The Long Summer

by Rod Rayborne

  President McNair stared at Professor Nyles, his face relaxed. The hardest decision anyone could ever have to make had been lifted from his shoulders.

  "You should have been a politician, Nyles," he said calmly. Then he turned to the men standing near a solitary soldier carrying a briefcase cuffed to his right wrist. Nodding almost imperceptibly, he said quietly, "Stand down."

  Chapter Three

  W hen the blast occurred, Celia McBride was pulling clean laundry from one of the many $1.00 per load Suds 'n' Go dryers with one hand and pushing it into a frayed indigo and white striped duffle bag that she was holding in the other. Some hours later, she awoke miraculously in what remained of the parking lot on her back, her left arm twisted behind her, legs broken and askew and right arm severed at the shoulder. Blood was pooling there, flowing in a slow but steady ebb that pulsed with her slowly beating heart.

  If anyone had been looking at the time, they would have seen a rag doll thrown through the air, pink dreads swirling around her head, exiting the building just behind the exploding wall and spinning top like top to land hard on the asphalt near her VW minibus some thirty feet away. That was Celia.

  She groaned, unaware that she had, her eardrums blown out by the concussion following the blast. Her sight too had been taken from her by the flash. There was no pain from either her shoulder or her ears, her eyes, legs or back. There was no pain at all.

  Instead, lying there, she turned her head slowly to the left and smiled. She was lying in a field of tall green grass, the sky a beautiful mixture of deep azure and billowing white clouds piling up on the horizon. A cool breeze tousled her hair.

  Near her, a mother deer and two fawns grazed, seemingly unafraid of her closeness. Further away, Celia could see children at play, running, chasing and laughing and behind them, men and women sitting on blankets, passing plates and sipping wine from delicate long stemmed glasses. All were wearing loose shifts and easy smiles. Then a man and woman arose and walked towards her. Their faces were bright, their warm smiles meant for her she knew. The others still sitting turned towards her, also smiling. She smiled back.

  When the two who were walking towards her got close, she recognized them. Grandpa and Grandma. But they were young, younger than she had ever remembered seeing them before. Grandpa had died of Oldtimer's when she was still little and Grandma of lung cancer a few years later. She had had a lung removed but couldn't stop smoking. She'd told her to never believe those who said that cigarettes weren't addictive. By the time of her death, her voice had taken on a gravelly almost masculine hoarseness. A voice Celia had loved to hear.

  "Hi Nuggins," Grandma said, using the nickname she had coined for her when she was still small enough to sit on her lap. Her voice was sweet again. Sweet and young. Like a small bird singing or shallow water playing along a pebbly brook. She held out her hand to Celia. "We've been waiting for you, dear. Come join us." Celia took her hand and stood, whole again.

  "I'm happy," she said, walking, her arm around her Grandmother's narrow waist.

  In the parking lot of the Suds 'n' Go, the blood pulsing from the thing that had once been Celia McBride grew still.

  Chapter Four

  T

  he girl lay prostrate beneath the balustrade that had fallen from the metal staircase in the backroom warehouse that ended at the door to a darkened room a floor above the main entrance to the warehouse superstore.

  The room where the employees sat, lit only by the glow of a bank of monitors, quietly watching customers as they filled their carts and sometimes their pockets with cheap store merchandise. It was the latter they were mostly interested in, though the wireless camera one of them had hidden behind a small chink in the foam ceiling tile above the woman's bathroom sometimes distracted on duty personnel long enough to allow a clever friend of the bathroom 'victim' to make away with something of more substantial value somewhere else. At those times it was hard to say just who was being played.

  Sofia stirred, groaning low. The railing had fallen at a right angle to the wall and floor, wedged against a forklift that kept it from slipping further. Thus braced, it blocked the heavy boxes of canned vegetables that tumbled from fifteen-foot high shelves from landing on the girl, likely crushing her in the process. Still, the railing had struck her a glancing blow, knocking her to the ground, extinguishing all conscious thought when it did.

