The Summer the World Ended

by Matthew S. Cox

  After a bit of bouncing around and hand waving to air dry, she pulled the clean set of undies on and covered her breasts with her arms, regretting her hasty search for cleanliness. I am an idiot. I forgot a shirt. She contemplated putting the one she’d been wearing back on, but one whiff of it made her gag. She cracked the door an inch, and peeked.

  Dad had his back turned, still broadcasting for survivors.

  “Dad, I forgot a clean shirt. Don’t look.”

  “Okay.” He leaned back in the chair, eyes closed. “You know right after we got married, your mother used to walk around topless―”

  “Dad!” she yelled.

  He chuckled.

  Riley scurried to the backpack and grabbed one of the white shirts. It wasn’t as long as the other one, and left her underwear exposed. She stared at herself, not caring if Dad saw her panties. Apathy faded after a moment, and she pulled on a set of the black fatigue pants. They were baggy enough to be comfortable, and a little long in the leg. Unless she jumped up and down in place, they’d stay on without a belt.

  “Safe.”

  Dad glanced back with a wink. “You almost look human again.”

  “My hair stinks.” She paced around, feeling cooped up. Sitting on the bed was getting old, fast. After a few circles, she got up to a jog. Nylon ties at the bottom of the pants whipped about as she picked up speed. After ten laps, she stopped and ran in place for a minute before she dropped and did five pushups.

  “Now what’s gotten into you?” Dad raised an eyebrow.

  “I’m sick of sitting around doing nothing. The world’s gone to crap. I should be like training and stuff. Lisa did pull ups and stuff every morning.”

  “Not too bad an idea.” He paused. “Who’s Lisa?”

  “Character from a game.”

  Riley did sit-ups until her gut ached. She’d spent so much time playing Call of Duty, now she was going to be living it. She thought about The Last Outpost, and wondered if she could talk Dad into heading east in search of Amber. No. She’s dead. He said the whole East Coast got vaporized.

  Discontentment at being locked up underground boiled over after another ten minutes. She stomped over to the radiation detector, her mortal enemy, and glared at it. The red light bulb inside the housing fluctuated in intensity, as if it got power from a hamster on a treadmill gaining and losing speed. This time she didn’t care about stepping in a puddle.

  “I hate this thing.”

  Dad looked over. “That thing saved our lives. I might’ve gone outside by now if we didn’t know it was fatal.”

  She let off an exasperated noise halfway between growl and sigh, and bashed her fist down on top of it, hitting a patch of water.

  The red light went out.

  “Dad?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Dad!” She bounced on her toes.

  “What?” He looked over.

  “It’s out.” She shifted to raise her arm, showing him the bottom of her fist. “And it’s wet.”

  He scrambled out of the chair and stumbled over. The copper fitting coming in from the well passed right over it. A fat droplet formed at the bottom of one of the silvery solder marks. All along the left side of the alarm housing, trails of water streaked through caked dust.

  “You shouldn’t have hit it. Now we won’t know when it’s safe.”

  Riley scrunched up her face, about to bawl like a five-year-old being yelled at. Her onrush of tears stalled on the way to her eyes. She balled her fists. “No. I didn’t hit it that hard. It’s wet. Maybe it shorted?”

  “I doubt it. Might be a shift in the wind pushing the fallout around. Let’s keep an eye on it for a few days. If it stays out…”

  “Do you have a manual for this thing?” She took a step toward the bookcase.

  “Printout, bottom shelf, far right.”

  Riley squatted, sifting through a bunch of stacks of copier paper held together by black metal clips. Eventually, she found one with a drawing of a familiar looking alarm box and a logo for a doomsday prepper website. “You bought plans for a radiation detection system on the Internet?”

  “Yep. They’re all over the place.”

  She flipped through it, lost by all the algebra and schematics. The drawings didn’t seem impressive. “Are you sure it works?”

  “Yes, I tested it with some Uranium.”

  Riley blinked at him. “Where the crap did you get Uranium?”

  “EBay.”

  “Really?”

