Fear: The Quiet Apocalypse

by T M Edwards

  I pushed the button to roll down the window. “Yes?”

  The gentleness in his eyes belied his rough exterior. “Be careful out there.”

  I didn’t know how to respond to that, so I just nodded, and rolled the window back up. I pulled the gear shift into “drive,” and eased the truck onto the gravel road.

  Next to me, Zena snorted. “He was checking you out.”

  “He was not.” I glanced at her sidelong when she started chuckling madly.

  “He was!”

  “And how would you know?” I accelerated the truck and we went over a bump so fast that we both bounced out of our seats. I gasped when the impact jostled my foot.

  “I’m not blind.”

  The desert stretched out in front of us, brown and lifeless except for the gray-green of the local bushes. I was too tired to have a comeback. I was trying too hard to remember the route I’d been told so that I didn’t have to ask the girl sitting next to me.

  “I’m wearing a denim skirt and a t-shirt with a rainbow kitten on it. I’d question the sanity of any man that thinks I’m attractive right now.”

  Zena snorted, but thankfully didn’t push the issue. “It’s no fair,” she said after a moment.

  “What’s not fair?”

  “Before you got here, they let me drive the truck.”

  I was startled enough to glance over at her. “I thought you were just fifteen.”

  “I am. But nobody else could do it.”

  “I guess it’s a good thing I’m here, then.”

  “Whatever.” Zena folded her arms, and stared out of her window. I was too drained to even figure out if we were upset at each other or this was just friendly banter. Would it even matter with her?

  We drove in silence, except for the crunching of gravel under the truck’s tires. When one gravel road branched into two others, I took the one on the right.

  The tension in my stomach tightened to a sharp ache when I realized that what I was seeing on the horizon was not a building. The black dome that peeked over the top of that hill, it had to be the object.

  As we approached, and the truck rumbled up the hill, more and more of the object came into view. It looked like polished obsidian. There wasn’t a flaw or a break in the surface of it anywhere. It was as long as a school bus, and twice as high. It was the shape of an egg, with one end that was tapered and one that was more rounded.

  I put the truck into park and stared at the object for a long time. Next to me, Zena was also silent. The air around us felt...charged, as if we stood in the middle of a lightning storm. The atmosphere felt heavy, like it was compressing my lungs.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Zena look at me. “You feel it, don’t you.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s the spores. They’re so thick here, I think they even affect us.”

  “Well, I guess there’s no point in sitting here.” With much trepidation, I opened the door. Zena helped me lift the wheelchair down and gather up all of the equipment. Previous vehicles had flattened the dirt around the object, or it would have been impossible to maneuver the chair. As it was, I was badly jostled by the time we reached the great black egg.

  I gave up trying to throw off the deep sense of unease that had settled over me, and focus on using the confusing instruments to get the data that the people back at the bunker needed.

  Day 46

  I sat on the little rolling stool, and held Sam’s hand. Even though the first hints of dawn had not yet snuck through the tent doorway, I could not sleep. I had only slept for a couple of hours before I found myself sitting by my friend’s side again, staring at his face and silently begging him to wake up, begging him to fight. I imagined all the ways I would painfully kill Dalen if the cessation of antibiotics killed my friend.

  His fever was a little lower, but his skin was still just as pale. The monitors beeped steadily on the other side of the bed. I turned his arm over to look at the wound. I couldn’t tell if it looked any better than it had before.

  “I miss you,” I told him. I reached out to brush his hair back from his forehead. “I know I hardly know you. But I know you better than the rest of the people here. Zena...well, she’s Zena. She’s a nice girl. I’m sure we’ll end up good friends, at least until the apocalypse ends and we all go back to our old lives, or start our new ones. But I miss you. You made me feel strong. I know these people need us, but somehow they make me feel small and weak.”

  Sam took a breath that was slightly deeper than the ones before, and I could have sworn his eyes fluttered. Encouraged, I kept talking. “I’ve never really been friends with a guy before. I’ve never even been in a relationship. I’ve been too scared, I guess. Trusting someone is hard. Somehow, it’s easier now. I guess we don’t really have a choice, right? None of us can survive alone. We all need each other.”

  I sighed, and looked down at his strong hand that lay so still on the sheet. I wrapped both of my hands around his. I could feel the callouses and the roughness of his skin. These details were part of his story. They were telling me about him, if I only knew how to listen. They told me of hard work and long days. Of a man who was not afraid to do difficult things. Of a man who was the strongest person I knew.

  I didn’t realize I was crying until a tear fell on our joined hands. “I’m so lonely,” I sobbed, as I looked at his still face. “I’m surrounded by people, but I still feel so alone. I’m scared. I don’t know what I’m doing...why I’m doing it…what they want from me…who to trust...how to make it all better...”

