by North, Geoff
“Maybe it would be best if you didn’t touch him. You’re in rough shape, a real mess, Jake.”
Jake Heez lowered his hand. Hayden was right; when his son had found him, he hadn’t gotten a good enough look. Now he could see full-on what had happened to his father—what he’d become—and the boy looked terrified.
“It’s me, Nicholas, its Dad.”
Hayden lowered the gun and helped Jake to his feet. “Can you walk?”
“I made it this far.”
“Come on then. Let’s get you back to the farm.”
Jake staggered alongside him. Nicholas held Hayden’s hand on the opposite side. “How did he get here? There’s nothing left of my place. Was… was Mandy with him?”
“Easy, Jake. I’ll explain it all back at the hole in the hill.”
Jake knew what the hole in the hill was. He’d been to Hayden Gooding’s farm a few years ago a half dozen times or so. The two men weren’t close, but their wives had been friends since high school. Teresa Gooding—Teresa Philips back then—had been Mandy’s bridesmaid at their wedding. Teresa hitched up with Hayden a year later. Teresa had always been a loud-mouthed, spoiled brat; the isolation of living on a farm hadn’t agreed with her, and after half a year the two split up. It had been during that six month period of marital bliss when both couples got together for the occasional backyard barbeque. Hayden’s farm yard sat on top of a hill, and on the north side, the hill dropped steeply off into the fields and pastures. Sometime in the seventies, Hayden’s father had removed a substantial section of that hill to provide shelter for horses.
That’s where Hayden was taking Jake and Nicholas now. He was taking them there because it was the only place to go. The house was no more. The sheds, garages, and barns had all been levelled. Like Jake’s property, there wasn’t a single structure left standing.
Hayden could see him surveying the devastation. “How bad was it at your place?”
“The same, maybe worse.”
They started down the steep incline; Hayden kicked rubble and dried clumps of baked mud out of their way, revealing steps made of two-by-sixes built into the hill. They had been put there less than four decades earlier, and likely replaced in the years since, but to Jake they looked more like ancient ruins hidden beneath the dust. They came to the bottom and stepped in front of two big wooden doors resting in a foundation of crumbling concrete set into the hillside. Dead, grey grass clung to the dried out soil around the door frame and hung over the header beam like a dirty toupee. The grass higher up had turned black, and nearer to the top of the hill it had burned away altogether.
“Mandy isn’t here,” Hayden said when Jake started for the doors. Jake turned and gave him a questioning look. “I’ll be straight up with you... she was here, but she isn’t anymore.” He stepped past Jake and lifted a wooden beam from the rusted brackets holding the doors closed. He pulled one of the doors open and the three stepped into blackness.
“Give me a second,” Hayden muttered. There was a flicking sound followed by a light hiss, and then a small orange flame jumped into life. “It’s an old Coleman gas lantern. I think it was my Dad’s. Never thought it would be of any use... but then again, I wasn’t expecting the world to take a nosedive into oblivion any time soon, either.”
Jake stared into the shadows all around him. He had never actually been inside the shelter before. The first six feet of walls above the dirt floor were concrete, above that, thick wooden beams kept the earth in place. More beams ran overhead, sloping down into the heart of the hill. Something snorted in the dark and stepped forward. The horse looked Jake over suspiciously, sniffed at his tattered shirt sleeve, and then backed off into the shadows again.
“Trixie was the only animal that made it,” Jake said. “My other two horses were outside when it happened. So were over a hundred head of cattle... and my dog.”
“Max.” Jake remembered the big, slobbering black lab from the family barbeques.
“Yeah, Max. He didn’t deserve to go like that. None of them did.” Hayden dug into a cardboard box pushed up against the wall. He pulled out a can of beans along with an opener. “You hungry?” Jake nodded emphatically. “Stupid question.”
Jake shovelled the cool contents into his mouth and swallowed without chewing. Some of it fell out of the opening where his cheek used to be, and he scooped it back in. “You said Mandy was here. Where’s my wife, Hayden? Where is she now?”
