Under a Broken Sun

by Kevin P Sheridan

  When I came to the sun was just beginning to set. My head throbbed so hard I could’ve taken my pulse just by paying attention. I looked around the underpass. To my left, Marilyn lay on her back, arm flopped over her head. Fires roared in the parking garage, and black smoke rose mixing dark grays on the canvas of the sunset.

  I crawled my way over to Marilyn and turned her over, afraid she’d be dead. Blood had pooled under her head and got on my hands as I touched her. I reached down to check her eyes, looking for something, like pupil dilation, I guess. I didn’t need to, they flittered open on their own. She scanned the area and then looked at me.

  “Adam?” she said. I nodded. “Head hurts.”

  “I know. Mine too. Take it easy. Can you sit up?” Her eyes closed again. “Stay with me, Marilyn! Hey!” I tapped her face to open her eyes again.

  “Ow,” she said.

  “You ok?” She nodded slightly. “Stay with me, ok? We’ve got to get you some help.”

  “No." she said as she reached for my arm. “I’m ok. They’re looking for us. Remember?” She touched a lump on my forehead, making me twitch. "You ok?"

  I nodded, distracted. She was right. We were lucky they hadn't caught us already. “I'm fine. I'm gonna look for some supplies,” I said.

  I stepped out from under the highway, and stopped at the sight of a blazing sunset. It was unlike anything I’ve ever seen. Colors danced behind the clouds like a light show at a concert. Usually sunsets are fairly stable in terms of color progression, but this was all over the place. Like watching aurora borealis while on acid.

  And the temperature. A cold settled in that wouldn’t have fit anywhere south of Canada for this time of year. I could just barely make out puffs of my own breath. After the heat of the day, it was a welcome relief, but definitely not normal. A gift I wanted to accept but knew wasn't good. Something about the Earth had changed dramatically.

  The crowd came into view. I was so struck by the sunset that I had lost focus on the disaster behind us. The fire raged on, and masses of people scurried with buckets; some held back as they defended their cars, some ran wild like children in an abandoned house. The few cops there were tried to keep order, but it was useless. EMT’s tried to help people, but the wounded surrounded them, like lepers reaching out to Jesus.

  Jesus. Was this really his second coming? I always thought that was crap because my father made sure I KNEW it was crap. But something did happened, something either really unnatural (terrorist?) or so weirdly natural that it took us completely by surprise. I remembered the paper in my back pocket. I thought of Reverend Jesse Hill and my dad.

  I thought of Marilyn. To hell with figuring it out now, I had to help her.

  Towards the crowd, in the back long-term parking lot, an EMT raced from an open ambulance. I just needed supplies, and I needed to get to them before the crowd did. I had to risk it.

  I ran towards the ambulance and went to the back. Perfect. I grabbed some bandages and boxes of other stuff that I didn’t even recognize. Had to be something there I could use.

  A hand grabbed my shoulder. “Hey!”

  I turned and saw an EMT. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “My friend needs help. Head wound. It’s ok”

  “No, it’s not. You know how many people need help? Put that shit away, son. We’ll get to your friend when we can.”

  I knew he was right; others needed help just as much as Marilyn.

  Fuck 'em. I bolted out of the back, over the top of the EMT, and across the parking lot back to the underpass. I don’t know if I caused it, but I left just in time: a riotous crowd surrounded the ambulance and began the looting.

  I found Marilyn passed out when I got there. I checked the boxes: gauze, some tape, and some pills, aspirin. Great. The tape wasn't gonna go around her head. And aspirin only does so much. I did the only thing I could do: I took off my hoodie and ripped it in two.

  A few folds made it a workable head-wrap. I used the tape to keep it together on Marilyn’s head, with several pieces of gauze over a nasty little two inch scrape over her left ear. The blood made it look worse than it was; the matted hair concealed the sticky blood on the healing wound. Nothing fatal.

