by Skylar Finn
I ran into the lot, keeping low to the ground as I went. I pulled the tool chest from the back of the Jeep and jacked it up as if my life depended on it, which it did. I was pouring sweat by the time I went to work on the tire. As I swapped them out, I listened: for the sound of returning voices, a gunshot, anything. It was thankfully silent in the lot, but that didn’t make it safe.
I thought of how proud Ethan would have been if he could have witnessed the whole operation, and felt instantly afraid again that I might not even make it to tell him about it. This doubled my resolve to get to the shelter and off the streets as quickly as I could.
I left the headlights off when I pulled out of the lot and into the street to avoid attracting any more undue attention. I sped up the block, thinking of the help this total stranger had appeared out of nowhere to give me. I hoped he was okay. I hoped they wouldn’t hurt him. I hadn’t even given him the soup.
I shifted into third gear as I picked up speed. Just ahead of me, I could see a small knot of figures grouped around a single, smaller one. As I got closer, I saw the men had cornered Leon. He had his hands raised in surrender, the tire iron at his feet. One of the men raised his gun. Another looked up and shouted when he saw the Jeep.
I didn’t hesitate. I shifted again and stepped on the gas. There was a terrified flurry of yells and shouts as I cut the wheel and aimed directly for the middle of the crowd. They scattered like nine-pins, diving sideways and hitting the ground. I felt a soft thud under the right rear wheel and glanced at my rearview mirror.
The man with the gun was sprawled in the road, clutching his leg and howling. His gun was in the street, several feet away. In the distance behind him, a surprisingly spry old man sprinted away, wielding a tire iron. He disappeared over the crest of the hill and vanished from sight.
5
The roads were all but empty now. The only obstacles were the many stalled cars, parked haphazardly where they stopped or crashed into one another in the middle of intersections. I turned on my high beams, resolving to mow down anyone who tried to stop me.
The downtown elementary school was the one Grace attended and I knew the way, which was fortunate because prior to this morning, I had been one of those people who needed my phone to find any location I hadn’t already been to at least a dozen times. I took the same route I always had before.
The sight of the gothic brick building looming up on the hill in front of me filled me with a relief I’d ever known. Beneath this was the fear that maybe they weren’t here, either; maybe some unseen obstacle had waylaid them between here and the store and I had arrived at another dead end. I pushed this dark thought from my brain and told myself they were surely inside, just beyond the crude perimeter erected at the main entrance.
I’m not sure what made me turn down the adjacent side street and approach the building from the back. Perhaps the foresight that had eluded me at the costume store in my failure to check the Prius for the jack or any other essential supplies before moving on had come to me now. But something about the idea of going in through the main entrance, past the police milling outside and what appeared to be members of the National Guard, left me cold.
Maybe it was just the fact that I’d spent the last several hours trying not to have these four wheels stolen out from underneath me, but I had the strong sensation that the private property of a private citizen was no longer valued or respected by anybody on either side of the law.
I had no doubt in my mind that I’d be asked to leave the Jeep in the capable hands of the authorities, who likely felt they needed it themselves. I was sure that they did, and more sure that I didn’t care. The only thing I cared about was finding Ethan and Grace and getting us out of the city to safety.
I drove around the back of the building and pulled up next to the wheelchair access ramp that ran up to the door of the gym. I cut the headlights and the engine. I left the bags locked in the Jeep and ran up the ramp. I was relieved to find the back door was unlocked because at that point, I probably would have kicked it down.
The scene inside was one of complete and utter chaos. There was no violence or fighting as there had been in the streets, but what looked like hundreds of people were packed not only in the gym but spilled into the hallways of the school as far as I could see.
Everyone seemed to be talking, yelling, or crying simultaneously, and it was like being inside a hive of angry bees. I fought the impulse to clap my hands over my ears to try and keep out the clamor of noise as I threaded my way through the throngs of people.
