The day after: An apocalyptic morning

by Jessy Cruise

  He rolled up the sleeping bags that were in the trailer, noting with satisfaction that they were the waterproof kind, and tied one to each backpack. Into his he carefully slipped six of the beers and both of the bottles of JD. Strictly for medicinal purposes, he told himself with a grin.

  "Okay, let's get out of the trailer," he said, once they were ready. "One last thing to do before we go."

  After they stepped outside, packs firmly upon their backs, Skip went and collected two of the rifles and pistols. He searched each body for ammunition, finding a total of six magazines of M-16 rounds and eight of .45 rounds. He shoved all of it into his backpack along with the cans.

  "Do you guys know how to use guns?" he asked them.

  They both shook their heads. "Our dad doesn't... uh didn't believe in guns," Christine said sadly.

  Skip raised his eyebrows a bit and looked at the .38 pistol that was lying next to his body. Christine followed his gaze over there. "It wasn't his," she explained. "He found it in the trailer. When the men came he pointed it at them but they just laughed. He fired at them a few times when they kept coming and they..." She couldn't continue.

  "It's okay, honey," he said soothingly. "Your dad was obviously a very brave man. He tried his best. But in any case, you guys need to take these." He handed each of them an M-16, after removing the chambered rounds.

  They took them very doubtfully. "I don't know how to fire this," Jack said. "I've never shot a gun in my life."

  "Me either," Christine echoed.

  "I'll teach you everything you need to know about them later," he said. "I was always in favor of gun control before. There were simply too many goddamn weapons out on the streets. If you had asked me last week, I would have said melt down every last one of them, including mine. But now, this is the kind of world where you're gonna have to learn how to shoot if you wanna stay alive. For now, just lug em. Sling 'em over your shoulders like I have."

  They did as he asked.

  "And take these too," he said, handing each of them one of the holstered .45 pistols. "Run the holster through your belt."

  When they were all armed up and ready to go the kids took one more look at their dead parents, tears falling from their eyes. Christine had asked Skip if they could bury them before they went but he vetoed that idea. There simply wasn't enough time. And so they left them there, lying beside the dead bikers.

  "Goodbye, Momma, goodbye, Daddy," Christine said as they walked away. Jack looked over his shoulder once, but offered no words of parting. Both of them were sobbing as the campsite faded from view behind them.

  Two hours later they were nearly a mile north of the camper, having trudged mostly uphill to where the woods were thicker and the problem of landslides was not as severe. Skip had a full stomach for the first time since the impact. After leading his new charges out of the zone of immediate danger he had stopped for ten minutes and inhaled a can of cold ravioli. That greasy, tinny tasting concoction of pasta, processed meat, tomato sauce, and imitation cheese had already been written into the log of his brain as the finest meal he had ever consumed. He had eaten every last scrap, even going so far as to run his finger over the inside of the can to gather up the stray sauce. Now, with food in his belly and working its way into his malnourished bloodstream, he felt himself a new man, full of energy, ready to take on the world and everything in it.

  "Can we take a rest for a few minutes?" Christine asked as the reached the top of the latest hill. They were in an area of dense forest and underbrush. Many of the trees had been knocked down by the wind but most were still standing, towering above them and rocking gently back and forth.

  Skip was in the lead, taking the point on their journey, his M-16 locked and loaded and held out before him. He stopped and looked at them, seeing that they were on the verge of exhaustion. Though they were younger than him and had been better fed over the ensuing week, they probably were not accustomed to lugging fifty pounds of gear uphill through the mud. "Sure," he told them, pointing to a fallen log that was half buried in the mud. "Let's take ten. I could use a breather myself."

  Christine and Jack unshouldered their packs and set them down in the least muddy place they could find. They set their unloaded rifles down next to them and then planted their weary bodies on the log. Skip, after setting down his own pack, grabbed a seat on another fallen log a few feet away. He kept his rifle cradled in his lap.

