by Harley Vex
We had left a world of tan, light green, and faded blue behind.
And now we had entered a world of rusty brown, gray, and distant, fiery orange. The facility had filled with shadows. Silence ruled. The narrow windows betrayed an alien sky of rusty orange, and on the horizon, distant, reddish-orange glows belched smoke.
The desert and the brush burned.
Lightning forked down, again and again, lighting the surroundings in evil blues and purples before dying again. Thunder rattled the facility, and then silence ruled once more.
“We’re in hell,” I muttered. This wasn’t Earth anymore. It couldn’t be. The strange light made it look like Mars was waking from a long slumber.
Then I fell to my knees, close to the blood puddle, unable to stand.
The shadows.
The lumps on the floor.
The smell.
“Laney. Get up.” Jerome took my arm and pulled me away from the nearest body, which was lying right outside the elevator door. I stood, falling against him.
“Yuck,” Alana said in a small voice.
That was an understatement. I guess she was trying to dismiss the situation, but it didn’t work. Everyone went silent again, and Tony grabbed the elevator door, wrenching it all the way open.
The odor hit with a renewed fury. I gagged and this time, I couldn’t help but retch something up. I leaned over and spit up in the crack between the elevator and the mine shaft. Right then, I was glad I had nothing in my stomach.
“Laney,” Alana said. She grabbed the back of my shirt. “Hold your breath. Put your nose in your shirt, or something.” She sounded dry and numb. “We need to get out of this elevator and do something about this mess.”
This mess. She was trying to make the problem smaller than it was.
I’d seen death before, but there was nothing caring or sterile about this type. This was different. I stepped out of the elevator. There were so many lumps on the floor, contorted into positions of agony. The darkness was a mercy, then.
The elevator wobbled with a few groans behind me.
People screamed and stampeded out of the prison box and into the brownish light coming in from outside. My foot hit something soft, and I let out a cry.
“Don’t look!” David shouted, right when another flash of lightning lit the world. “No one look down.”
I didn’t have to. There was no point denying what any of this was.
The other tour group had fallen here and died like Mr. Ellis said.
Radiation.
Was it still here?
There was Shelli from the honor society, curled up near the front desk. I thought I glimpsed her purple Hello Kitty purse on the floor.
Don’t look.
Count to five.
I inhaled the stale air under my shirt and breathed in.
Five. Five. Always five.
I took a step over another lump that was definitely not a body. I breathed in the air that was just stale from the AC no longer running.
Why was I kidding myself? Reality didn't care about feelings.
I had to get outside. Going back underground was not an option now.
"Go," David said, taking charge. "Everyone. Don't look down and get outdoors."
I stepped over another lump. Count to five. Safe, safe, safe.
The front door remained shut. Another lump—the receptionist lady—lay across the counter, her computer off and her cell phone under her waxy hand. It had a nice pink cover on it with metallic flowers. It was something Mom would have loved.
"What about the radiation?" Christina asked.
"I feel fine," David said. "That part might be over."
"Dude, with radiation you can feel fine at first, and then it kills you," Jerome said.
"You don’t know what you’re talking about." David whirled on him.
We were all talking about everything except for what was lying in the room. I passed the vending machine. Someone lay slumped against it. I dared to look. Blood had run out of the guy's nose and down onto his chest. I didn't recognize the kid at first. His face looked like a million bees had stung him.
Josh.
I breathed out and bolted to the door.
"Laney!" Alana shouted. "We don't know what's out there." Her feet trampled the carpet and hit something as she followed me.
They were all dead. Gone. Everyone left on the surface had succumbed to radiation from space.
I threw open the front door. I let it slam against the outside of the building as a chill washed over me. The sky was wrong. I stood under the awning and breathed in the fresh air.
It might be the last fresh air I’d get.
In the distance, the sky flashed with lightning again, and then went quiet as faint thunder rolled over us. Several spots on the horizon continued to burn as fires raged through dry brush.
What the hell had happened out here?
"Laney!" Alana was there, holding my shoulders. "Go ahead. If you have to scream, I will not stop you. In fact, I might join you." She laughed. It was crazy. We were all going insane here. “The world just ended!”
I sucked in a breath. The radiation could still rain from the sky, splicing through all my cells while I stood here. Heck, maybe all the particles raining down caused all the lightning. I wondered how long it would take to die and how much it would hurt. It wouldn't be painless. I wondered if there was a way to make it end faster. My heart raced. Was I okay, or was the radiation already making me sick?
"Holy—" David said, coming out of the building behind us. Then he choked as he eyed the world that was left.
I hadn't realized I was staring at the dusty parking lot at first, or that the chill in the air wasn't right. The school bus remained untouched by the lightning, and so did the other vehicles in the parking lot. Dr. Shetlin was nowhere to be found.
“This isn’t our world,” I blurted.
Denial. Ah, the first stage of grief. I was still working through it. But I couldn’t wrap my mind around this. None of us could.
The sky was a dull, reddish-brown color, as if a layer of smog had spread over the entire planet. Listless clouds hung high in the air, maybe even higher than airplanes flew. The sun was a pale sphere struggling to shine through the muck.
