Fear: The Quiet Apocalypse

by T M Edwards

  All conversations stopped, and everyone turned to face me. I felt dizzy with the weight of their attention, and wished desperately for my cane.

  Just as I opened my mouth, someone shouted across the dozen or so feet that divided me from the crowd. “What’s going on?”

  “Dalen was controlling the object!” Someone else yelled back.

  “The object fell from space!” That was a third person.

  Then, people just started yelling. Some were gesturing, some were shouting, some were moving toward each other like they were going to start fighting.

  Next to me, Zena rolled her eyes and sighed. “Why do they have to be like this?” Without giving me a chance to respond, she ran forward, and used a chair to climb onto the top of a table.

  “Quiet, you idiots!” She yelled, startling most people into silence. “Shut up! Why can’t you just shut up for one second and let the person who actually knows what’s going on, talk?”

  Kiera stepped forward. “Zena, you get down off that table this instant!”

  “You’re not my mother!” Zena cried.

  I swallowed the lump of anxiety in my throat and stepped forward. Kiera started to say something else, but I held up my hands. “No, listen!” I limped forward until I stood on the floor next to where Zena was perched on the table. “Look, I know everything’s all messed up. I know everybody’s confused. But don’t take it out on her.” I looked up at my friend, then back at the crowd. “That girl will always have the mark of the injury she got trying to help all of you. So will I. The least you can do is hear us out.”

  “Dalen says you two messed up the water tanks.” This set off another round of murmurs, I was losing the crowd.

  My voice felt weak, and my hands were shaking so hard that I had to hide them behind my back, but at least nobody’s ire was directed at Zena anymore. “Look. I didn’t want to say anything until I was sure. When that little girl got lost, I found the room behind Dalen’s tent. I didn’t want to believe it, myself.”

  “What is it?” This was from the man that I recognized as Tom, who had flown us on the helicopter. I guess he could speak after all.

  “I don’t know. I mean, not exactly. But it was Dalen. He was controlling the object.”

  “But that’s crazy. It fell out of the sky!” I couldn’t see who said this.

  “But did anybody actually see it fall?” asked someone else.

  For a moment, there was a shocked silence as everyone looked at everyone else.

  “The news started talking about it the next morning,” said Tom, stepping forward. “They said it happened during that big storm, remember?” I saw nods. Confusion. “Someone nearby called it in when they found it.”

  Someone like Dalen?

  Murmurs were growing louder again, and I waved my arms. “Okay! I don’t have all the details, all I know is that Dalen was controlling the object, and Sam turned it off. But the filters are also off, which means you’re all breathing spores right now, and you will keep breathing them, unless we fix the air system.”

  “Someone cut the wires!”

  I stared at the crowd. “What?” The hum of voices was rising at an unsettling rate.

  “They cut the wires that run from the solar panels.”

  I pinched the bridge of my nose. “Why?”

  “So Dalen wouldn’t be watching us anymore.”

  Inwardly, I groaned. “So we have zero power? Well, that’s just great.” I let my hands fall to my sides.

  “What are we going to do?”

  “Are the spores going to kill us?”

  “We should kill Dalen!” this was a cry that was taken up by several other people. “He did this to us! He deserves to die!” There were nods. A couple people pumped their fists in the air.

  “No, no, no!” I cried, but nobody was listening to me anymore. If I couldn’t stop this, they would turn into a mob. A paranoid, angry, fearful mob. And I still wasn’t quite sure that they wouldn’t decide Sam, Zena and I were the ones at fault rather than Dalen.

  From behind me, I heard a voice. It was a voice that sounded familiar, and yet I could have sworn I’d never heard it before. “Silence!” it called, loud and commanding, across the room. People stopped and stared. They looked past me, and I turned to see who it was.

  It was Sam. He was pale, and the bandage on his leg was stained with blood. Despite this, he walked, tall and steady, across the concrete.

  “There has been enough bloodshed today.” It had been his voice I heard. In this moment, he was a hundred percent the soldier, not the Sam that kissed me and held me in his arms. This was a Sam as he must have been before the trauma that broke him, the Sam I’d begun to see when we were trapped in that fridge. He walked until he stood next to me. When he took my hand, its trembling was the only sign of the weakness he must feel.

  “We cannot destroy everything that you all have worked so hard to build.” His voice, strong and sure, caught the attention of everyone, and brought all dissent to a halt. “We may not understand the consequences of what Dalen as done, and he does deserve to pay for what he did. But we can’t lose our humanity over this. You have all spent these weeks fighting to survive, and to make the best life possible out of this situation. You were betrayed. Your country was destroyed by the man who lies in that tent,” he pointed back to one which stood right next to the tent in which Dr. Haroun fixed his leg. “But he has not destroyed who you are, and you can’t give him that power. I stopped the spores, but it will take time for them to dissipate. In the meantime, we all have to keep working to survive. That means fixing the filters. That means searching for water. Not murder. There has been enough death already.”

