“Two, the people in those cities were ignorant. Good information was kept from them. They were superstitious and oblivious to even the most basic understandings of cleanliness and hygiene. They threw their bodily wastes out of their windows and into the streets for heaven’s sake, and then drank from the rivers that the waste ran into!” Clive acted out this part of his story, and then ended by shaking his head and waving his hand as if something stunk in the bunker.
“This was all in the cities, mind you. Three, there was little to no knowledge of the part played by vermin in the carrying of disease. City people killed all the animals that preyed on vermin, and then the rats and such-like animals, multiplied out of hand in the cities. Just like today. People will kill a harmless snake in their yard because they’ve been trained to be afraid of snakes, even though humans are about a million times more likely to be killed by a disease that is carried by the snake’s natural food! That’s the kind of mentality we’re dealing with!” Clive threw his hands up into the air. “Have you ever heard a modern urbanite say, ‘the only good snake is a dead snake’? Well, those are the people who will destroy the world via disease!”
Clive looked at Calvin and Red Beard and realized that he’d raised his voice, and now he was shaking his finger. He put his hand down and started to laugh.
“I don’t mean to preach,” Clive said, “but it gets me hopping mad that cities and industrialism cause a problem, then they get credit for solving the problems they cause, even if they didn’t really solve the problems at all. They just postponed them for a century or two. Listen, an individual, or a family, or an extended family group living on the land unmolested in the year 600 would have the same life expectancy as people do now. The trick is to live unmolested. It’s a simple thing to grasp, really.
“Walled cities were not places—originally—where people lived. They were once called ‘citadels,’ and they were places where people went to get away from occasional violence, and also to worship. The citadels stored up food and supplies from the countryside, and eventually people stayed there to trade and do business because it was safer, and of course there were more people there. A lot of those people ended up staying, because it didn’t make sense to keep traveling when you could just live in or around the citadel. Once the people got used to the cities though, most of them figured they liked it better than having to work in the fields or forests for their food, so they eventually raised armies to go and plunder other areas, and to defend their own city. The cities became occupied military bases and home to mercenary armies. Rampaging armies have a way of causing… you guessed it… citadels in other places, which is the root cause of more armies, which cause cities. It’s a loop. Diseases and a high mortality rate are the result of cities and, of course, ignorance and violence, which are the result of the wickedness in the hearts of men.”
Clive stopped again and twisted his mustache between his thumb and forefinger. “Anyway, too many people have these simplistic conceptions about the middle-ages, and they therefore have mistaken ideas about cause and effect.” He had his hands in his pockets now, like a professor, and he paced back and forth as if he were lecturing to his students.
“Many people will make it through these critical days only to be killed by tetanus or cancer or hunger, or whatever.” Clive looked up and then he froze. He followed Red Beard and Calvin’s glances, and looked over his shoulder. He saw that Veronica was glaring at him, and he immediately recognized the insensitivity of his words. The three men all apologized in unison. “Sorry, ma’am.”
Clive looked at her and smiled underneath his mustache. “He’s a strong boy, Veronica. He’ll be all right.”
Veronica weakly returned his smile.
They all knew that Clive was lying.
****
After a while, Veronica came down the hallway and sat with them. How long had she been standing over her Stephen? What is time when your son is dying? She leaned her head against the cold of the concrete wall and sighed. She sat listening to her own breathing for a moment. The others were content to let her have the silence. Then she spoke. Heartbreak filled her voice.
“Youth and innocence die first in war. Don’t let anyone tell you differently,” she said.
Red Beard spoke first. “You’re right, Veronica. You are surely right.”
****
Veronica woke from a deep sleep and the feeling (was it imagined?) of cold air rushing across her face braced her. Something left her unsettled. She sat up and looked to her right. There was her sweet child. He was breathing heavily, and the sweat glistened from his head in beaded droplets. She bent down to brush his forehead with her hand, and he rolled his neck forward. She kissed his cheek and held the face that had looked up at her so many times. Now, his eyes were ablaze with fire and intensity. He was alive, but barely so.
Veronica didn’t see or hear anyone else. There was a light from down the hall, and she heard the whirring of someone cranking the lamp, and she called but no one answered. The noise of the dynamo stopped, and after what seemed to her to be only a few moments, she got up to look around, and there was no one to be found. She and Stephen were alone in the bunker. She grew frightened. Anxiety formed in the pit of her stomach and poured out from her towards some unknown point in the future, some obstacle she’d not yet encountered. She thought of the fact that the two of them were locked inside the earth, alone, following a nuclear attack.
She felt, for the first time in her life, like she was in prison. A lifetime ago she and Stephen had locked themselves in the nuclear bunker under the Brooklyn Bridge, but that had been an adventure. This was not an adventure. This was a long nightmare. One from which she could not wake.
****
Stephen’s body jerked violently and Veronica wrapped her arms around him and held on tight. His muscles bulged out of his neck, showing the tendons all the way to the shoulder blades and sockets. In an instant, he became all skeleton and sinew. His pelvis arched up and outward. His feet bent back until the bones seemed ready to snap. His fingers looked as if they would pop out of their sockets. Veronica held her son in her arms and whispered in his ear. She rocked him as she had done on those nights when he was just a baby, and as she’d done after they’d learned about his father’s death. She held him, swaying with him until the tension relaxed and his muscles released. This scene went on for a while, repeating its own little history as if it were an endless loop.