  Christine put her hands in the small of her back and pushed her hips forward, stretching out her spine. There was an audible pop as she reached the limits of her stretch. She grimaced a little and then took her baseball cap from her head, freeing her blonde hair. It was damp and spotted with mud, the bangs and the ends knotted in stringy lumps from the lack of recent care. She ran her fingers through it a few times before bunching it back up and replacing the hat. Her face, though dirty and rapidly acquiring the thousand-yard stare of combat fatigue, was pretty and had an undercurrent of innocence about it. It was a face that boys had probably pined after not too long before, that they had dreamed of kissing.

  They had not talked a lot on their journey so far, the effort of movement making idle conversation a waste of precious energy. Now that they were at rest however, Skip made an effort to get to know his new friends.

  "Where are you two from?" he asked, directing the question at no one in particular, but looking more towards Christine.

  It was she who answered him. "Berkeley," she said softly. "Dad was a professor at the university."

  Skip nodded. "And what brought you up here? Wasn't it a school day when the comet hit?"

  "We come up here every year at the beginning of hunting season," she told him. "Mom was a wildlife photographer. When the hunters started filling the woods, all of the deer would go into the national forest to get away from them. That was when she got her best shots." She sniffed a little at the memory.

  "Yeah," Skip said, feeling a pang of sadness of his own. "I came up here for the start of hunting season every year too, although I was always one of the ones chasing the deer into the national forest. It's kind of funny, isn't it? How we're alive now just because of an annual tradition?"

  "Yeah," she said bitterly. "Real funny."

  "Were you both in high school there?" he asked next, trying to ease the subject to a less painful track.

  "I was a junior," Christine said. "Jack was a freshman. I was gonna study medicine when I got to college. UC Davis has a top-rated medical school. I guess that's not really gonna happen now, huh?"

  "I guess not," he said.

  "What is going to happen to us, Skip?" she asked next. "Is there anyplace we can go, anything we can do? There had to be someplace safe, doesn't there?"

  He sighed, wishing she had not asked that. It was a question he hadn't even wanted to ask himself. "I think civilization on planet Earth is pretty much over," he told her.

  "Over?" Jack said. "How can it be over?"

  "Most of the major cities are probably gone along with all of the people in them. For those that were anywhere near the coast, that's a given. For those that were inland... well, people build cities near rivers so they have a water supply and a means of transporting goods. They build them on low, flat ground. Those rivers are all swelling up to ten, twenty times their normal size because of all this rain. Those that weren't swamped in the initial strike when their dams broke are now probably underwater from torrential flooding. Without those cities, there is no structure to base society on. A lot of people probably survived the impact - I imagine there are groups like us all over the place - but they're scattered all over and soon, they're going to start starving. There will be no crops, no food production or transportation, no organization of any kind. Everything has collapsed to rubble."

  "So are we all going to die then?" Christine asked. "Are we going to starve to death when we run out of food?"

  "Millions of people will," he said after a moment's consideration. "But that doesn't mean we have to be among them. Are you familiar w
ith the theories of Darwinism?"

  She scoffed. "Are you kidding? My dad's a college professor at Berkeley. I've heard about Darwin since I was in kindergarten."

  This got a laugh out of Skip, the first he'd had since flaming rocks and mud had started to fall from the sky. "I see your point," he said. "Anyway, we're living in a Darwinian system now. There is no law. There is no civility. There are no hospitals or schools or jobs. There is only survival of the fittest. I think that the human race can survive this little episode. Eventually these clouds are going to clear away and we'll be able to grow food again. We'll be able to rebuild a society and start feeling safe again. But the ones that are left to do that are going to be the ones who can live through the next year or so. In order to live through the next year, we have to be strong enough and smart enough to keep ourselves alive in a world that wants us dead."

  "And how do we do that?" Jack wanted to know.

