky
Way sprawled over his backyard like a scar of light.
    He grappled with vertigo, feeling
suddenly that he was at the lip of a great fall. Far from being secure on the
ground, he was a microbe on a pebble hurtling through the nothingness. Only
laws he couldn't comprehend kept him from falling endlessly into the eternal
black, and he could fall for a thousand years into that bloated darkness and
its mysteries would be no closer. The view wouldn't change. He was nothing
against it; his entire planet was less than a speck of dust.
    He blinked and forced his eyes
down, swallowing nausea. In another life, surrounded by his family and able to
return to the comforting light pollution of his cul-de-sac, he may have
appreciated the feeling of his own insignificance, even found it awe-inspiring.
Now it only brought him horror.
    He stood and reached for the deck
door, but another sight snagged the corner of his vision, and he looked up
again despite himself. It was the blue star from a few nights ago, the one he'd
thought was a satellite. It was smaller than the North Star, but far more
vibrant—like someone had pricked the fabric of space with a needle, betraying a
glimpse of endless, brilliant blue beyond.
    It's not a satellite. Flush
with the revelations of finding the Milky Way in his own backyard, he was
suddenly certain. It's this. It's everything that's happened.
    It's coming here.
    But that was madness: paranoia
brought on by the trauma of the last few days and his sudden confrontation with
the sprawling stars. He turned his back on it and went inside, telling himself
that his thin walls could shield him from the universe.
    29
    The roar of a flushing toilet woke
him.
    He opened his eyes to