In The End: a pre-apocalypse novel

by Edward M Wolfe

“So,” Jim finally said. “Did you see a big flash this morning?”

  “I figured that must’ve been a transformer blowing, which would explain how I got stranded.”

  “One or more transformers may have blown today, but I have much worse news for you.”

  Terry looked at Jim suspiciously, wondering if after everything, he was now about to be robbed. “Oh yeah? What’s that?” He pushed the last of his food into his mouth to free his hands.

  “Denver got nuked today.”

  Terry choked on the food he was swallowing and his face started to turn red. Jim jumped up and ran to him. He pulled Terry’s chair out, put his arms around the man and did the closest he could come to a Heimlich maneuver. Terry expelled the food that was caught in his throat and looked briefly at Angela and then away. Still coughing and trying to regain his composure, he covered the food he had spit out with a paper towel. “Sorry,” he said between coughs.

  When he stopped coughing, he wiped his watering eyes and looked at Jim. “That makes twice now.” Jim walked back to his seat and resumed eating, waving off Terry’s gratitude.

  “Are you serious? Nuked?”

  “Yes.” Terry could see from the looks on their faces that they weren’t kidding.

  “That explains why the flash seemed to come from every direction at once. I thought it was just snow-flash, even though I couldn’t think of what might’ve caused it. Or maybe I just wanted to find an ordinary explanation for something that didn’t have one.”

  “We were nuked, but that’s all we know. It could have just been Denver, but it could be everywhere. The radio in the car didn’t work on the way over here, and the one in our cabin didn’t either, so we don’t have any news. Have you got one here we can try – or do you think there might’ve been an EMP?”

  “The one I was listening to this morning in the walk-in cooler might still work. But isn’t that your BMW parked next to my truck?”

  “Sorta,” Jim replied.

  Terry looked at Jim and raised his eyebrows, wondering how the car was “sorta” his.

  “It’s a loaner. Long term.”

  Terry decided the details of the car’s ownership didn’t matter. “If you were able to drive it, we didn’t have an EMP blast, or that car’s shielded, which would be really unusual for an average person’s car. Did you happen to borrow it from someone who works at NORAD?”

  “I borrowed it from a dead neighbor.”

  “Oh,” replied Terry. “Then it might just be that the power station in Denver was knocked out and there wasn’t an EMP. I’ll go grab my radio. Be right back.”

  Terry got up and went off in a hurry toward the kitchen.

  Jim ate the last of his hotdog and started looking around the room. “Did you notice if they have any cigarettes here?” he asked Angela.

  “Why? You don’t smoke.”

  “I’m going to now.”

  “Why, Jim? You haven’t smoked since high school.”

  “I don’t know, Angela. Maybe I’m feeling a little anxiety about living through an apocalypse. Jesus. Don’t hassle me.”

  “There’s a vending machine by the restrooms.”

  “Thank you. Where are the fucking restrooms?”

  Angela frowned and pointed back over her shoulder with a thumb. Jim got up and walked in the opposite direction of where she had indicated. “Where are you going? I thought you wanted cigarettes.”

  “I do. But I don’t have any coins.” He walked over to the cashier’s counter and began pushing buttons on the cash register. He started hitting the buttons harder, then he kicked the counter.

  “Is it on?” Angela asked. “There should be a key.”

  Jim looked more closely at the cash register, saw the key and noted that it was in the LOCKED position. He turned it to the setting that said SALES then started hitting buttons again with no better results.

  Angela sighed, got up and walked over to him. She pressed a button and the drawer popped open as the cash register dinged. Jim grabbed a roll of quarters from the far left compartment of the coin drawer and headed toward the restrooms. “Thanks, shweetheart,” he said, approximating a Humphrey Bogart voice.

  “Hey!” she called out. He looked back at her with his eyebrows raised. She said, “I wants some too.” Jim made a sound like a small amount of air being released from a tire stem.