  After I had dressed her wound, without her even waking up, I sat back against the wall and thought, shivering as the cold settled itself on my bare chest. My nose felt busted up but wasn’t bleeding, yet I twitched as I touched it. No broken bones otherwise, and a few deep breaths proved the lungs still worked. Head still pounding from the bump. I took a few of aspirin and looked around. We’d need a cover or something. The temperature continued to drop. To my right a large collapsed cardboard box lay on the ground. Sad to say, it looked inviting. Until it moved.

  I approached it, thinking there might be a raccoon or worse, a rat, inside. What I saw confused the hell out of me.

  4.

  The body of a teenage girl lay curled up on the ground.

  In the shadows, with the sun setting, I couldn’t tell if she was alive or not. The cold seemed to bring her around. She shivered, curled up into herself, and looked for the cardboard I just pulled away from her. When she realized it was gone she shot up with a start. I let out a breath.

  I crouched down to her level. “Hey.”

  She looked me up and down, and then wrapped her arms around my neck in a tight squeeze. “Whoa,” I said as I pulled her off. “Do I know you?”

  She pulled away, and in the light that remained I could see her face. Her blond hair.

  “Ashley?” I asked. “You’re the chick from the airport, the one who pulled the guy out.”

  “Mm-hm.” She grabbed me again in a bear hug, shaking and squeezing every drop of protection she could out of me.

  “Where are your parents?” I asked. She turned and looked at the parking garage.

  She pointed. “We were on our way to our car, trying to see if we could get out of there. We got in but the car didn’t start. Didn’t make a sound. My mom told me to go try the parking assistance phone on the wall near the stairwell. The plane hit and threw me down the stairs. I tried to get upstairs to see if my parents were ok, but I saw their car flipped over and sticking out of the departure entrance. So I ran. This place seemed as good as any.”

  I checked her out while she talked. No major cuts, but she winced as she shifted her weight. Had to be sore as hell. And her back was gonna have one helluva bruise to brag about. But otherwise she seemed ok. Amazing.

  I took her back to where Marilyn lay.

  Marilyn moaned as she slid herself up to a sitting position. I built a small fire with the cardboard box and a lighter Marilyn had in the pocket of her black pants. Tiny flames lit the underpass and Ashley and I huddled together around the fire, shivering. “What happened?” Marilyn said, her voice barely a whisper. She touched the hoodie piece wrapped around her head, and then slowly took it off.

  “The parking garage blew up,” I said. “Another airplane.”

  “Oh.” She looked at my bare chest and then at the rag she held in her hand. “Sorry.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I found a T-shirt.” I said through chattering teeth. I pulled out a grubby and smelly gray T-shirt that probably once lived a clean white life, but it was better than nothing.

  "You're actually going to wear that?" Ashley asked.

  Marilyn looked behind me. “Who’s she?”

  “Ashley,” I said, handing Marilyn a couple of aspirin. “Here, for the headache.” She tried to dry-swallow them but couldn’t. She hawked them out.

  “Oh, God, now I feel worse.” Marilyn glanced at Ashley with eyes half shut. “What’s your story?”

  Ashley told her about her parents, and I mentioned how Ashley helped us pull the reverend guy out from underneath the beam.

  “You never told me his name,” Marilyn said.

  “Some reverend guy. Reverend Hill, I think.”

  “Reverend Jesse Hill?” Marilyn asked. “You’ve never heard of him?”

 
“Nope,” I said, adding some balled up paper and trash to the fire.

  Marilyn laughed a little and scooted up towards the fire. “He’s famous. Like, World Famous. My parents listen to him all the time. Called for the end of the world on more than one occasion.”

  “Yeah,” I laughed. “He seemed like a total dick.”

  “He’s mean,” Ashley chimed in. “He said I was going to hell. That this was just the beginning and that we’ll all burn and shit like that.”

  Marilyn’s eyes grew wide. “Wow. My mom would’ve smacked me good for talking like that.”

  “Fuck ‘im,” Ashley said, trying to impress even more.

  “It’s not God. It just happened,” I said. I thought about my dad’s argument about religion, but really, astronomy was his religion. The universe was his god. We got into a few arguments about that, how he couldn’t just dismiss everyone else’s god just because his took a different shape, a different discipline. But hell fire and brimstone and shit like that? My father and mother would never hear of it.

