Summer of the Apocalypse

by James Van Pelt

  “Sure,” she said, but she seemed distracted. Another rush of wind smacked his back, and this one was distinctly cooler, like an open refrigerator door, and he wished he had a soda, something sweet and bubbly in a glass with ice-cubes clinking. He felt like he’d been breathing soot for weeks.

  “It’s smokier,” she said.

  “Might be cooling off,” said Eric. “Maybe another storm.” Leda dropped her backpack and sleeping bag to the pavement and flinched when the breeze hit the broad patch of sweat where the pack had rested. She pulled the shirt away from her back, ran to the brick wall and climbed to the top.

  “What’re you doing?” asked Eric. She faced back the way they had come, shading her eyes from the sun. She looked… jaunty up there, her hair stretched back, white cotton shirttails fluttering behind. He turned and gazed down the road, squinting as the wind picked up, carrying dust and smoke and a strong, harsh, burning odor. A dark barrier rose from the mountains: thunderclouds, ebony and deeply gray. Shapes boiled up within them, like a sea of fists and black babies’ heads. As he watched, the storm’s top edge touched the sun and swallowed it. The temperature dropped another five degrees, reminding him of something, as if he’d done this before. He shook his head to clear his thoughts.

  “I need to get higher,” Leda said. “Come on.” She jumped to the other side of the wall and out of sight. Eric caught up to her as she pounded on the front door of a brick tri-level. She waited a second and pounded again, three quick whaps that rattled the window.

  “Nobody home,” she said. “Or dead. We’ve got to get into the garage.” Confused, Eric said, “It’s going to rain. Maybe we should find some place to wait it out.” But she’d already disappeared around the corner. He shrugged his shoulders and followed. The sky grew darker.

  The deja vu returned and he suddenly placed the memory: it was the eclipse, and with the darkening, the dropping temperature, he felt an overwhelming sense of doom.

  When he was six or seven, Dad had started talking about a “total eclipse of the sun,” and he talked about it for weeks. One day, he seat-belted Eric into the car and the two of them left. Mom stayed home. He didn’t know why. They drove south until late that night, Eric reading comic books. Air blasted through the open window, ruffling Dad’s hair. Eric snuck shy looks at him. Once their eyes met, and Dad winked. He seemed so confident and strong, so focused on the road. Palm on top of the steering wheel, he made tiny corrections to keep them on course. Eric tried to rest his elbow on the door’s edge too, but he was too short. When it became too dark to read, Eric watched the lights out the window: farm houses mostly. Occasionally they’d flash by a gas station alone on the highway, its neon sign a pool of radiance in the night. “You’ll appreciate this when you’re older,” said Dad. “You’ll only get to see this once.” They’d slept in the car at a truck stop. Dad crammed in the back seat, his head against the armrest, his knees bent, and Eric took the front. For hours, it seemed, Eric lay on his back, sleepless, watching the stars through the windshield. He had no idea what a “total eclipse of the sun” was, but he was excited. It’s Christmas, he thought. It’s better than Christmas, because we have to drive a long way to get there. A tiny flutter tickled in his stomach, and he almost squealed for joy. Eric scrunched his eyes closed and tried to will himself to sleep.

  The next day, after another nine hours of driving, and after crossing the Mexican border, they pulled to the side of the road. Dad kept checking his watch. Puzzled, Eric climbed out of the car and sat next to his dad on the hood. Up and down the two-lane highway, Eric could see other cars parked like theirs. Some people had telescopes, and others held up sheets of paper or cardboard and let the sun’s tiny image fall through a pinhole onto another sheet of paper. Dad had a similar contraption and showed Eric the circle of light no bigger than a pea.

  “It’s starting,” Dad said, almost in a whisper. Eric looked at the paper, but nothing seemed different. He glanced up.

  “Don’t,” said Dad, startling Eric. “You can’t look at some things straight on.” He pulled Eric around and held onto his shoulder. “Here,” he said.

  Eric looked at the pea-sized light again, but now he saw a tiny notch taken out of one side. Under his dad’s heavy hand, Eric squirmed uncomfortably. Why have we stopped out here? he thought. What’s the big deal? He wanted to climb back into the car and read a comic. Then a horrible realization came to him: this is it. This is why we’ve come so far. This is a total eclipse of the sun. Choked with disappointment, he looked at the image, and slowly, ever so slowly, the notch grew bigger.