  Sam’s hand twitched, and I looked up to see that his eyes were open. Even though they were still glassy with fever, I knew that he saw me. He weakly squeezed my hand. “It will be okay,” he whispered. Then he closed his eyes, and seemed to go back to sleep. My heart caught in my throat as his chest rose and fell, a little stronger now, and some of the color seeped back into his cheeks.

  I leaned forward until my head was resting on his knee, and within moments, fell asleep myself.

  ***

  When I woke again, it was to the sound of Sam’s warm voice, and Dr. Haroun responding. I sat up and rubbed my eyes blearily.

  “Good morning, Ms. Scott!” the Asian doctor said cheerfully. “I’m sorry if we woke you.”

  I shook my head, and looked gratefully at the face of my friend. Some of his color had returned, even though he still looked weak. “Sam!” I felt tears behind my eyes again. “Sam, I…”

  “I’m okay,” he said, as if he knew that I had been about to embarrass myself by declaring how much I had missed him. “Dr. Haroun says the infection is healing.”

  The doctor nodded. “He has a few more days before I’m giving him permission to get out of this bed, though.”

  “Thank you,” I responded wholeheartedly. “Thank you so much.”

  She smiled gently at me. I wondered if she knew I’d overheard her fighting Dalen to give Sam a better chance of survival. “That’s what I do, Ms. Scott.” With a final glance at the monitors, she left.

  Sam turned to look at me, and raised his hand to touch my face with his fingertips. “I heard you. I couldn’t respond, but I heard you.”

  I felt suddenly ashamed of my outburst. “Oh…”

  “What happened?”

  I shrugged, and stared down at my hands. I realized I was still holding his, and self-consciously let go. “They sent us out to look at the object. Me and Zena. They said we’re the only ones that can do it. It affects everyone else too badly.” I wouldn’t tell him what I thought about Dalen. Not yet. Maybe not ever. Not unless it became necessary.

  “What did you find out?”

  I shrugged. “Not much. There’s a little opening in the top where the spores shoot out in like this super-fast stream. They said that’s how it spreads so fast, it’s going high enough in the atmosphere that it’s somehow getting into the jet stream. Like the ash cloud from a volcano. They said it’s probably spread all over the world by now, but we have n
o way of knowing if it’s affecting people in other countries.”

  “Do they have a plan to stop it?”

  “No. They have no clue. The force of the stream is such that trying to block it would just force it in a different direction and probably super-saturate the area to the point that the bunker’s air filters can’t keep up.”

  Sam shook his head incredulously and laid it back on the pillows. “So what are they going to do?”

  “They said to give them a few days to study the data and see what they can do.”

  “Okay.” Sam’s eyes were drifting closed. “Deidre?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I missed you, too.”

  Day 47-50

  Slowly but surely, Sam was getting stronger. I sat by his side as much as I could, and tried to ignore the nagging anxiety in my chest over a whisper I’d heard exchanged between two nurses. They were saying that antibiotics were almost gone. It would only take one more person with a severe infection before all of the IV antibiotics had been used up. The bunker hadn’t been built to sustain such a community, and the infrastructure was already beginning to fray. I tried not to hear the people yelling at each other, tried to pretend I hadn’t seen a fight break out when someone wanted extra food that they could not have. I wanted to hate Dalen for seeing numbers instead of humans, but I was starting to understand that hard choices had to be made to keep this place running and keep as many people as possible alive.

  If only my leg would heal as fast as Sam. Dr. Haroun said that if the world had been normal, I would have needed surgery. It was likely I would never walk normally again. Or walk without pain. That information must not have sunk in yet, because I wasn’t agonizing over it. In my past life, my germaphobia and hypochondria would have been crippling. Maybe there were just too many other things, real things, to worry about.

  As I sat in that tent with Sam, the world lying in pieces around us, we talked. We told our stories, our dreams, even our fears. Sam told me how much he loved his daughter, and how he planned to walk to Seattle to find her, once this was all over. I had much less to tell. My life had been far less interesting than his. We were reduced to this, each of us the culmination of the major events of our lives. The movies we loved and the books we read and the memes we shared...they all meant nothing now. They no longer existed. We were just...people...sitting next to each other, looking into each other’s eyes, and having conversations. It was the first time in my life that I could remember truly connecting with someone this way.

  At some point, someone fashioned me a cane made from some tree branch, that had a smooth knob for the handle, and a tip that had been coated in plastic. Zena brought it to me, though she didn’t say where it had come from. There was a tiny “A” scratched into the surface just below the knob. Her giggly response to my questions made me form a pretty strong suspicion of who the maker was. Maybe she’d been right about his interest, after all.

  The next day, when Sam was a little stronger, he sat up in the hospital bed while the three of us played card games. We almost felt like a family, even though our skin and our ages and our backgrounds were so very different. We were the chosen ones, of a sort, meant to save the world, the ones the world had barely tolerated until its moment of need. It was a pretty strong bond in this world where all conventional bonds no longer existed.

