by Holly Hook
"Who put you in charge?" Jerome asked.
"We still need to remove the bodies," David said. His class jacket ruffled as he faced off with Jerome. The good guy and the slacker were rivals like me and Christina--except Jerome might be a lot less of a slacker than he let on.
"Okay. Stop," I said, injecting myself into the faceoff. "You're right. Bodies go outside. If the radiation's still coming down, it's not going to make any difference by now." I realized what I was saying. I was volunteering to touch a dead body. I had done so before, but not one that died from radiation sickness. These bodies might be giving off dangerous particles or gamma rays for all I knew.
"It might attract vultures," Mina said. "I don't want to see Mrs. Taney getting eaten by vultures. She sent us down there to save our lives."
She had. Mrs. Taney and Mr. Ellis would have stood up here to allow all the students to go underground. Whatever had happened, they knew what it was.
"If there are any left," Christina said. Behind her, the rest of the tour group hung back. Eric picked at his shirt.
“I agree," David said. “Maybe we should have some kind of ceremony for our teachers."
My heart ached. I realized that I would miss Mrs. Taney’s attitude. I’d miss her breaking phones and confiscating tablets. I’d miss the way she glared at the class whenever people started talking too loud. It was normal, the way things should be. The phones had turned out to be useless, anyway, useless just like the pink one under the waxy hand of the receptionist.
“The bodies,” Jerome said. “We have to get them out of here. We’re not dying yet, so maybe the radiation part of this is over.”
I realized that my stomach had calmed down. Maybe we weren’t going to die. Yet. We still had the issue of the brownish-red sky. Who knew what that was going to do? At least the air around us seemed clear.
And then we moved the bodies.
I went somewhere else while we were pulling on limp, cold arms and legs. I visited the park where I used to play back in elementary school when Mom would read her books while I swung around on the jungle gym with some random kids I’d never met. I visited the beach where my parents and I bathed in the sun when I was eight. I even went to the den when it was decorated for Christmas, where Mom and I stayed up late every night playing board games together. I wasn’t out in the desert, isolated and pulling dead bodies out of a building that had failed to protect them.
"Take them far from the building," David ordered.
The air was getting cooler outside. I noticed that every time we pulled another body out into the cracked earth and the dust. David pulled beside me, holding the other arm of Mrs. Taney. Her head lolled back and forth and I was tempted to believe she was just sleeping. There was a tear in his eye. He blinked it away and grunted, putting his all into pulling her across the doorway and outside into the gloom.
I felt like we’d gone to some horrible underworld and this was our punishment.
“Set her here,” David said, letting go of her arm. I did and it flopped to the ground. A bit of dust rose.
I came back to the field trip gone wrong.
We had dragged everyone out. Mrs. Taney lay on the end of a line of seventeen bodies. I counted them, making sure that I had gotten it right. Our teacher, the receptionist and the other students who weren’t lucky enough to board the elevator in time. That was Allison down near the end. The art girls had dragged her out. Her face looked strange under the reddish brown light. Allison and I had talked in gym class before because we were bored and there was nothing else to do. Now she was lying here until someone came and recovered her.
“We can’t just leave them out here like this,” the Goth girl said. “They’re just going to rot.”
“The ground is too hard,” I said. “You need softer ground to bury them.”
“You know about graves?” she asked.
“A little,” I said. “The point is, I don’t know what to do with them.”
The Goth girl wiped her palms off on her baggy black jeans. She faced the sky. “Well, I don’t think the radiation’s coming down anymore. We’re safe.”
“Something’s messed up the atmosphere,” David said. "It looks like smoke."
“That's not smoke," Jerome said. "It's the wrong color. Some weird chemical reactions are going on up there or something."
"It's smoke," David insisted.
“Whatever it is, I don’t like it,” Tony said. “I think we should get back inside and raid that vending machine, first of all. Then we start the bus and go get help. Where did Dr. Shetlin go?”
It was a good question. “She’s not here,” I said. I turned in a circle, trying not to look at the row of death. I shivered. The desert should not be this cold in the daytime. Then a thought hit me. “What about the driver?”
Alana’s face fell. “Oh.”
We found where he was a minute later. The bus hadn’t moved from its spot in the parking lot and neither had any of the cars. The driver’s body was underneath the bus, as if he had crawled under it to hide from the rays of death coming from the sky. Blood had dribbled onto the dust. I knelt there, peering under our transportation.
Our driver was gone. Dead. He had probably been the first to go, being outside and completely unshielded from the fallout. The others had taken longer to die.
We had no one to drive the bus. If we wanted to leave, we either had to wait for Dr. Shetlin to return or we had to drive it ourselves.
I stood up. My skin was burning. I rubbed my arms. They felt even more burned than before. "He's gone," I said. "You don't want to look under there."
"I don't want to, either," David said. "We've seen enough death." David rubbed his arms. "Are anyone else's arms on fire? Mine are. My face hurts. We need to go inside. Now!"
