Half Past Midnight

by Jeff Brackett

  “Tape?” Ken asked.

  “Just watch.”

  I set the KFM on the ground and quickly unrolled about a foot of the tape two inches in front of the charging wire. “Ever noticed how scotch tape creates a static charge when it’s unwound?” Ken nodded. “Well, we’re just taking that charge and putting it to good use.” I moved the freshly unwound tape about a quarter of an inch away from the charging wire and slowly passed the full length in front of it. The wire accepted the charge, and the aluminum foil leaves on the inside of the soup can instantly separated.

  “Time,” I called, and Debra started the stopwatch. I quickly measured the distance between the bottom of the two leaves. “Seventeen millimeters. Give me four minutes.”

  “Got it.” Exactly four minutes later, she called, “Time.”

  I took another reading. “Thirteen millimeters.”

  We checked the chart together. “A difference of four millimeters in four minutes. That gives us a reading of…” I ran my finger down the reference chart on the side of the can, “point eight rems per hour.”

  I looked at the second chart on the other side of the can. “According to this, we could stay out here for more than five days, if the radiation level stays the same. Unfortunately, there’s not much chance of that happening. It’s bound to go up.”

  “But for now…” I stood and patted Ken on the shoulder. “We can count on having at least another hour before things get critical. So let’s wind all this up and get in the shelter as quickly as possible.”

  “I’ll go along with that.”

  “Debra, you think you know how to read this thing?” I pointed to the KFM.

  She pursed her lips and frowned. “I guess it looks easy enough. When should I take the next reading?”

  The chart displayed five columns, one each for fifteen-second, one-minute, four-minute, fifteen-minute, and one-hour readings. “Take a four-minute reading every fifteen minutes. If the results start climbing, use the second column on the chart with a one-minute reading every five minutes. If you reach the point to where you lose the complete charge during your one minute timing period, yell out. Then take a fifteen-second reading using the first column on the chart.” I grabbed Ken. “Come on, let’s get everything inside and cover up this hole.”

  We herded as many goats and chickens as we could find into the house and covered all of the windows and attic vents with plastic sheeting to hopefully protect the livestock from fallout and ensure that we would have a source of food when we came out. It wasn’t a lot of protection for them, and it was sure to create a major cleanup problem, but it was better than leaving them outside. The chickens, at least, were supposed to be fairly resistant to radiation; I couldn’t find any statistics on goats. Now all we could do was hope.

  Just over an hour later, we scrambled for any last minute items we could think of, then sealed ourselves into the shelter. During that time, the fallout had risen to six-point-two rems per hour.

  After we finished latching down the blast door, Ken turned to me. “Now what?”

  “Now we pray.”

  “Dad, Megan hit me!”

  “You farted in my face! What did you expect me to do, you little sh-”

  “Megan!” My tone shut them both up. “Don’t hit your brother.”

  Zachary smirked at his older sister. “And, Zach? You do that again, and I’ll fix that little butt of yours where farting in someone’s face is the last thing you’ll want to do.”

  His smirk evaporated and he trudged back to his hammock. “Don’ know why it matters anyhow. This place stinks like farts all th’ time.”

  Debra raised an eyebrow at me, and I shrugged. We were both too tired to worry about another spat between the kids. It had only been a week, but we all felt the pressure of living in a darkened, confined space. And, Zach was right. The place did always smell like farts-or worse. There were seven of us living in less than three hundred square feet of dimly lit tunnel, and around the corner at one end of that tunnel was what passed for our bathroom. There was no way the place couldn’t stink, but usually I managed to block it from my mind.

  The first few days had been pretty bad. Everyone was scared, uncertain about what kind of world we would emerge into-uncertain about when we would be able to emerge, or if we could ever emerge without certain death being the outcome. On top of that, I’d been putting off a particular conversation.