"Nuclear winter," David said. "We had a nuclear war. That’s the only explanation." Behind me, everyone muttered as they struggled to push out of the dead building.
"We don't know," Mina said. "We should get back in and shut the door. What if this is poison gas?"
I backpedaled, as much as I didn't want to go back into the Visitor Center turned morgue. She was right. We didn't know if there was poison gas out there. The sky looked bad enough.
"Wait," Christina's friend babbled. "I can't stay here. This is disgusting. Please let us go outside!"
Mina slapped her. "The air might be poisonous."
"If it's not safe, then it's already here," Jerome said. "We're already dead, in that case. Does anyone feel sick?"
My stomach heaved. It might just be the smell. It might just be the stress. But I didn't know. Acid burned at the back of my throat.
"I'm fine," I lied. "How about everyone else?"
"Well, besides the fact there are about twenty bodies in there, I'm okay," Eric said. "I think we should risk the outdoors. Maybe someone will rescue us. Dr. Shetlin left. She probably went to get help." He looked at Tony.
“Whatever happened, it came from space,” Jerome said. “A nuke would have left shock waves.”
We were fighting and falling apart. I couldn't stay here. What difference did it make now? If the world had ended, it was only a matter of time before the rest of the tour group keeled over and died. I couldn't maintain that hope we'd all band together and everything could be okay. Things might never be okay again.
"We don't know what's past the horizon," David said. "Things are burning and we don’t know if help is coming. Everyone. Remove these bodies so we can at least take shelter for a little longer."
“I have to get home!” Christina shouted. “Does anyone have a working phone?” She asked, over and over, but no one answered at first.
At last, Eric turned on her. “Shut up! Nothing’s working right now, and everyone’s probably dead!”
Silence fell. Christina sobbed, and I looked at Alana, determined to shut out that sound. It brought back too many memories.
Remove the bodies. They were objects now, not my classmates. Not Mrs. Taney, who lay near the door as if she were trying to protect the rest of the class from the horrors outside.
We might now inhabit a world full of bodies.
“Get moving,” David shouted.
"Who put you in charge?" Jerome asked.
"We still need to clean this place up and stay safe, first," David said. His class jacket ruffled as he faced off with Jerome in his holey jeans. I didn’t know Jerome too well, but I knew he couldn’t be stupid if he was in the Science Club. And David was staring at him as if he had no place here.
"Okay. Stop," I said, injecting myself into the faceoff. "You're right. Bodies go outside. If the radiation is still coming down, it will not make any difference at this point.” I was volunteering to touch a dead body. I had done so before, but not one that died from radiation sickness.
"It might attract vultures," Mina said, hugging herself. "I don't want to see Mrs. Taney getting eaten by vultures. She sent us down there to save our lives."
She had. Mrs. Taney and Mr. Ellis would have stood up here to allow all the students to go underground. Whatever had happened, they knew what it was.
And now we couldn’t ask them.
"If there are any vultures left. They’re probably dead, too. I hear nothing out here,” Tony said. Behind him, the rest of the tour group hung back. Eric picked at his shirt.
“We need to move," David said. “We’ll get into any memorial ceremony we want to do later.”
“But is it safe to go outside?” Christina asked.
My heart ached as I closed my eyes. Mrs. Taney’s attitude was something I'd miss. I’d miss her breaking phones and confiscating tablets. I’d miss the way she glared at the class whenever people talked too loud. It was normal, the way things should be.
Jerome cleared his throat. “We’re not dying yet, so the radiation raining down or whatever must be over. Even the lightning looks like it’s about to stop. Maybe the dangerous particles flared up the entire atmosphere and caused all these fires?”
I looked at the sky. One last flash of lightning came on the horizon and then faded. Maybe we wouldn't die. Yet. We still had the brownish-red sky, though. Who knew what that would do?
“Okay. Move,” David said, pulling his shirt over his nose.
And then we moved the bodies.
I went somewhere else while we were pulling on stiff arms and legs, begging joints to obey and bend. The park where I used to play back in elementary school when Mom would read her books while I swung around in the jungle gym. The beach where my parents and I bathed in the sun when I was eight. I even went to the den when it got decorated for Christmas, where Mom and I stayed up late every night playing board games together. I wasn’t out in the desert, isolated and pulling former living people out of a building that failed to protect them.
"Take them far from where we’re going to be," David ordered, snapping me back to reality as I helped Alana drag a set of arms across the packed, dusty ground.
A stiff wind blew against us and a cold bit into my skin. I just had on my tank top, shorts, and gobs of sunscreen. Nothing felt right. I noticed that every time we pulled another body out onto the cracked earth and the dust.
But the activity kept me grounded.
Now David pulled beside me, holding the other arm of Mrs. Taney.
I was dragging our Physics teacher. No. Not her. Her head lolled back and forth. And I wanted to believe she was just sleeping and not swollen. There had to be something I could grab onto, something that would stop me from cracking.