Hayden lit a second gas lantern further in. Trixie came back into view, kicking at a pile of loose straw in a corner. “I’m trying to conserve the fuel; God only knows how long we’ll be stuck in here. I don’t know much about nuclear fallout and radiation, but I’m betting we have enough food and water stored in here to last a month, maybe a little less.”
Jake stumbled towards him, pleading with his hands. “Please... just tell me.”
“She didn’t make it. She went out before the big one hit.”
Jake stopped. “Before? That doesn’t make any sense. Mandy was at home with Nicholas. She came here after the blast... didn’t she?”
Hayden dunked a pail into the horse’s water trough. He pulled it back out, half-filled, and sat down on a plastic milk crate. He met Jake’s eye with a grim gaze. “Mandy had come to see me the morning it happened.” He pulled up a second milk crate and motioned Jake to come sit in front of him. “I have half a dozen twenty-four packs of drinking water. We’ll have to go through those sparingly. I’ll clean the worst of your wounds with this. Considering you were drinking from an irradiated river when I found you, that shouldn’t be an issue?”
Jake sat on the crate and watched him wet a piece of cloth into the pail. Hayden wrung it out with his big hands and questioned Jake with raised eyebrows. Jake nodded, and Hayden started to dab the cold cloth gently to his skull. “My son found me... not you.”
“Nicholas snuck out while I was sleeping,” Hayden explained. “I warned him how dangerous it was outside, told him the air was all wrong... that it would make him sick. I came across you first, washing up in the river.”
Jake looked over to his son. Nicholas had curled up into the same straw pile Trixie was rooting around in. The boy’s eyes were heavy, beginning to close, but they never left Jake’s form. “Mandy and I were having trouble,” Jake whispered. “We’d been fighting for months. I never really understood why... thought it was all my fault.”
Hayden rinsed the cloth in the pail and pressed it against the less ravaged side of Jake’s face. “It’s no one’s fault... not really.”
“Is that what you told yourself, Hayden? Did it lessen the guilt some?”
“It wasn’t something I was looking for. Mandy was here all the time when I was still married, visiting with Teresa. After we split up, Mandy kept coming over... she said she was just as concerned about me as she was with her best friend.”
“I’ll bet.”
Hayden didn’t argue. He dunked the cloth in for a third rinse, and Jake took it from his hand when he went to raise it back towards his face. “I grabbed as many supplies as possible before we left the house. I didn’t have any medical dressing or bandages, but I do have some clean linen sheets. I could tear some into strips and wrap up the worst of your burns.”
Jake rubbed the cloth down the bridge of his nose. Blackened skin peeled away with it. “Why bother? I’ll be dead in a few days. Save your fucking sheets.” Hayden tried offering him one of the bottled waters. “Save that, too.”
Hayden sighed and stood. If Jake was going to take a swing at him, he probably would’ve tried it by now. Hayden was almost six and a half feet tall, and just shy of two hundred and fifty pounds. Jake was no match for him, before or after the blast. “She left the shelter to go find you.”
“What?”
Hayden covered a small blanket over Nicholas’s sleeping form. “I tried talking her out of it... told her there wasn’t time. She went anyway.”
Jake tried to picture how Mandy’s last minutes had been; speedin
g down twelve miles of back roads trying to find him—trying to save him. She had been cheating on him with another man, but in the final moments of her life, Mandy had come looking for him. Jake wept into the damp cloth, his tears mixing with the blood and horse’s trough water.
Chapter 10
Hayden pushed one of the shelter doors open a crack. The sky was heavy with clouds. They were swirling about like massive whirlpools in an ocean of radioactive grey and green. Clouds like that brought frightening storms with them, the kind that spawned twisters. The weather patterns were all fucked up, adjusting to the garbage in the atmosphere, and extremely unpredictable. He’d only left the shelter twice, once to chase after Mandy, the other after her son. Both times Hayden had encountered strange weather; hot winds and cold winds, dust devils the color orange, and a spatter of rain that smelled chemical. The old earth didn’t know what to make of the change, so she tried to adjust the best she could.