  I’d waited at first to try and find the right time to tell Deb and the kids about Dad, but I finally realized that there just wasn’t ever going to be a “right time.” So, on the third day in the shelter, I sat them down and told them what had happened. After the inevitable tears from everyone, the conversation took a turn I hadn’t anticipated.

  “Dad, do you think Grandma…” Megan hesitated. “Do you think she’s still alive?”

  Evidently, that hadn’t yet occurred to her younger brother. “Whaddya mean? Gramma’s all right!” He turned to me for reassurance. “She’s okay, right, Dad?”

  I sighed and shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know, Zach. There’s no way for us to tell.”

  “But you said you left her a note, an’ you told her to come here when she got home, right?”

  Megan interjected before I could figure out what to say. “She didn’t have time to get away from Houston, Zach.”

  “She did too!” Zachary turned back and forth between his sister and me, his quivering voice practically begged for reassurance. “Dad?”

  “No she didn’t.” Megan’s voice took on a bitter tone. “No one who was still there got away. Everyone we knew is gone.” She looked at me, tears streaming freely down her cheeks. “Aren’t they?”

  I couldn’t help it. My own eyes began to fill at the thought of my father, and the likelihood of my mother also being dead. No! Time enough for that later. Trying to be discrete, I coughed and wiped my eyes on my sleeve. I swallowed the lump in my throat and took a deep breath. “I don’t know.” Pulling Zach onto my knee, I wrapped my arms around him. “We’ll probably never know. All we can do is hope.”

  Debra leaned over and put an arm around Megan, who buried her face in her mother’s shoulder. “Josh is dead, isn’t he?”

  I felt two feet tall. I’d completely forgotten her boyfriend, and things had moved so quickly that I’d never thought to talk to her about him. Debra answered, “I don’t know. It’s like your dad just said, we might never know.”

  Zach turned his face up to me, suddenly realizing the further implications of what we were saying. “What about Jeremy. Or Kenny?”

  Ken spoke from his hammock. “I have a brother in California. He lives in the mountains, in Sierra City. I wonder what happened there.”

  Zachary turned his attention to Ken as Ken sat up and smiled kindly at him. “I like to think he’s over there on the other side of the country in a nice cabin in the mountains. I’m sad that I won’t ever get to talk to him again, but I think he’s probably okay.”

  “Why won’t you get to talk to him again?”

  Ken came over and sat on the dirt floor next to us. “You remember how the electricity went out before you came here to see your nanna?” Zach nodded. “Well, if what your daddy says is true, I think the electricity probably went out all over the country, even in California. And without the electricity, a lot of things won’t work, things like the telephones, and radios, and a lot of cars and gas stations. There’s just a whole lot of stuff that got broken and, without that stuff, I don’t have a way to talk to him anymore.”

  “But you think he’s okay?”

  Ken nodded. “I’ll bet he is. I bet he’s up in the mountains wondering if I’m okay, and sorry he won’t get a chance to tell me.”

  Zachary got up from my lap and hugged Ken. “We’ll find a way to talk to him again.”

  I caught Ken’s eye over my son’s shoulder, and mouthed, “Thank you.” Ken just nodded.

  Things were pretty reserved for the rest of the day but, after another day of moping, th
e kids had adapted as well as could be expected. We all knew we had to keep ourselves occupied to keep from dwelling on our losses, so we found different ways to entertain ourselves. We took turns reading our favorite authors aloud by the light of twelve-volt bulbs hooked to the car batteries. It turned out that Cindy was an avid reader of Nostradamus’s prophesies and had searched his works for portents of things yet to come. By her estimation, things didn’t look too good.

  “Here’s another one,” she proclaimed one evening. “Quatrain number ninety-one in the second book of Centuries translates like this:

  At sunrise one will see a great fire,

  Noise and light extending towards Aquilon

  Within the circle, death, and one will hear cries,

  Through steel, fire, famine, death awaiting them.”

  Her voice rose in pitch as she tried to convey the importance she placed upon this prophesy.

