by A. K. Meek
Power in the house shut off. The sirens stopped.
A power failure.
Finishing the first bottle, Johnny cracked the other and guzzled it down. He steadied himself on his couch arm as he got up. He retrieved the rest of the case and went back to the couch. Better drink them while they’re cold.
The hot Georgia day and his dehydration (and no doubt the adrenaline) allowed him to buzz quicker than normal. As he popped another bottle he figured if the apocalypse was happening he could think of no better way to bow out of this lousy world than with a beer in one hand, a remote in the other.
Idly, he clicked the buttons but the television didn’t respond. He knew it was out, but it was worth a try anyway.
Johnny Cassidy took a drink, spilling a portion down his stubbly cheeks and chin. He closed his eyes and prayed that he would already be passed out when the apocalypse came.
And that it wouldn’t hurt.
01.02
LIFE IN A SMALL TOWN
“Wake up!”
Johnny’s eyes fluttered open. He saw blurs. His head throbbed with residual hammer blows and he could feel each thumping heartbeat in his toes. He wasn’t dead, but worse than dead. He was alive but felt like he’d died. This wasn’t the first time he felt this way.
“Get up, I said.”
Clive always had an exceptionally deep voice. In middle school he’d earned the nickname Clive the Loveless Frog. His classmates added “loveless” to Clive because it had become well known through small town gossip his father had skipped town with a nail salon girl.
A shorter than average white guy, he made up for his height deficiency by spending most of his off-duty time in the gym. It didn’t help him much.
“Stop it, Frog!” Johnny flipped over on the couch.
“That’s deputy to you.”
“Shut up.” Johnny wanted to say more, but each syllable was a nail for the hammer in his temples.
The sound of his daughters laughing made him decide to sit up, despite his body’s unwillingness.
Clive had the girls sitting at the kitchenette. They were eating jelly on bread. He had moved over to the counter, munching on his own jelly sandwich.
His deputy uniform wasn’t immaculately pressed like he was known for. In fact, he looked like he had been on an all-night binge or hadn’t slept for a week. That wasn’t like him at all.
“What time is it?” Johnny rubbed his hair, which also hurt. “What’s going on?”
“What’s going on?” Clive mocked him in his best impersonation, paying particular attention to sound extra stupid. “How long you been out? Good thing the sheriff sent me to find you.” He finished his sandwich and tussled Annie’s hair. She giggled as she pulled away. “He wants you at the station.”
The spinning room and the fact Johnny didn’t remember the last several hours left him disoriented. “What…” was all he managed to get out.
“A bunch of bad stuff happened. The power’s out now.” Clive turned to the girls and his voice lost its condescending edge. “Do you want to go for a ride on a horse?”
The girls, at first skeptical, eyed each other for validation they heard him correctly. They smiled and nodded. Tossing their breakfast aside they wiped their hands on their dresses.
If the room wasn’t bouncing Johnny would’ve stood to protest. Instead he propped himself on his elbow. “A horse? What are you talking about?”
Clive ignored him. After the girls found their shoes and slipped them on he led them to the front door. “Once you sober up get to the station.” The door closed.
The incredible hangover killed any last remnants of parental concern Johnny might have had tucked away. It was washed away with beer and the half bottle of Jack he found in his bathroom.
Another forty minutes and his body finally cooperated enough for him to stand. He peeled himself off his couch and made his way to the bathroom. Water splashed on his face. Finding his jean jacket over the back of a chair, he fished his cell phone from the pocket. Mashing buttons didn’t make it respond.
He grabbed a half-eaten piece of bread and devoured it as he stepped out the door.
Dark clouds were gathering to the north and east, just above the horizon, keeping the sun partly hidden. They filtered daytime into a purply-pink surreal. At first, he thought it was twilight. But he wasn’t sure of the time. Now that he thought about it, as the cobwebs of drunkenness slowly evaporated, he wasn’t sure if this was even the same day. Some internal clock told him he had slept more than just the day away. Maybe he slept two.
Overhead, contrails scrawled across the sky. They crisscrossed, several making sweeping arcs. They were all bathed in purple and for a moment Johnny imagined a gigantic purple octopus had wrapped itself around the world. That would definitely be an apocalypse-worthy scenario.
The events that had unfolded earlier were pushed to the part of the mind that holds unreliable distant memories. When he stumbled from the house he second-guessed what had happened. But with the mysterious trails etched in the sky, the chaos that had overrun the town, that had temporarily seized him so that he wanted to run inside the courthouse to escape, came flooding back as not a distant, almost forgotten memory, but as a new reality. A reality that would be better left as a dream. At least you can wake from a dream.
His blood ran cold in the muggy day, which was good because it helped sober him. He needed to get to his brother. He would know what had happened.
Setting out on foot, which he was used to since the Trans Am he bought a year ago had never run, Johnny headed the few blocks down and over to the sheriff’s office.
Along the way, he noticed the quiet. A couple of people were outside, but they were preoccupied. They ignored him and watched the sky. He didn’t hear any cars. No TVs, no booming stereos, either. Unnaturally quiet. No kids were out playing.
