Under a Broken Sun

by Kevin P Sheridan

  “I don’t have the map right now! What am I a GPS?”

  I scanned the darkening horizon, trying to take my eyes off the cloud and pay attention to the road. I’d never seen anything like it. The entire sky behind us was clear – it was like all the clouds that should’ve been formed and floating gently in the sky congealed into this one.

  "There!” Louie shouted, he pointed to a blue sign with an H in the middle of it. We were right on top of it before the sign became visible in the setting sun. “Follow that.”

  I slowed the horse down, took the off-ramp, and checked behind to make sure the other two still followed us. Tommy cradled Ashley in his lap, his left arm crossing under her arm and up to her right shoulder, like a human seat belt. He held the reigns in his right hand and moved with a grace I could never match. Tolbert rode behind him, looking a little less comfortable, but trying not to show it.

  Up ahead loomed a five story building – the kind you always see and for some reason you just know it’s a hospital. Square, bricked, with windows with curtains drawn. Another blue sign pointed the way for us, confirming my suspicion. We'd been near a hospital before, in Philadelphia. And like Philly, a frantic mob surrounded the building.

  As we made our way up the hill to the emergency entrance the cloud drifted overhead, turning the already darkening evening sky an odd, shade of gray. The temperature dropped again, almost by the minute. Then came a torrent of rain. Not just big fat drops of cold water, but raging, stinging beads with high winds whipping them about like pebbles at our faces. We couldn’t get out of it fast enough.

  At the emergency entrance, we dismounted the horses, and I grabbed Ashley from Tommy as he lowered her down. Tommy took the reins and began to tie the horses up. “Tolbert, your turn to watch the horses,” I said.

  Tommy pulled on my arm. “You trust him? Dude, we’ve only known him a day – he could take off with them.”

  “Fine. You watch Tolbert.” I didn’t much give a shit. Ashley was still out cold. I barged into the emergency room and saw the hell that had become planet Earth in one cramped, crammed, white-walled room.

  I took Ashley into the crowded waiting area, but every seat was taken. Candles dotted the room, casting a dull orange glow on the walls and sending up scents of flowers and fruits.

  A woman held a screaming infant trying to feed him with her breast, but the baby wouldn’t take it. An old grandmother cradled the white-haired, balding head of her husband on her lap as he lay on his side. A doctor with peppered hair and a white jacket triaged people sitting on the floor near the entrance to the waiting room. “Hypoxia,” he’d say. “O2 stat.” or “Gone”.

  That was it. Just the word “Gone.” And then they’d move on. This is what we’d come to. People weren’t salvageable anymore. They were just “gone”.

  As I took Ashley to the corner of the room one of the people in the waiting room fell on the floor in a convulsion. No one moved to help. I heard Louie crying behind me. “I wanna go home,” he said. “I want my mom.”

  I turned to him. Need to get him busy. “Louie,” I said. “Move that table out of the way in the corner there.” He moved over to it, but avoided touching anyone nearby. Like he was gonna catch something.

  He dragged the small end table out of the way more towards the center of the room. That created a small space, enough that I could lay Ashley down. “Watch her,” I said to Louie. “Put everything else out of your mind. The noises, the smells, the voices, everything. Focus on her. Hold her hand. Talk to her.”

  He looked up at me. “Where are you going?”

  “To get help.” I placed a hand on his shoulder. “You’ll be fine. Stay with her. Stay focused. Ok?”

  He nodded.

  The doc was still triaging people – as he triaged one person three more came into the emergency room. I didn’t want to interrupt him, and he’d probably tell me to fuck off given his current state.

  I looked around for another nurse or doc. I saw a younger doc, maybe thirty or so – giving orders. “Move that person to room 4." A body rolled by him and stopped. A nurse in a baby blue ducky shirt called out to him. “Goddammit! Andy, I need your help.” The doc immediately bent over the body of a fat, middle aged Italian-looking guy, and checked his pulse. The nurse fumbled with a manual blood pressure cuff and started taking his blood pressure. Another nurse put a green bulb mask over the guy's nose and mouth and started squeezing. The doc started pushing down on the guy’s chest. CPR. “C’mon”, he grunted between pushes. “C’mon!”

