by Russ Munson
I did too. I unbuckled my belt and climbed out of my broken windshield and kneeled on the hood. Ahead was an overpass. The concrete was trembling. The air was hot and the cars shimmered. I shielded my eyes with my forearm and squinted.
Behind the overpass, a mushroom cloud reached toward the heavens, its stalk hairy with fire.
There was a collective inhalation as if someone had stepped on everyone’s chests and punctured their lungs. Some people rubbed their eyes, blind from the blast, while others clutched the hands of their loved ones and squeezed until purple.
I glanced back at the cop. He had forgotten about me and had climbed out of his cruiser and was watching the ball of fire like everyone else.
It looked like a test-site video. It had to be nuclear.
There would be fallout, mass suffering, chaos. But I didn’t think about all that. Not right away. Now was my only chance to escape. While everyone else was standing on their hoods and getting a bad sunburn while they had a front row seat to God’s wrath and were trying to grapple with a bleak new future, I took full advantage of the physiology that had made me champion.
I slid off the hood and ran like hell.
Chapter Ten
The exit ramp was empty. I jogged down the short stretch of asphalt and winced and hobbled through the wind-swept gravel and broken safety glass. I should have grabbed my boots, but they were back in the locker room at the arena. Behind me, the stunned silence on the highway turned to yelling. Arguments. Sobbing.
I kept moving. I took a left at the bottom of the ramp. I was headed toward Arlington. Ahead, down the street about half a mile, was a chain drug store. I would need some supplies. I was guessing that once the city came to its senses, the drug stores would be the first places hit.
All along the street, dozens of cars had run up on the sidewalk. They were wrapped around telephone poles, their tires flat from striking the curb. Others had their noses buried half inside the shop windows. Airbags were deployed and the drivers seats were stuffed with cloth marshmallows. An SUV had smacked into a fire hydrant and a geyser was shooting a spray of misty diamonds across the road, the fog red and twinkling in the light from the fading blast.
In the distance, the buildings that had once been stalwart rectangles against the clouds were now nothing more than twisted metal cages. They stood crooked and wilted among the flames, their skeletons glowing with heat, the night sky behind them pink and orange with creeping fire.
I was only about two miles from the city, but the heat was everywhere now, and thick, as if I were working under the truck after running the engine. My pores leaked sweat and my arms glistened. Keep pace, I told myself. It was nothing more than a morning jog, an easy two miles, but I was already extremely thirsty.
Don’t go too fast, but don’t slow down. Keep moving. Ignore the sourness in your stomach and your swimming head. Collect your thoughts later.
I ran through the hydrant mist. It clung to my skin and felt good and cool, but then other things clung to my skin too. Dust. Ash. A light snow was drifting this way. I hoped it was paper and tried to imagine all those financial records in those buildings going up in smoke, but I knew better. If the blast was indeed nuclear, then the fallout would cling to my skin and my lungs eat me up from the inside out.
Don’t think about it. Keep moving.
The rational part of my brain told me to turn around, to run in the other direction, to abandon the mission. I knew it was too late, that even if I could make it downtown, I wouldn’t like what I found.
But a hard fist clenched my heart. If I turned around now, I would have nothing but regret for the rest of my life.
Keep moving. I forced my legs to obey and tried not to think about every breath, about the carcinogens invading my lungs.
I was horribly unprepared for this. I thought about the rifle cabinet in my father’s house, about my friends scrambling to get their guns and seal the windows and the doors and take shelter in their basements.
Everything was different now. This was 9/11 times a thousand.
And what about my father? He was still back at the arena, stranded. He had no way to get home, no way to get back to my mother, no way to get back to the mountains.
I should have stayed on the porch. I never should have come to Fairfax.
After I got downtown, I vowed to go back to my father. We’d find a place to hide in the mountains and I’d try to explain what happened in the ring and what happened with the cops.
I swore it to make it good.