“Well,” I choked out when we reached the small dip where we were lining up the lumps. Didn’t healthcare workers use gallows humor to cope? Dad told me that. “Who’s going to throw your phone off the balcony now?”
David offered me a dry laugh. “It’s never going to work again. The EMP fried almost everything.”
My stomach lurched. EMP.
That meant the power grid had gone down, possibly all over the world. Everything not shielded somehow would never work again, right?
But what caused those? A solar flare? No, that light hadn’t come from the sun. It had come from the horizon. But I didn’t want to argue with David right now. Clearly, he had his own ideas, and no one was to challenge him.
“Set her here,” David said, letting go of her arm. I did, and it flopped to the ground. Dust rose from the shallow depression in the ground where a creek might have once flowed. We were some distance from the Visitor Center, and I realized everyone was standing around on the bare ground. We stared at each other, and David’s class jacket flapped around him in the wind. Far behind him, a distant fire raged through desert brush. Black smoke rose and merged with the sky muck above.
We stood in a hellish underworld.
Me, David, and half of our field trip. I realized Alana stood there beside me, and Tony and Mina turned away from the row of bodies wrapped in each other's arms. Eric, Christina, and the others stood off in their own group.
Something made me turn my gaze down to Mrs. Taney. She now lay on the end of seventeen bodies, next to the receptionist. This swollen thing didn’t look like her. Her blank eyes faced the uncaring sky, and her hand had stiffened into a ball.
She was holding a paper.
“Laney?” David asked.
“She’s got something.”
I leaned down and grabbed the paper, glad that the chill and the wind took the smell down somewhat and I could breathe. After a few desperate tugs and hyper-focusing on Mrs. Taney’s fingernail, I tugged the piece of paper free. A sticky note, probably taken from the receptionist’s desk.
Alana appeared at my side, tears streaking down her face. “Did she write us something?”
Smoothing the paper, I held it up to the pale brown light and willed myself to stop shaking. “Yes. She did. I can barely read it.”
Mrs. Taney had struggled to write this note at the end, and it showed three scrawled, pained letters that sloped downward as if she had given up at the end. Which, I realized, she probably had.
G
R
B
“That’s it,” I said. “That’s all she wrote.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
“What does that mean?” Alana asked, her voice rising with each word. “That doesn’t even make any sense. And we have to get home. Start this bus, get the driver out, and get out of here.”
I tucked the note into my pocket. “She was trying to tell us something, and couldn’t. She knew some of us were down there and safe from whatever happened, and that we’d have questions.” My mind slipped back into that numb state. “We have to find out what happened, first, and then make a plan to get out of here.”
We had to take this nightmare one thing at a time.
Just like Dad and I took Mom’s nightmare one day at a time. It was the only way to cope.
Alana sucked in a breath. “Okay. First things first. Figure out what ended the world, and then figure out how we’re going to leave the Visitor Center.” Her chin wobbled as she struggled to hold it together.
Not that I could blame her.
Seventeen bodies.
They were lying in a long row, far from the building, under the rusty sky. They were objects. Yes, objects. Only they weren’t.
The numbness flew away.
This row of lumps was our teacher, the receptionist, and the other students who weren’t lucky
enough to board the elevator in time. That was Allison down near the end. Her face looked strange under the reddish brown light. Allison and I had talked in gym class before while we bounced a basketball back and forth to each other.
I turned away as Alana continued to shout about going home. Her voice rose into the uncaring sky.
“We can’t just leave them out here like this,” Bethany said. “They’re just going to rot.”
“The ground is too hard to bury them,” I said.
Bethany looked at me as if shocked I had this knowledge. Then she wiped her palms off on her jeans. She faced the sky. “Well, I don’t think we have deadly particles coming down anymore. We’re safe.”
“But what happened to the sky?” Mina asked. “What is all that reddish-brown haze?”
GRB.
That was our only clue, and we had to find out what we were dealing with.
“Whatever it is, I don’t like it,” Tony said. “I think we should get back inside and raid that vending machine. Then we start the bus and go get help. Where did Dr. Shetlin go?”
I stepped over to Alana to comfort her, but she wandered away in a state of shock. “No vending machine,” I said to everyone. Having dealt with death and shock before, I had to step up, even if I didn’t want to. “Dr. Shetlin said the food on the surface might be poisoned with whatever came down earlier. And she’s not here.” I had to focus. I turned in a circle, trying not to look at the row of death. I had dealt with it before, but not like this. I shivered. The desert should not be this cold in the daytime. Then a thought hit me. “What about the bus driver?”
Christina’s face fell. “Oh.”
“We have to check,” Jerome said, running towards the bus.
I was glad to leave the bodies behind, but I held tears down. Now wasn’t the time to break down. We had a lot of problems, and they needed solving. Alana joined me, silent, and I held her hand while Tony boarded the bus, got off, and then looked underneath it.
“He’s under there,” he said in a tone that warned us we wouldn’t like the results.
I got on my knees and let go of Alana. The driver’s body was underneath the bus, as if he had crawled under it to hide from the rays of death coming from the sky. Blood had dribbled into the dust. I knelt there, peering under our transportation.
