The Chaos Function

by Jack Skillingstead

  He backed up, then looked out the driver’s window, like there was something super-interesting on the sidewalk—but not before she saw the hurt in his eyes. It was going to hurt a lot more to die in the torture cell in Aleppo. Any way you cut it, Olivia was responsible for Brian not making it. How could she let him comfort her?

  Alvaro said, “This is the end of human civilization.”

  Brian turned back to Olivia. “And I thought you were gloomy.  There’s duct tape in the glove box.”

  Olivia squinted at him. “What?”

  “Duct tape. For the hole that guy put in my windshield.”

  Somehow he had vanquished all traces of hurt feelings. He was so good at that. Was it an admirable trait or a deceptive one? Probably it depended on who was hiding which feelings from whom and for what reason. By now, Olivia should have been the world’s leading expert on hiding feelings. Sometimes she wondered if she was hiding them or if she simply didn’t have any. No, she had them all right. They were like a wound that you could ignore unless you touched it. Olivia had bumped her wound against Brian and was astonished when, instead of hurting, some kind of healing had begun. Now it hurt all over again, and worse than ever. Sooner or later, caring meant hurting. How had she forgotten that?

  She managed a weak smile. “Ah. You came prepared for the apocalypse.” She retrieved the duct tape, tore off a couple of strips, and covered Roy’s handiwork with a big X.

  “What do we do now?” Dee asked.

  “Those guys back there,” Olivia said, “I didn’t count on them knowing about the bomb shelter. I should have. It was a dumb mistake. Anyway, they won’t be able to break into it. It’s like a bank vault. And Javadi isn’t going to open the door for them, either. Assuming he’s even in there during this probability.”

  From the back seat Alvaro said, “We have to try for the ranch. I can keep you alive there until you link again.”

  “Or you could kill me and see if the link migrates.”

  “Liv!” Brian looked appalled and at the same time like he was ready to fight whoever needed fighting.

  Alvaro said, “I’m not a murderer.”

  “How the hell am I supposed to know what you are? Just a sec.” Olivia opened her door and puked on the street. “God, my head. It’s worse than the other times.” She slammed the door. “I’m not going back to Sanctuary.”

  “That’s right,” Brian said. “No way.”

  “You only saw part of Sanctuary,” Dee said. “The part that was above-ground.”

  Alvaro said, “The ranch was designed to function even when the rest of the world is going to hell. There are underground shelters, well provisioned and capable of withstanding almost anything. If there’s one place where anyone could survive, it’s there. Except for whatever doomsday options the government has, I mean. But no one will survive for long. No bomb shelter will protect us if the Aleppo crisis point isn’t repaired.”

  “You don’t know that for certain,” Olivia said.

  The car got very quiet. Olivia could still taste the vomit. And the jai ba leaves. Then everyone started talking at once. Dee stuck two fingers in her mouth and cut loose with a game-stopping whistle. Olivia winced, holding her head. The whistle was like a hot needle shoved into the middle of her migraine.

  But everyone stopped arguing.

  “We have to protect you,” Dee said, “until you can link to the probability machine again.”

  “That’s great. Could you protect me a little more quietly?”

  Alvaro said, “We’re back where we started.”

  Olivia hiked herself around on her seat to look back at him. “No. We still might be able to get into Javadi’s shelter, or at least get the vaccine. We talked to him before, in the other probability. He only gave us one dose, because he was saving the rest for his own people.”

  “So?” Alvaro fidgeted.

  Olivia had known plenty of guys like Alvaro. Always impatient, always wanting to do something instead of thinking it through first. That wasn’t necessarily a bad way to be. But in the Disaster it could easily get you killed. And now the whole world was the Disaster.

  “His people,” Olivia said, “were in West Virginia.”

  For a minute, no one spoke. Then Alvaro said, “So they must be dead.”

  “I don’t know about ‘must be,’ but it’s probably a fair assumption, especially if they were on the road when the nuke hit. That guy’s down in his hole all by himself and the world is falling to pieces on top of him.”