All of us ran for the low building. My heart raced again and my stomach threatened to lose contents that weren't even there. The radiation. It might still be coming down. Next to me, Alana pulled her sleeves down over her arms in a futile attempt to shield herself. This radiation must not work fast, or it was so much that you thought you were okay at first, and then you swelled up, puked blood and died. Someone sobbed next to me. It was too late. Maybe the dose wasn't as high as it was but enough to be dangerous. I'd heard that radiation sickness was a horrible way to go.
All of us crammed into the darkness and into the leftover smell, a smell like a group of zombies had just finished having a party. I gagged and the burning sensation calmed a bit. All of us scattered, filling the building. Mina leaned against the vending machine and I hung close to Alana. Her eyes were red. She was close to tears.
"So this might be it," she was saying. "Maybe it'll be fast." She sat down next to the desk, under the pink phone with the metallic flowers. It was a relic now, a piece of history and part of an era that had just passed. Passed on. Died. Whatever. My arms still stung and I held them up. Most of us were quiet as if waiting for our sentence to come down.
My skin was red like the sunburn had worsened. Mr. Ellis had been red--sort of. I felt my skin, but the sunburn sensation remained like I had upgraded to an entire day at the beach without sunscreen, next to the reflective water. It didn't make sense. We had only been outside for a few minutes.
David went over and closed the door, shutting out the dull light that was coming in. "Something's still wrong," he said. "My skin is fried."
Darkness fell on all of us. Everyone became a moving shadow and people stayed out of the dull light that was coming in through the windows. The sun had moved because the light was starting to come in through the other side. Someone muttered something. Eric coughed. At least, I think it was Eric. "I don't think this is the same thing that got everyone else," he said at last. "I just feel sunburned. Did whatever this was screw up the ozone layer or something?"
"I don't know," David said. "A nuke might have."
"Get off the nukes," Jerome added. "This thing came from space. Maybe some weird chemical reactions took place up in the atmosphere
when the light hit. That can happen."
"Since when did you become valedictorian?" David asked. "You sleep in class most of the time."
"Class is boring. I have every reason to sleep. Can't wait until high school's over."
"News flash," I said. "High school is over and so is everything else." I had to get out of here. The building seemed to be closing in on me. I felt like we were in some chamber on another planet, trying to stay protected from the atmosphere outside. The desert stretched away in all directions. We were in the middle of a wasteland without help for miles around. I still couldn't figure out where Dr. Shetlin had gone.
"Is anyone getting sick?" David asked.
"I'm just fried," the Goth girl said. "So is everyone else. I think Jerome's right that the ozone layer's messed up or something. Maybe that blast blew a hole in it and we just got the worst sunburns."
"Then we can't go out during the day," Jerome said. "We'll have to wait until dark to go out again."
A dark shape moved to the window. "I don't see any vultures," Christina said. "I think they're all dead, too."
I thought about my guinea pig back at the house. I thought about him all curled up, or stretched out with his legs in the air. We only lived fifty miles from here in Colton, a medium sized town built by the river. The mystery blast might have struck Colton, too. There was no doubt, no hope, not like I had for New York. I was supposed to go home this afternoon and feed him.
Maybe I wouldn't have to.
The thought actually filled me with some relief. My guinea pig wouldn't have to starve to death. I hoped that however he passed, it was quick. But that made another thought hit me.
"How are we going to eat?" I asked. "Is the food and water safe?"
"That's a very good question," David said. "I don't know. If these particles decay fast, the food and water is probably still okay. It's the ozone we have to worry about, or the lack of it. We're all burnt just from being out there a few minutes The ultraviolet rays must be very bad if they're getting through the smog."
"Maybe we should close the windows," Christina said. "Or put a cover over them, or something. The rays are getting ready to come in the other side."
Jerome swore. I did, too. As the sun shifted to the west, it would spill its dangerous light right on us. My mind spun.
The reddish glow was illuminating the carpet. People stayed out of it. This would only get worse. The long windows were too big now. Too spacious. Jerome moved out of the glow and squinted. Everyone crammed together as David crept towards the window, looked outside and then backed away.
"You're right," he said. "We need to cover them. I wished these people had installed blinds."
"Blinds might not even be enough," Eric said.
"If the radiation burned us through that smog after just a few minutes, I can't see blinds working unless they're thick," I added. We were going to die. We wouldn't even make it one day in this new world. This place was all death and destruction now and I was still thirsty. I didn't even want to think about dwindling supplies...
Then I got an idea. I ran up to one of the framed posters and yanked it off the wall. "How about this?"
"That might work," Alana said. She stood up, filled with renewed hope. I felt bad for her. Hope was a crazy thing to hold onto. It kept you going and sane for a while, but it eventually fled, leaving you empty and unprotected from reality.
I squinted, even though the light was dull, and shoved the framed poster into the window. I had to push, but the poster fit right into the window frame and darkness fell on me. Only a few small cracks of light were getting through, making slivers and knife blades on the floor, but nothing else. "I think this will keep us safe," I said. "Let's get all of these moved." I reached for the next one, a picture of a ball of light in space. A couple of bright beams flew away from it in each direction. I wasn't sure what it was supposed to be, but something about it gave me the creeps.