  She was on her belly, covered in white powder from the crushed wallboard that had exploded outward, her thick black hair and face now speckled with gypsum. She lifted her head slightly and coughed. White dust flitted around her face mixing with the swirl in the air. She pushed herself onto her elbows. She was bleeding. She touched her head and her fingers came away red. She pushed herself up to a sitting position. Turning her head, she looked at the junkyard around her.

  Sofia frowned. Where was she? What had happened? She coughed again and wiped her mouth. Her head hurt. A lot. Then she looked again at something beneath a fallen sheet of corrugated fiberglass lying some feet away.

  That's right, she thought, she was at work. It seemed like forever had passed since she had clocked in. Was it even the same day?

  There was the stack of defective fiberglass sheeting a customer had brought back. Daniel had been trying to get a couple of guys together to find a place to put it in the warehouse. If the company didn't take it off their hands, they'd have to eat it. It would sit in the dumpster bay until someone finally took the time to drive it too the dump, Daniel had grumbled.

  That was the last thing Sofia had heard. She looked at it again. A foot and part of a leg was sticking out from beneath. She slid back, bumping into something. A mop crashed to the concrete floor behind her, causing her to flinch. Then she stood up slowly. Something hard was clinging to her cheek. Dried blood matting her hair to her face. She looked back at the shoe. It was Daniel's.

  She gasped. She didn't want to scream. Except for the watery sound of ceiling grit raining down to the floor in places, it was quiet, too quiet to scream.

  Standing, she looked out through the swinging plastic doors that separated the backroom from the store proper. They sat ajar, one drooping to the right, overlapping the other, attached only by its bottom hinge. Occasionally a roof tile would fall or a fluorescent tube crash down somewhere. Water dripped from ruptures in the overhead fire suppression system.

  Her mouth hanging open in shock, Sofia felt in her back pocket and pulled out her phone. It appeared undamaged. She pressed the home button expecting the screen to light up as it always did. It remained dark. She frowned and shook the device. Then she pressed the button again. Still nothing. She stared indecisively at the phone for a moment and then slipped it back into her pocket.

  She stepped towards the swinging doors, forgetting the foot lying quietly behind her. She stumbled over debris, slipping and grabbing a tipped shelving unit to steady herself. The few remaining cans of spackle that sat on it clattered to the floor and she jumped fearfully.

  Bodies lay scattered like jacks around her, clothes soaking up the water and moist paste the shattered wallboard was becoming in it. Some were still alive, just, groaning feebly. Like her, they were dusted with white and whatever exploded products they happened to be standing near at the time. An explosion! She stood still, staring out at nothing. Then she whimpered. She wanted out.

  Sofia turned and ran, tripping over the dead and dying. Dust hung in the air. She pulled the neck of her shirt over her nose and held it there. Her eyes stung. She ran to what was left of the front of the store, climbing over a small mountain of crumbled ceiling and roof materials, piping, aluminum girders and hanging wires fogged by powder. The water was slowly spreading over the floor, carrying flotsam and blood with it.

  She made her way outside and stopped. More people, scattered like thrown jacks, some whimpering, most not. High above, brown smoke was curling, drifting into the pristine blue of the sky, mixing with other columns of smoke rising from places far away, slowly blotting out the sun, gre
at shadows sliding cheerlessly across the landscape around her. It told of something that had just happened. She shook her head. She had only been unconscious for a minute or more.

  It didn't seem possible. Surely days, weeks had passed. No, of course that couldn't be right. She couldn't have survived that long without water. Without food, maybe, but she wasn't hungry. She turned and gaped at the destruction around her. The parking lot was buckled in places. A pipe poked out from one slabbed mounds of asphalt. From it water was shooting high into the sky, splashing back to earth twenty feet away. The vehicles nearby were being washed of their dust by the falling cascade. Cars were overturned, trees upended and a nearby Burger King on the other side of the parking lot, was even now beginning to collapse. It looked like something she would have expected in the aftermath of a hurricane or a...