  Alvaro sat forward again. “So you think he will let us in?”

  “He might. There’s at least a chance. His complete isolation might make him change his mind. We should at least try before we drive all the way to Idaho.”

  Dee said, “Alvaro? It does make sense.”

  “I guess it does. But what about the neighbors?”

  “They’ll give up soon enough,” Olivia said. “Javadi won’t let them in, and they aren’t going to break in with a hammer.”

  Brian faced forward again and started the engine. “Let’s get supplies, in case this doesn’t work and we have to cross the country.  That should give those assholes time to give up on breaking into the shelter.”

  The parking lot of the Elmhurst Whole Foods was full. Brian double-parked and started to climb out. “Come on, Liv.”

  Olivia, head still throbbing, opened her door.

  “No,” Alvaro said. “You don’t leave my sight.”

  “If he goes in there by himself, he’ll come back with potato chips and tonic water.”

  “I’ll go with him,” Dee said.

  Brian shook his head. “Nope. I’m not leaving Liv alone with him again. Sorry.”

  “For God’s sake,” Alvaro said. “We’ll all go.”

  Olivia threw open her door and started walking toward the store. Car doors opened and slammed behind her, footsteps ran to catch up. Brian touched her shoulder to let her know he was there, and the other two fell into step.

  “And now we are four,” Olivia said. Marching into a crowded store. Why don’t we just beg for variola to find us?

  They prowled the aisles of Whole Foods, which weren’t as depleted as the Safeway’s were back in Seattle. Maybe Midwesterners were made of sterner stuff and didn’t panic as easily.  With the grid down, generators powered the cold cases and about half the lights. The store was shadowy but bustling, and almost everyone wore a filter mask. Large handwritten signs warned: CASH ONLY. No credit or debit purchases could be processed. Brian metaphorically raised his half-full glass to the cheese display. “This isn’t so bad.”

  They walked toward the back of the store. A middle-aged woman with a small child, a boy about five years old, stood in front of the frozen dessert cabinet. The boy wore a filter mask but the woman didn’t. The boy’s mask had big Chicklet teeth drawn on it with thick black marker. The mother stood there crying without making a sound. The boy stared at her, his eyes big and expressive over the cartoon teeth. Brian approached the woman. “Are you all right?”

  She gave him a stricken look that hurt Olivia’s heart. “There’s a cloud,” the woman said. “A radioactive cloud. I heard it on my wind-up radio. Do you think that’s true?”

  Brian looked at a loss. “I don’t know.”

  In a low, urgent voice, Alvaro said, “We need to speed this up.”

  Olivia tapped Brian’s arm. “Bri, come on.”

  At the checkout people were talking.

  I heard North Korea is gone. We just fucking unloaded on them.

  It was the Russians. A sneak attack.

  Are we at war with Russia? Who are we at war with?

  The smallpox is worse. I heard a hundred million dead and no way to stop it.

  Variola, the whole thing’s a government hoax. Keep the masses scared and begging for Big Daddy to keep them safe. We might as well kiss all our civil liberties goodbye. Anybody who didn’t see this coming is an idiot.

  This last from a guy in hunter’s camo and
a holstered sidearm riding his hip.

  * * *

  Dozens of people stood on lawns across the street from Javadi’s house. The oak trees on East Sherman Avenue looked tired in the August heat. Brian parked around the corner, out of sight. “Do you think that woman was right about the radioactive cloud?”

  “Don’t worry about radiation,” Alvaro said. “That takes time. Variola is a bigger danger.”

  Olivia opened her door. “Let’s go.”

  Everybody piled out of the Ford. They walked one block over, intending to approach the house from the back. Olivia wanted to avoid another confrontation with the neighborhood watch.

  Brian kept looking at the overcast sky.

  “Brian?” Olivia said.

  “The sky looks weird.”

