Summer of the Apocalypse

by James Van Pelt

  Climbing around a particularly treacherous stretch of sharp-edged rock silenced them for a minute. Eric spotted where the slide ended and the fishing trail, as fresh and vivid as when he last saw it, began. After they stepped off the slide, they splashed water in their faces and cooled their necks on a grassy shore by the creek. Dodge refilled their canteens.

  They picked up their backpacks, but didn’t put them on as they looked for a comfortable place to eat lunch. Above the trail, Rabbit found a spot of soft grass shaded by a juniper, and they sprawled comfortably.

  “What else about shelf life?” asked Dodge. Eric wished he had a cigarette. He had only smoked tobacco for two or three years after the plague, but the urge still hit him strongly sometimes. “This is kind of a lecture,” he said.

  “We don’t mind, do we, Rabbit?” Rabbit shook his head. Dodge said, “We like your stories.”

  “Well, this isn’t a story.” He dug into his pack for a jar of crabapple jelly. “A loaf of bread stays fresh for a week if you keep it wrapped up, right?”

  Dodge held out a hard biscuit for Eric to put jelly on. “Right.”

  “Well, then we can say its shelf life is one week. Shelf life is how long something stays good. Bread has a short life unless you freeze it; then it lasts longer.”

  Dodge said, “But we can’t freeze things because we don’t have ’lectricity.”

  “Right. But this isn’t a problem because flour, salt, sugar, eggs and yeast either have long shelf lives or are always available. Shelf life, though, doesn’t just apply to food. Lots of technology from the Gone Time had limited shelf life. Batteries, for example, are fairly obvious. A battery stays good for up to five years, or so, then it’s dead. Even a rechargeable one. Ammunition, gasoline, florescent light bulbs and many medicines chemically degenerate. The problem is that we don’t have access to the raw materials, or we don’t have the technology in place, to replace the items with limited shelf lives. Imagine if we didn’t have flour, salt, sugar, eggs and yeast how long it would take to run out of bread.” Dodge said, “Well, we could store up a bunch and it would last a long time.” Rabbit said, “Shelf life. One week. Doesn’t matter how much you have.”

  “So, is this what you were arguing with Dad about?” Dodge rested on his back, looking into the sky.

  “Exactly,” Eric exclaimed. “Your dad wants to have his cake and eat it too. On one hand he says that we don’t need to read, and on the other he wants to keep finding Gone Time technology to maintain the community. He wants to scavenge, but he doesn’t want to learn how to make these things ourselves. What’s important is not finding a warehouse filled with leftovers from the Gone Time, but teaching ourselves how to make them again. The answers are in the books, and that’s where we don’t see eye to eye.”

  Thinking about Troy normally depressed Eric, but today, sitting with his grandson, eating crabapple jelly by Clear Creek, he felt fine. Something about this spot was restful: the way the light reflected from the water, or maybe its musical clattering as it swept around the canyon’s bend. Now he could see their disagreement as philosophic, not solely personal. If he could figure a way to bridge the argument about relearning Gone Time knowledge rather than relying on or abandoning Gone Time technology (Troy seemed to want to do both), then they could work on their real personal differences. The philosophic chasm just complicated matters.

  “I don’t understand,” said Dodge. “Why did people forget?” Eric thought, this is the essential problem: why people forgot. “The plague scared people. For a long time after, they kept expecting to die. The ones that didn’t go insane, and there were many, grieved over their dead and worried about living. And during this time, so much technology was lying around that no one thought how to make more of it. The water plants shut down and the electrical generators quit working, and nobody knew how to run them. They were too big and required too many knowledgeable technicians to throw the switches. People just survived, sort of like we are now. Some of us forgot because we didn’t want to remember.”

  Rabbit munched on a handful of sunflower seeds. “Cars sound like fun, but I’m happy here, right now. A car or a book won’t make lunch better. Don’t you like this?” He waved his hand at the creek, the trail that ran below them and the spray of wild flowers along the bank.

  Surprised, Eric looked at him. Rabbit never talked about himself, how he was feeling.

