Postcards from the Apocalypse

by Allan Leverone

  The night she died was a typical midsummer New Hampshire evening, clear and warm and utterly unremarkable but for the horror that followed. Low humidity. Light breeze. Nothing to suggest she would get T-boned by a drunken asshole in a decrepit pickup truck as she was crossing a desolate county two-lane on her way home from a night spent watching movies at her best friend Hilary’s house.

  I found out my little girl had been in an auto accident when a somber-looking young sheriff’s deputy rang my doorbell just before midnight and changed my life forever.

  “She’s alive,” he said, “but you need to get to the hospital immediately.” The poor kid had to raise his voice in order for me to hear the end of the sentence, because before the words were even out of his mouth I was sprinting to my car in bare feet, cutting them to ribbons on my driveway as I ran. I didn’t even notice and I certainly didn’t care.

  ***

  The doctors allowed me to see her for a few precious minutes after she came out of surgery. If I hadn’t known it was her, I might not have recognized my little Katie. Half her head was shaved and bandaged where they had sewn up a deep gash in her skull, her pelvis was fractured, her legs broken, and she had suffered a severe concussion from serious head trauma. The swelling of her brain inside her skull was what worried the surgeons the most and for good reason. Shortly after speaking with me, Katie lapsed into a coma from which she never recovered.

  During the short time she was conscious she was able to relate exactly what had happened during the final car ride of her much-too-short life. As she stopped and checked both directions for crossing traffic at the intersection, the only vehicle which was a factor had been the pickup truck, approaching from off her right, passing the empty Baptist church, directional flashing, indicating the driver was planning a right turn.

  Katie started across Route 28, discovering too late that the truck wasn’t slowing to turn; it was in fact speeding, going much too fast, racing almost out of control. She realized a split-second too late that the driver had simply forgotten to turn the directional off after making his last turn.

  My daughter hesitated for a split second and then hit the gas hard in an attempt to make it through the intersection—her only option at that point—but the pickup never slowed, never even swerved. It just plowed straight into Katie’s car, driving the little yellow vehicle into a utility pole which snapped in half from the violence of the impact. The pole then smashed down on the roof, crushing it and trapping my injured daughter inside.

  She lay in semi-conscious agony inside the ruined car for twenty minutes before the ambulance arrived and rescue personnel cut her out of the mangled mess of sheet metal. She said she was vaguely aware of the man who had hit her walking around his truck examining the damage. He never so much as looked into her car; never checked to see if she was all right or even if she was still alive.

  As she finished relating the story, in obvious pain and tiring rapidly, I hugged my baby and told her I loved her, and that I would be right there, sitting next to her bed when she awoke. She never did.

  ***

  I found out later that the driver of the other vehicle in the accident that took Katie’s life, the pickup with the continuously flashing turn signal, was none other than the son of our local sheriff, a young man who had been in trouble with the law on numerous occasions but had always been spared any serious consequences from his actions thanks to his father’s influence. That explained why he never received as much as a traffic citation on the night he ended my little girl’s life.

  A few weeks after the accident, I received an anonymous letter in the mail from one of the sheriff’s deputies who had been on duty that night. He couldn’t come forward publicly, he said, or he would suffer the wrath of his boss and probably lose his job, but he thought I should know that on the night in question, Pete Malone, the sheriff’s son, had been drinking and twelve empty beer cans had been found scattered throughout his truck.

  There were no skid marks on the road leading up to the accident site, which corroborated Katie’s recollection that the truck never slowed. The officer concluded the letter by saying he was terribly sorry, but he knew nothing whatsoever was going to be done to Malone. The man would once again suffer no consequences for his reckless and this time deadly actions.

  Over the course of the next couple of weeks, that letter from the anonymous sheriff’s deputy constituted my life. I chewed on it like a dog worrying a bone. It was the first thing I looked at when I got up in the morning and the last thing I studied before I went to bed. I memorized it. I could recite it forward and backward. It was all I thought about.

  After two weeks I knew what I had to do. I went to see Pete Malone.

  ***

  When he opened the dented and rusting metal front door to his rundown trailer and saw me standing on his tiny landing, the look on his face was that of a guy who has accidentally bitten into a lemon. It was quite obvious he knew who I was, and equally clear he didn’t want to see me. “What do you want?” he asked, as if sharing a few minutes of his precious time with the man whose child he had killed was asking too much.

  “I’m not here to cause you any trouble, Mr. Malone,” I told him. “I just wanted to hear from you in your own words what happened that night.”

  He shot me a look of utter scorn. His mud-brown eyes were huge and aggressive. “You want to know what happened? I’ll tell you what happened. That stupid chick pulled right out in front of me. The whole damned thing was her fault and I ended up losing my truck because of that dumb bitch.” He grinned, his thin lips parting to reveal a mouth filled with stained and yellowing teeth. “Maybe you should have spent a little more time teaching her to drive.”

  I kept my temper. I had to. I needed to know. “Were you drinking that night, Mr. Malone?”

  His grin turned to a snarl. “Drinking? Where did you hear that?” he demanded.

