by Jeff Strand
“Yes.”
“Meet me out front. I’ll be there in five minutes.”
“Okay.” Missy disconnected the call and tried her parents again.
Phillip coughed up some blood. “I can’t make it,” he said in a whisper. “I can’t go anywhere. I’m going to die.”
“No, no, you aren’t,” Missy insisted. Her parents didn’t answer, so she tucked the phone back into her pocket.
Phillip nodded. “Yes, I am. I can feel it. It’s all over for me.”
Most likely he was absolutely correct, but Missy couldn’t see any benefit to telling him that his logic was sound. “You’ll be fine.”
“I won’t, but it’s kind of you to say that.” He wiped some blood off his face and gave her a brave smile. “I’ll be with the Lord soon.”
“I’ll send somebody for you,” Missy promised. As her eyes filled with tears, she continued down the hallway.
“Wait!” Phillip called after her. “Please, stay with me! Hold me! I don’t have much time left!”
Missy stopped and turned around. Was he fucking serious?
“I can’t die alone!” he said. “I’m scared! I’m so scared!”
Missy choked back a sob. She had to stay with him. She had to grant his dying wish. You couldn’t not grant somebody’s dying wish, right?
Then again…by asking her to stay with him, he was possibly dooming her in order to fulfill his own needs. If he was possibly dooming her in order to fulfill his own needs, then he was a bad person. If he was a bad person, then it was okay for him to die alone. If it was okay for him to die alone, then it was okay for Missy to get the hell out of this building to increase the chances that she’d still be alive tomorrow.
She covered her ears with her hands and left.
* * *
Nobody else tried to stop her, because the eleven or twelve other people she encountered were already dead. It had only been a few minutes. What kind of poison was in this smoke? She kept touching her nose to check for blood, but so far, nothing.
As she rushed outside, Missy saw that the air still had the tinge of green smoke and that traffic outside the building had completely stopped. There were at least three accidents just within her line of sight. Kevin was never going to make it here.
Then he drove up, onto the front lawn, riding a motorcycle. He did not own a motorcycle, nor had he, to the best of her knowledge, ever been on one. He pulled up beside her, overshooting by about ten feet.
“Hop on,” he said.
“Where did you get this?”
“It was donated.”
“Donated?”
“I promise you I didn’t kill anyone for it.”
Missy climbed on and put her arms around his waist. They sped off, wobbling a bit at first, but not falling over.
She tried to ask him some questions, but the motorcycle was too loud, and they just ended up shouting things that neither one of them could understand. This might have created amusing hijinks under circumstances where there were not bloody corpses littering the streets. But she was pretty sure they both said “Uncle Jake” at some point.
She tried again to call her parents, cursing them for only having a landline and thus preventing her from sending a text message saying that she was okay. If they answered, she’d make Kevin stop so she could talk to them, if only for a minute, but they didn’t answer. Missy desperately hoped that this was just a local nightmare, and that Mom and Dad were fine.
As they drove, paying little attention to the rules of the road or the definition of “road,” the smoke sometimes thinned, sometimes became almost too thick to see through, but never cleared out entirely. Missy wondered why they hadn’t gotten sick, and then decided for the sake of her mental health not to dwell on it too much.
The interstate was not nearly as congested as she would have thought. Lots of cars had crashed into each other or just stopped, and there were corpses all over the place, but apparently there weren’t a huge number of people trying to evacuate. Either they were already dead, or there was no place to go.
They took the Gleer Road exit, racing down the paved road until Kevin took a left turn onto the convoluted series of dirt roads that led to Uncle Jake’s place. Last time, he’d used a GPS, and Missy hoped that Kevin could remember all of the turns, because she certainly couldn’t.
The smoke was a lot thinner out here than it had been in the city, but it still looked like she was viewing the world through a green filter. Not a beautiful emerald filter—a mold one.
With what seemed like about a mile left to go, unless they were hopelessly lost and had several miles left to go, the motorcycle sputtered and came to a stop. “Out of gas,” said Kevin, tapping on the gauge, though Missy didn’t need the verbal or the visual cue to figure out what had happened.