  Nothing. The other, older doc yelled from the emergency room. “Andy, give it a rest. Find someone else.”

  Andy’s hands shook. The ducky nurse rolled the body away. Andy walked to an empty space on a wall and slid down to the floor, crying. I walked over to him.

  “It’s too much,” he said. “Too much, too much. I wasn’t trained for this.” He broke down, holding his head in his quivering hands.

  I squatted down beside him. “Hey,” I said, putting a hand on his shoulder. “Focus, man. We need you.”

  He looked up at me. “Why? Why bother? We had it under control. We had it. Now the storm. Now this.”

  “My friend hit her head. Bad. I just to make sure she’ll be ok. Please?”

  He wiped his eyes. “I’m not sure I know what to do anymore.”

  “C’mon,” I grabbed his arm and lifted him up. “One at a time, right? Just focus on one at a time.”

  He wiped his eyes and said. “They just don’t stop coming in.”

  I led him to Ashley. More people came in from the pounding rain outside. Lightning flashed and lit up the room. “Over there, against the wall.”

  Andy knelt down beside her, took something out of his pocket and broke it half. He held it under Ashley’s nose and she jerked awake. He rolled her onto her side to inspect the wound. “You do this?”

  “No! She fell off a horse-“

  “No, I mean the bandaging.”

  “Oh. Yeah.”

  He looked up at me and smiled. “It’s a good field dressing. You kept the bleeding down and might’ve saved her life, but I can't be sure without an x-ray. The skull doesn’t seem fractured, but watch for signs - listlessness, slurred speech. She's young; she may just have a concussion." He wiped his nose on his sleeve. No time for formalities.

  I looked at her and then him. "You're a good doc. I can tell."

  He smiled at me and put his hand on my shoulder. “Thanks. Take her somewhere to rest. No travel for at least 48 hours. Find somewhere safe. Keep feeding her ibuprofen for the massive headache she’s gonna have. Ok?”

  “Yeah. Thanks Andy.”

  He smiled, gave my hand a wobbly shake, and took off.

  Ashley tried to sit up. “Ow,” Ashley said. “My head’s gonna explode.”

  Louie smiled and helped her up. “Whoa – slowly,” she said, reaching out a hand to him. “Easy there Luigi.”

  I hugged her. I couldn’t help it. She hugged me back, but weakly. “Can you walk?” I asked.

  She looked around. “Yeah, what’s going on? What happened?”

  I slowly lifted her up. “Horse threw you. You're one tough little chick. Just a concussion, but we gotta get you some rest."

  She stopped when someone screamed down the hall. Another loved one had died. "What the hell is going on?"

  I led her out. She didn't need to see all this. "All manner of shit," I explained. "Gun shot wounds, trampled people. Lack of oxygen.” Someone screamed behind us for the police. “Chock full of crazies - deranged, dying crazy people.”

  A fight broke out with some guy yelling “Gimme some meds goddammit.” A gurney fell to its side, toppling a dead guy onto the floor, cracking bones in a body that had no reaction. I thought Louie was gonna hurl.

  “Let’s get outta here,” she said. She took a wobbly step, Louie holding one arm, me holding the other.

  Back outside, Tommy met us at the door in a panic. “They took the horses,” he said. Tolbert cradle
d his arm behind him.

  “You ok?” I asked him.

  “Yeah, small cut on the arm. I’ll be fine.” I had to suppress a laugh. Cut on the arm. Been there.

  I led Tommy away from the hospital, pausing before going out into the real monsoon. “How many were there?”

  “It was a riot. There were, like, fifteen or so. They said they needed food. Christ, Adam, they’re going to eat the horses.”

  “Did you keep our packs?”

  “Yeah, they weren’t interested in those.” I put my hoodie up, grabbed my backpack and put it on. Everyone else followed suit. The cold settled in, and the rain made it worse. Ashley wouldn’t be able to move too quickly, and I had no idea where we could go to get out of that shit.

  Down the street stood a hotel. “Let’s try that,” I said.

  “You got cash?” Tolbert asked.

  I shifted my backpack. “No. We’ve got guns.”

  18.

  For the first time in over a week, I slept on a bed. After nights of folding myself in half to sleep in the back seat of a car, I would've welcomed a fucking futon.

