Desolation

by David Lucin

  “That’s what I figured,” Gary said, sitting back in his seat across the table. “Air bursts, right?”

  “Most definitely,” Liam said. “Makes me sick that I feel good about that.”

  Maria returned with a glass of water. She remained standing and leaned on her cart, giving Liam the chance to rest in her seat.

  Liam downed half the glass in one gulp and continued, the entire room watching him intently. “Anyway, most people are indoors now. We’ve mostly got things under control and people have started to calm down. Still, I doubt we’ll see power for a while. Backup at the hospital still works, thank God. My partner and I did crowd control there for most of the day.”

  “How long before we get power again?” Jenn asked.

  Liam took another sip of water. “Best-case scenario, we have limited solar in a day or two. Places like the hospital and the station are fine because they weren’t plugged into the grid. From what I’ve heard, the solar panels themselves are fine; it’s the batteries or the converters or something that are toast, so we just need to hook up fresh ones. But we won’t be able to power the whole town. As for the grid coming back online, that’s anyone’s guess. I think we were—” Liam stopped himself.

  “You think we were what?” Jenn prodded.

  He looked to Gary, who nodded slowly.

  “I think it’s an EMP,” Liam said. “One of those will knock out power across half the country. If that’s the case, we’re on our own for the foreseeable future.”

  Jenn’s stomach sank. Sophie said the same thing, but hearing it from Liam, a police officer and Gary’s friend, not some paranoid apocalypse nut, made it more real somehow.

  “We’re completely cut off,” Liam continued. “No contact with the city at all. We even tried landlines. Nothing.” He finished his water and stood, wincing as he put weight on his prosthetic leg. “Sorry to be the bearer of bad news. The next step for us is to get the town settled in for the long haul and try to reach the state or federal governments. Sit tight and wait for news. And feel free to come by the house any time.”

  He made for the door, and Gary popped out of his seat again. Holding it open for Liam, he reached his hand out and they shook. “Give Erin and Debbie our best.”

  “Will do,” Liam said. “Thanks again for checking on them today. We really appreciate it. And honestly, if you need anything, you let us know.” He said goodbye and stepped into the night.

  Jenn knocked her knuckles against the tabletop. “So what’s our next move?” she said as Gary made his way back.

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  Jenn snorted. “I mean we can’t ‘sit tight’ like Liam said. We’re dealing with a situation here.”

  “Yes,” Gary said, fetching Liam’s glass from the table, “but from what Liam just said, the police have things under control. I think we should follow his advice: stay inside and wait for news.”

  Jenn almost laughed at that.

  To her surprise, Maria cut in. “Have you not seen Sam’s face?” she asked Gary, making her way to her chair beside Jenn.

  “Yes, but—”

  “We watched a riot outside of a real estate office and got into a fist fight at Minute Tire,” Jenn barked. “Somebody tackled me to the ground, then punched Sam in the mouth. I’d say things are far from under control.”

  “You haven’t seen what they’ve seen,” Maria said to Gary. “You went out looking for them, but other than that, you’ve been here all day with me.”

  Maria smiled at Jenn. She could tell Maria was tired. Her life of routine had been turned upside down. Jenn thought Maria was coping well, considering the circumstances, but she wondered how much of her resolute exterior was a mask. Was she frightened or actually this strong?

  “What do you think, Sam?” Gary asked, walking over and standing behind him.

  The question threw Jenn off guard. She’d never heard Gary ask for Sam’s opinion before.

  Sam blinked hard, and Jenn gave him a nod. She hoped he’d be honest and not side with Gary. Given their last blowout, she doubted he would, but part of her feared he’d choose reconciliation over doing the right thing. “Jenn’s right,” he said. “We can’t wait around and hope for the best.”

  Jenn breathed a sigh of relief.

  Gary ran his fingers across his scalp. “Okay. I guess it doesn’t hurt to be ready.”

  Sam gave Jenn a wink and reached for her hand. She took it and held it in her lap.

  “So what’s first?” Gary asked, pulling out his chair and sitting down again.

  “I think that’s obvious,” Sam said.

  “Maria’s oxygen,” Gary answered.

  Maria dropped her chin and avoided eye contact.

  “What’s wrong?” Jenn asked.

