In The End: a pre-apocalypse novel (3 page)

They parked next to a maroon Chevy pickup that was the only
other vehicle in the lot. There was a row of ten cabins in front of them and a
large main lodge building behind them.  Jim said, “Stay here and keep
warm.”

“I’m going with you,” Angela
responded.

“No, you’re not, Angie. You’ll
freeze your feet off. Have you ever walked up a ski slope? There’s no reason
for both of us to suffer. If you want to do something, see if you can get
inside the lodge and find some food and start a fire. If I can actually get
this guy down, he’s gonna be frozen. And depending on how long he's been up
there, he’s probably starving too.”

As usual, she couldn’t argue with
Jim’s logic. She wasn’t happy about being left alone, but she understood that
she’d be far more useful staying behind. And maybe she’d find some people
inside.

Jim removed the skis from the rack
on the BMW while Angela stood watching. She didn’t know why, but watching him
getting ready to leave, even though he wasn’t actually going away made her feel
sad and she fought the urge to cry.

Jim turned around, looked at her
face and asked, “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know,” she answered.
“Just… be careful and hurry back, okay?”

“Sure,” he said, wondering what was
up with her. “Wait!” he said. “I need your help with something. Come here for a
sec.”

Jim removed his arms from his
jacket and explained to Angela how he wanted her to tie his sleeves together
just below the ski bindings as he held them against his back. She tied the
sleeves in a knot then he asked her to zip up the front of his jacket, which
she did.

“Thanks. I know this looks stupid
with a jacket on below my armpits, but now both my hands are free to use the
poles.”

Angela was still standing close to
him after zipping up his jacket. She leaned forward and kissed him on his lips.
Then she quickly turned and headed toward the lodge without saying anything.

“Huh.” He stood there for a second,
watching her walk away. He turned around and began walking across the parking
lot and headed toward the base of the run. When he reached it, he looked up and
was glad to see that the guy had gotten stuck above one of the easiest of the
beginner runs. It wasn’t going to be hard at all to reach him on foot.

Jim didn’t say anything as he made
his way up the slope; not even when he was sure he was close enough to the man
to be heard. He waited until he was almost directly beneath him before he
yelled, “Need some help!?”

The man was startled out of his
daze and looked down at Jim who was walking to a point in front of him now. “If
you’re not too busy, sure - I could use a hand,” he replied.

Jim laughed and liked him
immediately. “You probably have a better idea than I do about how to get you
down. What would you like me to do?”

The man said, “If you could walk
the rest of the way up to the terminal, there’s a diesel engine that’ll get
this thing moving again if it still works. I’m hoping it’s just a power
outage.”

“It is,” Jim said, realizing the
guy had no idea what had happened in Denver, and most likely in other major
cities across the country. As he slowly made his way up the slight incline, he
thought about how the man on the ski lift was living in the old world – the one
before the nuke. When Jim told him what had happened, he would cross over into
the new world that he and Angela were in. It wasn’t often that you had the
power to change someone’s entire world with a few words.

A short while later, Jim watched the
man slowly moving up the slope as the smell of diesel exhaust spread out around
him.  The man hopped off the chair with a smile, and walked over to Jim,
sticking out his hand.

“I’m Terry. I owe you one for
saving my ass.” Jim shook his hand and told Terry he didn’t owe him anything.

“Anyone would have done it.
Besides, I literally had nothing better to do.”

“Well the way I see it, the resort
isn’t even officially open yet so I’m damned lucky you happened to be here.
What brought you over, anyway?”

“You did. A friend of mine spotted
you dangling on the line and pointed you out to me. So I guess you are kinda
lucky, but if you want to thank someone, that would be Angela. Should we take
the lift back down, or do you want to ski down?”

Terry said it would be best to shut
off the lift and ski down, so they did.  When they stepped through the
front door to the lodge, they could smell an unusual combination of hot dogs
and coffee. “I guess you’re not as lucky as we thought,” Jim said.

