Black Rain

by William R Hunt

  And besides that, she was not ready to leave Sage Springs. First she had to find her daughter.

  Eddie glanced in her direction. “There you are, Kay. Listen, we have to get everyone out of here. There’s a minivan out front. If we can find the keys—”

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered, and turned, retreating to the stairwell. She heard Eddie calling her, but she ignored him. Her low-heel pumps clicked loudly in the stairwell as she descended through the darkness, her heart fluttering with both fear and shame. She could not stay to bandage the others’ wounds, guide them down the stairwell, speak consolingly to them as she helped each one into the minivan—not with that cloud moving steadily toward them, swollen with radioactive matter. The moment Luna was born, Kay had discovered a new life purpose: to look after the well-being of her child. She could not stay to help her colleagues, not when there was so little time to spare.

  Kay reached the door and shoved it open. The daylight blinded her a second time, and red motes danced across her vision as she moved into the open.

  “Kay!”

  She turned around. Nigel was standing in the doorway.

  “Were you going to leave without me?” he asked.

  “Don’t try to stop me. I have to get Luna.”

  “Have you forgotten Ada’s there, too?”

  She had forgotten. She felt a stab of guilt for being so selfish.

  Her eyes shifted to the bicycle Nigel had taken to work. “Need a ride?”

  2

  As Kay hurried to her car, a plan took shape in her mind. The school was no more than a five-minute drive away. If she could pick up Luna before the radiation reached them, she could then take Luna into the mountains. There was a small town up there, Westward, a place her husband often stopped at for supplies on his way to his cabin. He might be waiting for them in town, and it was just possible the elevation would keep them safe from the effects of the bomb. They could ride out this storm until help arrived—whatever that help might look like.

  She reached the car and fumbled in her purse. As she pulled the keys out and unlocked the car, a shadow passed over her. She looked up to see a thick cloud blotting the sun, its shadow spreading across town like a dark wave, covering everything in its path. People climbed out of their cars to stare at it, while others staggered blindly about in the street, clutching their burned faces. A child screamed from an abandoned carriage. A row of dogwoods hung broken like matchsticks, shards of white wood sticking upward like spears.

  A warm wind struck Kay’s face, breaking her paralysis. She climbed into the car and turned the key in the ignition. The engine hesitated, then turned over and began to hum steadily. Nigel climbed in beside her, tucking his satchel neatly between his feet.

  “You’re gonna want to put on your seatbelt,” Kay said.

  The road was a mess of stopped vehicles. Some of the drivers had abandoned their cars in the middle of the street to seek the closest shelter they could find, while others gawked at the approaching cloud through their windows. A family of four with luggage lashed to the roof rack were climbing from their car to get a better view. The husband handed his wife a camera and then posed with the mushroom cloud behind him, a nervous grin on his face.

  “Get out of the way!” Kay shouted, slamming the horn. A few vehicles sluggishly inched forward, but it was no use. The road was effectively blocked.

  “Kay,” Nigel said in a matter-of-fact voice, “whatever you’re doing, I suggest you do it fast. It won’t be long before that cloud reaches us.”

  That was all the motivation Kay needed. She threw the car into reverse, backed up enough to get a running start, and then drove up onto the sidewalk. It was an obstacle course of trees, trash bins, and bus stops. She kept her foot on the gas, her knuckles white on the steering wheel as she bent forward like a jockey.

  “Watch out!” Nigel shouted as Kay narrowly avoided a fire hydrant.

  “Just keep your eyes on that cloud!” she snapped. “I’ll watch the road.”

  “Not much of a road,” Nigel answered, but he did as instructed and stared out the window. After a moment he said, quietly, “We had to leave, Kay. If we had stayed to help the others…” He did not finish, nor did he have to.

  They bumped off the sidewalk, brushed the fender of a pizza delivery truck, and then accelerated along a narrow residential street flanked by junipers. The detour had cost them time, but Kay hoped these side streets would not be as congested as the one they had left.

  She punched the radio, then slowly turned the dial as the sound of static filled the car. Occasionally she heard the distant squeal of an electric guitar or the soft rhythm of jazz, but most of the stations were unclear. Then a voice cut through, just audible above the static:

  “—alone. I know how unreal this all must feel. But you can get through this if you don’t panic. The first twenty-four hours are critical. You need to get to shelter immediately - underground if at all possible - and plug up any ventilation. The air outside will soon be—”

  As Kay accelerated through an intersection, she caught a white blur out of the corner of her eye. She had checked both sides of the road briefly as they approached, but she had not considered how fast people might be driving under these conditions. The vehicle to her right, a white semi truck with an A/C unit above the cab, was barreling toward them at fifty miles per hour or more.

  Realizing it was too late to stop, Kay stomped the gas and felt the car lurch forward. Nigel’s head bounced off the back of his seat. Inside the cab of the truck, two shadowy forms leaned forward, as if in utter disbelief at what was about to happen. The driver, however, did not try to swerve—perhaps he feared he would lose control of the truck.