  Ken groaned. “And I suppose the ’great fire, noise, and light’ is a nuke?” He and Cindy had evidently had similar conversations in the past. I could understand his jaded outlook. I had only had to listen to The Centuries for a couple of nights. He had probably been forced to listen to them for years.

  “Well, doesn’t it sound like it to you?” She turned to me for moral support. “Leeland?”

  “Oh no, you don’t.” I laughed. “You’re not dragging me into a family argument.”

  “It sorta sounds like it to me.” Megan volunteered from her hammock. When the rest of us turned to her, she seemed to regret having spoken, as if she feared being ridiculed. “Well, you gotta admit that the other morning looked like a lot of ’steel, fire, famine, and death’!”

  None of us had a rebuttal to that.

  “So then, where is Aquilon?” Ken’s mocking tone was aimed at his wife. “No town around here with that name.”

  “That’s because he was from France, so most of his stuff related to France. Aquilon was an ancient city there, but with everything that’s going on, who’s to say what’s happening?”

  We played various games. Ken played the guitar, and Cindy, who had the best voice, was a pleasure to listen to when she sang.

  We took vitamins, drank Gatorade, ate lousy food cooked over Sterno cans, and did our business in a covered bucket around the corner. We made a man-powered recharging device for our car batteries by attaching a hand crank to an antique automobile generator that Ken had owned.

  We all took potassium iodide tablets to prevent our bodies from taking in radioactive iodine, all of us except for Debra, who had a severe allergy to iodine. In general, we tried to remain optimistic. Usually it worked, but not always. There were bad days, dark, dismal, dreary, and depressing days full of anxious and paranoid musings about the type of world to which we would emerge.

  Once a day at noon, whichever adult had accumulated the smallest dose would bundle up in rain gear, rubber gloves, boots, and gas mask, all sealed with duct tape, and go outside to dump the waste buckets and take a reading with the fallout meter. Fallout readings had reached their worst on the day after we went underground, reading twenty-four rems per hour. Cindy had gotten the job of taking that first reading. I had gone over all of the charts with everyone; she knew that anything over ten rems was too dangerous, so she came back in immediately after taking the reading. The next day at noon, Debra reported twenty-three rems, and the day after that I got twelve rems. The next day was Thursday, and Ken reported a reading of seven rems. Readings decreased rapidly after that.

  Actually, we got off pretty easy. The fallout wasn’t nearly as intense as it could have been, and nowhere near fatal in such small doses. If anyone had been unsheltered through all of it, though, they would probably be dead within a month.

  A long and excruciatingly painful month.

  ***

  After nine days, our PDRs no longer glowed when we went outside. On the twelfth day, it took an hour to get a recognizable reading on the KFM, and even then, it was less than one rem per hour. Simple calculations showed we could stay outside for over seven weeks before things even got close to being dangerous. The next day, the reading was point-oh-three rems per hour… five months of “safe time.”

  It was time to see what was left of the world outside.

  Chapter 7

  June 26

  Le deffaillant en habit de bourgeois,

  Viendra le Roy tenter de son offense:

  Quinze soldats la pluspart Vstagois,

  Vie derniere amp; chef de sa cheuance.

  The transgressor in bourgeois garb,

  He will come to try the King with his offense:

  Fifteen soldiers for the most part bandits,

  Last of life and chief of his fortune.

  Nostradamus — Century 4, Quatrain 64

  We already knew most of the chickens had made it through all right. Each day at noon when we had emerged to read the fallout meter, we had taken the five minutes necessary to scatter feed for them to ensure our long-term food supply. Several of the hens had even nested in the house, though none had laid eggs. They did seem to have a natural resistance to the radiation.

  The goats didn’t fair quite as well. There had been forty-five head before we went into the shelter. We had managed to round up twenty-nine of them and force them into the house. Out of those twenty-nine, two were dead, and six were near death and had to be put out of their misery. We buried them all. Though fallout was no longer a major consideration, disease was.

