The Great Big One

by J. C. Geiger

  Her question dropped like a pebble in a pond, sending out aqua ripples. Griff clapped his hands. A yellow shock wave. Thomas did a vocal didgeridoo: WAABWABAWABAWABAWABA! Warbling notes passed through like psychedelic smoke rings. Charity laughed—purple bursts.

  “The Everlight! The EternoGlow!” Thomas said. “Still working on a name.”

  “It’s amazing!” Charity said.

  “You’ve outdone yourself, friend,” Griff said.

  He covered the device. Went to the next object.

  “Griff? The honors?”

  “Hey yes,” Griff said. He whipped off the covering.

  “Ta-da!” Thomas said.

  “It’s a sandwich,” Griff said.

  A blue plate special. White bread. A thin strip of purple jelly.

  “Peanut butter and jelly,” Charity said. “Your favorite.”

  “Not jelly,” Thomas said. “Jam. A jam sandwich.”

  Griff touched the sandwich. Hard plastic. Thomas fingered a groove in the back and popped open the bread. Inside, a nest of circuitry.

  “Holy shit,” Griff said.

  “Go ahead,” Thomas said, flipping a switch. “Try your phone.”

  Charity took her phone out. No signal. No Wi-Fi. Nothing.

  “Signal jammer?” Griff said. “Sweet.”

  “Fleeing the state? Out on the lam?” Thomas said, resealing the device. “Perfect for your pic-i-nic basket! It’s a Jam Sandwich. Get it?”

  “We get it,” Charity said.

  “Charity,” Thomas said. “Please unveil the Portable Early Alert Response System. I’m calling it—PEARS.”

  Charity whipped off the blanket.

  Eyes and little claws, grabbing mesh.

  “Ahh! Damn it, Thomas!”

  Charity walked away.

  “It’s a perfect system,” Thomas said. “No batteries or cell service required. Rats are one of the rare mammals that can actually survive in Death Valley. And I can’t leave you, little sweetie.”

  Neapolitan settled in her carrier. Made a quiet humming noise.

  “Oh my gosh. Do rats purr?” Charity asked.

  “Go on. Touch her.”

  They did. All three of them, touching a rat.

  “How did my life come to this?” Charity asked.

  “I keep wondering why you’re still here,” Griff said.

  “Are you kidding? You are the most interesting people I’ve ever met.”

  Their smiles evened out, and the silence took on weight.

  “Tomorrow,” Thomas said. “Five thirty AM. We rendezvous at the Point parking lot.”

  Charity leapt and danced and then ran in place.

  “I’m just too excited,” she said. “Can’t even control it.”

  When Charity hugged them goodbye, Thomas took a new, bright blue pen cap, popped it in his mouth.

  “You’re more nervous than usual,” Griff said.

  “Just don’t want it to happen today,” Thomas said.

  “What?”

  “The earthquake. The nuclear strike. The closer we get, the more impossible it feels. Like something bad is going to happen.”

  “Don’t say that,” Griff said.

  “Like flipping heads twice in a row,” Thomas said.

  Thomas took a quarter out of his pocket.

  “Don’t do it,” Griff said.

  He flipped, slapped the coin.

  “Heads.”

  “Thomas. Don’t.”

  “Griff. I never had a choice.”

  Thomas flipped the coin again.

  —slap—

  “Don’t look,” Griff said. “I’ll back away slowly.”

  Thomas stood with his hand on the quarter. Like holding a grenade with the pin pulled. Griff laughed and sprinted for the stairs. All the way from the front door, he could hear Thomas scream.

  FORTY-NINE

  WAKING UP FELT LIKE CHRISTMAS IN JULY. THE FLUTTERY-FEET feeling. Griff had barely slept.

  His parents were not awake. He left quickly on his bike.

  They were going to the desert. Together.

  On days like this—birthdays, holidays, travel days—the whole world got fresh corners and a bright new palette of colors. Today, on Marine Drive, the blue-gray sky glowed with pigments borrowed from heaven. The air tasted like sacred water crashing on stone. The whole world had already changed.

  Down the last dip in the road, there they were.