  "It's simple," Skip said. "Food is life. We have to find a way to keep eating even though there is no more food being grown or produced. As you can see from the little stock you found in that trailer, there is food in cans to be had. The trick will be finding it and keeping others from taking it away from us."

  "And how are we going to do that?" Jack asked next.

  Skip offered him a cynical smile. "As soon as I figure that out," he said. "You'll be the first to know."

  They continued to work their way northward throughout the rest of the day, stopping every hour or so to rest and regain their strength. They saw no one although several times they came across the remains of tents, trailers, and SUVs. In each case they made a search for usable supplies and in each case they found someone had been there before them, stripping away anything that was even remotely useful. These findings served to confirm Skip's belief that there were other survivors all around them.

  As they went north, heading towards the Auburn Ravine section of the mountains, they continued to climb higher and higher in elevation. The mudslides ceased to be much of a danger as the foliage grew thicker but the temperature also dropped, chilling them in their wet clothes. Through it all, the clouds overhead remained thick enough to block out the majority of the sunlight and the rain continued to fall in a steady downpour.

  Just before dark Skip found them a place to camp for the night. On the leeward side of a rocky hill he was able to build a lean-to of sorts out of thick branches from a fallen pine tree. Once it was complete it was almost undetectable as a man-made object unless you happened to be standing right next to it and the inside was relatively free of dripping water. Skip directed the two kids to store their backpacks and their guns against the rock and to spread their sleeping bags out in a line.

  They shared a family sized can of chicken noodle soup for dinner, taking turns using the spoon attachment on Skip's Swiss Army knife to ladle the cold broth into their mouths. Afterward, Skip took the empty can and set it where the rain was falling, holding onto it with one hand to keep it from blowing away. Less than five minutes later, the can was full of clear, sweet water that had been boiled upward from the heat of the comet five days before. They passed this around, rehydrating themselves until it was empty. Skip then refilled it six more times and poured the contents into their canteens.

  "How do you know so much about, you know, surviving? Building shelters and all that?" Christine asked him as he poured the last canful into a canteen. They were all three sitting under the shelter of the lean-to, looking out at the forbidding and rapidly darkening landscape.

  Skip shrugged, tossing the can to the side and fishing into his sleeping bag. After a moment, he pulled out one of the bottles of Jack Daniels. "I grew up in Sacramento," he said, breaking the seal and twisting the cap off. "My dad used to take me camping and hunting a lot when I was a kid. Usually right up in this neck of the woods. He taught me a lot of stuff, like the lean-to for instance, in case I was ever lost in a snowstorm or something. A lot of the other stuff I learned from the survival school I had to go to in the army."

  "Survival school?"

  He nodded, taking a large swig out of the JD. He wasn't much of a hard alcohol drinker and the liquid burned like fire as it went down his throat, bringing tears to his eyes. But at the same time he felt warmth spreading through him for the first time in forever. The fact that it was false warmth, that it was actually making him more prone to hypothermia, seemed a trivial Micker. "Aviator's survival training," he said when his pallet was clear. "It was designed to teach us how to survive if we were ever shot down behind enemy lines. They taught us all about evasion techniques and living off the land and then they dropped us into the woods by ourselves and made us do it while people tried to find us. It was pretty intense training. They called it hell on earth back then." He scoffed a little, taking another swig. "They obviously had no idea what hell on earth really meant."

  "You flew airplanes in the army?" she asked, hugging herself with her arms to combat the cold.

  "The army doesn't have any airplanes," he told her, taking one more swig. He could feel it going to his head now, making him buzz pleasantly. "They only have helicopters. I started off flying the Kiowa; that's a little Bell Jet Ranger like the police departments fly. Its job is to seek out targets for the combat choppers. I did a little time in the Blackhawks too; those are the transport choppers. Finally, they gave me the job I really wanted. My last two years I flew the Apache. It's an attack helicopter that goes after enemy armor. That's what I flew in the Gulf War." He shook his head a little, remembering who he was talking to. "Christ, you two were in kindergarten during the Gulf War, weren't you?"

