by North, Geoff
AS THE WORLD
ENDS
Part 1 – Jake
Geoff North
Copyright © 2015 by Geoff North
www.geoffnorth.com
Also by Geoff North
CRYERS
Live it Again
The Last Playground
Children of Extinction
Jake
The world was minutes away from having its ass kicked. The planet’s most successful and dangerous species was set to eradicate everything, and they were helpless to do anything about it. When ten to twenty thousand nuclear weapons are primed to use on any given day for more than half a century, it’s only a matter of when it will happen, and which crazy fucker presses the first button.
Jacob Heez hadn’t grown up during the Cold War. He was still a dozen or so years from being born around the time Reagan was demanding Gorbachev to tear down The Wall, and the Soviet Union was collapsing like a house of cards. Jake remembered the stories his father had told him of how it had been when he was a little boy growing up into a young man during the late seventies and early eighties. He told Jake of the recurring dreams, of bombs dropping in the wheat fields, and the billowing mushroom clouds that rose into the grey skies of his teenage nightmares. Dwayne Heez would wake in a cold sweat and cry, terrified that one of those times he wouldn’t wake up—that the nightmare would have become a waking reality. Jake’s father told him these stories because he believed those days were long gone, and he wanted to instill in his son a sense of what the world was like in its most frightening times.
But Jake’s old man had gotten it wrong. He forgot to account for the fact that history had a tendency to repeat itself. The Cold War blew back in with a vengeance. It was no longer simply cold; it was frozen, and there was no chance of a thaw. Jake’s twenty-first century Cold War era had become an Ice Age of old paranoia and new mistrust. There were fresh players—North Korea, Iran, Pakistan, and India to name just a dangerous few. Some of these countries had gone to war, and there had been limited nuclear exchanges between the more radical governments. The world had managed to hold on. People continued going to work and going to war. Their relentless pursuit of over-populating the globe and killing their neighbors continued.
Jake was a farmer, like his father before him. He wasn’t all that involved with the world around him. He was more concerned about the five thousand acres of that world he owned. But his father had taught him to keep an eye on current events. Those old talks of how things were had stuck with Jake. He watched the news, and though there was little new about it, he remained aware.
Earlier that morning, Jake had listened to the news on the television while he ate his breakfast and prepared for ten or twelve hours of back-breaking fence repair. Most of it went unheard. It was the same thing day in and night out. People thousands of miles away were threatening to obliterate each other. After listening to that same bullshit his entire adult life, Jake had developed a way to block most of it out, as he was certain almost everyone else did.
Perhaps that’s the problem, he thought, as another six-foot long pole was pounded into the ground with his sledgehammer. Maybe we have to stop blocking so much out and start doing something about it. He removed his work gloves and wiped the sweat away from his forehead with one of them.
What kind of lesson am I teaching Nicholas by ignoring the problem? He looked north, in the direction of the Heez farm house over three miles away, where his five-year old son was undoubtedly now out of bed and running about in. Mandy would be awake now as well, chasing after him and trying to settle him down long enough to eat a bowl of cereal. He would be asking where his dad was, of course. Mandy would be explaining that Daddy has work to do, and that if he was a good boy, he would see him again in a few short hours for lunch.
Jake grinned, imagining the exchange. He inhaled the crisp morning air deeply and looked up at the sky. One word kept coming back to him from the news. Imminent. It had been plastered in big red letters on the bottom of the television screen. The media loved using words like that: Devastating. Looming. Tragic. Desperate… Imminent. The more frightening the headline, the more apt viewers were to sit up and take notice. They scared the shit out of people and kept their ratings up. The smile dropped as his thoughts darkened once again. What kind of world have we brought him into? All was blue and clear above, but looks were deceiving. It was a dangerous, scary world to raise a kid in. It’s what his father had told Jake’s mother years before, and what Dwayne’s father had likely thought decades earlier during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Same worries, same shit, from one generation to the next. There had never been a good time to raise a kid into this world, and there never would be.
Jake replaced another worn post with a new one and put his tools in the back of his pickup. He jumped into the cab and headed south where another quarter mile away a dozen or so more rotted posts waited. He would head home after that and have an early lunch. The wiring could wait. Jake wanted to see his son. Maybe he would bring the boy back out with him in the afternoon. They could spend a few hours together and talk.
Jake saw a jet contrail through the windshield. He slowed the truck to a crawl and peered up at the cloudless sky. He spotted a second one off to the left. There wasn’t much unusual about jet trails in the sky, dozens of planes travelled overhead above the Canadian prairies. They flew east to west and west to east twenty-four hours a day, picking up and depositing people all over the country from Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg, and the bigger cities out east.
These white streams were different. They were running north to south, or south to north, Jake wasn’t sure which. Another trail appeared off through the right edge of the windshield. North to south, he thought, with a sickening lurch in his stomach. This third trail was much lower than the others, and Jake was almost certain he could see a bright orange spot at the head of it. The orange spot vanished over the horizon and a fourth and fifth trail suddenly appeared higher above.
This isn’t happening. This can’t be fucking happening.
