by Noah Mann
“We still have options,” I said.
“Options?”
The man mocked me with his tone, veiled dismissiveness at best. I retrieved my pack and removed the small notebook Martin had given me, handing it over to him.
“There’s a list of lockers in there,” I said as he flipped awkwardly through the pages with one hand. “Food caches. They exist. I’ve seen them.”
“You’ve seen them,” Ben parroted. “These were supposed to be for select personnel.”
“You know about them,” I said, surprised, though I should not have been.
“Did you get this from your NSA hacker kid, too?”
“Yeah,” I confirmed, taking the list back from him, telling him next about the green food locker that had exploded, killing Burke.
“Sounds like something our guys would dream up,” Ben observed.
“How so?”
“We like things that go boom,” he said. “Look around. We’re all about that. We have the biggest toys that make the loudest noise.”
I ran my thumb hard over the cover of the flimsy notebook.
“How many were useful?” Ben asked.
When I didn’t answer he nodded, understanding.
“There could still be some,” I said.
“Of course,” he agreed without belief, doing so for my sake.
The man knew reality. He acted on facts. Reacted to the absence of them.
“I’m not a pessimist, you know,” Ben said, as if reading my thoughts. “I’m actually a pretty sunny guy. I like the thought of a better tomorrow. I just can’t imagine it.”
He quieted for a moment, mouth struggling through a brief spasm.
“Or maybe,” he went on, “I just can’t see myself as part of it.”
“You’re going to make it,” I said. “We all are.”
“Okay,” Ben said, a tiredness enveloping him with worrisome speed. “I’m holding you to that.”
He closed his eyes, right there, leaning against the cold steel console, sleeping, breathing softly, still with us. For how long I couldn’t even guess.
Forty Two
The routine became sleep, and eat, and talk. The food helped to bolster Ben’s strength, but his symptoms did not go away. If anything they had worsened, if only by a smaller degree than I’d expected. The side of his face drooped, and if more movement was required in the confines of the LCC I suspected his overall mobility would have exhibited a marked impairment. Some moments I would notice him staring off at one of the bare metal walls in front of him, a line of drool tracking slowly from the corner of his lips. As it was there was nothing I could do to help him. Nothing any of us could do but get him back to Bandon with us. Back to Doc Allen with the hope that some medical fix might be workable.
I had my doubts about that, though.
“Eric...”
Elaine called to me from where she sat at the console. Neil and Ben were sleeping in the bunk area, and I’d been treating myself to the luxury of an actual shave after finding a razor left by one of the crewmen who’d abandoned the LCC.
“What is it?” I asked, sliding the matching chair along the track to sit nearer to her.
“First, kiss me.”
I did, no additional prompting needed. There was a sweetness about Elaine that I hadn’t anticipated when we’d first met many months ago. Recalling that moment it occurred to me she’d been among a group of strangers pointing guns at me. I doubted many relationships, in the old world or the new, began in such a manner.
“Did you read any of this?” she asked me, the professor’s notebook open on her lap.
We’d been in the LCC for just over a week now. I’d dug into the man’s notes, but had only done so sporadically. It was simple avoidance most of the time. An attempt to leave the world we’d temporarily left out of my thoughts as much as possible. But it was also because I didn’t see myself as the person who could decipher what had been memorialized on those pages. I was reasonably intelligent, but what I’d skimmed had mostly gone over my head. In my old life I had built warehouses, and shopping plazas, not to mention custom homes and office buildings. Things which required abilities in math, and communication, as well as some bullheadedness to make things happen that were seen as infeasible or impossible. The contents of the notebook, though, were created by a man with intellectual finesse. A depth of thought. Technical mastery of things both factual and theoretical.
I was a contractor with rough hands and a brain made for swinging hammers.
“I gave some of it a glance,” I told Elaine.
“It’s in here,” she said, smiling. “How he did it.”
“How he beat the blight?”
She nodded.
“It’s sunlight,” she said, flipping to a certain page and directing me to notations he’d made alongside equations. “He found out that certain components of sunlight activate the blight organism in the plant’s cells through photosynthesis.”
Junior High biology class came flooding back to remind me that plants converted the energy from sunlight into chemical energy through the process Elaine had mentioned. It was essential for the survival of plant-based life.
“He used filters to remove different components of sunlight until he’d identified Ultraviolet-B radiation as the trigger,” she explained. “UV-B.”
“Filters?” I asked, recalling what I’d seen when finding the notebook and seeds. “He had those over every light down in his lab.”
“He was using special bulbs to mimic sunlight and filter out UV-B so he could grow plants that wouldn’t be affected by the blight,” she said. “He discovered that after two generations of growth in the filtered environment, the seeds produced were immune to the blight.”
“That’s why everything in the greenhouse could grow.”
“Right,” she said. “Things even grew faster. He wrote in here that he thought the blight organism acted almost like a cancer in plant cells, causing them to grow rapidly before a nutrient stream could open sufficiently to support the accelerated growth. That’s why it spread so fast, and why the plants died so fast.”
