Go-Ready

by Ryan Husk

  A strange thought, apropos of nothing, coming to him at the end of the fucking world.

  The phone was back in his ear. Still no answer from Bradley.

  The roar of the beast grew louder and louder. The light had diminished enough that he could chance another glance southeast. The mushroom cloud was inescapably there. All at once, every piece of speculative fiction he’d ever read was neither speculative nor fiction. The realest threat to mankind ballooned. The angry churning cloud of orange, gray, and blackness pushed quickly towards the sky, rising higher and higher, still mushrooming, not yet spreading out across the sky.

  But that would come soon enough.

  Atlanta had been annihilated by something. The pyrocumulus mushroom-shaped cloud was of the tall, thin type, with two levels—the lower half was straight and pushing up, up, up, while a half-closed umbrella shape separated it from the upper half of the cloud, which was a bloated piece of deformed cauliflower. Only two minutes after the blast, light still emanated from within…

  It’s beautiful.

  A few people who had been lucky enough not to be blinded were stepping outside their cars, staring up at the sky, pointing at the black cloud that was encompassing the sky. One woman fell to her knees, crying while she clawed at her face. They see it, too. It’s not just me…it’s not just—

  “Edward!” Bradley shouted in his ear.

  It took a moment to realize Brad was there, in his hand, on the phone, speaking to him. Edward heard more screeching. A few drivers were trying to move around as much as he was on Busbee Drive. He looked ahead, unsure of what he ought to pay attention to first. “Bradley?” he said.

  “Ed! Do you fucking see it, man?! Do you—”

  “Get your shit packed,” Edward said, speaking as though he were in a dream. Am I dreaming? He’d certainly dreamt of this moment countless times. At nights, he’d woken up, cold sweats covering his body, searching for his go-ready bag, half believing what he’d seen in his dream was true, almost disappointed when it wasn’t. “Get it all packed, I’m coming by your house and we’re heading straight—”

  “Oh my fucking God! What the fuck! Oh my fucking God! That cloud in the sky! Ed, do you see it, bro?! It’s moving fast as fuck—”

  “Brad, listen to me,” Edward said, moving onto the shoulder of the road and zipping around a dozen cars trapped at an intersection—a work truck had crashed, spilling a ladder and some orange cones, and others had dammed up around it from all sides. “Go inside your house and get your bug-out bag. It’s in the basement—”

  “Fuck me! Fuck me, man! Are you seein’ this?”

  “It’s in the basement where we left it last summer after we filled it up, remember?”

  “I gotta fucking call Patricia—”

  “Did she not stay with you last night?”

  “—and I gotta see if her dad’s still at his house!”

  “Anybody that’s not with you isn’t coming with us,” Edward said. His tone was that of a site manager hollering for the parts he needed—strict, stern, uncompromising, calm but not willing to listen to excuses. “That was just the detonation. We gotta get to the Cohutta Wilderness before the fallout cloud starts this way. Remember?” On the other end, Edward could hear Brad screaming, shouting to someone else, the phone falling away from his ear. Panicked. The man was no doubt hollering to his neighbors. Edward made out some of it, but very little. “Brad! You still there?”

  “The fuck’re we gonna do, man?! What is that cloud—”

  “Fuck the cloud, Brad! It’s…some kind of illusion, I dunno! Get your shit together!” he shouted into the phone, glancing at the mushroom cloud now in his rearview mirror. A strange thing to see when not on TV. “Get your fucking bug-out bag, and be waiting outside in your front yard! I’ll be there in ten minutes! You better be go-ready by then, or else I’m leaving you!”

  “Go-ready…” The sound in Brad’s voice was like that of a man suddenly waking up from hypnosis, responding to a command, in search of something to connect the word to.

  “You remember. You’re in shock. Just take a deep breath, and let it out slowly. We have to get ahead of the crowds on the roads. Remember?”

  “Crowds…crowds…?” He was searching for sense.

