The Summer the World Ended

by Matthew S. Cox

  She shivered, unable to bring herself to ask.

  Dad looked down. “Riley… It’s all gone.”

  A hundred images of Mom, Amber smiling, her old home, and Kieran flashed in her mind. She swallowed the saliva in the back of her throat and covered her mouth with both hands, trembling as she crept across the bunker. When she got close, he grasped her hips and looked her straight in the eye.

  “We’re still alive, Squirrel.”

  All she could do was stare at him. The next detonation overhead caused a faint twitch.

  He brushed her hair away from her face. She stood numb, barely noticing his patting and squeezing. His lips moved, but she didn’t hear him. Dad reached up and patted her cheek. Sound seemed to start back up again, as if she’d surfaced from being underwater.

  “… eetie, come on.”

  “Huh?” She blinked. “The world can’t be over. No one’s stupid enough to―”

  Boom. A low rumble shuddered through the walls.

  “I’m sorry, Riley.” A hand on the back of her head pulled her face to his chest. “I’m so very sorry.”

  ay Two.

  Dreamless sleep faded to still silence. Riley stretched, wondering why her bed felt strange. The coarse wool blanket against her arms shocked her eyes open. She gawked at the plain concrete above her. Not a dream. Her lip quivered. Dad snored in the radio chair, headset still on. She covered her mouth and wept for everyone she’d just met in this horrible little town. It was too much to believe that Kieran, his mom, dad, aunt, and all his friends were gone. She thought of little Jesse and that adorable childlike face, and felt sick to her stomach.

  Maybe some of them survived, hiding in their basements?

  Radiation was a slow killer.

  She shifted at a painful presence in her bladder. Dad snored again. She glanced from him to the open toilet and back. Oh, no way. Screw it. He’s asleep. Riley slipped off the cot, cringing as her bare feet froze on contact with the floor. Once the initial shock wore off, she crept over to a standard house toilet. It appeared clean, as though it had never been used. She turned around and sat on it, noticing she could see right over the bed to her father. It took her a moment to get up the nerve to pull her panties down, and she used her oversized shirt to hide as much of herself as she could.

  Letting go while in plain sight of her father, even while he was asleep, was another matter entirely.

  He snored again.

  Stay sleeping. Stay sleeping.

  Dad yawned and stretched.

  “Don’t turn around!” she screamed.

  “Huh?”

  “Dad! Please.” She couldn’t bring herself to say why.

  He started to look back, but whipped away as soon as he noticed where she was. “Sorry. I never expected to have company if the need arose to use this shelter.”

  This is so, so, so much worse than going outside. She distracted herself with memories of how when Amber’s younger brother was five, he had zero regard for privacy and would walk in and use the bathroom no matter who was in there. It didn’t help. She tried to rush the issue, but had little luck. After an arduous fifteen minutes, she felt better, but sat there for a while more.

  “I’m gonna get up now. Don’t turn around.”

  “I promise.” He held up a Boy Scout hand gesture.

  She waited another minute, staring at his back. Eventually, she reached down and pulled her panties back in place under the shirt and stood. Oh, God… he’s gonna use the toilet too. She flushed.

  “You decent?”

  “Yes.”

  Dad went to the storage room and returned with two brown packages. He set one on the table for her and dragged his radio chair over.

  “What’s that?” She lowered herself onto the metal seat, teeth chattering.

  “MRE. Military ration. Open it. There’s pouches and stuff inside. We eat one of these in the morning and one at night. Of course, that’s a high-energy output schedule. We should probably have one of these in the morning and some canned pasta at night unless we’re doing heavy work. If we’re just lying around all day, we should have only one.”

  Riley aimed a forlorn stare at the brown block for a few minutes before opening it, finding it packed with smaller pouches. Writing identified the contents: an entrée (chicken breast), pretzels, peanut butter, a flat packet bearing the scary title ‘beverage base powder orange,’ crackers, plastic utensils, and one marked ‘flameless ration heater.’

