by Mike Kilroy
“It’s not time,” she whispered angrily. “Not until you say it.”
***
Bray sat up quickly, the blood rushing into his head in such a gush that it made him dizzy.
The sun filtered in through the blinds, painting him in a zebra pattern of light. That made it even more difficult for his eyes to adjust.
He rolled out of bed and peered outside. People milled about in the suburban streets. Occasionally, he heard the faint sound of laughter. White smoke billowed over the roof of the house next door and he could swear he smelled pork.
He could hear faint music playing and saw a football spiral high and then dip out of sight again.
A party? They’re having a fucking party?
Bray unbuttoned his shirt and slipped on a T-shirt, white with a yellow smiley face on the chest. He hated this shirt—a gag gift from Justus Coe—but it was the only one he had that was clean and didn’t smell like sweat.
He rubbed his eyes and clumped down the steps.
“Maggie!” he bellowed, but received no reply.
He walked outside and felt the warm midday sun on his face. He yawned, stretched and walked next door, following the scent of the barbeque that summoned his rumbling stomach.
As he turned the corner, he saw Maggie, who walked briskly toward him, her lips turning up into the biggest, widest smile he had ever seen on her face. “Hey, honey. You’re awake. You’re probably hungry. Let’s get you something to eat.”
She took a double-take at his shirt and snickered.
She grabbed his hand and led him to the backyard. Tables were set up and loaded with food—potato salad and deviled eggs and a cheesy noodle casserole and, of course, the main dish: pulled pork.
Kids laughed and played touch football in a clearing and most of the neighborhood milled about, many wearing Hawaiian shirts and leis around their necks. They laughed and swapped funny stories and ate their food and otherwise ignored the fact that the power grid had suffered a catastrophic failure.
It was obvious they didn’t know the severity of the crisis. Most didn’t. Bray, though, knew. He toyed with the idea of smashing their ignorant bliss, telling them they should save all this food, that in a week or two or three—and most definitely in four—they would kill for such a feast.
He refrained.
A man Bray only knew as Anderson—it could have been his first or last name—rushed toward him.
“Hey, Paul,” Anderson bellowed through a raspy voice. His voice was always raspy, probably as a result of all the cigars he smoked on his porch next door to the Brays. They exchanged waves and smiles and how-are-you-doings but little more than that. They were neighbors, but mostly strangers.
“Wanna lei?” Anderson said before blurting out an annoying chuckle. He tried to slip a lei around Bray’s thick neck, but Bray resisted, putting up a beefy hand to block.
Anderson frowned. “Okay, suit yourself.” Anderson paused to admire Bray’s shirt, hit a grin creasing his face again. “Nice shirt. Come get some grub.”
Anderson tottered off. He was a short man with thinning hair and a pot belly. Bray wasn’t sure what he did for a living, but it sure the hell didn’t involve physical activity.
Bray followed and loaded up his plate with pork and the cheesy noodles. He noticed plates with ample food still caked to them stuffed into a waste basket. He shook his head.
Maggie snaked her arm around his. “When do you have to go back to work?”
“Not for a few hours. So far, everyone is behaving.”
“So far?”
“Yeah. I don’t expect that to last.”
Maggie didn’t ask a follow-up question and Bray was happy she didn’t. He had already told her too much. She was fragile and prone to fall back into one of her moods again. He wanted this Maggie to stick around for as long as possible.
Bray finished his meal and burped loudly. The neighbors laughed at his belch and Bray chided them in his own Bray-like way. He was letting his guard down, being the boisterous Bray that rubbed some people the wrong way, but delighted most.
As they sat around the fire pit, silence fell over the group. It was a rare moment of quiet and Anderson broke it. “We should do this more often.”
“What?” Bray asked. “Listen to your stupid stories. Fuck that.” He broke into laughter and slapped Anderson hard on the back.
The other neighbors chuckled and Anderson shook his head. “No, have a neighborhood cookout. It’s a shame it took a little power outage to bring us together like this.”
A voice, commanding and stark, rose up. “It’s not a little power outage.”
Eyes swung to the woman. Bray vaguely remembered her name—Maris Hart. He saw her every now and then around town. She rarely spoke to anyone, rarely engaged in any meaningful conversation. She was always dressed sharply in a pantsuit, her hair as black as raven’s plumage, pulled back, and her blue eyes piercing.
They were piercing now.
“What do you mean, Maris?” Anderson asked. He had a smile on his face, but it was a fake one.
“You guys have no idea what’s happening, do you?”
Anderson glanced around at the others who sat in the circle, his smile growing wider—and more and more mocking—by the second. “Oh, yeah, Maris. What do you know?”
Maris lifted a bottle of beer to her lips and took a gulp. She swallowed, clenched her jaw and made eye contact with everyone, including Bray. He had the urge to stop her, but didn’t. He wanted to see just how much she really knew—and how she knew it.
She cleared her throat, set her empty bottle among the others by her chair, and picked at the glowing red and yellow coals of the fire with a stick. “The newspapers aren’t telling the whole story about this blackout, either, because they’ve been told not to, or it is being covered up.” Her words brought an eclectic array of looks from the gathering, from concern to aloofness to downright scoffing.