  Did it? A low, purple overcast. Nothing special about it. But she felt the weirdness, too. On 9/11 people talked about the stillness of the sky after all air traffic had been grounded. But it had been more than an absence of airplanes. It was the stillness of something broken, broken so badly that though it might eventually be fixed, it would never be wholly right again. The stillness of this sky felt like that. Maybe their minds added the extra element of sorrow, but that didn’t make it any less real. The purple overcast pulled across the sky like a shroud. The world was broken, and Olivia had broken it.

  “Here?” Dee said.

  “Yes.”

  They stood before a ranch house with an ornamental maple planted in the sloping front lawn, a birdhouse hanging from one of the branches. They would have to slip behind the ranch house and climb the common fence dividing the two backyards. Olivia rubbed her forehead, tried to organize her thoughts. It would be better if she did it alone. She was the one who had to talk to Javadi. And it would be less conspicuous if she trespassed by herself.

  “Hey,” Dee said, “there’s somebody in the window looking at us.”

  “There is?”

  The sky was reflected in the ranch house’s big picture window.  You had to gaze past the reflection to see the figure of a man.

  “What do we do?” Brian asked. “This isn’t—”

  An explosion behind the ranch house sent debris flying into the air, the concussive force shattering the picture window out of its frame. Olivia instinctively crouched and ducked her head, her ears ringing. Her first thought was: IED. She’d heard dozens of roadside bombs in the Disaster. Her body reacted with a chemical dump: fight or flight. Her heart raced. Debris rained from the sky. A jagged board, barn red, clattered to the street behind them, and a dirty gray-and-black cloud drifted over the roofline of the ranch house.

  Brian picked up the hunk of charred red-painted wood. “Jesus Christ.”

  “They’re trying to blow their way into the bomb shelter,” Olivia said.

  Twenty-Four

  The door of the ranch house burst open. A heavyset man wearing a white T-shirt and holding a hunting rifle came out. His head was bleeding. “What are you doing here?” he yelled.

  “Whoa.” Brian held his open hands up. “Take it easy.”

  The heavyset man aimed his hunting rifle at them. “We’re not children!” he yelled. “You can’t just come here.”

  A woman in a green housedress appeared on the porch behind the man. She held a butcher knife in her fist.

  “Maybe they’re nobody,” the woman said.

  Could Olivia be hearing this correctly? She cupped her hands over her ears and opened her mouth wide, trying to made the ringing stop.

  “Get out of here,” the man with the rifle said. “Get out of here now.”

  He pointed the rifle in the air and pulled the trigger.

  The four of them took off running. Crossing East Sherman Avenue, Olivia looked toward the Javadi house. People filled the street. The explosion had blown out windows up and down the block. Glass glinted like ice crystals in suburban lawns.

  “Do you think they breached the shelter?” Dee asked.

  “I doubt it. And they’re going to be pissed. We need to beat it out of here.”

  Back at the Ford hybrid, Brian got behind the wheel and Olivia started to get in the front passenger seat.

  Alvaro said, “I want the front. I get motion sickness riding in the back seat too long. I need to look out the windshield.” His eyes met hers briefly and looked away, embarrassed.

  “Go ahead,” Olivia said.

  Once they were all in the car, Brian said, “Where to?”

  Sounding exasperated, Alvaro said, “Sanctuary.  We already talked about it.”

  Brian looked over his shoulder. “Liv?”

  “Get on the 90 and go back the way we came. Between here and there, we can figure out if we really want to try the ranch. Meanwhile, we’re headed in the right direction—away from the blast zone and any radiation. We’ll stay on the road, avoid populated areas where it’s more likely we’ll run into variola, or the National Guard. Just like we did on the way here.”

  Alvaro said, “As soon as you can access the probability machine, you have to do it, even if we’re still on the road.”

  “How do I know if I can do it, without actually doing it?”

  “When all the pain is gone from the last time. Just tell me. I have the jai ba.” He held up the baggie of dried leaves and shook it.

  “All right.”

  “Good.” Alvaro tossed the baggie on the dash.

  Dee, who was looking out the back window, said, “Guys. The welcoming committee is coming this way.”