  “People going for their spouses, parents rushing schools to pick up their children, shit like that! In about fifteen minutes the roads won’t be accessible to anybody not already on them! We can go off-road in the jeep—”

  “Schools…fuck me, man! Fuck me! This ain’t happenin’, man!” Panicking again. “I can’t…I can’t believe what I’m fucking—”

  “It’s either that or duct-tape your windows, get down in your basement, and wait for help that’s probably never going to come! Now which is it?”

  “This ain’t fuckin’—”

  “Which is it, Brad? Don’t waste my motherfucking time!”

  Like magic words spoken to break a spell, Bradley Pennington went silent. Only the general roar all around Edward and the occasional screeching of tires filled his world. He continued driving as normally as possible, in a spell of his own. “I’ll be…I’ll be…I’ll be fucking go-ready,” Brad panted.

  “You better be.” Edward switched off the phone, tossed it into the passenger seat.

  Checked the rearview mirror. Cloud still climbing, not spreading yet. Checked his watch: 9:39 AM. The bombers, whoever they were, had selected a weekday morning, just as he and every expert in the world had always suspected they would. Crowded roads, people off to work, the city at its maximum population of about eight or nine million, kids dropped off at school. But there was one single benefit to this timing. Most people are going into the city around this time, the roads leading out won’t be clogged just yet.

  But that would change in about ten to twenty minutes.

  Edward drove into his apartment complex, flooring it, unconcerned with whether he ran over the Mexican neighbor’s kids or not. He came to a screeching halt, left the engine running, and bolted inside. It felt like an oven outside. At least twenty degrees warmer than when he left home that morning.

  Atlas was at the door scratching, barking like crazy. Edward gave the dog hand signals that calmed him down, then got the dog’s tactical gear bag. He led Atlas outside, but had to help him into the jeep because of his hip injury.

  They got moving again, driving to the rear entrance of the apartment complex while his neighbors ran around shouting at each other. He honked his horn as he headed for the shortcut through the complex’s parking lot, which brought him out onto Chastain Road. The road headed first east, then north, and not through any residential areas, nor did it have many stores besides a mom-and-pop bait and tackle shop. An ideal road selected two years ago when he first moved to this area. He followed the exit strategy in his mind precisely.

  It was getting hotter outside. A second hot blast was coming their way. Outside, it was getting to be the temperature of a forest fire.

  The temperature climbed inside the jeep. The air conditioning was already up at full blast. He considered removing his shirt, switched on the radio instead. Nothing. No signal. Not surprising. Any major radio towers would be taken out by the EMP, which would go out for about ten miles beyond ground zero. Cars would be dying twenty miles behind him, planes would be crashing from the skies.

  The skies…Edward looked up again, at the gathering darkness, but did not see the dark moving cloud. In the back seat, Atlas whined as he looked out the window and up at the blackening sky.

  Wonder where the president is? he thought, already in survival mode and leaving his old life behind. It was gone. Like a dream, it never really was. Gone were the twice-a-year family reunions at Uncle Ray’s house. Gone was the paperwork in his fraud department at SNB. Gone was Hope, the girl Brad had set him up with a week before and had had to postpone until this weekend. Gone were the hot dogs at Shannon’s Grill, the ones with the award-winning chili that made them so popular at lunch time. Gone was his Chinese neighbor
who sat on the steps and played the harmonica at all hours.

  All of it. Gone. The mushrooming cloud behind him was all that was left of its end. He was on a fresh start. A new world lay before him. New matters, new concerns. He looked around him, saw the blur of stumbling people on sidewalks and in the streets, those that could see running towards something. Probably trying to go home, check on loved ones. They were still in the past.

  If the president’s in the U.S., he’ll be moved underground within the next five to ten minutes. COGCON will be initiated in about thirty, he reckoned.

  Edward looked in his rearview again. The mushroom cloud loomed there like the dusty plume after a giant’s foot had smashed the earth. He started singing. “You don’t really need any more from me,” he sang. “To make things right, you need someone…bump-bump…to hold you tight…” Had to keep it together. Had to stay focused.

