by Dean M. Cole
Between the sideways rain, blowing wheat, and flying mud, Vaughn couldn't see more than a hundred yards in any direction, even less in some. The helicopter was stable for now, but he knew there were likely more tornados out there. If one hit the Black Hawk, it would toss the aircraft around like a toy, an event he'd probably not survive.
He could just leave the helicopter running and try to find cover, but then he'd be completely exposed to the elements and flying debris. Vaughn eyed the external temperature and shook his head. Out in the frigid driving rain, he'd be just as likely to die of exposure as find shelter.
"Screw that. I'll take my chances in here."
The pilot cranked up the Black Hawk's heater. Staring into the storm, he cinched the neck of his flight suit against the cold air leaking into the cockpit.
Thinking of Mark, Vaughn recalled the conversation they had just before the vacuum chamber flight. The astronaut had told him he could start over, could do better if he'd just apply himself.
Vaughn shook his head as he stared into the raging storm. "Well, Colonel Hennessy, I'm batting a thousand on your whole fresh start thing," he said sarcastically. "Not that it matters now."
Chapter 10
An hour later, the storm relented. No other tornados had emerged from the black clouds. Dark, bulbous cumulus gave way to a smooth layer of low, gray clouds, restoring a measure of light to the world as they glided overhead. The wind dropped to a manageable level, and the temperature hung just above freezing.
In the still running Black Hawk, the pilot started adjusting the controls for takeoff, but then, in his mind's eye, he saw Mark's shaking head again.
"Goddammit!"
Frowning, Vaughn shoved the collective control back down to the stop and shut down the helicopter, cursing under his breath through the entire process.
A moment later, he stepped from the cockpit of the now silent aircraft. Shivering in the cold, brisk air, he stared across the destroyed field of matted wheat. The uprooted oak had landed a hundred yards behind the Black Hawk. The upside-down tree's earth covered roots scratched at the steel-gray sky. Vaughn started to walk toward the back of the helicopter. Looking up, he inspected the aircraft and its rotors for damage. Aside from the brown mud splattered across its side and the yellow wheat stalks jammed into its every nook and cranny, the helicopter looked miraculously unblemished.
Vaughn gave the inverted tree a final bewildered glance as he rounded the back of the Black Hawk. Then he walked along its left side, inspecting the other half of the main rotors. The man stumbled as something snagged his right boot. He looked down to see a strand of barbed wire wrapped around it. Visually, he followed the path of the wire as it stretched across patches of earth and toppled wheat. It led straight to the helicopter's left wheel. To his shock, Vaughn saw that it had hooked around the main landing gear's large vertical strut, catching it just above the big, black tire.
"Son of a …" the pilot whispered.
Turning left, he followed the wire away from the Black Hawk. About twenty feet out, he found the first of a line of laid-over posts.
Apparently, the helicopter had plowed through a fence during its short landing roll. Vaughn peered under its belly and saw that the wire had completely wrapped around the hub of the right tire, trapping it between the wheel and the strut. That must have happened when he'd turned the copter into the wind. If he'd tried to take off with that wire wrapped around the main gear, Vaughn would have likely crashed, flipping ass over teakettle when the twisted steel strands yanked the bottom of the helicopter out from under him.
In his mind's eye, he saw Mark nodding.
"I hear you, buddy."
Vaughn dug a pair of cutters from the tools he'd stashed in the pocket at the bottom of the pilot's door. A few minutes later, he had the wire cut free from the helicopter. He dragged it well clear and wrapped the loose ends around a branch of the inverted oak tree.
Then he climbed back into the pilot's seat. He soon had both engines running. After a final check of the aircraft's flight systems, he pulled power and guided the helicopter into a stable hover, pivoting it left and right to ensure nothing else had latched onto the Hawk.
Now confident that the aircraft was clear and flyable, the pilot turned its nose to the west.