  “I don’t want you guys doing all this work for me,” she said, turning her head away from the table. “I don’t want anyone getting hurt because of me.”

  Jenn let go of Sam’s hand and squeezed Maria’s shoulder. “Nobody’s going to get hurt. The cops are doing their jobs, helping and keeping an eye on things.”

  “That’s right,” Sam said. “Your oxygen is the priority.”

  “Great.” Jenn shot up and turned for the door.

  “Jenn,” she heard Gary say. “Where are you going?”

  She stopped. No one but her had moved. “What do you mean? We just decided to get oxygen for Maria.”

  Sam and Gary exchanged glances. Gary spoke first. “We didn’t mean tonight.”

  “How come?”

  “It’s late,” Gary said. “Nothing will be open.”

  “Not like it will be open tomorrow morning anyway,” Jenn countered. “The Go Market was already closed when I walked by today.”

  “I agree with Gary,” Maria started. “Even if Carla’s pharmacy is closed, we have a better chance of getting her help in the morning.”

  Gary crossed his arms. “Right. Who knows? Maybe she’ll be there tomorrow.”

  “She’s just as likely to be there now,” Jenn argued, trying to keep calm. “She’s not the type to walk away. That place is her life.”

  Sam and Gary remained quiet. Had that done it?

  “Probably,” Maria said. “But that’s not the point.”

  “What is?” Jenn asked.

  “You need to rest. I understand you’re worried about me, but I’m fine. I’m not going to run out of oxygen tonight.”

  Jenn, outnumbered three to one, flopped back into her chair. “Fine,” she conceded. “But we’re leaving at the ass crack of dawn tomorrow.”

  Sam crossed his legs and put the ice back on his jaw. “We can do that.”

  “That settles it.” Maria planted her palms on the table to push herself up. Gary rushed over to help lift her from her seat. “I’ll fix us something to eat.”

  “Good idea,” Gary said. “There’s plenty of propane in the barbecue. Maybe we can have that soup you made the other night.”

  Sam perked up at the mention of food. “Soup, you say…”

  Maria grabbed her oxygen cart. “Yep. We should eat it now, before it goes bad.”

  Jenn hoped Sam liked potatoes, onions, and watered-down chicken broth, because thanks to the war, that was pretty much all Maria had for the soup. Thinking about it made Jenn’s mouth water, though, and she realized she hadn’t eaten since breakfast. “Sounds great,” Jenn said. “I’ll set the table.”

  11

  Jenn rolled over in bed and stared up. In the dark, she could barely make out the popcorn ceiling, which reminded her of her room at home. She saw the faint outline of the brown heart-shaped stain, too, but that was unique to the Ruiz house. It looked like water damage. Jenn’s father would have never tolerated a stain like that. He’d have torn the ceiling apart and replaced it long before the stain grew half this large. He wouldn’t have to fight with water damage in Phoenix, though, since it only rained there five times a year.

  Sleeping on his side and facing away from Jenn, Sam snored like n
othing happened today, like the power across Arizona wasn’t down and that five nuclear bombs hadn’t exploded above Phoenix. He’d fallen asleep a few minutes after he and Jenn went to bed. She tried not to feel jealous about that.

  She took her phone off the nightstand. Knowing it wouldn’t turn on, she tapped the screen anyway. Sam was right: old habits indeed died hard.

  Swallowing a lump in her throat, she laid it back down. Wide awake and with no phone to keep her mind busy, Jenn thought about home. Maybe that was why she couldn’t sleep in the first place. She didn’t know. This was a chicken and the egg debate. Either way, lying here with Sam and waiting until morning felt wrong. Her parents hadn’t come to meet her. The drive took less than three hours, and more than twelve had passed since the lights went out.

  Jenn dwelt on Gary’s words: “not from Phoenix,” he’d said about the fallout. They hung in the back of her mind, pestering her like an itch she couldn’t reach. Talking with Liam did little to scratch it. She dissected the words and broke down their meaning. The mention of Phoenix implied fallout from somewhere else, which meant other cities were hit, too, a reality Jenn surmised at the kitchen table but refused to consider further. Now, with a dead phone, unconscious boyfriend, and no distractions, she began speculating.