How long would it be before they could set out? How far would they have to travel to even find another survivor? Hayden pulled the door shut. Judging from the color of the sky, they’d be waiting a long time.
The lanterns had been snuffed out. It was pitch black inside, like a cave deep inside the biggest of mountains, stifling and claustrophobic. He could hear Trixie clomping her hooves restlessly in the straw. She needed to get out worse than the rest of them. She needed room to move, and pastures to run through. Somewhere near his horse, Jake was sleeping next to Nicholas. Jake’s dying. As horrible as it sounds, I hope it happens soon. The boy will be devastated, but the man has suffered enough already.
Hayden crawled to the nearest corner and found the blanket he’d yanked from his bed a few days before. He lay on his side in the dry dirt and pulled the comforter up over his shoulder. He rested his head against a balled up sack that once held oats. Mandy and Nicholas had been with him when he ran throughout his home gathering supplies. It had been her idea to bring the sheets and blankets. Hayden wished she’d thought of grabbing some pillows as well. It would’ve been softer than an empty feed sack.
The doors started to rattle. The wind had picked up. Batten down the hatches, a storm’s blowing in.
It picked up, and the doors shook continuously for the next half hour. Hayden kept one eye trained on the strip of grey light. It had grown darker outside, and nightfall—such as it was since the dust had started to settle—was still hours away. There was nothing Hayden could do about it. They were in the safest place left known to him. He closed his eyes and prayed the noise wouldn’t waken Nicholas. He prayed that Jake was already dead.
Hayden thought more about the pillow that had burned up in his house. If he had it with him now, he could crawl over and smother the last bit of life away from Jake. It would be a mercy. End his misery... end Nicholas’s fear and confusion. Hayden winced in the dark. Mandy had sacrificed her life in a hopeless attempt to save her husband, and here Hayden was now, planning to kill him anyway. What would she think of that? What kind of monster was he?
He listened as the wind roared down the hill and pulled at the doors.
***
Hayden could hear something hissing. He opened his eyes to a bright yellow light and shielded them with the back of his hand. The gas lantern... it was off when I went to sleep, I’m sure of it. Something cold and hard jammed up under his chin. Hayden pulled his hand away and saw the barrel end of his hunting rifle. Jake was on his knees, holding the gun in both hands. Hayden tried to speak, and Jake pushed harder.
“Doesn’t feel that nice, hey—having a fucking gun stuck into your head?” Jake was whispering, still mindful not to wake the boy sleeping less than twenty feet away. It was a dry, painful sounding rasp. “What did you think, Hayden? How’d you think I would act once I found out you’d been banging my wife? But it didn’t end there, did it? The two of you made it worse... dragged Nicholas into it.”
“It wasn’t like that.” Hayden gasped, and tried swallowing against the pressure on his Adam’s apple. Jake pulled the gun back a half inch. “We weren’t... we weren’t messing around the morning it happened. We never did anything like that when Nicholas was around.”
“So what was it then? Why the hell was Mandy with you, and why did she bring my son to your fucking farm?”
“Goddamn it, Jake. It wasn’t just sex. We were friends... she came over for coffee, that was all. She came over a lot to visit. Your wife was lonely... I was lonely. Nicholas was always welcome. I love that kid.” Hayden saw something in his glistening, sick eyes—a twinkle of pure hatred. He had said the wrong words. Screwing a man’s wife wasn’t a good thing to do; being her friend and loving his son was unforgivable.
Jake rammed the gun forward again, hard enough for Hayden to feel it pushing up against the underside of his mouth. “Don’t say another word about him, not another fucking word.” He leaned in close and whispered. “You couldn’t keep your own wife happy, so you stole someone else’s. You’re a piece of shit, Gooding... a worthless, cheating piece of shit.”
Saliva had pooled into a little pocket between Jake’s gums and the remaining flap of cheek flesh. It spilled over as he leaned closer and leaked onto Hayden’s chest. “Don’t do this, Jake. You need me to survive. You need someone to look after him.”