  “Yep. I mean, it was weak… but enough to test with.” He put the headset on. “Colonel Bering, this is Black Sheep, come back.”

  Riley cast a dubious look at the plans and stuffed the home-printed manual back on the shelf. “If water got into that thing, could it make it light up?”

  “The odds of that are incredibly remote… but, I suppose technically possible.” He jumped as if startled. “Yes, sir. Thank you. The perimeter rad sensor is now indicating a clear condition. About ten minutes. Riley hit it, and it went out. No, I don’t think so. She’s not that strong.”

  Riley stuck her tongue out at the back of his head.

  “Possible water infiltration to the housing. Yes. Will do.” He took the headset off. “If it stays out for 24 hours, I’ll take the handset and check the outer room.”

  “Okay.” The idea of getting out of here was as appealing as it was frightening. What if everyone topside had gone ‘rapey’ and insane? “Dad, do you think there’s God?”

  “Your mother was an atheist.”

  “I know. Are you?”

  “I don’t have an opinion. There’s a lot that humanity hasn’t been able to figure out. It wouldn’t surprise me if there was a God, or if God was really an advanced alien species laughing their intergalactic testicles off at the mess we’ve just made of our planet. There’s a lot of evidence among ancient civilizations… Aztecs, Mayans, the Nazca lines, even the Egyptians. Some of them had knowledge of astronomy and astrophysics that we’re just beginning to comprehend today.”

  Riley stepped on the nylon tie dangling from her pant leg, cinching it tight around her ankle and almost tripping herself as she crossed the bunker. “So you think aliens came to the Earth two thousand years ago?”

  He made faces at the wall. “No. I don’t think so. If there were aliens capable of reaching Earth, they’d have been back already.”

  “So you do believe there are aliens?” She sat on the edge of the cot and loosened the tie.

  “If you think about how many individual planets exist in the universe, by pure mathematical odds alone, there has to be at least one other planet where life occurred, probably more like millions. It’s a mathematical certainty that there is something out there, but given the vast distances… and who knows what kind of tech level they have. Everyone always assumes aliens are super advanced. What if we were the head of the pack?”

  “Not anymore.” Riley frowned.

  “That’s an idea.” Dad laughed. “Maybe the advanced aliens that visited us 2000 years ago blew themselves up just like we did, and that’s why they never came back.”

  Riley fidgeted with the nylon strap, tracing it back and forth over her foot. “Do you think Mom’s dead because she was an atheist?”

  “Not for a second.” Dad’s face reddened. “I should’ve punched that old bastard right in his old nose.”

  “Doctor Farhi thinks it was―”

  “Stress, yeah. Chances are it was a FSB operator with a tight-beam focused microwave weapon capable of inflicting deep-tissue damage from far enough away for her not to notice.”

  Riley blinked.

  “Or,” said Dad with a blasé shrug, “maybe it was just alcohol and the stress of her job.”

  She glared. “You don’t sound very upset she died.”

  “I am, inside. What good does it do to fall apart?” He ran his fingers over the radio unit. “Now, I’ve gotta stay strong for you.”

  “This isn’t fair.”

  Dad tapped his fi
ngers on the radio table, a rhythmic thrumming that grew louder over the next minute. “I tried. I really tried, Riley. I tried so hard to protect you two by leaving. I’m so sorry. This is all my fault.”

  Though he sounded tired and bored rather than sad, Riley sensed anguish in him. She crawled to kneel on the pillow end of the cot and hugged him from behind. As soon as she touched him, he gave in to soft sobs.

  “You didn’t do this, Dad. Crazy politicians did.”

  “I tried. I knew you’d be better off without me.” He shook his head in an endless back and forth. “I couldn’t protect you.”

  She kissed him above the left ear, and whispered. “You did.”

  “No, Riley… this is all my fault. You’re stuck down here because of me.” He looked at the door. “What are we doing?”

  Riley squeezed him as hard as she could. “Stop, Dad. You’re scaring me.”