  I rolled over and watched Ashley sleep.

  I never had any siblings. It would've helped I'm sure; someone to share a common enemy with. But no, Dad wasn't much into procreation. Maybe that's why my mother jumped. Maybe she wanted more of family than she could ever have.

  The other three had rooms of their own, although Tolbert didn’t look too happy at me sleeping with Ashley. Someone had to keep an eye on her. Make sure she was still breathing. I occasionally gave her a little shake to get a reaction – thought that may prevent her slipping into a coma. But really I think Tolbert just wanted to be in charge. “I have more medical training,” he had said. But we didn’t know him from a hole in the wall, and based on what we experienced, I was a little gun-shy of anyone wearing an army uniform. How the hell do we know he’s legit?

  I brushed aside Ashley’s hair from her face. She moaned, tried to roll to her side, but her shoulder flared up and forced a gasp from behind her gritted teeth. The girl's body was pretty much beat to shit.

  I looked around the room. Everything still in its place, including the little folded welcome card, paper coasters on the glasses next to the ice bucket. We had no problem getting a room. Didn't even need the guns. Management and staff abandoned the building and stragglers and strangers poured in with no one to stop them. With all this going on, the choice between staying to protect your bullshit job and going home to your family must've been a no-brainer. We found two rooms whose occupants had checked out of the world, removed the bodies, and claimed our ground. Blowing the handle off a room door with a rifle made the whole electronic key thing unnecessary.

  I got up and stretched. With the rain, I couldn't tell the time; must've been around noon, but I had no watch and honestly didn’t care. Hill had a massive head start on us.

  I unfolded the map and spread it out on the wooden modern desk they had set up for business travelers. “Free Wi-Fi access” a folded card announced. I threw it aside.

  Pittsburgh. Three hundred miles or so from Chicago. Maybe even further. We still had to cross Ohio, Indiana. I looked at Ohio.

  Columbus. We’d have to stop there. I knew Ashley wanted to stop there. After all she’s been through, she deserved a chance to reunite with her mom. For the first time I felt sad that she might stay there and leave us. I shook myself out of it. It’s not you she’d be leaving I told myself. But I didn’t buy my own bullshit.

  We’d need transportation. I figured we were probably a day or two behind Hill's army. Add another two days and they’d be camped outside of Chicago before we could get into Indiana. Then we'd have to get through them to get to my dad.

  Ashley moaned and moved to sit up in bed. I opened the little fridge next to the desk and pulled out a bottle of warm water. Grabbing her pills I went to her side and sat on the edge of the bed.

  “Whoa,” she said, rubbing her eyes. “This is awkward.”

  I smiled. “Relax. Nothing happened. I just wanted to keep an eye on you. You took nasty fall.”

  “What happened? I remember the horse, running to the car…and that’s about it.”

  I brushed her hair away from her forehead, checking out the bandage. “Yeah, the horse decided not to jump, and you kept going. Head over heels right into a car.”

  She stretched her neck, her arms. “My whole body hurts.”

  “Here.” I handed her four ibuprofen pills. “Water’s warm, but the bar’s stocked.” She drank the water, and I handed her a small bottle of whiskey. “One quick shot. Will help with the pain.”

  She gulped down a huge shot. Not exactly what I had in mind. She noticed my arm, the fresh white bandage around the most recent cut. “Getting any better?”

  I touched the bandage. “Yeah. Ya get used to it. Your arm becomes numb.”

  She touched my face. “You don't cry much...”

  I nodded. “When my mother died, my dad – he was already kind of a stiff – he wouldn’t cry. Said what happened was just the universe unfolding itself in the way it was supposed to and to cry would be to admit there was something we could’ve done about it. He wouldn’t let me cry either. Every time I started to he’d smack me. Not hard, like abuse, but a quick ‘get it together’ smack.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Twelve, thirteen. I guess I needed the discipline.”

  “That’s not discipline. That’s abuse.” She looked away, like she had some memories she didn’t want to share.

  “You still want to go to Columbus, right?” Her eyes returned to mine, locked in, and she nodded. “Ok, that’s our next stop. About a hundred and fifty miles. Should take about four or five days if we make good time. Faster if we find transportation.”

