The Ending is Everything

by Aaron M. Carpenter

  “What radio?” she asked.

  “Yeah, I don’t know if I even have one that works.” I had an entertainment system, for MP3’s, CD’s, the internet and vinyl listening. I never bothered hooking up the antenna to the receiver.

  “You could go out to the car and listen,” Zero said. Now we both looked at him like a dog looking at its master not sure of the command.

  Outside, it was a balmy seventy degrees on this day in November. Wearing the outerwear Kaitlyn and I had on was absolute overkill. The heat was magnified near uncomfortable levels in my car. But, we all piled in, Kaitlyn and I up front, Zero in back, and I began scanning the A.M. stations. Nothing but static. None of the L.A. stations were broadcasting. A few had the annoying, emergency broadcast sound, but nothing else. Finally. 1140 A.M. Something could be heard despite the static. It was a live radio show, and the DJ seemed flustered and out of breath.

  “We are definitely getting reports, that DC, New York, Dallas, Atlanta, Seattle, and Detroit, have all been hit with a nuclear explosion,” the DJ said.

  “Holy shit,” Zero said. Not loudly. More as a sad statement.

  The DJ continued. “All of this is conjecture and moving pieces. But for now, it appears everyone needs to stay in their homes and wait for updates. We have heard of some military activity out of San Diego. But, nothing is confirmed. So, please, everyone, stay inside. If you are near one of the blasts zones especially. Board up your house and hunker down. We will continue to provide information as we get it.”

  I turned off the radio and said, “Well. That’s that then.”

  By two in the afternoon, not only were Kaitlyn, Zero and myself hanging out in my home, but Drew and his wife, Alicia, and their two daughters, Jane and Natalie, were present as well. The Welles family. They showed up a couple of minutes after we heard the radio broadcast. It was, of course, right after I resealed the door with duct tape, that the doorbell rang. They thought I might know what was going on and hoped I was home. Their immediate thought was to get out of town once they heard about the bomb. But, when they approached, close to the freeway, they could see the traffic back up and headed to my place.

  We went through the entire process again with Drew and his family. The bomb. The possible radiation. Thankful for the Santa Ana winds. The sealing of the house with duct tape. The bedroom in the hallway, which would now have to be changed.

  Natalie, age six, looked like her mother, with flaming red hair and pale skin. Jane, age five, looked like Drew with her thick, wild, jet black hair. They weren’t very happy about the paper and crayons I gave them. They would much rather have a tablet. But, eventually, when they realized the electricity was out at my house and I didn’t have a tablet, they accepted their fates and began scribbling incoherent images of homes and families with unknown origins, except in the minds of their creators.

  “When I came home, Alicia was already there, and we both went to pick the kids up from daycare together. The place was mostly empty,” Drew said. “Thankfully Mrs. Nash was waiting with all the children who had not been picked up yet. And it wasn’t until after we left that we heard the news. You’d think they would’ve sent out a big bulletin or something.”

  “No channel to do so,” I said. “Most of the electricity in the area is out.”

  “Why is that?” Kaitlyn asked. “We are pretty far from the blast site.”

  “An EMP?” Zero suggested. He probably saw it happen in a movie.

  “No. Not an EMP. An EMP would’ve knocked out your phone, immediately. And every electronic device, including your car,” I said. “If I had to guess, there was an electrical surge when the bomb went off, and then everyone panicked, and no one has gotten around to fix it... Yet.”

  “So, the power could be back soon?” Alicia asked.

  “Yes. I would think so... Unless there is something else going on.”

  “Like what?” Kaitlyn asked.

  “No idea. No one showing up to work. Maybe,” I said.

  “Well. What do we do now?” Alicia asked.

  This was the question that needed to be answered. The only instructions from any sort of authority, was from some DJ in the high desert, telling us to stay put. We heard no official announcements from any government body. With the electricity and cell phones out, who knew what was going on in the government.

