by J L Bryan
“Told you they put him in here,” the red-haired soldier said to the other.
“What’s happening?” Ruppert asked.
“Fucking game over, man,” the blond soldier said. “Can you walk?”
Ruppert heaved himself up to a sitting position. He tried to put weight on his feet, then shook his head.
The soldiers left, then returned with a folded wheelchair. They muttered and grumbled to each other as they figured out how to open it and lock it into position. Then they hefted Ruppert into the chair. He was able to turn the wheels with his own hands.
“We have to take the stairs,” the red-haired soldier told him. “No power, no elevators. Nothing works.”
Ruppert followed them into the stairwell. The soldiers turned him around and rolled him backwards down the stairs, one step at a time, down five landings.
They followed a wide corridor into the detention center’s staff cafeteria, where hundreds of people had gathered, prisoners and Army guards alike. The young and the wounded were wrapped in blankets gathered from the hospital rooms and guard barracks. The crowd was silent, listening intently to a scratchy radio set into a wooden case the size of a coffee table.
“Everything fritzed out,” the blond soldier whispered. “We found the old radio in the basement. Couple generators.”
“We killed those psychos that were running this place,” the red-haired soldier told him. "That's what you want to know, isn't it?"
“I don’t understand,” Ruppert said.
“When the cities started going up, they told us to kill all the elderly prisoners,” the blond soldier said.
"And adult males," his friend added. “To, you know, conserve resources, and all that."
"But we talked it about it," the first soldiers. "We decided not to do it. But you can't just disobey a psycho. But D.C.'s gone, no chain of command, so what the hell, right? We figure we had to kill the psychos instead. We put ‘em out there.” He nodded toward a window wall that looked out into a concrete courtyard outside the staff cafeteria.
There were five bodies in black cloth. Ruppert saw one man in an official, military-style Terror uniform, black with silver ornamentation, and four others in black-on-black suits. Crane was among them, his blank eyes open toward the stars, snowflakes accumulating on his frozen eyeballs. The ice and snow around his head had become a wide circle of red slush.
"That's an extreme decision," Ruppert said.
"Extreme days," the red-haired soldier said. "And we saw your video. That was you, right? With the Nazi guy?"
"What?" Ruppert asked. "When?"
"It's going around." The soldier shrugged. "Helped us make up our minds about the psychos. Figured they brought things down in the first place, right?"
Then the two soldiers left to collect another patient. Ruppert wheeled into the crowd, looking carefully among the shadowy faces. His heart stuttered when a dark-haired woman seated on the floor turned towards him, and he recognized Lucia. She looked smaller, as if she hadn’t eaten well, but now she was spooning peanut butter out of a gallon-sized aluminum can. She shared it with Nando, who sat beside her on a folded bed sheet.
Ruppert rolled towards her, but Nando saw him first and sprang towards him. Lucia gasped.
“We didn’t know if you were alive,” she whispered. “Are you hungry?”
“No, thanks. What’s happened?”
Several people shushed them, and they lowered their voices even more. On the radio, a man’s voice crackled: “Has anybody heard any announcements? Is there anyone left out there?”
“It was war,” Lucia whispered. “Real, nuclear war.”
“With who?”
“China. Our cities, their cities. Nobody’s sure who started it.”
“What about the anti-missile satellites?” Ruppert asked. “The Skyfire system? The President said it would protect us.”
“Who knows?” Lucia whispered. “Maybe the Chinese took it out. Maybe nobody turned it on. Maybe it never worked."
"Maybe it never existed," muttered a man in a meshback cap.
Ruppert shook his head. “Nando, are you all right?”
Nando nodded without looking up. He'd returned his attention to a heaping spoonful of peanut butter.
“Again, this is Jerry Rothman, licensed chiropractor, broadcasting by ham radio from Garrison, North Dakota,” the radio voice said. The sound was full of hiss and static. “I’ve heard from survivors as far away as Eau Claire. They say they’ve heard people from upstate New York. Reception is not good. There has been no word from the government. We have known survivors in the following areas…”
Ruppert looked out through the tall windows into the predawn dark. Looking south, he thought he could see bright embers of the holocaustic light, unnaturally white, glowing over the southern horizon, consuming the cities of North America. He thought of his parents in Bakersfield, his wife in Los Angeles.
Lucia took his hand.
“What do we do now?” she whispered.
Ruppert watched the sun begin to rise over the smoldering ruins of the civilization. He didn’t know the answer.
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