Summer of the Apocalypse

by James Van Pelt

  Eyes closed, he leaned against her, and she against him, until finally he relaxed. The crisis passed. Breathing felt fine and normal and smooth. Goosebumps faded away. The sense of emergency that had harried him for days dropped off. Something else had changed too; he felt bigger, somehow—not older really, just bigger, as if the room had shrunk a little bit, as if he had grown within himself. He gave her one last hug and said, “Help me move this desk, will you?” Dad had said the key fit a drawer behind it. She let go, rubbed the back of her wrist under her eyes and took a position on one corner.

  “Sure.”

  Crushed between the back of the desk and the wall, a bundle of papers fell over as they pushed the heavy piece of furniture. Eric gave his side one last heave, moving it another foot, then picked up the bound sheets. Setting it on the desk, he undid the ribbon that held them together and looked at each wrinkled document: the house mortgage, a list of bank accounts and their balances, a handful of stocks, a legal looking paper with a key taped to it giving Eric the right to open the safety deposit box, and all the warranties to the major appliances in the house. Forty-two twenty dollar bills filled a new, white envelope, and at the bottom, he found a will and power of attorney naming him as the sole executor of the family’s assets.

  “He must have thought that you might outlive him,” said Leda. Her hand rested on his back as they leaned over the papers. “Looks like they were dropped, then the desk was pushed up against them. Why were they on the floor?”

  “Don’t know. They seem kind of useless now,” said Eric. “Let’s see what he left me in the drawer.” Eric dropped to his hands and knees behind the desk. At the bottom in one corner, he found a small knot-hole big enough for his key to fit it, and when he looked very closely, he saw the outline of the drawer in the wood, about the right size to hold the papers on the desk. The grain and finish hid it well. Only someone who suspected that the hiding place might be there would have a chance of finding it. He inserted the key and unlocked the drawer.

  Inside, Eric found a single sheet of note paper. He read it, sat for a moment, reread it, then handed it to Leda.

  Eric relaxed against the wall, his feet braced against the desk. Leda put the paper down. “It’s complete now,” said Eric. “No unanswered questions.”

  Dad made it, thought Eric. They blew up the tunnel so he couldn’t come back to me. There were no ambulances in Golden. He saw how bad things were. There was no place to go but home, and that’s what he did.

  Eric thought about the trip to see the eclipse when he was ten. Dad assumed I knew what an eclipse was. A thousand mile drive and he never once asked his ten-year-old son if he knew what an eclipse was!

  Dad must have continuously assumed I knew things. Mom said Dad never shared what he thought, but there, at the end, he tried. He made it home to leave me a message, not knowing whether I’d find it or not. He died not knowing.

  That knowledge hurt.

  Dad left it anyway, Eric thought. At the end, he must have realized what Mom knew, that he assumed too much from me. At the end, he wanted to leave one thing, and this is what he left. It must have been the most important thing.

  Eric reached up. Leda handed him the note. He read it for the third time. In shaky script—recognizable but not firm: not well—it said, “I have always loved you. Dad.”

  “There’s advantages to the downfall of civilization,” said Leda as they walked out of the Littleton Target with new clothes, backpacks and supplies. She had chosen a man’s blue work shirt and had tucked them into her jeans. Eric thought the look complemented her. “I don’t need to go to work in the morning.” Eric struggled to fit the stiff, surgical tubing over the aluminum rods of the new sling-shot while at the same time carefully picking his way between the tumbled and smashed shopping carts that littered the parking lot. “No driver’s license test for me,” he said.

  “No April 15th.” She led them toward the river. “We ought to find a place close to the water. Bottled stuff we can drink, but bathing could be a problem.”

  “Sounds good,” said Eric. “You can forget Superbowl Sunday hype.”

  “Yeah, and Christmas decorations up before Halloween.”

  “Or elevator music.”

  “Rock and Roll rules,” she said.

  The late afternoon sun turned the river a mellow gold, and they walked south along its bank until they found an empty house with unbroken windows. After knocking loudly several times, Eric pried open the front door with a crowbar. “Useful tool,” he said. “We don’t need keys anymore.” Leda checked the bedrooms, and Eric looked into the basement. Her voice floated down the stairs. “I don’t need to remember my social security number.”