All along the road, the car and shop alarms blared at each other like a loud, nonsensical argument. The angry din pulsed in my head and my vision danced with purple as if I were pinned to the mat and someone was pounding on my ears.
The drug store, the last shop at the end of a brick row, was only a few hundreds yards away. I’d duck inside, get some water, and catch my breath. I’d get gauze, and medicine, and extra clothes.
I turned to cut across the road, but a loud siren broke through the cacophony of blaring horns. The falling ash lit up in red and blue and a hard shape and two eyes of bright white light bore down on me.
God, I thought. Another one. An unmarked police car.
In all this mess, why the hell were they still coming for me?
I sprinted for the building. The Crown Vic swerved toward me, cut across both lanes, hopped the curb, and barreled toward the drug store. I cut left and ran for the door, but it swerved again, right for me. It slammed through the concrete parking curb and I dove and rolled out of the way. It crashed into the building with an explosion of brick and glass.
The passenger door popped open and the driver crawled across the seat and fell head first onto the pavement. His uniform was dark blue, his head buzzed, a giant gash at his hairline. Blood was running down his face and he was blinking fast.
I should have kept going. I should have grabbed my supplies and gotten out of there. But cop or not, a man was hurting right in front of me, and I couldn’t let him die.
I had to make amends for the Horseman. I scrambled to my feet and helped the cop sit up against the wheel well. The whole passenger side of the Crown Vic was scratched and dented. The cop must have swiped his way through the traffic as the other cars swerved away from his siren. He was lucky he hadn’t crashed. Blind luck.
"They're coming,“ he mumbled.
The radio hanging off his dashboard crackled in between static and shouting.
“Who’s coming?” I said. “What’s happened?”
His eyes were red and swollen. He rubbed them and held his hands out in front of his face and pawed the air, but he couldn’t make sense of the fleshy shapes.
“It’s an attack,“ he said. "The whole country is under fire."
Chapter Eleven
“Who attacked?” I said.
He shook his head and squeezed his eyes shut. “I don’t know. I can’t see anything. Who are you?”
“I’m nobody,” I said.
“Your voice sounds familiar.”
“It’s not,” I said.
“My eyes feel like they were rubbed with sandpaper.”
“You’ll be okay. You drove into a drug store. Go inside. Get some eye drops. Rest until you can see again.”
“Do you have a car?”
“No.”
“You need to help me. You need to get me a car so I can go help people.”
I was standing over him.
“You can’t do anything right now. You’re blind from the blast. You can’t help anybody like this. Go rest.”
“I’m a police officer. I command you to help me.”
I had no vehicle, no way of carrying him, no way of helping. “I can’t. I’m sorry. You’re gonna have to fend for yourself. I have to get downtown.”
“You can’t go downtown. There is no downtown. It’s all gone.”
I was quiet. I pictured the rubble. The hands reaching up for help. The nail polish. She always did funky designs. Little star bursts.
“I wish I could. I have to go.”
His voice changed. It was that same voice in the back of my head, but louder, deeper. It sounded like a garbled, 8-bit voice coming through cheap speakers, yet underwater from the flesh of his vocal chords. I didn’t know what he said, but whatever it was, it gave me the chills.
I stared at him. “Are you in control?”
He got to his feet. He reached for his gun.
Without thinking, I whipped my foot around and kicked his hand away. He yelped and the gun went flying across the road and skittered across the parking lot. He cradled his hand.
“Relax, you’re fine,” I said. I couldn’t wait for another attack. I grabbed him by the collar and yanked him away from the car and spun around his back and put him in a sleeper hold. I squeezed my forearm up under his chin, my other hand pressing on the side of his head. He kicked his heels on the concrete and clawed at my forearm.
“Shhh,” I said. “Go to sleep.”