  "I was in first grade," Christine said seriously, as if that made a difference.

  Skip laughed. "God, I'm getting old. Now I know how my dad used to feel when he talked about Vietnam."

  "How many ragheads did you kill?" asked Jack, speaking for the first time since dinner. "In the war I mean?"

  Skip looked at him, seeing something like life in his face for once. "I didn't kill people in the war," he said. "I killed tanks and armored vehicles and radar sites. I did it from three and four miles away, or actually, my gunner did."

  "But there were people in those tanks," Jack pointed out.

  "Not as far as I could see," Skip answered, offering the justification he had used back then. "It's real easy to kill someone when you don't have to see them. I got in a gunfight once as a cop but I didn't hit anyone. When I shot those bikers today, that was the first time I ever killed anyone at close range. I didn't like it much. I didn't hesitate to do it, but I didn't like it."

  "They deserved it though," Christine said. "They killed our parents."

  "Yes," Skip agreed, taking yet another swig of whiskey, "they did. That makes it justifiable. That makes it a little easier on my conscience. But that doesn't make it enjoyable. Not at all. Try to remember that as we go on here. There may come a time when you kids have to kill someone with those guns I gave you. Don't hesitate if it's necessary, but don't be surprised when you feel guilty about it later."

  While they contemplated that thought, Skip screwed the cap back on the JD and stashed it next to his backpack. Though the temptation was to drink until he passed out, he refused to give in to it. He had people to take care of now. A hangover the next morning would not be a good way to do that. "We'd better hit the sack," he said. "Let's try to get to the edge of the canyon tomorrow so we can get a look at what we're dealing with. Auburn and Colfax are across the canyon. If there's any sort of civility left in the world, maybe we'll find it there. And if the bridge across the canyon is still intact, maybe we'll be able to get there."

  "Do you really think there might be?" Christine asked hopefully, no doubt thinking about warm hotel rooms and pancake breakfasts in the diner.

  "No," he said simply, having made a vow not to lie to them, "but it's worth a look, isn't it?"

  On that note, they began to get ready for bed. Skip set his rifle down alongside his sleeping bag and then unstrapped the .40 caliber pisto
l from his belt, laying it next to it. Before he got any further in his ritual, he noted with alarm that the kids were fully intending to climb into their sleeping bags as they were.

  "Whoa," he said, holding up a hand in the rapidly encroaching darkness. "You aren't going to get in your sleeping bags while you're wearing those clothes, are you?"

  They looked at him in confusion for a moment. "What?" Jack finally asked.

  "What else would we do?" Christine contributed.

  "Strip," he said simply.

  "Strip?" they said simultaneously.

  "Everything off," he confirmed. "If you climb in there like that, you're going to get the inside of your sleeping bags all wet and muddy. Pretty soon they'll mildew. Not only that, but you'll be a lot warmer if you're not wet."

  They looked at each other and then at him for a moment, both clearly embarrassed at the very thought.

  " Christine," he said, rolling his eyes a little, "you go first. Go out and pee if you need to and then take your clothes off and climb in your sleeping bag. Jack and I will turn the other way while you do it. Trust me on this, you'll be a lot happier if you're dry in there."

  Only after several more minutes of cajoling and convincing did she agree to do as he said. She hiked out into the rain and out of sight for a moment to relieve her bladder and then came back to the lean-to, a sheepish look on her face. Jack and Skip, as promised, turned their heads away from her. From behind them came the sound of a belt buckle being undone and then clothing being pushed forcefully down.

  Skip, looking out at the dim landscape outside, didn't see a thing. But listening to the young girl undress behind him, he became aware of her for the first time as something other than someone that he was trying to look after. He found himself wondering what just what her breasts looked like. Would they be nice and firm? Would they be small? Did they have pert little nipples? What would her pubic hair look like? Would it be blond, like her hair?