  Dad quieted, resting his hand on her arms where they crossed under his chin. She shivered. If Dad hadn’t taken her in, she’d have been vaporized. Yeah, it sorta was his fault she was stuck underground, but it was better than the alternative. Riley rested her chin on his shoulder, gazing at the flickering lights on the radio. Soon, he resumed calling for survivors.

  No one answered―only a faint hiss came from the headphones.

  ay Nine.

  Beretta parts littered the square folding table in the center of the bunker. Sixteen hollow point 9mm bullets formed a miniature stockade fence around the empty magazine. Riley sat with one heel on the chair, reaching around her leg to work a toothbrush through the crevices of the upper slide. The first time she’d tried to disassemble the pistol, the spring shot across the room and skittered under the bookshelf. It took her over an hour and some creativity with a rigid copper wire to retrieve it.

  Every minute or two, her heart would threaten to stop as she got the urge to check the radiation detector by the door, fearing it would be on again. The sight of it still dark let her breathe again. After an hour of cleaning the pistol, she gave up and dropped the brush.

  This is as clean as I’m going to get it.

  She stuck the spring over the barrel, slipped it into the slide, and grabbed the pistol grip. After a bit of grunting and squirming, she squeezed it together and flicked the lever to keep the spring from flinging it to pieces again. With a triumphant smile, she set the gun down and grabbed the magazine. Bullet by bullet, she snapped them in, leaving one on the table. Riley checked to ensure the safety was on, locked the slide back, and put the stray round in the chamber. She held her breath, aimed at the storeroom in case it went off, and let the slide rack. For a few seconds, she didn’t move, not fully confident holding the weapon.

  “Dad?” She picked up the full magazine.

  “Hmm?”

  “The light’s still off.” She slid the mag into the handle and clapped it tight. “Think it’s safe to check outside?”

  “I’m not sure.” He pulled the headset off and made his way to the detector.

  Riley set the Beretta down, pointed away from her, and lowered her foot to the floor. Dad leaned left and right around the box like a bee looking for the perfect place upon a flower to land. She bit her lip. Maybe this is a bad idea. What if everything outside is poison?

  Clonk, clonk. Dad gave the alarm two light taps with a hammer to the side. Clack. One to the top right corner.

  She jumped.

  “There’s condensation inside the glass,” said Dad.

  “Does that mean water got in?” She felt neither hope nor dread.

  “Yep.” He glanced down. “All this water on the floor, the damn thing’s been dripping probably since we walked in the door.”

  More than a week’s worth of beard had left a frizzy, wanton explosion of brown hair on Dad’s face. It lent an erratic, wild quality to the look of mission in his eyes. He hunted down a screwdriver from the tools section of the bookshelf and took the clear plastic face off. He huffed and puffed at it, waved his hand, and used the postcard-sized panel to fan it harder.

  “It’s definitely wet in there.”

  Riley pulled her left foot up onto the chair, hooking an arm around her shin and gazing at the faded remains of polish on her toes. Such a trivial little gift from Mom had made her so happy. Now, who had time to care about nail polish?

  The world was still alive when I painted them.

  Mom was dead. Amber was dead. Kieran was dead. A good chance existed that everyone she’d ever not hated was dead. Her house was probably gone. Her old school had likely become a pile of toothpicks and ash. Scene after scene of her old neighborhood played a slideshow in her head.

  All those people.

  “Dad?”

  “Yeo?” He whirled with an attempt at mixing ‘yeah’ and ‘yo.’

  She kept quiet a moment. “What’s the point?”

  “Of?”

  She looked up at him, expressionless. “Surviving? If the whole world is dead, why bother?”

  He slid the plastic rectangle into the detector box and walked over, pulling her head against his chest. “We don’t know it’s all gone yet.”

  “Colonel Bering said it was.”

  Dad’s hand on her cheek, rough and warm, held her against his body with gentle reassurance. “A lot of people are dead, yes. That doesn’t mean every human on the face of the planet is gone. Look at us. Two people in the middle of nowhere managed to make it. There’ll be more. Pockets of civilization have survived. No one nuked the third world. Maybe we could make our way west and find a boat… go to the Caribbean or Hawaii or something.”