Every square inch of floor was covered by either people, cots, or fold-out tables. I could see that the battle to impose some kind of order or organization onto a massive group of scared and unhappy people, looking for loved ones, answers, or both, was a losing one. The gym was poorly lit with oil lanterns and faces seemed to loom up at me out of the dark, staring into my face in what seemed like an accusing fashion that I wasn’t the person they sought. None of the faces were Ethan’s or Grace’s and after about ten minutes of this, pushing my way through a crush of unwilling bodies, I felt like I would go insane.
I reached an air pocket in the corner and doubled over, gasping for air and sweating. I had to get out of this gym. Maybe one of the officials out front could tell me where to go and how to find my family. I straightened up and my eyes landed on the man in front of me, who held a clipboard. I grabbed his arm. He looked alarmed. I could tell he was secretly afraid he’d be torn to pieces by the crowd at any moment.
“Please, sir.” I tried to sound calm and reasonable, the opposite of the way that I felt. “I’m looking for my family. Is there someplace they might have checked in?”
“Haven’t started the check-in process yet,” he said briskly, already edging away. “All the medical tents are set up outside for now. They might be getting checked over out there.”
“Might be?” I said, both angered and increasingly desperate. But he disappeared into the crowd, as if sucked into it like quicksand. I inched along the wall toward the nearest door. At this point, I felt like I’d be lucky to get outside without suffocating.
I was almost to the door when I heard a shout behind me. I glanced over my shoulder as two men came to blows, one landing a solid punch on the other’s face while a woman screamed, “Stop it! Stop it!” over and over again in the background. The crowd contracted around the two, either to join the fray or break it up. I didn’t stick around to find out.
I pressed against the people who were now pressing against me, trying to witness the action, and swam against the current until I reached the door. I nearly wept with relief. I pushed against it just as it was yanked open from the other side and tumbled out onto the pavement outside. Two cops jumped over me and a third leaned over to help me to my feet.
“Are you all right, miss?” he asked cordially as I dusted myself off. He sounded like the first fully sane person I’d encountered since leaving campus that morning.
“Yes, I’m fine, thank you,” I said. “Can you tell me what’s going on?”
He glanced through the door behind me, where the cops inside were breaking up the fight, and apparently determined he had a moment to spare.
“Some kind of attack up North,” he said. I felt certain he was being purposely vague. “Knocked out the power grid.”
“And our phones?” I asked. “And cars? The Wi-Fi and everything else?”
He glanced at me, then back inside. “We’re not too sure about that yet.” He started to move past me.
“Wait!” I exclaimed. “My family! Someone said the medical tents are out here?”
He paused and pointed behind him. “They’re at the bottom of the hill. They’re looking over anyone in need of medical attention. Make your way down there if you’re in need or haven’t found your people inside.”
“Thank you,” I said, already race-walking away.
“Be careful,” he cautioned me before disappearing inside.
By the time I reached the botto
m of the hill, I was running. I weaved in and out of the white tents at the bottom, emblazoned with red crosses. I saw people holding compresses to their heads, covered in blood. People moaned and wailed from stretchers on the ground. It was the same series of unfamiliar faces as the ones inside, only these were in pain and none of them seemed to see me as I ran by.
Someone had lit a series of tiki torches and stationed them at even intervals around the tents. I had the sensation of running through a war-torn, makeshift village in medieval times. How quickly we regressed.
I stopped, spinning around in a helpless circle. Anyone even remotely official-looking was either sprinting through the chaos or huddled over a crying, bleeding person. I didn’t know who to ask for help.
A hand gripped my arm, and I whirled around, expecting to see Ethan. But it was a stranger: a woman with wide, dark, frightened eyes.
“Have you heard about the end of days?” she asked.
“Excuse me?” I said, yanking my arm away.
“Humanity has ravaged the earth for too long now,” she said, and I saw how dilated her pupils were in the fire’s light. “This is the world’s way of cleansing us, our noxious presence. It’s the end of days.”