  They met in the living room. “All clear,” she said. “This will do for now, but we’re going to have to do some planning. Find other survivors. Set up for the long haul.”

  “The government should send help eventually.” Eric shrugged his shoulders out of his backpack, letting it drop to the carpet.

  Leda seemed to contemplate that comment for a bit before saying, “Could be a while.” She crouched next to her pack and began removing canned goods, big cans in back, little ones in front, like kids for a school picture, which Eric thought amusing. He realized there was much to learn about her. He opened the drapes and windows. Having dropped below the mountains, the sun turned the clouds violet and pink. Light painted the foothills a soft blue and the plains a dusky yellow. “You know,” he said without turning from the window, “I don’t know your last name.”

  She stepped beside him. An empty road between them and the river followed its contours in both directions until it was lost to sight. No traffic. Not a single, mechanical or human sound. Farther up stream, the water rushed over and around the broken cement of what once was a bridge.

  “We don’t need last names anymore,” she said.

  That sank in for a while. Then, he nodded in agreement.

  Later that night, long after he’d drifted to sleep in a four-poster single bed decorated with beige lace, with the windows open and the river mumbling its secrets in the dark, his bed moved, jarring him awake. Leda snuggled against him, and they made love. In the midst of it all, in the heated, passionate ecstasy of it all, Eric imagined their sounds echoing among the empty buildings, the silent town, with no one to hear.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  ALEXANDRIA

  Lost in shock, Eric was shrouding Pope’s face with a clean smock that had been draped over the back of a chair, when a young man rushed into the radio room. Eric ignored him. The motion of hiding the face felt studied and graceful. He released the smock’s shoulders and the cloth settled on Pope’s features. Only the hands resting on the armrests remained uncovered. “He asked me,” said Eric, and he waved at the switches, each with its ominously glowing light above it. He added, “You know, they killed a boy.” The man stared at the dead librarian, his mouth open. Finally, he stuttered, “We only have a minute or two. Hurry.” He hustled Eric out of the room and down the stairs. Apathetically, Eric allowed himself to be led.

  At the basement entrance, the young man blurted to the elderly woman what he’d seen and heard, then joined a line of people heading through the basement door. She turned to Eric. “You helped him?” Eric nodded. “Thank you,” she said. Her lined eyes scrunched closed for a second. “He was a visionary. The staff will miss his guidance.” She gripped his hand tightly, then returned to directing the line of people.

  “I’m sorry,” Eric said to her back. He thought, I should find this fascinating. Where did these people come from? What were they doing in the library? But he felt numb. He could see Rabbit running across the quad to save the burning books. The unyielding surface of the glass still rested on his palms. He thought of a term from the Gone Time, the slow motion replay, and that’s what was happening in his head, over and over, Rabbit dashed toward his death. Everything else seemed to be happening too rapidly—events rushed— and he didn’t feel he could keep up.


  “Quickly, quickly,” she said and coughed. An acid bite flavored the air. She patted each person on the shoulder. All wore white smocks. Most were young, under thirty, and several children took their place in line. A few carried boxes, a few, one or two books, but most were empty-handed, their faces nervous but controlled. The evacuation seemed rehearsed. Noxious smoke billowed across the ceiling. Within a minute, the last one passed through. Eric bent low to avoid the fumes.

  “You need to hurry too,” she said.

  Age and brittleness overwhelmed him. Joints ached—elbows, knees and fingers—skin and muscles dangled from his bones. He felt like an empty vessel. Eric sat on the floor. Flame crackled but he couldn’t see it through the murk. This seems fitting, he thought. He didn’t have a plan, just an urge to quit, to let the library burn all around him. Rabbit died, he thought, because of me. I brought him here, and he died for nothing. I destroyed the library. The long journey’s a failure. We can’t be helped. The effort to keep his head up seemed too much. “I’ll stay,” he said. Metal groaned from deep in the smoke, and then something crashed heavily.

  “Come on,” she said urgently, and pulled at his arm. “The building’s doomed. You’re not.” She dragged him backward a few feet, and mostly through her effort, not his own, he clambered through the trap door and into the tunnels.

  “Move,” she said. Low wattage bulbs lit the tunnel until it curved out of sight. The last of the other people disappeared around the turn as he watched. “We have to be beyond the campus before the perimeter goes up.”

  “Perimeter?” said Eric dully.

