by R. M. Smith
“I have no idea. They were just here. We weren’t gone that long.”
“Oh God, Dan.”
“Just relax,” I said. “I’m sure they didn’t go far.”
“We shouldn’t have split up,” Mindy said. “Dammit I hope they’re ok.”
We sat there in the gray hotel’s parking lot. It was almost dark now.
“Well, let’s look around for them,” I said. “They couldn’t have gone far.”
Mindy nodded. She drove east to the end of town. We had to go around a bad wreck in the middle of the street as we drove. We passed gas stations and small shops, but we didn’t see the van anywhere. “God Dan, I hope the army didn’t get them,” Mindy said. “What if the guys who let us escape changed their minds and they came back for us? And we weren’t here so they only took Cindy and Ski?”
“I don’t think Ski would let that happen,” I said.
Mindy turned around at the east end of town. We went back to the hotel.
I said “Let’s eat something while we wait.”
She nodded again. I got out, opened the hatchback, and rummaged through some of the stuff we found. I grabbed two small cans of peaches with pop-open tops. I also got two bottles of water and some plastic forks.
Back in front, Mindy was crying.
“It’s gonna be fine,” I said. “They’re strong.”
A dead was at my window. It slammed into the window hard enough to shake the SUV. Mindy screamed. I saw that it had dried white paint all over its arms. Its teeth were wet with fresh blood.
Where the hell is the tire iron? I thought crazily. In the shopping cart!!
The cart was still in the parking lot across the street at the store.
“Go to Safeway quick!” I hollered at Mindy.
She shoved the SUV into gear. We tore out into the street. She screamed “Did you see them??”
“No the tire iron is in the cart still!”
“Oh shit!”
She sped through the parking lot to the front of the store. The cart still stood there, untouched. I spun out of the passenger side door. Quickly I grabbed the tire iron then jumped back into the car.
“That zombie was bloody!” Mindy cried. “It had fresh blood on it!”
“It could have been from anything!” I yelled closing the door “Let’s go kill it.”
Mindy put the car into park. She started crying loudly. “Oh Ski,” she cried. “Cindy…”
“They’re fine! C’mon!”
The dead was shambling toward us. His hands were outstretched.
I flipped the door open again. As I stepped around the door, I swung out. I whacked the dead with a low underhand arch. The tire iron came up, smashing the deads jaw upward into its face. It went down.
Back in the SUV I tried to comfort Mindy. She was so distraught. I was scared, too. What had happened to Cindy and Ski?
I finally convinced Mindy that we would have to look for them in the morning. It was starting to get too dark. We were still sitting in the Safeway parking lot. We needed to find somewhere to sleep for the night.
She drove into the parking lot of the gray hotel.
“We should sleep right here in the parking lot,” she said.
I sighed, agreeing. “Yea we shouldn’t leave. We really could get lost from one another if we did.”
“Yea.” She reached to the side of the seat, pulling a lever. Her seat reclined backward. I did the same with mine.
She sat up.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
She didn’t say anything. She locked the doors.
She lay back down. We looked at each other, listening for anything, as the world grew darker around us. Her eyes were serious. There were no smiles.
She slept after a while. I listened to her breathing when it got too dark to see.
I stayed awake for a long time.
Listening.
I woke up in very dim morning light. It was before dawn.
The SUV was surrounded by deads. They didn’t know we were in there. They were simply shuffling along, going nowhere. They grunted every now and then, some higher whimpers, some low like they were choking on vomit.
Their shoes scuffed along. They all walked around like they had no meaning to do anything. What went through their heads, I wondered. Did they think? Did they have any idea that they were dead? What was it that drove them to constantly scavenge for flesh or blood?
Washburn had said that we all had the MCON virus. What the hell did MCON stand for and what did it do? I didn’t feel like a dead. I didn’t want to eat flesh. I felt fine, not sick. My brain didn’t hurt. I didn’t even feel ill at all, not even a fever or rash or anything.
I wondered if the Air Force base was something that had been pre-planned. Marge had said that the place looked new. Had it been revamped? And if so, what for? I wondered if some psycho military officer had launched the nuke after he had seen his wife or family get eaten by a group of deads. Maybe it was his payback to humanity. Maybe Washburn was totally out of his mind and ordered the murder of all mankind because of someone he lost…or didn’t want to lose? Was someone on the plane that he wanted dead? Or maybe he was trying to stop the plane or someone from going to Kansas City.
I could go on guessing forever…
We didn’t have much time. We needed to get moving.
I laid there, listening to the shuffle of the feet. Listening to the gurgles and whines.
Where was Ski and Cindy?
Mindy was starting to stir. I put my hand over her mouth. Her eyes went wide.
“Quiet,” I whispered. “Shhh.”
She stayed lying down but looked around. She saw all the deads.
“Let’s go!” I whispered.
Her eyes told me she still didn’t want to leave.
“We need to get away from here!” I whispered a little louder this time.
“Just wait,” she whispered.
We waited a while. The deads were slowly moving to the west. It didn’t look like they were doing it on purpose, just meandering that way.
