Summer of the Apocalypse

by James Van Pelt

  “Ten minutes, tops,” said Eric. They turned onto West Aberdeen Avenue. When he was five, he had chased an ice cream truck down this street. He’d delivered papers here when he was twelve. He knew who lived in most of the houses. The white-bricked one with the lavender trim belonged to the Stewarts, whose two daughters were on the student senate at the school. The Isenbergs lived in the cedar house. Their son, Chaim, was the only Jew Eric knew. Beyond them were the Johnsons, the Cardwells and the Gizzys. All with busted in windows and no signs of life. Home, he thought, I’m nearly home. Leda said, “A couple of week ago, gangs started going around setting cars on fire, breaking windows, beating anyone well enough to be on the street. Not just kids either. Old guys. Sick, angry. People shot anyone coming to their doors. Scary stuff. They were just afraid, I guess, and they couldn’t do anything about it, so they lashed out.” She brushed hair away from her face, then waved her hand at the houses.

  “Probably this happened late. One or two guys with baseball bats or something, fever just starting, little bit of itch in their throats. Nothing left to do. Everybody dying and all that glass unbroken. Must have seemed like some kind of metaphor.”

  Eric sighed gratefully; his shoulders relaxed, and he realized how tense he’d been. It was the most she had spoken since this morning.

  A movement behind a mini-van parked in the Gizzy’s driveway across the street caught his attention. A Doberman, its ears up and pointed, watched them intently. As they passed, Eric saw that its muzzle was torn, and part of the side of its head was ripped as if it had been in a fight or had collided with some barbed wire.

  Leda continued, “Of course, the gangs only lasted a few days. The bug caught ’em, or the National Guard or the helicopter boys.”

  The Doberman stood. Another dog, a collie, emerged from the shadows by the house and joined him. A couple others lay in the shadow, their mouths open, panting.

  “That’s a big dog,” said Leda. It stepped toward them. “Nice puppy,” she said.

  “Looks well fed.” Eric scanned the ground for a rock or stick, but grass lapped against the sidewalk, and the dead roses in the flower bed sprawled over mud. He shuffled along sideways, keeping his face toward the dog. Sweat beaded under his arms although it was still cool. “What do you think he’s been eating?”

  “Gross thought,” said Leda, walking backwards, watching the dog. “Kibbles and Bits?” Growling and stiff-legged, the Doberman crossed the gutter onto the edge of the street. Leda raised her hand over her head and mimed a throw. It ducked and retreated a step, then started barking. The other dogs stood, heads low, growling deep.

  Eric said, “They don’t seem too friendly. Maybe we just need to get out of their territory.” He remembered dogs from when he carried papers, and he thought he recognized the collie from the Kissle’s house up the block. It had always greeted him at the door with slobbery licks on his hands when he collected once a month, but it didn’t look playful now with its lips raised off its gums and its tail straight down and still.

  Eric kept moving, thirty feet, fifty feet. Heads low, the dogs crossed the street, matching their pace. The Doberman led, still barking: loud, repetitive, explosive, insane-sounding.

  “How big’s their territory?” asked Leda. Her low, calm voice comforted Eric. He swallowed dryly. Step by step, the dogs advanced.

  Eric said, “No sudden movements.” Then the other three dogs started barking. “Run!” he yelled, and he sprinted up the lawn.

  Arms pumping, breath tight, Leda beside him, he headed for the broken picture window above a knee-high growth of shrubbery. Barking stopped, but a frantic clatter of claws on asphalt spurred him on. He thought of his Achilles tendons, unsocked, glaring below the short pants, crying out “Meat, meat, meat.” And he knew the thought should have been funny, but it wasn’t. He dove through the window, trying not to land on the broken glass, Leda right with him, and they slid across a hardwood floor into a gray and blue pin-striped sofa. A Tiffany lamp on an end table, teetered, fell, and shattered on the floor. “Up! Up!” he yelled, pulling on her arm. Barking boomed outside the window, and he saw them hesitating. He thought, maybe going into a strange house was too new for these dogs who’d learned to adapt so fast. The Doberman circled twice, howling, all black gums and shiny teeth, then charged the bushes, the others in tow.