  A face welled up before her. Mara. Sofia began to run.

  Chapter Five

  T he wind had picked up. Before it was a tempest, now a hurricane, growing louder it seemed with every step Gordon took. Smoke whipped past him, causing him to choke. Ejecta continued to drift from the sky and the city.

  Plucking a flannel shirt out of the air as it flew past him, he wound it tightly around his face with just a gap that flapped furiously through which he could see. How long he had been stumbling along he could only guess. His watch had stopped working and the roiling black cumulus offered no clues. If anything, the sky had only grown darker as the hours passed and Gordon found himself tripping over debris he couldn't quite see clearly enough to avoid.

  He had continued along the shoulder of the road keeping the lighter darkness always before him. West Los Angeles, the Hollywood Hills, home. It was too dark for him to access his direction from any road signs that were still standing were it light enough to see them clearly from a distance, but he had come this way so many times in the last three plus decades of his life that he didn't think he could lose his way.

  He lived alone, his wife having run off months ago with a man she had met in a nightclub years before when he had thought she was working late, leaving him stranded in LA in a house with a view (the value's in the land, he was told), a cat and little else.

  A call to Ed, his better-off older brother had materialized into a $5,000 check that was thrown at him when he drove by to pick it up. That, and a threat to put him in jail should he fail to repay it promptly. They had never been particularly close, he and Ed.

  Upon receipt of the check, Gordon bought a case of Guinness and headed up the coast to breathe.

  It was only after he got to the outskirts of Gaviota that occurred to him that he had forgotten to leave any extra food or water out for Jasmine, his cat. After momentarily considering another call to Ed, he stopped, cursed and yanking the car off at the next exit, crossed the overpass and turned south again towards home.

  He had gotten nearly all the way there when the manic voice exploded from the radio that had changed his world forever. He was on the 405, north of the I10 turnoff, maybe an hour and a half from home by car. Then the world turned black.

  Now, as Gordon topped the rise on foot, he found himself staring in awe at a sight he could never have imagined an hour before. A dark and silent Los Angeles, a quiet broken only by sudden gusts, lit now only by scores of fires and an angry, glowering sun staring down on him accusingly, a swollen reddish/orange smudge, barely visible through the brown smoke. As elsewhere, boiling clouds of smoke merged high above the city, fluting through the lowering ceiling of soot. Illuminated by the reflections of the conflagration, they cast weird glimmerings back on the silent streets below, providing better light for him to see by.

  The sight appalled Gordon, already numbed by the events of the last several hours. Fully another hour passed before he realized that he was still standing at there amongst the debris that was once the lifeblood of the greatest city on earth, the City of Dreams, La La Land, now extinguished but for the wind, utterly quiet and at rest.

  It was growing hotter the deeper he got into the city, Gordon realized, a combination of the fires and the clouds of smoke above stoking the heat, pressing it downward. Removing the mask he had made, he pulled off his torn sweat soaked shirt, using it to wipe away the grime that had gotten through the mask to his face. Tucking the rag into a rear pants pocket for future use, he retied the flannel around his head again. Gusts of smoke whipped thick around him and he held the cloth against his mouth to breathe.

  Some hours later, he topped another rise and paused, once again awed by the sight before him. Under sultry skies, what he could still see of the smoldering city looked as though it had been upended and shaken of it's contents, short hills and valleys of shattered debris, dirt and dust seeming to cover every square inch of the vast scene before him, turning everything dusky brown.

  The freeway, too, was laid out in broad sections of shattered concrete, entire spans hanging down at odd angles in broken chunks attached by mere strands of twisted rebar or completely detached, lying on the street beneath. More rebar stuck out from the shattered ends like the frizzled hair of old hags dreaming of children to cook. The wreckage was at once both horrifying and wondrous, pulling his stomach in ways he had never experienced before. He closed his eyes then, his hands shaking and suddenly vomited. Bending double, hands on knees, he heaved violently until his stomach ached. He remained there some minutes, gazing at the rows of parallel lines etched into the concrete beneath until his stomach finally settled. Then standing, wiping his mouth on the rag again, he began his trek towards the nearest off ramp.