  As Sam’s last words faded away, I watched in awe as people looked at me, and at Sam, for instructions. They were definitely on our side now. Sam’s arm went around my shoulders, and I could feel how weak he was. We stood there together, injured and weary, before a crowd that for once was just as broken as we were. They were looking to us, the ones so many of them might formerly have despised. They wanted us to tell them what to do. I only wished I knew what to say.

  The rest of the day passed in a blur. There was still confusion, and pain. People had trusted Dalen, and he had betrayed them in the cruelest way possible. Some still insisted it must have been an alien object, and that Dalen was controlled by the aliens. Some had even crazier ideas.

  Once the wires were spliced back together and power restored, people spent the rest of the day making the filters work. I was exhausted and exhilarated beyond describing. I couldn’t name how many fights I worked to settle, how many arguments I broke up. I lost count of how many times I ordered Sam back to his bed when he tried to insist on helping. When I finally screamed something at him about how I loved him too much to let him die, he listened. I still wasn’t sure what we were to each other, and it wasn’t time yet to think about that. All I knew was that I cared for him deeply, and I needed him to heal so that we would have more time together.

  At some point that afternoon, Dalen was found dead in his bed. Dr. Haroun determined that he’d had a concussion, and the swelling in his brain had killed him. So the community’s wish came true, and nobody had any more blood on their hands.

  When the sun started to set and people were finally winding down for the night, I found Zena and Sam and the three of us found sleeping bags and retreated to the desert. We may have been the saviors of humanity, but really we were just three tired people who needed the space to breathe.

  Before the last rays of the sun had disappeared from the sky, I was asleep in my spot, nestled between my two friends. I slept until the chill in the air woke me sometime after midnight.

  Day 58

  Above me, the great bowl of the sky was awash with stars. There was no light, except the moonlight, to blot them out. There were no buildings to obscure the horizon. No sounds of civilization to drown out the sounds of the breeze and the insects. I lay on my back and threaded my fingers together behind my head, an
d stared wide-eyed at the stars.

  To my left, Sam was asleep in his own sleeping bag. To my right lay Zena. I knew she wasn’t asleep. Her breathing was too deep, too uneven. I turned my head to look at her. She was also laying on her back with her eyes on the sky.

  “Do you think we did the right thing?” she asked. Her voice was hushed.

  I looked back at the stars and sighed. “I hope so.”

  She turned up and propped herself up on one elbow. “If we weren’t sure, why did we do it?”

  “They needed to know.”

  “Do you think they’ll survive without a leader?”

  “If they can just make it until the spores dissipate, they can start to rebuild.”

  She flopped back down. “I can’t believe it’s almost over.”

  I laughed, but clapped a hand over my mouth when Sam stirred. “It’s hardly even begun.”

  “But the spores are gone. Dalen’s gone. What more is left?”

  I gestured around us at the desert. “Almost everyone in the country is dead. We have no infrastructure, no government. Even without the spores, we have a long way to go before things ever become normal again.”

  Zena sighed. “I forgot.” She was silent for a moment. “Is it horrible that I’m glad my parents are dead?”

  “Maybe.” When she huffed, I amended my statement. “But I can understand. They were pretty horrible to you.”

  “I’m not glad, exactly. But it’s nice to be free. Maybe I’ll miss them someday.”

  Free. I rolled the word around in my head. Are we free? All of the social constructs that had once bothered me so much were gone. The world was much emptier, and as much as I mourned the enormous loss of life, I couldn’t deny that I felt more at peace in this new world order.

  It was a new world. One where Sam and Zena and I were the saviors. Where blood ties meant less than the bonds forged in trauma. It was a world where I knew my own strength. Where I had been reborn into a person I hardly recognized. It was a harsh world, and I had been turned into a person who could survive it.

  Beside me, I heard Sam’s sleepy voice. “Would y’all just go to sleep? We can rebuild the world in the morning.”

  His actions belied the annoyance in his words as he reached over to pull me closer to him. There, in the Nevada desert beneath the stars, Sam kissed me, long and deep, and full of promise.

  Promises of brighter days to come. Promises of the future.

  THE END

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  Other books by T. M. Edwards:

  Famine: Book 2 in the Quiet Apocalypse

  Fractured

  Thelma

  Amy

  Keiko

  Robin

  Roger

  Kayla

  Tanisha

  John