First Days After

by Jay Vielle

  “Fair enough, but you were a Marine, right? Didn’t you see action?”

  “Yeah. Long time ago. Didn’t see tons of action, either,” said Jake.

  “How is that? You were a soldier. How can soldiers not see action or know how bombs work?”

  “All depends on when and where you go. I went in just as the Gulf War action was slowing down. I went OCS. That’s Officer Candidate School. Figured it’s better to be the boss than the grunt that has to sweep up pigeon shit off of runways, so I went OCS. That training took a while. You ever see Officer and a Gentleman?”

  “No,” I answered.

  “You young, unwashed bastard. You truly have no upbringing. It’s all about OCS. Actually, it’s more about Richard Gere chasing Deborah Winger and pissing off Lou Gossett. But OCS is the setting.”

  “Richard Gere. Mmmmm. If I was older--I mean a LOT older--he’d be my type.”

  “You are so gay. I mean, not in the homosexual way. But the lame way.”

  “So, in one sentence you just offended non-heterosexuals and the handicapped,” I said. “That’s like twenty percent of the population. Gotta be a new record for you.”

  “Jake Fisher. Successfully offending people since the last millennium. Anyway, I finished OCS and most of the work was done in Iraq. I got sent in for clean-up duty. I basically oversaw guys cleaning up the mess we made after bombing the shit out of Saddam Hussein. No really a forward position as combat goes,” Jake said.

  “Then you’ve never killed anyone,” I asked. Jake stiffened.

  “Never said that,” Jake said, casting a glance downward.

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean,” I stammered.

  “Naw, it’s okay. I mean, hell, we are in the aftermath of a nuclear war. Not like we can afford to be too squeamish about our conversations, right? Yes. I have killed,” he said.

  “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to. I didn’t mean to touch a nerve.”

  “No, you didn’t,” Jake said. Then he took a deep breath, closed his eyes a moment, exhaled loudly, then nodded.

  “We were picking up broken pieces of a building. It had been a bank, but it was mostly rubble at that point, and we were trying to determine if it needed to be completely demolished or if it could be fixed up. I had a couple of engineers with me waiting for us to move a few things so they could go in and assess. I felt like they were being impatient, and since shit flows downhill, I got after the guys to pick up the pace. Rushed them a little bit. Didn’t really make a complete check of the perimeter for people in the vicinity. Not well enough at least. We hadn’t had any trouble at all for two weeks, so I figured that today would be no different. So, I gave a cursory look at the streets nearby, but didn’t check into one of the nearby buildings. Big mistake. A group of men dressed in black charged us. Most had handguns, one had an automatic rifle. He came in and sprayed the front of the building and hit a bunch of my men. Everyone ducked for cover as they came running up. One of my friends died in front of me almost instantly. His head was half blown off. I kind of snapped at that point. Fury ran through me. I ran out with my pistol and shot the rifle-toter immediately. Shot him in the face three times. Then I turned on the others. There were five of them. I shot two, then ran out of bullets. One had his gun pointed at me. The rest was kind of instinctual.”

  Jake stopped for a moment. I could see he was starting to have some trouble finishing his story, but I didn’t know what to say. He clearly wanted to finish telling it. Almost like confessing to a priest, but he was struggling not to show emotion, and I didn’t want to press him. Men like Jake have an almost primal need not to show real emotion. It means weakness to them. I’ve never understood that, but then again, I was never a Marine, never a wrestler or a fighter of any kind. The men I spend most of my time with aren’t usually macho, aren’t usually afraid to show feelings. Jake, on the other hand, needed some help here, and I wasn’t sure how to give it.

  “Instinctual?” I asked. He nodded.

