The Long Summer

by Rod Rayborne

  She had felt lucky the day she was hired at the Arrow Superstore because she didn't have a car and the store was within walking distance of her little apartment, squatting in the Hispanic district on the ocean side of the I10. Some days she even walked home for lunch, her anti-social days, she said to herself. If she had a car, she would have eaten lunch there rather than sit in the overly bright upstairs break room, listening to mean-spirited gossip and watching the clock tick her lunch and her life away faster than any clock had a right to.

  Now she ran as fast as her five foot three frame would take her. As she did, her heart sank, destruction turning her neighborhood into something she hardly recognized. Before she even reached her apartment, her tears had created alleys of clean skin through the filth on her face and made navigating the broken hillocks the road had become without tripping, almost impossible. The smoke made that even harder.

  She saw the apartment when she turned the corner and seeing, she collapsed where she stood, falling to her knees, wailing, her arms covering her head. She sobbed, her body wracked with grief, fingers drawing blood where her nails pierced her palms. There she sat in the street until she fell over, exhausted. Then she slept.

  When Sofia awoke, the sky was gone. She found herself face down on the asphalt road. It was dark, almost too dark to see where she was, what was around her. But the sky was beginning to flare, casting a weird flickering orange glow over the landscape below. When it did, she could momentarily see jumbles of concrete and upended trees, cars and trucks askew, resting in piles. Some distance away she heard water splashing. In the distance she thought she saw sparks falling from the sky, like rain. The apartment was somewhere nearby, but in the gloom and smoke she didn't know where. All she could make out was a jagged landscape, nothing particularly recognizable.

  She sat up and winced in pain. The bruises she had acquired some hours before were beginning to make themselves known in a big way. She stood and felt for broken bones or other serious injuries. She was surprised to discover nothing more than the few bumps and bruises.

  She looked around, her heart pounding. She could feel the pulsing in her throat. God, what had happened? Her hands were shaking and she noticed seconds later, her teeth were chattering as though it were a frigid winter morning instead of the very pit of Hell. Except that it wasn't cold.

  It was hot, very hot and bound to get hotter she knew, looking at the sky. Sweat ran beneath her clothes in torrid washes that did nothing to cool her down. Absently, she yanked off her soiled shirt with it's name tag and dropped it at her feet.

  She turned from the place where the apartment once stood, no point in looking for it further. Mara, her sister, was gone. Everyone was gone. She wasn't going to dig for the proof. She turned and walked the distance back to the store, pushing her way back inside. Those whom she'd heard moaning hours before were still now, the building quiet.

  She emerged a half hour later, a large pack strapped to her slender body. Equipped with an assortment of vending machine junk food and soda, she stepped back out onto South La Cienega to consider her options.

  Chapter Seven

  N yles staggered over some bit of casing and seared cushion. Not looking too closely, he bent to vomit into a white hat lying upside down in a pile of twisted metal. When he had finished, his eyes focused and he saw that the hat was the one worn by General Tompkins of the Navy. Frowning, he tipped the hat over, spilling the putrid contents out onto a patch of grass beneath. Standing drunkenly, he shook his head to clear some of the fog, wiping his mouth across his right sleeve. Then grabbing a seat ejected from the plane as it was breaking up to steady himself, not looking to closely to see who was still sitting in it, he glanced around.

  The plane was a crushed puzzle of scorched and twisted 747 lazily spread out over a wide stretch of flat land where it had joylessly bounced to a stop after touching down in the gloom somewhere far behind. A hundred miles away was the SAC base in Omaha, Strategic Air Command, where they'd lifted off in a hurry following the news of the imminent strike.

  The last thing he could remember, the President's cabin had descended into a massive free for all of shouting and fist waving following his final order. At that point, Nyles had been in a somewhat heated conversation with the Director of Army Intelligence, Geoff Bradford, about the perfect accuracy of his conclusions. The general consensus in the room was that he was either a melodramatic idiot or a traitor working in conjunction with the enemy as a spy. A mole who'd gotten close to McNair with the aid of other White House moles to gain his trust and circumvent US retaliation for an unprovoked attack with a "tissue of lies". If not for the intervention of the President, the .45 Bradford had roughly placed to Nyles's forehead would have eviscerated several layers of his prefrontal cortex in very short order.