  “Where are your parents?” Marilyn asked me. I looked up, startled, curious how she knew what I was thinking.

  “My dad’s somewhere in the middle of the country, if he’s still alive. He was on a plane to L.A...” I looked at the smoldering flames of the parking garage, the hopelessness of the people surrounding it, watching it burn with no fire trucks, no water pumps, nothing in sight. Was my dad on a plane like that?

  “And your mom?” Ashley asked.

  “Dead. Ten years now.” That was all they were gonna get. I curled up under another cardboard box that I retrieved for myself and closed my eyes. They don’t need to know how she died. I didn’t want to remember. I had to get it out of my head.

  Whenever I thought about her, the nightmares came back. The one that night was the worst one ever.

  To understand the dream you have to understand how my mom died. There are several theories, depending on whom you talk to, and what they want to believe. Ten years ago, doctors found a tumor in her brain. Terminal. Four weeks later, cops found her body down in a valley behind our house. They investigated and filed the usual report: probably fell asleep at the wheel thanks to the meds she was on, she shouldn’t have been driving, whatever.

  But I saw it happen.

  Our backyard, in the mountains of California, sloped down towards a highway below; not too steep, but it had a helluva view of the valley. A road wound below our yard in plain sight. I used to walk to the edge to smoke some weed, hang out, watch cars. It was my getaway spot.

  One afternoon, after calling in sick from school, I stood on the edge watching the occasional traffic zoom by and I saw my mom’s convertible on the highway below. It was a 1964 cherry red Chevy Chevelle ragtop, and she loved it. Drove it all the time. There was no mistaking it.

  I watched her blast through the guard rail over the edge, had to be doing seventy. I watched her stand up in her car, and as the engine-heavy front took a nose dive, she jumped out and took a swan dive and disappeared from my view.

  Hard to do if you’re asleep. But the police never believed me. Said it may have just looked like that, but she wasn’t wearing her seatbelt and fell out.

  Back in Philly, in my dream that first night, I was pushing the car up the incline like that Greek dude pushing the boulder up the hill. I could see my mom’s head in the front seat, her long blond hair tied into a ponytail. The car should’ve weighed more but it didn’t. Still, I nearly gritted my teeth to nubs while sweat blackened my gray T-shirt.

  Towards the curve that she wiped out on, the road leveled off, and pushing the car became easier. The car started going on its own momentum, and I ran to the driver side to tell my mom the news.

  “There,” I said as I jogged up, “see? Not so hard. We’ll have you over the cliff in-” I stopped short. My mom’s eyes were gone, her skin a thin leather covering like rotting tissue paper, her mouth and teeth exposed in a grin that burned into me.

  “Mom?” I said. The car reached the cliff ledge and continued forward, teetering at the midway point. I put my hand on the driver’s side door. “Mom?” I asked again, crying.

  The skeletal thing lunged forward, grabbed me, and yanked me into the car as it tumbled over the side.

  I woke up with a muffled scream, sweat on my brow despite the cold. I knew that I died in that dream. I could feel it, and it felt like a premonition.

  Water dripped on my head. The sun rose as it normally should, but against a strange assortment of colors in the background: purples usually reserved for cloudy mornings, even streams of a pale green luminous light. A fog floated above the ground like some cheesy rock concert or bizarre special effect.

  I listened for birds but didn’t hear any. No traffic either. No planes flying overhead, only voices murmuring and fires crackling drifted about like the fog. An occasional explosion jarred the monotony, but nothing else. It’s hard to describe a world gone still. I'd never experienced absolute, true silence like that before.

  Marilyn slept next to me, and Ashley lay curled up in a ball on my other side. So much for scoring with Marilyn with that little third wheel around.

  I got up. The heat was already climbing. I could feel the slow, cold drip of sweat roll down my back.