He brought the pickup to a halt and staggered out, not bothering to put it in park. The truck rolled on for a few more feet, but Jake no longer cared. His eyes were jumping from contrail to contrail. They were appearing magically overhead, streaking across the sky, back and forth, north to south, south to north, as if a child’s invisible hand were painting lines of grey and white on an immense blue canvas.
I need to see Mandy… I want to be with my son.
Jake’s needs and wants would go unfulfilled. He couldn’t operate his legs, both arms hung limp at his sides. All he could do was watch as the missiles continued their terrible arcs in the sky. There was a deep rumble growing from somewhere behind him, he could feel the ground beneath his feet begin to shake. One of the awful trails appeared directly above him, pushing ahead of it a blazing yellow point of light as bright as the sun. The light was moving incredibly fast towards the southeast.
Jake tried to comprehend what city was close enough to obliterate from the weapon’s low trajectory. This is Canadian farm land. There’s nothing here for miles worth destroying. Winnipeg was almost two hundred miles away to the east. This thing was headed almost straight south. It would reach its target in the next few moments. The only other center of notable population was Brandon, a town with less than one-hundred residents. Why would they want to wipe out Brandon?
Perhaps the missile was intended for Minot, North Dakota. Jake remembered his father telling him about the US missile silos located there. Maybe that’s where this thing was headed—to atomize the American weapons before they could even clear their hidden bunkers. It was going to run short of its intended target—much shorter.
The reasoning of where the missiles were heading, and why—this yearning to be with family—took place in his mind for less than a second. By the time he’d finished thinking how much he wanted to feel Mandy’s warm skin against his lips, the blinding missile light winked out of sight over a distant ridge of trees five miles away. A few seconds later, the blue sky with its growing number of puffy grey contrails, was consumed in white.
Jake raised his hands instinctively to his eyes. The light was like knives, burrowing between his fingers, slicing through his eyelids. He turned away from it and collapsed to his knees. Jake was enveloped in white and almost complete silence. Moments later the truck’s engine sputtered to a halt.
No. I want to see them… I want—I’m only twenty-four and I don’t want to die.
He was on his feet again, or at least he thought he was, lurching forward to where he believed home was. He fell from the small hard trail he’d driven the pickup down and rolled into a ditch. He continued to roll and ended up in water. Jake tried to picture where he was as he gasped for air. His head went under. Ice cold. Sitting water. I’m at the southeast end of the farm. I’m in a low slough of sitting water. Winter snow melted and collected here less than two months ago. So cold.
Jake flailed about in the bottom of it, his hands clawed at the mud, and his knees and boots became mired in it. Like quicksand. Can’t work myself free. He needed to breathe, he needed to get his head out of the water and provide his lungs with fresh air. The water and mud he was trapped in was about to save his life.
Another rumble, this one much louder, rippled around and over top of him. Jake no longer felt so cold. His body was going into shock—or the water was warming up. A sound like a million stampeding elephants being slaughtered by a million screaming monkeys roared somewhere above. The water was becoming hot, boiling hot. With his last bit of remaining strength Jake pushed his body up.
The water and mud in his hair dried away almost instantly. The soaking fabric of his jacket and shirt steamed into his skin, and Jake fell forward. He pressed his burning face into the ground and sucked air between his teeth that scalded the inside of his mouth and the back of his throat.
Dad saw it happen. He saw this in his dreams over thirty years ago. Did he feel the pain?
The rumbling lessened. The charging elephants and screaming monkeys moved on. Jake took another small breath, a gulp of hot air. It didn’t hurt as much. He inhaled slowly through his nostrils and smelled the end of the world; charred vegetation, boiled water, and something else. The air was different. It was something else now… something foreign and unpleasant. It smelled dead.
Jake lay there for another minute, his body and brain adjusting to this new, horrible reality. His body ached. He looked at the fingers of his left hand placed palm down in the cooked mud his cheek was adhered to. He wiggled them and wondered why they looked so fat and pink.
They’ve been burned. They hurt like hell, but they’re still working.
He pulled the fingers towards his face and felt his cheek. It was numb to the touch and rough feeling. Not good. He reached for the top of his skull and felt more dappled flesh. My hair’s gone. It’s all gone.
All gone. All of it. The field, the slough at his feet boiled away. The farm.
Mandy and Nicholas.
A fresh wave of panic flooded through him and Jake tried rising to his hands and knees. His cheek peeled away from the ground and he vomited violently. After a few more dry hacking heaves Jake was standing. He swayed back and forth taking in the devastation all around. There was no more color. Everything and everywhere was grey. The slough he’d fallen into was a basin of steaming, baked mud that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the bottom of Death Valley. The sky above was grey. Most of the missile contrails had puffed away in the shockwave, but a few billowing streaks remained—or they had just appeared. They’re still sending them, he realized. They’re firing more and more and more.
He climbed up out of the ditch and stood on what was a road only minutes ago. Jake’s truck was nowhere to be seen. It was gone with everything else… the trees, the fields, and the fence posts. Gone in a puff. All that remained was Jake and the towering monster before him.