  “Basically, with the martial arts training they give us—mostly Aikido and ju-jitsu type stuff in terms of disarming someone—I took the gun away from the third guy. I broke his wrist and the gun went flying in the street. Then I snapped his neck and he fell limp. I turned to the other two and reached down my leg for the knife that we always carry. They were scared, even though one of them had a gun. Not everybody who runs in to attack you is a fearless warrior, and those last two were scared to death. The fourth one I knifed in the throat. I could hear gushing noises as I pulled the knife out. The fifth one had already dropped his gun and pissed himself, and dropped into a ball on the ground, covering his head with his arms, with his hands up in a kind of pleading gesture. He was trying to surrender. I reached down, picked up his gun. I realized that it had been one of ours. Somehow this guy had gotten a hold of an American pistol. That really ticked me off for some reason. Not sure why. I flicked off the safety and shot him in the head.”

  “Jesus, Jake.”

  “All of the shooting had been heard by our troops, and a bunch of our guys ran our way, guns raised ready to back us up anyway they needed to. When they got there, they saw me standing over a half a dozen of the enemy, covered in blood, gritting my teeth, shaking like a leaf. Both engineers were dead. One of the guys in my unit was dead, and two more badly wounded. One of the wounded didn’t make it and died the next day. They were just kids, even younger than I was at the time. The ones who survived told this story about me that made me into some kind of legend. Told everyone in the compound what I’d done. They tried to get the higher ups to award me a medal, but it was determined that had I done a better job scouting the area first, the whole thing might have been avoided. The guys stationed there all treated me like some kind of celebrity, but I was messed up after that. I blamed myself for the deaths of my colleagues, and seeing what my rage had accomplished scared me. I got kinda fucked up in the head after that. They sent me home with PTSD three weeks later.”

  “Holy shit, Jake. I’m sorry.”

  “Once I got home, I became asymptomatic very quickly. They determined I was fine, so back to work I went. One of the kids in my unit who survived—his dad was a pretty important officer in the Corps. He came to see me. His son had told him everything. He had been hiding inside the bank’s walls and watched me singlehandedly dismantle our attackers. Made me sound like Chuck Norris or something. The colonel said that he knew that the Corps would not reward me as I should have been due to the nature of the incident, but he still felt that my actions were valorous, and he wanted to do me a favor. He asked me what I wanted to do with my life, why I had entered the Corps. I told him I wanted to wrestle, and that I was hoping to try out for the all-Marine team, in their World Class Athlete Program. He put me on the Marine Corps wrestling team for the last two years of my service. I was basically a professional athlete for two years, training and competing. I had spent less than three months abroad, saw no actual combat, but managed to come away from Iraq responsible for nine people’s lives—some of them American.”

  “Wow. That’s some heavy shit,” I said.

  “Heavy enough,” Jake answered. “How the Hell did we get on this topic again?”

  “You were making excuses for why you don’t know anything about bombs,” I answered, smiling. Jake laughed at that. He nodded at me and smiled. “Oh yeah, that,” he said.

  “Discussing traumatic events makes me hungry, Eddie. If you are not gonna eat that sausage,” he hinted, raising his eyebrows.

  “You can have it,” I said, forking it over to him. He grabbed it off my fork, stuffed the whole thing in his mouth, and started chewing.

  “I thought you people liked sausage,” he said laughing.

  “My people? You mean Hispanics?”

  “No. Gays,” he laughed.

  “Links? You bet. Patties? Not nearly as much.”

  Al DeFillipo walked over to the table where Jake and I were sitting.

  “The ice machine is working again, a
nd the freezer’s on. Looks like everything is back up and running. You got any thoughts on that,” Al said.

  “We were just talking about it,” I said. “What are your thoughts, science guy?”

  “Science guy thinks it probably has something to do with the grid being out, but not the whole source? I don’t know. I’d have to know what kind of bombs they were using. Nice to have electricity though.”

  “My thoughts are that we take nothing for granted. Why don’t you set up a schedule for some of the kids to haul ice from the machines into bins and coolers that we have put in the freezer. You never know when it’ll run out,” Jake said. “Has anybody had any luck on the internet yet?”

  “No. That’s the first place everybody went yesterday, and all communications were knocked out all day after the last of the explosions hit. Could a nuclear bomb knock out the internet?”