  The next thing he knew, he was staggering from the plane. How he had managed to survive when so many others now decorated more than a mile of sweet Nebraska countryside (he hadn't even been seated, come to that) threatened to shake his lack of faith in miracles.

  He turned from the scattering of fires that had followed the trail of the skipping plane to stare at the fires that engulfed it. Groaning, he walked back to the destruction and began the horrifying search for the living amongst the dead.

  He stumbled through the wreckage of the plane, the darkness hampering his efforts to distinguish between those who needed his help and those who didn't. It took him several hours to walk around the broken remains of Air Force One, spread as it was over a distance of empty fields, corn and rye gone to seed. He found uniformed men and women, some still belted into their seats, some not, some partly. A few had been disemboweled by panels or consoles that had come loose upon impact, others were missing heads or other parts of their bodies deftly sliced from them when a wing had torn loose from the plane, severing the fuselage like a can of beans beneath an axe.

  Nyles walked nearly full circle but found amongst the bodies no other living soul. Well, not quite, None that he could do anything for, at least. Then as he rounded the nose cone of the plane, he heard a sound like breathing, low and halting. He ran towards the noise, feeling around in the darkness until he found a twisted form, wet and yielding, lying in the grass. He was on his back, his neck twisted at an impossible angle. Like Nyles, he had not been in a seat.

  Nyles leaned close to the man, taking one of his hands in his own, knowing that the gesture would likely not be felt. He looked at him sadly, wishing he could do something to ease the man's suffering.

  "Mr. President, is there anything I can do for you, Sir?"

  The President sighed, tried to turn his head to look at Nyles, gave up and turned his eyes only. Nyles felt one of the hands slowly squeeze his own and he gasped.

  "I'm so sorry, Sir. I'm so sorry!" Hot tears ran down Nyles's cheeks, wetting the face beneath him.

  "Where...are...we?"

  "In Nebraska, Sir, in a corn field, I think. I can't be sure."

  "The others. The crew..."

  Nyles looked up for a moment. Near him, the decapitated body of a woman, a Navy Seal, rested quietly in the tall grass. The pretty blond who'd been standing near the President at the time.

  "Well, Sir. They're well."

  A tiny smile appeared in McNair's eyes.

  "And the country..."

  "It's well too, Sir. We dodged the bullet. The world is safe thanks to you. Thank you, Sir. You're a good man. A good man."

  "Nyles..."

  A single tear ran down Robert McNair's face. Then gently his hand grew soft.

  Nyles watched him a moment longer then leaned back and stared out into the darkness.

  Chapter Eight

  A gain Gordon had no idea what time it was when he awoke. It was lighter outside than it had been when he passed out, but only just. Yet he felt more refreshed than he thought he should under the circumstances. He sat up, empty beer cans rolling away from him and stared at the scene outside. His temples pulsed slightly, but no more than usual after one of
his all nighters.

  Outside, nothing moved at all except for a thin swirl of smoke on the street. A sound like falling pebbles, what had awakened him, chattered intermittently on the roof of the store, only accentuating the quiet. Somewhere far away he heard a distant tinkling of falling glass.

  He stood and walked towards the front of the store, making his way around the counter to gather a few plastic bags. As he rounded the island, he tripped on something soft and heavy in his path and grabbed the counter to steady himself. He didn't need look to know that he had stumbled over a body, maybe a store employee who had fallen when the bomb dropped, for such he supposed could be the only cause of a blast of this magnitude. The smell of the body assured him that some time had passed since he had entered the store. He had slept well.

  Feeling unaccountably guilty, he stepped over the inert shape and felt around in one of the cubbies for the bags. Finding them, he pulled a handful from the roll and returned to the main floor.