“Get Maris here another beer!” Anderson bellowed, laughing. Some of the others joined him in the ridicule. Some didn’t, however.
Maris made eye contact again with everyone, a searing glare that took everyone aback, even Anderson. “You’re all dead and you don’t even know it. You have a pig roast in the shadow of Armageddon.”
Her blunt statement was met with only a few disbelievers—Anderson one of them. He chuckled and punched a man Bray knew only as Josh—a wispy thin man with rotting teeth—on the arm. “Do you remember whatshisname, the guy that lived a street over who had all those cans of food and ran those drills with his poor son and daughter?”
“Oh, yeah! Amos,” Josh said between laughs.
“Yeah. That was his name. Lame-os Amos. What did you call him? A prepper?”
“He was nuts,” Josh said.
“He shot himself in the foot on one of those exercises of his. Lost his big toe.” Anderson slapped his knee with his hand, laughing so hard he snorted. “Maris, are you a prepper loon like Amos? Do you have all your toes?”
“You’re going to be the first to die, Anderson,” Maris said coldly. “The shortsighted ones are always the first to get killed.” Maris scanned the rest of the gathering again. “Mark my words, people. Your lives will never be the same again.”
Anderson scowled at Maris. “I don’t believe you.” Then he made eye contact with everyone around him. “Don’t believe her. She’s just telling a scary story to mess with us. Bray, you’re a cop. Tell her she’s full of shit.”
Bray set his eyes on Maris, who simply poked even more angrily at the embers with the now blackened point of her stick. “Tell them the truth, Detective Bray.” Her eyes cast on Bray now. “You know as well as I do the power will never be restored.”
Bray sighed. He didn’t like being put on the spot like that, least of all by a bitch who thinks she knows it all. “You’re scaring these people for no reason. Just shut the fuck up.”
Maris pulled the point of the stick out of the fire, blew on it and set it with several others sh
e had made. She gathered them and stood, staring down at Bray with displeasure. “They deserve to know their fate. They need to start prepping for the worst, because the worst is coming. This ‘Ejection,’ as people are calling it, is the harbinger of the end of life as we know it. People are going to begin to starve and when that happens, they are going to get desperate. And what do desperate people do, Detective Bray? Anything they can to survive, even if it means killing your neighbor. You have a lot of guns, don’t you? I’d make sure you lock them up because soon people are going to be coming after what you got.”
Bray watched as Maris stomped away. The others looked to him for answers, including Maggie, who squeezed his arm tightly.
“What a whack job,” Bray said, laughing. It calmed the horde.
For now.
Chapter Three
The End of the World as We Know It
Bray’s eyes rolled over the lines.
Maris Ann Hart, 38, had her own secrets. She graduated with a Masters degree in psychology and criminal justice from Robert Morris University. Moved on to the FBI where she graduated at the top of her class at Quantico. Then she was reassigned to Colorado. The rest of her file was either redacted to a point of incoherence or marked as classified.
From what Bray could gather, she was run out of the bureau about a year ago and was teaching a psych class at the local community college.
Bray strummed his fingers on his desk. She obviously still has connections to the government. She definitely knows what’s going on.
Bray decided to find out just how much she knew.
***
Maris Hart had a nice, little home about a block away from Bray. Her grass was cut short and the hedges trimmed. There were flowers in a patch of dirt in front of some bushes near her large front window that had the curtains pulled shut—nothing out of the ordinary. Pretty average, really.
That’s probably what she was going for. The sly bitch.
Bray rapped on her door and waited. He rapped again and the door swung ajar just enough for her blue eyes to peer through. “What do you want?” she barked.
“To continue our doomsday conversation.”
“Why? So you can mock me again?”
“Nah. Because I believe ya. I also believe you know a whole lot more and I’m a curious kind of guy.”
The door swung open. She held a gun tightly in her right hand and a beer just as tightly in her left. Bray put up his hands and smiled, “Whoa there. I come in peace.”
She holstered her gun and stepped aside.
Bray clumped his way in, peering about at her rather boring décor. A green couch sat caddy corner in front of a small flat-screen television. A recliner sat in the other corner. End tables were placed next to each with a lamp on each one. The walls were cream white and had no pictures or paintings hanging from them.
It was as dull as dull could be.
Candles burned all around, the flames flickering off her smooth features and casting ominous shadows.
Bray crashed down on the couch and straightened his left arm on the rest. “So, former Special Agent Hart, what’s the scoop?”
Maris cracked a small smile as she sat in the recliner. “Well, you did your homework. How did you get my file so fast, especially now with no power?”
“Got a friend in the Pittsburgh field office. He was coming up here anyway and brought it along. I always do my homework. How is it I didn’t know a Fed lived right down the street from me all this time?”
“A former Fed.”
“What happened? You must have pissed someone off pretty good to get shitcanned.”
“I didn’t get shitcanned. I quit.”
That’s interesting. Bray sat forward and smirked. “Got tired of wearing pantsuits?”
“Got tired of Halcyon.”
That’s REALLY interesting. “What’s Halcyon?”
“A huge mistake.”
“Can you be more specific?”
