Spit If You Call It Fear

Waylon still ain't over Y2K.

He's my brother and I love him but Jesus, I won't miss him.

His canned goods stockpile is so big and silver in his backyard you can see it from Google Maps. He tears off all the labels on account of food is food, so it's just can after can, stacked two-tall, running in rows from the edge of the woods up to the porch of the home we grew up in. The underground shelter he dug is packed with bottles of Nestle water—you know, the cheap shit, tastes like pipe.

"That's how life's gonna taste anyway," he likes to tell me, "when it all zeroes out."

He's yet to invite me, or anyone else, into his postapocalypse fantasy—all this prepping's all for him, his private Independence Day.

Or at least that's how it seemed until today, when I come with him canning. He won't answer my check-up calls, so the only way to talk to him is to help with some project. So we're out behind Aldi's with a black trash bag for full cans, a white one for empties. Waylon's up on the Dumpster, about to hop inside, but then he stops, pats his ass pocket, pulls out his cellular.

"Mom calling?" I ask. He's just standing up there, balancing on the edge, staring at the technology. A doc who's asked daily to stop practicing medicine—that's what Way looks like to me. It's the beige trench jacket, like a surgeon's stained lab coat, his big bottle glasses with the left lens cracked. Those muttonchops got wild since his re-enactor days. Forever he'll be a head taller, three years my senior, and tenfold braver.

"You think she's the only person I talk to?" he says, glaring down at me.

"Know full well she is." He's afraid of people, though he spits if you call it fear—more like nobody's worthy of his trust. He's a loner. MacGyver. Three clicks batshit. Always armed.

"Well," he says, pecking out a text message. "Wrong!"

What we'll do with the used aluminum is haul it all to Waylon's place, where he'll melt it in his backyard forge and fashion thin pieces of armor—lightweight and wearable and, to his mind, resistant to electricity. Waylon's future's got blue bolts of man-made lightning leaping across the plain like antelopes, galloping toward all of our homes and bodies, hot for a place to rest. It was supposed to happen on Y2K, but things've been delayed, thanks to our father. 2038—now that's the year the computers are set to lose their shit, Waylon says, something about a hiccup with the date change, Earth's tilt, 32-bit systems, binary's going to break. The world's set to enter something called the Trinary period, where all computer systems and electrical programs will have to adapt to a new code with three numbers—0,1, and 2. And like every in-between period in history, the sure-as-shit result will be a ton of pain. Unrest. A power grid that becomes, itself, a critter species, roaming all of the terrestrial US. Rivers becoming charged. Whole oceans. The rain'll snap and glow with current, Christmas lights tossed down from heaven.

I always tell Waylon he should make a website, spread the word, who knows who you can find. Partners. A militia. Company. But he hates anything with a screen, which is why I'm half-spooked to see his eyes holding contact with the cellphone.

"Who is it then?" I ask him. "Who you texting?" He's inside the Dumpster now and I'm just outside, talking through the green metal barrier. He tosses out an empty Progresso.

"Carla," he says. "Met her on Prepper."

"Prepper?"

"Prepper," he says, poking his head up from the dumpster, handing me a half-drank High Life tallboy. "It's a dating application."

"For nutbars?" I...