  Kay felt the car shiver as the truck caught the rear bumper and sent them into a tailspin, the tires shrieking as they burned rubber. As the car made its revolutions, Kay gripped the steering wheel, not sure what else to do. She kept thinking how wrong it would be for her to die here, only a short distance from the little girl who needed her. Her last memory of Luna was seeing the girl look at her with tears on her cheeks and a hurt accusation in her eyes, unable to understand why her mother would send her away with strangers. That memory was not good enough; Kay intended to make many more with her daughter.

  A news stand flew by the window, followed by a streetlamp with a horned devil spray-painted at the base. Kay looked at Nigel. His eyes were clenched in a grimace and his lips whispered a silent prayer.

  After several revolutions, the car came to a halt in the middle of the street. Kay stared through the windshield, scarcely able to accept the gift of their continued existence, almost certain they were about to be smashed by a second truck. Her knuckles had turned bone-white on the steering wheel.

  Nigel released a long, unsteady breath. “Kay,” he said.

  She did not answer.

  “Kay. The school. We should get moving.”

  Kay nodded, still in shock, and slowly pulled the car forward. In the rearview mirror, the dark cloud continued to grow.

  _____

  Kay knew the side streets of Sage Springs by heart. She used to drive them almost every day, letting the gentle motion of the car rock Luna to sleep. Luna had always been an uneasy sleeper, constantly restless for some new adventure, some new place to explore. She got her energy and idealism from her father, which always put the burden on Kay to be the practical one and say no when the plan wasn’t realistic. It had not been much of a problem when it was just the two of them, but since Luna’s arrival on the scene, Kay had felt as if she and her husband were constantly trying to win Luna to their own point of view. It was the primary source of tension in their marriage.

  “Hold on!” Kay shouted as she pulled onto the curb again, navigating around a mess of abandoned vehicles. She knew in the back of her head they were not making good enough time, felt the cold certainty that whatever was in that cloud would reach them soon, and if she and Nigel did not have shelter when that time came, it might not matter whe
ther she reached Luna. She might, in fact, become a danger to her own daughter.

  She pulled back onto the street. There were more vehicles parked ahead, so Kay decided to make another detour and turned right. She nearly crashed into the telephone pole lying directly across their path. She stomped the brake as hard as she could, managing to come to a stop just inches from the pole. She shifted into reverse, turned to look behind, and felt Nigel’s hand on her arm.

  “Look, Kay. Look at the windshield.”

  At first she imagined it was snow—great gray flakes drifting lazily through the sky, piling against the glass and quivering to the asphalt. But it was much too early in the year for snow, the day was much too warm, and this looked more like...ash.

  She looked at Nigel. He was staring intently at the ash, his hands on his thighs. “So it’s real,” he murmured, as if he had not believed any of the earlier signs.

  Kay swallowed, trying not to think about where this ash had come from. “We have to get to the school.”

  Nigel spoke in the time it took her to twist her neck around. His voice was eerie, resigned, like a man on his way to the gallows. “We can’t get there. The road’s blocked. See?” He pointed through the window at the street.

  “Then I’ll go on foot.”

  “And you’ll die. You might get to your daughter, but even if you do, you’ll be too sick to recognize her. And as soon as she touches you, Kay, she’ll have it too. It’s like a virus that spreads and spreads.”

  Kay imagined a room of schoolchildren with their faces pressed against the glass, the ends of their little noses turned white and their mouths unconsciously parted. Or had the windows at the school been broken like those at the office? No, it did not matter. Surely the school had a protocol for this. The principal would have received a warning about the explosion and notified the teachers to follow their emergency procedure, and the children would have been herded somewhere safe, far from any windows.

  But did the school have a basement? It must—how else would the students be safe from an attack? The country had been obsessing about aerial attacks since the Cold War. Surely every school in the country had a plan for just this sort of event.

  Nigel closed the vents on his side of the car, then reached across and closed Kay’s.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “It’s in the air. Radiation. If we breathe it in…” He looked at her, letting the fear in his eyes finish the sentence.

  Kay nodded, her face as blank as a sleepwalker’s. So it had come to this, trapped in a car like coal workers buried in a mine, unable to do more than watch the poisonous ash fall gently over the town. How long before the particles found their way inside the vehicle and then into their lungs? An image came to her of Aunt Elise lying in a hospital bed after the latest round of chemotherapy treatment: hair fallen by the roots, face pale and gaunt, tendons protruding from the skin of her hands like guitar strings. The beginning of the end. There was only so much endurance in the human body, only so long the human spirit could fight before it was checked by its own mortality.

  Kay shifted the car into reverse. While her foot was still on the brake, a rock struck the windshield, denting the glass and shooting off runners in all directions.

