Paths

  “I think we have enough gas,” he said, “but why chance it.”

  She gave him a loving smile, touched his shoulder and said, “You don’t know how happy I am you’re still alive.” She began to cry. “I don’t know what I would have done without you.”

  “Me too,” he said choking back tears.

  They drove for a few more miles before Drew decided to pull over.

  6

  Drew parked the truck along the shoulder on the opposite side of the road, the forest side. It didn’t matter anyway where he parked, since there would be no more coming and going of traffic. The dense blackness of the tree line at night provided camouflage not available from the side they were on, which was open scrubland. Surrounded by the vast forest, the F-150 pickup truck looked small and forlorn.

  Inside the cab, Drew placed his fingers over the ignition switch. He hesitated, heaving a sigh, and then killed the engine. He unstrapped himself, and tilted the bucket seat back a little.

  “Well, that’s that,” he said.

  “You should get some sleep,” she advised. “I’ll keep an eye out.”

  “We should do it in shifts, okay?”

  She nodded.

  “I’ll go first,” he said redundantly. “How long do you want to make them?”

  “The shifts?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  She gave a questioning shrug. “How does...every three hours sound?”

  “Can you stay up that long?”

  “I think so.”

  “Okay.” He consulted the dashboard clock (it was still keeping time, though Drew suspected intermittent electromagnetic interferences threw it off by several minutes, give or take. It would have to do). “It’s almost eight-o'clock. Wake me at eleven.”

  She nodded okay.

  He pushed the bucket seat back even more. He turned away from her and tried his best to get comfortable.

  After a long silence he said, “You were right.”

  She jumped with a start.

  “You scared me.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Right about what?”

  He turned to face her. “About stopping for the night. I didn’t realize just how tired I was.”

  “I’m always right. You should know that by now.”

  He chuckled, winced in pain. He touched the scrapes on his head, then the back of his neck. They were beginning to sting.

  “How are those?” She asked trying to examine them closely. The low light made it hard to tell how bad they were.

  “Hurts,” he said grimacing. “But I’ll live.”

  “I wanted to stop at the pharmacy back in town. The last thing you need is an infection.”

  “Well, let’s not worry about that now.”

  “Okay,” she agreed.

  “We’ll find some place tomorrow.”

  “I hope so. Because it’s not only your cuts I’m worried about. I think we should start thinking about stocking up on first aid kits. And also food and water, at least until we find someone who can help, if there’s anyone left.”

  “We should also think about a place that’s a little more permanent than a truck.”

  She thought for a moment, said, “Everything happened so fast, I feel like I’m dreaming, like I’m going to wake up any second and it’ll all finally be over.”

  He sat up straight in his seat, brushed a strand of hair off her face with a forefinger. “Are you okay?”

  She nodded and said, “For now.”

  He leaned forward and kissed her. She finally unbuckled herself, drew in a long breath. She looked at him. “What do you think happened?” she asked. When he didn’t answer she rephrased the question. “What could have done all this?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Do you think it was nuclear?”

  He shook his head.

  “Why not? You saw what’s happening to everyone. If those aren’t symptoms of radiation I don’t know what is.”

  “I still don’t think it was a nuclear explosion, not even an airburst.”

  “Why?”

  “Because any person standing close enough to an exploding nuke to see the entire sky light up, like we did, wouldn’t be around to talk about it.”

  “In other words, we wouldn’t be around to talk about it.”

  “Yes.” Then he added, “It wasn’t just the sky that lit up, everything lit up, every damned thing everywhere, as if the world was caught in a gigantic beam of light, a very, very bright light. “Eva, I was in the bathroom when it happened and even in there I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face.”

  “I know,” she agreed. “I dove to the floor covering my eyes like you said, with my arms. But I didn’t stay there. I got up.”

  “Why? You could have been blinded!”

  “I put on my sunglasses.”

  “Yeah, but-”

  “I covered the sides with my hands and saw, Drew…I couldn’t see everything, but I saw enough.”

  Although she was looking at him, Drew could tell by her gaze that Eva was really looking inward, reliving the events as she spoke.

  “Everyone became transparent. I could see through their skin, like when you hold a flashlight against your hand you can kinda see the bones underneath, but this was a thousand times more intense than that, maybe a million. It was like looking at an x-ray. Instead of people I saw skeletons!” She shook her head as if trying to shake the thought away. “And then they dropped, all at the same time. I saw a bunch of skeletons, heard their screams, and watched them collapse, all at the same time. It was horrible! Just horrible!”

  She turned away, allowed a moment to breathe. She continued. “I thought they were getting vaporized, but then I would have been vaporized along with them, right?”

  Fascinated, he did not want to say anything that might take Eva out of her recall. He waited for her to continue.

  “When it ended, I saw that they was still there, looking like they were just sleeping. I don’t know, a part of me still expected to see a bunch of small ash piles all around.”

  “Jesus,” he muttered.

  “So if it wasn’t a nuke, what do you think it was?”

  Drawing a heavy sigh, he considered the question. He said, “I don’t for sure. I can only guess.”