  “This is a nice spot,” agreed Dodge. “I like the way the mist floats on the river. Kind of like ghosts.” Eric noticed the heat from a half hour earlier had dissipated. A mist was rising from the water, and a cooling breeze bent the grass around them. “Yes, it is,” said Eric. Goose bumps rose on his arms and neck. He was trying to remember. He had been here before. He inhaled deeply. The air smelled, oddly, of tangerine.

  Dodge spoke, but Eric missed it. “Excuse me?” he said. He looked at Dodge.

  “I didn’t say anything,” said Dodge.

  In the corner of his vision Eric sensed movement, and a flash of delicious inevitability flooded his head. He didn’t have to look to know what was coming. He had been here before, not just this place but this time.

  Trudging toward them on the trail, a teenage boy, a bike slung over his shoulder, looked up at Eric. What struck Eric first was the boy’s unwashed hair plastered to his forehead. Smaller details, the cassette player hanging from his belt, the wire leading to the speakers around his neck and the Air Jordan sneakers he noted, but what Eric concentrated on most were the boy’s sunken and exhausted eyes. No one had ever looked so alone to him; so abandoned, lost and alone.

  The boy glanced down. Eric almost called out to him, but he realized there was nothing he could say. Eric wasn’t even sure if the boy could hear him. He doubted it. Then his eyes watered, and he blinked the tears away.

  The boy was gone.

  From the old watch post, U.S. 6’s appearance had changed considerably. Despite the height, Eric could see weeds pushing through the asphalt and rocks cluttering the road. Eric found it hard to imagine the same road crowded with traffic. He remembered the scene, but he couldn’t feel it anymore.

  “Come on, Grandpa,” yelled Dodge. “I want to see the cave.” He and Rabbit stood at the cavern’s entrance holding hastily constructed torches. Eric guessed they might give them five minutes of light if they were lucky.

  Dodge said, “I’ve never been in a cave before.”

  Rabbit lit one torch, handed the unlit ones to Dodge and Eric, then led them into the crawl way. On his hands and knees, Eric followed Dodge. The acrid smoke from the torch stung his eyes, and he couldn’t see anything anyway, so he squeezed them shut and continued to crawl.

  He butted into something soft. “What…” Suddenly, Dodge’s rump pushed into him. “What…” Eric said again.

  Dodge screeched, “Back! Back! Back!” Deeper in the cave, Rabbit swore. Eric tried to turn around, whapped his head against the rock wall, then backed up as fast as he could. The stone roof snagged his shirt and pulled it snug against his armpits before ripping. Dodge smashed Eric’s fingers twice and kicked him in the chin as they retreated.

  Panting loudly, they stood outside the cave. Rabbit had lost his torch and his left elbow oozed blood. Dodge’s nose bled freely from a kick Rabbit had delivered, and Eric rubbed his chin gingerly.

  “Rattlesnakes,” said Rabbit. “I got into the room, saw the boxes you told us about, then I heard buzzing. Cave’s full of them. Must have been two-hundred.” He sat heavily. “I don’t mind a snake or two, but sheesh!”

  Dodge held his nose to control the bleeding and said nasally, “I thought your face was on fire or something.”

  Cautiously they inspected the other entrances. All were homes for rattlesnakes. The system of cracks and crevices provided an ideal environment for a large rodent population, and the snakes were evidently well fed. They could find no way in.

  “So what’s special about this cave anyway?” asked Dodge. The sun touched the canyon rim to the west. Although
it was only mid-afternoon, they could expect no more direct sunlight. Eric thought about the last time he’d been here, the summer after the plague. He and Leda had parked their four-wheel drive at the blocked tunnel, then carried a shovel and pick to the cave. He’d dug in the rocky soil most of the day to excavate a hole deep enough to hold his mother. Leda inventoried the items in the cave and packed the most useful ones to the highway.

  They’d wrapped the black plastic tightly around Mother, carried her out and buried her. He’d thought of her as a big woman, incapable of being budged once she set her feet, but her body seemed so light. She was no trouble at all to carry to the grave.

  He had a hard time relating the two versions of himself in his memory: the one who listened to rock and roll under his headphones and worried whether school would be canceled or not, and the one a year later who with his wife drove a car he’d taken from a Chevy dealer’s car lot to bury his mother. It seemed as if he’d lived two lives.