  “Oh, it’s okay for you to smoke, but not for me?”

  Jim didn’t answer. He disappeared into the dark corridor where the restrooms and vending machine were. He came back a few minutes later and tossed a pack at Angela who was still sitting at the table.

  “What are these?” She said, looking at the unfamiliar brand in a silver package.

  “Cigarettes, dumb-ass. What you asked for.”

  “I know they’re cigarettes, Jim. I meant, what brand? I’ve never seen these before.” She took a deep breath and silently encouraged herself to ignore his attitude. He really wasn’t a jerk, she told herself. He just acted like one – perfectly.

  Jim and Angela opened their cigarette packs; neither of them thinking about the fact that being non-smokers, they did not have lighters or matches. Jim realized it first and got up from the table. As he started walking toward the kitchen, he almost ran into Terry coming out.

  “Have you got a light?

  “No, but there are long stick matches by the grills.”

  “Thanks.” Jim walked past him and into the kitchen. Terry went back to the main room carrying his radio and smiling. Angela saw the radio and Terry’s smile and she smiled in return.

  “It works?”

  “I think it will. I think the cooler would’ve shielded it - if there was an EMP.”

  “Great! So the batteries are still good.”

  “Actually, no. I didn’t have any batteries. I was using A/C this morning.”

  “Oh.” Angela’s smile dropped away. With no power and no batteries, the excitement of the radio was now lost. “Maybe we can find some batteries,” she said, afraid to hope.

  “No need. Watch this.”

  Terry and Angela heard Jim coughing and turned to look toward the kitchen. Jim came walking toward them, coughing and smiling, enjoying his smoke despite the trouble he was having getting used to it again.

  Terry turned a knob on the bottom right side of the radio and a green LCD panel lit up. Angela’s eyes lit up also. “You do have batteries!”

  “Nope.”

  “Oh, come on. You have to. The radio is on.”

  “Nope. No batteries. You see that mirror over there?” Terry pointed to his left at a mirror on a wall.

  Angela squinted her eyes and frowned, wondering what the mirror had to do with anything. “Yes,” she said.

  Jim sat down next to her, took a cigarette from her pack and lit it with the end of his own, then handed it to her. She took it, but just held it, still looking at Terry.

  “And you see that one over there?” Terry pointed to another, larger mirror on his right.

  “Yeah?”

  “And you know what happens when you look at the reflection of one mirror in another mirror, right?”

  “Well, yeah. They keep reflecting each other for as far as you can see.”

  “Exactly. It’s called the Infinity Effect. Wherever you have an Infinity Effect, you have a particle wave, which carries energy. With this radio sitting between the two mirrors, there’s enough energy generated by the Infinity Effect to power the transistors.”

  Angela looked from one mirror to the other, then to the radio and back to Terry. “That’s amazing! I never heard of that.”

  Jim couldn’t hold it any longer and burst out laughing. Angela looked at him, wondering what was so funny.

  “What?” she asked.

  Jim took a drag from his cigarette and started coughing again. Between coughs, he was still laughing.

  Terry smiled and said, “I’m just kidding. The battery is charged by a hand-crank. I charged it before I brought it out here. That’s what to
ok me so long.”

  Despite the disaster of that day, and the possibly bleak future they all faced, the three of them laughed briefly for the first time in a while. If they found it strange to be laughing under the circumstances, they also found that it helped them to keep their sanity.

  Six

  After several minutes of tuning through nothing but static, Terry finally gave it a rest. “Well, we still don’t know anything.”

  “But if there are no radio stations broadcasting, doesn’t that mean there had to be an EMP?” Angela asked Terry.

  “Not necessarily. The stations probably don’t have any electricity either. And there could be too much electro-magnetic interference in the air for the signals to get through. Or an EMP may have hit Denver and the surrounding areas but not made it up this high.”

  Jim lit another cigarette. “I thought nukes had to be detonated high in the atmosphere to create an EMP.”

