The Starving Years by Jordan Castillo Price

was back there at the…what time is it?”
    Tim turned to look at Randy while Javier jabbed at the keyboard. The video went mute. The churning mass of bodies was even weirder without volume. Tim spotted Nelson and jumped away from Javier as if they’d been caught surfing porn at the office. Nelson shifted and felt the big sweatpants he was wearing slip down over his hip. He caught them by the waistband and hiked them up, but the elastic was stretched out, and they drooped again the second he let go.
    “Hello?” Randy said. “What time is it?”
    “Three,” Javier snapped. He was pounding windows closed for all he was worth.
    “You’re awake,” Tim said to Nelson.
    Nelson hiked up the sweatpants again, then folded the waistband in a few inches and rolled it a couple of times to encourage them to stay put. The pants rode low on his hips now, but they’d hold as long as he managed to keep from stepping on the cuffs and pulling them down. “Can I get some water?”
    “Yeah. Sure. Here, let me—” Tim jumped up and rounded the kitchen island. “I’ll wash out a mug. They’re both dirty.”
    Nervous, or just twitchy? Nelson couldn’t tell, not yet. He didn’t know Tim well enough. Javier—now he was definitely acting shifty. It wouldn’t do any good to make him feel cornered, so Nelson sidled up next to the hulking behemoth of a twenty-year-old laser printer and made it clear he was not looking at the monitor. Because who gave two shits what was on the screen when he could be checking out Javier instead?
    Javier’s jet black hair had a messy, windswept look to it, his tie was gone, and the top two buttons of his shirt were undone. No undershirt. Chest hair. Nelson allowed himself to gawk, since Javier’s eye was fixed on the screen. “So, anything fun happen while I was tripping?” Nelson ventured.
    “You seem awfully laissez-faire.” Javier glanced at Nelson briefly while he spoke, then focused again on the computer.
    “But I’m crying on the inside.” Damn. Another dollar for the cliché jar. “Really, though, what happened? Why are we all camped out here?”
    Randy answered. “No phone service, no news coverage, and the lower east side’s gone all Lord of the Flies. That’s what.”
    Tim handed Nelson a mug of water. He was a close-stander. Nelson backed up a step and drained the mug. The water was cold and tasted like the inside of a refrigerator, though Tim didn’t strike Nelson as the type of guy to be into the whole fancy water filter craze. He looked more like the type of guy who’d stick his head in the sink and drink straight from the faucet to avoid getting a glass dirty. If he bothered with filtration, it was probably because the plumbing in his old building made the water taste funky.  
    Nelson tipped the last few drops into his mouth. Still dehydrated. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Javier hit a final key, then relax…until Javier noticed an orange light flashing on the printer. “What’s that?”
    Tim took the empty mug from Nelson, big-handed, clumsy. Practically groping it out of his grasp. “More?”
    “Yeah, thanks.” Nelson had worked with a similar printer model before, in a lab with no money, testing residual levels of DDT on alfalfa. He scanned the buttons and lights, letting the configuration ease its way through his hazy post-pill head.
    All at once, he remembered. “It’s just on bypass,” he said, and flicked a lever in back.
    The machine clunked and shuddered, and made a sound like a jet engine preparing for takeoff as the rollers heated up. Javier shot out of his seat and spread his hands to catch the print—but the machine had been set for outputting labels on a straight path, and a cascade of paper shot from the back instead. The sheets fluttered, and fanned out to cover a daisy chain of patched-together power strips.
    “That’s a fire hazard waiting to happen,” Randy said. He grabbed a handful of papers that had landed within arms’ reach of