He kicked and flailed. The oxygen stopped going to his brain and he went limp. I dragged him into the drugstore, through the broken glass and the scattered candy bars. The power lines had fallen and the store’s insides were dark and yellow from the emergency generator. Behind me, the bar of lights on the cruiser’s grill were pulsing and throwing blue and red shadows across the aisles.
I dragged the cop toward the back, through the spilled bottles of vitamins and other worthless supplements. My head knocked Halloween balloons out of the way and plastic skeletons groped at my face and plastic witches cackled and stirred their cauldrons.
In the back, I lay the cop on the tile in front of the pharmacy counter. In the convex mirror overhead, I could see a women in a blue head scarf and a white lab coat cowering among the medication. She was covering her ears.
I glanced at her warped reflection. “Give him some eyedrops before he wakes up.”
“Was it a bomb?” she said.
“I think so. But in a few minutes, this place is gonna swarm. If I were you, I’d take what you need and get out.”
She looked at me. I was still shirtless, slick with sweat and covered in ash.
“There is no stealing, sir.”
“I need all your antibiotics. Put them on the counter.”
“Do not steal,” she said.
“There’s no such thing as stealing anymore.”
Suddenly, she was a woman possessed. She climbed onto the counter and leapt onto my back. She got an arm around my neck, but before she could pull it tight, I snapped my head backward, and cracked it against her forehead. Her arm loosened and she fell to the floor. I spun around and put a knee in her back, twisted her arms behind her, grabbed a roll of gauze from the shelf, and tied her up.
“Don’t hurt me.”
“You just attacked me.”
“No, I didn’t,” she said.
“Yes, you did,” I said. “I’m not imagining that.”
“I didn’t mean to. I don’t know what happened. I had no control.”
“You saw yourself do it?”
“Yes,” she said. “I don’t know what happened.”
“You heard a voice.”
She nodded. “It told me to kill you.”
I wasn’t sure if I was relieved or terrified. At least I wasn’t crazy.
“Something strange is going on,” I said. “Stranger than the bomb.”
“Where are you going?”
“I have to leave you here.”
I left the cop and the pharmacist there on the floor and rounded the corner, but knocked over a free-standing cardboard box and spilled these rainbow-colored foam swimming noodles all over the place, an end-of-summer clearance sale or something.
I found a duffle bag, a cheap nylon thing, and swiped my arm across the first-aid shelf and filled it with supplies, with bandages and bandaids and a pair of scissors. Then I went back to the aisle where the cop and pharmacist were. I sat on the floor and picked the gravel and glass out of the soles of my feet, squeezed a worm of antibiotic ointment onto my feet, greased them up, and wrapped my heels with athletic tape. It wasn’t as good as boots, but it would have to do for now.
There was crunching by the door. I looked up to the mirror in time to see two men climbing over the broken cruiser. That didn’t take long. One was bald-headed and the other was tall and skinny. Their skin was bright red and blistered, twice as red in the blinking lights, and I couldn’t tell if they were white or Hispanic. I was pretty sure they were the first of many.
The bald one pointed down the aisles. “You get the water, I’ll get the band-aids.”
The shelf behind me was now empty. I had taken all the gauze and bandages and antibiotic creams.
The tall one headed for the refrigerated cabinets on the other side of the store. I could see the top of his head over the shelves. The red lights from the cruiser caught the slide on a pistol as he waved it around. It was probably the same gun I had kicked away from the cop.
The bald one came toward my aisle.
The pharmacist whimpered. I put a finger to my lips. “Shhhh.”
Then I stood slowly and slung the duffle bag over my shoulder and motioned for the pharmacist to get behind the counter.
The bald one rounded the corner cap. He saw me, saw the cop on the floor, saw the empty shelves. His eyes went to my duffle bag and the crinkled tube of ointment on the floor.
“What you got there?”
I put my hands in the air to show I didn’t want trouble. “I’m just leaving.”
“There are lots of people hurtin out there, bro. Share the wealth. There’s enough to go around.”
“I’m sorry. I need these more than you.”
“How do you know that?”