  “Yes.” She pushed him in the back, almost knocking him over. He staggered forward through the shallow water, splattering gray splotches onto the curved walls. She said, “We’ve extended the tunnels.”

  “The perimeter!” Eric could see again the scene in the quad, but instead of Rabbit, he watched Teach carrying Dodge and Ripple into the greasewood, the thickly wooded, dry brush that choked nearly all the open space in Boulder. Eric picked up his pace, outdistancing the elderly woman. “Teach is with my grandson out there. I’ve got to warn them!”

  Eric turned into the first cross-tunnel, even though no lights illuminated its length. Blind, he ran forward, brushing his hand against the wall, feeling for a ladder. He pictured Pope’s map on the wall, each number representing a bomb in the outlying buildings and the spaces between them. Even on a still day, the ring of fire would close in and burn out the center. The fire would create its own draft. Federal and his men would be trapped—that would be Pope’s Pyrrhic victory—but so would anyone else. Behind him, the elderly woman shouted, “It’s too late. If they’re within the perimeter, it’s too late.” Sound and touch guided him as the rough cement ripped at his palm and each step shot splashes of water up his pants legs. She shouted something undecipherable behind him. Still, he ran, sucking great gulps of moist tunnel air. Finally, his hand slammed into a ladder, and he swarmed up the rusty rungs. But even as he climbed, comprehension came to him, and the futility of his effort slowed him down. With no surprise, he found the padlock holding the trap door closed at the top of the steps. Back down the tunnel, he heard the cautious footsteps of the old woman.

  “We’re on a countdown,” she called. “We have to get out.” Her disembodied voice came up to him. “You can’t help him by dying down here.”

  Eric said, “Why burn the whole university? Why burn the books?”

  “I’ll show you, but you have to come right now. We may already be too late. Besides,” she said as Eric descended, “with all the shooting, your friend would have been smart to leave. He’s probably far away.” Bile rose in Eric’s throat. Teach’s strategy isn’t running, he thought, it’s to get off the main path and then not move. Teach’s strategy is to hide. He could be crouched behind some bush on campus right now, still as a deer.

  “Hurry,” she said. “Time is running out.” She beckoned, her form outlined by the light behind.

  “We’re at least ten feet deep,” Eric said, defeated, realizing that what she’d argued was true: he could do nothing. “Burn it to the ground and we wouldn’t know.” Everything’s gone, he thought. Dodge outside, unaware of the danger to come, and in the library, flaming fingers reaching everywhere, flowing across the rows and rows of books. Perfect tinder, a book: dry, thin, crisp. Irreparable.

  “It’s not that,” she said, panic rising in her voice. “The tunnel’s wired too. We have to be beyond it or we’ll be trapped. You weren’t supposed to stop.”

  Again, he found himself running, more like shuffling now, following her through the lit tunnel, passing one cave-black side passage after another. Whatever youthful energy that had spurred him up the ladder was gone. He sucked thin lungfuls of air that came and went too quickly to help; water weight dragged at his pants’ legs. He thought, How long since I threw the switches? They went past another side passage. She talked as she kept up behind him, panting out words. “Big explosive… seals the tunnel… little ones… along the way… finish it…. All entrances… blocked. Tunnels… collapse.” He thought he heard Dodge’s voice in his mind. “Grandfather,” it called. Fear and guilt spurred him on. Maybe, he thought, Teach will get him off campus. We’ll meet up. Then I can take him home. Eric pushed the possibility that Dodge might die down as hard as he could, determined not to think about it. He picked up his pace. Lights flicked by faster. We have to get home, he thought. Pope’s message was not all negative. I’ll get Dodge—oh God! let them escape!—and we’ll warn Troy and Littleton. We can get upstream into the mountains, drink only rain water. Pollution may be rampant, but it might be slowing. Radiation might be higher, but maybe not deadly; Pope didn’t say.

  “There,” she gasped, pointing ahead to a large green box mounted on the side of the passage that became more visible as they rounded the slight curve. It blocked two-thirds of the tunnel, leaving just enough room for a person to fit through. “The bomb… We have to be… beyond it.”

  “How much time?” The box loomed before them, and as Eric approached, he sidled to the opposite side, away from the explosive.