  “They can be, for greater effect, but they don’t have to be. Depends on how smart the attackers were and what their intentions were. We have no idea who even hit us or why.”

  “I just thought of something.” Angela and Terry both turned toward Jim. “We came up here with some friends who left after the nuke went off. They were driving their SUV which definitely wasn’t shielded. At least I don’t think it was – Josh bought it new from a dealer in Nampa.”

  “You’re probably right,” Terry said.

  “Either way, we have no power, so I don’t see what difference it makes,” Angela replied.

  She got up and started gathering the plates. Terry scooted his chair back, making more room for Angela. He looked at her and said, “It actually makes a huge difference. If the power station is just knocked out, then it can presumably be brought back online fairly soon, depending on how bad the damage is. But if it was an EMP, it could be years before we ever see electricity again – especially if this is happening all over the country.”

  “And if most of the population is dead, we’re gonna have a hard time finding electrical engineers who can get the power back on,” Jim added.

  Angela froze, looking at Jim. “Do you think…?”

  Terry reached over to Angela, putting a hand on her arm. “Hey, don’t worry. We have no idea what’s happened yet. Jim’s just considering a worst-case scenario.”

  “We could be the last people alive, for all we know.” Jim took a long drag from his cigarette and attempted to blow smoke-rings into the light hanging over the table.

  Terry looked at him and shook his head. Angela set the stack of three plates down on the table and sat back down, looking at the two men and fearing that what Jim said could be true but waiting to see what Terry would say.

  “That’s highly unlikely. In fact, I’d be willing to bet it’s impossible. We’re alive. And I was outside on a ski-lift when the nuke hit, so I’m sure there are plenty of people alive. Millions of people live in rural areas across the country.” Angela felt relief at hearing Terry’s viewpoint and she looked at him, waiting for more reassurance.

  Terry saw her need and continued. “Let’s look at what we do know. Five of us up here are just fine. Denver is probably toast, as well as NORAD and Peterson. It’s possible that NORAD was the main target with Denver the secondary so they could knock out our air defenses in preparation for a longer and larger conventional attack still to come. The rest of the entire country might still be just fine.”

  “Except for possibly being under a conventional attack, of course.”

  Terry looked at Jim and began to re-assess his opinion of him. He seemed like a smart and likeable guy, but now Terry was thinking he could be difficult to be around for extended periods of time. He certainly wasn’t one for keeping morale up in a crisis.

  “Again, we don’t know the status of the rest of the country, so there’s not much use in speculating. For now, we should consider some basic possibilities and then make some plans on how we can deal with the most likely scenarios.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Angela.

  “Well, take the power for instance. If we’re going to be without power for a few months, we need to think about preserving the food we have here, and being able to stay warm through the winter while we wait for the power to come back on.”

  “And if the power isn’t coming back on for years?” Jim asked, always the optimist.

  “Then we need to plan on moving somewhere. We have plenty of food to get us through this winter, but when that runs out, we’re going to need to be able to grow our own. And this ain’t the place to do it. If things are even as bad as Jim hopes.”

  “Oh, god,” Angela said, burying her face in her palms, suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that life as she knew it might be forever lost. She had no idea how to grow food or where a good place to do it would be. She conjured up an image of a farm in her mind, and then an old, foot-powered sewing machine, and then visualized herself wearing a home-made Little House on the Prairie dress.

  Terry patted her arm and said, “Remember, we don’t know anything yet. It might not be that bad at all. Don’t go thinking the worst just yet. For all we know, the power could be back on in a week and things could be back to normal in no time. It’s possible that this was just a lone jihadist who blew himself up in Denver. In that case, Denver would be uninhabitable, but life would still be totally the same for you in Nampa and everywhere else.”

  “Boise,” Angela said, suspended now between fear of the worst and hope for the best.

  “Okay, Boise,” said Terry.

  “Same thing,” Jim replied.