  “Nope,” I answered smugly. Jake and Al yanked their heads around to stare at me.

  “What? I Googled it right after the first ones hit,” I said.

  “And,” said Jake.

  “Well, the fact that I Googled it after the bombs hit should be a hint, Einstein,” I said. Jake crossed his eyes and stuck out his tongue. “I copied it on my phone,” I said, “Here,” and clicked my cell phone on, opened up my memo page, and read what I had copied:

  The bigger issue from an EMP would be the shutdown of critical systems and infrastructure like the systems that keep nuclear power plants stable, keep power grids running, manage your water and gas, and even run your car. All of those would be down temporarily. Whether or not you have internet access is a minor consideration after an EMP attack.

  “Well, they got that last part right. Lots of other problems besides the internet. Besides---it sounds like the internet itself isn’t the problem, it’s the access that could be sketchy for some. Essentially, all power now should be considered unreliable and able to go in and out at a minute’s notice. No telling what’s going on with local government, also. Or if there even is any. For all we know, the Maryland state government is running things fine, double checking power grids and trying to assess damage,” said Jake.

  “Or thousands of people could be dead, and people are still trying to figure out what’s going on,” said Al.

  “Or that,” I said. “I mean, we could hear the bombs going off over Frederick and Camp David.”

  “Eventually, we’re going to have to do what Coach Orville has suggested,” said Jake, “and go out and see what’s happening. My concern is with radiation. We don’t know what hit where, how hard, and what the aftereffects will be, and I’m just trying to be safe.”

  “So, you agree with me now,” said Lou Orville, sauntering up to our table.

  “In theory at least,” said Jake. “I never said it was a bad idea, just maybe not the first thing we oughta do.”

  “How long does radiation last? Isn’t it, like, forever?” said Lou.

  “Not necessarily. Depends on the power of the blast, location of the blast, and how much water is exposed,” I said.

  “Water,” asked Orville.

  “Fallout lands in the water, essentially contaminating it. Water can then, in turn, contaminate things around it.”

  “How do you know all this shit?” Orville asked.

  “History teacher, remember? Hiroshima, Nagasaki, even that nuclear plant in the Ukraine, Chernobyl. Lots of info on that. The town of Pripyat, where Chernobyl was, started getting some plants to grow back between 10-20 years. Saw a 60 Minutes on that.”

  “Twenty years? We don’t have twenty years. How are we gonna live?” yelled Orville.

  “Slow down, Lou,” said Jake. “Chernobyl was a different thing. It was worse than a bomb in some ways. The explosiveness of a bomb—that’s the part that’s bad. It spreads the damage, but as the blast radius grows, the damage lessens. Question is, where did the nearest bombs hit, and how big were they? No way to tell until some type of news gets up and running somewhere.”

  “Speaking of which,” said DeFillipo, lifting his phone. He had the internet up and running, and an MSN news feed was running on it. He clicked the first article he could find. The headline was ominous:

  WORLD WAR III BEGINS.

  The article spoke of a multinational alliance with the United States, Great Britain, France, Spain, Canada, Japan, and South Korea all launching missiles and receiving word of counterattacks coming from Russia, North Korea, China, Cuba, and Venezuela. The article mentioned larger target cities in the U.S., such as New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington D.C., and how the capital had the best anti-missile defense system of any location in the world. It was also three days old. Nothing newer had been posted at all.

  Al read out the article. It was what most of us remembered, but to hear it out loud, to see it written—that was different. It was no longer like we were playing at survival. We were actually there.

  “Why hasn’t there been an update?” asked Al.

  “Hard to say,” said Jake. “Could be a multitude of things. Maybe it’s technical, could be a satellite got destroyed, could be the building sending it out was destroyed, or even the people doing it were killed. How long have you had service, Al?”

  DeFillipo squinted as he thought. “It went out for me about an hour after the first warnings came out. Came on again briefly. Then nothing while the power was out. Then it picked up again just a few minutes ago. It’s like you can’t really know yet what works and what doesn’t.”