“I need to find my family,” I said, backing away. I turned and disappeared into a narrow alley between the first two tents I saw. Whack jobs. Zealots. Freaks. They all came out of the woodwork in the event of a crisis. People found an excuse to channel their insanity and declare their delusions from a soap box.
I wandered through the madness, divided between hoping I would and wouldn’t find them here: if I did, it meant one or both of them was injured, but if I didn’t, it meant they were either in that nightmare crowd inside the school or somewhere else entirely.
I ran headlong into a woman in a lab coat, so hard she stumbled back a few feet and fell to the ground. I reached for her hand to help her up, mumbling a quick apology before saying in a rush, “Have you seen a man and a little girl? I’m trying to find--”
“You’ll have to check in,” she said, starting to push past me. “They’re setting it up in the gym, there should be someone there who can help you--”
I didn’t let go of her hand. She stared down at my hand, uncomprehending, then back at my face, incredulous.
“I need. To find. My family,” I said through gritted teeth. “I’m aware this is a chaotic situation, and you have a lot of people to help--at least, theoretically, you’re helping--but the only thing I’ve encountered here is utter incompetence. Where am I supposed to go?”
She looked shocked, angry, and a little afraid. She also looked as if she was on the brink of slapping me. I realized then how tightly I was squeezing her hand. I’m certain the confrontation would have escalated further, but a loud popping sounded only yards away. I dropped her hand and hit the ground. She ducked and covered her head.
I looked for the source of the sound, but couldn’t see any. In the next row over, one of the tents caught fire and erupted into flame. The woman in the lab coat scrambled to her feet and ran towards the bright light of the fire and the ensuing yells and screams. I got up.
I had to find Ethan and Grace. I weaved through the line of tents, coughing, waving smoke away from my face. This wasn’t a safe place. This many people in a space with no direction, no organization, no reassurance--it was just asking for chaos to erupt any moment. And I knew that it would.
The sight of the fire had set several people off nearby. They, too, had been wandering around the tents looking lost, and started yelling when they saw the fire.
“Is it them? Are we under attack?” a man yelled.
A woman grabbed me by the shoulders and held me in place. Her eyes were huge and tearstained, pleading, but her tone was one of utter hysteria.
“Where is Maria?” she screamed at me. “Have you seen her? Have you seen my daughter?” She shook me. “I can’t find her anywhere!”
I realized then how I must have looked to the doctor or volunteer or whoever she had been when I held her in place and demanded she help my family. I didn’t care. I felt threatened and my fight-or-flight response was triggered. I kicked the woman in the shins as hard as I could and broke away when she grunted in pain and doubled over. I ran from the crowd swarming the tents. I needed to get somewhere clear, somewhere with as few people as possible.
A short distance from the farthest edge of the city of tents was the playground. I could see a small group of people huddled on various structures, apparently uninjured. Maybe one of them had seen Ethan and Grace, or could at least tell me how to find someone you knew in the midst of this disorder.
As I got closer, I heard a familiar voice coming from the wooden structure shaped like a castle with a slide attached to it. It was a voice I knew better than my own name. I broke into a run.
Suspended several feet off the ground (he always did prefer the high ground) on a crude little bridge that led from a ladder to the slide was Ethan. Grace sat huddled on his left side, moodily dangling her legs over the side of the bridge. She looked the way she did when someone interrupted her in the middle of a sketch and massively inconvenienced her, which I guess from her perspective was precisely what had happened.
“Ethan?” I called as I got closer. “Grace!”
They looked up simultaneously, alert as two birds on a wire. Ethan leapt from the bridge and landed on the wood chips below. “There you are!”
He declared it as if running into me at a concert after becoming separated after we went to get drinks. He picked me up off the ground and spun me around before setting me down. “I knew you’d get here, eventually.”
I looked at him, simultaneously relieved and disbelieving that I’d even found them at all. I was also both dazed and incredulous. Ethan hadn’t even worried as I crawled through the streets, evading gangs of armed fiends terrorizing everyone in sight. He’d never doubted I would make it here unscathed; for him, it was just a matter of when.
