Summer of the Apocalypse

by James Van Pelt

  Ripple reached it, ran by. Teach turned his shoulder, ran by, letting go of Eric’s hand, Dodge faced it, then ran by. Finally Eric slid his back along the cement, the box’s smooth surface catching a glint from the ceiling lights. His own breathing thundered in his ears; heartbeats throbbed, a death-clock. From within the box, a sharp snap, like a mouse trap.

  Eric froze.

  It’s a dud, he thought, and then he was beyond, following Teach, Ripple and Dodge who waved frantically at him to hurry from thirty feet farther along. He tried to laugh in relief, but he had no wind for it. All urgency fled. Dodge’s alive. We’re safe now. Besides, he thought, I’m an old man. What can they expect from me?

  Running toward them as best he could, he attempted to get out the words about the bomb, to let them know the danger had passed. Then their faces lit up as if the sun peeped through a gap in the clouds, and a mammoth hand picked him up from behind. His last thought was, I’m flying. Something on his forehead cooled his brow and felt fine. For the longest time, Eric let the pressure of it hold him down, and he drifted. How old am I? he thought. Where am I now? Sounds swam around him, water whispers like voices murmuring, and for a while he believed he was in the house in Littleton where he and Leda had first stayed after he’d discovered the note from his father. He’d woken once in the middle of that night, her arm under his head, the bedroom window shimmering with moonlight, and the river gurgling and chuckling outside. She’d shifted in her sleep, snuggled closer but hadn’t wakened. I just need, he thought, to roll over and open my eyes, and there she’ll be, black eyelashes pressed together, her face an inch from mine. I’d kiss her on the corner of the mouth. Press my lips lightly against her, a clandestine declaration of love. She’d never know I’d seen her sleeping by the silvery sheen of the summer moon.

  The damp weight lifted off his forehead—he wrinkled his brows—the compress returned.

  “You’re awake,” someone said. Eric struggled to hold onto his unconsciousness, the pleasing lassitude, the painless ease of the past, back to the four-poster bed done in beige lace, but it was too late. Dodge leaned over him. “Grandfather?” he said. Eric tried to sit, and a grating pain in his left shoulder jerked him into full wakefulness.

  “It’s broke,” said Dodge. “You’re not supposed to move.” The dark-haired boy adjusted the blanket under Eric’s chin. “You slept all night,” he said.

  Lifting his head hurt too, but he did enough to see the dark-rock walled room lit by a single frosted bulb hanging from a wire. “Help me.” Bracing with his right arm, he pushed himself up from a thin mattress. A wave of dizziness swept through him, and he nearly fell back. Dodge supported him. Shifting the weight of his arm ignited new pains in his shoulder.

  “They said you should stay still,” said Dodge. “I told them you wouldn’t go for it.” The young boy sounded triumphant.

  “Where?”

  Dodge helped Eric stand. Steady now, the shoulder only ached. A sling held it tight to his chest. Keeping hold of Dodge’s thin shoulder, Eric limped to the door.

  “You’ll see,” said Dodge.

  Outside the door, hundreds of lights circled a large, high-ceilinged room that at first Eric thought was a mausoleum. Black, square recesses, wide and tall enough to accommodate coffins, checker-boarded the stone walls. Fifteen feet away, in the center, around a cement table sat Teach, Ripple and the old woman.

  “Welcome to the real library,” the old woman said, smiling. Eric joined them. The old woman looked at him keenly. “With Pope gone, you are now the last of the Gone Timers. This can be a place for you to stay. You can help us preserve the past. From here, the Gone Time will be restored.” Confused, Eric glanced again at the deep gray stone walls, and the clearly man-made space. The impression of a tomb struck him even more: the walls of stone, the carved niches side by side and stacked to the ceiling. Despite the electric bulbs, shadows dominated the room, and no light penetrated the squares cut into the stone.

  She stood stiffly. “Cool air catches me in the joints.” Then she shuffled to a wall. “Did Pope say anything to you about the ancient libraries?” She faced them, her form bent and haggard in the room’s harsh light.

  “It was his greatest fear that we’d suffer the same ignominy here.” Her voice cracked. Despite her age, she sounded like a lecturer, a college professor. “Three years after the plague, he drafted his plans.” She waved her hand inclusively. “It was a two-part strategy. Part one was the excavation of the chambers, and part two was this.” The old woman put her hand into one of the niches and removed a mirrored plate about the size of a tea saucer.

  “It’s a…” Eric moved closer, searched for the word, “a computer disk.”