  “I don’t want…” began Eric.

  “Shush!” said Dad and tightened his grip. Over half the sun’s image had vanished, like a dark coin sliding across a bright one.

  Eric looked up, and he blinked. Everything seemed shadowy, and the after-image of the partially eclipsed sun kept crossing his vision. He tried to blink it away. A happy buzz of talk from a group of people standing by a car fifty yards up the road caught Eric’s ear. They too stared at the sun’s image. One of them, wearing sunglasses, stood apart looking directly into the sky.

  Then, gradually, the air dimmed more and chilled. In the mutated light, the land looked alien. Even with other people in sight, Eric felt isolated, like he and his dad were lone explorers in a new world. Birds he hadn’t really noticed before quit chirping. Without knowing why, Eric began crying. Now, in Littleton, clouds covering the sun, the houses and lawns almost purple in the odd light, Eric felt like he was once again at the eclipse. Dad hadn’t explained to him what had happened until they were driving home. He’d assumed Eric knew what an eclipse was. For the weeks before, he’d thought Eric was excited as he was about the chance to see one. “It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” he said repeatedly.

  Leda twisted the garage door handle, but the door wouldn’t budge. “Dang,” she shouted. Her vehemence startled him. The wind pushed her hair in front of her face, and the bitter smoke caught in Eric’s throat. He coughed hard, once, and squinted his eyes against it, then rubbed goose-bumps off his arms. This is weird, he thought. Wind’s cold, like winter cold, but the smoke smells hot. Leda said, “You going to help, or what?”

  “How about that window?” he said. A clean, pink and blue geometric patterned drape hid whatever was in the garage. He pried a decorative border-brick out of the garden and heaved it through the glass without a qualm Careful of the glass he looked in. It was hard to imagine that they were actually breaking into someone’s house. Not only did he feel that in some way no one owned this house anymore, but that the whole city was unowned. Even though two tricycles were entangled by the back door, that a tennis racket, three baseball bats and a fishing pole stuck out of a cardboard barrel by a work bench, and that a sign above the cluttered bench read, “BLESS THIS MESS,” he couldn’t imagine the people they belonged to. He felt like an explorer as he had with his dad, like a Conquistador. Absurdly, for an instant, he thought about “claiming” the house, but he couldn’t come up with a sovereign to claim it for, and he decided Leda might think it stupid. She was clearly agitated.

  “Help me up,” said Leda.

  Eric stepped between her and the window. “You’ll cut yourself.” He tugged sharp-edged glass teeth out of the frame. Leda stared to the west, where the sky grew increasingly dark.

  “Hurry,” she said. “We need to find a ladder.”

  Eric shook his head without understanding and removed the last piece of glass. “Okay.” Once inside, Leda yanked the manual release on the garage door opener and slid the door up its tracks, but the outside wasn’t that much lighter than the leaden interior. Eric spotted a ten-foot extension ladder hanging from a pair of hooks. He took one end while Leda carried the other, and they set it against the side of the house. Leda swarmed up before Eric was even sure the ladder was firmly planted. He rattled the ladder, then followed her.

  Leda, bracing her tennis shoes against the siding, leaving a pair of smudges, chinned herself from t
he low garage roof to the higher roof above the second story. Running lightly, Eric jumped and caught the edge of the roof on his chest, easily levering himself up beside her.

  “It’s an advantage to be tall,” he said, but she was peering west and didn’t seem to hear him, or the clamor of wind might have swallowed his words.

  “That’s what I thought,” she shouted.

  “What?”

  Eric looked back the why they’d come. Through the smoke at first he noticed the clouds, now directly overhead, blackening the sky and hiding the mountains, They’d lost their shapes, and become a single, sullen, flat gray, plate-seeming to rest only a hundred feet above and stretching north, south and west. To the east, a thin line of blue vanished as he watched.

  “Not there,” Leda said. “There.” She pointed to where the road crested over a hill they’d come over a mile or so away. Smoke obscured his vision, then the distance cleared and he could see the intervening ground: closest to them, hundreds of house roofs poked through a broad expanse of trees bending in the wind. Beyond that, closely packed stores and warehouses crowded Bowles Avenue. Open field, golden with waist-high, dry prairie grass stretched both north and south behind the business areas. He saw nothing odd.