"Thanks, Mark. I owe you one," Vaughn said somberly. Then he remembered Mark's shove, the one that had snapped him out of the trance induced by the onrushing jet, and he added, "Again."
Vaughn adjusted the controls and the helicopter accelerated across the ground and then climbed away from the tortured field. The Black Hawk leveled off beneath a leaden mantle of low clouds. Vaughn wasn't surprised to see a meandering trail of scoured earth. Coming in from his left side, the wandering brown path approached from the southwest. Beneath Vaughn, the trail faded into a spiral of twisted wheat stalks where it had broken from the ground and returned to the cloud that had birthed it.
Three hours later—at the end of yet another chain of dashed hopes—the Black Hawk finally emerged from the back of the cold front, breaking into clear air. On the western horizon ahead of the helicopter, snow-covered mountains buttressed a surreally beautiful azure sky.
The clear, smog-free atmosphere stoked hopes that he'd finally found the edge of the light wave's effect. But then he swept in over Denver's eastern suburbs and saw the truth of the situation. The same scenes of sudden disappearance that he'd encountered innumerable times in Cleveland and everywhere along his journey now scrolled beneath his helicopter.
Isolated areas had burned, but it appeared that the vast majority of this city stood unblemished. However, its few remaining fires, along with the town's still accident-clogged intersections, told him that the dearth of devastation wasn't the result of human intervention. A fresh coating of snow covered Denver and the mountains beyond. With a sinking heart, Vaughn realized that the city's saving grace must have been the rain and snow. The moisture had tamped down the fires that would have otherwise obliterated it.
Tears clouded the man's vision. He wiped them away with the back of a glove.
Vaughn had all but known this outcome awaited him when the first phone call had gone unanswered. His mother never missed a call, especially when her only son was on the other end of it. But having the proof of the fact staring him in the face made the news no easier to digest.
The man felt hollowed out. Since his wife had skipped out on him, Vaughn had withdrawn from so much in life, but not from his mother. As an only child, he'd become the man of the family at the ripe old age of 13, when his father had died in a car crash. He could still remember hearing the knock on the door, the hushed words from the foyer. A stifled wail. The look on his mother's face when she'd returned to the living room.
The death had hit both of them hard. Vaughn's father had been a good man and a better father.
And he'd been a good provider.
Mark had been wrong about one thing: Vaughn hadn't been a rich kid, not always, anyway.
His mother never had to work. As a stay-at-home mom, she had home-schooled her young son. The settlement they'd received from the trucking company responsible for the accident hadn't changed that arrangement.
She'd moved them from Houston to Boulder. Even through Vaughn's high school years, she'd continued to serve as his teacher. When most of his contemporaries were rebelling against their parents and chasing girls, Vaughn had spent his teens at his mother's side. They had served one another as emotional crutches through those years, she as the parent and teacher, he as the budding man of the house.
In hindsight, Vaughn now knew that the combination of homeschooling coupled with the symbiotic relationship with his mother had emotionally stunted him, forever making him socially awkward. It was a fact that his ex had been all too happy to point out on many occasions.
Now his first instinct was to fly the Black Hawk up to Boulder on Denver's west side, to visit his mother's home, but with all of the snow on the ground, an off-airport landing wasn't the bes
t idea. And if he ended up needing the helicopter again and if it required servicing, he'd be a long way from the tools and parts necessary for the job. Besides, in his mother's upscale community, he wasn't likely to find a vehicle capable of circumnavigating the city's many choked roads.
So Vaughn turned the helicopter toward a place that contained all of those things.
White powder blasted from the Hummer's grill as it crashed through another drift. For a whited-out moment, snow obscured the windshield. Then wipers swept the surreally blue sky back into view.
Vaughn had found the ride not long after landing. The big military four-by-four had already gotten him through several snowdrifts. The Hummer had successfully negotiated numerous pileups, and where burning neighborhoods had blocked all roads, the vehicle had made easy work of the area's rugged terrain.
