The Chaos Function

by Jack Skillingstead

  “Yeah.”

  Dee opened a bag of pretzels and watched the scenery go by. Olivia turned to her own window but looked inward, deep down, where she saw it—yes, the cornered, waiting memory of a very bad day in Aleppo.

  * * *

  In the middle of the night, in the middle of South Dakota, Alvaro, who was driving now, said, “We have to stop. Get fuel and charge the batteries.”

  Olivia heard the words through a veil of exhaustion. She had been dozing, half dreaming, half remembering her father. Her mother had long ago stopped making appearances in her dreams, at least the dreams she remembered. But her father and her stepmother still turned up. In the dreams with Rohana, Olivia was never unhappy. It was as if a deeper part of her mind understood something that was beyond her conscious grasp. Either that, or dreams were just weird.

  She blinked, rubbed her eyes, still in the grip of complicated feelings of loss and regret. It was too dark to see much of anything beyond the edge of the road. The car slid onto an exit ramp, swung around, and a truck stop came into view. An oasis of light stranded in the prairie. There were a couple of semis and a few civilian vehicles parked around the diner/office/store.

  “Too many people,” Olivia said.

  “No choice.”

  Alvaro brought them alongside a fuel pump. A hand-printed sign attached to the pump announced cash-only transactions. So way out here, too, the credit processing infrastructure was compromised, though they had electricity.  The battery-charging station stood separate.

  Brian unbuckled. “I’ll go in and pay.”

  “Charging station, too,” Alvaro said.

  Olivia didn’t like it. “Wear this.” She found a filter mask and passed it to him.

  Brian pulled the mask over his mouth and nose. “Don’t look at me that way. I’ll be right back.”

  “Just hurry.”

  They should have no contact with the potentially infected. But who was she kidding? Weaponized variola was airborne. She watched Brian cross the tarmac and enter the building. A beefy man in a yellow-and-black plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled above his elbows moved behind the counter. The man wore a shoulder rig, the handle of a big-ass gun sticking out from under his arm. Brian talked to him and slipped his wallet out of his hip pocket. After a minute, Brian turned and gave a thumbs-up, and Alvaro unhooked the pump nozzle, inserted it in the Ford’s fuel port, and started filling the tank. Olivia kept her eyes on Brian. Instead of coming back immediately, he wandered out of sight.

  “What’s he doing?”

  Dee said, “He’s fine.”

  Nowhere in this picture was anything fine.

  “Come on,” Dee said, “let’s stretch our legs.”

  They got out of the car. It was a warm night, quiet and windless. Maybe she was overreacting. The feeling was the same as what she experienced whenever she entered the Disaster. A sense of hyperalertness, the strain of nerves constantly on edge. Ceaseless fear. Now the Disaster was everywhere. And Brian, a human probability machine, had chosen to follow a dangerous thread into the unknown superpositional probabilities of this truck stop.

  Finally Brian emerged and walked toward them. Something about his body language, the way he looked back at the diner, signaled something was wrong. Olivia’s chest felt tight. Halfway across the tarmac, Brian stopped. As if someone had called to him, his chin came up.

  “Bri?” She stepped toward him, and, shockingly, he stepped back. “What are you doing, what’s wrong?”

  Before he could answer, far to the east a brilliant white light silently detonated. Like a mini-sun hiding below the horizon. For one fleeting moment, the prairie became visible, shadows stuttering forth. Olivia blinked, and the world beyond the truck stop went black again.

  “Oh—” Dee sounded like someone had slugged her.

  With trembling fingers, Olivia touched her lips. Brian pulled his filter mask down. He looked as frightened as she had ever seen him, more frightened even than he had been after getting shot in front of the madrassa in Aleppo.

  “Was that—?” Brian asked.

  Olivia held her hand up. “Wait.”

  Deep rumbling thunder rolled out of the prairie. A tectonically big sound. The sound of giant stone wheels grinding out the last hours of humanity. Almost imperceptibly, the tarmac shuddered. A push broom leaning against the wall next to the truck stop’s door fell over with a clatter.

  Alvaro started shouting: “Get back in the car, everybody get back in the car now!”

  The man in the plaid shirt blundered out of the office, his holstered handgun swinging under his armpit.

