Summer of the Apocalypse

by James Van Pelt

  “What do we need electricity for anyway? What would serve us best is using the daylight more productively. Farm, hunt and fish during the day. Rest at night. These are values we should embrace.” Eric could see the natural politician his son was becoming, but he couldn’t help arguing. “We are entering a new Dark Ages, and you are leading the way!” That meeting marked the beginning of Eric and Troy’s political split. Eric called Troy’s followers the “New Barbarians,” and Troy called Eric’s camp the “Gone Timers.” Most of the “Gone Timers” lived before the plague and remembered what technology could do, but the passage of time dwindled their numbers. The New Barbarians, led by Troy, opposed almost all Eric’s suggestions. Eric often believed Troy took positions solely to spite him and not because he believed them.

  Every door Phil opened revealed some remnant of technology. In the radio room, Phil turned on the short wave receiver and roamed through the bands. “Mom said she last heard someone on this the year I was born. I’ve never heard anything other than static or this.” Through the crackles and hiss of static came a steady beeping.

  Eric listened intently. “I’d bet that’s a weather satellite.” Phil agreed then turned the system off. After an hour of other rooms, they came to the kitchen. On the stove simmered a large pot. “Beef stew,” said Phil. Eric peeked into the pot suspiciously.

  “How old’s that meat?” he asked.

  “I told you, I traded. This is three years old. Vacuum packed for freshness. I threw out the meat Mom stored ages ago. It was like shoe leather.” He ladled big spoonfuls into bowls. “We’d better get a meal up to the boys. Movie will be about over by now.”

  Dodge dug into the stew eagerly, but had a hard time eating and talking at the same time. “The Gone Times were wonderful!” he said through a mouthful. “Floating cars, light sabres, star cruisers. Do you think Luke lived through the plague? I’ll bet he did. He hopped in the Millennium Falcon and got away when people started getting sick. I’ll bet he’s coming back for us.”

  Rabbit sniffed his stew before tasting it. “None of it’s real, Dodge.” Dodge glanced angrily at him. “I know that. I’m not a baby. It’s make believe.” Eric wondered how much Dodge meant when he said, “It’s make believe.” Did he include airplanes?

  Doctors? Everything he’d been telling him about the Gone Times? If it weren’t for Phil’s interest in Dodge, Eric would encourage him to stay, to see what technology could do.

  Phil sat next to Dodge on the floor. “You’re right, though. Make believe is wonderful. I’ve probably got the best collection of tapes in Colorado. Hell, best in the world, and I’ve got the electricity and equipment to show them.” He put his hand on Dodge’s shoulder. Eric stiffened. “Would you like to see more?” Dodge said, “Sure!” Then he looked at Eric. “Maybe when we finish our trip, I can come back?”

  “Maybe,” said Eric. He breathed easier.

  “Well, at least you boys can get a decent shower and spend the night. When was the last time you had a hot shower?”

  “We have running water,” said Rabbit. Eric guessed what had upset him earlier. He must have sensed that Phil wasn’t “safe.”

  “Sounds great to me,” said Dodge. “Maybe we can see another video?” After they watched Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Phil took them to a locker room with gang showers. The drag racers, he explained, used the lockers to change before their contests. He found towels for them, then said, “Have to shine up the cars. Mom insists.” He closed the door behind him. Rabbit said, “Let’s leave.” Eric turned on a spigot. In a few seconds, clouds of warm steam billowed off the tile floor. He wondered where Phil stored the water and how he heated it. Two days of grime decided the debate for him.

  “I think we’ll be okay. I don’t think he’s dangerous.” Dodge looked from Rabbit to Eric, puzzled. “What do you mean? I like him.”

  Rabbit started to strip. “Wait a minute,” said Eric. He searched the locker room, carefully covering the four video cameras he found.

  When he was sure he’d got them all, he said, “I don’t think he’s dangerous, but I don’t want you alone with him either.”

  Dodge said, “I don’t get it.”

  Rabbit smirked. “He wants to bugger you, dolt.”