  “Check the horizon,” Leda said. Her hand traced the shape of the hill, and she waved to show the clouds above.

  More smoke blew in their faces, and Eric turned away until it lessened. He wiped his eyes and studied the empty reach of road. A flicker of movement caught his attention. It was a black dog, maybe a Labrador Retriever, racing down the street. A few blocks farther, he spotted another pair of indeterminate breed, running their direction like greyhounds. He thought, what are they running from? and he looked at the clouds again. On the horizon, outlining the hill and the line of building and fields on either side, the cloud’s color was different. Not the flat gray like that above them, but a seething, dark, dark red.

  He started to ask, “What is that?” but he knew. A bright line of flame crested one side of the hill. Pushed by the wind, it flowed through the grass like water and washed against the backside of one of the mini-malls. A flash of light and flame enveloped the building, and a few seconds later, the dull whump of the explosion reached them. Flame broke over the top and the other side of the hill simultaneously. As far as he could see, in both directions, fire flew along the ground toward them.

  “We’ve got to find a safe place!” yelled Leda. She hopped onto the garage roof, lost her footing on the pitch and almost slid off the edge before catching herself.

  Eric leaned into the gale, which was really brutal now, and watched the flames for another instant. Wind flattened it out. It didn’t look like a campfire, but like a blow-torch, nearly horizontal. A building in the path caught fire before the flame reached it. He realized the air in front must be super-heated. Nothing could stand up to it for long. He hopped down, careful not to fall, and followed Leda down the ladder to the ground.

  “No place will be safe, Leda. We’ve got to outrun it.” They hopped the brick wall. Leda recovered her pack and sleeping bag, shoving her arms into the straps.

  She breathed hard, but not panicked. “The wind’s forty or fifty miles an hour. It’ll catch us.” A piece of plywood large enough to cover a picture window blew across the lawn behind her and splintered in two against a light post.

  “Listen,” Eric said. He grabbed her arm. She tensed as if to pull away, then relaxed. The sound of a few more explosions reached them. Probably gas tanks, he guessed. Leda’s dark hair streamed in front of her face. She cleared it away impatiently. Eric continued, “We don’t have to run far.” He pulled her along with him. “The Platte River is a half-mile, maybe less. If we can get to that, we’ll be safe.” She looked over her shoulder, nodded and started running down the street. Eric followed. For a block he kept up with her, his long legs matching her efficient jogger’s rhythm, then he stumbled and almost fell. She didn’t see him, and he regained stride. His legs were like rubber, and he remembered he hadn’t eaten anything decent for… he couldn’t come up with the last full meal he’d had, but it must have been at the cave. Since then he’d had a few handfuls of beef-jerky, a couple of cans of peaches, some Oreos and Twinkies from the Wal-Mart, and that was it.

  The street dropped down a hill and through an intersection. Eric looked both directions as he crossed under the dead traffic signal. Then Bowles Avenue angled left. Leda turned with the street, and Eric stopped himself from yelling at her to go straight. He figured the river must be just beyond those houses, but he wasn’t sure. Maybe the river curved, or, more likely, the fences and hedges would slow them down more than the distance to the water they’d cut off. He kept running.

  Two blocks later sparks flew overhead, and he glanced back. He almost fell again, watching the treetops. Flame and smoke hid the center of the four-lane street a few hundred yards behind them, and he guessed that the house they’d stood on was already burning, but what was happening to the trees caught his attention now. Like long-fingered hands unclenching from fists, the wind stretched balls of flame from one tree to the next. For a second, the flames caressed the next victim, then the green tree burst into yellow, sickly light. Eric gasped at the sight and took in a lung full of caustic air. All the ornamental oaks, the willows and aspen, the birch and pine planted on the expensive front yards in little stands of three or four, lined along the property lines like sentinels, unwatered and dry as tinder, provided jump points for the fire.

  Wind creaked the trees’ branches as he ran, and he realized that the closer they got to the river, the thicker the trees were.

