Summer of the Apocalypse

by James Van Pelt

  “That’s why I’m going home. I’ve got to find Dad. We’ve got to go together and bury Mom.”

  “Yes, that’s what we’ll do.”

  Eric sat on the ground in the midst of the flattened houses, in the middle of God’s footstep, or King Kong’s. “My dad…” He gasped. “My dad is a survivor. He’s too strong.” Everything was letting go inside of him. He could feel the unraveling, and inside he tried to stop it, to hold back the wind. He put his face in his hands and he could feel his skin on his skin. Why do I feel this way?

  Why am I acting this way? She’ll think I’m a fool. Dad’s fine. I’ll find Dad and everything will be like it was. We’ll live in the house. We’ll play catch. He’ll teach me new bird calls. Dad’s okay.

  “No, it’s all right,” she said. “I believe you.” Her arms were around him and they were both sitting on the ground. She rocked him quietly while he shook in her arms.

  After a long while, after he had quit sobbing and the muscles in his back relaxed, she still held him. He felt her chin resting on the top of his head.

  “Look at that,” she said.

  He lifted his head and blinked away tears. “What?”

  They were sitting near another broken tree trunk. The trunk itself leaned and roots hung in the air on one side, clods of dirt still clinging to them.

  “Sticking in the wood.”

  He followed her finger. Protruding from the tree trunk, four inches or so of silver glittered in the sun. He pushed himself off the ground, then pulled on the metal.

  “Jammed in there pretty tight.” He worked it back and forth several times before it pulled out. He held it to her. “A spoon. What would do that to a spoon? You couldn’t do that without bending it.” Taking it from him, Leda turned it over in her hand. “A tornado,” she said. “That’s what it was.” He gazed at the scene of destruction, and it seemed familiar, like news footage he’d seen before. “You’re right. Only thing it could be.”

  “They skip,” she said. “They touch down, destroy everything, lift, then touch down again.”

  “Darned regular. I’ve never heard of one leaving a trail.” “Strange storms. Leave some stuff, ruin others. If anything’s unusual, it’s how much it destroyed. Colorado tornadoes are generally narrower than this.” She gestured to the block-wide path.

  “A year ago,” Eric said, “this would be the top story. Denver would be cleaning itself up. It’d be in mourning.”

  She dropped the spoon. “Small potatoes, now, a tornado.” He smiled. It was incredibly hard to make that movement with his face. The muscles felt weighed down from frowning. “Does a house falling in a city make a noise if there is no one to hear it?”

  “Come on,” she said, “let’s find some food. I’m starving.”

  “I’m sure we’ll catch up with Dad soon,” said Eric. “He’ll be glad to meet you.” She didn’t say anything, and Eric glanced at her. “Sure,” she said, “I’ll bet he will be.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN

  Teach said, “Keep your hands underneath you. Don’t look up. Don’t separate your feet. Be a rock, and that’s what they’ll see.”

  Eric scrunched his face into the gravel on the hillside above the road. The rest of Teach’s boys had scattered, and when he’d last looked, he could only pick out a couple of them in the same posture he was taking now, folded on themselves, faces down, practically invisible. Their leather skirts and wool shirts blended perfectly into the background.

  “Where’s Rabbit and Dodge?” Eric whispered.

  “They’re okay. Don’t move and you’ll be fine. Unless they’re expecting to see something, they won’t.” Teach broke a branch off a nearby juniper and jammed it into the ground by Eric’s head. He braced the bottom with a couple of rocks. “There, that’ll give them something to focus on if they do look this way.” Teach climbed a few feet up the slope and lay down, hands underneath him, feet drawn up, the back of his gray-haired head to Eric.

  Eric pulled his limbs in even tighter; his back crawled under the heat of the sun. A bit of sand he’d sucked up when he put his face in the dirt gritted uncomfortably between his teeth, and chunks of gravel dug into his cheek, but he didn’t move. They’ll be able to see me, he thought. I might as well stand and shout. Before the point-man had whistled the warning that sent them scrambling for cover above the road, they had been walking up-canyon, crossing a slide that hid the asphalt for hundreds of yards, Eric was hiking gamely, trying not to slow the pace. Teach said, “You’ve got two problems.” Eric panted, put a foot on a stone, placed his hand on his knee and pressed to help himself up. One of Teach’s boys carried Eric’s pack, but even without the extra weight, the soreness in his legs and the incessant buzz of pain in his hips reminded him of his age. “What’s that?” he said. The mountain air smelled of pine and creek water, of sun on hot rocks, but it didn’t fill the lungs.

