Winter Kept Us Warm

By Insomniac Owl

Six months after the aliens leave, the O-man loses both arms to some bloke with a cricket racket before Andy pulls him off. One's gone at the elbow, the other at the shoulder. Gary cobbles something together from a pair of golf clubs, and it becomes a running joke to yell 'Fore!' during fights, whenever the O-man pulls back for a swing. There are a lot of fights.

So it's only a matter of time before something else happens. That November, someone puts a fist through one side of Peter's head. The woman that does it has one of those facial tattoos everyone seems to be getting, because Blanks can't - something about scarring, about what they're made of. Before they know about this, Gary convinces Andy to get a matching Sisters of Mercy tattoo, but doesn't take; the ink keeps running off.

Peter's depth perception is shot, after that, but he was never very good in fights anyway, so Gary doesn't count it much of a loss.

But then they lose Steven. Gary wakes for his turn at guard duty one night, and Steven just isn't there. They're supposed to keep moving, but Gary keeps them in unfriendly territory for three more days, scouring the black market and the shadier doctor's offices, and only agrees to leave when Peter is attacked by a gang of children. They beat the shit out of him. Gary makes a few jokes about that, but it's not really funny with Steven gone. There's a ragged space in the phalanx during bar brawls, and the balance of the group is off.

"He might have just left, you know," Andy tells him over the fire a few nights later. It's Gary's watch, but Andy couldn't sleep, he said, too many fucking crickets. He'd kill for a siren in the distance.

"He wouldn't," Gary says. He's trying to balance a bit of grass between his thumbs to make a grass whistle, but it's not working. The sound is low and pathetic as an old man's fart.

"Maybe not. But he always felt like he had to prove himself when you were around."

Gary pitches the blade of grass into the flames. "I thought you lot were only supposed to remember the good times, the Friday nights."

Andy gives him a long look over the fire. Gary shoved a dandelion through his second buttonhole two days ago, and it's still there, but the petals have gone all wilty and dry.

Andy stands. "I'm sorry we couldn't find him, either way."

And he's probably right. But this is what they have, now. This is what Gary bought for the world with blood and beer and Primal Scream lyrics shouted from a tabletop. The ability to choose.

They lose Oliver next. Someone smashes his head in during a brawl on the side of the road - highway robbers, like the god damn Wild West. Gary ties a rope round one of Oliver's golf-club wrists and leads him like a dog for four days, silent and uncomplaining through the blasted landscape, but after a while he can't take the sight of him anymore. And what can he do, then, but leave him? Oliver doesn't hear anything he says, the apologies or the self-recriminations, or how his voice breaks when he says goodbye. One of the golf clubs jerks up to catch him in the shoulder, and then, more slowly, to pat at the side of his face. Apparently satisfied, Oliver drops his hand back into his lap. He doesn't see Gary walk away.

They wander, for a while, up north to Glasgow and the Scottish hills, where the world is so green and gorgeous it's hard to imagine everywhere else is a smoking ruin. Maybe there are still places in the world that look so perfect, Gary thinks, standing on the porch of some farmer's croft. There are several bottles of good scotch in the liquor cabinet, but he hasn't touched them. He keeps thinking about Oliver and Steven and Peter's half-shattered face. The landscape is beautiful but it doesn't bring him any peace.

The Blanks weren't meant to live in this world, Gary thinks in the middle of the next fight, this time over a purple knit hat some arsehole stole from Peter. Peter's hidden under a table, the hat clutched in one hand, and Gary watches, horrified and numb, when a big bloke, bigger than Andy at forty years old, executes an elbow strike on top of it. An explosion of shattered skin-colored pieces and blue shoots out across the floor, and Andy has to drag him out of the bar in a chokehold. He can't get his feet to work properly and he wants to claw someone's eyes out with his fingernails.

"What's the point of this?" he asks, later. His face is tear-streaked and puffy; Andy's a checkered blur in the corner of his vision. "You all keep on fucking dying."

"Maybe," Andy says, slowly, "you should find people who don't die so easily."

"Wait, you mean - "

Andy turns half away, then shrugs. "Just an idea. You're the leader."

Gary throws his head back, choking on laughter or the beginning of a sob. "Leader of what?"

Andy doesn't answer. This Andy is eighteen years old and he doesn't know what it's like to be forty one and see your world break apart around you. This was supposed to be a new beginning. Everyone got with who they were supposed to, in the end. They were all supposed to be happy. Sam and Steven, Andy - the real Andy - and his wife, Gary and these sooty sword-wielding bell ends. And he loves them, he does. Leaving Oliver by the side of the road like rubbish was one of the hardest things he's ever done. But it's just him and Andy, now, and one day Andy will go as well, and what will he be left with then?