  She took the entrée pouch, peeled the end open and sucked on it like an infant with a bottle, holding it in both hands. It didn’t even bother her that the substance labeled ‘chicken breast’ had the consistency of paste. Dad glanced at her with sad eyes, and brushed a hand over her head. Riley jostled with the contact, but otherwise didn’t react.

  This didn’t happen. This couldn’t have happened. Everyone’s dead? No, I’m dreaming. I spent all night playing a post-apoc video game. That’s why I’m dreaming this. I know I’m dreaming, so I’m supposed to wake up now, right?

  After nothing about her situation changed a minute later, reality crushed in on her. Riley chewed on the plastic, squeezing the goop inside up like toothpaste.

  Dad shredded through his MRE, stuffed all the garbage back into the original brown pouch, and went back to the radio. Riley continued sucking on the packet for a while after it was empty. Eventually, she let it fall to the wayside and took the crackers. She pulled her legs up, heels on the chair, clutched the saltines to her face, and nibbled tiny bites while staring into space. Kieran’s smiling face lingered in her memory. Over and over, his voice repeated, “No one is crazy enough to hit ‘the button.’” How had the almost-best day of my life become the second worst?

  “Copy, sir. Thank you. Sorry about Lillian.” Dad let out a long sigh.

  He spun his chair around. At the sight of her, he covered his mouth and shed two tears. Dad moved to her side, squeezed her shoulder, and ran his hand over her head. She continued gazing at nothing, wanting to react to his touch, but unable to find the ability to move.

  When she ran out of cracker, she left her hands together at her chin. Dad scooped her out of the chair and carried her to the cot, sitting with her sideways in his lap. Some time later, she went from squirrel pose to one arm limp in her lap and the other clutching his shirt.

  “What did Bering say?” she whispered.

  “He’s in Cheyenne, safe in NORAD. His wife didn’t make it. DC is ash. The United States has suffered a full-scale nuclear strike from multiple hostile nations. We fired back, but there’s not a lot of intel right now about how bad things are.”

  “If Kieran’s dead, shoot me.”

  He shook her, hard. “Riley McCullough. Don’t you dare say anything like that again.” Tears ran down his face. “I won’t lose you too.”

  She sniffled.

  “As much as it hurt you to lose that boy, ten times that is what it would do to me to lose you. You understand?” He shook her again, softer.

  “Yeah. I can’t believe he’s dead too. Mom… Why is God mad at me?”

  He kissed her on the cheek. “If he exists, I think he’s mad at humanity in general.”

  “Do you think Mr. Hensley survived?” She laid her head on his shoulder.

  Dad grumbled. “I hope not, but that would be the way fate works, wouldn’t it?”

  “Yeah.” She reached up and grasped his shirt by the collar. “I don’t want to die.”

  He kissed the top of her head. “You’re not going to die. Nothing can get us down here.”

  Glint flashed at the edge of her vision, drawing her attention to water droplets gathering on the copper pipe. She tracked one as it fell, and looked up from where it landed to the armored door. The zombies from The Last Outpost couldn’t batter through that.

  “Dad, are there gonna be zombies?”

  He chuckled. “Zombies only exist in two places.”

  Riley lifted her head to look at his face. “Where?”

  �
�Voting booths and church pews.”

  She sighed, letting her head thud into his chest. “That’s not funny.”

  “No, it’s sad.” He ran a hand up and down her back, reminding her of Mina.

  “Can zombies break in here?”

  “Riley, there’s no such thing as zombies.”

  She stared over her shoulder at the door, waiting for the mindless thumping to start. Perhaps an hour later, she nodded off, but snapped her head back up.

  “Okay, you need to rest.” Dad stood with her in his arms, turned around, and lowered her onto the cot before covering her with the blanket. “Get some sleep. I’m going to try to find out what’s going on. I’ll sleep once you’re up.”

  Riley shifted around as he returned to the radio, pulling the blanket up to her eyes and staring at the door. The red light in the sensor box flared and faded in a slow, repeating cycle, making her think of a heartbeat.

  I can’t sleep when there’s zombies outside.

  ay Three.