By the time the sun was up, the deads had moved pretty far off into the distance. Mindy grabbed the can of peaches I had given her the night before. She popped open the lid.
The dead with the broken jaw suddenly attacked Mindy’s side of the car. It clawed the window with its white painted hands.
Its face was caved in from the chin upward. The tire iron must not have crushed high enough up into the deads skull to end its existence. Mindy dropped the can of peaches. She started the engine of the car.
A van pulled up right next to Mindy’s side of the car. The van was so close it smashed the dead between the vehicles. The crushed dead fell to the ground.
The passenger window of the van rolled down. It was Cindy and Ski.
Mindy quickly rolled her window down too. “Where the hell have you been?” she shouted.
Ski looked at Cindy in confusion. “What the hell you talking about?”
“You scared the shit out of us, Ski!” Mindy cried. “We thought you guys left us…we don’t know what happened!”
“We wouldn’t leave you!” Cindy said. “We went down the street and found a better hotel. It wasn’t ground floor like this one. That’s what we said we were going to do!”
I said “We slept out here all night waiting for you to show up. Did you guys even look for us?!”
“We saw you go into the fucking store” Ski shouted. “We left a fucking note for you right on the god-damn front desk of this hotel.”
“A note in the office? How were we supposed to know you did that? And how come you didn’t come looking for us?” Mindy cried.
Cindy and Ski looked at one another. Ski said “Shit, I don’t know. We thought you guys would find the note and come to the hotel down the road. We figured you’d be safe. We found a room and pretty much went right to sleep.”
Mindy was angry. “I can’t believe you left us.”
“Jesus Mindy” he said. “Ho
w were we to know?”
“It’s called watching each other’s backs, Ski! It’s called being careful and not separating from one another.”
Ski said “You guys went for food. We went after somewhere to sleep. I’m sorry for upsetting you.”
Mindy looked at me, tears running down her cheeks. I looked at Ski. He looked mad but with a lot of questions on his face. He asked “Did you even see the note I wrote?”
“No man,” I said. “We didn’t even go inside.”
“We’re sorry guys,” Cindy said.
“We were worried sick about you,” Mindy said. “We thought you were gone.”
“Well we’re all together now. Here.” Ski reached into the back seat of the van. “I found these in a pick-up down the road.” He held up a pistol as well as a hunter’s rifle with a scope. “Mindy, give this to Dan.”
He handed the pistol to Cindy who handed the pistol through the window to Mindy. She held it for a minute, feeling its weight.
She said “I should shoot you with this, Ski.”
“Oh Jesus,” he said. “We had a case of mis-communication. That’s all.”
She handed the gun to me and said “We need to get going. They’re gonna blow that nuke off and we’re still in range of it.”
“You’re right about that,” he said. “We still need gas though.”
Mindy looked at the gas gauge. “”We’re at three-quarters of a tank here. What do you got?”
Ski said “Less than a quarter.”
“We could siphon yours into ours,” Mindy said.
“There’s a gas station over there,” Ski said, pointing. There was a Shell station on the south side of the road.
Cindy suddenly said quite plainly “Oh shit.”
Ski touched her arm. “What?”
She was looking in the passenger side rear-view mirror. In it she saw a great light trailing up into the western sky.
The nuke had been launched.
There was no time.
We all got out of the vehicles.
On the horizon, a dome of light, huge, brightening, was rising. The second nuke had already implanted into the ground. Another trail of light was dissipating as it shot further up in the south.
Salt Lake, I thought morbidly.
This was followed by an eerie calm. We all looked at one another, surprised, silent, and fearful.
Far on the horizon we could see a dark line moving toward us. It wasn’t an actual line stretching across the horizon, but an uplifting of dirt. It started out small. As it got closer we all realized that it was a wave of destruction coming our way. This wave was not water. It was dirt. It was cars. It was boulders. It was anything that the line touched.
Basically, the horizon of the earth was being destroyed, thrown up into the air. It was hurtling toward us at supersonic speeds.
This was our death.
As it came closer, it grew taller and taller.
“Get in the cars!” I screamed.
Wind started to suck in toward the horizon as it approached. I was able to jump into the Xterra and slam the door. Mindy was able to make it in and snap her seatbelt on. The wind was so strong it caused her door to slam very hard. It barely missed her foot.
I didn’t see what happened to Ski and Cindy. The last thing I knew they were standing there still watching as the horizon came over us. Their clothes were rippling in the wind.
They were holding hands.
THE MOUNTAIN
The wave of destruction hit us with a massive jolt. In the car, the airbags deployed. The wave carried us in the Xterra for what felt like a very long time even though it may have been just a few seconds. The Xterra flipped over from end to end as we were pushed. I held onto the ceiling and braced my feet on the floorboards, but it was very difficult to hold on – thank God the airbags had deployed. The force of the flipping was intense. All of the groceries were flying all over the inside of the car. I was being pelted by cans. The small barbeque was banging like mad inside the hatchback. The outside of the car was being battered. Loud bangs echoed in our ears as the car was struck. I tried to look over at Mindy but it felt like my head was jammed against a wall.