  Something woke Eric. He hadn’t been sleeping easily anyway. The strange bed, the excitement of the electric lights and the other Gone Time triumphs that Phil had shown him, conspired to ruin his night’s rest. Finally, though, he’d drifted into a doze. Now, a night light (a green glow-worm from a baby’s nursery) provided the only light. Dodge slept on a bed near a boarded window; Rabbit slept on the floor. He’d smelled the mattress and insisted.

  He heard a noise again, a slight rattle, the door. It creaked as if someone were pushing against it. He propped himself on his elbow and said, “Go away, Phil. We’re sleeping.” Quick footsteps padded away down the hall. Eric got out of bed and checked the chair he’d jammed under the doorknob. It still held firmly. Eric smiled and went back to bed.

  After a breakfast of pancakes and syrup, Phil walked them to the front doors. He seemed worried. “Get into the city,” he said privately to Eric. “Maybe they aren’t ghosts, but I don’t believe they’re human, and those people in Northglenn and Commerce City couldn’t have just gone without a good reason. I figure they got scared or carried off.” He put his hand on the small of Eric’s back, conspiratorially. “You ought to leave the youngster with me, for safe keeping. When you go home, you can pick him up. If it’s dangerous, you wouldn’t want him with you anyway.”

  Eric stepped away from him and didn’t say anything, as if he were considering the idea. Then he said,

  “What would your mom think?”

  Phil’s face clouded. “You’re right,” he said. “She wouldn’t like it at all.” He wiped his face with his rag.

  “What’s a son to do?”

  Dodge and Rabbit waited for him at the end of the path.

  “Let’s not come back this way,” said Rabbit.

  Dodge nodded in agreement. After he walked for a while, head down, kicking pebbles in front of him, he said, “But he did have nice toys.”

  Eric thought about the cars in the showroom, mirror bright. Phil wandering among them, dusting each grudgingly for his dead but omnipresent mother. He thought about him sitting alone on his couch watching sixteen televisions at once. He thought about all the rooms filled from floor to ceiling with electronic gadgetry. He thought about Phil’s dwindling supply of non-renewable, non-repairable resources and what else Phil had told him when he showed him the tanker truck filled with diesel. “There’s enough to last me until I’m gone, and what do I care after that?”

  “Yes, they were nice toys,” said Eric.

  He guessed they would be in Golden before noon, and he realized they would be within a couple of miles of the cave where his mother was buried. “We’re going to take a little detour today,” he said. “Want to show you something.”

  A breeze from the hills to the west cooled them. The clear sky was blue, high and vibrant. Eric felt good. He felt as if he could hike forever.

  Chapter Six

  KING KONG

  Eric heard his father talking, and that was all he heard. His soft voice filled the cave. “I read a book once that discussed the filming of the 1933 King Kong, a wonderful movie. Great special effects. When that sad ape climbed the Empire State Building, and all those biplanes buzzed around like mosquitoes, I cheered. Smash those planes, I said. Crush them out of the sky.” It had been a week since their trip to Idaho Springs. Dad held Mom’s hand. Eric supposed he’d held it all night as her coughing worsened and the fever built. With a wet washcloth he’d wiped her forehead, but he never let go. When Eric awoke, Dad was holding on. Mom’s face glowed with fever. She’d lapsed into a coma. An hour later, she died. Now the lantern’s light dimmed and brightened. It was low on fuel. Eric sat cross-legged on the rock floor of the cave near his mother’s feet. He reached out to touch her leg, brushed the
rough blanket, then pulled his hand back. He imagined her leg would feel hard, wooden. He didn’t want to know. Dad talked. Eric had never heard him like this, non-stop, a droning monotone.

  “The funny thing was, about this film, the Hays Office censored it. Nowadays they’ll show any god-awful thing, but King Kong they censored.”

  Dad leaned forward as if his stomach hurt. “There’s a scene on Skull Island, before Kong goes to New York, where he chases Fay Wray to the giant barricades that are supposed to protect the village from him and the prehistoric monsters on the other side. He reaches over the wall—they used a sixteen inch model for all the shots; I didn’t know that—grabs a villager and bites his head off. That’s what the Hays Office censored. Too graphic, I guess. But the next scene Kong pushes down the barricade, crushing twenty or thirty villagers.”