They got off, and Kevin wheeled the motorcycle into the ditch. Then they began to run.
“What do you think is happening?” Missy asked.
“I don’t know. It’s got to be terrorists, right? I guess it could be some kind of huge industrial accident, but…I don’t know; I don’t see any way it’s not terrorists.”
“Do you feel okay?”
Kevin nodded. “Yeah. You?”
“Yeah, physically I feel totally fine. So maybe we’re immune from whatever that stuff is. Are we going the right way?”
“I think so.”
“I don’t remember that tree.”
“Which one?”
“The weird-looking one with the branch shaped like a spoon.”
“Oh. I don’t remember it, either. But I’m not one to remember much about trees. I’m pretty sure we’re going the right way.”
“Will he even let us in?”
“Yeah, he knows we’re coming. We’ll just stay down there until we find out what’s happening. We’ll be fine.”
“I do remember that tree,” said Missy, pointing ahead to a tree with branches shaped like people having an uncomfortable three-way.
They picked up their pace to an all-out sprint, and, finally, yes, there was Uncle Jake’s shack. They rushed over there, out of breath, and Kevin pounded on the front door.
Nobody answered.
“You think he’s already down there?” asked Missy.
“Probably.” Kevin tested the knob. Locked. “We may have to break a window.”
Missy looked around for a large rock. She quickly found one, turned her head to avoid getting shards of glass in her face, and then smashed it into the front window. As she broke out the glass around the frame, the door swung open.
“What the hell are you doing to my window?” Uncle Jake demanded. He was in a full yellow radiation suit, and his voice was muffled by the gas mask. He held a revolver, though it was pointed politely at the ground and not at Kevin or Missy.
“We thought you might be in the shelter,” Kevin told him.
“I was! That’s no reason to destroy a man’s property! Jesus H. Christ, Kevin, do you think I want vandals down there with me? How do I know you won’t smash up the toilet next?”
“We won’t break anything else. I promise.”
“All right.” Uncle Jake gestured for them to follow. Missy and Kevin hurried into the shack after him. He punched in the code, lifted the lid of the hatch, and said “Hurry, hurry, hurry, hurry, hurry, hurry, hurry!” as they climbed down the ladder.
Uncle Jake slammed the lid shut and climbed down into the shelter with them. Missy noticed that he had indeed hung some pictures on the wall, though they looked like artwork he’d stolen from a hotel chain that despised its customers.
Uncle Jake pressed a button on the wall, and there was a whoosh sound. “Ventilation system will get rid of any of that crap that came in with us. I’ve only got the one suit, though.”
“What do you know about what’s happening?” Missy asked.
Uncle Jake plopped down onto the desk chair. “The news says it’s happening all over the place.”
Missy took her phone out of her
pocket as she felt an extra blast of panic. “All over? West coast, too?”
Uncle Jake began to type on his laptop keyboard. “I mean all over, all over. I’m talking North America, Europe, Asia…”
“Are you kidding me?” asked Kevin, peering over Uncle Jake’s shoulder at the screen.
“Iraq, North Korea, all those places you think might be doing it to us…well, it’s happening to them, too. Doesn’t mean they’re not faking the footage, but we’ve got reports of U.S. troops in the Middle East saying that soldiers on both sides just started hemorrhaging.”
Missy wanted to throw up, but she thought that was a pretty good way to get booted out of the shelter, so she did everything she could to resist the urge.
Her parents didn’t answer their phone.
“People are just dying everywhere,” said Uncle Jake. “Maybe even the scientists in Antarctica are keeling over. What if this is really it? What if this is really the end of the world?”
“It’s not the end,” said Kevin. “It’s going to be fine. I mean, not for everybody, not for the blood-gushing people, but just on our drive over we saw that others are immune. I’m not saying that there’s a plus side to all of this, but let’s not turn it into something bigger than it is.”