As quickly as it started, the destruction ended. The Xterra was back on all fours. Outside the cracked windshield all I could see was dust.
I looked over at Mindy. She was looking at me, tears on her cheeks. She was breathing hard. She had a small trail of blood running down the side of her face. She asked “You ok?”
I nodded slowly. “I think so. You feel ok?”
“Yeah but I think I got knocked in the head with a can of soup.” She swallowed. “I think that was the end of the world…again.”
I agreed. “I think so, too.”
We sat waiting, watching the dust clear. The airbags deflated.
Everything we had seen in Davenport was gone. The Safeway was gone. The gray hotel was gone. The gas station and every tree, every building, was gone. All that was left over was the ruined earth littered with broken trees, smashed vehicles and splintered buildings thrown off of their foundations. Smoke rose here and there but there were no fires.
The damage looked worse than any hurricane or tornado damage I had ever seen.
It looked like the earth had been wiped clean by a huge hand as it swept dishes off of a table and onto a dirty floor.
Mindy cried for a long time. Cindy and Ski were gone. Everything she knew in life was gone.
I felt like crying, too, but I needed to be strong for Mindy. As far as I knew, she and I may have been the only people left alive on earth. The destruction was so intense.
The sky was brown. Even though it was daytime, I couldn’t see the sun. There wasn’t even a bright spot in the sky where the sun would have been. Everywhere there were splintered trees reaching up to the brown sky. The ground was pitched and cracked and covered in all kinds of trash. There were deep house-size holes everywhere, almost as if the ground had blown itself out. Nothing was recognizable.
I wondered how far this destruction went.
Unbelievably, we both felt fine, even after going through such a hell. Mindy’s head hurt a little due to a gash from a flying can, but I think the airbags saved her. I was achy from my body being thrown around in the car – even though I had braced myself. The muscles in my sides and shoulders hurt.
We abandoned the SUV. All the tires were flat and the frame was bent. There were other cars lying around, but there was nothing drivable. Even if we did find a car to drive, there was no road to be seen.
We were walking hand-in-hand toward the east, avoiding deep holes, stepping over brokenness as we went.
We slept in a lower lying area. The damage was still impressive. It looked like when the horizontal shove passed over, it didn’t go down into a valley or ditch; more or less went right over it.
We were in the flatlands of eastern Washington. In the dusty eastern horizon ahead I thought I could see mountains in the distance, but who knew for sure. I wasn’t even exactly sure if we were going east – and honestly I didn’t know why we were even going east. Maybe to find the edge of the damage? Mindy and I didn’t talk much. Most of the time we were too busy climbing over the destruction.
We didn’t eat much, either. Sometimes we would find something lying in the dirt or stacked against the bottom of a broken tree. Most of the time the cans didn’t have labels or weren’t pop-open tops.
There was no wild life. There weren’t any deads, either, thankfully. We stumbled over many dead bodies, all broken or ripped apart. We would scavenge things off of them if they were useful. Mindy was sad about a boy we found. He was a boy scout with a backpack. In his pack we found some papers and a pack of crumbled Oreo cookies. His legs were broken forward at the knee.
We continued on. It took a long time to notice, but as we went the damage started to become less. Still, there was nothing recognizable as a town. It looked like the trees weren’t as damaged.
“Dan, look!” Mindy said softly.<
br />
I looked where she was pointing. Ahead of us there was a mountain. It wasn’t natural. It was a mountain formed from the end of the horizontal shove. This is where all of the damage from the nuclear blast had finally come to rest.
The mountain looked to be about a mile high. It stretched as far as I could see from north to south.
We started to climb.
As we approached the top we both looked around to see where we had come from. It was desolate destruction.
I looked north and south. This mountain stretched far into the distance; it was part of a gigantic circle. I imagined that this circle was complete. It was probably 500 miles in circumference; the center being the exact same spot where this whole nightmare started for me: atop the mountain at Snoqualmie Pass near the red roof of the hotel.
“Oh Jesus,” Mindy muttered. She pointed at a blue KC baseball cap in the debris. “Was this Ski’s?”
“No. It’s not his,” I said, taking her hand.
“I know,” she said, her head lowered. “I just miss them.”
“I do too. Come on.”
At the top we were able to see down on the other side. There was a large lake. It looked like the mountain had stopped rolling in the middle of a city. To our left, the mountain had piled up against the side of a six story hotel.
Down below there was a large parking lot full of undamaged cars. There was a marina on the lake with yachts under rows of blue awnings along several long docks. The grass of the hotel and marina was well manicured.
The lake was crystal clear.
We hurried down the mountain of trash, almost running. It was like we had just stepped out of a nightmare into the real world.
The air smelled clean.
I led Mindy down to the marina. There were many different yachts to choose from here. All of them looked brand new to me.
I tried several of them but none of them would start.
“They all out of gas?” Mindy asked.
“No, there’s something wrong.”
We went back to the parking lot. We looked inside several of the cars but of course none of them had keys in their ignitions.