“I got here first,” I said. I slowly lowered my hand and reached in the bag. “I’ll give you a roll of gauze and a tube of medicine. That’s it. I need the rest.”
“Toss me the whole bag.”
“Can’t do it. I need it.”
The man turned to his right. “Hey Wilson, some guy over here is hogging up all the supplies,” he shouted as if he couldn’t hear himself over his ringing ears. “He’s got all the gauze.”
“What guy?”
“I dunno. This weirdo over here. Looks like he knocked out a cop. He ain’t wearing a shirt. He must’ve been out for a tan or something,” he said and turned back to me. “My friend’s got a gun, you know. It doesn’t have to get ugly.”
I glanced at the mirror. The one named Wilson had been posing with the gun in the reflection on the beverage case. He left his reflection behind and came down my aisle.
I didn’t want to be the first one to strike. I never struck first. Even in the ring. I always waited. I let my opponent move first and used his momentum against him. But I had never faced a gun in the ring.
Wilson moved his finger to the trigger. “It’s gettin real shitty out there. It’s the end of the world. My friend asked you to share the supplies, and I suggest you comply.”
“I offered him a roll of gauze,” I said. “Your friend is getting greedy.”
Wilson glanced in the convex mirror and saw the tattoo across my back and shoulders: We the People.
He lowered his gun. “No shit. Are you Jake Wright?”
I nodded.
“Who the hell is Jake Wright?” the bald one said.
“This is Jake ‘the Constitution’ Wright.”
“Never heard of him.”
“That’s because you never leave your basement,” Wilson said. Then he said to me: “What are you doing here?”
“I had a fight in Fairfax,” I said.
“Against who?”
“The Horseman.”
“You win?”
“Of course I won.”
Wilson laughed and slapped his thigh with the pistol. “Dang right! You’re the best pound for pound fighter in the sport.”
“I don’t care who he is,” th
e bald one said. “We gotta get those bandages back to Vienna.”
“Shut up,” Wilson said. “You got any idea what’s going on here, Jake?”
“Not a clue,” I said.
“This is the big one, isn’t it? The one that ends the world.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It depends.”
“On what?”
“What happens here.”
He smiled. “I had heard you were into philosophy.”
On the floor behind me, the cop moaned and stirred.
“I think we should form a tribe and shit,” Wilson said. “Safety in numbers. Come join us.”
“I’ve got business in the city,” I said.
“There ain’t nothing left of the city,” Wilson said. “We saw it from our roof. Vaporized.”
The cop sat up. He rubbed his eyes and tried to make sense of the scene.
“You ever steal anything before?” Wilson asked me.
“No,” I said.
“Me neither. But I bet the cops will band together and form their own tribe. They’ll come after the folks just trying to survive. It’s all about sticking together now.”
“I have to go,” I said. “It was nice meeting you.”
Wilson raised the gun and pointed it as my chest. He looked down at his own hand, his eyes wide in terror. The gun was shaking.
“I’m not doing this,” he said. “I swear to God.”
Chapter Twelve
He raised the gun higher and circled it, trying to aim it at my head.
“Save your bullets,” the bald one said.
“I’m not doing it!” Wilson said.
He squeezed the trigger. The bullet whizzed past my ear and struck the convex mirror. Shards tinkled on the floor.
I slid my toes under a foam noodle and kicked it up and snatched it out of the air and whipped it at Wilson’s face. He jerked the gun back and fired at the ceiling. The shot was mute compared to the blast still raging in our ears, just a tiny pop, like a cap gun. I spun around, delivered a quick round house to the side of the head, and he went down and smashed face first into the shelves.
The bald one put up his fists and I whipped him with the noodle. He raised his arms instinctively to block it and I jabbed a push kick at his unprotected gut and hit his sternum flat with my heel. He staggered backward and lost his balance and crashed into the makeup aisle. A cloud of powders and concealers and mascara swallowed him.