  Departing the Santa Monica freeway at the La Cienega exit, Gordon surveyed the intersection before him, slack jawed with terror. The off ramp emptied onto a broad avenue, everywhere mounded in a variety of detritus. Transfixed by the sheer crushing power man could bring to bear when he had a mind to, in another setting he might have believed that a massive landfill had exploded under it's methane payload, such was the scene around him.

  Ankle deep in junk, he giddily wondered at the enormity of the products people had managed to wrest from the Earth. Espresso cups, plastic bags and newspaper swirled about him in tight tornado like vortexes. Melted green plastic liter-size bottles, wrappers, shoes and other bits of clothing, even a couple of pink lawn flamingos, now bleached white. Paper trash everywhere.

  A heavy frown crossed his face and groaning, he stepped off the curb and picked his way across the street, bypassing dead vehicles and the rest of the dross of every sort that churned around him, blown out of the nearby buildings through their shattered windows by the blast.

  Near some of the taller buildings, the smoke was even thicker, gathering here, dispersing there, drifting past him in gentle eddy's, lazy swirls of grays and browns that curved around the vacuum his passing body left behind him.

  If Angelinos had grown used to Stage 1 smog alerts, he supposed this might rate a 20. Water sloshed along the gutters, formed puddles and lakes, fed by several broken pipes sticking up through the blistered tar the street had become in places. He watched a geyser two blocks away throwing water into the air from a cracked water main to neatly empty through a shattered second story window in a nearby building. The water was pouring back out into the street through what was left of the first floor facade and had made a sizeable pool in front of the building.

  The wind had died down momentarily. Shaking the dried vomit from the rag, he wiped the grease from his arms once again and surveyed the area, letting his gaze settle on a fueling station-convenience store on a corner opposite him. It sat quiet and empty, too dark to clearly make out the details on the usual assortment of posters, now lying in torn glassy heaps, that generally plastered every convenience store window in LA

  When he approached the entrance to the store, he could hear the crunch of glass under his shoes and realized that the building, like most to the others he had seen, had no windows. He didn't bother to push the door open against the fallen shelves, choosing to walk through an empty window frame instead. The floor was litter
ed with cartons, plastic bottles and other items that had fallen from the shelves to mix in a thick anomalous mass everywhere Gordon stepped. He crunched his way towards the refrigerated section and found a can of something to drink. It was too dark to read the label. Beer, he realized, after taking a swallow.

  He downed the warm liquid in three gulps and dropping the can, found the rest of the six-pack. He repeated the process until he had five empty cans lying near him and finishing the sixth, he laid back on a soft pile of once frozen deli goods and stared outside at the flames boiling in the sky. As usually happened when he had a little too much to drink, he began to philosophize. Also as usually happened, his philosophies surfaced disguised as humor.

  "So the last man on Earth turned towards the last woman and asked, 'How was the apocalypse for you, dear?' The last woman threw her arms around the last man and said, 'Oh honey, it was a blast!'" He chuckled sleepily, rolled over and lost consciousness.

  Chapter Six

  T he sky, while still dark, had lightened considerably, now a mixture of blues, grays and whites but unfolding miles away, it's base hidden by the intervening city was a slow boiling column of fire. Smoke with a thickening accent of flames spinning upwards, growing wider as it ascended, full of life. Death. As it rose, the fire tornado claimed sky, playing with it teasingly, defying it, widening and finally overwhelming it.

  Sofia stopped only for a moment to stare at the sight before her, her mouth hanging open as the flame repeatedly stabbed outward far overhead, spinning upward. Then she turned and ran. She only had two blocks to go.