“Not bigger than millions of people dead?” Missy asked.
Kevin sighed. “I’m not going to apologize for having a ‘glass half-full’ kind of attitude. We could be one of the dead people.”
“My mom and dad might be dead,” said Missy. She wasn’t intentionally being a downer, but still…
“Okay, look, I’m not trying to be all rah-rah-rah, life is awesome,” said Kevin. “I’ll just be quiet.”
The shelter began to rattle.
It was a mild rattle at first, just enough for everybody to glance at each other with a “Did you feel that shit?” look. But it quickly gained intensity, knocking the bad paintings off the walls and causing Missy to almost lose her footing.
The lights went out.
Missy stood in the darkness, trying not to scream. When she felt a hand grab hers, she did scream, but it was just Kevin.
The rattling stopped.
A few seconds later, the lights came back on, much dimmer than before.
“We’re on the generator,” said Uncle Jake. He pressed some keys on the laptop and tried a few clicks of the mouse. “We’ve lost Internet.”
Missy looked at her phone. “I don’t have any signal.”
“So this is it,” said Uncle Jake. “I don’t even know what to say. I knew this kind of thing would happen eventually, but…wow…” Missy put a comforting hand on his shoulder.
Uncle Jake pushed back his chair and stood up. He removed the hood of his radiation suit.
“We still don’t know—” Kevin said, but Uncle Jake waved him off.
“We do know. At least I know. I can feel it. In some ways, it’s like I’ve spent my entire life preparing for this day, but now that it’s here, I don’t know what to do. I never had many friends, and most of my family won’t talk to me, and I’ll admit that I’m not a huge fan of humanity in general…but, damn, I can’t believe this is really happening…”
“But we’re safe now,” said Kevin. “As bad as things are, we made it here, and that’s what’s important. We’ll get through this. We just have to be strong.”
Uncle Jake shook his head. “Nope, I don’t want to live in this world,” he said, right before he picked up the revolver, shoved the barrel into his mouth, and pulled the trigger.
His body dropped to the floor.
Missy and Kevin both screamed for a very long time.
When they were done with the incoherent part of their screaming, Kevin switched to actual words: “What the fuck, Uncle Jake?”
Missy bit down on her fist in an effort to briefly stop screaming.
“Oh my God, oh my God,” said Kevin, kneeling down beside Uncle Jake’s body as if there might be a medical treatment for blowing one’s brains out. “Oh, God…”
Eventually, Missy was able to stop screaming without keeping a fist against her mouth. A short while after that, she was able to stop hyperventilating.
Finally, she was able to speak.
“There’s never going to be a good time to ask this,” she admitted, “but did he ever tell you the code for the lock?”
CHAPTER THREE
After a brief discussion, Kevin and Missy decided that the most important thing for them to accomplish was to arrange it so they could stop staring at a gore-laden corpse. Kevin, being a total sweetheart, offered to handle this himself, but Missy couldn’t let him do that. If this was the apocalypse, she had to do her full share of the work. She couldn’t let other people drag the bodies of suicidal uncles out of the way by themselves.
She did, however, let Kevin take the upper half, which was far messier. The shelter didn’t have a freezer or a spare bedroom or anyplace convenient to store him, so the best they could do was drag him into the corner and toss a blanket over him.
“Should we say something?” she asked.
“Like what?”
“Like, you know, a eulogy?”
Kevin lowered his head. “Uncle Jake, you were a good man, but killing yourself was a dick move. Amen.”
“Amen,” said Missy.
“I’m going to clean up the blood and…the other stuff that came out of his head,” said Kevin. “See what you can do with the lock.”
Missy nodded and walked over to the ladder. She climbed to the top and pushed on the hatch lid. The lid didn’t budge. She pushed as hard as she could without wrenching her arm out of its socket or falling off the ladder. Nope. This thing was sealed tight.
“What was Uncle Jake’s birthday?” she called down to Kevin.
“Ummmm, he was a Pisces, I think.”