  We slaughtered one of the healthiest-looking males, discarded the organ meat and the meat closest to the bone, and cooked cabrito for dinner. It was the best meal we’d had in two weeks.

  Now that we were out, a multitude of things needed to be done. The first order of business was locating the dead goats, not those from the house, but the unfortunate ones that hadn’t been found in time or had been too stubborn to go inside-sixteen goat carcasses hidden somewhere in twenty acres of brush. We couldn’t allow that.

  I was certain any hospitals in the area were already deluged with more cases of radiation sickness than they could handle. Besides which, everyone was going to be low on food, clean water, and all of the modern little conveniences that kept us all healthy. That meant our immune systems would not be at peak performance, which in turn meant we had to be very careful about health risks, like those involving bloated animal carcasses.

  We spread out in a straight line, with about thirty feet separating each of us, a grim search party to find the remaining goats. Within the first thirty minutes, we had found eleven of the sixteen. I also found I was beginning to get sunburned. Only then did I recall some of the speculated effects of nuclear weapons on the ozone layer.

  “Hey, Amber!” I shouted. “You have any sunscreen?”

  “Back at the house. You getting burned, too?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Me too,” Debra chimed in from further down the line.

  Everyone else admitted to light burns, as well, everyone but Ken and Cindy, whose darker pigmentations had protected them… so far.

  Mentally, I kicked myself. I was supposed to be the expert, and I had forgotten one of the most controversial issues concerning the after-effects of nuclear war. Many scientists claimed that nuclear explosions would deplete the earth’s ozone layer, allowing excess ultraviolet radiation to filter through the atmosphere. They claimed that even if you survived a nuclear war, the damage to the atmosphere would be so severe that the resultant UV increase would likely destroy the earth’s delicate ecological balance. Vegetation would shrivel and die. Animals dependent on that vegetation for sustenance would starve. The food chain would be interrupted, causing widespread starvation and disease. Large areas on all of the continents, deprived of their bonding vegetation, would erode and turn into giant deserts. In short, claimed these scientists, life on the earth would become a living hell.

  Then, there was the other side, the scientists who claimed the others were basing their projections upon faulty computer models. Though they conceded
the existence of slight evidence that there could be some damage to the ozone layer, they claimed the extent of the damage would not be nearly as severe as the others feared. According to them, the measurements taken from early nuclear testing indicated less ozone depletion than resulted from industrial pollution, and that the ozone would quickly replenish itself. As for the delicate ecology, they replied that the earth wasn’t nearly as delicate as the opposition claimed. The niche occupied by humanity may be delicate, but Nature had repeatedly demonstrated its resiliency. In short, though mankind might destroy itself, Mother Nature could easily carry on without us.

  Plenty of facts and figures backed up both arguments. I just hoped I had picked the right side.

  “All right,” I yelled to get everyone’s attention. “Everybody back to the house!”

  As we trudged back, I explained, “The ozone layer’s evidently been shot to hell by the bombs, and we’re taking on too much ultraviolet. We’re going to have to go back to the house and take a few precautions. We’ll need to wear long pants, long-sleeve shirts, hats, and sunglasses. Anywhere our skin is exposed, we’ll need sunscreen. I don’t know how long this will last, but we might have to live with it for a long time.”

  We all retreated to the house and geared up before returning to finish our search. By sundown, all of the goats had been found and buried with the help of Ken’s back hoe, and though everyone complained about having to wear so much clothing in the humid southern heat, it wasn’t a major problem.

  June 29

  Three days after we emerged from our shelter, Amber, Ken, and I decided to head into town to see how it was holding together. I also wanted to report our encounter with Larry and company to the local authorities, assuming any authorities were left.

  At the edge of town, we were stopped at a roadblock-two diesel pickup trucks manned by two rather tired-looking Rejas police officers. One came around the blockade to talk to us. I noticed the other kept his rifle pointed in our direction. Not a good sign.