  “That’s not an answer. Were you?”

  “Screw you,” he shot back. “That accident was her fault and you’ll never prove otherwise.”

  I bent my head and sighed, scuffing my foot on the spongy rotting pine of the man’s front deck. My neck felt hot from the relentless sun and I wondered absently whether it was getting burned. The overwhelming sense of sorrow and hopelessness I had felt for weeks began to be replaced by something else. “I have one more question, Mr. Malone, then I’ll go away and leave you alone—“

  “You’re good and damned right you will or I’ll call the cops,” he interrupted, making a show of looking at his watch as if he were late for a pressing appointment. The filthy and torn t-shirt he was wearing suggested otherwise.

  “Was your turn signal on when you ran my daughter into that telephone pole?” I asked. “Did you forget to turn it off in your drunken haze?” My fury was building and I knew I was pushing my luck.

  He coughed and spat something slimy and unidentifiable past my leg onto the punky wood at my feet. There was barely enough room on the deck for the two of us. “Get offa my property. You’re lucky I don’t sue your ass for a new truck.”

  Somehow I was able to control my temper. To this day I don’t know how I managed it. I turned without another word and walked off his porch and back to my car. I had found out what I needed to know.

  ***

  After that I made it my business to watch Pete Malone’s trailer for most of every day until I learned his routine, which wasn’t exactly complicated. Get up around noon, slouch around the house, go out drinking in the evening, come home around midnight or later, get up and do it all over again the next day. If he had a job I couldn’t discern what it might be.

  ***

  Ten days after my little encounter with Malone, I was sitting in my usual surveillance spot, across the street and down the road from his house. I had experimented with varying my location once or twice, but gave up when I realized Pete Malone wasn’t in the habit of paying the least bit of attention to his surroundings. I probably could have unfolded a lawn chair ne
xt to his front door and as long as he didn’t have to walk around me to get to his rental car, gone completely unnoticed by him.

  On this particular night, at precisely 7:30 in the evening, right on time as usual, Malone walked down his rickety steps and slid behind the wheel of the rental car he was driving while searching for another dilapidated fifteen year old pickup truck to replace the one he had destroyed when he crushed my daughter like a mouse in a trap and ended her life so prematurely.

  Ironically, the rental was a vehicle remarkably similar to my Katie’s car. Small, utilitarian, mostly featureless. I knew he didn’t have auto insurance and I was surprised the man could even afford to rent that little piece of shit, considering his apparent employment situation, or lack thereof.

  Malone fired up the engine and drove to the end of the rutted and dusty access road upon which his trailer sat. He flicked on his turn signal as he approached the entrance to the county road and when he did, the entire vehicle disappeared in a blinding burst of orange flame and shrieking sheet metal. Three separate explosions, the last one igniting the fuel vapors in his gas tank, incinerated Malone in the little car instantly. I could feel the concussion from the blasts even way down the road where I was parked.

  Pete Malone probably never knew what hit him, but I like to think in the last milliseconds of his life that he realized why he was dying and maybe even who had killed him.

  The previous night, while my daughter’s killer slept, I had rigged his piece of crap rental with homemade explosives. It was simple, really. I wired them together and ran a lead to the right turn signal at the front of the car. I smashed the plastic lens, exposing the bulb, soldered the lead to the brass base, and ran the wire under the frame to my three bombs—IED’s, I believe the popular term is—which I duct-taped to the undercarriage of the vehicle.

  The whole project took maybe twenty minutes. It really is true what they say; you can do anything with duct tape, just as you can find anything on the Internet, instructions for building lethal explosive devices included.

  I assumed, correctly as it turns out, that in his haste to get to the local watering hole and wet his whistle, Malone would never notice the broken lens, and even if he did, he wouldn’t investigate. His truck, after all, hadn’t exactly been a model of preventive maintenance.

  After the explosions, which I’m proud to say must have gotten the attention of at least a few of Malone’s neighbors, I sat thinking. I watched the fire burn for a moment, hot and bright, as it greedily consumed his vehicle, then started my car and drove slowly away.

  ***

  Now I sit in my empty home wondering how long it will take for the police to arrive. I’m pretty confident I didn’t leave behind any evidence directly implicating myself, but I’m sure the authorities will come to the obvious conclusion pretty quickly that I am the prime suspect in what was clearly a planned event. Even with the intense heat the fire generated they will no doubt discover evidence of my homemade explosives. They are very good at investigating when they actually choose to do so.

  If I am interrogated I won’t deny what I’ve done. As I said previously, the authorities don’t concern me. I gave due consideration to my actions before taking them and I am prepared to deal with the resulting consequences. Besides, my Katie is gone and she’s not coming back, so what happens to me is irrelevant now.

  As I mentioned earlier, though, the issue of my eternal future is a more pressing concern.

  But I figure when my time for judgment comes, I can make a fairly compelling argument for my actions if I’m allowed by the Big Guy to speak on my own behalf. Sure, the Good Book says to turn the other cheek, but there’s also a pretty substantial nugget in there about an eye for an eye.

  Finally, and correct me if I’m wrong, but somewhere in that big old book of wisdom is a passage that concludes, “Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord.”