“But by denying UV-B...”
She nodded at my realization.
“The accelerated growth was still there, but the path for nutrients grew along with it,” she explained. “The plants were no longer starving themselves. Before they were like marathoners trying to sprint the entire twenty six miles. They’d drop dead by mile two.”
“Now they can go the distance,” I said.
“Just not fast enough to produce food so he didn’t starve.”
If ever a history was written about the blight, and about the heroes who fought, who persevered, so that the remnants of humanity could survive, Dr. Myron Haskins’ name would rightfully deserve its place in the tome.
“He had a worry, though,” Elaine said.
“About?”
“What happens a few generations down the line,” she said. “Would the plants still be viable? Would they mutate? Would the seeds germinate?”
“All I can say to that is thank God we’ll have the luxury of that concern to occupy us in a few years.”
She smiled and took my hand and looked down to the notebook again, one of the most important collections of words and letters and numbers the world had ever known, or might ever know.
But we still had to get it back to where we’d come from. We had to put it to use, and then spread that knowledge. Every moment, every second that I considered the importance of doing just that, I wanted out. Out of our self-imposed subterranean prison.
We needed to get out there and start saving the world.
Forty Three
At eight in the evening on day fourteen of our exile from the world above we gathered our packs and filled them with supplies, crafting one from materials we’d found in the LCC for Ben to use. Neil switched out the AK he’d acquired for an M4 from the storage, along with full magazines. Ben, too, chose an identical weapon, having abandoned the empty Drag
unov above, though I truly wondered how long he would be able to manage the load he would bear. Finally, we filled water bottles and drank until our stomachs were full. Then we gathered at the lower hatch.
“Any idea what we’ll find up there?” I asked.
“Nothing,” Ben said. “A whole lot of it.”
We’d spent the previous day making plans for our journey west. We’d keep north of Cheyenne, most of the city certain to have survived the effects of the distant blast, though fires started further out might have been driven into it by winds washing across the prairie. Our path out of Wyoming would take us through southern Idaho, then into Oregon, with a trek west to the coast before turning south toward Bandon. Toward home.
Over a thousand miles, as Ben had reminded me. How many steps would that be? How many days? Weeks? Months?
The possible numbers weighed heavy on me. I’d been charged with this mission, at which we could say without doubt we’d fulfilled. We’d succeeded. But we hadn’t completed it. Returning home with what we’d acquired would mark that moment. That would be the end.
It was time to start.
“I’m first,” I said.
No one argued. It hardly mattered who would be the first to let their head poke through the opening, if it still existed as Ben had assured us it would. We were all about to set foot in a place, onto a landscape, that few had.
“Open it up,” I told my friends.
Neil and Elaine unlocked the lower hatch and pulled it inward. The darkened shaft beyond angled up before us. Every flashlight with us had been replenished with fresh batteries from the supply we’d opened in the LCC, but there was no point in wasting now what might become precious in a week’s time.
“Just my light for now,” I said. “Conserve everything. We have a long way to go.”
It was hardly the rousing pep talk a leader would give. But it was true, and short, the latter being most important, because I was ready to go.
I switched on my flashlight and slung my AR across my back and entered the escape tunnel, slowly clambering up its slope on all fours. My friends followed, Neil bringing up the rear. Behind us the generator chugged on, but soon, according to Ben, it would sputter and die, leaving the LCC a cold and dark monument to wars that were never fought.
At the top hatch I slipped the dust mask that hung around my neck over my mouth and nose, as did the others. Until we were five miles from the blast site we would need to keep them on, as a precaution. The fireball from the detonation had never touched the ground, creating none of the traditional fallout expected from a nuclear burst. But, as Ben explained it, a small amount of radiation might be present on the surface, so the masks were simply a prudent step to take.
There were other steps we might have taken. We could have waited longer, exhausting our food supply in doing so. A Geiger counter brought up from below would have told us if we were facing an unlikely amount of dangerous radiation, though, if we were, what choice would we have but to leave? Starving while waiting for the poisoned land to become harmless would still leave us dead.
In the end, our best move was to put miles between us and this place as quickly as we could.
“Okay,” I said, reaching to the four pins that I’d rammed shut two weeks ago.
I slid the first open. Then the second. The third. Finally, the fourth. If the hatch had been damaged above, this would be our tomb, but its edge popped slightly upward.
“Ready?” I asked.
They were.
I pushed the hatch open and we climbed out.
Part Five
The Wasted World
Forty Four
The dark earth smelled of day. Hot and dry. Windswept with no wind. The ground was cold but looked hot. Like the scalded bottom of a once blazing cauldron.
“There’s nothing,” Neil said as he surveyed the area, comparing what he saw with what he remembered.