  “Shit!” Leda pushed him in the back, and they scrambled into a short hall with three closed doors. Eric tugged at the first door knob, and it didn’t turn, then things began to slow down for him, became almost dream like. Leda reached for the knob when Eric’s hand slipped off. She’d cut her palm; a shallow flap of skin waved free and blood streaked her wrist. Her dark hair hung down, covering her face. Eric thought, we’ll have to get that cut wrapped.

  Still, while he stared at her wrist (a drop of blood broke free and floated lazily to the floor), since so many horrible things had happened to him in the last few days, since so many times he’d been running or scared, the oddness of his detachment occurred to him. He thought, four months ago I was going to school, watching MTV, and now I’m hoping a stranger, an older woman I slept with last night, can get a door open in sombody’s house before a man-eater dog can attack me. He thought it almost laughable. A scratching noise in the living room and then a series of thuds told him of the dogs’ progress. Then a distinct metallic sound from beyond the locked door. Leda pulled, and he heard from the other side a semi-loud chink-chink, like someone shaking a bottle full of coins up once then down. I know that sound, thought Eric.

  “Get away!” hissed a voice on the other side.

  Leda looked toward him in surprise, her hair flying in her face in slow motion, her own teeth bared, her hand on the knob. The Doberman rounded the corner, tensed his thighs and sprang for Leda’s throat. A connection flashed in Eric’s mind, a sound memory from a scene in Terminator II: Linda Hamilton stalking the second terminator, the one made of liquid metal. Mad as hell, she marched toward it, her one arm hurt or broken, and in the other hand she held a pump shotgun. In a real strength move, one that marveled Eric then, she chambered a shell home with one hand. She jerked the gun up and down once. Chink-chink.

  Eric caught Leda’s arm and threw himself backwards. Her head jerked. The dog sailed toward them. They fell.

  Suspended, the Doberman hung in the air, mouth agape, teeth luminous.

  Then a section of the door blasted out, catching the Doberman, throwing it against the wall. It almost seemed to stick for a moment, and Eric thought he saw, in the second before it slid wetly to the floor, a look of profound disappointment in its furious face. Cordite and burnt wood smoke eddied to the ceiling. Cowering, the other dogs stood at the entrance to the hallway. Eric thought, I didn’t even hear the shotgun.

  Chink-chink.

  Grabbing Leda’s collar, Eric scrambled backwards to the next door, which swung open easily under his pressure. Still on his backside, he pulled Leda after him. She kicked the door shut.

  “You’re choking me,” she gasped, and he let go of her collar.

  “Get out of my house!” screamed a voice, and the roar of the gun was deafening this time. In the hollow ringing that followed the explosion, the sound of alphabet blocks scattering across the floor seemed unnaturally loud.

  “Get away from my baby!”

  On the wall adjoining the other room stood a crib, a tightly sheeted bundle resting in the exact middle of a bare mattress. Chink-chink. Another shell in the chamber! thought Eric. A pie plate-sized hole appeared in the wall, knocking a corner off the crib blowing sheetrock dust in on them. Eric stood, picked up a kid’s rocking chair and heaved it through the unbroken window. While Leda flopped a blanket over the ragged knives of glass and went through the opening first, the repetitive metallic cocking of the gun followed by a click beat out a manic rhythm, and a rising wail penetrated the wall. Filled with grief and death, and hardly human, the sound chased them out of the house. Later, after they’d crossed two more lawns, passed through two more
picture windows (careful to yell out before entering, “Anyone home?”), down two more bedroomed hallways, shutting doors behind them, and crawled out two more bedroom windows to throw off the dogs. They sat with their backs against a sun warm cinder block garden wall.