Even with the truck's assistance, the normally forty-five-minute drive from Denver to Boulder took two hours. Ice, mud, and soot caked the Hummer's exterior by the time he arrived at his mother's hillside villa on Sunshine Canyon Drive. He parked the dirty vehicle in the street, not wanting to sully her driveway.
The unlocked front door offered no resistance. It opened, and the conflicting smells of redolent flowers and burned coffee swept over him.
Vaughn deposited his dirty boots in the foyer and walked hesitantly into the house. Lights shone from the kitchen. Like the rest of the neighborhood, the home still had electricity.
He peered into the room but saw nothing out of place. Vaughn flinched as an air-raid siren blared from deeper inside the home. Then he heard the accompanying guitar riff and recognized the song. His mother, a metalhead since the seventies, had apparently left her collection of heavy metal music set on loop. Two days after the Disappearance—as Vaughn now thought of it—Ozzy Osbourne's warbling voice belted out the lyrics to Black Sabbath's War Pigs.
After turning off the coffee maker, Vaughn searched the rest of the bottom floor. Upstairs he found the source of the music, her laptop. It sat open and still powered up. Colorful lines danced across the screen. He tapped the display, and the screensaver vanished, replaced by a large headline.
"It's the End of the World!"
Vaughn stared at the words for a long, silent moment. Seeing his worst fears—thoughts which he hadn't dared to voice—emblazoned across his mother's computer screen hit him like a sledgehammer.
The man's knees buckled. He collapsed into the desk chair.
According to the article, the wave of light had first appeared somewhere in Eurasia. At the time of the posting, the curtain of energy had already swept through all of Europe and much of Asia along with the eastern half of North America. Vaughn skipped over the reports that chronicled the light wave's effect—he'd seen enough of that first-hand. Instead, he focused on the statements given by scientists and observers from around the globe. None of them knew what the light was or what had caused it, but every one of them said that they'd seen no reduction in the anomaly. According to the sources, it hadn't attenuated in any detectable way. Ground- and space-based observations still showed a feature that reached from the surface to the outer edge of the atmosphere, just as bright and tall as it had been when it first crossed Europe.
Now Vaughn thought he understood why Director McCree had lost hope, why the man had sounded so dejected when he discovered that the two of them had been disconnected from the planet's molecular field. Until then, all of the evidence at his disposal must have pointed to the loss of everyone behind the wall of light, even those underground. That's why he initially mistook their survival as a sign that the wave was losing strength. Otherwise, he'd have simply reasoned that the chamber's thick walls had shielded them from the light's effect. However, the hope had died when he realized that the wave hadn't weakened, that Mark and Vaughn's unique isolation had saved them.
This thought slammed home another, more ominous realization. In the entirety of humankind's history, no person on the planet had ever been as disconnected from it as Mark and Vaughn had been when the light swept through their part of it.
He now faced a horrible possibility. Taking the article as fact, believing that the wave had continued its path across the planet unabated, without weakening, left him with one inescapable conclusion:
Vaughn was almost certainly the last being on Earth.
Unfortunately, the realization pushed out all other thoughts. Later, Vaughn would regret not fully accounting for the last part of that epiphany, not considering what it meant for a person not on the planet.
At that moment, one sentence kept repeating in his mind:
I don't need anybody or anything.
Vaughn shook his head. He'd felt righteous when he had said that to Mark, but now it sounded like a moronic protestation issued by a clueless jackass.
After a long, silent moment, another thought did burn its way into the man's shocked mind. The article's presence on this computer removed any hope that his mother had passed in the blissful ignorance of sleep.
Vaughn slammed the computer's lid closed. "Damnit!" The motion disturbed the curtains behind the desk. Through them, he glimpsed something out of place. Vaughn stood and pushed one of the cloth panels aside and peered down into the backyard.
"What the hell is that?"