  Again, why Phoenix? Something in metro Phoenix threatened China or Russia or Brazil enough to invite a nuclear attack. The air force base in Glendale? Jenn visited that part of the city last summer, touring the new aquarium and zoo near the base. In her father’s pickup, she drove there in under half an hour from her place in Peoria. If her average speed was, say, thirty miles per hour, then that put the air force base around fifteen miles away.

  She hadn’t driven in a straight line, though. First, she went south from home, then due west along Olive Avenue. That made the distance between her house and the air force base, the hypotenuse between points A, B, and C, less than fifteen miles.

  Maybe she drove faster than thirty miles per hour. In fact, because of the long stretches with no traffic lights, she probably went fifty or more on Olive, so the trip might have clocked in at more than twenty miles, putting the air force base a little farther from her house.

  But what was the blast radius of a nuclear bomb? And how far did radiation spread? It hadn’t come up this far and Gary said there’d be no fallout, at least not from Phoenix, but she’d seen pictures of radiation victims after Hiroshima. She hadn’t asked Gary about that. Regardless, all her calculating meant nothing if she couldn’t find answers to these questions. Her phone would have known. Gary might know, since he knew everything about World War Two and, Jenn decided, more than the government of Arizona, which had apparently put out those safety videos without researching nuclear weapons first. But he went to bed over an hour ago and she didn’t want to wake him. For tonight, her best hope was that her parents lived in the suburbs, far from the city center and, she prayed, far enough from the air force base in Glendale.

  The door squeaked open. “Sorry,” Maria whispered. “I know you’re trying to sleep.”

  “It’s okay,” Jenn said, throwing off the sheet and sitting up. “I can’t sleep anyway.”

  “How’s Sam?”

  Jenn poked his shoulder. He wouldn’t have woken up if she fired one of Gary’s guns in here. “Dead to the world.”

  “Oh, okay.” Maria paused and tightened the belt of her housecoat. “You mind if I sit with you for a bit?”

  Jenn patted the sheets and slid closer to the head of the bed. Maria shuffled forward and eased herself down with a groan as Ajax jumped up to join them. He rubbed his cheeks against Jenn’s knee, so she scratched his neck. Ajax knew how to push Jenn’s buttons, but she happily obliged, especially now, when any distraction was a welcome one.

  “It’s been a tough day,” Maria said, speaking quietly to avoid waking Sam, who continued snoring.

  “Yeah.” Jenn didn’t know what else to say. Tough didn’t quite describe it. Exhausting? Terrifying? Exhilarating? Frustrating? All of those worked better than tough, but Maria’s choice of words wasn’t strictly wrong.

  “Are you doing okay?” Maria asked.

  “I’m fine.”

  Maria snapped her fingers, drawing Ajax over. “You’re a terrible liar.”

  “I’m fine considering,” Jenn clarified. Maria pet Ajax but didn’t follow up. She knew when to give Jenn time to process her feelings, a patience Jenn envied. It reminded Jenn of her mother. Her father, too, showed patience, in his own way. Even her brothers did. Patience, she reasoned, must have been genetic, since Jenn had next to none. “I’m scared, I guess. Feeling guilty more than anything else.”

  “Why on Earth would you feel guilty?”

  “I’m worried, you know?” Jenn snorted and shook her head. “Stupid. I’m such a dumb ass.”

  “What? No! Why do you think that?”

  “I actually thought they were coming up here to get me.”

  “They still might come. Don’t give up so soon.” Maria picked up Ajax and set him on her lap. He snuggled in, shut his eyes, and let out a rhythmic purr. “I felt the same way after Camila stopped emailing us.”

  Jenn flinched at Camila’s name. Maria hardly talked about her daughter. But she brought her up this time, so maybe she wanted to for once. Jenn feared offending her, so she tried saying something safe, something she already knew wasn’t controversial or dangerous. “Where is she deployed?” she asked, careful to use the present tense.

  “India, we think. She never actually told us, but that’s our best guess. She always complained about the humidity. But I guess it’s humid in Panama, too, so we don’t really know. I’m surprised we got any clue at all.”

  Jenn decided to keep the mood light. “Censors took that day off, hey?”

