And then, from upstairs: An ear-splitting wail.
A child is screaming.
Alice jumps. Mark drops the gun.
Cries from the upstairs bathroom. “Heeeelp me!! It’s not my fault! Where am I?! I want to go home! I’m bleeding!”
For a moment the family is frozen in shock. Then Mark bolts up the stairs.
The bathroom door is locked from the inside. The child’s cries are becoming more frantic and hysterical. “I’m dyyyyyying!” Mark batters the door with his shoulder. Forces it open.
The bathroom is empty. Yet the child’s cries continue.
Mark tears open the shower curtain: nothing. He’s dumfounded, turning in circles, trying to locate the child’s screams. He dumps the wastebasket into the sink, and there he finds it: Amidst the tissues, tampons and garbage is a small iPod and speaker from which the cries are coming.
Mark tries to turn it off, then yanks the wire from the speaker. “What the fuck?”
Burno is driving as the Sun peeks over the horizon. Lasers still light the sky, spelling out the computer error of the world’s last defense.
Down the road, lights are flashing.
But Debbie… It’s not fair… You’re not being fair to me… How do you think I feel? All alone up here?
Alone? What about the other colonists? Sure they’re all dudes, Jones, but desperate times… Wink, wink…
The lights, closer now. And the sounds of sirens.
Burno eases on the gas, as the military escort flies by. Humvees and Cargo trucks. And between them, a yellow school bus.
Pressed against the window glass, the terrified faces of children.
“Holy shit!” Fizzy watches the bus pass, lost in the eyes of the frightened kids. “Where the hell are they going?”
“Maybe bringing ‘em to shelters?” Howdy is trying to light a roach with trembling hands. “You know, to save them?”
“More’n likely to the camps,” Burno calls from the driver’s seat. “Debbie says they got internment camps set up all across the Midwest. Slave labor.”
“No way,” says Fizzy. “They’re just kids…”
“I dunno, man,” Burno’s voice, a dry whisper. “Bad people take advantage of bad times…”
Bill Hendricks is arguing with the Bombs’ chosen spokesbomb.
“This is ridiculous,” he says. Pounds his fist on the console. “You’re being unreasonable. Why don’t you want to explode?”
“You think it’s so great, why don’t you go out there and blow up?” The spokesbomb is getting testy.
The church lies in embers and smoldering ruin—the screaming dead, flailing in flames. It’s uncertain whether the dead are living or the living are dying, but all are burning. By noon, the entire gasoline inferno is reduced to ashes and bone.
And Stephen Redding, the antichrist, he’s proud of his handiwork. Only wishes he could’ve seen the look on his face as Father Bob melted in front of his burning flock.
“Yeah,” he thinks, warming a nuclear wing over the glowing coals of Christ on the Cross. “It’s a good day to be the Bad Guy…”
Roger has finished his pre-flight preparations and is taxiing down the rural runway, before he realizes that something is wrong. The Cessna isn’t responding properly—the throttle is sluggish, the engine is beginning to sputter.
He tries to abort the take-off, but the brakes are not responding. The engine won’t quit—in fact, it stops sputtering and begins to rev and race. With dawning horror, Roger realizes that he can’t stop the plane as it continues to accelerate down the runway.
Hoping to keep it grounded, he veers into the open private airport field. The plane is beginning to shake, the increasing speed is making it more and more unstable. Heading for the woods at the field’s edge, Roger realizes that he needs to either take off or crash.
He opens the cockpit hatch, ready to jump. Unclasps his safety belt. So much for scouting the Aurora suburbs for dead hordes. He clenches his teeth and leans into the gusting wind.
And then, a small voice from the cabin:
“Daddy?”
Roger desperately yanks back the throttle and the plane takes off. As he climbs into the laser-lit sky, the steering control stops responding. The Cessna climbs steeply… and the racing engine sputters out.
From the corner of his eye, Roger sees one of the globules drifting past—closer than he would ever have dared a flyby. Long twines of what look like black tissue paper flapping in the breeze. Oily feathered gasbags dripping venom. A million twittering eyestalks and suckered tentacles—all slimed together with no cohesive rhyme or reason.
The dead plane begins to fall.
Roger lunges from his seat and dives for the cabin. Grabs his emergency parachute and slings it over his shoulder.
“Brandon?” he screams, “Is that you? Where are you, Brandon?”
“Daddy!”
“Where are you!” Roger flings open cabinet doors, kicks open the lunch cooler. He’s running out of places to look on the small plane.
“Help me, Daddy! I’m bleeding…! I’m dyyyyying…!”
Tears stream down Roger’s face as he tears the cabin apart. The plane continues to plummet. He rips open a small storage cabinet—a cold sweat runs down his neck. Inside, an iPod and speaker.
Roger holds the device in shaking hands. The last thing he sees, out of the small port window as the plane hurtles to the ground—all the while wondering if the voice on the iPod is even his son’s—is a dirty white van.
A white van with a peeling bumper sticker.
THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE HOME!
Margie is looking out over the water, watching the waves. The ocean is getting choppy. She shakes her head.
“I don’t think I can do it, Ricky.” Tears draw dark lines of mascara across the sunscreen that cakes her face.”
“How many Mai Tais have you had, hon?” Ricky places his arm lovingly around his wife’s enormous girth.
“Five.”
Ricky laughs—his face, it’s turning blue. His neck is beginning to swell. “Then not only CAN you do it, Sweety… you already have!”
Ron is already dead, his wife’s once orange tanning salon face now dark and bloated and nestled in his lap.