  “I’m not going to sic the Review Committee on you.”

  Drew laughed. He didn’t think he’d ever laugh again. The world still held surprises. “Anything’ll do,” she assured and finished by saying, “All I know is that it was a giant explosion.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t think it was an explosion. I mean I don’t think it was a nearby explosion, since we didn’t feel any heat or hear a boom.”

  “That right,” she said. “I didn’t even think about that! No boom! Of course!”

  “See how all the evidence is pointing away from a nuke?” he said. He held up a hand, and as he spoke he counted the evidence off on his fingers. Up went the thumb: “Impossibly bright flash, lasting for several minutes mind you.” Second finger: “We should have been vaporized.” Third finger: “No heat and,” fourth finger: “no boom, nothing.” He lowered his hand. “It had to have come from far away. Very far away.”

  Eva stared at him in amazement.

  “And one other thing. A nuclear explosion doesn’t turn people into…raging lunatics.”

  “Unless it was some kind of terrorist weapon,” Eva suggested. “A superweapon.”

  “Maybe,” he said. His face crinkled, shook his head. “But I doubt it.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Well, because…”

  “Because why?”

  “Because it was just too big. It would’ve been more than a superweapon. It would’ve been a super-duper weapon. The money, the labor, the resources required to make something like that would be incalculable, way beyond the means of a superpower like the United States, much less a pissant terrorist group.”

  “But you don’t kn-”

  “Eva,” h
e interrupted. “Honey, it wasn’t a terrorist group.”

  “Okay, fine!” she shot back. “It wasn’t nuclear. What was it then? Some kind of solar flare?”

  ‘I don’t think so,” he said. “Good guess, though. Solar flares are not brighter than the sun. They would have to be right on top of us to have that kind of brightness.”

  “Well, why can’t it be that?”

  “Same reason why it wasn’t a nuke. We’d have been cooked. Also a solar flare would not be able to travel 92 million miles, which is how far the sun is from the earth and maintain that kind of energy. It would have been dispersed far and wide.”

  “Has it got something to do with a rip in the fabric of space itself?” she said.

  Shocked to hear her say a sci-fi reference, since she was so un-sci-fi. It got him thinking about a phase transition.

  As an undergraduate, Drew had discovered his love of programming through an unlikely source, a class called Computational Sciences in Network Systems. Although the title initially almost had him running for the hills, his interest in knowing how computers talk to each other - the “ghost in the machine” if you will - had proved too tempting to back away.

  One fall day his college professor, formerly an astrophysicist before switching to computers, had scrawled an equation as long as the blackboard and prattled on about probabilities and random events. As the professor spoke, he borrowed from his former life, as he did so often, to make comparisons between the universe and integrated circuits. During one of these detours, he mentioned something that caught Drew’s attention. Two words: “phase transition”. To Drew it sounded like something out of Marvel comics. ‘Once again supervillain Magneto threatens to destroy the world, this time with his molecular phaaaaaaze transition gun.’

  The professor’s analogy focused on creating an algorithm to evaluate the properties of an event within a network nearing a critical point, such as a power glitch in the system. He compared it to the energy of the entire universe reaching a critical point – or phase transition, an event that could occur randomly at any moment. Though speculative, phase transition theory supposes that the universe is buoyed on an unstable space/time plane, known as a false vacuum, which could collapse at any moment. When that happens every atom and particle that make up the universe would be torn apart. Think of it as a house that is built upon an eroding crust, which will eventually collapse into a sinkhole.

  For Drew, the implications were staggeringly terrifying. For countless nights he obsessed over it. To keep his panic attacks under control, he resorted to Valium. It was the image of a tiny speck of light no larger than a pinhead suddenly appearing from nowhere that unnerved him. A bright, tiny glow like a Christmas light looming in mid air above his head, then in an instant shooting outward in every direction at the speed of light, vaporizing all matter in its path. It would be the Big Bang happening all over again, starting in his bedroom. His last moment of consciousness would be frozen in an eternity of screaming in an infinite (but stable) vacuum.

  His fear had grown to such extremes that he began to believe that thought alone might trigger the unthinkable, for wasn’t it true that consciousness can affect matter on a quantum level? The more he tried to block the thoughts, the stronger they grew, until he had a breakdown. On that night Drew closed the Kierkegaard book he was trying to get through and arose slowly from his desk. He crossed the small space of his dorm room and quietly closed the bathroom door, so as not to wake his roommate, Bill Parks. He proceeded to crawl into a corner, tighten into a ball and scream. It took Bill Parks nearly twenty minutes to convince Drew that drilling a hole in his head was a bad idea.

  He required seven months of therapy and a regiment of Prozac, 20mg per day, for Drew to return to normal - whatever that means.

  He would stay on the antidepressant for the duration of his undergraduate years.

  “I don’t think it was a rip in space/time either,” he said to Eva. “We would have been ripped along with the rest of the universe.” His hands shook a little as he said this.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “Yes, why?”