  “Funny,” I said. “When this place only had cable television, when I was a student here, internet was harder to get. It was considered more cutting edge. Now all we have is internet, but it isn’t nearly as hard to damage as cable.”

  “Now you sound like an old man, Eddie,” said Jake, smiling a little. “Teach you to make fun of me when I’m reading a book, won’t it?”

  Just then Melanie Richmond came running up to the group of us. She was out of breath and looked a little scared.

  “Guys,” she said. “We’ve got company.”

  On the athletic entrance of the building was a wall of thick glass. About eight to ten feet of it were doors, then above those, just a decorative wall of glass, with an awning of steel and concrete jutting out about fifteen feet from the doors for shelter. Standing under that awning were four figures standing in front of the doors.

  Knocking.

  Two were adult sized, one seemed the size of a teenager. One looked female from the distance.

  “What now?” I asked Jake. His face went cold, and he stared off into the distance.

  “Jake,” said Melanie. “What do we do?”

  “Now,” he said. “We figure out who we are.”

  Everyone could hear the knocking, and everyone went completely still, as if not moving would keep people from seeing them. But they saw us. They knocked harder as they saw us look their way. They started yelling.

  “Gather round, quickly,” Jake snapped, and everyone quickly assembled into an extended huddle. One of the kids whispered “what should we do” only to have Lou Orville look at them as if they were stupid.

  “You don’t have to whisper,” he snapped back.

  “Shouldn’t we let them in?” asked Maureen Kelly. “I mean, they need help, right?”

  “Hell no,” Mark Longaberger answered. “You want to share food with them?”

  “Yeah, and what if they’re contaminated. They could spread that shit,” said Orville.

  “Really?” asked Robin Eaves. “Could they contaminate us?”

  Suddenly everyone was looking at Jake, which made sense. He had calmly assumed leadership, gotten us on track, and given us a plan for survival. It’s natural to look to our leaders for answers to everything. But Jake didn’t have all the answers.

  “I don’t have all the answers,” said Jake. “We have to decide what our goals are, and who we are going to be. I’m not an expert on radiation, but I know that people wear suits to block them from it, so I’d have to say yes—if they
are contaminated, or maybe their clothes are, I’m thinking they could spread it to us.” Everyone gasped almost collectively at the thought.

  “Not pumped about that idea, then,” I said.

  “No fucking way,” said Lou Orville. “This is our place. They can get their own.”

  “They’re human beings, not lepers,” said Maureen.

  “Lepers are also human beings, dear,” said Robin. Maureen drew her mouth up in embarrassment.

  “I say we don’t let them in,” said DeFillipo. “It’s a matter of survival now. I’m sorry if that seems dickish, but it’s how I feel.” Longaberger patted him on the back.

  “What if they need medical care? Food and water? Are we just going to let them die?” asked Maureen. “That’s savage.”

  “Tough break for them,” said Longaberger. “It’s just the way it is.”

  “Just the way it is because you’re on the inside,” she retorted. “Something tells me you’d feel differently if you were the one knocking.” The banging and yelling started getting louder. Nerves were beginning to fray, and most of us were staring down Jake.

  “Why don’t we start with finding out what they want,” said Jake. Heads nodded in agreement.

  “They’re knocking on the fucking door,” said Orville. “We know what they want. They want in. The answer is no.”

  “They’re looking right at us,” said Maureen. Everyone snuck a quick glance at the door, then most of the people turned their heads away uncomfortably.

  “Let’s go talk to them first,” said Jake. “We’re under no obligation to do anything right now, and we can be patient for the time being. Let’s talk and see.” Everyone seemed to like that idea except for Longaberger and Orville, who grumbled the entire time. Wes Kent was silent during the entire exchange, his face unreadable, but caution slowed every step he took. Jake took bolder strides and led the pack towards the other entrance. As we got closer, we could see their faces. They brightened at our approach, believing that we were coming to let them in. Then their faces dropped when we all stopped about ten feet shy of the door.