  The plan, assembling in front of him. Flesh and blood and bags and a blue Thunderbird, all waiting in the Point parking lot. Charity wore a hoodie, her small face peeking out from inside. Curls tousled in the wind.

  “C’mon,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  They stashed Griff’s bike in the trunk of Charity’s blue Sonata. They stashed the Sonata in the west end lot by beetle-browned pines and cathedral gorse and packed into the ThunderChicken. Inside, quiet as church. Charity rode in the back with the copper poles, canvas bags, tents, a case of MREs, and two blue 5-gallon water bricks. The trunk was full.

  The ThunderChicken’s engine came to life:

  Cheepcheepcheepcheeep

  It was real. The Band was real. They were leaving.

  Thomas used his signal, pulled out slowly. Driving the length of Marine Drive, Griff felt the town hang heavy. Molasses pavement. Road shoulders squeezed like pinching fingers. A feeling of urgency. They followed the tsunami evacuation signs. Griff ate his first square of dark chocolate. Chewing too quickly.

  “Seven more,” Thomas said.

  He and Griff had dug the postholes.

  “Six,” Griff said, another sign flashing past.

  “Five,” Thomas said.

  There were on Highway 2. Home to mudslides, washouts, and falling rocks, but TripCheck had showed nothing but a bright green line and on they went—banking away from the ocean, the long, undulating road toward the redwoods. They counted the last three evacuation signs.

  “Three.”

  “Two.”

  “One!”

  EXITING TSUNAMI EVACUATION ZONE

  They passed the pullout, Florida Fork—as Leo had named it—approaching 50 miles per hour. Thomas removed the cassette from his pocket.

  “Let’s wait,” Griff said. “Just a little longer.”

  He wasn’t ready to celebrate yet.

  “C’mon,” Thomas said. “I’m delirious. It’s time for a little levity. Charity, spark that thing up. Clap three times.”

  Charity did. Thomas cheered and the ball in her hands pulsed bright green. Charity tossed it to Griff, who bobbled it in his hands.

  The ball shuddered and glittered. Purple and yellow. Signs hugged the next curve.

  WARNING: FALLING ROCKS

  WARNING: TIGHT CURVE AHEAD

  “Freedom!” Thomas yelled. The lights flashed red, white, and blue.

  “Did you program that?” Griff said.

  Thomas looked in the rearview mirror.

  Lights continued to flash. In his hands, the globe was green.

  “Hey,” Charity said. “No, no, no.”

  BWWWOOOP! BWOOOP!

  Police siren.

  “It’s okay,” Thomas said. “We’re all legal. Seat belts on, hands at the ol’ ten and two, click the signal. He’ll probably blast right by.”

  He signaled. Gently, Thomas eased the car over.

  Just ahead, the road curved into a shady chute of old growth. The way out of town. They stopped just shy of the deepest part of the canopy.

  “Go on,” Thomas said, waving. “Go on!”

  The police officer stopped.

  “He pulled over,” Thomas said.

  “No. He pulled us over,” Charity said. “We’ve been pulled over.”

  Charity sat up straight. Put her hands on her lap.

  “We have nothing to worry about,” Thomas said.

  “Don’t be ignorant,” Charity said. “Put your damn hands out front. Don’t mess around.”

  It didn’t sound like her. She was more worrie
d than Griff had ever seen her. In the rearview mirror, more traffic. A familiar black truck—hard to see through the reds and blues. Another squad car.

  “It’s a whole convention,” Thomas said.

  “Oh Jesus.” Charity pressed her palms against her eyes.

  The officer’s door opened and clapped shut. Griff squinted in the mirror. On the front of the squad car, a familiar sticker. Gold letters on matte black:

  NOAH WAS A PREPPER

  “Dunbarred,” Griff whispered.

  Thomas chomped down on his bottom lip.

  “I need you to listen carefully, Griff,” Thomas said. “Charity, listen. No matter what happens—listen to the radio.”

  “What?”

  Thomas had clicked into plan B. Griff could see it, but didn’t know the script.

  “We meet in the same place,” he said.

  In the rearview, the officer advanced quickly. Sunglasses and a uniform.

  Thomas ejected the tape and gave it to Griff.

  “What’s this?”

