by Nate Kenyon
That was when the slight tremor ran through the shelter.
CHAPTER THREE
I felt the tremor low in the core of my body, a vibration that coursed down my arms and legs and made my fingers and toes tingle. Then it was gone.
“What was that?” Dan said. Nobody answered him. I mean, it could have been anything. We all waited in silence for about a minute. Another tremor rattled the shelves. Something crashed to the floor in the kitchen and rolled across the concrete.
I’ve never had a feeling of dread like I did at that moment. Like I said, I couldn’t figure out why, but I knew that something was seriously wrong. Looking back now, it seems like I already knew then that the world was ending, that we’d never see the clear skies or calm water or smell fresh-cut grass again. Maybe that’s what ESP is all about; simply a low-level feeling of unease just before the shit hits the proverbial fan. But I suppose it’s more likely that it was nothing more than the cannabis rearing its ugly head.
The crazy thing was, coincidence or not, this time that paranoia was dead-on.
“Turn on the TV,” I said. Dan stood on a chair and the television blinked on. The pleasantly warm buzz from the pot was gone now. My whole body had suddenly gone into fight-or-flight mode. Every hair stood on end.
We all sat and stared at the static on-screen, looked at each other in silence as the weight and impact of that one simple image sunk in.
I checked my cell phone; no signal. “Maybe it’s not hooked up,” I said.
“I checked it before,” Dan said. He flipped through the channels, one by one, faster and faster. They all held nothing but snow.
“What’s going on, man,” Jimmie said. A whine had crept into his voice.
This time the whole shelter shuddered. Dan tumbled from the chair and my heart leaped into my throat and thudded so hard I could barely breathe. The lights flickered. A strange purplish glow filtered down from the direction of the stairs. I heard a roaring, rushing sound that was somewhere between river rapids and a jet engine. The light from the stairway turned bright pink, then blindingly white.
Someone screamed. Maybe it was me.
“The hatch,” Dan shouted. He reached out and shook me hard, screamed spittle into my face. “Did you close the fucking hatch?”
I shook my head no, and Dan pounded up the stairs and into the teeth of that sound like some terrible, angry god rising above us. I followed him and we climbed to our feet in the dirt and stared off over the water.
I don’t know exactly how to describe what we saw. Night had turned to day. It was like the inside of a lava lamp, mixed with one of those static-electricity plasma globes. The sky at the horizon line was a mixture of bright whites and purples and blacks. The center of the light burned so brightly I threw up an arm to shield my eyes. A huge cloud mushroomed skyward like a pulsing bruise; I turned and saw another, and another. The air was unnaturally hot and humid, and the sound we’d heard downstairs continued to swell. Now it sounded like a thousand tiny voices screaming.
I stood there, at the edge of the abyss, at the end of all time, and I laughed. What are the odds, some part of my mind was thinking. Nuclear Armageddon, and we happen to be holed up in a bomb shelter. The voice sounded hysterical to me. It went on and on. I laughed into that hot wind, but it swallowed up the sound of my voice until I could not be sure I was there at all. I did not know if I even existed anymore.
Finally I realized that the voice was no longer in my head, it was coming from me.
“Oh my god Oh my god Oh my god Ohmygod ohmygodohmygod—”
“Get inside,” Dan said. He didn’t say it loud but I heard him anyway. I realized that I hadn’t been laughing out loud at all. My face was wet, my eyes burned as I blinked away spots of light. A hot breath of air rushed across my skin as everything seemed to be sucked away from us, like the retreating tide just before a tsunami approached at hurricane speed.
“Get the fuck inside now!” He gave me a rough shove. I scrambled clumsily back down the ladder until my hands lost their grip and I fell off the last few rungs onto my back. The impact rattled my teeth and snapped my skull back hard enough to make stars swim across my vision. Dan swung the hatch shut from the ladder and locked it, cutting off the sound and light from above all at once. In its place was a faint humming sound like high-tension wires on a summer day.
I blinked up into the swirling dust as he landed on his feet next to me.