Margie can feel her throat constricting. The rest of the lounge lizards and sun kings, they’re either dead or convulsing on the deck. Half-finished plastic glasses of suicide cocktails tipped over and spilling, rolling across the floor.
“I only feel bad about leaving Father Bob…” Margie whispers, slumping to the deck next to her husband. “I’m sure he could’ve used some help keeping the faithful in and the crazies out of the church.” But Ricky, he doesn’t hear her—he’s already dead.
And the END OF THE WORLD – GET OUTTA DODGE cruise, it drifts further and further out to sea.
As the bus burns down the road, Howdy hits the brakes and slows to a crawl.
“Look!” he cries. “Jesus Freaks!”
A gathering of wide-eyed apocalypsts stand at the side of the highway, holding signs and waving placards.
THE END IS HERE!
And,
REPENT SINNERS!
And,
BAPTISE YOUR DEAD!
The bus slows and Burno, he slides down his window and hangs out to his waist. Waving his arms wildly, he makes a face and hollers, “Keep it in the church, you nutbags…!”
An old, blue-haired lady with a SMILE, JESUS LOVES YOU sign screams back, “Fuck you, you dirty hippie…!”
The bus erupts in hysterical laughter.
“Ha! Holy shit! I think they’re picking up rocks,” announces Burno, eyes on the rearview.
In the distance, a small plane falls from the sky.
You’ve gotta be kidding me, Deb… How the hell do you expect me to be there for you if I really love you?
My point exactly, Jones. Look, I think you need someone to talk to about this. Instead of calling my radio show, why don’t you find one of the other guys up th
ere and—
Rocket Jones turns off the satellite radio with a click! Glances around the cold room. The other colonists have been dead for a long time.
They were already dead when Jones had launched the Z-Globules from remote satellites down to Earth. Already dead when he’d locked out TALBY’s authorization codes and AI nuke enthusiasm routines.
He’d killed them the day that Debbie had fucked the Burning Man kid. And talked about it on the air.
The other colonists, they’d listened to the show and laughed at him behind his back—and right in front of him.
But second thoughts breed second chances. Rocket Jones has forgiveness in his heart. He unlocks the authorization codes. Restores the enthusiasm routines.
Turns back on the radio.
…and that’s really all I have to say about that. You are sooo low on my list of priorities, Jones. I really, just don’t have the time for you right now. So let’s see, we’ve got another ‘Three for Friday’ all queued up, and it looks like we have—
DEAD AIR.
Jones watches the fireworks on Earth through Tranquility II’s viewing window.
The Bombs are exploding—flickering lights all over the once-blue planet. Lighting it up like the Rapture.
Love—true love—comes only once in a lifetime.
And it's beautiful...
***
About Scott Christian Carr
Scott Christian Carr has been a radio talk show host, editor of a flying saucer magazine, fishmonger, spelunker, psychonaut, journalist, award winning poet, TV producer, and author. He is a Bram Stoker Award nominee, Scriptapalooza 1st Place Winner for Best Original TV Pilot, and in 1999, he was awarded The Hunter S. Thompson Award for Outstanding Journalism
Scott is a contributing editor and columnist for Shroud Magazine (his column Someone Oughta Sell Tickets…! focuses primarily on bizarre fringe culture), and a 2010 Choate Road “Spotlight Scribe” - But his most satisfying and rewarding job is that of “Dad.” He lives in a home once owned by George Hansburg (inventor of the pogo stick) on a secluded mountaintop in New York’s Hudson Valley with his two children.
His novels include THE THOUSAND YEAR NIXON, a serialized novel for the Amazon Kindle, HIRAM GRANGE & THE TWELVE LITTLE HITLERS available from Shroud Publishing, the soon-to-be-released illustrated (by Danny Evarts) novel MATTHEW’S MEMORIES from Baby Rhino Press, and the upcoming WASTELAND BLUES trilogy (co-authored with Andrew Conry-Murray) from Dog Star Books. Scott’s stories have appeared in dozens of anthologies, including Sick: An Anthology of Illness, Death Be Not Proud, Desolate Places, Beneath the Surface, AnthoCon Anthology 2012, Anthocon Anthology 2013, Demonology: Grammaticus Demonium, Scary! Holiday Tales to Make You Scream, and the upcoming Terror at Miskatonic Falls. Scott’s fiction and journalism have appeared in countless magazines and publications, including Shroud Magazine, The Dream People, GUD, Pulp Eternity, Horror Quarterly, The MUFON Journal, Weird N.J. and Withersin. His novella A Helmet Full of Hair was recently translated and reprinted in the prestigious French quarterly, Galaxies: La Revue de Référence de la Science Fiction.
Carr is an award-winning writer and producer of film/television. He is the Sr. Writer/Co-Creator of The Learning Channel (TLC) television series Dead Tenants. As Head of Development for both the Emmy Award-winning Triple Threat Television and the Academy Award-nominated Fredric Golding Productions Scott developed original programming for MSNBC, ESPN, CNBC, A&E, The Hallmark Channel, Discovery Networks and The Learning Channel.
Scott is the creator and executive producer of the post-apocalypse scifi film The NUKE Brothers (featured at DragonCon the World's Largest Scifi & Fantasy Film Festival and the 2012 AnthoCon Speculative Art & Fiction Conference) and writer of the tie-in comic book The Continuing Adventures of Fat Man and Little Boy...
He writes every day.
http://www.scottchristiancarr..com/
NUKE Love!: A Road Trip Through the Zombie Apocalypse... Page 2