What I remembered was a pile of charred rubble, but that was gone, just a bare stone foundation, short lengths of the steel elevator support shaft jutting upward from it. Stubs of sturdy metal, ripped off, shorn by the force of four hundred and fifty thousand tons of TNT exploding two miles directly above. Not far from it the wreck of the armored HUMVEE had rested. It, too, was gone. Just gone. Swept somewhere, north, south, east, or west. Scattered whole or in pieces. The fence, what there had been of it, was no more, reduced to broken poles protruding from the ground every ten feet around the perimeter.
And also gone was the farmhouse in the distance. The full moon revealed just flat prairie, devoid of anything. No house, no barn, no structure of any kind.
“Cheyenne will still be there?” Elaine asked.
Supporting himself with a hand on my left shoulder, Ben looked to her, a grim detachment about him.
“Probably,” he told her.
“Let’s go,” I said.
By moonlight we began to move, northwest to stay clear of the city. A few hours later we turned due west and aimed ourselves toward Laramie. Our plan was to steer clear of it to avoid any entanglements with survivors, should there be any. We wanted to be alone. It was an odd sentiment to hold, the desire for solace. Most people craved companionship. One day, I hoped we would again. But not now. Now we needed to move. To move as quickly as we could. As quickly as our bodies would allow.
* * *
That first night we made ten miles before finding a leaning barn for shelter. We slept through the heat of the next day and set off again near sunset.
That night and part of the next day we made twenty miles. That was the pace we maintained. We helped each other along. Shifted packs when one of us tired.
On the third day we reached a spot noted in the list Martin had supplied, near a rail line just east of Laramie. Food might be there to top off our supplies. In a red locker under a foot of earth.
All we found was a hole and a rusted metal case that looked too much like a coffin when empty.
We pressed on, our pace slowing slightly. Ben was having more and more difficulty, requiring the use of a makeshift crutch to maintain his balance. I’d suggested a wheelchair, which we’d seen next to the burned out shell of a motorhome on the side of the interstate, but he’d have none of that, walking on with leg numb and arm hanging.
Neil, too, was feeling the effects of our increased exertion, even with the ample supplies we had at the moment. He forced himself to keep pace, though. There was a determination in him to not be the slowest of our number. But my friend was hurting.
Day four, day five, day six. They materialized and faded with sunrises and sunsets blending together. The terrain around us seemed never to change. The road ahead began to feel like a moving conveyor keeping us in place. Every step seemed both necessary and futile. We walked in both light and dark, with decreasing attempts at communication. Few words were exchanged.
We saw no one. We heard nothing. All were dead and gone along the miles that we crossed.
But we lived. We pushed on. That was our only choice.
Forty Five
It was habit. You walked along the highway, a back road, a city street, and, wherever you found a car you checked to see if there were keys in the ignition. You reached in the open or shattered driver’s window, or through the fully open door, sometimes past bits of the mummified or skeletal owner that remained behind the wheel, and you turned that key. You turned it and you heard silence. You wished you heard more, a click even, from a bad starter, which would mean the battery, at least, still had some life in it. Or, even better, a chugging engine, which would tell you that the battery had enough charge to actually spin the starter.
But you never heard those things. Batteries were drained. Fuel had gone bad. Wires had corroded and failed. Electronics were burned out.
Still, though, you tried every car. Every truck. Every motorcycle tipped on its side. You did this because you didn’t want to walk anymore. You didn’t want to take another step on your feet that burned. On your ankles and knees that ached. Mo
re than that, even, you wanted an engine to turn over so that your friends would not have to walk. So that they could rest and ride as passengers to the coast of Oregon. All the way home.
You wanted this because, though you were hurting, two of your travelling companions were dying.
We’d come a hundred and fifty miles since emerging into the wasted world once again. That had taken us seven days. That we’d covered that distance in that amount of time was agonizingly slow and miraculous all at once. Our last meal had been consumed that morning, but even with the rations to sustain us, illness and injury were taking a mounting toll. Ben was our weakest link, needing constant assistance now, a partner to walk alongside so that, should his crutch slip, he would lean into them and not tumble to the ground. His speech was slurred when he attempted to convey any message at all.
Neil coughed almost constantly now, as if battling pneumonia. A dose of antibiotics, given on the fifth day after leaving the LCC, had, as yet, offered no relief. He stared mostly at the road just a few feet ahead as he walked. As if marking that spot as a destination. A short distance to complete, to be followed by another, and another. The larger impossible carved into the many possible.
Elaine and I were all right. I thought how awful it was that what the world had become, what our existence had become, allowed such an appraisal to be made, and believed. We were thin, and we ached, but no specific malady had yet attached itself to us. Compared to our brethren, we were thriving.
I hated that we were. That I was. Particularly when thinking of my friend’s state. He’d crossed the country once to reach me at my refuge. His arrival had saved me from certain death. And here, now, he was making a similar journey. How much had been taken out of him on that first trip? How much now was being extracted from what remained?