I was simultaneously awash with fear, tension, and endless relief. Ethan seemed perfectly calm and in control. He was like that about everything. Whether you were caught in an endless traffic jam or mudslide, he was as calm and even-tempered as he would be out walking the dog on a pleasant summer evening. He was a fortress of unflappability.
“I thought I’d never find you,” I said. “This place is a nightmare.”
Ethan eyed the tents in the distance, one pouring smoke that curled over the camp and hovered there. “I thought it would be,” he said quietly. “I knew it would be safer than where we were at, but I was hoping it would be better than this. We’ll have to leave soon. We were just discussing it.”
He nodded to the bridge, where a distinguished-looking older gentleman perched next to Grace. “That’s Dr. Charles Peterman.” The man nodded cordially to me.
I hid my surprise as I nodded politely back. Peterman was a renowned surgeon and a regular speaker at the college. He was an alumni who not only excelled in the field of medicine, but had published several texts on the correlation between human thought and psychosomatic responses to environmental threats. I’m sure he had a great deal to say on our present circumstances, though I was growing increasingly edgy and agitated. I was less than interested in what those things might be.
“We were just discussing how to get out of here safely without being trampled or eaten alive,” said Peterman.
Ethan lifted me up by the waist and I clambered up onto the bridge and wrapped my arms around Grace. She returned my hug delicately and a little formally, like an old lady greeting her partner at bridge. For a child, she was prim and proper as a Victorian butler. I found it hilarious, but sagely kept my amusement to myself. Grace despised being laughed at.
I politely extended my hand to Charles Peterman as Ethan pulled himself up next to us. “Dr. Peterman, it’s nice to meet you,” I said.
“Charles, please,” he said. “I suspect we can all dispense with honorifics.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “I fe
el like after seven years of post-grad work, I earned every letter of the word ‘doctor.’”
He laughed. “Agreed,” he stated. “Ethan was just telling me about your work. Of course, I wish we’d met in happier times so that we could discuss it.” He glanced uneasily at the city of tents, his expression reflecting my unease.
Ethan turned to me. “The good doctor here has just informed me that the country is under attack,” he said as casually as if explaining the man’s opinion on the day’s weather. Of course, to Ethan, such a concept was neither foreign nor alarming. He’d been preparing for this his whole life.
“Attack?” I said. “From whom?”
“Who doesn’t want to attack us?” Peterman asked. “Is it North Korea? The Russians? Terrorists? Foreign, or homegrown right here on American soil? Take your pick. Is it our own government? Is it a scare tactic to gain control over us?”
Ethan shifted uncomfortably. Whatever his cynicism regarding virtually every institution, he had a deep and unshakable streak of patriotism. I knew he didn’t like the implication that our own government could have ever been complicit in what was happening.
“Does it matter?” asked Ethan. “Whatever the source, we have to deal with the fallout, the ramifications. The most pressing being, how do we survive in the short-term? Followed by the inevitable, how do we survive in the long-term? Most will struggle to adapt for the remainder of their short lives.”
“Most never will,” said Peterman. “They were dependent on a rug that has now been yanked from under their feet. We’ve regressed to a primitive state of fight-or-flight based instinct. Our most pressing concerns center around the need for the basics: food, medicine, and shelter.” He glanced around the makeshift camp, unimpressed. “Ideally a better one than this.”
He snuck a look at Ethan, looking shrewd. I glanced at Ethan to see if he would mention the ranch, knowing at the same time that he wouldn’t.
Ethan remained silent and impassive. He appeared unaware he was being baited into mentioning whether we had any better place to go than here. I was certain that he did, and had simply chosen not to say anything. He was still getting the measure of Peterman and wasn’t entirely sure he could be trusted. I had no doubt in my mind that an outsider had never been included in his plans for us in the event of a disaster. But if I knew Ethan, he was considering it. “Never waste a valuable resource,” he always said, and an experienced doctor was nothing if not that.