  “What happened? What’s going on?”

  He sounded angry, but it was fear. Olivia had seen it countless times, experienced it in herself—waiting for the crack of a sniper’s rifle, or huddled in a bombed-out building with a ragged assortment of rebel fighters while Russian planes dropped heavy ordnance indiscriminately all around them, killing children and every other living thing. Wanting to scream at the pilots. Wanting to kill them. So angry.

  So terrified.

  The truck stop guy’s hand kept straying to the grip of his revolver. A big, long-barreled weapon. A Dirty Harry gun. Plenty of stopping power, but not enough to stop what was now unleashed. He looked directly, pleadingly, at Olivia. Despite his stubbled jowls and drinker’s nose, fear had erased the adult and left a confused and frightened boy.

  “It’s coming” is all Olivia said.

  An unsatisfactory response. The man licked his lips, looked around helplessly.

  “Will you two get in the fucking car,” Alvaro said.

  Brian took another step back, a look on his face that made Olivia feel queasier than she already felt.

  “Bri, come on.”

  He just stood there.

  “Brian.”

  “That truck stop,” Brian said, “it was full of sick people.”

  “What?”

  “After I gave that guy a couple of twenties for the fill-up and charge, I wandered into the diner to look for coffee. There were people slumped in the booths. They had serious lesions, and there was a god-awful smell.”

  “We have to get moving now.”

  “I was exposed. That place must have been thick with variola. I can’t get back in the car with you guys.”

  “Bri, if it was in the diner, it’s probably all over, including the air we’re breathing right now.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “You can’t stay here,” Olivia said.

  “Does it really matter?”

  She grabbed his arm and pulled him toward the car. “It matters.”

  Twenty-Five

  Alvaro raced past the battery-charging station and back onto I-90 and headed west. In the back seat, Olivia fumbled with her lap belt. Dee knelt on the seat, facing the rear window. Olivia craned her head around. The truck stop rapidly receded, an island of light in a black sea.

  “Goddamn it,” Dee said. “Where do you think it came down?”

  “Pretty far away,” Olivia said.

  “It’s really happening.” Dee sounded stunned.

  The car strayed onto the shoulder. Gravel pinged the undercarriage, and Alvaro swerved them back onto the road.

  Olivia nudged Dee. “Better put your seat belt on.”

  Dee sat down and buckled up.

  Brian was quiet, staring out the windshield. To save them, he would have stayed behind at the truck stop, waiting for whatever hell got served up next. Would Olivia have been willing to do the same? He was tougher than she’d given him credit for back in Syria. A full-fledged member of the hard-nosed fraternity.

  Olivia wanted to touch him. Comfort him in his obvious distress, using the tools he had taught her, simple human empathy and touch. But she couldn’t make herself reach out, not when she knew what she would soon have to do. How do you reset a relationship to “safe-distance” mode? She needed the distance, so when she killed him it wouldn’t hurt as much as she knew it was going to.

/>   “I shouldn’t have gotten in the car,” Brian said.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Alvaro said. “It’s begun. The end. No one will survive. Hydrogen bombs or smallpox, take your pick. Even if you’re a carrier, none of us will get sick immediately.  We have another day or two. I doubt we ever had more than a few days left, anyway. It’s all up to you.” In the rearview mirror, he stared hard at Olivia, taking his eyes off the road for an uncomfortably long time. “Link to the machine, fix this, and all of us can go on.”

  Not all of us. Olivia sat back and looked out the passenger window, through her own reflection and into the black. She felt sleepy, and her thoughts drifted across the seemingly unbridgeable gulf. She was fourteen. Her mother had been dead for three years, but grief always circled beneath the surface, a hungry shark waiting for her to drop her guard and trail a hand or foot in the water. Her dad had just married Rohana, and Olivia felt betrayed by both of them—betrayed and isolated.