I yanked it off the wall as the two art girls joined me. The three of us crammed it into the next window. The boys joined in, and together we got the west-facing windows all filled in, leaving the east-facing ones free. The room got much darker, almost planetarium dark, and I bumped into someone as I backed away. I was glad I couldn't see what was on that poster now. The light coming in through the east windows was much less intense than the rays that were on the floor. One of them was on someone's red shoe. They had bright yellow shoelaces and green soles. One of those crazy pairs.
"I think we did it," I said. "No more sunburns. We can't get burned again."
"For now," David added. "We'll need to move these posters to the other windows in the morning, when the sun's coming up. We don't want a shower of UV rays to wake up to."
"No," I said. I wanted to turn around and pound my fists into the wall. "We don't. Not ever."
Chapter Five
The vending machine was next. Jerome and Tony set to work kicking it, trying to break the glass, while Alana and I dug through the front counter for an emergency radio or flashlight or really anything that wasn't fried. My eyes adjusted to the dark after a while, but it was still slow work, going through drawers and drawers of stuff we had to feel around through rather than just work through. I came across a set of keys, which helped us open the locked drawers. I found a small emergency radio, a flashlight, and a bunch of AA batteries that I set out on the counter.
"This woman loved her candy," Alana said. "She had a sweet tooth. It's ours now." She plopped a colorful bag of something on top of the desk.
"We can't live on that," I said. "We need real food."
"It'll hold us over until we find real food," she said. "You're so negative all the time."
"I think I've got every reason to be. As soon as we eat, we need to find a safe way out of here. I have to find a working phone and try to call Dad."
Alana stopped rummaging through the drawers. "You can't," she said. "We're all going to have to leave together. We can't go out there in the daytime."
"I can't stay."
"You have to, Laney. My family's out there, too. We're all worried."
I didn't want to tell her that her family was probably gone, suffering the same fate as everyone lying out in the dust to rot. She must not know yet. She must be holding onto that monster called hope, that cruel beast that hollowed you out when it was done with you. Maybe I was doing the same thing, hoping for Dad's safety, but for him it would depend on where this light hit. We knew nothing about it. Maybe it only hit this small area or we were on the edge of it. I had reason to hope for him. I knew when it was time to give that sort of thing up.
Like the hope that we would get out of here alive.
None of us had checked to see if the bus would start. We hadn't had time. EMPs screwed up cars and trucks, right? But Dr. Shetlin had gotten out of here. Maybe she had walked and the UV rays had gotten to her and she wasn't coming back, either. It was miles and miles to the next town. Walking wasn't an option in the daytime. The desert offered nowhere to hide when the sun came out. We couldn't count on finding a cave when the sun came up and I had the feeling that no amount of sunscreen would protect us from the rays. The thought of burning alive, skin first, sent a chill down my spine. It would be a slower, less forgiving death than the first bout of radiation.
I glanced outside, to where the bus was still parked with the dark form underneath. The keys were there somewhere.
A shattering of glass announced the success of Tony and Jerome in breaking the vending machine open. We all cheered. I hadn't realized that food and drink could be such a morale booster. I looked. Glass sparkled on the floor in one of the narrow beams, reflecting death right into my eye. I squinted and turned away. Horrible brown, misshapen moles danced in front of my eyes again. Even if I made it out of here, I might end up like Mom. We all might from this one burn alone.
They passed out bags of chips, candy bars and drinks. I cracked open a Coke and sucked it down faster than I had sucked down anything before. I hadn't realized tha
t my thirst was bordering on dangerous. Even Christina, who normally picked at her food, was wolfing down a bag of Cheetos.
"That's so good," Alana said, drinking a root beer. "It's the best thing I've ever had. Let's just hope it's not poisoned."
"Really," I said, taking another drink. "After this we need to figure out how we're going to get out of here. We can't just sit around and wait for the food to dwindle."
"I agree," she said, "but we need a vehicle to leave. We can't walk."
"Dr. Shetlin might have," I said. "She's probably dead or burned."
Alana stared at me with wide eyes. "There's no shade around here."
"Exactly. She was wearing that white coat but even that wouldn't have protected her from that crap." The sun had taken a few minutes to burn us. I sat on the floor and my arm rubbed against the edge of the counter. Waves of burning pain went up and down it. I was burned, all right. Really burned. I might peel just from being outside for that short time. I eyed the small beams of light that were coming in through the windows. They were beams of slow death and they grew longer now, so much that they lit the opposite walls. We had figured out a way to block the threat just in time.
"We have to look for her," Alana said. "When the sun goes down."
"It'll be too dark," I told her. "You have no idea how dark things can get when there's no moonlight and no electric light. I went camping with my parents one time up in Oregon, away from all the cities. When it turns night and it's anything other than a full moon, you had better carry a flashlight or stay in your tent. Who knows what else is going to be out there?"
"We have one," Alana said, setting her drink down and getting up. She picked up the small plastic stick. "Yes. I did. Let me see if it still--"
An explosion of light filled the space behind the desk.
"--works," she finished.
"Ouch!" David shouted.
"Where did you find that?" the Goth girl asked.
Alana told them. "After dark, we need to go out and investigate." She then told them the plan.