  “This is where I started to grow up,” Eric said. “I wanted to see it again.” He led them to the grave, a flat patch of ground between matched boulders near the top of the ridge. He’d chosen the site because the rocks sheltered it from the wind, and it was a good high place to rest. He barely recognized the spot. No sign remained of the wooden cross he’d made, and the ground was no longer bare. A knee-high bed of Columbine covered the entire area like a blue fog. Their delicate stems and petals trembled in a breeze too slight for Eric to feel. He paused at the edge of the bed.

  “Where’s the grave?” asked Dodge.

  Eric knelt and passed his hand over the flowers, letting the fragile blossoms brush his palm. He remembered Mom in the backyard of their Littleton house, knees firmly planted in earth she’d just turned over, carefully pushing bulbs into the garden in expectation of the spring. Mother had always believed in the spring, in regeneration. She’d said once, “A flower proves nature is an artist.”

  “She’s buried by that boulder,” Eric said. “Underneath this…” The Columbines shimmered in the canyon dusk. “… this… blue quilt.”

  Dodge said, “Doesn’t look much like a grave, Grandpa.”

  Eric sighed deeply. His breath shook a little when he exhaled. On his knees, the flowers spread out before him like an affirmation of beauty and life, and he recalled when he first went to school how he’d kneel on a footstool in front of his Mother so she could comb his hair. He felt her hand on the back of his neck and her breath in his face.

  “That’s the way it should be,” he said. “Nothing ought to look like a grave.”

  “Shush!” said Eric. He put his arm across Dodge’s chest to stop him. They were almost to the old watch post. “I saw something.” Rabbit stepped past Eric and surveyed the road. Sun shone on the canyon wall east of them, but deep blue shadows filled the valley Eric had stood watch over years ago. He looked west, toward Idaho Springs. Whatever caught his attention wasn’t moving now.

  Rabbit said, “I see them.”

  “Who?” asked Eric.

  “Don’t know, but they’re sitting by the creek.”

  Eric strained his eyes. All he could see was foam on the rocks and a scattering of low plants lining the river. He squinted. Nothing.

  “Where? Are they ghosts?” said Dodge.

  “By the bank, there,” said Rabbit. He pointed. “Two by that rock and another on the shoulder.” Frustrated, Eric gritted his teeth, then turned his head—an old hunter’s trick—and let his peripheral vision go to work.

  Dodge said, “Ah, I see.”

  Eric dug into his backpack for binoculars. When he found them, Rabbit was halfway to the road. “What’s he doing?” Eric hissed.

  Dodge sighed. “He’s always going off on his own. Lots of times when we scavenge he’ll leave me, and I won’t see him for the rest of the day.”

  Eric focused the binoculars where Rabbit had said he saw the figures by the creek. “He’s not going to find anything. Nobody’s there.”

  Dodge said, “’Course not. Soon as Rabbit moved, they took off.”

  “Where?”

  “Up the slope.” Dodge shivered. “They might be ghosts. I watched them until they reached those bushes…” He pointed to a half dozen scraggly clumps of rabbit brush that couldn’t hide a good sized marmot, “…then they kind of melted into the ground.”

  Eric raised his eyebrows.

  “Honest. Like coyotes. You see them for a few feet, then they’re gone.”

  “Were they people?”

  “No.” He gulped. “They were b….” He colored and looked away.

  “Dodge?”

  “You won’t believe me.” He crossed his arms across his chest. “You’ll laugh. It’s just a story they tell little kids to scare them after dark.”

  “What’s the story?”

  “You won’t make fun?” Dodge asked. Eric shook his head.

  Rabbit reached the road, crouched low and ran on the shoulder next to the canyon wall, keeping out of sight of the creek. Eric swept the length of the canyon with the binoculars. Nothing.

  “It’s about the Gone Time. Dad told me the story when we went hunting. He said that in the Gone Time people were very proud. That they flew higher than birds and clouds, that they drove faster than arrows in their cars on the roads, that they lived in the buildings we scavenge, but that the buildings were beautiful and rose thousands of feet in the air. He said there were so many people that I could never count all of them because babies would be born faster than I could tally.”

  Dodge paused and looked at Eric. “Is all that true, Grandpa. Are all the stories you told us true?” Surprised, Eric said, “Of course. Why would I lie to you?”