  “Compact disk, with enough space for hundreds of megabytes of information. If it’s pure text, this disk will hold more than a full set of encyclopedias.” She carefully placed it back in its spot. “Within this chamber are over eighteen-thousand disks: the entire library, including pictures and diagrams, speeches and video. For the last fifty-seven years, Pope and the library staff have devoted themselves to preserving all the learning we have on these disks. They wore out and replaced computers and scanners and laser disk recorders, but they didn’t quit. He wouldn’t let them. Oh, his perseverance.” Her tone became reverential. “He knew the technology. He nurtured it, and he had the drive to make this all real.” Eric looked into one of the niches. Several score of disks stood side by side on edge in a marble tray. From where he stood, each disk caught a little of his reflection, an eye and a portion of his forehead. Behind that tray, a line of trays extended to the end of the four foot deep cavity. He plucked one disk out of its slot. It was nearly weightless, blunt-edged. The mirrored surface caught the chamber’s light and broke it into spokes of color radiating from the hole in the middle.

  The old woman cackled. “The plan’s beauty is that the library itself will motivate man to rebuild. All knowledge is here, but when our last computer breaks down, it will be unavailable until technology can duplicate the readers. Pope thought of everything. He carved instructions on gold plate just inside the surface doors to the repository. Mankind must rise to learn.” The old woman sounded like an apostle now, filled with zeal and passion. “Of course, he hid the entrance. We can’t have the hordes in here before they are ready. No, that would be no good at all. The doors are hidden, but man will find it again. That was Pope’s dream: man will discover the treasure under the mountain. None of it disappears.” She scanned the room, her survey deliberate as her gaze wandered from section to section, as if she couldn’t believe the achievement herself. “Archival quality polymers in the disks. Highly stable,” said the old woman. “Under ideal conditions acid free paper might last a couple of hundred years, but it would be susceptible to fire, moisture, insects and wear and tear. Compact disks resist heat, cold, pests and mildew. They may last… well… forever. Until man is ready again.”

  In wonder, Eric replaced the disk. All was not lost. The building was gone and the books burned. The library, however, still stood. He rested his palm on the top of the disks. From little finger to thumb, how many millions of words? he thought. How big a pile would the tomes beneath his hand make? Then, suddenly, in swelling horror, he thought of something else. “All the library’s books?” he said. “The Chem and Biology libraries too?”

  “Yes.”

  He fell against the stone wall, pressing the back of his wrist to his mouth. An image flashed before him again of the pile of books starting to burn, of Rabbit tossing away the first fire-brand, of the rifle coming down. The futility of it. The stupid, misguided futility of his gesture. That was all it could be. Rabbit had to have known when he’d dashed into the quad that he couldn’t stop all those men. He must have known. In each niche, hundreds of disks stood upright in their marble slots, each tray sporting a number carved into its base. They glinted sharp light back to him as Eric passed. I wanted this, he thought, for the library to be here and all the learning saved for my son and
grandson. I wanted to build cars again, planes, schools, hospitals….

  In Littleton, Dodge and Rabbit had brought him books. They dug deep, bringing him poetry and texts, and manuals and novels. Rabbit always brought the most. Quietly he’d lay the book down, waiting for Eric to pick it up, to nod approval or pat him on the hand. “Books, boys, it’s books that will save us,” he’d told them. “Books will make man great again.”

  The labor to carve this crypt and to preserve the library staggered him. But a vision of the stack of burning books that Rabbit tried to save rose up within. Looking at all the disks in the niche before him, stepping back so he could survey the other niches circling the room and reaching to the ceiling, Eric couldn’t justify Pope’s effort. The room and what it represented lost its magic. It was just a stone cold tomb. A museum not of the old, but of the alien, of a world that no longer existed and could never exist again. The chamber was a sepulcher of the Gone Time. “Come on,” he said to Dodge, Teach and Ripple,

  “We need to go home.”

  “Eric,” said the woman, “stay. You’re the last of the Gone Timers. This is your place.” They headed toward the exit where stairs led to the surface. The old woman looked beseechingly at him, then bent into a niche, reaching in as if to make some minute adjustment to a disk. “Maybe the Turks at Alexandria,” Eric added, “knew what they were doing.”

  Late in the afternoon, a few miles west of Boulder where the first of the foothills cupped the two-lane highway out of town, Eric slogged determinedly forward. Not only did the broken shoulder throb with every stride, but his whole left side felt bruised. The first hour or so of hiking had loosened it some, but now the pain intensified the farther they walked. He’d leaned gratefully on Dodge several times. Soon, though, they outpaced him. They were a hundred yards ahead and out of sight. “Go on,” he’d said. “Need some time to think, that’s all.”

  From Boulder, a thick column of black smoke rose straight up, marking the ruins of the smoldering campus. Before they’d left, Teach had reconnoitered, but found no sign of Federal’s men. “Lots of melted guns,” he had said. “The tents were full of them.”