  I was relieved that Sam and Zena seemed to get along okay. The girl was kind-hearted and caring, she just struggled with expressing herself. But it seemed like Sam appreciated her blunt nature, and there was even times that I saw them laugh together.I didn’t have the strength to laugh, though I appreciated that they were able to.

  Sometimes I just sat on the cot and watched him as he played Solitaire with the cards, or read a book. At times I pretended to read a book, but I was really just staring unfocused at the page and feeling the warmth of his gaze on me. I didn’t know what we were to each other. Our relationship felt deeper than friendship, but I would have laughed if anyone had called it romantic.

  I had no idea what we were to each other. All I knew was that I wasn’t quite sure if I could live without Sam in this crazy new world.

  Day 51

  We got to move out of the hospital tent that day. Sam walked slowly, his longest walk since he had fallen ill. I walked next to him, my arm hooked through his, as I leaned on my cane with my other hand. I could feel the tension in Sam’s muscles as we walked through the common area, toward one of the largest tents. Alan, the man who had helped me to the truck a few days earlier, the man I suspected of fashioning the cane that supported me, was leading us.

  “What’s wrong?” I whispered to Sam.

  “I hope they don’t intend to put us in the dorm.”

  “The dorm?”

  Sam nodded. “It’s what they call the tent where those without a family unit sleep. It’s full of bunk beds.”

  I felt as if my heart had sunk into my stomach. “What?”

  Sam didn’t answer, but he probably understood my apprehension as much as I understood his. Sleeping in crowded places was something we both feared, albeit for different reasons. My own anxiety was heightened by the thought of poor Sam having to endure the humiliation of having one of his nightmares in a crowded room. I’d be amazed if he ever let himself sleep at all.

  To my dismay, Sam’s suspicion had been correct. We were led to a large tent that had sixteen sets of bunk beds in two rows. 32 beds. Up to 31 other people that I had to share a room with.

  I looked up at Sam. I didn’t know what I was looking for. Reassurance, or simply to know that I wasn’t alone. His jaw was set and his face had gone a shade paler. I was the only one here that knew his secret. Knew about the nightmares that plagued him every night, and the shame he felt over them.

  “I...is there anywhere else?” I asked Alan hesitantly.

  He looked at me with one eyebrow raised. “Not unless you want to sleep outside.”

  “Actually…”

  “I’m sorry, but this is all we have.” He nodded to me and passed over Sam, then turned and walked off before I could respond. Was he jealous? The thought was almost funny.

  “Well,” I said with mock cheerfulness, “At least they gave us the corner?” As I looked at the bunk with the gray blanket made up into military-neat corners, it hit me that this bed was now the entirety of the space that I could call my own. This bed, with nothing but that thin blanket and pillow, with nothing to distinguish it from 31 other beds and no way to gain privacy, was all I had.

  I sat down and buried my face in my hands, struggling not to burst into tears.

  The mattress dipped as Sam sat down next to me. “It’s going to be okay.” I might have believed him if his voice wasn’t shaking. I just shook my head without lowering my hands.

  Sam’s strong arm went around my waist, and he pulled me toward him until I was leaning against his chest.

  “How? How is it going to be okay? I can’t live like this!”

  He reached up and pulled the weight of my hair behind my shoulders. “It doesn’t look like we have much choice.”

  I lowered my hands and looked across the tent, which was empty except for the two of us. Each bunk had two square wooden crates at the end, which held people’s meager personal items. There had to be someone who cleaned up in here, because there’s no way every one of these people knew how to make hospital corners on a bed.

  “They don’t even have their own clothes.” It was the most random thing to notice, but trust my brain to be weird.

  “This reminds me of being at Basic,” Sam remarked.

  “Basic?” I sat up so I could see him.

  “Yeah. Boot camp. We all had a dorm like this.”

  It was warm and stuffy in this tent. I wrestled my hair into some semblance of a bun to get it off of my neck. “So you’ll be okay in here?”

  Sam’s face darkened. He didn’t reply, just gazed across the rows of beds. I knew how dumb the question was. If anything, reminders of his military service woul
d just make this situation that much worse.

  ***

  So passed another day of little progress. Nobody had yet come to tell me that I needed to return to the egg for more study. Nobody even assigned us a job. I didn’t know whether it was because I was injured and Sam was still weak, or because we were somehow special. Whatever the reason, I had little to do besides sit and worry about whether I’d ever be able to sleep in the dorm tent.

  At some point in the afternoon I wandered into the hydroponics room, where I found Zena. The girl was working on cleaning one of the giant, open-top tanks, nearly unrecognizable in the plastic goggles and the rubber apron and gloves. I lowered myself onto a folding chair in the corner, with my injured leg stuck out in front of me. Zena didn’t seem to notice me as she worked around the tank, pulling up plants to inspect them before lowering them back into the dark water. Every couple minutes, she would note something on a clipboard on the table beside her.