“Tell me we did not just see that,” I said. My voice shook with the effort of speech. My tongue had thickened in my mouth. “Please tell me this is a joke. Please. Please, please, Jesus God.”
“No joke, Pete. Now get up. We need to get downstairs.”
“We’ve got to do something, we’ve got to get help—”
“There’s no help!” he screamed at me. “Nothing we can do out there now, understand? The only thing we can do is stay where it’s safe, and see about the others.”
I stared at him, and he stared at me. Something shook the earth above our heads. I opened my mouth and closed it again. My whole body trembled so violently my teeth chattered. I felt like laughing hysterically. I felt like I needed to say something, but I didn’t know what.
Ultimately there was nothing to say, nothing to do except go back and try to explain to the rest what it was we had seen. Suddenly I had to be with Tessa, had to make sure she was all right. Nothing in the world was more important at that moment, and I jumped and stumbled down the stairs.
Sue and Jay were huddled together, arms around each other. Tears streaked Sue’s face. Jay’s glasses sat on the table and his eyes were closed. Jimmie stood on a chair and kept pressing the television’s buttons, cycling through channels, over and over, muttering something I couldn’t make out.
Tessa sat hugging herself. She looked up at me as I came down, and it almost broke my heart. I wanted to move, wanted to say something to comfort her, but I couldn’t speak.
“It’s a nuclear strike,” Dan said, to nobody in particular. “Multiple hits. I counted at least three from where we stood.”
I will never, as long as I live, be able to understand how he could be so infuriatingly calm when he said it.
A high keening noise slipped from Sue’s mouth. Her knuckles turned white as she gripped Jay’s shirt. “No. Oh, no. No.”
“You’re wrong,” Jimmie said in a voice that cracked and rose just slightly. He jumped down from the chair. “What are you, fucking crazy? It’s just thunderclouds or something. You dumb fucking shit. Lemme see.” He moved toward the stairs. Dan stepped in front of him.
“Dan’s right,” I said. “Oh, God. God. I mean it. You can’t go out there. You can’t.”
“Fuck off.” He tried to elbow past us. Dan grabbed him in a bear hug and pinned his arms to his sides. Jimmie let out a choked sob and thrashed like a netted fish as something rose up within him and tried to break free. “My father, he wants me home. My dad—he, he needs me. My father—oh, Jesus, Daddddeeeee—”
“Shhhh,” Dan said, as he held the other boy tightly in his arms. “Easy, Jimmie, take it easy.”
Something hurt deep down inside my belly. My shaky legs gave out and I sat down heavily on the bottom step as the world tilted and slipped into gray, watching them struggle with each other, engaged in a strange sort of dance made in hell. Tessa came over and sat next to me. I felt her arm slip around my waist and I leaned into her, my heart pounding, my mouth full of cotton.
Then the lights went out.
Sue screamed. In that absolute blackness the terror seemed all the more real, the heaviness of the air close and suffocating, and I snapped back to life. There was sudden, immediate panic within the group. I lost track of where people were, heard a body hitting the floor.
But a few moments later a battery-powered lantern flickered on, and Dan placed it in the middle of the table, bathing us in a slightly bluish light. How he’d remembered where it was in all the confusion, I’ll never know. I went to where Jimmie had fallen like a
crash-test dummy from Dan’s embrace and pulled him to his feet again. We all huddled around the light like moths drawn to flame.
Within my own shock I had a terrible sense of helplessness. I kept trying to picture what was happening up on the surface, and Tessa probably did too, because she kept asking me if it was true, over and over again. She wanted to know what it looked like out there; she begged me to tell her. I don’t remember what I said, but whatever it was she didn’t believe it. She started hitting me and I sat down on a chair and let her do it. I watched her tear-streaked face lit from the side by the light of the lantern as she swung at my head and body. Days after that my cheeks were still swollen and my arms and shoulders hurt when I moved them.
Eventually she pulled away from me. I grabbed hold and hugged her so tightly it probably looked like I were trying to fold Tessa’s body into my own. Then we went over to Jay and Sue and put our arms around them, and we all rocked together, trying to draw strength from each other while the world crashed and burned around us.
