The day after: An apocalyptic morning

by Jessy Cruise

  His auditory sense was the first to pick up a signal. Out of the thousands of sounds that were being processed every second by his brain, one pattern did not belong. Though Skip did not consciously hear the soft breaking of wet twigs, or the gentle sucking of boots coming free of mud, or the occasional scraping of a hand against tree bark from above and behind, he did hear them. And though he did not consciously smell a wet odor of sour sweat drifting on the breeze, a few molecules of this scent did reach his olfactory nerve, which was able to identify the fact that it belonged to neither Christine, Jack, nor himself. His eyes, when he looked back for routine checks of their rear, did not consciously see, among the thousands of other things, a few broken branches or fresh indentations in the mud where feet had recently trod but his brain did recognize that something was just a little different. His brain would have dismissed any one of these things individually. But when they were all added together in the subconscious, warning bells began to go off. The sympathetic nervous system activated the adrenal glands, dumping fresh adrenaline into the blood stream. As the inputs grew stronger and more constant, the subconscious began to yell at the conscious that something was wrong.

  Skip swallowed forcefully when the sensation became too much for him to dismiss as nerves. He did not break stride or make any indication that he was nervous but his senses were now on full red alert status. He glanced at Christine and Jack with his peripheral vision, seeing that they were keeping tightly in formation. That was good. Trouble was coming soon and he hoped they would react correctly to it. He gripped his rifle a little tighter and began to scan the area around them, looking for favorable cover that would protect them from fire coming from above.

  He found it less than a minute later. A group of three tall pine trees had been blown down, probably in the hurricane winds that had followed the initial impact. They lay on the ground like fallen soldiers, their root systems sticking up into the air in an interwoven pattern of mud and wood. If they could get behind those trees the trunks would provide cover and the roots would provide concealment. But would they be able to get there in time if whatever was triggering his instincts turned out to be hostile? He didn't know, but he was about to find out.

  " Christine, Jack," he barked when they were almost upon the trees. "Behind those trees on the left! Now!" He waved his gun towards them.

  They both hesitated for the briefest of instants, probably more out of surprise than fear. It could have been a lethal mistake but this time they were allowed to get away with it.

  "Go, goddammit!" Skip yelled, "Go!"

  That got them into gear. They began running as fast as they could, their ankles and knees rising and falling, splattering mud. Within a second or two they rushed past him.

  "Get under cover!" he commanded, beginning to run himself.

  Up on the ridge, Dave and Mick saw them break and run, heard Skip's frantic shouts.

  "They know we're here," Dave told Mick. "Get them! Don't let them get away!"

  Both men raised their rifles and tried to sight in but their targets were now moving rapidly across their view, making a precision shot impossible. They tried their best anyhow, both pulling off shots at the running figures. The battle began.

  The bullets traveled faster than the sound of the exploding gunpowder. Skip heard something whiz over his shoulder just as Christine, who was in the lead, rounded the roots and dove behind the tree. An instant later bark exploded from the tree, sending chips through the air. Just to the right of this, another shot buried in the mud. Then came the sound of the shots. Two rifle blasts echoed through the air around them. Jack screamed a little but kept moving. He followed his sister around the tree and dove to the ground.

  Skip was right behind them. Just as he pulled himself around, another shot impacted into a standing tree five yards in front of him. It was followed by the sound of another shot. He threw himself down into the mud behind the logs, scooting as close to it as he could.

  "Somebody's shooting at us!" Christine yelled from her position. She sounded greatly offended by this.

  "No shit!" Skip yelled back. "Return fire at them! Shoot and then duck! Don't let them close with us!"

  Skip raised his head up over the log, training his rifle up towards the hill where the shots had come from. He saw nothing but forest, trees, and mud but he knew that at least two armed people were up there. He fired a series of shots across the landscape, the M-16 bucking against his shoulder, the expended casings flying out behind him. To his left, Christine and Jack both did the same. Up on the hill, Mick and Dave were forced to dive behind bushes in terror as muzzleflashes winked up at them and bullets began to plink into the mud all around them.

  "Fuck me!" Dave cried in terror, realizing belatedly that he and his companion were now trapped. There was no way for them to get out of the field of fire without exposing themselves. "Shoot!" he yelled at Mick. "Shoot them or they're gonna kill us!"

  Below, Skip ordered the kids to hold their fire. They each squeezed off one more round and then ceased.

  "Now get down!" he shouted, following his own advice even as it left his lips. They put their heads down and an instant later, two shots slammed into the log right on the other side of them.

  "Move down that way," he told them, pointing further down the log. "Shoot and then cover! Don't fire from the same place twice!"

  While they crawled along the muddy ground to their new positions, Skip eased three feet to the right and then popped up again. He fired three more shots into the hillside, again not seeing a target but wanting to keep them pinned down. He ducked back down just as Jack popped up twelve feet to the left of him. Jack, his face with an absolute look of terror upon it, unleashed five rounds up the hill before diving back to the mud. The moment he was down, Christine popped up from the far end of the log and fired four shots.