  She hugged me tight, and I kissed the top of her head.

  The door burst open.

  “She ok?” Tolbert said.

  Ashley smiled big and wide. “Hey there soldier.” Tolbert came in and gave her a hug, damn near shoving me out of the way. Tommy and Louie followed behind him, and the reunion scene got to be a bit much. I left the four of them talking and relaying stories while the rain pounded the window outside.

  The rain hadn’t let up at all. The cloud had no end to it. The world outside, from our first floor room, was a gray, watery haze. The sun floated somewhere above it in a midday position, but it didn't help anything down here.

  I threw on a shirt, checked my pack. “Guys,” I said. “Hey, hate to break up the party, but there are supplies here. Check your rooms as well, take as much as you can. Soon as Ashley’s ready, we gotta fly.”

  “We can’t go out in this,” Tolbert said. “We’d never make it.”

  Tommy chimed in. “Yeah, Adam, we’ve got shelter, a bed, we’re safe here. Give her time to rest.”

  I pounded candy bars, cans of soda, bottles of liquor into my bag. “I said when she’s ready. I’m not stupid.”

  “I’m ready,” Ashley said. “I just need to get dressed.”

  “I’m staying,” Louie mumbled. We all stopped. “Look, it’s not that I’m not grateful, but that’s some messed up stuff out there. I don’t wanna see it again. I can make it here. I feel better about staying. Safer.”

  I went over to him and sat on the bed in front of him, meeting him eye to eye. “Kid, there is no more ‘safe’. You saw that they took our horses. You saw the riots at the Wal-Mart. It's only gotten worse. The temperature’s so messed up that illnesses are gonna be rampant. Even if you find someone to take care of you here, you’re not going to be sure how long they’ll survive. You’ve got a long life ahead of you. Do you want to spend it all alone, foraging, wondering when you’re gonna die, wondering what the Earth is gonna throw at you next?”

  "That's what you're gonna do."

  "Yeah, but we have a destination. A plan. We can rebuild starting in Chicago." I felt as if I were trying to convince myself.

  “Chicago’s so far away,” he said.
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  “It’s getting closer every day. It can’t stay far away forever. We can do this. YOU can do this." Luigi looked up at me. “Just like Covert Ops Missions II, right?”

  His eyes lit up. “You played that game?”

  “Level 42, buddy. Master Chief, right here.” He smiled big and hugged me. “It’s gonna be ok, buddy.”

  Somewhere, if there is a God, He decided to prove me wrong. As if to say, "oh yeah?” the floor started vibrating,

  “You guys feel that?” I said.

  “Knock it off,” Ashley said as she put her T-shirt on over her sports bra, one painful arm at a time. She put her shoes on and as she bent over she noticed it. “Oh shit. What is that?”

  I knew. It always started out like those old vibrating beds I’ve seen in movies. The gentle vibration became more rapid, more violent. Soon pictures on the wall were swaying.

  “We gotta get out of here,” I said, throwing my pack on. “C’mon.”

  We ran into the hallway, down the stairs, as the vibrations became harsher, more pronounced. “An earthquake?” Tommy said. "In Pittsburgh?"

  “Yeah,” I replied. “It’s not stopping either.”

  We burst through the door to the main lobby, where hundreds of other people had gathered. We went around to the side facing down river, towards the city, and we could see the skyscrapers swaying back and forth. The sound of concrete being torn apart filled the air. Along with the screams. Ceiling tiles and chunks of wall fell into the lobby.

  “Follow me!” I led them to the fancy stairwell leading up to the atrium of the lobby. I’d been in two major earthquakes in California, and I knew a bad one when I felt it. The epicenter wasn’t near, I could tell. When you're near the epicenter it sounds like the Earth is being torn apart – you can hear ripping sounds in the air that seem to come from everywhere. Here, the sounds were just of falling debris, screams from horrified people. I ducked everyone down in the stairwell.

  “You sure this’ll hold?” Tommy asked.

  “Yeah, better than anywhere else.” I wrapped an arm around Ashley, pulling her close and burying her head in my chest. “Close it up,” I said. I looked at the group – Louie, shaking hands covering his head; Tommy, arm around my shoulder protecting Ashley as well, and…no Tolbert.