“I can. But I’d have to kill you.”
She didn’t smile. She didn’t as much as flinch. For a moment, Bray thought she would actually have to kill him if she spilled the details about this Halcyon. Bray chuckled nervously. “Whatever.”
“I can tell you this. This world faces a million threats. But it’s the millionth-and-one threat that will kill us.”
“You’re talking about the Ejection.”
Maris nodded. “The coronial mass ejection. It was only a matter of when, not if. But did we do anything to prevent it? No. We counted on an aging power grid that we thought was indestructible. We thought we’d have enough lead time to cycle down the satellites and power plants and substations. Obviously, we didn’t. We are going to learn in the coming months how wrong we were. Instead of preventing an Armageddon, we were wasting time building a bunker to house people in the aftermath of one. Save a few thousand instead of billions. How shortsighted.”
Maris pressed the bottle to her lips and gulped.
Despite her ranting and her obvious inebriation, Bray believed her and he felt a sinking feeling in his gut. “So, what are we talking about here?”
Maris finished off her beer with another chug. “The end of the world as we know it. Nothing will be the same again for those who survive. And many won’t. Everything is gone.”
She stood from her chair and walked to the couch, sitting next to Bray. He could smell the alcohol on her breath as she spoke. “At first, things will be okay. Some will even embrace it as a novelty, like that fucking twit Anderson. In a week to ten days, though, that novelty will begin to wear off. Water won’t come out of those spigots anymore because the generators at the water plant will run out of juice. The cities will fall first. There will be riots and bloodshed as people begin to get frustrated and then desperate. Grocery stores will run out of food and with no shipments coming in, people will begin to feel the panic strangle them. After three days without food people will take to the streets in a blind frenzy, pillaging neighbors or anyone they come across who have what they need. After two months, society will completely break down and there will be one law: survival at any cost.”
Bray listened to her speech and let it all sink in. He sat in silence as Maris stared at him, a glum look on her face. Finally, Bray asked, “They can’t fix the grid?”
Maris shook her head. “It would take more than a year. By then, there won’t be anyone left to fix it. They’d have to leave to take care of their families or themselves. They’ll abandon their jobs, just like you eventually will, like everyone eventually will. We’ve lost the ability to live off the land. We’ve lost the ability to fend for ourselves and that will be the undoing for most, like us.”
“I can hunt.”
“That’ll only get you so far. People will try to take what you have. You have to be willing to kill to protect what you have.”
Bray snickered. “I can do that.”
“Can you?”
Bray thought about the girl he had killed outside that convenience store. He thought about killing another human being and it turned his stomach. He felt panic and fear because he knew Maris was correct.
“Only if I have to.”
“You will have to. That I can guarantee.” She placed her hand on his thigh and squeezed. “Go to your wife. Protect her as best you can. Hunker down and keep those weapons of yours close. Don’t trust anyone.”
Maris stood and walked to the door, swinging it open.
Before Bray hit the humid air outside, he stopped. “What are you gonna do?”
“I can take care of myself. Good luck. We’re all gonna need it.”
Chapter Four
Thou Shall Not Kill
St. Paul’s Catholic Church was packed. It was never packed, but the end of the world as we know it has a way of bringing out the religious in people.
Bray stood in front of the stoup at the entrance. He peered inside to see it empty. No holy water here. Someone had drunk it.
His gray flannel shirt was loose around his sh
oulders and his jeans, the thighs worn and faded, were falling down around his hips. He pulled them up and fastened his belt a loop tighter.
Bray could hear the murmurings of prayer. Maggie had her knees dug into the kneeler at the pew nearest him, her elbows pressed against the back of the pew in front of her, her hands clasped together and pushed against her mouth.
She prayed in silence.
Father O’Reilly led people into the confessional. They trained in like cattle, each one entering with profound worry and leaving with a slight smile.
Maggie stood and got in line, glancing back at Bray. He knew what she wanted. She wanted him to get in line with her, to spill his guts to the father and cleanse himself of all his sins.
Bray knew it didn’t work that way. No sins could be cleansed here. And what of the sins they were all about to commit?
Things weren’t getting any better. In fact, they were getting much worse. It was spelled out on every face in this church. These people were starving and had come here as a last resort, to throw themselves on the mercy of the Lord.
Bray shook his head and scoffed that their hypocrisy.
Someone in this church had stolen the sacramental bread a few days ago. The wine had been filched days before that. Then the holy water. There was nothing left in this church but desperation and a false sense that God was here with them.
Maggie smiled as she came out of the confessional. Her grin was big and bright and she took a deep breath as she paused and then walked briskly toward Bray.
“Paul, you need to confess,” she begged Bray.
He shook his head. “Confess what? It doesn’t matter anyway.”
“Yes it does. It absolutely matters. We all need to make peace with ourselves to face what’s happening.”
“That won’t feed us.”
She wrapped her arms around him and squeezed, placing her ear against his heart. “Do it for me.”
His heart began to beat faster. She had a way of convincing him to do things he would never do. She had such a kind soul.
He couldn’t resist.
“Okay. Fine.”
She pulled her head away from his chest and reached up to kiss him on his cheek. “Thanks, Paul.”