  “The way I see it,” I said. “We have a couple of options. Number one. We all hole up at our own places and wait till we hear something from any government officials. Number two. We try and brave the traffic and get out of town. Number three. We all combine our resources and hole up together and ride out whatever comes our way. I suggest number three.”

  They looked at me with a renewed sense of confidence. Drew seemed to turn to Alicia to say ‘I told you we came to the right place.’

  “Number Three,” Drew said.

  “Fuck. I got nowhere else to be, and my place is a shithole,” Zero said.

  “Can you watch the language?” Alicia said, as she looked at the children, who were giggling at Zero’s unburdened, colorful language.

  “Sorry. Ma’am.”

  “We need to gather some supplies and people.” I went through a whole list of things we need to survive at least a month without leaving: boxed or canned food, bottled water, propane, gas, weapons, blankets, pillows, binoculars, weather-proof coats, boots, sleeping bags, flashlights, batteries and anything else that we could use.

  “We also need to stop by Ethan’s. He may be home and see if he wants to join us,” Drew said. “And do you think this is the best place to stay? It’s not very big, with all these people.”

  “I think that is why we should stay here. A small place is easier to keep an eye on, than a bigger one. And because it’s tucked away in a cul-de-sac, I think we can avoid any unwanted attention,” I said.

  “What, like marauders or something?” Drew asked.

  “Maybe.”

  “Do you think it will come to that?” Alicia asked.

  “I don’t know. I really don’t,” I said. Which was true. I was just making most of this stuff up, as we went. Obviously, based on some military training. But, not a lot of apocalypse training was provided by the Army.

  Eventually, we decided that Zero and I would go out to his place, the Welles home (Drew gave me the key) and to stop by Ethan’s, once the sun went down. Alicia found some crackers and fruit for dinner for the kids and the others who stayed behind. I showed Drew where I hid the guns in the bathroom. I believed everything was in order. We had our strange grocery list, and I was taking my handgun.

  I turned to Kaitlyn who was sitting quietly on the red couch watching the kids color on my rug. “What do you think?”

  “I don’t think I have much of a choice,” she said.

  “I know, and I told you we would get you to Utah as soon as we can and we will.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  11/11/2024

  It seems almost surreal to me now that everyone appeared to treat that night like any other. I remember reading a similar thought in the novel by H.G. Welles, War of The Worlds. I remember thinking as I read, how can people continue to live as if nothing happened? A giant meteor landed in a field directly from Mars, and the start of an alien invasion was imminent, yet people were just going about their daily lives. I, of course, was a little unfair to the citizens in War Of The Worlds. I knew it was an alien invasion. I read the description on the back of the book. Yet, while driving with Zero to pick up our survival supplies, I saw similar reactions. While Kaitlyn and I were bundled up and anxious about radiation, a man a few blocks down was washing his car at twilight, basking in the fresh air, drying his Ford Fusion, with a microfiber towel. They say there are two primary responses to a perceived harmful event; fight-or-flight. I would like to add a third; ignore. A twenty-first-century human reaction to the unimaginable. I will ignore everything and pretend the world and myself are just fine.

  As we drove the two miles to Zero’s apartment, I observed nothing
out of the ordinary. No speeding cars. No riots. Police sirens were nowhere to be heard. It was all too strange. Zero while driving, was also, quiet. Which, for him, was unusual. He seemed to be operating with a heightened sense of awareness as if the alien invasion of H.G. Welles’ novel was going to burst out of the sky at any moment. Hands at ten and two, checking the mirrors repeatedly. He was, of course, anticipating more from this night, like myself, than the actuality of the situation.