  A house behind a low brick wall and across a long stretch of lawn directly to his left exploded. A billow of white and orange pushed the windows out, throwing a piece of the roof into the sky. “What?” Eric yelled in surprise. There wasn’t fire within four blocks of them yet. Then he tripped. Pavement rose toward him. He saw it coming, and he rolled his shoulder. As he fell, he thought, I’ve got to bounce right up. Dad’s waiting. A second explosion ripped the house. Something whistled just above his head and whanged into the matching brick wall on the other side of the road. He hit partly on his shoulder, partly on his back pack. He heard a crunch, and his shoulder-blade went numb. Against the wall, bent in half, rested a snow shovel. A light pink gash in the darker brick showed where it had hit. Dully, he realized he’d smacked his head too.

  A heavy thud in front of him shook the ground, and he looked up. At first what he saw was Leda, still running from the fire. Good for her, he thought. Go, Leda. Then, a few feet to the side, almost to the sidewalk, a metal semi-circle stuck out of the pavement. It took him a second to recognize it: a manhole cover. Gas in the sewers, he thought. The house must have filled with it. The whole street could go. He imagined the network of pipes under him loaded with natural gas. Why don’t they all blow up?

  Eric didn’t hurt, but when he tried to push himself up, his right arm wouldn’t hold his weight. He fell back to the road. He couldn’t feel his hand. He lay there for a second, focusing on the pavement, looking at his fingers stupidly, as if they belonged to somebody else, and suddenly, the idea of rising and continuing the race to the river seemed too hard to him. His head throbbed. It’d be so much easier to stay here and rest a bit. And even as he thought this, another part of him knew he should be running. But the pavement feels so good. I’m tired, he thought. I’ve done more than anyone can ask. More than Dad could ask. He shifted his weight so he could look back at the flames, and he heard the crunch that he’d heard when he fell. Shaking his shoulders, he heard it again. It must be the flashlight, he thought, not a bone. A tingle in his hand and arm confirmed it as feeling flowed back into them.

  Blast-furnace hot, the wind pushed against his face. He screened his eyes and peered between his fingers. There was something beautiful about it. Up the street, a two-story cedar-sided house stood silhouetted against the fire. Then, a corona formed on the sides and roof, bright, so bright the house became a bl
ack form in the middle of the burning border. His mouth opened wide in surprise. The image was close and familiar; he’d seen it before, on a sheet of paper standing with his dad on a Mexican highway: the dark dot in the middle surrounded by light. An eclipse. A two-story, suburban, cedar eclipse.

  “Come on, Eric. Get up!” Leda yanked on an arm, almost throwing him to his feet. “How far now?” she yelled. A steady roar like a freight train filled the air.

  Shuffling his feet, Eric started after her. She pulled him into a run. He felt muddled. “Did you see the eclipse?” he asked, and he knew she would have no idea what he meant, if she even heard it. She ran backwards, dragging him by his hand. “Come on. Come on. Come on,” she chanted. Eric thought, She’s holding my hand again. Just like Wal-Mart. Orange light reflected in her eyes. Eric caught the urgency and lengthened his pace. She shouted, “That’s it. That’s my boy.” In front of the aching, scorching wind, Eric ran. On the backs of his legs, he could feel it. Running full stride now, Leda beside him, he felt heat on the back of his head, like a hot compress, singeing his ears. Bowles Avenue curved right, and he saw the river. Beside it, River Front Mall, a huge, all-glass shopping center, glowed with the light of the fire behind them.

  “The bridge,” Eric tried to say, but the air was too hot and caught in the back of his throat so he nearly gagged. To both sides, houses burned. Leaves curled up, darkened and caught fire as the storm raced ahead of them. Eric pointed at the bridge, and he could feel the skin on his arm prickling like a sunburn; the bridge was down. A fifty-foot slice was missing from the middle.

  It’s okay, he thought, and no part of him was afraid. He felt calm. Like he had before at the cave when Jean Jacket and High School held guns on his father; and when Beetle-Eyes nearly killed him, and again when Meg started drawing blood, he remained unemotional. The situation was clear. We don’t need to cross. We need to get in. Sparks whirled around him, in front of his face, in his hair, on the back of his neck. And he tried again to speak, but breathing the toxic air hurt too badly. His voice was gone. Without hesitation, as if she heard him anyway, Leda pulled him off the road, down the river embankment. A canopy of fire whooshed just overhead, barely missing them, nearly reaching across the river. Only the sudden slope of the bank saved them.