  Right?

  Well, not this time it wasn’t. This time, I beat Him to it.

  Devotion

  A couple of years ago, Black Hound ran a bit of an untraditional February contest. The idea was to come up with a flash fiction story combining the typical elements of Valentine’s Day with the darker elements of, well, dark fiction. The upper word limit on this particular contest was a mere 750 words. “Devotion” appeared in February 2009 and did pretty well in the contest, finishing second.

  February 14, 2009

  My Dearest Valentine,

  I have known since the very moment I first laid eyes on you that we were meant to be together. I don’t feel it is an exaggeration to say that our chance meeting those few weeks ago has become the highlight of my existence. Perhaps it has even begun to define my existence. I think about you all day every day and then, when I finally manage to fall asleep, I dream tortured dreams of you at night.

  To think that our destinies were entirely dependent upon the vagaries of chance, my love! It brings me to my knees when I realize that had I been just a few seconds later entering the doorway of that quaint little coffee shop I would have missed you entirely as you were exiting. Knowing you as I do now, my darling, I tremble at the mere thought of the treasures I would have missed out on had the fates not thrown us together that afternoon—your shining blue eyes, your full, trembling lips, your lithe and sensuous body.

  Every great couple faces challenges to their destiny, my sweet Valentine, obstacles to be overcome, and of course we are no exception. Do not fret over this, my darling! I have come to accept and forgive your initial concern regarding my advances; your reluctance to commit yourself fully to our burgeoning relationship. In fact, your shy hesitation served only to fuel my desire even more than I had ever dreamed possible!

  Others less intuitive than I claimed they saw terror in your eyes when you looked at me, but I knew better. The poets say the eyes are the windows to the soul, do they not, my love? As such, I alone knew the truth, because I alone could see into your soul. I alone am your soul-mate! I alone could see that the emotion those other unfeeling fools mistook as terror was in fact respect and admiration, and—dare I say it?—Love!

  The blessed knowledge that I have succeeded in winning the heart of the most beautiful and desirable woman in the world is the one thing that will sustain me, my dearest love, during those seemingly unbearable and interminable hours when we must of necessity be apart. Because even though destiny threw us into each others arms and showed the world we were meant to spend eternity together, I cannot hold you close to me every moment of every day.

  But now we will never truly be apart, will we my darling? For I stole your heart, didn’t I? Despite the cruel and misguided efforts of all those ordinary people to whom romance and true love mean nothing, the people who were determined to keep us apart (As if that were even possible!), I was able to take your heart, wasn’t I?

  You knew all along that your heart would one day be mine, didn’t you my love? I offer this solemn promise: that I will hold it close to my own, darling, forever. I will treat it with the utmost reverence. I pray that though you now sleep the eternal sleep, somehow you are aware of the enormity of my regret that I must utilize an ordinary glass jar as the receptacle for such a divine organ; such a perfect example of our lasting commitment to one another.

  If nothing else, though, we may now rejoice in the knowledge that your heart will be near me always and forever. And that is what we both wanted, isn’t it my darling Valentine?

  Yours in Eternity,

  Your Loving Valentine

  The Wheels on the Bus

  We’ve all seen the reports we aren’t quite sure we can believe, of people who possess the ability to move items using only their minds. It’s a hard thing to wrap our minds around and a hard thing to believe unless we see the proof with our own eyes. Now imagine you are the mother of a four year old child who appears to possess this ability. But you can’t tell anyone, not even your husband, because a child with telekinesis is the least of your problems . . . “The Wheels on the Bus” first appear
ed in the print anthology MAUSOLEUM MEMOIRS, released in December 2009.

  “Mommy, mommy, I want the salt!” Jonathan Weingarten slapped his tiny four year old hands on the kitchen table as if to punctuate his demand. The resulting noise was surprisingly loud, reverberating through the kitchen and causing the boy’s mother to jump. Of course, she jumped a lot lately.

  Deborah Weingarten responded sharply. “That’s enough, Jon! I told you once already I’ll bring you the salt when I’m done picking up. Now, eat your breakfast and try to exercise a little patience.” She was almost finished cleaning the stove after cooking the boy’s favorite meal—scrambled eggs and toast—and wanted to get everything straightened up before crossing the kitchen to hand the salt shaker to her son.

  She watched and waited as the towheaded blonde bundle of energy scrunched his face up as if preparing to scream bloody murder. But he didn’t scream bloody murder. He didn’t do anything at all, in fact. He just sat on his booster chair with his face scrunched up, staring with fierce concentration at the offending salt shaker, which at the moment sat innocently across the table, far out of reach of the little boy.

  “Here it comes,” she mumbled under her breath, not even realizing she was talking to herself. Right on cue, the salt shaker began quivering, almost imperceptibly at first, then more and more violently, as if the world’s tiniest earthquake was taking place under just that one isolated portion of the kitchen table. Then the salt shaker moved. It moved in fits and starts initially, before sliding smoothly across the table’s surface, gathering speed as it went, finally stopping in Jonathan’s tiny outstretched fist.