  On her way home from school one day, Olivia had a loud, hurtful argument with her boyfriend, who had told her she was too “touchy,” whatever that meant. When Olivia banged through the kitchen door, Rohana had said, You’re late. It wasn’t a scolding remark but simply an observation, delivered in Rohana’s bluntly declarative tone. But that’s all it took. Rohana was cooking, and the house smelled of curry.  The house always smelled of curry.  Why did she have to turn the house into a Mumbai café with weird spices permeating everybody’s clothes and hair? Olivia winced at her teenage self’s attitude, which now seemed akin to some sort of racist reaction, though she certainly hadn’t thought of it in those terms at the time.

  Olivia had blown up, slammed her books down, yelled Why can’t we be normal around here!, and stormed off to her bedroom—where she stayed, determined to punish everyone by lying miserable and alone in the dark. Her dad came home. She heard them talking. After a few minutes he opened Olivia’s door and told her she should come out now for dinner. Olivia had replied, I don’t want any. It smells bad. And her father had gotten angry, which was rare. You need to grow up, he’d said, then pulled her door shut, not quite slamming it, like he was closing it to keep his own temper contained.

  Olivia felt worse and worse. Even back then, she hated self-pity. But she was drowning in black, shark-infested waters. When her bedroom door opened again, she was sure it was her dad, and she tried to steel herself, pretend she didn’t need him. Instead, she burst into fresh tears.

  But it wasn’t her dad; it was Rohana.

  Olivia buried her face in her pillow. Go away, she sobbed. I’m alone. Not: I want to be alone. I’m alone.

  There was no soft-shoe retreat. The door did not close. After a few moments Rohana sat on the bed beside her and stroked her hair. Little Oh, you are not alone, she said. You are not alone. And Olivia couldn’t stop crying. It wasn’t until years later that Olivia started resenting Rohana for this small act of kindness that had begun Olivia’s journey back to vulnerability. And where had that journey led? To her dad slumped over the arm of his chair.

  And to Brian.

  In the car, teetering on the edge of sleep, Olivia could almost feel Rohana’s hand stroking her hair.

  * * *

  White noise hissed out of the car’s speakers. The satellite band was ominously empty. Finally auto-search landed on a human voice. Female, flat Midwest accent. Drunk or high, or maybe just scared and barely holding it together.

  Things don’t look good, neighbors. I think we could all use us some Willie Nelson about now.

  Willie Nelson’s voice warbled out, the recording sounding shakier than usual.

  Olivia, who had been trying to find a connection for her IsnGlas, gave up and slid the flexible, wafer-thin tablet back into her pack.

  In the front seat, Brian said, “Whoa—”

  Olivia looked up. What could have been especially bright heat lightning suddenly lit up the northwestern sky. Could have been—but wasn’t.

  The Ford slowed down until it was coasting to a stop in the middle of Interstate 90.

  “This is bad,” Alvaro said.

  Another flash occurred, followed by a series of three, all of them more laterally north.

  God’s Morse code: Dear children of Earth, you are hereby and forever doomed.

  The radio crackled and went back to white noise.

  The night returned to black.

  “Maybe it’s not what we think.” Dee sounded like she wanted to convince herself.

  Olivia had once done a piece for Slate about the history of the START treaties. “They’re going after our Minuteman silos in Montana and North Dakota. Trying to take out our strategic response capabilities. It won’t help them unless they get the rest of our subs and bombers.”

  “That’s bullshit.” Dee’s voice quavered like Willie Nelson’s. “You can’t know that.”

  “I researched the nuclear triad for a story.” Olivia lowered her window. Grinding thunder rolled out of the prairie. Except it wasn’t thunder.

  “Fucking North Korea doesn’t have that capability,” Dee said.

  “I can think of a few other countries that do.” It came out in a whisper. Olivia couldn’t find her breath. It was as if the oxygen had been siphoned out of the car. She remembered walking into a public square in Raqqa and encountering a man hanging by the neck from a construction crane, naked from the waist down, shit running down his legs. Her reaction then was like her reaction now: This can’t be real.

  The car shuddered, like something big had tunneled under the road, making it buckle.

  “Let’s keep moving,” Olivia said.

  Alvaro began to accelerate.

  Brian yelled, “Jesus Christ, look, look over there!”

  Invisible claws scratched fire in climbing arcs across a black slate—missiles streaking away at incredible speed.

  “We’re launching,” Olivia said numbly.

  In a voice on the edge of sobbing, Dee said, “God help us.”

