Again the hero, the sentiment flashed in her mind, and she hated herself for it. Even now, their lives all but forfeit, and these were the thoughts percolating in Rachel Fisher’s mind. A twang of metal near her head shook her back to reality and she refocused on the task at hand.
They reached the access panel a few moments later, as the tank turned and began heading their way. Harry and Adam pulled up the heavy plate and threw it clear. Beneath them beckoned the dark maw of the metal staircase, down into the bowels of the tunnels.
She turned and took stock of their motley crew of refugees. A quick count revealed ten of them here; if there were others still in the warehouse, they would have to find their own way. One by one, they disappeared into the darkness, the metal steps clanging under their desperate feet.
Rachel was sixth into the stairwell, the darkness taking hold within a few feet of the last step. The light from above faded, plunging them into total blackness. No one spoke; it was silent but for the ragged gasps of fear. It was tight down here. She could touch both walls of the corridor at the same time. The walls were cool and damp with moisture. It was humid and chilly at the same time.
“Everybody stop,” a voice hissed. Sounded like her father, but she couldn’t be sure. The acoustics were hell.
The human caravan paused. Rachel bumped squarely into a man’s back, her mouth and nose pressing up against his sweat-soaked shirt. The sour stink of fear and exertion filled her nostrils.
“It’s about two hundred yards to the farthest stairwell,” Adam said. “That’s the one we should go for. It’ll take us to the cafeteria.”
“What about the warehouse?” someone, someone very stupid, Rachel decided, asked.
“We’ll deal with that later.”
They began their march through the tunnel’s inky void. Above her head, the tank continued along its path of destruction, and Rachel hoped the floor could support its gargantuan weight. With every step, she braced herself for the shudder and collapse of the floor above her. Would she feel anything, in that last terrible moment as the tank fell on her, crushing her like an egg? She hoped it would be instantaneous.
She wasn’t afraid of dying, not anymore. What she was afraid of was suffering, of being trapped in a netherworld of pain and misery, death on a distant shore, where she would be forced to swim to it, denied the release of her suffering for as long as possible. Death was coming for all of them, never had that been more apparent than in this plague-blasted world of theirs. It might come slowly or it might come quickly, but invariably, it came.
In the tunnels, she felt like she was dead already. Only the sounds of the others shuffling through this black coil with her reminded her she was still alive. It was impossible to tell how long they had been down here. She kept a hand pressed to the tunnel wall, which gave her some reassurance she wasn’t lost in time and space, that she really was still here.
She stifled a scream as she passed through a large cobweb, its silky strands twirled around her arm, gluing themselves to her face. She didn’t want to be the one to cause a ruckus down here. Spiders, man, spiders, those were bad enough when she saw one in broad daylight, peacefully spinning their webs like Charlotte from the children’s book. But she could picture it now, trapped in her hair, burrowing deeper until it found her neck. She slapped at her neck as a shiver rippled through her.
That part of her brain storing the most terrifying images she’d ever seen in movies got to work, the giant spider from the Harry Potter movie, the one from It, the one that cocooned Frodo in the third Lord of the Rings book. Movies she hadn’t thought about in a decade or more, and here they were flickering through her mind like she’d seen all three at the San Diego drive-in she had gone to with her mom and stepdad. Around her, the chitter of rodents surprised by the influx of visitors peppered the air.
“How much longer?” a voice thick with fear asked.
“Shut up,” another responded. “We’ll get there when we get there.”
“I gotta get out of here.” The first voice again, so choked with fear and terror and tears she couldn’t tell if it was female or male. “I gotta get out of here. I can’t be down here anymore.”
There was a sudden ruckus ahead, a wave of elbows and flailing. Rachel pressed her body to the wall as she felt the quick and sharp breeze of someone running past her, back toward the stairs.
“Let him go!”
Then whoever it was had disappeared, like a bubble that had floated up from the depths of a lake and then vanished once again. They kept moving as the sounds of the footfalls receded behind them. A second later, perhaps ten minutes later, there was no way to know down here where time and space had stopped and mated and birthed this anti-creation of nothingness, she became aware of a faint glow. Her heart soared; they were close now, it had been longer than she had guessed. They were near the exit. They were almost there. Will. She had to get to Will. He was all that mattered now. She pushed herself up off the ground and backed away from the din.
The others kept pace behind her. The darkness had stopped being an issue, something she’d become used to. If anything, it might have been helping keep them alive. Bring on the cobwebs, the rats, the bats, anything down here if it kept their attackers at bay.
A few minutes later, they reached a T-junction. She looked left and then right, but she might as well have been looking with her eyes closed. Each branch was as dark and inscrutable as the other. She had no idea which way to go. A damp hand clamped down on her shoulder, and she gasped.
“Which way is the kitchen?”
“Go. Right.” The voice was pained, soft, a throaty whisper, but she recognized it all the same. It was her father.
“Dad? Are you hurt?”
“It’s not much farther,” he replied, not answering her question.
She draped her right arm around his waist and they staggered toward the exit like drunken revelers headed home after a long night of partying. As they shuffled down the corridor, Rachel became aware of a wetness on her right hand. It was slippery and warm.