  At some point during the zombie-free night, Dad joined her on the cot. She lay there for some time, clinging like a terrified little girl who’d had a nightmare and run to her parents’ bed. With a couple hours of sleep in her brain, the idea of zombies made her feel silly. Dad must think I’ve cracked. Zombies… really. She pulled her fingers across her eyes, displacing crumbs, and climbed over him to get out of bed. After using the toilet, she snagged a granola bar from the storage closet and spent the next hour pacing in circles around the bunker, drifting through periods of boredom, sorrow, and disbelief.

  She stopped, gazing up at the ceiling. The red light is still on, but it’s been quiet.

  Riley trudged over to the bookshelf and knelt, shuffling sideways while examining titles. Two copies of Nuclear War Survival Skills sat at the top left. Next to them were several operator manuals for US Military weapons as well as land mines, and about six different medical studies regarding radiation poisoning. She kept scooting right. Anarchist’s Cookbook, Teflon Bullets, Basic Electrical Engineering, Ricin: Silent Killer, A Culture of Conspiracy, The CIA Exposed, They’re Watching. Riley shuffled faster. The middle part of the shelf had normal sounding titles, even if they looked old. Moby Dick, The Iliad, Don Quixote, The Odyssey, and a host of other books she figured only people ordered by teachers to read would bother touching. The third shelf had a few books by Dan Brown and perhaps everything Tom Clancy ever wrote, plus a copy of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, as well as A Bible, Koran (translated), and an English version of the Talmud.

  Sheesh, Dad. A little light reading?

  Dad groaned as he got up and went to the radio. She plucked Da Vinci Code off the shelf and trudged to the cot around the ‘go bag’ she still hadn’t moved from the spot where she dropped it two days ago. Modesty didn’t seem very important anymore. Nothing did. Besides, Dad hardly looked at her. He spent most of his time absorbed by the radio.

  He walked past the bed. “Shitting.”

  She scooted around to put her back to him and tried to ignore the horrible sounds. The smell wasn’t as easy to disregard. Riley wadded her shirt over her face, coughed, and tried to read through watery eyes.

  “Oh, don’t give me that. It’s not all roses and butterflies when you use it.”

  She flipped a page, not acknowledging his comment.

  Dad returned to the radio, trailing a more intense blast of awful. She coughed again. “Turn up the fan.”

  “It’s going through an NBC filter. It can only push so much air.” He jumped into his chair and donned the headset. “This is Chris McCullough out of New Mexico, attempting to reach any survivors. Anyone hearing this, please, copy.”

  He repeated the radio spam every ten minutes for the next two hours while she read.

  Dad sucked in a quick breath. “Yes, sir.”

  Riley perked up.

  “I understand. Yes, she’s fine, thank you for asking. Depressed, but I don’t blame her. First her mother, now… yeah. That’s good, sir. No contact from assets. Will do, sir. Six months? More than likely. I’m stocked for five years, but I wasn’t expecting a teenage daughter in here… She’ll probably shower through our water in two.” He chuckled.

  Dad leaned back and stretched.

  “What’d he say?” Riley set the book down, using the blanket for a bookmark. She crawled on all fours to the end by the radio. “Dad?”

  “The president made it to safety. He’s out of reach. Our country will go on in some form. No word from Europe, but early signs say it’s probably been melted back to the Middle Ages. DC is on fire. We’re still not sure who started it.”

  She sat back on her heels. “What happens in six months?”

  “Colonel Bering said they should have enough resources to send a Blackhawk out to our location then and give us a ride to wherever they wind up reestablishing civilization. Not all that bad, sweetie.”

  She flopped on her side, no longer interested in the book. What did that matter anymore? What did anything matter?

  The lights went out; the vent fan sputtered and fell silent.

  “Crap,” said Dad. “Well, there goes the infrastructure. National power grid always was a rickety hodgepodge.”

  “I thought you had solar panels?”

  “I do.” Dad grumbled. “You’d think out here in the middle of the desert they’d work great, but the damn things crap out on me all the time. Good for a backup, but I haven’t worked the kinks out enough to wean off municipal power. We’ve been running on city juice.”