  Things then happened very quickly. As soon as Christine was back under cover, Skip raised up again, preparing to fire another quick burst. But just as he did so, he saw a muzzle flash from behind a small mound of earth with bushes atop it. One of their attackers had fired at the spot where Christine had just been. In doing so, he had given away his position. Worse still, for him anyway, he was only behind concealment, which just hid a person, instead of cover, which hid and protected. Skip quickly sighted on the bush from which the flash had emitted and pulled the trigger five times in less than two seconds. Just as he ducked his head back down he saw a body come rolling down the hill, a rifle trailing after it.

  At that instant, another muzzle flash erupted from yet another bush ten feet further up the hill. The bullet slammed into the log less than six inches above Skip's head, peeling a large sliver of wood off and throwing it over the top of him. Specks of wood and mud struck him in the face, stinging his eyes. A fury of rifle shots answered this as Christine and Jack unleashed a barrage at the spot where the shot had come from.

  "We got him!" Jack yelled triumphantly. "We got him, Christine!"

  "He's down, Skip!" she answered back gleefully. "We got him!"

  Skip, having poked his head back up, saw that they were right. Another rifle and another body was sliding down the hillside. It fetched up against a rock and lie still. He then looked at the two kids, seeing that they were staring at the spot, mesmerized by what they had done. "Get the fuck back down!" he screamed at them. "There might be more out there!" He fired another three rounds up the hill as soon as these words were out of his mouth. Jack and Christine, heeding his warning, both hit the dirt once again.

  Skip slid about five feet to his left, switching his rifle to automatic fire as he did so. It was time to bug the hell out of Dodge. "Regroup," he yelled at them. "Form up on me! Keep low!"

  He put his head up once more and squeezed the trigger twice, sending two short bursts upward before diving back down. No fire answered this. He allowed himself to be slightly encouraged by this. He had only heard two rifles during the battle and two people were down. But that did not mean that there was not anothe
r person lying in wait up there.

  He began to slide to the left, meeting the two kids near the center of the log. He raised up and fired another burst, again receiving no answering fire. He looked at his two companions. "Is everyone okay?" he asked them.

  "Yeah," Christine said, nodding rapidly. Her eyes were bright and wide with terror, the pupils so dilated that they almost completely erased the blue surrounding them. Her hands gripped her rifle tight enough to make her knuckles white.

  "I'm okay," Jack echoed, breathing rapidly and fidgeting. "We shot that guy, Skip! We fuckin' shot him!"

  "Yeah," Skip agreed. "You did good. We'll talk about it later, after we're the hell out of here. I think there was only two but I'm not sure, so we're going to exit this place as if we were under fire, okay?"

  They both nodded.

  "Jack, you go first. Christine and I will give you covering fire while you move. Head for that small hill over there about twenty yards past these trees. Run as fast as you can without tripping or falling. Zigzag as you go but do it irregularly, without a pattern, understand?"

  "Yeah," he said, looking where Skip was pointing. "I think so."

  "Do you think so, or do you know so?"

  He took a deep breath. "I know so," he said.

  "Good. Once you're over there, find a firing position. When Christine comes across, both of us will cover her. Use short bursts on automatic. Short bursts. Don't waste your ammo. We don't have a whole hell of a lot of it. Once you two are both over there, spread out and give me covering fire when I come over. Got it?"

  "Yeah," they both agreed.

  "Then let's do it."

  They did it, the entire operation taking less than two minutes to accomplish. Though there was no one else left alive to oppose their transit, it was unlikely that anyone would have been able to hit them even if there had been. It was an almost textbook retreat under fire.

  Once they were behind the dirt mound, Skip popped out his expended magazine and let it fall to the dirt. He reloaded his rifle with a fresh one. He then directed the two kids to do the same, even though they both had a few more rounds in their clips. They saved their partially emptied clips as an emergency reserve.

  "Now," Skip directed, his eyes never wavering from the direction from which they'd come, "we're going to move down this hill and over to that grove of trees by the mudflow as fast as we can. Don't stop for anything. Keep up the zigzag pattern and don't worry about keeping in formation. Once we're over there, find the best cover that you can and pull yourself into it. We'll hold there for a while and keep an eye out. Are you ready?"

  They told him they were ready.

  "Then let's do it. Go!"

  They continued to leapfrog from one place to another for the next two hours. They dashed from one area of cover to the next, spreading out and holding once they got there to watch for followers. Once they were reasonably certain that they were alone and unobserved, they moved on. Finally, more than an hour after their traditional lunch break, Skip allowed them to stop.

  "If there was anybody back there," he said, sitting down on a log, "then we've lost them." For the first time in hours he set his rifle down and relaxed. His nerve endings were all tingling with adrenaline overload and a sudden wave of fatigue, common following combat situations, washed over him.

  Christine and Jack, both equally exhausted despite their youth, slumped down next to him. He looked at them affectionately, these two children of a screaming liberal Berkeley professor and his environmentalist wife. They had done good. He could not remember ever being as proud of someone as he was of those two at that moment. "We're alive right now," he said Micker-of-factly, "because of you two."

  They looked at him questioningly.