After a while, Veronica heard a bustling at the door of the bunker, and before she could get up to see what it was, Red Beard came hustling down the stairs. He was wearing a fallout suit. “Are you awake, Veronica?” He leaned his head into the doorway and got his answer. “Good. Sorry for not waking you earlier. We decided you needed some sleep. Come with me for a moment.” He motioned with his hand toward the door.
Veronica got up and began moving in that direction. She hesitated, looking back at her boy. What if? Then she followed. She didn’t even think to ask why.
“We decided that there were things that needed to be done—things that can’t wait any longer.” He didn’t explain what he meant, and she didn’t ask. He indicated with his hand to a fallout suit hanging on a hook by the door, and Veronica began putting the suit on without question. Red Beard continued talking while she did so.
“Clive mentioned that he knew someone, a man on the next farm over—the Amish farm.”
“Mr. Stolzfus?” Veronica asked. “Clive has talked to us about him before.”
Red Beard nodded. “Okay. Stolzfus’s old man used to serve as doctor to the whole community. The son, Henry, runs it now, and he learned a thing or two from his daddy, I’m sure. We have to take our doctoring where we can get it now.” He finished zipping up his own yellow suit. “Anyway, you don’t run a farm or build a barn or raise a roof or clear a field without a cut here and break there. You learn some field medicine by necessity when you’re a farmer. The man won’t be able to do much, Veronica, but perhaps he can ease the boy’s pain.
” He motioned down the hallway toward Stephen. “We didn’t want to see him go on like this any longer.”
Pat half-way smiled at Veronica, and she was overcome with emotion. She looked at him standing there in his bright yellow suit, with his head of red hair exploding out over the top, his facial hair spilling onto his chest, and she wanted to hug him. At long last, she smiled. Red Beard smiled back. He wondered whether anyone alive had ever seen such a beautiful smile as hers.
“We’re saddling up some horses,” Red Beard said to Veronica. “Clive is going to ride over there with the boy in a little bit.”
Veronica looked back at him. “I’ll come, too.”
He frowned. “Oh ma’am, you can’t. It’s far too dangerous.”
Veronica waved him off. “Nonsense. I can and I will.”
Red Beard could see that it wouldn’t have made a difference to argue with her, so he didn’t. He turned on his heel and made a motion toward the door. “Okay, then. I’ll have Calvin saddle up another horse.” They walked out to the front steps of the house together and waited.
Clive’s RV was in the yard. The farm below them was spread out in beautiful rows, all white now and covered in snow that had fallen overnight. This is the way of Pennsylvania in winter. Snow lies on the ground for months, enriching the earth for spring. An imaginative watcher might imagine the scene in spring, rows of corn spread out in the field, lofty stalks pressing up into the lazy blue sky, with the white farmhouse and red barn in the foreground, and the rusty wheelbarrow, and the white and yellow chickens scratching about in the yard. The sun also rises over Amish country, and falls along the trees on the banks of the river rolling just on the western edge of the property. The creative mind could imagine the scene in its entire rural splendor—even now. Even with the smoke.
However, it was not spring. It was winter, and the fields were white, and the sky in the distance was heavy with smoke. Beauty enveloped in ugliness. On top of the strange looking RV blinked the only light that Veronica could see on the immediate horizon, save for the light of the sun and the sky, and the reflections off the water rolling by in the riverbanks. She stopped in her tracks.
On top of the odd-shaped RV was a small transmitter antenna, turning in a slow, robotic fashion to the north. From the lazy and unsteady movement, it was unclear whether the dish was turning by a motor, or whether it gained its motion by a manual, cranking action. The dish stopped for a moment, and the engine revved in the RV.
Clive Darling was on a phone call.
****
They placed the boy’s body, racked with pain, onto a stretcher and tied him down firmly with plastic wrap. They could not afford to have the boy jerk in a spasm and fall off either the stretcher or the horse. They would have to move quickly along the roads, though they didn’t have far to go. There was no telling what they would find once they got off Clive’s farm and headed down the river road. Veronica and Clive fixed the stretcher to a horse that was to going to be led along like a pack mule. As they tightened the straps and secured the litter, Veronica noticed that there were other packages tied underneath the stretcher. She noticed them but did not feel the need to ask what they were. She bent forward and awkwardly kissed her son and asked the horse that was carrying him to be careful with her “precious boy.”
Clive laughed, but in an affectionate way. His breath rose up in front of his face like a spirit when he did. “You think that animal understands you?”
Veronica stroked the end of the horse’s nose and dropped her head to look into its eye. “More than you know, Clive,” she said.
The two mounted the horses and pulled off across the snow. At the bottom of the hill, there was a little step-down onto the road. The road was covered by a patch of ice and one of the horses slipped for a moment, its hooves skidding outward, causing the saddle and its rider to slide backward and hang there precipitously for a moment. The horse caught itself, and, steady now, they continued on their way.