  She tried to figure out where the ceiling was, peering into the infinite black. “How long is it gonna stay dark? Are we gonna run out of air?”

  “Until we flip the switch. Would you mind going to the crawlspace again?”

  “I don’t like it down there.”

  “You’re a lot smaller and more flexible than I am, but I don’t want to force you.”

  Riley lay silent for a few minutes until a chair squeaked. “It’s okay. I’ll go.”

  She crawled off the cot, fumbling through the dark until she bumped the table. Her hand followed the edge to the post. She guessed at a quarter turn left and walked forward until her groping found the bookshelf. From there, she hand-to-handed her way right until her fingers brushed the storeroom door, reached inside to the shelf, and repeated the process until she grabbed the post at the end. A few passes of her foot swiping back and forth found the flashlight she’d left on the floor by the hatch, and she stooped to grab for it.

  Light made her squint, but her eyes adjusted fast. She pulled up the hatch and dropped down onto the chilly dirt floor and musty air of the crawlspace. The battery cluster still winked and flashed with little green lights. It had its own control box with a similar up-down switch as the water, though she got nervous getting close to it.

  “Dad,” she yelled. “Will this thing shock me?”

  “Don’t touch metal,” he shouted.

  “It’s all metal.” Gee, Dad. Thanks.

  She reached out, grasped the handle, and tugged it down. Something inside the box made a loud click, and an amber light came on. At the same instant, a shaft of light appeared where the hatch was.

  “You got it,” yelled Dad.

  Riley duck-walked back to the opening and stood in the hole with the floor at the level of her collarbones. “There’s a yellow light on the thing.”

  Dad muttered. “The solar panels must be covered in fallout from the blast. That light means we’re not getting much power from the panel array and running on battery more than anything. We’ll have to hope for a windy day to clear them off.”

  “What time is it? Maybe it’s getting dark out?”

  “Ten after noon. We might be having a nuclear winter scenario too.”

  Riley planted her hands on the floor and hauled herself out of the hole. She kept the flashlight with her and moped back to the cot. The lights were on, but weaker than before. “Nuclear winter sounds bad. Are we gonna run outta heat?”

  “If en
ough sediment got blasted into the atmosphere, it will block out the sun. That in turn may cause a die-off of plant life, which could lead to the atmosphere becoming unbreathable as we run out of oxygen.”

  Riley dropped the flashlight.

  “Bering didn’t say anything about that though.” Dad tweaked another dial on the radio set. “That, he would’ve mentioned. Don’t get too worked up about it.”

  She picked up the light and tossed it on the bed before moving to stand next to him. Dad fiddled with the buttons on the bit that looked like a calculator and turned a few more knobs. Riley looked up at the ceiling, terrified to imagine what sort of hell existed thirty-odd feet over her head.

  “Dad? Slap me,” she droned.

  “What?” Dad looked up, stunned.

  “Not too hard. Just give me a slap enough to hurt. I wanna wake up.”

  He slipped an arm around her and pulled her into his lap. Riley flopped like a doll, letting gravity take her body wherever it wanted. Dad rocked her for a moment, then bounced his knee, seeming confused at how to deal with her current state. When last he’d been around, she’d been little. He repeated his broadcast for survivors a few more times. She shifted, clutching a fistful of his shirt close enough to her face to make sucking her thumb seem like a good idea. The soft sound of his beating heart and the warmth of his chest were all that kept her from a complete spaz-out.

  Time lost meaning. After a while, she’d gone from a limp body draped over him to a shivering girl curled up in his lap the way she used to do when she was six. Each time Dad repeated the broadcast, she came a little closer to crying, but couldn’t find the energy. She set her feet together on his right thigh. He clasped a warm hand over them.

  “You’re cold as ice, hon. Where are your socks?”

  “Dad?” Was that faint, pathetic whisper hers?

  “I love you, Riley.”

  “Mom’s better off, isn’t she?”

  “Depends on if you believe in that whole afterlife thing.”

  “Even if there isn’t.” She flexed her toes up and examined the flaking polish. “She’s better off gone than alive in whatever’s out there now.”