It was all we could do, this simple, grasping act of humanity within such madness. If we had known that this was only the beginning, perhaps we would have ended it all right there.
But we didn’t, and so we clung to all we had left, and tried as best we could to shut out the truth for just a few minutes longer.
CHAPTER FOUR
“We need a radio,” Dan said. “Maybe someone’s still broadcasting.”
“A fucking radio,” Jimmie muttered in a flat, dead voice. “That’s the big plan?” He was just a dim shape rocking in the corner under the TV, knees drawn up to his chest and his back against the wall.
We’d left our group embrace and had been sitting silently in our own places in the room for maybe twenty minutes. It felt like forever.
“No, he’s right,” Tessa said, hope blooming in her mascara-streaked face. “My God, he’s right. I think I saw one in the bedroom. Someone’s got to still be alive.”
“What about more light?” I asked. The shadows were getting to me; I kept thinking I saw things moving in them. My mind was up to its old dirty tricks again, and I kept thinking I saw my father’s face in the twists and folds of light and dark among the shelves. It used to happen to me a lot right after his accident. I’d see his twisted, broken body lying somewhere close and it was like I was dreaming while I was awake. I thought he was gone from my life the day he died, but I was wrong. He never really left.
“There’s a…a backup generator,” Sue said. I didn’t have the heart to ask her why she’d waited until now to tell us. “A buried tank with enough fuel to keep it running for weeks too, if we conserve it well enough.”
“There’ll be a switch,” Jay said, nodding. “Like an oil-burner cutoff. Located near the electrical panel. Maybe in a closet.”
We went at the search with a single-minded determination that barely concealed the desperation we all felt. A minute or two later, Jay let out a shout, and we all piled into the little kitchen, where he stood in the near darkness by a small access panel set into the wall inside the pantry. He flipped a switch and something hummed into life. The overhead lights blinked on, and we cried and screamed and hugged each other with relief. Light was life; light meant power, and strength, and my God, it was human. A little bit of control had just been returned to us and it felt damned good.
Dan went around and turned off everything that didn’t absolutely need to be running. Sue found the radio and we sat at the table and went through the frequencies, but got nothing except static.
“Do it again,” Jay said. “Slowly.”
“Maybe there’s too much concrete,” Sue said.
“They’re dead, you fucking cow,” Jimmie said, without looking at her. His voice held the same dull and flat and mean tone it’d had before. “They’re all dead, eh? Everyone’s gone.”
Nobody said anything to him, and nobody defended Sue, not even Jay. We sat without speaking, listening to the static and feeling the hope that had bloomed with such suddenness slowly fade away, until I started hearing ghost voices through the hiss.
They weren’t real; it was like seeing patterns of the Virgin Mary in grilled cheese sandwiches. But all the same, it seemed like they were talking to me, in a voice just a fraction too low to make out. I thought I heard my name. I thought, for just one moment, that it was my mother.
…Pete…hurts…
Guilt washed over me. Guilt for my father, and for me leaving my disabled mother alone. Guilt for the terrible fight we’d had just before I left, for leaving her with that final memory, and for generally being such a shitty son. I blinked away more tears, reached over and flicked off the radio. The silence that followed was worse.
“You were talking about the end of the world,” Jimmie said. “Just before it happened. About raising children after everyone had died. Why, Sue? Why would you say that?”
“I don’t know,” she whispered. “God help me, I don’t.”
“It’s like you jinxed us or something. The fuck—”
“Leave her alone,” I said. I didn’t like the strain in his voice, the way his eyes kept darting around the room without fixing on anyone. Jimmie shrugged and licked his lips, but he didn’t say anything else.
“If it was al-Qaeda, they had help,” Jay said, as if to fill the empty air. “My money’s on a Russian-based terrorist group. Their military doctrine has always stressed striking first. They feel that a nuclear war can be won. There have even been rumors that they’ve been preparing something ever since Bush started building a missile defense system.”