He picked up his step, realizing he’d missed something big.
As he neared town, more people were out, wandering the streets. They all had the same preoccupied look.
The cars that had made a mad dash for the courthouse still rested where their owners had left them. Many had jumped curbs and slammed into parking meters. Now, they were all two thousand pound lawn ornaments next to toppled, sun-faded flamingoes and grumpy garden gnomes.
Five men and two women were drifting from car to car, pushing what they could off the street. One motioned for Johnny, no doubt to come help. He acted like he didn’t see him. Instead, he sped up his walk but not enough to make it seem like he was trying to get away. Casual, but with purpose. He rounded a corner, out of sight.
If he remembered correctly, which was difficult because of his headache, people were screaming about bombs. So far, he hadn’t seen any evidence of that, which led to the only logical conclusion that everyone was going insane. And that was saying a lot since he was typically the drunk one.
Last week he swore the pecan trees across the street had come alive and were arguing outside his bedroom window. They were fighting over which one was going to eat him. When he awakened Annie to run next door to fetch an axe, she reminded him he fell asleep watching Lord of the Rings. He probably dreamed of Ents. No one was around to see him blush from reason number five thousand why he sucked as a parent.
On Sage street, about halfway down, between the local YMCA and an overgrown lot, sat the Bartel sheriff’s office, which used to be a nail salon.
The Health Department shut down the old office because of asbestos. Bartel’s city council, always trying to not bust their small-town budget, decided they could save money by leasing space instead of investing in asbestos remediation or a new building altogether.
The Dragon Lady Nail Salon, abandoned since Trish skipped town with Clive’s father, became bank property because of the mountain of unpaid bills and back rent. The city got a good deal on the lease.
One cruiser was parked in front. It had seen better days. As Johnny made his way to the door he thought he heard a horse sneeze. He went insid
e.
Inside was a bustle of activity. Three deputies talked with several people. Clive was one of them.
The civilians scribbled on clipboards, pausing every so often to relay a critical piece of knowledge to the deputies that simply couldn’t be contained in writing.
LaTonya Alaka, a black deputy who dwarfed Clive and was twice as strong, spotted Johnny from across the room. She stood from where she was kneeling at a card table, entertaining Annie and Abby.
She swaggered over to him, her hips resisting being defined by her uniform. She was a big girl naturally, even more so since she took up weightlifting in high school. Johnny found out her God-given strength way back in third grade, when he called her a stupid black girl. She gave him his first of many elementary school beatings.
“Well look who decided to show up.” She looked him up and down with a healthy dose of disgust. “You’re looking in fine shape, like always.”
Johnny ignored her attitude, which he’d learned to do long ago. He could only take her in small doses. “Where’s Kurt?”
“Your daughters are fine, by the way,” she continued, not caring to mask her disdain for him in any way. She motioned at them with her head.
“I see them. Thanks for pointing them out to me,” he replied with no emotion. As he started to the table his daughters looked up at him and gave him small waves. “What are you drawing?” He bent over the table.
One paper showed a house. Fluffy clouds and a smiling sun. Large, black bombs were raining from the sky.
Annie, his oldest, gave him a quizzical stare. “Daddy, they say we’re gonna die,” she said, pointing to a couple sitting across the room. “Is that true?”
Immediately, LaTonya put her arm around Annie’s shoulder and gave her a light squeeze. “Of course not, baby. They’re just scared.”
“Yeah, just scared.” Johnny parroted LaTonya’s words.
He moved to the door at the back of the room that still reeked of acetone and nail polish. A sign on it read: KURT CASSIDY, SHERIFF. Johnny didn’t knock before he entered his brother’s office.
Kurt beat Johnny out of the womb by about two minutes, but that might as well have translated to twenty years. Johnny would always be the “little” brother. You could swap “little” for “second,” “insignificant,” “leftover,” or “lesser.” Whichever you preferred.
Johnny’s older brother sat behind his desk rifling through papers that looked to have been pulled from a trash can. He was as disheveled as the papers, one more person that appeared to have partied through the night. But Johnny knew Kurt was too perfect to drink.
Kurt ran his hand through his hair, already thinning at his temples. He tossed the papers aside, then looked up.
“Well,” he said, his voice not unlike Johnny’s, a little thin, maybe even more exhausted. “Look who slept through the end of the world.”
Johnny couldn’t say otherwise. He figured the best thing to do was ignore it. “What’s going on around here?”
Kurt leaned back in his chair and started to say something, but paused, reflected for a moment. He shook his head in response to some internal monologue. “This.” He slung the stack of papers onto the other stacks. “We were bombed,” he said.
The papers were incident reports, mostly phone calls and bits of information scratched onto whatever was nearby. Too important to not go undocumented.
“Bombed? We weren’t bombed.”
“Not Bartel. Our country. Haven.”
“Haven…” Johnny said. Haven was a just a hair bigger than Bartel, six miles away. A tiny town in middle Georgia, a blip of nothing on a map. Why would anyone want to bomb that bit of nothing?