  Riley glanced at the detector box, brushing her hands down her thighs in a nervous, repetitive gesture. “How long does fallout last?”

  “There’s a lot of variables.”

  “Do you think it blew away already?”

  “Maybe it rained.” He patted her on the cheek and crossed the room to the shelf, where he set to rummaging. “The initial blast might have scattered enough debris around the outside area to set the detector off, and maybe the water kept it showing an alarm condition after the background radiation faded to survivable levels.”

  “I don’t want you to die.” She jumped up.

  “Good,” he said without looking back. “I don’t want to die either. A-ha!”

  Dad held up a device that resembled a yellow lunchbox with a handle, and a length of wire connected to a short, metal pipe. On second thought, it looked like a gizmo from Ghostbusters. She crept up behind him as he fumbled with fixing wires to a huge squarish battery with spiral contacts, leaning up on tiptoe to get a better look. After a moment, the device came to life, emitting a series of quiet ticking sounds.

  She let her weight down on her heels. “Whazzat?”

  “Geiger counter.”

  Riley pursed her lips and blinked at it. Yeah, normal people have those lying around. She crossed her arms and gazed up at the roof with a lump rising in her throat. Normal people are dead now. A sudden inspiration took her, and she trotted to the storeroom and draped herself headfirst through the hole, dangling upside down.

  The amber light by the batteries had gone out. The solar panels must be working.

  She grunted, dizzy from the blood rushing to her head and pulled herself up. When she jogged back to the bunker, Dad was in the midst of exploring it from corner to corner, waving the pipe around in front of him. The ticking gained and fell in frequency, but the device’s reaction didn’t sound alarming to her untrained ears. He lingered at the thick door for ten minutes, moving the sensor around the seam.

  “Dad, the solar panels are on.” She pointed at the storeroom. “Light went out.”

  “Hmm. I’ll be damned.” He snapped the detector wand into a socket on the housing and flicked a switch. The device stopped ticking. “Nothing above background standard. Maybe we got lucky.”

  She swallowed a mouthful of saliva. “Uh…”

  Dad patted himself down, checking pockets, paced back and forth for a moment, and whirled
to face her. “Wait in the storeroom.”

  “Huh?”

  “I’m going to open the door and check the outer chamber.” He grabbed at her shoulders, urging her in the direction of back door. “Wait in there.”

  “Is this gonna help?” She kicked the flimsy, white plastic.

  “Not much, but it gives you more distance from the opening.”

  When he spun around, she grabbed his arm. “Don’t.”

  “I thought you couldn’t stand it down here?” He paused.

  She wrapped her arms around him. “It’s better than being dead.”

  “I promise you, if it shows even three times a normal background reading, I’ll stop.”

  Riley backed into the storeroom again, crouching against the shelf. Dad grabbed the Geiger counter and approached the armored front door. He made another pass around it with the sensor before lifting the lock and swinging it down to free the wheel.

  She whined. “Don’t let the nuke in.”

  “We’re good.” Dad set the Geiger counter on the floor between his boots and grabbed the wheel, let out a weak grunt, and shoved. The metal ring spun up to a blur, drawing bars out of the top and bottom. Dad took a knee and held the wand up to the gap as he pushed the door outward. Still, the ticking sounds remained calm and slow.

  Riley leaned her weight forward onto her hands, whining at him as he crept into the outer room. “Dad…”

  “Stay there,” he said.

  Geiger counter held high, he slipped out of sight.

  Riley crawled two feet into the room, reaching at the door. “Dad, no. You said two weeks after the light went out, but it’s only been a day.”

  “Hmm. Interesting.” His voice echoed in the other room.

  No! She leapt up and ran to the doorway. Dad was halfway up the ladder, holding the wand over his head.

  “Dad.”

  “Get inside.”

  The harsh command shocked her to a halt. She crept backwards, taking tiny steps, until she bumped against the support post. Vibration from the ventilation fan ran through it, rattling her teeth. She covered her face with her hands, trembling.