  She slowed, as if a sudden movement might set it off. Her white hair had pulled free of the ribbon that held it back, and strands of it stuck to the sides of her face. “Chemical fuse. Five minutes minimum. Eight or nine minutes tops.”

  Dodge’s voice came to him again, a remote echo, “Grandfather?” Eric stopped and cocked his head, listening, the bomb within arm’s reach, and the old woman collided with him, her eyes wide and wild.

  “Go,” she hissed, and pushed by, careful not to touch the box.

  “Did you hear that?” He remembered the vivid memories that had come more and more often lately, the inability to separate what was happening with what he recalled. But the voice sounded real.

  “What?” She kept moving farther down the corridor, putting distance between her and the bomb. Indecisive, he took two steps the way they’d come.

  “Don’t be a fool,” she said, backpeddling.

  “I thought I heard something.”

  She kept retreating. “I have to go,” she said, almost apologetically. “I’ve got a responsibility. Pope’s dead.” She started running again and shouted back to him over her shoulder, “I’m the Librarian now.” Her footfalls banged away.

  Eric ran to the first cross tunnel. “Dodge?” The sound bounced back from an unseen, far wall. He listened intently. Water seeped out of a crack over his head and dripped steadily onto the floor. Around each small bulb suspended from the ceiling, a subtle nimbus glowed, casting edgeless shadows of pipes and conduits on the walls. “Dodge?” he cried again.

  Clanging echoes of his own voice bounded around him. He looked back. The woman was gone, and he staggered forward, alone, in the tunnel whose bare walls offered no hope in either direction. Chest hurting, hand scraped, wet and loggy with fatigue, he felt profound isolation, like a marble in a long tube rolling nowhere. Forward or back, he could barely tell the difference.<
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  Further down, from the next branch, a voice called, “Eric?” It was Teach. Slime underfoot nearly cost Eric his footing as he rushed to the opening and turned into it, running several paces away from the lit tunnel. “Dodge!”

  Out of the darkness emerged Teach and the children. Teach said, “When the library caught fire, I guessed you’d go underground. I broke another lock.”

  Dropping to his knees in the shallow water, Eric pulled the slender young boy to him. Dodge’s wet face trembled against Eric’s own.

  “Rabbit,” sobbed Dodge.

  “I know.” Eric stood. Tears marked the dust on Ripple’s cheeks. “We have to run. There’s a bomb.” Catching Teach’s eye, Eric said, “What about Federal?”

  Looking grim and determined, Teach fingered his knife. “He’s dead.” They started toward the lit corridor.

  The lights went out.

  Dodge tightened his grip on Eric’s hand. Ripple inhaled sharply. Pure blackness.

  “Was this supposed to happen?” said Teach.

  Eric extended an arm and walked forward until a damp wall blocked his path. He lost his orientation. Which way? he thought. Did I come from the left or the right? Sickly, he recalled reversing directions several times before he’d got here. And, he thought, how much time has passed?

  He’d thrown the switch—that started the bomb’s timer—covered the body, ran down two flights of stairs, climbed into the tunnels, ran some distance in them, went back for Dodge, Teach and Ripple. How much time?

  “Left or right?” asked Ripple, parroting Eric’s thought.

  “I don’t know. Right,” said Eric, pulling on Dodge’s hand, keeping his arm in front. Teach crowded behind him. Underfoot, the cement vibrated, then Eric’s ears popped.

  “Was that it?” asked Ripple. “Are we too late?”

  Her voice seemed to come from nowhere, as if she were drifting in space. The blackness was absolute, as solid as obsidian. “No. Too small. Too far away.” He thought, I turned right to get them. “Back, back, back!” He about-faced, put his hand out again and straight armed Teach. “We’re going the wrong way.” Within a few strides, Teach’s silhouette took form, and a few steps more around the gradually curving tunnel showed the bomb. Ceiling lights in a line beckoned beyond. Must be a different circuit, he thought. Breath came to him in quick sips. “Quickly, now,” he said. “That’s it.” In Eric’s head, a large stopwatch ticked off seconds. He giggled, a high pitched giggle that echoed metallically around him. He’d drug up a weird Gone Time association. It’s Sixty Minutes, he thought. Now for a few words from Andy Rooney. Only they won’t be words, and there will only be one. Looking larger and more ominous than before, the box raced toward them. How long, Eric thought, is five to nine minutes? Surely twice that time has passed.