  Eric said, “Looks like you cut your hand.”

  Sweat soaked Leda’s maroon shirt in wide circles from her armpits to the her belt. Her head was back and her eyes closed. “Yeah.” She breathed deeply and when she exhaled, she shuddered. “Guess not everybody’s dead yet.” Quietly she watched as he tore a sleeve off the shirt, then wrapped her hand. Next to them, water dripped sporadically from drooping branches of a willow. Nearly touching the grass, the longest branches appeared to set the drops down as if they were washing the ground, or baptizing it. Silence stretched between them—she sat, cradling her hand in her lap, staring blankly across the grass—but the silence calmed Eric. He didn’t feel awful about her anymore, sad that she hated him, but not upset. They’d shared sex and near death, and of the two, death was more overwhelming. Nearly dying unites people, he thought. “How long do you think we were in that house?” he asked, making small talk. He guessed that the whole incident from the time they dove through the picture window until they hurdled the chain link fence in the back yard was less than a minute.

  “An hour and a half… a lifetime,” said Leda.

  Faraway, dogs barked. Eric listened intently; they didn’t seem to begetting closer. “Let’s go,” he said.

  “We’re nearly there.”

  Leda nodded and pushed herself upright.

  When they rounded the corner onto Panorama St. a few minutes later, and his house finally came into view, he thought, how will I face him? They turned up the driveway. What will I say? Glass sprinkled the front yard here too. One of the curtains hung outside the window. He thought, I’m not the same as I was a week ago. I’m not the same kid.

  He opened the front door.

  Chapter Nineteen

  SACRIFICIAL BOOKS

  That’s an elaborate story,” the quaky voice on the other side of the door said after Eric finished explaining who they were and why they were in the library’s basement. The voice, who had introduced himself as a Gone Time survivor, asked, “How do I know you’re not just a clever liar?” Despite the quiver, the voice seemed learned, each word carefully pronounced.

  Eric pressed his forehead against the wood. Outside, the bullhorned announcement boomed over and over, “Give up your books for the good of the people.” His feet hurt. Water from the tunnel had soaked his boots, and now his feet felt hot and damp.

  “Let us in,” Eric said, exasperated. “I tell you, I’m seventy-five years old and have walked all the way from Littleton because I thought you might be able to help us. My friend here lives in the mountains. We don’t have anything to do with those people threatening the library.”

  “So you say. If you are seventy-five, than you’re lucky to have got this far.” The voice sounded as old as Eric felt.

  “Ask me something from the Gone Time. Not something I could have read in a book. If you’re as old as you say you are, then you’ll know what to ask.”

  Through the wood, Eric heard a whispered discussion, but he couldn’t catch any of the words. Sour-faced, Teach sat on the trap door at the bottom of the stairs behind Eric, scraping the last of the muck off his water-darkened moccasins.

  Finally, the voice said, “Okay. Three questions. If you answer them correctly, then we will open the door. If not… we will use the Old Science against you, and you will die.” Eric smiled wryly at the phrase “old science” and the doomsday tone the voice used to say it. He guessed that the people in the building, whoever they were, had held off Federal’s men with such a warning, but it sounded ridiculous to him, almost superstitious.

  “Ask away,” Eric said.

  The three questions were, “What did the phrase, ‘Plastic or paper?’ mean? What exactly was the Pepsi Generation? and, What was call waiting?”

  After he answered, several locks clicked, then the door swung open revealing the same white-smocked, elderly woman who’d surprised them as they exited the tunnel, and a truly ancient appearing man in a wheel chair.

  Nearly bald except for a fringe of wispy white hair that reached to his collar, and dark liver spots that marred the smooth skin on his head, he scrutinized Eric through a milky-gray cataract haze, but he seemed to see fine as Eric crossed the threshold. The woman stepped protectively to the old man’s side. Eric looked past them. His eyes widened. Rows of books stretched behind the man in the wheelchair, thousands and thousands of books, lit only by narrow shafts that slipped through the cracks between the boards on the windows. Grinning broadly through yellowed and broken teeth, the old man extended his hand toward Eric. “I’m Pope,” he said, “the Librarian. I thought Federal had killed all of the Gone Timers but myself.”