  He’d been talking steadily for two hours. Eric supposed he should feel grief, but he didn’t, really. His eyes felt pressured like someone was pushing thumbs into them, and his face seemed heavy; the corners of his mouth dragged down and no effort could move them, but he didn’t want to cry. The woman lying under the blanket wasn’t his mother, not the one who toted a shotgun so jauntily the last weeks, not the one who woke him for school or bought him milkshakes when they went shopping. She was just a body, and Eric had never seen a dead person before. He didn’t know how to behave around one. He sat, and his dad talked.

  “I didn’t understand why they censored that scene. Stupid thing to do. Hundreds of people died in this movie. Why’d they take out one death? The expedition chased Kong, trying to save the girl. Kong crossed a log over a chasm, and, when the men followed, he picked up one end and shook them off, down and down into the ravine. Why not that scene? So I read in this book a theory that the death of one is more horrible than the death of many. It’s psychological. Kong nips off a head like you’d bite the end of a hot dog and the censors cut it out, but he can smash a faceless crowd.” He rocked back and forth. “One death,” he said, “hurts too much.” The Coleman lantern sputtered, then lapsed into the rapid fire fut-fut-fut that meant it would go out any second. The light turned Dad’s face into a dancing moonscape of black shadows. He started coughing, a long series of dry, painful sounding explosions that made Eric flinch.

  When he finished, he moaned quietly and leaned forward again so that he trapped Mom’s hand between his chest and his thigh.

  Behind Dad a pile of canned goods caught the flickering light but the cave wall beyond reflected nothing. Its gray and black surface sucked in light, returning darkness. Eric stared at it for a long time until he saw high on the dull stone that someone, some earlier explorer, had carved a heart and scratched within it in barely visible, shaky letters:

  Martha W. loves George

  “Dad,” Eric said finally, “we should take her home.”

  The lantern flared for an instant, then winked out. An afterimage of the inscription on the wall drifted in front of Eric, the letters and heart now dark on a lighter background. His dad inhaled shakily, held the breath, then let it out in a long hiss. He said, “I’ll go into town and bring back an ambulance.” Clothes rustled and Eric heard his dad’s back crack as he stood. “You stay here with your mother.” After lighting a battery lantern, then covering Mom’s face, Dad took a filled canteen and dragged his bike out of the entrance to the cave. His parting words were, “I’ll be back before sunset.” As Eric sat on the cold stone floor an hour later, he suddenly wished very deeply that before Dad had left that he would have held him close, then kissed him goodbye as he had when Eric was a child. Three hours after sunset, Dad still had not returned. Eric took a flashlight to the watch post and listened to the creek rumbling beside the highway below. Clouds obscured the stars, but the night was not dark. To the east, toward Denver, the clouds glowed redly. In the nights before when it was overcast, the lights of Denver lit the sky a pleasant, even electric white, but tonight the clouds boiled like bloody sheets. He retrieved the Mutant Ninja Turtle radio from under a rock where he stored it, but it gave him almost no news. Over the last weeks, fewer and fewer radio stations stayed on the air. Tonight he found several channels squealing out the emergency broadcast signal, interrupting themselves every few minutes with a message to tune to KTLK for information about the “current situation.” KTLK, however, played elevator music, and the only announcement Eric heard was one warning people to obey the curfew and to report looters to the proper authorities.