  “The music,” Thomas said. “You’ll need it. Just hold on, buddy. Promise me. Hold on.”

  “What going to happen?” Charity asked.

  The worst thing. The worst possible thing.

  Officer Dunbar reached the car. Squatted down. His face, adorned with a calm little smile. Outside, it was already warm. It was going to be a beautiful day.

  “Hey, Thomas,” Dunbar said. “Just wanted to catch you on the way out of town. See if you and Griff and your special friend are all familiar with State Penal Code 807.620.”

  “Yes, sir,” Thomas said. “I’m intimately familiar with that goddamn code.”

  “Oops,” Dunbar said. “Get out of the dang car. Griff, your father is waiting. What’s your name, in back? Could you please remove that hood? Slowly, please.”

  The door creaked. An aching sound. Griff’s shoes touched the pavement.

  He could feel the gravity of disappointment from inside his father’s truck. His father watched him walk. Didn’t get out. Griff wouldn’t be able to breathe in that truck. This was the last of the air. The end of the sun. That truck, like a black hole.

  Not even light could escape.

  FIFTY

  ALONE IN HIS ROOM, GRIFF CONSIDERED THE PARACORD.

  Over six hundred known uses.

  “You’re on lockdown until further notice,” his father said. “No contact with those two.”

  “We can get you someone to talk to,” his mother said. “We want you to be okay.”

  There were games. If you had a friend, you could do a cat’s cradle.

  Hold the paracord in such a way that if you had a partner to play with, you could trap their hand in a rectangle of strings and then let that person go.

  They could trap you and let you go.

  That week, the fires returned. Creeping up the coast. The air quality meter was so red it turned purple. Particulate matter hung and made the landscape look like charcoal etchings. Griff picked at his paracord. He could make a pulley system to lift water jugs. Dampen their roof to guard against embers. He could tie a mask on his face.

  No red circles on the calendar. Empty boxes.

  He had one standing appointment on Wednesday at eleven, when the whole town shook with the weekly test.

  bbbadabadabadawwwEEEEEEEEEEEEE

  Griff was not allowed to work with Thomas. Thomas was out there picking up roadside trash. Doing ocean cleanup. Cutting gorse. Worse than SubWatch. Winter-thick gloves in summertime, chopping the thick, sticky stems to stumps. Swabbing poison on the blunted ends.

  Thomas had been right about the tape. Griff needed it. Every listen, like a quick breath.

  But he couldn’t keep air in his lungs.

  Without weekdays, weekends, or school, or reliable daylight, everything became a slow, dark circling. The sun had burned out in its socket, like a dead bulb. One twilight, his father opened his bedroom door without knocking. Red-rimmed eyes. He said:

  “I just don’t know who you are, Griff.”

  He stood a minute longer, shifting his weight. Silence.

  “Can you just tell me why? Was it drugs?”

  Drugs.

  That would’ve been easier. How could he explain the value of music? That he would give anything to see the Band and meet the people who loved the Band. Explaining this to his father would be like trying to explain a shuttle launch to a golden retriever. The dog might love you, the dog might wish to understand, because it loves you. But the dog could not understand.

  When his dad left, Griff sat on his bed swallowing his spit and breathing and trying to survive from one minute until the next.

  Hold on, Thomas had said.

  Griff listened to the radio, but Thomas was never there.

  The coast burned father north. The air was a gray stew and the sky fell in small dandruff flakes on the black truck like God scratching his head. The smoke killed small things. Dead fruit flies in the kitchen. Tiny corpses on a pile of brown bananas. One day, a larger thing died. In the endless twilight, that day emerged like an alligator wandering from the fog to clamp its jaws on your leg and remind you things can still get worse.

  Griff did not hear the car accident, but he saw the furry thing at the base of his driveway and thought it was a rat. Large ears. Small face and a golden coat. An Abyssinian cat with a broken leg and internal injuries and it chose their home as the place to die. With a paracord, you could make a cat leash to keep it from running into the road. You could make a tourniquet or hold a splint in place but you could not make it better when it was too late. You could not, with a paracord, tie the cat back to this world.

  Music stopped working.

