In The End: a pre-apocalypse novel (4 page)

Terry smiled and said, “I’m just
kidding. The battery is charged by a hand-crank. I charged it before I brought
it out here. That’s what took me so long.”

Despite the disaster of that day,
and the possibly bleak future they all faced, the three of them laughed briefly
for the first time in a while. If they found it strange to be laughing under
the circumstances, they also found that it helped them to keep their sanity.

After several minutes of tuning through nothing but static,
Terry finally gave it a rest. “Well, we still don’t know anything.”

“But if there are no radio stations
broadcasting, doesn’t that mean there had to be an EMP?” Angela asked Terry.

“Not necessarily. The stations
probably don’t have any electricity either. And there could be too much
electro-magnetic interference in the air for the signals to get through. Or an
EMP may have hit Denver and the surrounding areas but not made it up this
high.”

Jim lit another cigarette. “I
thought nukes had to be detonated high in the atmosphere to create an EMP.”

“They can be, for greater effect,
but they don’t have to be.  Depends on how smart the attackers were and
what their intentions were. We have no idea who even hit us or why.”

“I just thought of something.”
Angela and Terry both turned toward Jim. “We came up here with some friends who
left after the nuke went off. They were driving their SUV which definitely
wasn’t shielded. At least I don’t think it was – Josh bought it new from a
dealer in Nampa.”

“You’re probably right,” Terry
said.

“Either way, we have no power, so I
don’t see what difference it makes,” Angela replied.

She got up and started gathering
the plates. Terry scooted his chair back, making more room for Angela. He
looked at her and said, “It actually makes a huge difference. If the power
station is just knocked out, then it can presumably be brought back online
fairly soon, depending on how bad the damage is. But if it was an EMP, it could
be years before we ever see electricity again – especially if this is happening
all over the country.”

“And if most of the population is
dead, we’re gonna have a hard time finding electrical engineers who can get the
power back on,” Jim added.

Angela froze, looking at Jim. “Do
you think…?”

Terry reached over to Angela,
putting a hand on her arm. “Hey, don’t worry. We have no idea what’s happened
yet. Jim’s just considering a worst-case scenario.”

“We could be the last people alive,
for all we know.” Jim took a long drag from his cigarette and attempted to blow
smoke-rings into the light hanging over the table.

Terry looked at him and shook his
head. Angela set the stack of three plates down on the table and sat back down,
looking at the two men and fearing that what Jim said could be true but waiting
to see what Terry would say.

“That’s highly unlikely. In fact,
I’d be willing to bet it’s impossible. We’re alive. And I was outside on a
ski-lift when the nuke hit, so I’m sure there are plenty of people alive.
Millions of people live in rural areas across the country.” Angela felt relief
at hearing Terry’s viewpoint and she looked at him, waiting for more
reassurance.

Terry saw her need and continued.
“Let’s look at what we do know. Five of us up here are just fine. Denver is
probably toast, as well as NORAD and Peterson. It’s possible that NORAD was the
main target with Denver the secondary so they could knock out our air defenses
in preparation for a longer and larger conventional attack still to come. The
rest of the entire country might still be just fine.”

“Except for
possibly being under a conventional attack, of course.”

Terry looked at Jim and began to
re-assess his opinion of him. He seemed like a smart and likeable guy, but now
Terry was thinking he could be difficult to be around for extended periods of
time. He certainly wasn’t one for keeping morale up in a crisis.

“Again, we don’t know the status of
the rest of the country, so there’s not much use in speculating. For now, we should
consider some basic possibilities and then make some plans on how we can deal
with the most likely scenarios.”

“What do you mean?” asked Angela.

“Well, take the power for instance.
If we’re going to be without power for a few months, we need to think about
preserving the food we have here, and being able to stay warm through the
winter while we wait for the power to come back on.”

“And if the power isn’t coming back
on for years?” Jim asked, always the optimist.

“Then we need to plan on moving
somewhere. We have plenty of food to get us through this winter, but when that
runs out, we’re going to need to be able to grow our own. And this ain’t the
place to do it.
If things are even as bad as Jim hopes.”

“Oh, god,” Angela said, burying her
face in her palms, suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that life as she
knew it might be forever lost. She had no idea how to grow food or where a good
place to do it would be. She conjured up an image of a farm in her mind, and
then an old, foot-powered sewing machine, and then visualized herself wearing a
home-made Little House on the Prairie dress.