  He gathered up several convenience store sized bags of food items, tossing a few candy bars into the mix and then moved back to the drink aisle. He had just filled his second bag with small bottles of water, juice and soda when his attention was pulled outside by what he at first thought was the start of a heavy rain. The light pebbly sound had become a loud pattering that rattled the building. It soon grew in volume to a thunderous cacophony that sounded like it might bring the ceiling down.

  It was the loudest natural phenomena Gordon had ever heard. He clapped his hands over his ears, staring transfixed through the shattered windows at the strangest scene he had ever witnessed. First the pebbles, then rocks, broken chunks of asphalt and concrete and an endless assortment of other precipitate fell from above in a thunderous chorus that nearly deafened him.

  He stumbled to the front of the store staring in disbelief. Quickly the noise reached an explosive volume as heavier and heavier things rained down. Bodies fell then, carcasses of birds, fish; even human remains in various states of decay, splattering the ground along with the rest.

  Gordon guessed immediately what had happened. When the bomb had gone off, the explosion had thrown everything not attached to the ground, and even some things that were, into the sky. The storms kept them there but as the winds died down, gravity took over. He was only now witnessing the culmination of that fact.

  Fearful that the battered roof of the convenience store would soon collapse, Gordon frantically looked about for someplace safer to ride out the event. Across the street was a tall office building, perhaps twenty stories high or more. Gordon grabbed the bags at his feet and raced out into the tumult, expecting to be brained at any moment. Immediately he did so, he was pelted with a storm of sand and small pebbles. One well-aimed stone he knew would end him as surely as a bullet.

  He ran through the gauntlet of trash, jumping here and there to avoid being skewered by metal siding, sliced by a plate glass window or crushed by chunks of concrete. He was leaping the sidewalk at the opposite corner when a small car suddenly slammed down directly in front of him and he spun to the left on one heel, missing the vehicle by inches.

  Running, he jumped through the nearest empty window frame of the skyscraper not stopping until he was deep within the cavernous lobby, then turning, watched in awe as enormous chunks of material continued to slam down in explosive washes. The convenience store was taking a monstrous beating and yet somehow continued to stand, albeit at an awkward tilt, it's roof piled high with a variety of fallen junk. Suddenly as he watched, one wall buckled and the store fell in a savage slow motion collapse.

  Above him Gordon could hear muffled crashes sounding from high above, the building vibrating with each impact. Dropping his bags where he stood, he sat on the floor, his eyes shut, hands covering his ears. He wondered how long the trash storm would continue.

  Some minutes later the storm abated almost as suddenly as it had begun. He hoped the worst was over. Everywhere he looked was seeming mountains of junk.

  Gordon walked to an empty window, standing near the outside edge of the building and looked up. It was lighter out now, the sky somehow less heavy though not clear by any means. The wind had stopped as well. An eerie silence descended, though he could still hear the shusss of fine dust drifting downwards, melting into a gooey mush on the wet streets below.

  Bodies, many now crushed by the bizarre storm, were scattered everywhere. Bodies that had been easier to ignore when it had been darker. That the people lying about had been caught by the blast as unawares as had he, was obvious by the packages and other goods that were spread around them where they had fallen. No survival gear this, rummaging through the oversized bags he found shoes and bath towels, sun glasses, clothing and dish sets, some still neatly sealed in now scorched store packaging.

  Why, he wondered, had he lived when so many others had not? Had he just happened, by some freak of happenstance, to be in some unlikely sweet spot, an eye of the nuclear storm when the blast struck? He could only guess.

  Deciding that the junk storm had subsided, Gordon walked north and then east, his own bags in hand. He found the going more difficult in places because of the residua scattered about pell-mell where it had fallen.

  He walked past blocks of ominously dark houses, many fallen, silent and foreboding. In none of them could he see or hear any remnant of life, no dog barking, not even the feeble glow of a candle.