He had seen pictures of mushroom clouds in books and on television. Jake had watched documentaries and movies depicting the power and terror of thermonuclear detonations. But nothing quite compares to the real thing. It filled the entirety of the south, rising into the cold upper atmosphere, seemingly intent to eat up the sun and stars somewhere beyond.
There was color left in the world. The blue had been snuffed out and replaced with awe-inspiring orange and brown. Jake had missed most of it, but there was still enough left to haunt his dreams for the rest of his life—a much shorter life than he’d been led to believe. It would be the final spectacular display of mankind’s power anyone would ever see again. This was the last big bang of human civilization. He didn’t want it to end. He reached out with swollen fingers, grasping at the dying light near its center.
Jake began to cry and the tears stung at the raw flesh of his cheeks. “No.”
The orange faded away and the immense rising brown column was slowly enveloped in the grey and black above.
Jake knew the human race had been living on borrowed time. Mankind had spent the last century industrializing, overpopulating, and polluting. But a part of him had hoped something more natural would play the final hand; a super-volcano, an asteroid from space, the magnetic poles reversing, a new goddamned Age of Ice that would’ve frozen civilization in its tracks under a thousand feet of glacier. It wasn’t as if Jake wanted the world to die, but it would’ve been fitting for Mother Nature to have the last word.
Imminent.
For once the news media had it right. They had warned Jake, and he hadn’t paid attention. He started the long walk back to the farm house—where the farm house had been—certain there would be nothing left. He should’ve stayed home. He should’ve woken his wife and son from their slumbers at 6 a.m. and enjoyed those last few hours with them. He should’ve paid attention. He should’ve known.
Jake had no idea how long it had taken to trudge the two mile distance from his life-saving water hole back to the farm yard he once called home. The mid-afternoon sky was blanketed over with nasty fallout. The stinking air swirled about Jake, buffeting him in cold and warm blasts. Most of the clothes on his body had been burned away, and the skin underneath had grown numb. Perhaps his mind was blocking out most of the pain, helping him cope with the physical agony and mental anguish. He didn’t know which, and he didn’t care all that much. The landscape had been transformed so drastically that Jake wasn’t even sure he was going the right way. He saw the remains of his house a few minutes later—a little further off to the left than he’d guessed.
A bit of it was still standing, a few charred two-by-fours and slabs of cement foundation transformed from grey to black. There had been a shelterbelt of poplar and spruce trees surrounding the yard. They were all gone—like Jake’s truck, blown off and scattered in the wind.
Maybe they had time to make it down into the cellar.
Jake tried running but could only manage something less than a jog. It was killing him to breathe, and his throat was swelling up. Everything felt so dry. He needed water. He needed to find his family even more.
He didn’t call their names. Jake was too afraid of the silence that would answer. He picked his way through the ruin, and there wasn’t much picking to do. The house had been incinerated, and even the main flooring where the living room, kitchen, dining room, and three bedrooms once sat was gone. All that remained was a gaping hole into the cellar, and all that was down there was a swirling pile of ash.
Jake staggered away from the destruction. He covered his burnt lips with his fat, blistering fingers and tried not to retch. Gone. They’re gone. They never had a chance.
The barn was gone, and all the li
vestock within as well. The only other thing sitting in his yard to prove a farm had been there was his old John Deere tractor. It had blown over onto its side, the thick rubber tires blasted away. The trademark greens and yellows were now solid black. All the junk that had been accumulated by three generations of Heez farmers had been picked up and moved away in an instant.
Jake called their names now. He stumbled about in a daze, kicking up ashes and dust, and screamed until there was nothing left but screeching rasps. With nowhere to go, and no one to find, Jake settled into a fetal position up against the overturned tractor and wept himself to sleep.
When he woke up, Jake thought he’d gone blind. He couldn’t see his hand in front of his face. All was in complete blackness. I’m dead. The world ended and I died. The exposed rim of the tractor wheel dug into his side and Jake knew he wasn’t dead. He was still lying in the dirt of his farm yard, and day had obviously slipped into night. If the nights were going to be this dark, he wished he could just go back to sleep and never wake up. What if the darkness was permanent? How would it be if this all-encompassing blackness became a constant as the sun rose and fell each and every godforsaken day?
Jake fought off a fresh surge of panic. There had been a thermonuclear exchange, and it had been massive. There was all kinds of shit in the upper atmosphere blocking the moon and the stars from view. It would settle eventually—days, months, years—Jake had no idea how long it would take, but he was certain things beyond those black clouds were still out there. He would see the sun rise again.
With the panic attack averted, Jake started to worry about his next—and more immediate—problem. He needed water, and he needed it fast. How long had it been since he’d last drank anything? Morning… I had a glass of water first thing when I woke up at 6 a.m.. Coffee too, just after that. Jake felt fairly certain he hadn’t slept more than twelve hours against the tractor. That meant he hadn’t had anything to drink for a maximum time of fifteen hours, maybe sixteen. It felt more like sixteen days. I should’ve gulped down that slough water when I fell in. Should’ve slurped that fucker dry before the nuke boiled it away.