  “The people in Boise may not even know that anything has happened here. They could end up watching the news tonight and hear that disaster struck in Colorado.”

  “Okay,” Jim said, “so we don’t know anything except that we don’t have power, our cars work, and we’ve got plenty of frozen food that is thawing right now.”

  “Right,” Terry agreed. “That’s what we need to focus on right now.” Angela lifted her face from her hands and carefully wiped tears from her eyes. “The first thing we need to do, no matter what the extent of the situation may be, is to secure the food.”

  “Snow,” Jim said.

  “What?” Angela asked him.

  Terry replied, “It’s freezing outside. We need to move the food outside to keep it cold.”

  Jim and Terry discussed the best way to store the food that would keep it frozen but safe from animals and still be readily accessible. As they were discussing this, they heard the sound of a car pulling into the parking lot, and then the sound of the engine died.

  They had visitors.

  Seven

  Terry and Jim ran to the windows facing the parking lot. Looking through the blinds, Jim said, “It’s Josh and Hailey.”

  “Your friends?”

  “Yeah. They said they were going home to Boise.”

  “Really? Denver got nuked and they decided to drive through the blast-zone?”

  “We tried telling them they were crazy, but you know - crazy people never listen.”

  The passenger door of the SUV opened, but no one emerged from the vehicle.

  “What the fuck are they doing just sitting there?”

  “Maybe it’s not them.”

  “It has to be. What are the odds of it being another Isuzu Rodeo of the same color? And with an Obama bumper-sticker? It’s definitely them. I have no idea how they found us though. Maybe they were just looking for someplace to go after finding our cabin empty. “

  “They’re getting out.”

  Angela joined the men at the window. “The snow doesn’t look right.”

  “That isn’t snow. It’s ash,” Terry replied.

  “You mean fall-out?” Jim asked.

  The driver-side door opened. Now both front doors of the vehicle were wide open, but no one emerged from either side.

  “What the fuck are they doing?”

  The three of them stood there staring, waiting and wondering.
Finally Hailey stepped out of the vehicle and fell to the ground.

  “Oh my God. I have to help her,” Angela said as she started toward the door. Terry grabbed her and held her back.

  “You can’t go out there!”

  “I have to! They’re my friends.”

  “That ash falling like snow is poison. It could kill you. It looks like your friends are already suffering from severe exposure. They either got out of their SUV somewhere, or it got in through the windows or vents.

  Outside, Josh slowly got out of the vehicle and held onto the ski rack with his left hand, trying to steady himself. Both of them were slowly getting coated with falling ash.

  “They’re getting more on them. I have to get them out of it.” Angela tried to pull away from Terry who was still holding onto her.

  “Angela, you can’t go out there. You’ll get sick and probably die. I’m sorry, honey. There’s nothing you can do. It’s too late for them. Their only hope would be if they took off their clothes and were completely rinsed off before they came in, and that’s not even remotely possible. I think it’s far too late anyway. They still wouldn’t stand a chance.”

  “How do you know? You’re not a doctor! Let me go!” Angela struggled but Terry held her firmly and looked to Jim for help. Jim came over and put his arms around Angela. Terry let go.

  “Angie. He’s right. They’re so far gone, there’s nothing we can do.”

  Angela wrapped her arms around Jim, buried her head in his chest and cried. She knew he was right. She just couldn’t stand seeing her friends dying outside right in front of her eyes and not doing anything to help them. Terry walked over to the door and turned the handle of the dead-bolt, locking Josh out, just in case he made it that far.

  Josh slowly made his way to the end of the car and continued walking toward the cabin door, stopping once to vomit. As he slowly staggered forward, Jim saw dark liquid running out of the bottom of Josh’s pants and onto his white shoes.

  “He looks—“ Jim started to say.

  “What?” Angela asked.

  “Nothing.” He was going to say that Josh looked like a zombie, but he figured that would probably just upset Angela even more.