Terry patted her arm and said,
“Remember, we don’t know anything yet. It might not be that bad at all. Don’t
go thinking the worst just yet. For all we know, the power could be back on in
a week and things could be back to normal in no time. It’s possible that this
was just a lone jihadist who blew himself up in Denver. In that case, Denver
would be uninhabitable, but life would still be totally the same for you in Nampa
and everywhere else.”

“Boise,” Angela said, suspended now
between fear of the worst and hope for the best.

“Okay, Boise,” said Terry.

“Same thing,” Jim replied.

“The people in Boise may not even
know that anything has happened here. They could end up watching the news
tonight and hear that disaster struck in Colorado.”

“Okay,” Jim said, “so we don’t know
anything except that we don’t have power, our cars work, and we’ve got plenty
of frozen food that is thawing right now.”

“Right,” Terry agreed. “That’s what
we need to focus on right now.” Angela lifted her face from her hands and
carefully wiped tears from her eyes. “The first thing we need to do, no matter
what the extent of the situation may be, is to secure the food.”

“Snow,” Jim said.

“What?” Angela asked him.

Terry replied, “It’s freezing
outside. We need to move the food outside to keep it cold.”

Jim and Terry discussed the best
way to store the food that would keep it frozen but safe from animals and still
be readily accessible. As they were discussing this, they heard the sound of a
car pulling into the parking lot, and then the sound of the engine died.

They had visitors.

Terry and Jim ran to the windows facing the parking lot.
Looking through the blinds, Jim said, “It’s Josh and Hailey.”

“Your friends?”

“Yeah.
They said they were going home to Boise.”

“Really?
Denver got nuked and they decided to drive through the blast-zone?”

“We tried telling them they were
crazy, but you know - crazy people never listen.”

The passenger door of the SUV opened,
but no one emerged from the vehicle.

“What the fuck are they doing just
sitting there?”

“Maybe it’s not them.”

“It has to be. What are the odds of
it being another Isuzu Rodeo of the same color?
And with an
Obama bumper-sticker?
It’s definitely them. I have no idea how they
found us though. Maybe they were just looking for someplace to go after finding
our cabin empty. “

“They’re getting out.”

Angela joined the men at the
window. “The snow doesn’t look right.”

“That isn’t snow. It’s ash,” Terry
replied.

“You mean fall-out?” Jim asked.

The driver-side door opened. Now
both front doors of the vehicle were wide open, but no one emerged from either
side.

“What the fuck are they doing?”

The three of them stood there
staring, waiting and wondering. Finally Hailey stepped out of the vehicle and
fell to the ground.

“Oh my God.
I have to help her,” Angela said as she started toward the door. Terry grabbed
her and held her back.

“You can’t go out there!”

“I have to! They’re my friends.”

“That ash falling like snow is
poison. It could kill you. It looks like your friends are already suffering
from severe exposure. They either got out of their SUV somewhere, or it got in
through the windows or vents.

Outside, Josh slowly got out of the
vehicle and held onto the ski rack with his left hand, trying to steady
himself. Both of them were slowly getting coated with falling ash.

“They’re getting more on them. I
have to get them out of it.” Angela tried to pull away from Terry who was still
holding onto her.

“Angela, you can’t go out there.
You’ll get sick and probably die. I’m sorry, honey. There’s nothing you can do.
It’s too late for them. Their only hope would be if they took off their clothes
and were completely rinsed off before they came in, and that’s not even remotely
possible. I think it’s far too late anyway. They still wouldn’t stand a
chance.”

“How do you know? You’re not a
doctor! Let me go!” Angela struggled but Terry held her firmly and looked to
Jim for help. Jim came over and put his arms around Angela. Terry let go.

“Angie. He’s right. They’re so far
gone, there’s nothing we can do.”

Angela wrapped her arms around Jim,
buried her head in his chest and cried. She knew he was right. She just
couldn’t stand seeing her friends dying outside right in front of her eyes and
not doing anything to help them. Terry walked over to the door and turned the
handle of the dead-bolt, locking Josh out, just in case he made it that far.

Josh slowly made his way to the end
of the car and continued walking toward the cabin door, stopping once to vomit.
As he slowly staggered forward, Jim saw dark liquid running out of the bottom
of Josh’s pants and onto his white shoes.