“But their economy’s shit,” Dan said. “We tore down the wall and they went to hell. They’re a fucking third-world country.”
“In some ways, maybe. But they’ve still got a lot of warheads, and there’s a terrible resentment against the United States. Put that together with a larger terrorist network, and you’ve got big trouble.”
“What difference does it make?” Tessa said. “I mean, seriously, why do we care who it was?”
Jay took off his glasses and rubbed the lenses with his shirt. The effect was ludicrous, really. I mean, here we were, sitting around discussing the situation like a bunch of fucking preppies in a Starbucks, only we weren’t talking about the latest 3-series from BMW, we were discussing a nuclear strike.
Jimmie looked like he might start screaming at any moment.
God, it was so quiet.
“Hey,” I said, “we don’t know anything for sure, okay? We don’t even know how far it went. Maybe the strike just hit New England. Hell, maybe it’s not a strike at all, maybe Seabrook Station went up. There’s no point in doing this right now, not before we know more.”
“What color did you see out there, Pete?” Jay asked. He’d put his glasses on again, and except for the dirty streaks on his face he looked like the old Jay, seriously bookish. I felt some sort of comfort in seeing it.
“The sky was purple, black and a pinkish white,” I said.
“Does your face feel sunburned?”
“A little,” I admitted, touching the skin of my cheeks carefully. Of course, Tessa had been beating on me pretty good, so it might have been her too. I kept that to myself.
“An electromagnetic pulse would disrupt radio traffic,” Jay said, almost to himself. “It’ll be getting dark now. Dust and radioactive waste is in the atmosphere, blocking out the sun. Mass fires. Near the point of impact nothing’s left standing. Craters a few hundred feet deep by a couple thousand feet wide. I’m guessing that the closest strike was at least ten miles from here. Much closer and you’d have second- or third-degree burns on your faces. But the shock waves still would have reached this far, blown out windows, started fires. The hatch may be buried in debris.” He paused, looked at Dan, then at me. “You may have been exposed.”
“How bad?” I said, my mouth suddenly filled with cotton. I wanted to go find my mother and bury my head in her lap, like I did when I was a little boy. The thought of my mother again made me want to cry.
I hadn’t thought of her in that way, as a source of comfort, in a while. Now it hurt so much I couldn’t stand another second.
I didn’t want to listen to him. But I had to know.
“It’s hard to say. Minimal levels, probably. Not enough to kill you. May lose some hair, or get a few skin sores. Or maybe not.” Jay sighed, rubbed at his eyes under his glasses. “Depends on the type of blast and the size of the warhead. But nobody can go outside. It was fairly calm today but once the radioactive waste gets up into the atmosphere it will spread out for miles. The fallout will kill a lot more people.”
“How long are we talking about being down in this hole?” I said. “A couple of weeks?”
Jay seemed to struggle with his control, and when he spoke the strain was clear. “I don’t think you understand, any of you. One warhead would destroy a city, cause hundreds of thousands of deaths for miles around. Fallout would make the area uninhabitable for weeks, maybe more. But what you described up there—three, maybe more hits at once even in this area—that’s Armageddon. Full-scale nuclear war.”
He looked at each of us in turn, shook his head. “We’re talking about the end of civilization.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Until that moment, when Jay brought it home for us, I don’t think we had a real idea of what we were about to face.
In the adrenaline rush of a life-threatening situation, there’s no time to think of the implications. It is only afterward, in the long silence that follows, that nightmares really begin.
But we were just children really, and maybe that saved us from losing our minds that long first night. We didn’t know what death was, or how close it could be. We didn’t have a grasp of our lives having a clear end point and finite length. Life is funny like that; just about the time you’re able to fully appreciate the accommodations, you’re checking out of the hotel.
We really didn’t know if there were survivors out there. We didn’t know if they’d be looking for us. But then Sue told us about the beacon that her grandfather had installed. Set to go off automatically when it sensed a severe atmospheric shift on the surface, it would broadcast a repeated SOS until someone came to shut it off.