  “Nothing, you looked a little...distracted is all.”

  “I’m fine. “I was just thinking about the explosion or whatever you want to call it.”

  She looked at him curiously. “I thought that’s what we were talking about all along.”

  “It is…” he said, flushed.

  She regarded him with a look that was somehow both questioning and sympathetic. Something she said earlier had thrown him off kilter.

  He said, “Remember when I said it probably happened from far away?”

  Eva nodded.

  “How far did you think I meant?”

  “Since you’d mentioned the sun being ninety two million miles away, I’m assuming further than that.”

  “Way further,” he said nodding to her.

  “Light years? Oh, come on.”

  “Light years,” he pressed. “At first I was thinking that maybe it might’ve been a star going nova, but no. A star nova would be too far away to wreak havoc on earth.” With a wave of the hand he added, “To produce this kind of destruction the energy had to be much more focused.”

  “What was it then?”

  “I think it was gamma-ray burst,” he said as almost a laugh, as if surprised by his own words.

  “A what?”

  “Gamma ray burst. You’ve never heard of it?”

  She shook her head. “You’re the one who watches the Discovery Channel, not me.”

  When he heard her say it like that, as though television was still available, he felt a momentary ache in his heart. She was in denial, probably expecting the old world will return eventually. That someday she will return to her living room, flick on the 52” flat screen TV and land on some not-so-funny sitcom or on some not-so-entertaining reality show showing not-so-talented reality star no. 1 dishing out dirt to not-so-talented reality stars 2, 3 and 4 about the slutty not-so-talented reality star no. 5. He supposed that a part of him also still believed that things somehow would return to normal.

  He thought about how long she’d go on having such expectations before she’d realize the old world was gone forever. He thought of how that realization might cause a breakdown - or not. So far Eva was doing very well considering what she lived through. Within a few hours, she not only witnessed, but by taking a life to save her own, had also become an unwilling player in the greatest cataclysm ever to befall humanity. He concluded with some apprehension that she might adapt to this shattered world, with all its uncertainties and horrors, sooner than he.

  “What’s a gamma ray burst?” she asked.

  He flushed. “I’m not sure.”

  “Do you know enough to explain how it could turn people into monsters?”

  He shook his head. “And I suspect neither would a scientist if one were still around and not slavering and clawing himself like an animal.”

  “Why not?”

  “Look around.”

  “No, I mean why don’t you think a scientist would know?”

  “Because this never happened before, not in human history. They had no context, no way of telling what a gamma-ray burst could do. There is a theory that it had struck earth in the past, about four hundred and fifty million years ago, but they have no proof.”

  “What exactly is the theory?”

  “That when it hit, it led to one of the greatest mass extinctions on the planet, maybe even greater than the doomsday asteroid that wiped out seventy five percent of life on earth, including the dinosaurs, sixty five million years ago.”

  He looked away considering, then back to Eva. “Remember when I said it wasn’t a star nova?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I might be wrong about that. Because in order to create a gamma ray burst you would need a nova, but not just any nova or a supernova, but a hypernova - the biggest star explosions in the universe. For a star to have that kind of explosive power it
would need to expand...”

  So enthralled was Drew on the subject of exploding stars that he was oblivious to the fact that Eva was fading fast. She had to reel him in. “Drew!”

  His mouth snapped shut like a bear trap. He looked at her in widened surprise.

  “I’m drifting,” she said with a gentle pat on his knee.

  “Sorry.”

  “Just the Cliffs Notes version please.”

  “Okay...The closest star system is Alpha Centauri, about four and a half light years away.”

  “That’s not very far, is it?” she said gravely.

  “It’s twenty six trillion miles.”

  “Oh...” Then, “Wow!”

  He continued. “If one of those stars went hypernova, it could have then produced a gamma-ray burst with power sufficient to destroy the earth, like a gigantic laser beam trained on us.”

  “Even from that distance?”

  “We’re talking mind-boggling amounts of energy here. A single burst contains more energy than the energy output of our sun’s entire lifespan.” He paused for effect. “That’s ten billion years!”

  Eva shook her head in disbelief. Her temples throbbed; she rubbed them. As she did she again grew aware of the sunburn - or MRI burn - on her face. It was too much to grasp.

  She suddenly stopped, her hands falling away from her temples as a moment of eureka went off like a mental nova inside her head. She looked at Drew as though gripped by an awakening. “How did we not know this was coming?”

  He blinked at the question.

  “How long did it take for the beam to hit us?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. Several decades I guess.”

  “But if it’s four and half light years from us, then it would have taken only four and a half years for its light to reach us…” She dipped back into her mind, came back. “How would that have looked in the sky?” she asked.

  “Very bright. Like a small moon.”

  “Then it couldn’t have been a gamma ray burst! We would have seen it happen years and years before it actually hit us!”

  Drew pondered this for a long time. Her reasoning was indisputable, pretty much obvious now that he thought about it. Nevertheless, he remained stubborn in his conviction. He refused to let go of the gamma ray burst explanation. It simply fit too perfectly in his mind.