“Yeah, I can’t do it on my own for much longer... But I’m not leaving him with you.” Jake pulled the rifle away from Hayden’s throat and struck the side of his head with the handle.
Chapter 11
Hayden woke up and discovered all hell had broken loose. One of the shelter doors was smashing up against the side of the hill, the other had been torn away from its hinges altogether. Dirt and straw were swirling around him in ferocious eddies, and he could see through the dust that the sky had turned a deadly shade of bruised purple and black. He called out for Nicholas, but the boy didn’t answer. The gas lantern was next to him, lying on its side, the glass cover broken into a hundred pieces. The wind had snuffed out the flames within, sparing Hayden a painful, burning end. He crawled to the opening and pulled himself up along the jagged remains of the door frame. He screamed the boy’s name again and pleaded for Jake to bring him back.
Green lightening forked down from the clouds, and thunder pounded into Hayden’s ears a second later. A sheet of sand whipped into his face and it wasn’t until Hayden went to wipe his eyes that he saw it was rain. It was burning his skin, irradiating him. They wouldn’t last long out in that, he thought. Even at his healthiest, Jake was no match for these new, perverted elements.
Nothing could survive in that. They’re dead already.
He stumbled out into it anyway. Where would they have gone, where do I start to look?
Something clomped up beside him. Trixie stuck her wet nose into the side of his neck and snorted her fear.
***
“You don’t have to be afraid. I’m here now, and everything’s going to be okay.”
Nicholas backed away further from the man that sounded like his dad. There wasn’t much room, and only one way to go, but he moved anyway.
Jake held his hand up in a gesture that said: I understand, you’re frightened, but don’t go any further. Crawling into the drainage pipe had only staved off the inevitable. If the burning rain didn’t kill them, suffocating in the four foot high, thirty foot long steel tube would. The wind had buried the far end in with rubble and soil, and the small opening they’d crawled through was acting like a reverse vacuum, sucking out all the breathable air left.
“I know. I screwed up... big time. We should’ve stayed in the shelter.”
Nicholas pressed up against the metal and pulled his knees into his chest. He muttered something, but Jake couldn’t hear it over the howl of the wind. Jake crawled towards him again. “What did you say, son?”
Nicholas cringed away from the raw-looking fingers. “I want my Mom! I don’t want to be here with you! You’re not my Dad!”
“I know I’ve changed... I know I don’t look like Dad, but you’ve go
t to trust me... it’s just the two of us now. Mom’s not coming back.” He rested his hand on Nicholas’s arm and felt the boy flinch away even further. “We’re going to get through this together.”
Nicholas screamed and dove under his arm. He scrambled for the opening, kicking his way forward against Jake’s ribs. Jake grabbed at one of his ankles, and the boy’s other foot kicked dirt up into his face. Dry grit stung into Jake’s eyes, and he let go.
Nicholas made it out of the drainage ditch and fled into an open field. Jake yelled after him, spitting dirt up from the back of his mouth, and blinking it out of his eyes. He climbed out from the pipe and watched his son run into the storm. Lightening forked throughout the clouds, and thunder shook the ground. Nicholas was a speck in the midst of it.
Jake started running after him, and the wind knocked him to all fours. He tried standing again, but the wind kept pushing at his back, as if the hand of an enraged God was forcing him to his knees. Jake fought back, he pushed harder, and the wind won. He collapsed forward into the dirt; his face pushed into grey soil. It isn’t just the wind, he thought. My legs are dead. All of me is done. Only his mind had the strength to fight back, and his mind was useless to him. He couldn’t will his son to return. All he could do was watch the small form shrink further away. “Come back,” he croaked. There was another flash of blinding green lightening, a boom of thunder rattled though his bones, and Nicholas was gone.
Jake rolled onto his back, resigned to the fact he would never see his son again. He would never see his wife again. His family, his world... all lost. He shouldn’t have fought it for so long. There had been dozens of opportunities to end his life before now. I could’ve let myself drown in that slough runoff. I could’ve let my body drop into the well. I could’ve stopped walking and starved to death... I could’ve just stopped.