Angela stepped out of the kitchen
and into the main room. “You made it! You must be hungry and freezing. I’ve got
some hot coffee ready for you.”

“And hot dogs?” Jim asked, sniffing
the air.

“Well, everything’s frozen and I
didn’t know how much time I’d have to thaw anything out, so I made hot dogs. I
guess I could’ve made soup instead. Sorry.”

“I skipped breakfast this morning
and spent the entire day hanging in the breeze, so right about now, hot dogs
sound just fine.
Coffee too.
Thank you!”

“Is anyone else here?” Jim asked.

“No.
Just me.
Everyone else had the day off, but they’ll be back tomorrow to get ready for
opening day. Maybe I can get you two some passes for helping me out of the bind
I was in. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say I could’ve died if I had to
spend the night on the lift. I feel really lucky.”

Angela looked at Jim who lightly
shook his head at her unasked question. They sat at a table big enough for
eight and ate their food. Angela had started a fire in the huge fireplace and
the only sounds for a few moments were from the wood crackling and the slurping
sound from drinking off the top of a cup of coffee that is too hot to sip
quietly.

“So,” Jim finally said. “Did you
see a big flash this morning?”

“I figured that must’ve been a transformer
blowing, which would explain how I got stranded.”

“One or more transformers may have
blown today, but I have much worse news for you.”

Terry looked at Jim suspiciously,
wondering if after everything, he was now about to be robbed.
“Oh yeah?
What’s that?” He pushed the last of his food into
his mouth to free his hands.

“Denver got nuked today.”

Terry choked on the food he was
swallowing and his face started to turn red. Jim jumped up and ran to him. He
pulled Terry’s chair out, put his arms around the man and did the closest he
could come to a Heimlich maneuver. Terry expelled the food that was caught in
his throat and looked briefly at Angela and then away. Still coughing and
trying to regain his composure, he covered the food he had spit out with a
paper towel. “Sorry,” he said between coughs.

When he stopped coughing, he wiped
his watering eyes and looked at Jim. “That makes twice now.” Jim walked back to
his seat and resumed eating, waving off Terry’s gratitude.

“Are you serious?
Nuked?”

“Yes.” Terry could see from the
looks on their faces that they weren’t kidding.

“That explains why the flash seemed
to come from every direction at once. I thought it was just snow-flash, even
though I couldn’t think of what might’ve caused it. Or maybe I just wanted to
find an ordinary explanation for something that didn’t have one.”

“We were nuked, but that’s all we
know. It could have just been Denver, but it could be everywhere. The radio in
the car didn’t work on the way over here, and the one in our cabin didn’t
either, so we don’t have any news. Have you got one here we can try – or do you
think there might’ve been an EMP?”

“The one I was listening to this
morning in the walk-in cooler might still work. 
But
isn’t that your BMW parked next to my truck?”

“Sorta,” Jim replied.

Terry looked at Jim and raised his
eyebrows, wondering how the car was “sorta” his.

“It’s a loaner.
Long
term.”

Terry decided the details of the
car’s ownership didn’t matter. “If you were able to drive it, we didn’t have an
EMP blast, or that car’s shielded, which would be really unusual for an average
person’s car. Did you happen to borrow it from someone who works at NORAD?”

“I borrowed it from a dead
neighbor.”

“Oh,” replied Terry. “Then it might
just be that the power station in Denver was knocked out and there wasn’t an
EMP. I’ll go grab my radio. Be right back.”

Terry got up and went off in a
hurry toward the kitchen.

Jim ate the last of his hotdog and
started looking around the room. “Did you notice if they have any cigarettes
here?” he asked Angela.

“Why? You don’t smoke.”

“I’m going to now.”

“Why, Jim? You haven’t smoked since
high school.”

“I don’t know, Angela. Maybe I’m
feeling a little anxiety about living through an apocalypse. Jesus. Don’t
hassle me.”

“There’s a vending machine by the
restrooms.”

“Thank you. Where are the fucking
restrooms?”

Angela frowned and pointed back
over her shoulder with a thumb. Jim got up and walked in the opposite direction
of where she had indicated. “Where are you going? I thought you wanted
cigarettes.”