“Dad, stop.”
He paused, leaned against the wall, grunted. The others continued, streaming around them like fish swimming upstream. Above them, the tank continued to ravage the warehouse, but the sounds had abated some.
She held the hand to her nose and sniffed; the scent was unmistakable. The metallic stink of blood. He was most certainly not fine. He must have taken a round before they made it to the tunnels.
“Let’s keep moving.”
She pushed everything out of her mind, focusing instead on the task at hand. Her mind was blank, empty. If they couldn’t get out of here, then everything else would be rendered irrelevant. Time dissolved into nothingness, an empty void swirling around them. They were here. They were nowhere. Dead, about to be reborn. The life they had known was behind them, a dying mother pushing them through this terrible birth canal into a world whose contours were not yet known. Every step brought them closer to the end, she told herself, each step a vital subset of the set of all the steps they would need to take to escape this dead place.
And with each step, her father weakened, the strain on her shoulder growing as his body listed toward her. Her neck and arm burned, but she pulled him tighter toward her, fully aware of the blood now seeping from his wounded abdomen. His arms were slick with perspiration, and his breath came in short ragged gasps.
“Ow!” a voice ahead called out.
“What?”
“Banged my shin on something,” came the reply.
“Steps,” her father whispered. “Out.”
“It’s the staircase,” she called out. “The exit.”
She gently lowered Adam to the ground.
“Sit here a second,” she said. “Eddie and Will should be here.”
“OK.”
Adam leaned back against the wall and let out a long breath. His quick agreement to her request was what scared her the most. He hated sitting it out, always wanted to be at the forefront
of the activity. Bravery, many would say, and that was part of it. He was brave. But he was also stubborn, and he didn’t trust many people. If you wanted something done correctly, you did it yourself, that was one of his mantras.
Please, God, please. Rachel Fisher had never been a religious woman, much to her mother Nina’s disappointment, but she found herself praying to Him all the same, because she didn’t think she could handle getting here and finding out Will and Eddie hadn’t made it here.
“Will!” she called out, her voice hitching.
“We’re here,” Eddie replied, and she clutched her chest in relief.
She ran to her son and hugged him tightly, rubbing her hands over his arms, his face, his head, unconsciously looking for any sign of injury.
“You OK?”
He nodded.
“Everyone wait here,” Harry said as he made his way up the steps.
She hustled up the steps behind Harry, not bothering to ask for his permission. He was already at the top, fumbling with the latch. A moment later, he had it free, and they gently pushed it open. The pair climbed out of the tunnels while the others waited in relative safety from the tank’s rampage, quiet and shell-shocked. It was quiet and dark in the commercial kitchen, the faintest of shimmer on the stainless appliances.
“I’m going to take a peek.”
She wound her way through the dining room to the cafeteria’s main entrance. She pushed the door open slightly and poked her head out for a view. A steady rain was falling and a thin fog had blanketed the area. The immediate vicinity was quiet.
She swung her head to the east, toward the main warehouse. A curl of smoke billowed into the sky, the byproduct of a small fire burning somewhere. But that was the least of their problems. Two of the outer walls were gone.
The interior of the warehouse was a picture of devastation. Tears streamed down her cheeks as she absorbed the scope of their loss. It was like some deity had thrown everything into a giant blender and forgotten to replace the lid. Ruined food had spattered everywhere, covering the ground and decorating the broken bits and pieces of concrete and drywall. The bandits had spread through the warehouse, collecting what remained of the canned goods. They were taking the cans now, tossing them by the armload into the bed of their pickups, working until the bed of each truck was sagging under the weight of the food. Others searched the trailers, looking for survivors, but the place was deserted. All the survivors had made it inside the tunnels.
And still the tank was working, now laying waste to the far corner of the building. It barreled along, razing the exterior walls as it went. Then it paused, a fearsome creature holding its breath. A moment later, the sonic boom of its gun firing again; the round slammed into one of the two remaining walls, the sound huge and terrifying. The gun rotated about thirty degrees and fired again, obliterating yet another wall into a cloud of dust and smoke and debris.
On cue, her stomach rumbled. She recalled Will giving her a hard time the other week about eating his dinner and if she could have right then, she would have grabbed him by the shoulders and shaken some sense into him.
You see? This. This is why I always made you eat your dinner. This. All this.
Her stomach rumbled again and she chuckled softly in disbelief.
The destruction was complete a few minutes later. The building had been completely razed, the walls a memory. Once the bandits had finished scrubbing them of their food supply, the tank made another run through the debris field, a good little worker ensuring he had done a good job. It reminded her of her stepdad after he’d cut the grass, taking in his work, returning to that little shaggy patch that had escaped his noisy lawnmower’s terrible blade.
Then the tank turned west, motoring directly toward them. After clearing past the rubble, it accelerated. Onward it came, rumbling and belching exhaust as it rolled toward them. The surviving trucks followed, the bandits hooting and hollering, firing off their guns into the air. They were just going to leave them here among the ruins of their home, leaving them to suffer, not even giving them the courtesy of killing them. No, these monsters wanted them to starve to death. They wanted Rachel and the others to suffer. The convoy continued west, leaving a cloud of dust and crushed gravel in its wake.