  At some point, the Band was intoning the wrong things. Emphasizing words like dark and the end and black and knotted and Griff could tie twenty-two different knots so he listened to K-NOW, but Thomas was out cleaving gorse because he had lied to a police officer and no longer had a show:

  bbbadabadabadawwwEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

  Wednesday again.

  Scruggs had taken their shifts on K-NOW but did not say anything mean about them. One afternoon, he played a new PSA for Lost Coast Student Government.

  “This is Charity Simms, one of your Lost Coast Student Leaders. We want to tell you students at home, we are here for you. A safe place. You can find us, September in the student union. Just hang on. School will be here before you know it.”

  GASP!

  A red-circle day. A lungful of hope! The air should’ve lasted for days, but as soon as the red ink dried, he felt like he’d made the whole thing up. Griff listened all day for a few days and the announcement never played again. The lilac bush across the street—Griff’s favorite, which dripped with fragrant cones of the deepest purple in the spring—died from the ashfall. The neighbors came outside in N95 masks and lifted drooping branches, shook dead leaves. Griff had never seen that before, with a plant. Limp and brown all at once. Just decided—enough.

  That same night, Griff woke in a panic. Breathless, like he’d forgotten something. Slept too long. One word ricocheted in his head:

  Terrible, terrible.

  He went to his window.

  He could not see it. No flash. No glimmer. Could the ash be that thick? He padded out into the hallway. Deactivated security. Laced up his boots, stepped into a still night that smelled like a concrete fireplace. Stinging eyes, closing throat, and a clawing feeling in his lungs saying run run panic run. You learn fast that all five of your senses are designed to tell you when something is burning.

  “Please,” Griff said. “Please.”

  He rubbed his eyes and screamed.

  “Hey! C’mon!”

  Screaming at the lighthouse.

  This is where you lose your mind, Griffin Tripp. Complex metal alloys such as cadmium, atomized by 800-degree fires, have melted like mercury butter in your brain and driven you batty.

  Shhhhh, the ocean said back. Shhhhhh.

  Paracord use #437 would
be to tie it to the guardrail at the edge of Marine Drive and rappel down to the mud flats. He’d make it. Five hundred pounds dead weight, two hundred swinging. Across the mud flats, there was no light. Really. No light. He walked home in the dark. Showered off the campfire smell and lay watching his window. He tried to summon with his voice:

  “Whoomp,” he whispered. “Whoomp.”

  No one to hear it, he said it louder.

  “Whoomp!”

  At breakfast his dad told him:

  “They shot up the lighthouse.”

  Probably two people in a truck, they left tire tracks in the mud. Tired of waiting, they shot out the handmade Fresnel lens with bullets from a semiautomatic gun. Over 370 individually cut panes of glass. They could not replace the shattered lens with any amount of money. They don’t even make them anymore.

  “It survived the ’64 tsunami,” his father said. “Couldn’t survive Clade City.”

  Paracord use #137, to choke the ones who did it.

  “Who?” Griff said. “Dad, who did it? You know. Tell me who. Tell me. Tell me.”

  “Please stop, Griff,” his mother said. “Please.”

  Her voice choked off. What was he doing? Grabbing the skin on his forearm. Pulling until it bled.

  Ah, he’d done that before. All coming back.

  Instead of clothing, he’d grabbed loose skin on his arms and pinched his throat and grabbed fleshy fistfuls from the back of his neck. In the hospital, they’d asked him:

  Have you ever slipped something around your neck? Do you have a plan?

  “Come to work with me tomorrow?” his mother asked. “It will be fun.”

  Tomorrow. Too many tomorrows. They stacked up heavy beyond his bedroom door, which he locked. One specific use for a paracord. He tested his desk chair. Five hundred pounds dead weight. His pants hung looser than ever. It would work fine.

  He sat on the chair and unclipped the bracelet. The thing was, you had to unlace the paracord and would not be able to lace it back the way it was, resembling the black-and-white piano keys. That would be challenging to explain, if he decided not to. A permanent thing, unlacing the cord. He stood and unlocked his door and went to the piano room.

  If he was ready to die, he could at least play it.

  Sheets of music, unmoved since October. Like the shoes and hanging clothes, they didn’t know Leo was gone. It was time to be honest with the music. He removed sheets labeled duets, piano four hands.