  I took out the papers from my back pocket that I had printed out, just as Marilyn stirred awake. I sat down on the ground, reading and trying to ignore the growling in my stomach. Yesterday I had a bowl of cereal for breakfast and a black coffee, plus the cheeseburger at lunch. Today, I’d be lucky to find a piece of fruit.

  Three pages. The first had UC Berkley’s logo on it, the whole Latin phrase under a shield that said something about light and knowledge and wisdom and shit like that. Gave Dad an air of authority. Underneath it was the title: “The Electro-Magnetic Pulse Effects of a Massive Solar Flare”. It had Dad’s contact information, but that was all. Useless.

  The next page read “Abstract”, and listed out all the things that could happen, and they all were happening. Marilyn saw it as she crept over my shoulder. It continued on to the next page, the last one.

  “What’s that?” she asked. “'loss of life support systems, 90 plus percentage fatality rate'…what the hell?”

  “My dad sent it to me, right before all this happened.” I told her about the airport and the email.

  “He knew this was gonna happen?” she asked.

  “Yeah. But he was a little late. Anyway, I dunno what good it’s gonna do now. It’s only two pages, and the deed is done.”

  “Is there anything we can do?” Marilyn asked. I just shook my head.

  Ashley stirred awake with a groan. “What happened?” she asked, eyes half closed.

  “We’re still here,” I said.

  “What’s that?” Ashley now moved over towards me to get a better look.

  “Something my dad left me,” I said as I read down a list of impacts: fires, starvation, hospitals shutting down, riots and looting, financial meltdown. All the money in the world is tied up in electronic records. Wealth suddenly became dictated by the cash you had in your wallet.

  Cheerful stuff.

  He listed something about a magnetosphere, in terms that someone would’ve had to translate for a layman. I understood it though. My dad pointed out all this astronomical crap to me as I grew up, like another class in school. He’s been bugging me to study astronomy since I could remember. Not directly, but in a more passive-aggressive kind of way. “You have such a talent for studying the stars” and “you could really go far with this.” Compliments meant to steer me in his direction, I guess. I ended up majoring in astro-mathematics just to shut him up. And it did come easy.

  “What’s a magnetosphere?” Marilyn asked.

  “It’s a layer of the atmosphere,” I said, trying not to sound too nerdy. “According to this, if it’s hit hard, we’ll see massive fluctuations in temperature, increased solar radiation, and…”

  Holy shit.

  “The Earth will be u
ninhabitable in less than a year.”

  I read the last words on the last page: “Should the worst case scenario occur”. That was it. No instructions, nothing. I could finish it off myself, though. Should the worst case scenario occur…we’re fucked.

  Marilyn looked up at me, “We’ve got a year?”

  “Looks that way.”

  “One fucking year?” I nodded and folded the papers up, putting them away.

  Ashley tried to hold back the tears. “Jesus,” she whispered.

  “There’s gotta be something we can do,” Marilyn said. “Somewhere we can go.”

  Somewhere to go. “My dad said to meet him in Chicago. He said that’d be the best location.”

  “Why?” Marilyn asked.

  “Access to fresh water, easy to find, centrally located for survivors.”

  Marilyn closed her eyes and leaned against the wall. “Fuck.”

  “You ok?" I asked.

  She didn't answer right away. When she looked up at me she seemed to snap herself back to this reality. "Yeah, yeah. I'm all right,” Marilyn said. She smiled, “My dad's a preacher. Always talked about Armageddon when Christ will come again to judge the living and the dead.” She stood up. "Bullshit, I know."

  I wasn't too sure she believed that. “Look," I said, "the only thing that’ll determine the living and the dead will be ourselves. If people want to lie down and die for their God, let them.” I stood up and started walking, Marilyn following behind.

  “Where are you going?” Ashley asked.

  “Chicago. But first I need some supplies.”

  Ashley jumped up. "Don't leave me," she said with a squeal.

  A quick climb up the highway off-ramp and we could see the city of Philadelphia ahead of us, across a river. The buildings stood as if frozen in a painting: no blazes or massive explosions. Small fires sent thin pillars of smoke up on the horizon, but otherwise it could’ve been an ordinary Saturday.