  “What was that?” Nigel exclaimed.

  Kay looked to the left, past the telephone pole, and saw a figure standing by an open garage door ten or fifteen feet away, waving one arm high in the air.

  “He’s offering to help us,” Nigel said. “Come on, Kay, we have to go.”

  Kay nodded distantly but did not shift the car into park. She was trying to remember the last thing she had said to Luna. Her last words to her husband came readily enough, a text message that angrily stated, “You do NOT get to make me the bad guy.” Would those be the last words she ever said to him? Another riposte in a fight that had been going on since Luna was only two or three years old?

  Then she thought of the tears still gleaming on her daughter’s face, the eyes downcast with hurt and disappointment. Would she ever read her daughter another bedtime story, share another milkshake with her? Or had their six years together been all the time God had allotted them?

  “Kay! We have to go!”

  Kay glanced at Nigel and everything snapped back into focus. She parked the car and pulled a towel from the backseat. It was Luna’s picnic towel, the one she placed in her lap while eating so she would not spill food in the car.

  “Do you have a knife?” Kay asked.

  Nigel drew a Swiss army knife and cut into the towel. Once the cut was started, they each grabbed an end and managed to rip the towel in half.

  “Like a burka,” Kay said, wrapping her half of the towel around her face. It would not provide nearly as much protection as a proper mask, but perhaps it would keep most of the radiation particles from touching her face. It was the best she could hope for.

  They counted to three and opened their doors together. Moving to the front of the car, they hurdled the telephone pole and ran toward the garage.

  The man was wearing a transparent poncho over a gray, greasy uniform with the name “AL” stitched above the right breast pocket. His face was hidden behind a beat-up baseball cap, a pair of safety glasses, and a paint-stained rag tied behind his head. In a different context, Kay might have thought she was looking at a desperate bank robber.

  “Inside, quick!” the man shouted, his voice muffled by the rag. They entered the garage and then he closed the overhead door behind them, cutting off the daylight. For a moment the three of them stood there, listening to the sound of their own breathing as the ash fell silently outside.

  Kay glanced around and discovered they were in an auto repair shop. A red sedan and a gray pickup were hanging from lifts in the middle of the room. Tools dangled from pegs over an L-shaped workbench, which was now covered with a fine layer of dust.

  “You’re a life-safer,” Nigel said, putting out his hand to thank the mechanic.

  The mechanic stooped and picked up a radio off the floor, ignoring the hand. “We’d better get downstairs. There’s no telling how much radiation’s in here.” He started across the room.

  “My daughter’s out there,” Kay said.

  Al paused, looked over his shoulder. “School?”

  Kay nodded.

  “She’ll be fine, then. They plan for this kind of thing. She’s probably sipping a juice pack right now, listening to her teacher tell stories—” The words caught in his throat and he began to cough, leaning on his knees.

  Nigel stepped toward him. “Are you alright?”

  “Fine, just fine. We’d better get downstairs.”

  Kay looked at the garage door, pictured Luna sitting underground with her classmates while the teacher distracted them with games and light-hearted conversation. She wanted to reach across the space between them, hold Luna’s hand and reassure her everything would be alright. But she couldn’t. All she could do was pray that someone else was protecting her daughter in her stead.

  Nigel touched her arm. “Soon, Kay. But right now—”

  “I know.” Kay nodded, fighting back tears. “Let’s go.”

  3

  Al led them down a flight of stairs and into an unfinished basement. A few broken steps allowed Kay to glimpse the hollow space beneath the stairs, an area piled with old sneakers and bags of clothing covered with spiderwebs and littered with the neat, tightly-wound corpses of the spiders’ victims.

  While Al stuffed towels beneath the door at the top of the stairs, Kay surveyed the room at the bottom. They were standing on the shore of a sea of clutter: cardboard boxes, tires, road and shop signs, fuel pumps, a clock made from the spokes of a bicycle wheel. Here and there teetering islands rose up from the rest, balanced so precipitously that a breath of air might have toppled them.

  Kay stooped and picked up a figurine of a black woman in a red dress, her face frozen in a tight smile. The word “CINNAMON” was written across her apron in cursive.

  Ni
gel frowned over her shoulder at the figurine. “Well, that’s...are you sure we want to be here?” He chuckled humorlessly, and Kay had a feeling what he might say before the words left his mouth. “This is like those movies when the characters think they are saved, but really—”

  “Don’t mind the furnishings,” Al said loudly, walking sideways down the stairs, his hand on the railing. He took the doll from Kay’s hand and set it down on a box of Christmas ornaments.

  “It’s a good thing I found you when I did,” he continued. “If I hadn’t come up for the radio, you’d really be in a pickle out there. But we’re safe in here. We can hold out a good long while. Excuse me.” He brushed between them, following a narrow path through the clutter.

  Kay and Nigel exchanged a glance.