  It was curious these days that the person I would call my closest friend was Zero. We had never been close. It was always mutual friends who brought us together. Either, Ethan or Drew. It was never our first thought to call each other and see what we were doing. Yet, over the past six months, it was Zero I talked to on a regular basis. It was Zero who ‘suggested’ I host a party. He was the one, without question, since I’ve been back who has treated me like I was the same person. We met playing roller hockey as freshmen in high school. He let me borrow a pair of hockey gloves. Mine were worn through, and I could feel the stick in my bare hands. It was ideal for grip and a tactile feeling of the stick, not so ideal for my hand’s safety. Zero, even at the time, was the life of the party. Always cracking jokes and being his imprudent, absurd, yet innocent, self. He offered the gloves to me without asking. “Fuck dude. Your gonna get a splinter with those gloves. Here try these.” As he tossed the new pair over, I was laughing. A splinter? That is what made me laugh. Hockey sticks haven’t been made of wood since the early nineties. Seated in his truck, I felt a sincere admiration for the man we all called, Zero.

  After five minutes on the road, Zero still drove with that anticipating look on his face. I was staring at that face when he slammed on his brakes, jerking my neck sideways. Out the windshield, a block away, red taillights, contrasted with the sunset. It was the intersection of Baseline Street and Milliken Road. At that intersection; a grocery store and a gas station.

  “Turn right up here into the neighborhood,” I said and pointed at a turnoff to a side street twenty feet from where the car idled in the middle of the road.

  “We need to go left, not right to my place.”

  “Yeah, but the next left turn is way up there.”

  “We don’t need a turn,” Zero said and turned left...over a medium separating the west and eastbound lanes. The medium, three feet across, comprised of grass, concrete, and brick, that created triangle patterns crisscrossing between the green grass. When he hit the curb, the whole truck creaked, and all his work equipment in the back trembled and threatened to eject from the truck bed. Thankfully, there stood no trees where Zero turned, and we were soon heading back east, the way we came. But, we saw our first sign that everything was not as serene as it first appeared.

  Ten minutes later we arrived at Zero’s apartment, and I had finally begun to process the significance of the past twenty-four hours. In a rush to figure out how to survive and the urgency of incoming friends, the impact of the previous twenty hours had eluded me. Standing in Zero’s apartment, raiding his kitchen, it finally dawned on me how the world had irrevocably been altered. Even if the news we heard on the radio was not true, that other bombs had gone off throughout the country, even if that was the case, one nuclear explosion in Los Angeles was sufficient to alter everything. Tens of thousands of people had died in an instant. Nothing was going to be the same. Maybe in the rest of the country, watching in horror, they thought that everything would eventually return to normal. But, it dawned on me, in Zero’s not so clean kitchen, that nothing would be the same.

  “What are we looking for?” Zero said, interrupting my meditation.

  “Look for anything that you would take on a camping trip.”

  “I usually take beer, and that’s about it.”

  I didn’t respond. I knew he was playing Zero, not himself, when he said absurd things like that. “Sleeping Bags, Barbecues, Charcoal, Lanterns, Canned food... Anything that you think we can use.” He just nodded and went into his bedroom. I went back to scouring the kitchen.

  By the time we reached Ethan’s house, we had thoroughly extracted everything useful from not only Zero’s home but Drew’s as well. The Welles family home was a gold mine of supplies as they always took camping vacations. We grabbed everything we could need for an extended stay at Hotel Blake.

  It was just after 8 p.m. My phone was down to ten percent. I was hungry and tired when we knocked on Ethan’s door.

  No answer.

  We peered through his front window. Dark and gloomy. Zero shined a flashlight in the front window of the apartment. Not as dark, still gloomy.

  “Should we break in?” Zero asked. I didn’t think that was an option until he said it.

  “If we can get in without making much noise,” I said, and Zero went to the window and pushed on the pane of glass, to see if he could move the window enough to dislodge the locking mechanism. It was slightly alarming to see him do this so casually. It was evident he had performed this level of unlawful entry before.

  The sound of Zero’s movements echoed disconcertingly across the silent apartment complex. I looked across the park with its colorful playground, at the many beige stucco apartment’s that sat in silence. No one moved. Three cars scattered between empty spaces in the parking lot. The apartment complex, single story, with buildings spread throughout the compound in a horseshoe around the common, sat still as a lion awaiting its prey. It was not one of the more pleasant apartment complexes in Rancho Cucamonga, but the ground level and cheap cost kept it perpetually occupied. Yet, on this strange November night, there was not a person in sight.