"By the time we were in our last year of uni," Gary says, pulling his shirt up to wipe his eyes, "everyone had pretty much drifted apart except you and me. I didn't care about myself anymore, and I wanted to know… to know that somebody did. To prove it to myself. So I called you." He swallows, head down. "You drove me to the hospital at four times the limit, and I was planning to wait until you picked me up and started carrying me in, because you loved me, you would have done that, and then I was - I was gonna shout 'Surprise!' and grab you, and it was gonna be a great laugh. Except you drove us off the road. Checking on me, or something, I don't know, it's all kind of screwy, even now. I panicked. I - I ran. You spent sixteen hours in surgery and then six days in jail and I never fucking visited you. Not once."

He chances a quick glance up, sees Andy staring at him with this intent look on his face. It's a strange expression on an eighteen year old, yet another reminder that he isn't human. The Blanks never get any of his jokes, and he had to teach them how to fight; Andy won four wrestling tournaments in high school and Gary had to teach the new one how to put someone in a headlock. He might look the same, but he didn't know who the Sisters of Mercy were. He still likes sunflower seeds and stupid pranks and summer more than spring but he doesn't remember driving off the road that night, even though it's the third most important night of Gary's life. He's good with a greatsword. The real Andy never had been.

"I abandoned you," Gary says, voice thick. He's trying to pack something into those words that might not fit or might, if it does, be beyond the understanding of this alien replica of his best friend at eighteen. "Do you get it?"

"I think so," Andy says. "Do you mean you want -"

"I'm not saying anything, okay, I just - never mind. Forget about it." Gary wipes the scummy gunk of tears from his eyes with the heel of his hand, pushes himself to his feet. "I'll go get some more water, and then we can do the washing up."

But Andy must have understood more than the thinks, because when Gary comes back with the water, he's gone. His things are gone as well, the walking stick and the sword and the knapsack they picked up at an Asco's up north, just before it started to snow. The days are cold, and the nights colder, but Blanks don't feel it. So Andy might have left him a heavy winter coat, but the real Andy would have stayed. He would have stayed even if Gary begged him to go in exactly so many words.

Gary stands at the edge of their meager camp, staring at the footprints leading north into muddy slush. He could follow him, he thinks. Andy's not so far ahead yet, and all the walking they've done has Gary in the best shape of his life. He could catch up. But he can see the sign for the A1 in the distance, and that will lead him down the eastern edge of England, all the way to London. Walking, he could be there in less than a week.

Picking up his knapsack, Gary heads south. He has water in a few pubs and in Newark-on-Trent he discovers a small cache of Glenmorangie Original that he sells for a packet on the black market. With the money, he buys himself a sleek black horse. It eats the grass by the roadside and drinks at the rivers, and when he can convince it to lay down at night it keeps him warm. He names it Andrew, and doesn't think about what that means.

When he reaches London he goes south, to Peter's old house. It's the only place he can think to look. London proper is a blasted ruin; his own apartment has burned to the ground and so have Andy's and Steven's. But there is movement inside Peter's. Gary, shaking his shoulders out, is preparing to knock when the door swings open.

"Gary!"

It's Peter. Or, not Peter, but a robot replica of him. There's a tell-tale blankness in the eyes before he speaks that Gary recognizes, two years in. He tries to smile.

"Hey. How's things?"

"Oh, fine, you know. What are you doing here?"

"Um," he reaches to scratch at his scalp. "Looking for Andy, I suppose. Sam and Steven as well, if you've seen them."

"Ah. Well, last I heard Steven and Sam - they're together, now, you know - had a little house down south in Greenwich."

"Greenwich? What the fuck for?"

"It's a nice place, actually. In that park near the astronomy museum. They had me over for tea, once."

"Mm. Well… cheers." There doesn't seem to be much else to say. "Guess I'll be seeing you."

Peter puts a hand out, but doesn't touch him. "Do you want some meatloaf, before you go? We killed a cow last fall, and the snow keeps the meat fresh." He's smiling, eager to please, and in that way he is the same as Peter ever was. But there's a shallowness to his smile, an accommodating affability to his manners that is common to all Blanks after the aliens left. It's why Andy left when Gary asked him to. It's why Peter invites him in.

But still. He hasn't had meatloaf in years. "Sure," he says, then jerks a thumb over his shoulder. "D'you mind if Andrew trims your grass?"

"Andr - oh. Not at all. Go ahead," he says past Gary's shoulder, chuckling as he turns back into the house. "Andrew. Andrew the horse."

The meatloaf is beef with onions from the garden Peter's wife keeps out back, and is better even than the cheese balls he and Andy ate for a week straight their first year at uni. Peter's wife looks tired. She probably looked tired before all this. She watches him suspiciously the entire time they're in the room together, but cuts him a thick slice, and for that he loves her.

"Don't worry," he tells her, "I'm not taking Peter with me. That ship only sailed once."

She lays down the knife, lays her hands flat against the countertop. "He's a shit husband, now, but a good dad," she says. Her voice trembles a bit, but steadies when she looks at him. "That counts for a lot these days."