  “First one’s easy, but important. Our last Gone Timer died seven years ago, and most of the young ones haven’t heard about Gone Time from someone who’s seen it. So you’re the featured speaker at the town talk-around tonight.”

  “Okay.” Eric almost did a skip step but didn’t. The dirt and sand footing was slippery. “You want to hear old Gone Time stories?” Nobody in Littleton listened to him. The kids would gather at the hunters’ feet and wait for each word about finding elk or killing a bear, but when Eric said anything about Gone Time, they ran off, except for Dodge and Rabbit.

  Eric looked for them. He spotted the dark-haired Dodge on the black-top beyond the slide. Rabbit walked in the tall grass on the road’s shoulder, as always looking as if he were ready to bolt. “I can do that.”

  “Talking might not be that easy. We’ve got a girl up there—name’s Ripple, a kind of, I don’t know, child prodigy—she’s got some strong ideas about Gone Time. You can bet she’ll ask some tough ones. Might have some things to say of her own. She was my best pupil, but she left me behind years ago.”

  “I’ll watch myself. What’s the other problem?”

  “Getting you into Boulder. The roads aren’t safe.” Teach offered Eric a firm, hard hand and helped him over a slippery patch of gravel.

  “You said the Flats weren’t safe either. More radiation?” He stepped thankfully off the uneven surface of the slide onto the flat road. Here and there, portions of the double-yellow line were still visible on the pavement. Been a while since a car had to worry about oncoming traffic here, he thought. The long stretch of highway curved in between pine-covered hills a half-mile away.

  “Nope. Federal’s gunmen.” Teach fell into pace beside him. Eric sighed a little to himself; the bigger man visibly shortened his stride to accommodate him. “Your library may or may not be standing, but there’s a guy who calls himself ‘Federal’ or ‘The Federal’ who thinks something’s valuable in Boulder, and he’s got the roads.”

  “Really? Guns? I haven’t seen a working one for years.”

  Teach grinned at him, his gray-flecked beard fanning out beneath the smile. “Neither had I. My dad kept a rifle, but he was down to just four boxes of ammo. Took it off the wall on his birthday and would fire one shot. Never did tell me why he did that. But the last year, it took six tries to get a shell that’d work, and it sound pathetic; hardly an explosion at all. Mostly smoke. Dad said the shells had gone gunny-bag, said there wasn’t much ammo anyway, so I’d better learn how to make arrows.” Eric stretched his gait a bit; the extra effort felt good. He thought, at least I’m not hobbling. “What kind of guns?”

  “Don’t know, but one of my men has one.” He chuckled. “Federal’s boys aren’t all that bright. One of them shot up a couple of deer and didn’t notice Skylar sitting in a tree. Walked right under him, and Skylar dropped a water skin on his head. He got the gun and a good knife off him, and the guy probably woke up an hour later with a sore neck and a lot of explaining to do. But bright or not, they’ve set up camps on the roads into Boulder. Sometimes we hear
shooting.”

  Teach spat into his hands, rubbed the palms together and wiped them on the front of his shirt. “Lousy hunters, the lot of them. No respect. Take just parts of the meat and leave the carcass in the open. Worst kind of jackals.”

  A whistle from farther in the canyon trilled down the scale. A lark, Eric thought. Haven’t heard one like that before.

  “Whoops, speak of the devil, as my dad told me,” said Teach. He scanned the slopes on the sides of the road. Eric looked up too. Here, the road snaked smoothly through rounded hills with few trees or boulders. Immediately the rest of the men started climbing. Teach tugged Eric’s arm. “Best place to not be seen is in plain sight.”

  Then he taught Eric how to be a rock.

  Eric’s back itched. He pressed his face down even harder. A particularly sharp piece of gravel dug into his cheek. A spot of dampness slid toward his ear. I’m bleeding, he thought. Feet tramped steadily on the road below, measured, military. Metal clicked against metal. Gun swivels? he wondered. They were less than a hundred feet off.

