Half Past One
By: Jennifer Douwes
Published By:
Copyright 2012 Jennifer Douwes
This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously.
It was half past one, July 2nd, 2014 when everything that I knew changed. We live on Whidbey Island, just North of the quaint little town of Oak Harbor, right off of Highway 20.
Or at least, we used to.
That day wasn’t normal for us, by any sense of the word. Joan and Rock were visiting from Seattle, and we were sitting around the kiddy pool we had purchased on the fly, knowing a child was coming to visit and also the fact that we had no toys for such an occurrence.
There we sat, drinks in hand, watching their three-year-old daughter splash and play. It was only sixty-seven out, but from the looks of it, kids have no sense of cold, only boredom.
Her dark blonde curls were bouncing as she splashed the water about, shrieking each time some of the water would land on her thread bare one-piece bathing suit, rendering it almost flesh colored.
We sat about with smiles painted on our faces. Tad and I were almost physically restraining ourselves from checking email, or turning the news on to catch up on sport scores and world events. Instead, we slammed another martini, gluing a look of contentment and joy on our faces. Joan and Rock had been at our house for two days now, and we were just about done being hosts at this point. They were due to leave in a mere two hours.
I had just sat down after refilling glasses, my own topped off and re-topped off, and was chewing on an olive when the air around me became charged. That’s the only way I can explain it. It was a physical as well as tactile change - the air felt heavier, my eyes felt like they were being pushed into my skull - an external migraine if ever I felt one.
The baby, her name is Kara, started to cry, pulling everyone’s attention to her. She was pressing her tiny hands balled up into fists to her eyes, her cries becoming more and more shrill as her mom ran to her. We just sat and watched as the horror unfolded before us.
The air was taking on a bleached-out appearance and everything around us seemed to be losing color rapidly. Kind of like an old faded photograph, so grainy you can barely make out the details.
Pressure was not only forcing in my eye’s but my eardrums were humming with a mix of a high pitched rushing sound and an odd absence of noise, almost a backwards scream. Fear began its evil dance in my heart when it was clear that this wasn’t an episode caused by my mixing happy pills with a martini again. No, this was real.
I looked around at my husband and friends, seeing the panic on their faces, witnessing Joan leaning down on her knee, pressing her daughter to her chest, tears falling from their bunched up eyes, faces reddened from effort now. But I could hear nothing.
And then, it stopped, and I could hear again, yet there was nothing there for my ears to discern. Everything was silent. No birds. No cars going by. No jets from the Naval station going overhead, running maneuvers. I rubbed my ears, conscious of the feeling that I was wearing earplugs only none were there.
Kara sniffed, pulling her hands away from her eyes, which were covered in blood, rings of which surrounded her eyes, making her look like a miniature deranged clown. But she had stopped crying, for which we were all grateful.
Everyone stood up and looked around, as the color returned to everything around us, our own eyes blood shot and burning from something still heavy in the air.
“What just happened?” Rock asked, blood trickling down from the corner of one eye, forming a line that divided his face almost comically. His voice came to me from far away - like words through the tin can phones we spoke in as children. He walked over to his wife who’s face had relaxed, and looked around, then crouched to pick up his daughter. Still the air was heavy, absent of normal sounds.
“You have blood on your face,” Tad said, pointing to the line. He turned to me, the air carrying his words at last at normal volume, “Do I?”
The whites of his eyes were bright red, dripping tears of blood slowly down his cheeks. I nodded, swiping my fingers beneath my eye, pulling them away covered in blood. Somehow, I had known it would be there.
“We all have it. Can everyone see okay?” I was wondering how much blood you had to lose before you lost your eyesight, picturing the sack that is our eyeball deflating as the fluid that filled it leaked from it.
“I can,” Joan offered, looking around at everything, seemingly taking in the darker, richer colors that had somehow intensified over the past five minutes. She stood and rubbed her belly. Baby number two was due in mere weeks. Everyone, including little Kara mumbled versions of the same.