Kurt pushed away from his desk and stood. He stretched and rubbed his back. “Yesterday I sent half my guys there once I heard it over the radio. I haven’t heard from them since. And with this power out—”
“Is that the bombing?” Johnny’s mind worked overtime to make sense of it all.
“I talked with Nathan at Georgia Power. He doesn’t know what knocked it offline.”
“What about the mayor?”
Kurt chuckled.
Johnny had heard that chuckle his whole life—just one of Kurt’s many condescending affectations. “She knows less than me. I’ve been keeping her updated.”
He’d seen his brother in plenty of situations. Kurt wasn’t sheriff by chance. Many people depended on his judgment and levelheadedness, including Johnny.
Kurt opened his window shade. The window overlooked the area behind the building, a small yard with overgrown weeds. Two horses idled in the grass, nipping tall stalks in between casual head swings. After a minute, Kurt spoke, breaking the heavy silence.
“You know, I can’t sit here and let whatever’s happening to our country happen. Before we lost power, we heard some big cities got nuked.”
“You mean like nuclear? Russia nuclear war nuked?”
Kurt shrugged. “As far as we know. I sent my deputies to Haven, into the unknown. I can’t sit here another minute and wonder what happened to my guys.” He paused, like deep contemplation had risen to surface as emotion. “Whether they’re dead or alive.” His voice was grim.
People flocked to Kurt for a reason. He was the guy you knew you could count on, the one to stop everything to save a stranded kitten from a tree or to find a warm bed for a complete stranger. He saved the best he had to offer as a caring human for any person other than his brother. That didn’t help the torrid relationship the two brothers shared.
“I’ve got to find my men,” Kurt said, more for himself than Johnny.
“You don’t have a car.”
Tapping the window, Kurt said, “I don’t need a car; I’ve got horsepower.” He grabbed his drill sergeant-style hat and burst from the office. “Clive, grab a couple of scatterguns. We’re going to Haven. LaTonya, you got those interviews done?”
“Working on it, boss, but…” she looked around the room, “you’re not leaving me with all this, are you?” She spread her arms, to show this being the unfolding chaos in the sheriff’s office.
Kurt nodded. “Yep. I want these people screened and ready for deputizing by the time I get back. Plus, if something goes sideways out there,” he spread his arms wide, the same way LaTonya had done, “all this is yours. You’ll be sheriff.”
Clive returned from the gun vault with a couple of shotguns and a backpack slung over one shoulder.
“What should I do?” Johnny asked.
Kurt said, “I had Clive fetch your girls so I’d know my nieces were safe. I expect things are going to get real bad real soon. Stay out of the way and don’t cause any problems. I gave LaTonya orders to shoot you if you get out of hand.”
Bartel’s sheriff and his deputy rushed from the office and gathered the horses in the backyard, the ones they had borrowed from a local ranch after the power to the town had been knocked out.
Johnny looked to LaTonya. She looked back at him, then smiled. She tapped the grip of her service revolver with one deep dragon lady fingernail before giving him a wink with her ridiculously fake eyelashes.
He wasn’t so sure she wouldn’t shoot him on the spot, if the mood struck her right.
01.03
DEATH’S ROAD
The lawmen rode two of old man Stewart’s finest American Quarter Horses along the shoulder of Highway 127, the main artery connecting Bartel to Haven.
Calliope and Juno hadn’t been used for “real” work in at least three years. They had done their time on the ranch and were supposed to be enjoying their retirement. Nothing more than an occasional ride, spending their days strolling around pastureland.
They snorted and flexed with exertion. Their riders still weren’t settled into the saddles. The horses found themselves fighting against the resistance of unintentional opposition. It didn’t take long, though, for the riders to get into a somewhat comfortable motion.
They only had to go three miles before they got an idea of what happened to Haven.
A massive chunk had been gouged from the road, leaving a wide crater. Asphalt and overturned earth had been spread wide. An SUV appeared to have been near the blast and was resting on its side.
“What in the…” Clive said, disbelief in his voice. “Looks like a bomb.”
They reined in their horses and dismounted.
Kurt kneeled at the windshield of the overturned SUV, careful to avoid the glass that had been punched out by the passenger’s head. A stringy-haired blonde girl from. A high schooler, no doubt. Her father, the one behind the wheel, didn’t make it out either. A fleeting image of Kurt’s own son flashed through his mind, making him turn away.
When he became sheriff five years ago, his days had mostly consisted of reviewing policy, attending city leader events, or visiting area schools, telling kids to just say no to bullying. It had been a while since he patrolled, since he’d witnessed the horrible things that can happen to the human body.
He’d seen hundreds of dead people, but not for a while. This took him by surprise. On another level, the feelings of revulsion were welcome. It meant he still cared, that he was still human.
“Hey boss,” Clive’s voice came from the other side of the SUV. “Come here.”
Kurt wiped an eye. He circled around the SUV to stand next to his deputy.
In the fading daylight, Highway 127 stretched away from them. Many more craters pocked the road and surrounding countryside, large scoops of earth blasted away. Cars had been indiscriminately tossed about, many still smoking from fire. It was a highway of death.
Clive scratched his head. “Who did this? Do you think Robins Air Base did this? A training accident?”