  Someone said, “Don’t like this duty. Stupid way to spend a day.”

  “Shut your hole, private,” rumbled another voice.

  “Just talking. No harm in that.”

  They passed. Slowly, Eric raised his head for a peek, marveling that he hadn’t been spotted. Marching toward the slide they had just crossed, a line of eight camouflage-dressed soldiers moved down canyon. They wore dark green boots that reached to mid-shin, and on their backs rode small packs, and each carried the same gun with distinctive open-metal stocks, sharply curved banana clips and cone-wrapped snub barrels.

  Eric sucked air between his teeth.

  “What?” whispered Teach.

  “I know those guns.” The men single-filed it to the other side of the slide and out of sight. “They’re army M-16s.”

  Firelight illuminated the blackened stone face of the natural amphitheater and cast flickering light on the pines that surrounded the site. Split-log benches, two deep, formed a half circle around the fire. Eric, Teach, Rabbit and Dodge had one bench to themselves, although it might easily have held a half-dozen more. The people of Highwater drifted out of the trees and started taking their places at the fire. Eric hadn’t thought much of the remains of old Nederland, what used to be a mining town and then became a tourist trap in the Gone Times. Most of the buildings were gone, part of the “Naturalization Project” as Teach called it.

  “Where’s the town?” Eric had said. A few foundations poked up, and a bank and small office building still stood. After a long afternoon of nervous hiking, convinced that at any second they would run into more of Federal’s patrols, he’d been looking forward to sleeping with a roof over his head on a comfortable mattress.

  Teach chuckled. “We’ve been walking through it for the last half mile.” He pointed to a small hill they’d just passed. “Got several families there.”

  Eric saw nothing man-made at first, then he picked out the shape of a wall. Unmortared, rounded stones slumped to one side. Partially hidden by a boulder, the house was practically invisible.

  “Looks small,” he’d said.

  “Much of it’s excavated. Warmer in the winter. Some of the homes have tunnels running back seventy, eighty feet. If they have another kid, they dig out another room.” Teach pointed to a pile of rock chips. Eric had assumed it was mine tailings. “Takes a long time, too. Soil’s thin. Mostly they’re carving into solid mountain.”

  More people sat at the fire. They moved silently, soft on their feet. Even the children were quiet, muted. He saw one poke another and a woman put a hand between them. They looked up and she shook her head gently at them.

  Teach said, “What’s different about an M-16? You sounded frightened.”

  “Not really,” said Eric. He shifted so he sat closer to the fire. After the sun set, the temperature dropped quickly, not at all like the late-June conditions they were probably enjoying in Littleton. “It’s a powerful gun, though. I saw a few in the year of the plague. Some National Guard units had them, and the people who lived got to be real good at hoarding items like that. I read up on them.” Eric noticed that the people around him were listening. He spoke a little louder for their benefit.

  “An M-16 is a small calibre weapon, only a 22, but it has a high muzzle velocity… uh, the bullets come out very fast. And the way it’s designed, the bullets don’t fly smoothly like an arrow. They tumble. When the bullet hits, it tears or smashes. I read that one could be shot in, say, the leg, and it still might kill. The shock of the impact would be so great that it could stop the heart.”

  A man behind Eric said, “Tears the flesh you say?”

  “Oh, yes, very ugly wounds.”

  “Wouldn’t want to hunt with one then.”

  “No. They’re designed to kill people. Weapons of destruction.”

  Another voice, a woman, said, “They’re part of Gone Time sickness.” Teach leaned toward Eric, “That’s Ripple. She’s a deep one.”

  The woman looked at Eric intensely, a full eye lock, as if she were challenging him, and it took a second for him to break the stare and to see that she was young, maybe fifteen, like the Earth Dancer. Her face was skinny, and even by firelight Eric could see dark circles under her eyes.

  “Yes, I suppose, but the world was dangerous, and America needed an army to keep itself safe.” She scooted forward on her bench, bent down and put her hands on the dirt. “No,” she said to her feet.

  “Gone Time sickness had many symptoms. An army was one of them. M-16s were a symptom.”