A minute later, he stepped onto the snow-covered lawn. Forty feet away, the two items he'd seen from upstairs still didn't resolve. They sat under the low-hanging branches of a ponderosa pine. Only a light dusting of snow had reached the ground under those limbs. A few steps later, he stood between the two items. A face-down open hardback novel rested on its crumpled pages. A toppled coffee cup lay two feet from it.
Bending over, Vaughn reached for the second item with a trembling hand. After a pause, he snatched up the mug. Standing, he held it at eye level. A crescent-shaped rouge smudge adorned one side of the cup's rim.
His mother's favorite lipstick color.
He lowered the mug and gazed east. From this vantage point, one could see all the way across Denver. Vaughn knew that two days earlier, it had offered his mother the no doubt fearful sight of her impending death.
The skyline began to waver in his vision. The cup dropped next to the book. A moment later, he dropped as well, landing hard on his ass.
For the first time since the Disappearance, Vaughn wept openly.
Chapter 11
Her dad stood before the grill, making her favorite dinner. The little girl who had known the man watched with rapt attention. The aroma of the meat set her mouth to watering. Steak always smelled so good. Angela's stomach didn't growl, it roared. She clapped her hands together.
"Daddy! When will it be ready?"
Her excitement faltered as did her smile.
Something was wrong.
Her dad looked gaunt, drawn, older than he'd ever looked in life.
And the smell. The little girl wrinkled her nose. A sickly sweet odor had suddenly mixed with the aroma of cooking meat.
The overly aged version of her father waved his tongs over the grill. Its top was too high. Even on her tippy toes, little Angela couldn't see the meat.
"It's ready, pumpkin," the man said in a gravelly voice.
The long ends of the utensil again disappeared as her dad reached for their dinner.
Angela looked pensively from the grill to her father's deteriorating face.
Turning to his daughter, the now corpse-like man presented the smoldering carcass of a previously white mouse. Bubbling fat protruded through patches of charred fur.
The little girl screamed and yanked her head back, striking a hard surface. Then a flash of white light washed across the yard, and her father vanished, but the burned rodent remained, hanging weightlessly in the air.
Angela blinked sleepy eyes and rubbed the back of her head. The reality of the space station's interior chased out the last vestige of that long-ago backyard, but the dream shifted into waking nightmare as the scorched mouse remained. Staring at the very real manifestation, Angela gasped.
She continued to blink eyes that now burned and watered.
Suddenly, her lungs were burning as well.
"Oh shit!" Angela screamed between coughs. "Mabel?! What the hell happened?" But Mabel was dead. The carcass's ruptured, empty eye sockets stared unblinkingly as its smoking body slowly tumbled past her face.
Suddenly, a blaring klaxon echoed across the station. Then Angela saw flickering yellow and orange light coming from one of the passageways that led from the module.
"Fire!" she screamed.
The sight sent a pulse of adrenaline coursing through her veins. Pushing off the wall, Angela shot across the module, somersaulting mid-flight so that she landed feet first next to the room's fire extinguisher. She placed her feet on either side of the cylinder and with one hand she pried the extinguisher from its mount. The Velcro released with the sound of tearing paper. With her other hand, Angela freed the adjacent respirator.
As coughs continued to wrack her body, the astronaut released the extinguisher. The red bottle tumbled slowly next to her as she donned the oxygen mask. She cleared the device and took several deep breaths.
As her coughs began to subside, Angela swatted two switches. The first shut down the station's ventilation system, stopping it from feeding fresh air into the fire. The second one deactivated the smoke alarm. Its blaring horn finally fell silent.
Angela reoriented her body, snatched up the tumbling extinguisher, and pushed off the wall on a trajectory that sent her flying toward the flickering corridor. As she floated across the module, Angela stared warily into the passageway's white-walled confines.
The station's lights began to flicker. For a moment, they appeared to pulse in unison with the yellow strobing of the unseen fire, but then the module's lights died, plunging Angela into a surreal kaleidoscope of glimmering amber radiance. Ahead of her, black shadows and orange light danced in the aimless smoke.