The traveling was uneventful. They saw no one on the road, and no dangers presented themselves. Still, the sound of this new world was eerie. There was the clop of the horses’ steel shoes on the slush of the pavement, the sound of plastic rubbing, and horses tossing their reins as Stephen tried to yell out, his jaw clenched in agony. These sounds echoed across the snow and rolled into the banks of the river. The riders were lost in the strangeness of it all, noticing the muted noises of the livestock and the sounds of an unexplained and undefined distant explosion. Everything seemed muffled, somehow.
As they rode, Veronica couldn’t help feeling as if someone were watching them—as if there were eyes peering at them from along the tree line by the river, or from the river itself, or from the ditch. It was as if the hills themselves had eyes. She rode in quiet awareness, watching to her right and northward along the river road. She reached to feel her pistol against her belt and a lightning bolt of understanding shot through her head. In all the excitement to get Stephen prepared, she’d forgotten to pack her pistol.
****
As they entered the road that led to the Stolzfus farm, they stopped. Clive made a little wave, and then the door to the farmhouse opened up, and Henry walked out into his yard. He made a little wave back, and the three then proceeded on horseback up into the barn, where the doors closed behind them. There was nothing particularly odd about it in the grand scheme of things. This was a friendly little neighborly exchange in Amish country, perhaps a visitation on a Sunday afternoon.
No, there was nothing extraordinary about the event taking place in front of Henry’s barn, except for the fact that everyone—the two riders on the horses, the boy strapped in the plastic on the other horse, and the man standing in the yard doing the waving, directing traffic—they were all wearing nuclear fallout gear.
CHAPTER 45
The explosion rocked the restaurant in Mount Joy, Pennsylvania, just as Ace was wiping up the last of the delectable meat sauce with a piece of buttery garlic bread. Mortars began landing around the area of the restaurant, and Ace could see by a quick-snap look at the owner Nick’s face that this attack was not normal. It was something in his eyes. Nick held his smile for the rest of the crowd, but Ace saw the truth in his eyes. He wondered if the others had also.
In seconds, most of the diners had bolted out of the front door and gunfire rattled here and there in the streets outside. Peter jumped up and took Elsie by the arm, pulling her gently but firmly towards the bar, where Nick already stood taking an accounting of the potential danger. Bullets began popping through the front glass of the restaurant, and the three travelers had just crawled along the floor to where Nick stood, when an explosion destroyed a third of the restaurant’s seating area. The table where they’d just been sitting was not the dead center of the explosion, but it was close. They watched as the roof collapsed in upon itself, pouring dust and debris on the very plates off of which they’d been eating only seconds before. They looked up at Nick for some reaction, but he only flinched for an instant, and then he went back to assessing the room.
Ace could see bodies falling over as patrons tried to make it through the bottleneck at the front entrance to the restaurant. He tapped Peter on the leg and motioned that they should stay behind the bar along the railing. Bullets began pouring in through the restaurants opening. Someone is shooting into the crowd. The plate glass windows that stood on either side of the front door shattered and began to disappear.
Peter saw the small boy crouched behind the bar, and Elsie saw him too and went over to the boy. Peter settled in beside them and saw that Ace was straining to pull Nick down behind the edge of the bar, forcing him to take cover for his own life. Nick struggled against him, but eventually he, too, crouched down. He pursed his lips in anger as he considered what was becoming of his thriving business.
“Those MNG bastards!” he said, barely above a whisper.
“Where’s the back way out of this place?” Peter asked Nick.
“You don’t want to go outside ri
ght now. If they’ve decided to hit this place, then they’ll be coming from all sides.”
“What, then?” Peter asked.
“Down.” Nick started low crawling along the bar towards the door that led to the kitchen.
“Down?” Peter asked, following Nick and motioning for Elsie and Ace and the boy to stay close.
“Down to the catacombs,” Nick said without explanation.
****
Natasha and Cole walked quickly out of Mike’s tent heading towards the tool shed. Prisoners wandered here and there, but few people took any notice of the siblings as they moved purposefully towards their goal. A slushy brown-gray mist splashed upwards from their boots as they hustled, and when they arrived at the shed, they ducked into the shadows. They both leaned with their backs against the structure, their chests heaving from the exertion. The air was cold and brisk, and the darkness was almost complete. Here and there, the light coming from inside nearby tents cast long arrows of yellow-gold light onto the slush outside. The breeze howled through the fence in the distance and gave music to their deep and rhythmic, icy inhalations. Neither one of them thought about the possibility of there being cancerous dust or particles in the cold air that they greedily sucked into their lungs. In those moments when there are more immediate and tangible foes in the dark night, the more long-term enemies tend to disappear from the list of frights.
The immediate threat to Natasha and Cole was the guard tower on the southeast corner of the camp. Cole had just begun to wonder why Steve would have picked such a highly dangerous and heavily guarded area for their escape, when a tremendous, earth-shaking blast destroyed most of the upright supports that held up the tower. The structure collapsed in on itself as it fell, and then tumbled outward. A large section of the fence fell flat with a thud.
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