“You don’t know the day?”
“No. Do you know the birthdays of all your aunts and uncles?”
“Can you think of any four-digit number he might have used as a code?”
“Not off the top of my head. Is there a police code for batshit crazy?”
There were ten thousand options. Missy had no idea where to start.
Maybe he’d left it at the factory settings. Missy punched in 0-0-0-0.
Something buzzed. It did not sound like a “Congratulations! You have entered the correct code, and the lid will now unlock, allowing you to leave at your leisure!” buzz.
The display read INCORRECT.
She entered 0-0-0-1.
INCORRECT.
1-2-3-4.
INCORRECT. TOO MANY ATTEMPTS.
Missy cursed and climbed back down the ladder. “I may have screwed us. It only gave me three tries.”
“Maybe it’ll reset. No reason to freak out quite yet.” Kevin closed his eyes and took several deep breaths, looking as if he were having a bit of difficulty not freaking out. “Okay, we can’t worry about that right now. We have other problems. How long does it take a dead body to smell bad?”
Missy shrugged. “Depends. A few days, maybe?”
“That long? I would’ve thought less. More like a couple.”
“Maybe it’s a couple. I don’t know. It’s not like we had lectures about corpse decomposition rates in high school.”
“We had one in biology. It was probably one of the days you cut class. Anyway, the temperature’s cool down here, and I doubt there are any bugs, so you might be right about it being a few days.”
“What do bugs have to do with anything?”
“Bugs speed up decomposition.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
“Hmmm. Yeah, I guess that makes sense. Afternoon make-out sessions cost me a lot of knowledge.”
“Anyway, I’m sure we’ll be out of here before he starts to rot.”
“God, I hope so.” Missy glanced at the floor. There was a small white chip a couple of feet away from Uncle Jake. “You missed a piece of bone,” she said. She suddenly felt unbearably sick to
her stomach, which was kind of surprising considering that she had already witnessed the moment when the bone was propelled from its skull of origin.
“Sorry,” said Kevin. He quickly picked up the bone shard and dropped it into a small plastic garbage container.
“Thanks,” said Missy. “Okay, we need to get information about what’s happening outside. We don’t know if the Internet is actually down-down or if it’s just not working in here right now. If you try to fix that, I’ll take inventory of what we’ve got.”
Kevin nodded and sat down in front of the computer. Missy walked over to the food shelves. The supplies were vast, though this sure didn’t look like enough to sustain her and Kevin for two and a half years. There were cans of baked beans, pinto beans, black beans, green beans, pears, and peaches. Missy hated all varieties of beans, except for jellybeans, of which there were none. But at least they had more than enough protein to avoid the awkward “Technically, Uncle Jake is edible” conversation.
Another shelf had packages of instant mashed potatoes, pasta, and various other non-perishable items, along with saltine crackers and peanut butter. Missy opened a drawer and found a can opener and various other utensils. A cabinet contained three sets of dishes.
Were her parents dead?
Stop it. Missy put that thought out of her mind and went back to distracting herself by taking inventory.
Were they calling her right now, blood dripping all over the telephone while they prayed for her to answer?
Enough. They’re fine.
They weren’t fine. Nobody was fine. That green smoke was everywhere, and for all she knew, almost everybody in the world was dead. She and Kevin could be the only two people left alive.
“We’ll be okay,” said Kevin, pushing back his chair as she began to cry. “We’ve got it made down here. We’re way better off than most people.”
“I wasn’t worried about us.”
Kevin nodded. “Yeah, I know. I’m sure your mom and dad are okay.”
“You don’t know that!” Missy screamed. “We don’t have any idea if they’re still alive or if they’re choking on their own blood! Don’t act like everything is just wonderful!”
Even before she finished shouting at him, Missy realized that she was being a complete bitch. He was only trying to keep her from completely losing it. (Apparently without great success.) He wouldn’t do either of them any favors if he ran in circles around the shelter wailing “All is lost! All is lost! The dark shadow of doomsday is upon us!”