  The road wound steadily uphill, and Eric watched his step. Years of thawing and freezing had buckled the asphalt and made walking difficult. Waist-high, scraggly limbed, loose-barked bushes poked up here and there, so the hike was more a matter of weaving than a straight path.

  For the first time, instead of thinking about clearing the brush and estimating how much work it would take to recondition the road, he thought of the inexorable progress of change. In another hundred years, he thought, no one will know that this was ever a highway. Why, a person hiking the other direction in two-hundred years might well think that no other human being had ever been there, and if he continued on, only right-angled mounds of brick will mark the foundations of the buildings in Boulder. A hunk of cement sitting in the middle of a field, vines growing all over it, might be all that’s left of an overpass. He might dig himself a fire-pit and find some other remnants, a key-chain maybe, or a beer bottle. Eric imagined the hiker turning the dirt-crusted bottle over in his hands, watching how the firelight cut through the muddy-colored glass. He would have come from a mountain community, High Water perhaps, one of the first explorers, pushing the boundaries of his world, hoping that the poisons had receded and the world was safe for people again. He would put the bottle aside, finally, and make his bed next to the fire, and then, before he went to sleep, he’d look up at the stars and make up stories about them, never knowing that mankind had once aspired to visit them, had once seen themselves as the inhabitants of a tiny planet, circling a star as beautiful and remote as the ones that wheeled over his head right now. He’d sleep, his next frontier the hill he hadn’t hiked over yet. To him, the world would be new again, filled with wonder and danger, a place to learn from.

  The image of the future hiker didn’t seem either good or bad, just interesting. The sun now nearly touched the hills ahead, and the shadows lay long behind him. In the still air, the steady chirping of mountain wrens and the crackle of the occasional twig or dry leaf underfoot were the only sounds. He hadn’t seen Teach and the children for some time, and the stiffness in his legs as he climbed toward High Water slowed him considerably.

  To loosen his calves, he walked backwards a few feet. Boulder’s plume of smoke hazed the air. It’s like Golden, he thought, years ago when I first came out of the mountains looking for Dad. The feeling of experiencing it again swept over him powerfully. Goose-bumps raised on his back and legs. Smoke in the sky, he thought. A city is burning, and I’m searching.

  The sense of then and now filled Eric so thoroughly, the sense of connection with himself at fifteen and himself at seventy-five felt so solid, that he almost wasn’t surprised when he turned around and saw striding toward him down the road, the figure of a man who could easily be his father. Dodge held the black-haired man’s hand. Behind him, came Teach and Ripple.

  “Troy,” said Eric.

  They stopped, a few feet apart. Dodge looked from his grandfather to his father and back expectantly.

  “I searched for you,” said Troy. “I was worried… you know… the boy. I didn’t think you were serious.”

  In wonder, Eric saw that Troy’s eyes were glistening, that he was shaking. Troy said, “I thought you were gone forever, Dad. You never said goodbye.” Silence stretched between them. The feeling of connection held on. Eric felt fifteen; he felt seventy-five. He was a son searching for his father; he was the father the son found. Everything circled around, he thought. Everything circled around.

  He said, because he knew it was the only thing to say, the words that had been written but never spoken, the words he had carried with him for sixty years, “I have always loved you, son.” Late that night, in their campsite beneath two old pines, Eric suddenly awoke. Only moonlight cast any illumination. The hillside glowed with its light. He canted his head from one side to another. Was that a bird? he thought, or did I only dream it? It was a bird, a meadowlark. I know that call; my father taught me.

  About the Author

  James Van Pelt grew up in Littleton, Colorado, where his dad worked for Martin-Marietta designing rockets, and Sky and Telescope magazines were neatly stacked on the coffee table for light reading. His mom, a voracious reader, encouraged James by buying books whenever he wanted them and giving him the freedom to read (as long as she didn’t check on him too often long after he was supposed to be asleep).

  Since then, he has taken his dad’s interest in science and mathematics, and his mother’s love of books, and turned them into his own life as a teacher and author of science fiction and fantasy. James teaches English at Fruita-Monument High School and Mesa State College in western Colorado. His short fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including Asimov’s, Analog, Talebones, Realms of Fantasy and many others. He was a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and his works have been finalists for the Nebula, the Theodore Sturgeon Award for Best Short Fiction of the Year, and others.

  His first collection, Strangers and Beggars, was named as a Best Book for Young Adults by the American Library Association, and his second collection, The Last of the O-Forms and Other Stories, is a finalist for the Colorado Blue Spruce Young Adult Book Award.

  His website can be found at http://www.sff.people/james.van.pelt. He can be contacted at Vvanp@aol.com.

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