  “Yes,” said Eric, and shook his hand absently. As far as he could see, stretching into the darkness, from floor to ceiling, were books. He walked past the old man, down the nearest row, trailing his fingers across the bindings. “Yes,” he repeated. Eric thought, I’m here at last, and the books survived. A smile ached on his face. Fatigue dropped away from his legs and back. Leda, he thought, if you could only see this. You were right, about the learning, about the persistence of knowledge. At thirty-nine, when she’d discovered she was pregnant, she’d said, “The child has to be taught, Eric. Promise me that we’ll teach him to read.” Even after fifteen years together he still shivered in amazement at her love. Her dark hair framed her face, and the only signs of age were tiny crow’s-feet in her eyes’ corners, but her gaze was so intense that he’d been taken aback. “Of course,” he said. “Why wouldn’t he?”

  She hadn’t smiled, didn’t break the stare. She’d said, “If something happens to me, you will have to be his teacher.”

  Not enough light penetrated for him to see titles, but the backs of the books felt fine and solid. He passed his fingers across the embossed letters of a thick, leather-covered volume, then inhaled deeply and smelled the library smell, millions of pages pressed together, the weight of thought and information heavy in the air. “Oh, Leda,” he whispered. “Oh, Troy.”

  Something lightly touched the back of Eric’s leg. Pope sat in his chair beside him. Eric had not heard the chair rolling. “We share our time in books, don’t we?” whispered Pope. “This has been my life work.” Eric grasped Pope’s wrist and squeezed gently. “They are beautiful.” Deeper back in the rows, more narrow streaks of sun penetrated through the boarded windows, casting thin, buttery light on other books standing neatly on dustless metal shelves.

  From behind him, the woman said, “We ought to go upstairs. It’s not safe down here.” Reluctantly, Eric turned away to follow Pope, the old woman and Teach to an elevator. “How do you power it?” asked Eric.

  Raising himself slightly from the chair, Pope pushed the up button and the doors slid open. “Generators on the roof and solar panels spread throughout the campus.” Eric, Teach and the woman stepped into the elevator. Pope blocked the doors with his chair. “Tell me again why you’re here.” He rested his chin on his chest as Eric told him of the troubles in Littleton, of the illnesses and stillbirths. Pope nodded his head slightly at each detail, as if in agreement.

  Teach cleared his throat after a few minutes of this. “Seems like a closet’s an uncomfortable place to get to know each other.”

  Pope let the door close and pressed a button. Teach’s shock as the elevator rumbled into movement tickled Eric.

  On the second story, a muslin curtain covered one tall, partially open casement window that overlooked the quad in front of the library. Pope said, “We can see out, but they can’t see in.” Seven large army tents filled the back third of the grassless area, and five heavy machine gun nests built of sand bags faced the structure. Behind the tents, and on both sides between red stone buildings, the ubiquitous scrub and greasewood stood, a wall of tough vegetation th
at encircled the camp. The loudspeaker, still blaring its message about giving up the books, hung from a pole beside the middle gun nest. A few yards from the broad marble steps that led to where Eric guessed were the front doors a rolled barb wire fence blocked the entrance. Behind that, a ditch paralleled the long front of the building. By leaning close to the muslin, Eric saw the ditch and wire made a neat ninety-degree turn at the far corner. No soldiers were visible.

  Pope said, “Federal surrounded us two weeks ago. It is pathetic, really. His men lie in that ditch, watching twenty-four hours a day. Meanwhile, my people come and go as they please through the tunnels. They think the buildings are haunted, because of us, so they are even unaware of the tunnel entrances.”