Apparently, you had to lose more blood than that to lose your sight.
With stiff joints and ringing ears we marched inside machine like, the five of us spreading out to different areas in the house, each of us in our own heads.
Tad clicked the button on the TV remote, attempting to turn the TV on, but nothing happened. Joan walked away from us to the bathroom just off of the kitchen and flicked the light switch, but the light didn’t turn on. Kara went to her toy in the hallway, and began to shove down the large brightly colored buttons but no sound or light emitted from the toy.
I watched all of this, unsurprised by the events unfolding before me. Hadn’t my dad always said Armageddon would someday come? Hadn’t he always told me that when it did, I’d be left here in hell? It took me awhile, of wandering through the house before the flaw in this belief surfaced. My heart knew that if this were truly the second coming that tiny Kara wouldn’t have been left behind.
God loves all the children in the world. The lyrics of the old bible school song floated through my head. This wasn’t Armageddon. What was it then? What had happened?
A spark had been lit in my brain and I was tearing apart the closets looking for a radio, any radio. Hats and baseball gloves and camping equipment came crashing to the ground as I tore through our belongings. Finally, I found an old boom box. I checked it for batteries, only to find the battery compartment dripping with acidic goo. The switch didn’t work either.
Rock came running in from outside, a radio held close to his ear. “Where did you find that?” I asked, walking quickly to his side.
“The RV,” he said, holding it out to show us. It was a wind up job, a rectangular and small black box; all business. He turned up the volume.
We walked as one to the living room, save for Kara who had lay down on her side on the floor and closed her eyes. Rock set the radio down on the coffee table in the center of the room. He was turning the dial slowly, looking for an emergency response or some kind of news.
Finally, we caught a male voice mid-sentence. “...want to stay inside, close all of your windows and doors. Again, this is an emergency message. What appears to be an atomic bomb has been dropped on Whidbey Island’s Navel Station. The situation is dire. If you were lucky enough to survive this attack, please go inside, wherever you are. If you are at home you will want to stay inside...”
I turned around and walked to my stainless steal and black slate designer kitchen, realizing that it was looping, repeating the same information over and over. For lack of something better to do I racked my brain for the rule about how fast food spoiled. Coming up with nothing except a vague recollection of my dad telling me we only had 12 hours ‘til the food spoiled in a refrigerator and/or freezer once the power has gone out, I started pulling out everything that had to be eaten. Which was everything, and began washing, cutting up, seasoning.
In a few minutes one by one the rest joined me, and without question, grabbed an apron to help.
Silently we worked as a unit, doing the only normal thing we could think of.
The report had told us not to go outside, but there was no other place to cook the food being the oven and stove weren’t working. We trickled out the door, all of our arms full, to the barbecue and started prepping the coals.
I can remember marveling at the odd color the flame turned when Tad scratched a match over the side of the box. The coals lit almost explosively at first, even without lighter fluid, making the women retreat and the men draw closer in interest. “Beautiful,” was murmured from cold stiff lips.
The cooking could really only be done by one person, so Rock was manning the grill, but the rest of us stood around the red circular Weber grill, watching with intense scrutiny.
Manual labor seemed to loosen up our frozen minds and bodies, and in no time we were making small talk. More like mini talk, but at least we were functioning, and not in a panic anymore.
The food cooked, and it seemed only natural for us to pull up chairs in the odd gray air and eat outside. Nobody questioned why we were all avoiding the truth of the matter. Why we were ignoring the radio’s proclamation for all to stay inside. Nor did anybody say a word when the child came outside to join us from her resting place in the hallway and laid down on one of the cushioned lounge chairs, curled up in the fetal position on her side, thumb in mouth, and went to sleep.
The fog that seemed to have fallen over our end of the world was so thick it permeated our brains, making everything that much harder to think through, weighed down the panic to the point of painting it black, and fading into the background.
We were in shock, all of us, reverting to survival mode out of shear instinct.
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