  "You guys were bad-ass," he said. "You did everything just right. You didn't panic, you didn't falter. If you hadn't of helped me fight those guys off, they would've nailed us. That was some good teamwork back there. We fuckin' kicked ass!"

  "Yeah," Jack said, picking up the giddiness. He raised his rifle in the air in triumph. "We fuckin' kicked ass!"

  "Hell yeah," Skip said, laughing now that the tension was relieved. He looked at Christine. She was trembling a little, her mind seemingly on overload. She was not smiling. "What do you say, Christine?" he asked her. "Did we kick some ass today, or what?"

  "Yeah," she said, unenthusiastically. "We kicked ass."

  "No, no, no," Skip said, shaking his head strenuously. He moved over next to her and put his arm around her companionably, pulling her against him. "You take away from the victory when you say it like that. What you mean is that we kicked some fuckin' ass! Right?"

  "Right," she said, the hint of a smile marring her face.

  "Then say it, goddammit," he chided, rubbing his hand up and down her arm. "Are we a team or aren't we?"

  "Yeah," Jack agreed, pushing at her legs. "Say it."

  The smile blossomed to full. She shook off his arm and stood up. She raised her rifle above her head. "We kicked some fuckin' ass!" she yelled happily, loud enough to echo off the nearest cliff.

  Skip allowed them double rations for lunch in celebration of their victory. They ate greedily, their stomachs swelling in a pleasantly uncomfortable way. Afterwards, instead of moving off right away like they usually did, they continued leaning against the log, their feet stretched out before them.

  "I still can't believe I actually shot someone," Christine said reflectively. "I mean, it was like the most intense thing that ever happened to me when it was happening, but now that its over, it seems like it was a dream or something. Something that happened to someone else."

  "Yeah," Jack agreed. "I keep thinking about it like it was a video game I'd played or something. It's like they weren't really shooting real bullets at us and we weren't shooting real bullets at them. It's like they weren't even real people. But then when I think about it a little more and remember that they were real, and that they were trying to kill us, I get all freaked out."

  "Understandable," Skip said, taking a sip from his canteen. "Sometimes it doesn't seem real to me either. When I shot those guys that killed your parents, it was the same way. I would find myself wondering at times if that had really happened at all. I think it's because you're a different person when you're in a combat situation like that."

  "A different person?" Christine asked.

  "Uh huh," he said. "You're in a completely different mode. You get pumped up with adrenaline and your mind starts to speed up. When this happens you either panic and go rushing off blindly, usually right into trouble, or you start to make instant decisions that are geared towards the most basic need: to stay alive. You two were in that category. You didn't panic. You were obviously scared to death but you did everything you were supposed to do. You moved fast, you listened to me and did what I told you to do and you shot back well enough to kill that fuck that was trying to kill us. But the thing is, after everything is over and done with and your body goes back to a normal mode, it gives you the feelings that you're experiencing now. You feel like it wasn't really you that did those things because you never imagined yourself doing them. Or if you do accept that it was you that did it, you feel like it wasn't as serious of a situation as it really was."

  "That's trippy," Jack said.

  "Yeah," Christine agreed.

  "Well, trippy or not," Skip told them, "you two are now official combat veterans. Your cherries have been popped, as we used to say back in the 3rd ACR."

  Christine started to giggle. "Gee, Jase," she said, elbowing him in the side, "bet you never thought you'd lose your cherry that way, huh?"

  Jack managed to look amused, offended, and embarrassed all at the same time. "Shut up, Chris," he barked, pushing her.

  Skip smiled as he watched this exchange. Though the world had forced his two friends into a brutal adulthood much earlier then they were meant to be thrust into it, for just a moment he was able to catch a glimpse of the kids that they had once been.

  "I'm glad you
're talking to me again," Skip told Christine that night as they shared their customary fellowship after Jack's departure to dreamland. There was still a little bit of light left, just enough to make out the silhouettes of the trees around them, but it was fading fast.

  "I'm sorry for the way I acted," she said softly. She was sitting next to him on the ground, hugging her knees to her chest. She did not look at him as she spoke. "I was being kind of a bitch I guess."

  "No," he said, shaking his head. "You weren't. I did something that hurt you and you were acting the way a woman does when she's hurt. You don't have to apologize to me. It's me that should apologize to you for sleeping with you and then rejecting you the next morning. I'm not the kind of person that does that, you know."

  "You had your reasons," she said. "I understand. I didn't at first but after what happened today... well... I think I can face just about anything after that. It seemed like being mad at you and not talking to you after you saved our lives was just... petty."

  "You saved your own lives. I just told you how to do it."

  She dismissed this with a wave of her hand. "You know what I mean," she said. "We wouldn't have been able to do that without you. We wouldn't have even known those guys were there in the first place if it wasn't for you. How did you know?"

  He shrugged, leaning over and reaching into his sleeping bag. He bypassed the one remaining can of beer and instead pulled out the opened bottle of Jack Daniels. "Something just told me," he said, unscrewing the lid and placing it carefully in his lap. "I just started to get a feeling that something was wrong and that someone was up on the hill above us. I don't know how I knew, I just did."