  Everyone turned. Half a dozen men, some of them armed, marched toward the car.

  “Go already,” Dee said.

  Brian thumbed the start button, the engine powered up, and they accelerated away.  The men stopped in the middle of the street. One man pointed a rifle at them but didn’t fire. A few minutes later, Brian found the interstate ramp and they were on their way west.

  * * *

  A couple of hours out of Chicagoland, the Ford’s satellite radio came back online. Terrifying news, like toxic gas, filled the car. Variola burned out of control through populations on five continents. The CDC denied rumors that an effective vaccine had been produced and was being kept from the public while it crawled through endless safety protocols.

  “The rumors are unequivocally false,” a spokesperson said.

  “Is it possible the CDC doesn’t know about Javadi’s vaccine?” Brian asked.

  “I doubt it.” But a darker possibility occurred to Olivia. What if they did know about the vaccine and had determined it too dangerous or ineffective? Olivia knew nothing about Javadi except that he had been Helen’s friend. What if he was mistaken about the efficacy of his own vaccine? Not that it mattered; she still had to choose Jacob’s probability.  The one that kills Brian. Olivia felt heavy enough to sink right through the car seat.

  “The whole thing’s insane,” Brian said.

  In other news: North Korea still existed, despite tremendous pressure to pound it into atomic dust. But the prospect of unleashing hydrogen bombs on the Korean Peninsula made Japan very unhappy—not to mention South Korea, China, and Russia. China, the big dog, claimed the nuclear strike against the United States had been carried out by a “rogue general” in North Korea, not the official government. And there was some US intel to support the claim. Meanwhile, the rogue general had already been neutralized by agents of the Chinese. So problem solved. Except for the millions killed in West Virginia.

  Americans wanted—no, demanded—a counterstrike. South Korea and Japan begged for restraint. The situation was no more stable on the Indian subcontinent, where the rattle of nuclear sabers between Pakistan and India had grown deafening.

  In one short week the world had become a vast room filled with explosive fumes just waiting for someone to strike a match. Or, rather, another match.

  “For God’s sake, turn it off,” Alvaro said.

  Brian reached for the button.

  “Not off,” Dee said. “Music. Something, anything that isn’t terrible.”
>
  “Yes.” After an hour of news, even Olivia had had enough. At least for now.

  Brian discovered a jazz station and locked it in. The road noise and the music made it possible to have a semiprivate conversation in the back seat. Olivia’s head still hurt, but the post-halo migraine had backed off considerably.  Which meant it was time to obsess about what was coming and what she was going to have to do. She almost wished the pain hadn’t backed off. She almost wished it never would. In the front seat Alvaro started snoring.

  “Dee? Tell me about Sanctuary, about the underground shelters. Is it really the way Alvaro says?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you believe it would be safe for us to go back there?”

  “Safe? Hell no. Andrew and his people would sacrifice you immediately and make sure the link migrated to Emilio. Me and Alvaro couldn’t stop it, even with Jacob on our side. And Jacob disappeared before Andrew announced the ceremony of transference. Alvaro doesn’t want to believe it, but I think Andrew had Jacob killed. Or, best case, locked up.”

  “Then I don’t understand. Why do you two want to go there?”

  “There are five separate underground shelters at the ranch, all but one interconnected by tunnels. The one not connected is actually outside the gate, in the woods. We call it the foxhole, and it’s there in case someone is caught in the open without time to code their way through the gate and get underground. The foxhole’s intended for security people, mostly.  We’re the only ones likely to be outside the fence when a disaster big enough to need a bomb shelter is coming. Anyway, the thing is fortified and autonomous. I think I could get us in there and lock it down. You’d be safe from bombs, radiation, Andrew’s faction, and anyone else. At least for a while. Long enough for you to recover and select the right probability choice. But if you do it while we’re still on the road, it doesn’t matter. How’s your head?”

  “Not good.” Olivia hoped she sounded worse than she felt. She didn’t want to be forced into linking to the probability machine any sooner than she had to.

  “It’ll get better,” Dee said.