  * * *

  The sun never appeared.

  Darkness merely seeped away, leaving a pale, smoky dawn. The eternal overcast hung low, the sky like a compactor crushing the world. They came up on Bozeman, Montana, all of them exhausted after twenty hours on the road. Dee was driving. Traffic thickened in a confused flow. Some vehicles passed the interchange at high speed, others barely moving at all, as if the drivers knew they had to go somewhere but had no idea where. They passed a big Ram pickup loaded with furniture and boxes and roped down like a Beverly Hillbillies jalopy. All it needed was Granny tied on top in her rocking chair. Wind-smudged pillars of smoke marked multiple fires in the city. An overturned semi blocked the exit ramp.

  “Anything on the radio? Anybody got any bars?” Alvaro asked.

  Dee switched on the radio. White noise hissed at them.

  “No bars.” Brian put his phone back in his pocket.

  “Try to stop here and gas up?” Dee said.

  Olivia rubbed the sleep out of her eyes. “Exit’s blocked. We’d have to get off farther down the road and backtrack.”

  “No.” Alvaro sounded grim. “Keep going.”

  Dee looked around at everyone. “Yeah?”

  Olivia nodded. “Let’s push on to Clewson. It’s only a hundred miles, and it’s a lot smaller. Less chance of exposure.”

  * * *

  An hour later, traffic clotted in front of a multiple-vehicle wreck blocking all the westbound lanes. A state police car, lights flashing and siren whooping, edged around them to reach the accident.

  “No getting through that,” Dee said.

  Some drivers whipped their cars around and crossed the median strip to the eastbound lanes and headed back toward Bozeman. One guy in a Land Rover, determined to keep going west, went jolting over the scrub on the right side of the highway, plowed through a low wire fence, turned onto an empty road, and roared away.

  “That’s Highway 2,” Olivia said. She’d noticed the sign miles back. “It can take us to Clewson.”
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br />   “Right.”

  Dee backed up, swung into the scrub, and bucketed over to the road.

  Highway 2 was a twisty snake of a road. It seemed to retreat a quarter mile for every mile west it gained. The extra distance sucked fuel. The Ford’s engine quit a mile outside Clewson. By then they had been running on the depleted batteries for almost twenty minutes. Dee started cursing.

  “I should have stopped in Bozeman.”

  Olivia held her head, the post-halo pain persistent but not agonizing. Could she link now? Part of her really didn’t want to know. “I forgot about the batts. We left that truck stop in South Dakota without charging them.”

  They coasted until the momentum ran out on the shallow grade, and Dee guided the Ford onto the shoulder and set the brake. “Now what?”

  “Here comes something,” Brian said, looking out the back window.

  Everyone turned. A tractor-trailer rig clutched down, air brakes hissing. Sleek and modern, painted white and blue. Its flashers started blinking, and it came to a stop maybe thirty yards behind them. The truck was big as a whale. A figure moved behind the cab’s tall windows. The driver’s door opened. A sturdy-looking woman with high cheekbones and wearing a green baseball cap climbed down. A shiny black braid, as long as her torso, swung between her shoulder blades. She stood by her rig, a pistol in her right hand, appraising them from a distance, the gun pointed down with her finger outside the trigger guard.

  “You folks need help?”

  Alvaro reached for his door.

  “Let me,” Olivia said. “You tend to scare people or piss them off, and you don’t want to do either of those things to someone holding a gun.”

  Alvaro sat back. “Go ahead.”

  Olivia climbed out. Six-foot-tall letters on the trailer’s side panel spelled WALMART. The air smelled of smoke and something else. Fried ozone? She waved at the driver.

  “Hi. We ran out of gas.”

  “Gotchya.”  The driver tucked the gun under her belt. “Sorry about the piece. Things have gone a little south, and you’ve got to be careful. My name’s Astina—that’s Cree. It means ‘hope,’ but don’t count on it. I can give you a ride into Clewson, you want. You can probably getchyou a can of gas and walk it back. It’s not far. Or you could push your car over the crest and coast right on down. Can’t push you with my rig. Too tall. I’d high-end you. There’s a gas station practically right on the bottom of the other side. I bet you could roll your vehicle right up to the pump.”