  Every vehicle he passed was sitting on its rims, the rubber either entirely missing, nothing more than black stains on concrete driveways. Too, every fire blasted car had lost much or all of its paint, looking old and rusted as though they had been sitting in overgrown fields through decades of harsh weather.

  Here was quiet, a silence so complete it shook his sense of reality. Only the terrifying sounds of his own steps echoing against empty houses assured him that he was still alive in a vast Southern California cemetery. Having lived his entire life in one part of Los Angeles or other, he had never imagined that the mere absence of noise could feel so oppressive, so viscerally palpable. Now, only his shoes on pavement, his breathing and the frightened beating of his heart sounded in his ears.

  Trees, those still standing, loomed large around him like phantom skeletons, silhouetted against the lesser darkness from the shifting smoke above. As he walked, Gordon bypassed several apartments that were still ablaze in one area, reeking of burnt plastics and scorched carpeting, walking around whole blocks enveloped in flames pushing him far from his path in others. When he finally found himself turning onto Third Avenue, the broad street lay as quiet as a country road on a moonless night and half as dark, stretching far ahead in a silent boulevard of rubble.

  Gordon made his way east through the street crowded with burnt and twisted vehicles standing mute, quiet testimony to the force of the blast. From some, smoke still issued, adding to the acrid odor already in the air. The rag he used to breathe through he'd held in place by pulling the corners and tying them behind his head. Though it helped to filter the smoke somewhat, the smell of burnt things passed easily through the loose cotton weave.

  After he had walked for an hour or so, he found a planter off the sidewalk and dropped the bags of food he had been carrying on the dried grass beneath the charred skeleton of a Magnolia tree. He looked up into its branches. With few exceptions, most of the trees he saw bore not so much as a single leaf.

  He flexed his sore fingers a few times to bring back the feeling the heavy plastic bags had numbed. Then, untying the bottom half of the mask, he found a box of Nilla wafers in one bag and finished off his breakfast with a quart of sour milk. With his first swallow it occurred to him with a sinking feeling that refrigerated goods were now a thing of the past, at least in the hothouse Los Angeles had become.

  When he began to heave some minutes later, spewing out a sour spray of cottage cheese and cookie crumbs, he threw away the only other perishable he taken from the store, a warm package of hotdogs. He supposed that they might still be ok to consume, being made princip
ally of preservatives, but decided it wasn't worth the risk. It appeared canned foods would be his only entrées for the foreseeable future.

  With that depressing thought in mind, he began his trek once more, looking out for an army/navy surplus, sporting goods, or general department store. A backpack seemed a good item to look for first, something sturdy enough to hold what food and drink he might find that hadn't already spoiled in the heat. Maybe a gas mask of some kind, if they still make such things for civilians, he thought.

  Made, he corrected. He shook off the thought, forcing himself to believe that this event was a localized one. An accident of tremendous proportions. Surely no sane person or government, threats aside, could perform a barbaric act of this magnitude deliberately. No, this had to be local and unintentional. Surely somewhere there must be a boundary to this nightmare, he told himself. He had only to live long enough to find it.

  He added a compass to his mental shopping list and wiping sweat from his brow with a damp forearm, supposed that the pack he chose would have to be spacious enough to carry plenty of water. Something light but still ample enough to hold sufficient nutrition to get him through a couple of days at a time. Maybe some freeze dried foods and a cook stove as well. Fuel and matches. An extra change of clothing. Another pair of shoes maybe.

  He had the nagging feeling that he was forgetting something, but try as he might, he couldn't imagine what it might be. The chill that ran up his body at the thought gave him pause.

  Food, drink, clothing and determination. There was a sporting goods on Sawyer, he remembered. That would be his first stop he decided, shifting the heavy bags in his hands.

  He had walked another mile when something brought him to an abrupt stop as he neared the twenty story Citibank on the corner of Aspen and Third. Somewhere perhaps a block away, he heard a thrumming, a rush of limbs rising and falling. Stopping, he listened intently. Coming his way.