  When the first black tentacle descended from the sky and swallowed up a teenage girl and pulled her apart, his blood froze in is veins, and he was suddenly sure he was living inside of a nightmare. Three seconds later, he convinced himself he hadn’t seen it, and drove on.

  * * *

  Gordon was picking up the pieces. He wasn’t sure if he’d meant to fling the pictures off the bedside table or if he’d stumbled out of numbness and shock. Such was his anger now. Yes, he’d definitely gone from having self-pity and guilt to having molten rage. It had gone on for all of a few seconds. Heavy breathing, fists clenching and unclenching. Then, he’d staggered away from the bed, backpedaled, and his hands had raked against the table he’d clung to for support.

  Get it together, he thought. Get a grip.

  Light. Light from outside. It filled the room, came in through the curtains and illuminated everything. For a second he thought, That’s weird. But then he ignored it. Just completely ignored it. Didn’t matter. How could it matter? Just an intense light. Maybe some weird, intense reflection of the sun off of the windshield from a passing car. It had happened plenty of times before, only not quite this intense.

  And the light lingered, though it faded as he went to his knees. The glass he pushed into a pile with his hands, forgetting all about a duster or broom. The picture was of him and Molly, sitting at one end of the sofa at her parents’ house ten Thanksgivings ago, she in his lap and him with a Styrofoam plate of ham, mashed potatoes and coleslaw in his hands.

  “Need a dustpan,” he muttered to himself. “Or…or something.” Standing, he shuffled into the living room. Halfway there, the walls started shaking. A picture fell off the wall. A low grumbling that went into his chest. Sounded like a train coming, but coming from everywhere all at once. The chandelier in the living room shook and tinkled. One of the deck’s glass doors cracked. The light coming in from outside turned a sickly yellow, then, very briefly, a sickly orange.

  Then it turned dark outside.

  The shaking went on for another minute. Earthquake? he thought. Maybe. Georgia did have a fault line that gave way to a two-pointer every few years, sometimes a three-pointer. Gordon waited for the shaking to stop, but even after it did the rumbling sound remained. The train had gone, but not that monster’s growl. Feeling along the walls and balancing himself on the backs of chairs, he came to the back window and oh God!

  Gordon Devereux’s eyes registered it, but his brain did not. The treetops were bending towards the house, pine cones and pine needles being flung at the windows and smacking against the siding, as a great wind pushed through the forest surrounding his home. Above the treetops, rising high in the south, there was a mushroom cloud. And, just behind and above that mushroom cloud, there was a grinning face, one as black as ink, spread thin across the sky.

  A large, grinning face was in the sky. The face of a terrifying god.

  Maybe just an illusion. Controlled demolition? he thought stupidly. It looked pretty close, but the size might be deceiving. But another part of Gordon Devereux’s brain was telling him to shake himself out of it, that this was something else, something that on a fundamental level he knew was extremely, terribly, horribly wrong.

  The face faded quickly. There and gone.

  Maybe a bomb went off somewhere. Yes, that seemed more likely for such a cloud, but he still hadn’t allowed himself to guess at the size. And that face…had he imagined it?

  The cloud was so large that it seemed quite close, yet if it was anything as large as an A-bomb and it was close, he would surely be incinerated by now, or killed by the blast wave. Maybe it’s bigger than I think. Now there was a thought closer to the truth, but still not solidifying or taking hold.

  Gordon turned away from the window, looked back, turned away again. The brain was germinating, dealing with one thing at a time. Two life-altering experiences had happened within the span of an hour.

  Then, the brain did what it did best, and conflated the two issues completely. Fear of one bled over to the other, multiplying the fears. “Molly?” he said, knowing full-well he would not get an answer. The echo of his voice sounded pitiful in the house, where the monster still grumbled. “Molly!” he whined. “Jesus Christ…Molly!” He ran around the house for the next two minutes searching for his cell phone before he remembered it was in his God damn pocket. He started dialing. He’d already tried calling her earlier when he first read the note, and got no answer then. Same as now. “C’mon! Answer, goddammit! Answer!”