"I'm sure he's great." Gary swallows, stabs at another chunk meatloaf. "This meatloaf, though, is fucking amazing."

"We've children in the house," she says, but one corner of her mouth turns up.

"Right, sorry. Could I, uh, get some more of this for the road? It is honestly the best thing I've ever tasted."

"Oh, off with you." She's smiling openly when she and Peter see him to the door, and when he untangles Andrew's reins from the fence and swings himself up. Their house is small, the windows covered with vines instead of glass, but they look happy. Happy enough. Maybe that's all that matters. But what he's looking for isn't here, so he presses his heels into Andrew's sides, and they move on, through the city to the banks of the River Thames, where the water has frozen solid enough for Andrew to walk on.

It's dawn by the time he finally finds the house. It sits in the middle of the park, trees overgrown and wild on all sides, a tent pitched beyond it in the long grass. It's set on a hill, with what would have been a lovely view three years ago. Now all there is to see is the ruined remains of London. The Eye, Big Ben, Parliament and Westminster, the blackened shells of skyscrapers in the financial district. Saint Peter's, soot-black but intact, looms like an omen on the horizon. But Gary's had enough of signs. This might be what he's been looking for these past few months. Andrew snuffles and stomps beside him; in the tent, a baby wails twice and then quiets. Gary considers knocking on Sam and Steven's door. Considers doing a knock-and-run, but his knee still hurts from his last fight. He wouldn't be able to run fast enough.

He doesn't have to knock, though, because from the tent comes the sound of a zipper being undone, and someone's head rises from the other side. It's a big head, a bit squareish from the back, attached to familiar shoulders.

Andy turns.

He drops the pot he's holding and water goes everywhere, steaming in the morning cold. Gary cackles. He'd forgotten how much he loves this man. "Fuck!" Andy swears. "You're boiling the next god damn pot you bastard." And then Gary's crushed in a hug, and he's laughing and hugging him back and messing up Andy's hair. Andy's lost a little weight - it'd be hard not to, eating nothing but what they can grow themselves - but he's still big, and there's a comforting solidity to him that Gary's missed. The robot Andy had always felt like he was going to tip over, nothing inside him but blue.

"Your glasses, man," he says.

"Annie dropped them; I had to make do. What's your excuse for the hat?"

"Annie? Who's Annie?"

"Oh - my daughter." He's blushing, if Gary's seeing right. His voice is soft and proud. "She just turned one."

"You're taking the piss."

"I swear I'm not. Gary, Gary hang on. You… you look sober."

"It's a lot harder to be a proper alcoholic, these days." Gary shrugs, like that's all there is to it, like he hadn't spent two miserable weeks vomiting and shaking in an abandoned farmhouse, unable to find anything to drink and dying, actually dying, for that to be different. Sometimes he wishes Andy had been there with him, but he always takes it back. No need for Andy to see him like that, not when it means he can stare at Gary now with this soft, stupid expression on his face. After a while Gary got used to not drinking, and used to being sober, and used to imagining Andy's - the real Andy's - disappointment in him if he started again. And at first there were fights to fill the void, but now the alcohol is part and parcel of a past he wants very little to do with anymore.

"So," he says, "are you gonna show me this progeny of yours, then? I won't believe it till I see it." His voice goes soft. "Always thought you'd be a good dad, though. You took care of me for long enough."

"That's because - " Andy cuts himself off, smiles, shakes his head. "I'm alright. Give me a second; I'll bring her out."

The baby is a bundle of blankets that fits into the length of Andy's forearm, with a pink little face and tiny closed eyelids. Except for a few wisps of curly brown hair, she looks a lot like Andy.

"Hullo," Gary says, leaning to see her. "She's adorable, mate, well done."

Andy offers to let him hold her, but Gary won't do it; her skull looks fragile as an eggshell, and he's never been good with precious things. Andy makes him anyway. After a while they drift toward the ruined cityscape, toward the pink sky and the rising sun. Gary hands the baby over, but lets his horse wander, pulling at the cold grass; he never goes far.

"There's an empty house down the street from ours," Andy says into the quiet.

Gary turns to look at him. "Yeah?"

"Two bedrooms, one bath. The people who lived there kept it pretty nice."

Gary plucks a bit of thread from his coat, rolls it slowly between his fingers. "Alright," he says. "But you have to help me find furniture."

"Course."

There are a lot of things Andy could ask about, then. The sword, his sobriety, the lack of Blanks. But he doesn't say anything. Neither of them do. They just stand there, shoulder to shoulder, watching the sun rise over the ruins of a civilization, over the beginnings of something new. We fight for what we want, Andy said, in a bar once years ago, and Gary's sick of watching the people he loves die or drift away. So he's making a choice. And maybe this was always where he was meant to be anyway: on a hill at dawn with Andy at his side.

It's not a bad place to be, this time around.