  “I think I got in,” Zero said. With one quick hard push, he had removed the window pane and laid it on the ground. He hopped into Ethan’s apartment and opened the front door with a “Ta-da!”

  Inside we found a mess. Trash accumulated on the kitchen counters. Dishes in the sink, which had not been washed for days, possibly weeks.

  “Jesus, I thought my place was bad,” Zero said. “It looks and smells like no one has been here in months.”

  “Yeah. Let’s just see if we can find anything we can use and get out of here.” It felt betraying to be in Ethan’s apartment. As if we were gazing into a slice of a friend’s life he didn’t want us to see.

  Ethan had been my closest friend throughout my youth. Yet, as I walked around his apartment, I honestly felt I did not know him at all. In his bedroom, I found dirty clothes strewn across the twin bed and piled on the beige floor. On a cheap IKEA dresser, buried underneath a pile of dirty clothes I found a framed photograph. It was of Drew, Ethan and myself, from our high school graduation, in our purple graduation robes and hats, smiling as if we just won the lottery. I had this same picture in a box somewhere in storage. The past eight years had flown by. I went off to college a few months after this photo was taken. Drew met Alicia that summer and married her a year later. Ethan? Ethan drifted from job to job. Taking college courses here and there, never with a plan of finishing.

  “What’s that?” Zero asked. I showed him the picture. “Cute. I don’t think there is anything here we can use. No canned food. Water. Nothing.”

  I put the photograph back on the dresser, moving aside some dirty clothes. “Yeah. Let’s get out of here.”

  On the way back to my place, by way of side streets, we passed a small business center, and an idea popped into my head.

  “Pull into the business center.” Zero did as I instructed. “One of the issues we are going to have is a contaminated water supply. At least, for a while.” Zero looked at me with a blank expression. “What does every small business have?” Zero shrugged. He’d probably never been in a real office. “Water.”

  “We’re going to break into the business center?” Zero said with a smile on his face.

  “Yep.”

  There we were, two old friends standing in the dead of night, pitch black, dressed like we were in the heart of winter in Minnesota, about to commit our first felony together. Or at least it was the first for me. Fo
r Zero, I had no idea. The small business complex we stumbled upon was a perfect spot for our thievery. It was located on a commercial block full of warehouses, far away from residential housing and shopping centers. An ideal location, especially with the electricity out, which meant no alarms, unless the building had some sort of backup generator, which I doubted.

  “So, how are we getting in?” Zero asked.

  “Not sure.” The doors were all made of glass. Each office had a separate door. But, the primary tenant, at the center of the compound appeared to take up half the space. That was our first prize, and then we would try the others. It was a real estate office and at the entrance was a double door made of glass, with garish gold handles. Locks located at the top, by the handle, and at the bottom.

  “We can try around back and see if we can bust any windows,” Zero said. Which seemed like a promising idea. But I had a better one. I grabbed the polished, gold, metal door handle, which ran horizontally and pulled. Nothing happened. Zero laughed. Then I pushed… And walked right in.

  “Holy shit. Like a damn Jedi,” Zero said. I was just as astonished myself. Bosses, supervisors, employees, in haste to leave, forgot to lock the door.

  I said a slight prayer to the Powers That Be and turned to Zero. “Let’s hope they still use the old school water dispensers and not the new ones. Grab the flashlights and the dolly, we’re gonna need it.”

  Inside, darkness, except for an unnerving green glow emanating from all the exit signs. A few laptop computers were still on, with little lights blinking in flat black boxes on desks in various states of order.

  At the front of the office we found the receptionist desk and behind the receptionist’s ergonomic chair was our prize. A white, with hot and cold, water dispenser. Thankfully, it was the classic style, not the new water dispensers that tapped directly into the water line, like a refrigerator. The blue jug on top appeared to be two-thirds full of water. I motioned Zero over, and we both looked at each other and at the dispenser. Neither of us had filled or removed a three-gallon water jug from a water dispenser before.