Will was standing at the window to her left, his little nose pressed up against it. She hadn’t heard him come up behind her. With each exhalation and inhalation from his little lungs, the panes fogged and cleared. She stood there, watching him, her shoulders heaving from the exertion, from the adrenaline, from the fear, from the hopelessness that swirled around her like a cloud.
“You OK?”
He nodded. He didn’t turn his head to look at her; he knew the score, the mountain of shit upon which they all now stood. As she stood there, one thought kept bouncing around her mind, a lone sock left in the dryer. She couldn’t bring herself to return to the kitchen to check on Adam.
Stalling. She was stalling.
If Adam died, then she would never get to call him out for the terrible job he had done as her father for the first eighteen years of her life. She could never yell at him, scream at him, ask him why he’d been clear across the country when she’d said her first word, when she’d taken her first steps, when she’d gone on her first date, when she’d done all the things a father was supposed to be around for but in Adam’s case was not. If he lived, she would keep on not asking those questions, she would always be almost about to ask them, but she never would.
“I’m gonna check on Pop-pop.”
He nodded again.
She kept her head down as she walked slowly back to the kitchen, trying to push away the worst-case scenario in her mind. He would be okay, her dad. Had a hard shell on him. She’d learned a fair amount of frontier medicine over the years, and she’d fix him up.
The crowd in the kitchen had formed a bubble around Adam, deep enough that she couldn’t put eyes on her father. When they noticed her, they began giving way, moving gingerly, as though this kick to their collective midsection had been literal and not figurative. Someone shifted, opening a clear line of sight for her to see Harry crouched down over Adam, who was now lying prone on the ground. She drew closer, her heart in her throat, placed a hand on Harry’s shoulder. He was a big man; even with him in a crouch, she was only a bit taller than him. She didn’t know why she did that.
“I’m sorry, honey,” Harry said, rocking gently on his heels. It must be bad, she thought. It wasn’t in Harry’s nature to be magnanimous.
Adam was motionless, his shirt thick with blood. More blood had pooled underneath him, as though his body had been anxious to expel it. His face was gray, lifeless.
She didn’t need a doctor to tell her which way the wind was blowing.
Adam Fisher was dead.
6
They wandered toward the ruins of the warehouse, in no rush. Here and there, a body would come into view. After taking Will home to their trailer, Rachel circled what was left of the buildings, following the zig-zag of rubble that had replaced it. Her muscles were heavy with fatigue, every step a struggle. A check of her watch told her it was eight-thirty-four in the morning. Less than two hours ago, it had been the start of just another day, another piece of the great puzzle of their lives.
But that was all over now.
There was nothing to protect here anymore.
She paused at the southwest corner of the Building 1, near a sloppy pile of ruined asparagus or maybe it was spinach. The air smelled ripe and wet. She touched a toe to the compost, calculating how many people this pile would have fed, and for how long. It made her head spin.
By the time she had completed her circuit, Rachel counted twelve dead, including her father and Max Gilmartin. It was a staggering loss for their already small community, which, no one would admit publicly, was only slightly worse than the loss of the warehouse itself. A gust of wind whistled across the compound, chilling Rachel to her core. Debris from the ruined warehouse swirled in the air.
&nb
sp; A group had begun collecting the dead. For an hour they worked, discharging this terrible duty, moving the bodies like sacks of flour and lining them up on an open patch of ground. Twelve in total when all was said and done. Twelve lost. A third of the people who had woken up here this morning were now dead.
(Fewer mouths to feed)
She dismissed that terrible sentiment as quickly as she could, as though someone might be able to read her mind. But she couldn’t help it. Fewer mouths to feed meant more for Will to eat.
You’re dead, you foolish little woman, you’re all dead now.
Her father was dead. Adam Fisher was dead. This was now a statement of fact, whereas an hour ago it had not been. Strange, how flimsy, how malleable reality was. All Adam Fisher had been or would ever be was an account now settled.
A steady wind out of the west blew away much of the cloud cover, and the morning sky brightened around them. Yet it seemed ominous, invasive, violative. A spotlight on all that had gone wrong in their world. An investigator’s flashlight inspecting a terrible scene. Jagged shards of concrete resembling broken teeth had replaced the once mighty exterior walls. She crossed the threshold, stepping gingerly around the rubble. The ruined innards of untold foodstuffs were thicker here. The saccharine smell of overripe fruit filled the air. Wet vegetables squished under her boots.
A machine had done this. A single solitary machine had left them with nothing.
Adam had died for nothing. The others had died for nothing.
A few other survivors sifted through the mess, picking at the debris like vultures. Eventually, an assembly line formed, and they piled up what they could save. No one spoke. When they were done, they had salvaged about two hundred cans of food. Enough for about a week, maybe two, and a belt-tightening one at that. The end had come.
“Not much,” Romaine said.
“No shit,” Rachel replied, shaking her head.
“What are we going to eat?” Erin asked, her voice high and reedy. Her eyes were red and puffy and she made no attempt to hide her tears. She was walking around, beating her head with her hands over and over.
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