  He flashed his light down the trail, hoping to see his father, though he knew Dad wouldn’t attempt to climb up without using a light of his own. Eric wrapped his sleeping bag around him. His muscles ached as if he’d lifted weights for hours. He’d never been so tired in his entire life, so old and drained. A breeze rattled branches. He flicked the flashlight on again, and its dim light penetrated the thin cloth of his sleeping bag. He thought he might go to sleep, but the idea that he could miss his father frightened him, so he pinched his leg hard. The pain almost felt good. It was real and immediate and normal, not like the body lying in the cave or the horrible red clouds that rolled languidly above him. He thought he should be mourning, and it worried him that he wasn’t. Don’t I love my mother? he thought. Am I a beast, some sort of sociopath? (He’d heard the term on television one night applied to a serial killer.) He thought about going to school. If everything straightened itself out, or if this is just a nightmare, I’ll never hate school again. I’ll go to class and smile at teachers and do homework and I won’t call anything stupid ever. The cliff walls across the canyon lit brilliantly. Eric blinked back tears, the light was so bright. Then all was dark. What? he thought. The air swelled like a crack of thunder, a great slam of sound that pushed on Eric’s chest. He screamed, but he couldn’t hear himself. Then echoes sounded for several seconds. He thought, this is nuclear. The end of the world for sure. In the distance toward Golden he thought he heard rocks falling, though the ringing in his ears prevented him from being positive. Movement down canyon caught his eye. A wall of darkness slid toward him, swallowing the highway, blanking the glimmer of the river. He stood on the rock, trying to see better as the darkness rolled by below. Whatever exploded between him and Golden had kicked up a cloud of dust; he decided it must be the tunnel. Someone blew up the tunnel.

  After a few minutes, the air cleared, and the canyon was quiet again. The river noise sounded unchanged. An hour before dawn, he fell asleep. Dad hadn’t come back yet.

  A black, muscled, immense shape heaved itself over the South Glenn Mall, scattering cars in the parking lot like children’s blocks. Its knuckles scraped the pavement. Sirens howled on University Boulevard behind Eric. He flattened his back on a brick wall and tried not to move, to not breathe. (He knew it was the Littleton Saving and Loan building that stood on the corner of the mall’s parking lot on the corner of University and Bellview.)

  The ape tore a light pole from its fixture, studied it briefly, then flicked it a hundred feet. There were no people in the scene, just empty cars and the giant black figure. Eric smelled him, a vast animal odor like a hundred zoos on a hot summer afternoon.

  In the background, a harmony of engines hummed, then grew] louder. (The biplanes are coming! The biplanes are coming!) Eric tried to shout, “Run away! Run away!” but his best effort sounded no louder than a squeak. He wanted to wave to him and warn him but he was too frightened. What if the ape spotted him? Eric’s inarticulate love bubbled within, but he was afraid of the size, the strength, the unbridled power. A creature so big shouldn’t die, he thought. They’ll drive him up some tower so they can knock him down. They’ll shoot him and he’ll never understand why they won’t let him live. In the dream—Eric knew he was dreaming—a blue van, its windows knocked out and its tires flat, limped into the parking lot. His mother was driving. “Stop, Mom!” he tried to yell. “Don’t let him get you.” But she drove to the monster’s feet. The ape looked at the van with his vast, glistening eyes, then bent down to peer in the window. Mom stopped and got
out. She put her hands on her hips and stared up at him unafraid.

  Eric struggled, but it was as if the wall held him. His voice called out in slow motion notes that were deep and incomprehensible. Don’t you know the story? The ape picks up the single person, plucks her from the ground and bites her in two. It’s his nature. It’s not his fault, but you can’t get close to him. He is death.

  It is Mom, isn’t it? The woman standing at the ape’s feet became slender and blond. She was Fay Wray. Eric knew she was his mom, but she was also Fay Wray. The ape cupped her into his hand and lifted her from the parking lot.

  Eric shouted.

  He brought her close to his face, his teeth visible.

  He rubbed his cheek against her.

  The engine noise rose to a deafening level.

  King Kong clutched Mom/Fay Wray to his breast, straightened and shook his fist into the sky. The first biplane circled high above, then winged over and began its attack. The next one followed. The next one followed. The next one followed.

  The sun woke Eric, and he lay in his sleeping bag by the boulder for a long time before he remembered yesterday’s events. He slid out of the bag and brushed the goose bumps off his arms. On the rock, the radio still played, but now it repeated one message continuously, “The Denver Public Health Department asks you to please stay in your homes.” Then it listed the hospitals that were no longer accepting patients. From the size of the list, Eric wondered vaguely if they wouldn’t save time by announcing the hospitals that were open instead.