  “Grown-ups make up stuff. I know about Santa Claus, and he’s a lie.” Rabbit reached the spot where he’d said he’d seen the three figures. He stood on the edge of the road, looking left and right.

  Eric stroked his grandson’s hair. Dodge reminded him of Troy, who had been hard-headed and skeptical. Troy had never believed man had walked on the moon, or that Denver used to glow at night like a sea of stars.

  “Santa Claus is different. The Gone Time is history, and history is real.”

  “Like Star Wars? Eric sighed. How could he teach Dodge the difference between reality and fiction when both sounded so fantastic? “I’ll have to explain that later. What was the story your dad told you?” Dodge looked disappointed, but he continued. “He said the Gone Time people got so proud that they spread all over the Earth building towns and driving their cars and watching their TVs. He said no one had to work because machines did everything and all they did was write poetry and go to parties.” Eric smiled at Dodge’s fractured version of history. “The stories you tell about the Gone Time don’t sound like that, but I’m just saying what Dad told me. Anyway, he said the Gone Time people kept knocking down forests and filling up the world till there wasn’t any place for the Bugbears.”

  “The Bugbears?”

  “Yes. Dad said they lived on the Earth before people did, and they didn’t mind sharing, but when there was no place for them to be private anymore, they came out of their holes in the ground and their secret places in the trees that were left. They touched people on their foreheads when they were sleeping, and when they woke up they got sick and died. The Bugbears went to everybody’s houses and decided who was bad, and they touched them.” Dodge pressed his finger in the middle of his forehead. “Good people they kissed and let live.”

  “You think those were Bugbears by the river?”

  Dodge nodded. “Dad said that sometimes you can see one if you’re real quiet for a long time. I figure it’s Bugbears that have been following us.”

  Rabbit trotted on the road toward them.

  Eric said, “That’s as good an explanation as any, I suppose.” He shouldered Rabbit’s backpack and his own. “Let’s get off the mountain. Unless you want to spend the night with rattlesnakes?” Rabbit waited for them at the bottom.

  “Did you see them?”
asked Dodge when they finally reached Rabbit. He shook his head. “Nothing there but a footprint on a rock. One of them must have stepped in the water.”

  “But where did they go?” said Dodge.

  Rabbit took his backpack from Eric and slipped the straps over his shoulders. “Don’t know. They’d have to be mountain goats to climb that hill.”

  Dodge started hiking toward the blocked tunnel. “Bugbears,” he said. Eric expected Rabbit to laugh or say something derisive about Dodge’s theory. Instead, Rabbit looked at Dodge and raised his eyebrows as if to say, “Could be.”

  After they pitched camp and doused the campfire with creek water, Eric lay on his back staring into the canopy of stars, each as bright and sharp as a new needle. He felt that tonight, if he stared hard enough, he could separate the individual stars in the Milky Way. If he just concentrated, he could pick out the planets circling each, count their moons, follow the paths of wandering comets alone and cold with no sun to burn them.

  The grave had him thinking about his parents. I’m seventy-five, he thought, and I miss my mom. I miss them both. Of all the people he’d ever known, of all the reactions he had seen to the plague and the change in the world, they had seemed the most flexible and resilient.

  He pushed his hands under the small of his back. The extra support always felt good when he wasn’t sleeping on a mattress.

  “Are you awake?” asked Rabbit. Eric rolled his head to the side and saw that Rabbit was sitting up in his sleeping bag, leaning against his backpack. The night was too dark to show his features, but his eyes glistened, reflecting the little light there was.

  “Yes,” said Eric. He looked back into the stars. Willow tree leaves rustled at the edge of the glade near the junction of U.S. 6 and Colorado 93 where they had eaten dinner in the dark before bedding down.

  “Do you believe in ghosts?” asked Rabbit.

  “Yes,” said Eric without hesitation. The answer hung in the air between them for a long moment. For some reason, with the start piercing the blackness above, with the little bit of breeze fluttering through the willows, he felt Rabbit had asked the most important question a human being could ask. We’re on the brink of understanding our world, thought Eric. It’s about ghosts, almost six-billion of them, and everything they left for us. Real ghosts, mythical ghosts and metaphorical ghosts. They’re everywhere. I can’t ignore them.