  * * *

  She was on the other side of the gymnasium when the flash came. Jesse had just started walking inside. They split up, their hands torn apart so reluctantly. She had given him a shy but daring smile, and he’d mustered up enough courage to do the same. A wink from him made her heart race enough that she felt like it would leap out of her chest. She was short of breath. Actually short of breath from a wink and a hand that had held hers for less than thirty seconds.

  Janet was in the cool shadow of the gym, taking a shortcut around the building, even though all the kids knew they weren’t supposed to—there was a famous kissing area back here, where Tiffany and Brian had been caught doing some PDA of their own about a month ago, in fact, and where Victoria Branson went to get finger-fucked by Joey Stennam, if rumors could be believed—but she had to make up for time lost following Jesse to the gym.

  Her iPhone was in her hand. She was about to send Jesse a text when she got one from him: I like when u smile :)

  Janet grinned. Goosebumps went up and down her arms. She started to send a reply. As she was texting, four things happened in quick succession. First, the world became incredibly dark. Then she looked up, and saw…she saw…It’s not a cloud, she thought. No cloud ever looked like that. It was an ink-black rock, looked like it was miles long, swelling and shrinking. Looked like millions of birds, or black locusts swarming the sky

  “What…the fuck?” she whispered.

  The giant blocked out the sun. The world became dark and cold. Someone screamed. Then, light burst from around the edges of the cloud, like in those animations of asteroids breaking through the earth’s atmosphere.

  Then came another light. From her left, around where the gymnasium’s shadow didn’t touch. From her little pocket of shadow, everything around her seemed to glow. She only had to close her eyes for the first two or three seconds. The final thing that happened was that there was a lot of screaming and screeching of tires from the road. Cartersville High School’s football field wasn’t too far from her, and Main Street ran parallel to it. About 150 yards away, it sounded like a lot of cars crashing into one another.

  As the light dissipated, she looked up.

  Dark clouds swirled and expanded. The locusts spread across the sky. Janet started to cry. The tears just started flowing. This was a nightmare. Had to be…

  Janet did not panic at all. It was far too surreal to cause real panic. All her life, she had lived in Cartersville, Georgia, and nothing bad had ever happened here. She didn’t live in a place like Darfur or Afghanistan, where one could expect to run into violence on a regular basis.
Whatever the bright light was, it probably had nothing to do with—

  “Holy shit!” someone screamed.

  “Whoa!” another student cried.

  “Fuck!”

  “What the hell?”

  Over the next thirty seconds, the bright light from the south faded, only when it did the world wasn’t lit exactly as it had been before. The grass, formerly so green and pristine, now looked orange. In fact, everything looked orange. Then, after a few more seconds, the orange faded to a dull yellow color that suffused everything.

  Then, the locust cloud swarmed tighter together, appeared to draw a weird shape in the sky, like a grinning face. Then, the face dissipated, and passed over the world quickly. The world brightened a bit. Janet could now see beyond the football field to Main Street. Cars had indeed collided with one another.

  “Oh my god,” she gasped, and dialed 911 at once. Her mom told her that if she ever saw an accident to report it immediately.

  With purple lights dancing in her periphery, Janet started running towards the street to check to see if anybody was injured, maybe record it on her phone’s camera, but when she came out from the shadow of the gymnasium, the image directly to her right made her pause.

  At the exact moment she spotted the mushroom cloud, the hot wind and the outskirts of the blast wave hit her and everyone else around. The ground quaked. The temperature went up twenty degrees at least. The hot wind pushed her back so hard she fell over, landing on her backpack, turning and sliding, her bare knees scraping across grass. Saplings that had been planted the year before by the school now bent and hissed, and a limb or two came free.

  The boom hit about the same time. It shattered her brain. She screamed, clapped her hands around her ears, and then screamed louder. She didn’t know it, but the screaming helped her alleviate the pressure to her eardrums. Something flew into her open mouth, though, something like a twig. She spat it out. The dirt flying around her felt like it was cutting against her skin. The world became a terrifying thing pretty fast.