  “But you never lived there. Much was good then, too. A lot.” Eric felt tense, defensive. “It was a magic time. We could fly, don’t you see. We had great learning. Man knew things.”

  “He’d forgotten all that was important.”

  Eric thought, she’s so young. She knows nothing of me or my time.

  As if she’d read his mind, she said, “I know myself. I know my time, and I’ve heard the stories. I’ve walked through the cities.” She drew a design in the dirt at her feet. Eric found it odd that she spoke to the Earth, and then he thought, she’s like the Earth Dancer, drawing designs, and he wanted to leap up and look at what she was making, to see if it were a noose.

  “None of you were native,” she continued. “The sickness came from not belonging. All the symptoms. None of you belonged.”

  “Go on,” he said, suddenly eager to hear what she might say.

  “None of you were native. You had no place you knew of as your own, and because of that you lived in all places as if you didn’t belong. You made an army because you feared being thrown out. You were always temporary.”

  “You mean we weren’t Indians? My family had lived in America for several generations.”

  “No,” she said, shaking her head, sitting up and looking at him again. The rest of the people, surely the whole population, listened intently. All the benches were filled. Eric guessed maybe sixty people sat around him. A log popped sharply in the fire sending a shower of sparks up with the smoke. “Birth doesn’t make you native. It’s a matter of life and mind.”

  People nodded around her.

  “Gone Timers, most of them, lived on land they didn’t know. It’s true, isn’t it, that most Gone Timers didn’t build the houses they lived in?”

  “That’s true, but our technology freed us from… from… some tasks. We could devote our lives to learning.”

  “You could, but did you? What you did is what counts, not what you could have done. You didn’t build your own houses, but you lived in them. You didn’t make your own clothes, but you wore them. What’s important though, what’s important is that you didn’t know where anything came from. Your house, your clothes, your food, your light, your medicine, your entertainment, even your water. You turned on a tap, and water magically poured out. You flushed a toilet and wastes disappeared. You put your garbage on the street, and others took it away.”

  “Well, yes, you
could look at it that way, but what does that mean? What does that have to do with being native? How does that make the Gone Time sick? We were advanced; we could go to the moon. We could cure sicknesses.”

  She said, “Not the last one.”

  Pushed by a breeze, smoke watered Eric’s eyes. He turned away from the fire. She said again, “Not the last one. But it doesn’t matter. The real sickness was in life and mind. Gone Timers lived in the world like the world didn’t matter. They took upstream and disposed downstream like upstream was forever and no one lived below. The sickness was in metal and coal, in gasoline, in things that could not grow back. The end was inevitable, one way or another.” Eric wondered if Troy and Rabbit were bored. Ripple was preaching, he realized, and a sermon is often a bore, but they were listening too.

  Ripple said, “There isn’t a rock here that I don’t know. Every tree, as far as I can walk, I have seen and touched. I place my hands in the stream and I feel the connection to all the water everywhere, to the liquid in my veins. Everything I eat, I know. I am careful with my wastes. I read in a book the saying, ‘Don’t shit where you eat,’ but Gone Timers always shit where someone else ate, and ultimately, because it’s all connected, in their own plates.”

  A child giggled. Someone hushed it quietly.

  “I share…” she said, “…space with all the living things. If I take a deer, I pray for a deer somewhere to be born to replace it. If I harvest a plant, I see that I leave the ground ready for another. When I die, I will leave a place that another can live. I am native. I belong.”

  “That’s a nice idea,” he said. “But people couldn’t live like that, not in Gone Time numbers. Mankind was successful. We learned how to make the work of a few feed and clothe many. We spread out, like grass; we covered the ground, and what we made was beautiful. You said you walked through the cities. Did you look? Did you really look? And what did you see?”

  A vision of Denver at night rose in Eric’s head. He said, “Lights everywhere: street lights, lights in homes, advertisements blinking on and on into the darkness. Cars hissing the pavement dry on rainy nights. Laughter. People laughing, coming out of theaters. And concerts, 70,000 people in Mile-High Stadium on their feet feeling music pounding in their chests. Heart-stopping rock-and-roll so loud your skin hurt. That was beauty, human beauty, and there was nothing sick about it. A good time, my father’s time.”