  “I guess so.” Maria smiled and rubbed her eye. “I still think she’s okay, and I’ll keep thinking it until someone proves I’m wrong. Gary—God bless him. He’s a good man, but he gave up on her so soon.”

  Maria had a point, but ten months had passed since they’d last heard from Camila. Her emails stopped as the Chinese launched their last major offensive into India, which nearly threw Allied armies into the Bay of Bengal. That was an ugly coincidence. Gary recognized that.

  “Anyway,” she continued. “My point is, you don’t know until you know. Don’t assume the worst if you can’t prove it.”

  “Schrödinger’s cat,” Jenn said.

  Maria eyeballed Jenn like she’d spoken Latin. “What?”

  Jenn smiled. “It’s this stupid physics thing.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Schrödinger, he was a physicist. German, I think. Maybe Austrian. Whatever. He did this thought experiment with a cat in a sealed box with poison. The box had some system that could either kill the cat or not. He said unless you opened the box to check on the cat, you had to consider it both alive and dead at the same time.”

  Maria pretended to cover Ajax’s ears. “That’s a little morbid, isn’t it?”

  “He didn’t actually do it! He was saying you can’t determine the location of a subatomic particle until you observe it.”

  “Bear with me,” Maria said, putting a hand on Jenn’s knee and looking her in the eye. “I was a journalist, so you’ll have to explain to me what quantum physics has to do with your parents.”

  “I’m agreeing with you,” Jenn said. “My parents are like the cat in the box—or electrons, if you want to get technical. I can’t know their state until I can see them for myself, so I shouldn’t assume anything until I have proof. I can’t wait for them here. I’ll have to go find them.”

  Jenn doubted the metaphor resonated with Maria. Admittedly, she stretched it a little thin, and the more she thought about it, the less it made sense and the stupider it sounded. After all, in one breath, she compared her parents to a cat in a box and to electrons orbiting an atom’s nucleus. She was just glad Sam hadn’t woken up. If he’d heard that, he’d never let it go. He still poked fun at her for cooki
ng some expired eggs for dinner and then spending the rest of the night with her ass attached to his toilet. The last thing she wanted to do was serve him another gem on a silver platter. But after putting him through hell today, maybe she owed him one.

  “Exactly,” Maria said. “Try to control what you can control. You’ll get there soon enough, but tonight, you need to sleep.”

  She patted Ajax on the rear, encouraging him to jump off. He did, and Maria stood. Jenn held her arm to help, but Maria waved it off.

  “Thanks for the chat,” Jenn said.

  “Of course. Now try to get some rest. Tomorrow’s another big day.”

  Maria followed Ajax and left Jenn’s room.

  Jenn lay down and pulled the sheet over her. Sam had stopped snoring.

  Then he cleared his throat. “Dork,” he said.

  12

  Jenn, seated in the back of Gary’s car, readjusted the seatbelt across her chest. She, Sam, and Gary had left for Carla’s pharmacy later than she hoped. Last night, Sam promised they’d leave at dawn, but when Gary finally woke up around 7:00, he argued that they should at least wait until Carla’s regular opening hours. Sam agreed, sparking ire in Jenn. Still feeling the guilt of storming off at Minute Tire and blaming herself for Sam’s bloody lip, she resisted arguing. They left the house at 8:55 a.m., according to Gary’s wristwatch.

  She peered through the window as he turned off Route 66 and onto Leroux Street. He’d kept the autodrive off, of course, and driven in manual the whole way.

  On their left was an old brick building from at least the early 1900s. Blue signs reading “FOR LEASE” hung in most of the windows. The building across the street was a hundred years newer and had a place called Pawndemonium on the bottom floor. Pawn shops, Jenn noted, might be the only truly depression-proof business.

  According to Gary, downtown was a lot livelier before the giant new Go Market, Flagstaff’s second, opened by the university ten years ago. After that, he’d said, the shops here stopped trying to compete. Many of the bars and restaurants survived a few more years, but America’s declaration of war on China and Russia sent the price of food skyrocketing. The government’s failure to impose rationing or price controls was the nail in the restaurants’ collective coffin, and most closed within two or three years. A couple of the swankiest remained, but only a privileged few—and certainly not Jenn or the Ruiz family—could afford to eat there.