“I do. But I don’t have any coins.”
He walked over to the cashier’s counter and began pushing buttons on the cash
register. He started hitting the buttons harder,
then
he kicked the counter.

“Is it on?” Angela asked. “There should
be a key.”

Jim looked more closely at the cash
register, saw the key and noted that it was in the LOCKED position. He turned
it to the setting that said SALES then started hitting buttons again with no
better results.

Angela sighed, got up and walked
over to him. She pressed a button and the drawer popped open as the cash
register dinged. Jim grabbed a roll of quarters from the far left compartment
of the coin drawer and headed toward the restrooms. “Thanks,
shweetheart
,” he said, approximating a Humphrey Bogart
voice.

“Hey!” she called out. He looked
back at her with his eyebrows raised. She said, “I
wants
some too.”  Jim made a sound like a small amount of air being released
from a tire stem.

“Oh, it’s okay for you to smoke,
but not for me?”

Jim didn’t answer. He disappeared
into the dark corridor where the restrooms and vending machine were. He came
back a few minutes later and tossed a pack at Angela who was still sitting at
the table.

“What are these?” She said, looking
at the unfamiliar brand in a silver package.

“Cigarettes,
dumb-ass.
What you asked for.”

“I know they’re cigarettes, Jim. I
meant, what brand? I’ve never seen these before.” She took a deep breath and
silently encouraged herself to ignore his attitude. He really wasn’t a jerk,
she told herself. He just acted like one – perfectly.

Jim and Angela opened their
cigarette packs; neither of them thinking about the fact that being
non-smokers, they did not have lighters or matches. Jim realized it first and
got up from the table. As he started walking toward the kitchen, he almost ran
into Terry coming out.

“Have you got a light?

“No, but there are long stick
matches by the grills.”

“Thanks.” Jim walked past him and
into the kitchen. Terry went back to the main room carrying his radio and smiling.
Angela saw the radio and Terry’s smile and she smiled in return.

“It works?”

“I think it will. I think the
cooler would’ve shielded it - if there was an EMP.”

“Great!  So the batteries are
still good.”

“Actually, no.
I didn’t have any batteries. I was using A/C this morning.”

“Oh.” Angela’s smile dropped away.
With no power and no batteries, the excitement of the radio was now lost.
“Maybe we can find some batteries,” she said, afraid to hope.

“No need. Watch this.”

Terry and Angela heard Jim coughing
and turned to look toward the kitchen. Jim came walking toward them, coughing
and smiling, enjoying his smoke despite the trouble he was having getting used
to it again.

Terry turned a knob on the bottom
right side of the radio and a green LCD panel lit up. Angela’s eyes lit up
also. “You do have batteries!”

“Nope.”

“Oh, come on. You have to. The
radio is on.”

“Nope.
No
batteries. You see that mirror over there?” Terry pointed to his left at a
mirror on a wall.

Angela
squinted
her eyes and frowned, wondering what the mirror had to do with anything. “Yes,”
she said.

Jim sat down next to her, took a
cigarette from her pack and lit it with the end of his own, then handed it to
her. She took it, but just held it, still looking at Terry.

“And you see that one over there?”
Terry pointed to another, larger mirror on his right.

“Yeah?”

“And you know what happens when you
look at the reflection of one mirror in another mirror, right?”

“Well, yeah. They keep reflecting
each other for as far as you can see.”

“Exactly.
It’s called the Infinity Effect. Wherever you have an Infinity Effect, you have
a particle wave, which carries energy. With this radio sitting between the two
mirrors, there’s enough energy generated by the Infinity Effect to power the
transistors.”

Angela looked from one mirror to
the other, then to the radio and back to Terry. “That’s amazing! I never heard
of that.”

Jim couldn’t hold it any longer and
burst out laughing. Angela looked at him, wondering what was so funny.

“What?” she asked.

Jim took a drag from his cigarette
and started coughing again. Between coughs, he was still laughing.