“He looks—
“ Jim
started to say.

“What?” Angela asked.

“Nothing.”
He was going to say that Josh looked like a zombie, but he figured that would
probably just upset Angela even more.

Josh eventually made it to the door
and collapsed onto the welcome mat.

“Help!” he cried out. “We need
help.”

“Oh, God.
I can’t stand this,” Angela said. Jim moved away from the window and led her to
the kitchen.

“Help!
Please!” They could still hear Josh calling out from the other side of the door
until they entered the kitchen and Jim shut the kitchen door. Terry stayed
where he was, thinking that Josh might try to break a window to get in, but
then considered that to be unlikely as he heard Josh go into a coughing fit,
followed by terrible vomiting. Then he was silent.

Terry looked over at the
ash-covered heap lying next to the SUV. Hailey hadn’t moved once since falling
out of the vehicle. He was pretty sure that she was dead. Just then she started
to cough and then she stopped as her throat and mouth filled with vomit. Her
body
spasmed
briefly, causing ash to tremble and fall
away from her clothing and hair, and then she was still again.

“Now she’s dead,” Terry said.

"
L'Enfer
,
c'est
les
autres
."
-
Jean-Paul Sartre

“Hell is other people.”

It rained the night that Josh and Hailey died and it continued
almost non-stop for the next three days. Terry said it was exactly what they
needed to wash away the radioactive ash that coated everything. They did not
have a Geiger counter to see if it was safe to go out after the rain stopped,
but they assumed and hoped that it was because they needed to do something with
Josh’s and Hailey’s bodies.

When the rain ended, it was
followed a short time later by a light snow. Terry drove his truck over to the
maintenance building and came back with shovels, tarps, plywood, hammers and
nails.  Jim went out to help him, saw the supplies and asked, “Are we
seriously going to make coffins?”

“We’ve got two immediate concerns:
Dead bodies and food preservation. So…”

“So we’re gonna eat them,” Jim
deadpanned.

At first Terry didn’t get what Jim
was saying. Then he got it and laughed, wishing he hadn’t. He wondered if being
around Jim for too long could warp a person’s mind.

“No, we’re not gonna eat them!
Jeez. We’re gonna bury them. But we also need to make an outdoor freezer for
the stuff that’s thawing out.

“So we’re making a freezer out of
wood?”

“Well, yes.
Sort
of.
First, we build a box. Then we pack snow around the box, and that
oughta
work to keep the food cold during the day. And it’ll
protect it from predators. I just wish I had some hinges. It’d make it easier
to get in and out of.”

Jim glanced around and said, “We
have plenty of hinges.”

“We do?”

“Yeah.
On all the doors in the motel rooms.”

“They don’t call ‘
em
motel rooms, but yeah, you’re right. We can take some
from a bathroom door. Why didn’t I think of that?”

“
Cuz
you’re old and feeble, and sometimes need to be rescued from ski lifts.”

“Okay, youngster, I’ll hold the
boards and you can do the nailing. Being that I’m old and feeble, I’m liable to
miss the nail and smash your fingers.”

“Isn’t it cold enough up here to
keep the food fresh without packing snow around the box?”

“It should be, but you never know
when you’ll get a warm spell. We can’t take any chances.”

Jim agreed and they took the supplies
they needed behind the lodge and constructed their refrigerator box near the
back of the kitchen. By the time they had finished, there was still a light
snow falling, but not enough accumulation to pack around the box they had
built. That also meant that the ground was not too frozen to dig two graves.

They had used up too much wood on
the refrigerator box to have enough left over for making coffins, but they had
plenty of tarps and duct tape. They agreed to not tell Angela how the bodies
were buried – unless she specifically asked.

It was dark before they finished
digging the graves so Terry grabbed a lantern from his truck that he’d brought
from the supply garage. Once they had light again, they finished digging and
then gently lowered the bodies into their separate graves.

“Do you wanna say something?” Terry
asked Jim, not knowing that Josh and Hailey were more Angela’s friends than
his. Being that Josh and Hailey were Jewish, the only thing that came to Jim’s
mind was, “
L'chaim
” but he decided to keep his warped
humor in check out of respect for Angela.

“We’ll save it for the service,” he
replied instead.

Surprised for not even thinking of
what would have ordinarily been obvious, Terry said, “Oh, right. Good
idea.”