by Ryan Husk
“Because I was conditioned to,” he countered. “I listened to that conditioning, and you were nearly minus a son because of it,” he replied. “War is nonsense. You’re an analyst, so you wouldn’t know. Some men do brave things, and just as many act like cowards, shoot above the enemy’s head so that they don’t have to go home with a heavy conscience, thinking of themselves as killers, and in so doing get others hurt or killed because they’re too afraid to do what’s necessary. But they live. The cowards live.”
“A coward dies a thousand deaths,” his mother quoted Shakespeare.
“Bullshit. That’s just what people tell themselves so they don’t feel stupid for meaningless sacrifices,” he told her. “Cowards die once, just like everybody else, they just live a lot longer and better before they do.”
“Is that what you learned? Is this my son talking here?”
He’d shrugged. “I learned there’s no such thing as camaraderie, only a façade of heroism that temporarily lives inside your mind. Like insanity. Temporary insanity, that’s all. And when it’s gone, you’re just lucky you didn’t die. I learned to get out while the gettin’s good. Everybody else will be. And is that all that survives? The cowards? What’s that say about us?” Edward had shaken his head, adding, “I won’t make the same mistake again.”
And why not? The military wasn’t paying for any more of his hospital bills. They didn’t have his back like they said they would. They were letting his bills pile up, ignoring his phone calls, forcing him to go through red tape, and every time he thought he found a way through they suddenly threw up more red tape, seemingly just to spite him.
So why stick his head out again, especially if he was never going to get paid for it, it might cost him his life, and only the cowards of the world were going to survive? If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, he thought, pulling out of the driveway.
Bevil Ridge Road was mostly empty, but Old Alabama Road had a dozen cars racing towards I-75. I’ll be lucky if it’s not a parking lot already. Thanks, Bradley.
* * *
The neighbors were screaming. Across the street, Donny Paxton and his wife were hollering to the Galloways, Tom and Nadine. Tom had put a ladder on the side of his house, climbed it, and now stood on his roof looking over the trees in his back yard at the mushroom cloud, now turning into miasmic, congealing black. Most of the sky was that sickening yellow color, most of the trees and the houses and the world was, too. However, at the far side of the sky, the yellow had started to fade, and a bit of blue was returning, although it was dim.
Peeking through the clouds was a face. Gordon couldn’t make sense out of it. Couldn’t be sure he was seeing what he was seeing.
He stumbled out onto the front lawn. The damn garage door had started jamming a month before and was tricky getting open. He pressed the button on the garage door opener ten or twelve times before it finally opened. The Camry was still there, but the Altima was gone. Gordon hadn’t even checked to see which of those she’d taken. Doesn’t really matter at this point. If she was at her parents’ house, she was safer than he was. Still, what if she needed his help?
If she was alive, she would be calling me, he thought, panicking, fumbling for the keys in his pocket and dropping them twice before he finally managed to unlock the damned door. She wouldn’t be so cruel as to not call and check on me, make sure I’m alive. Then, on the heels of that, Or would she? Could Molly actually be so upset with him that she no longer cared for his well-being? Or was she, in fact, dead? Strapping his seatbelt on, he realized that if it was the former, he would be furious with her, and if it was the latter…he would never get to ask her what went wrong.
He dialed again, started backing out of the driveway. Molly’s phone rang and rang and rang, went to voicemail again. “Hi, you’ve reached the voicemail of Molly Devereux. I can’t come to the phone right now, but if you’ll leave your name, number, and a brief message, I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. Thank you.” He prepared his spiel. Then, the damn automated voice explained his other options. “Record your message after the tone—”
“I know, goddamn it!”
“—or press one to send a numeric message.”
“Fuck, I know!”
“For delivery options, press pound.” Beep.
“Molly,” he growled, “it’s me. Molly, where are you? Answer your phone. I’m on my way to your parents’ house to pick you up. If you’re not there, call me back so I know where you are and that you’re safe. If you don’t call me back, I’m going to assume you’re at your parents’. Please, call me back!” He hung up, checked his watch: 9:57.
Then, he stomped on the brakes. Gordon suddenly had a thought. He didn’t know from whence it came, or how it was born. He wasn’t a violent man at all, but still, that didn’t mean others weren’t. He put the Camry in park and bolted from the car. He went inside the house, found the Glock where he’d laid it back on the bed, and tucked it in his waistband.
When he came back out, the Paxtons were climbing up the ladder to join Tom Galloway on the roof to look at the mushroom cloud, which seemed to have darkened in just the time it had taken Gordon to retrieve the gun. Nadine Galloway was on her phone, but was running over to Gordon waving her hands as he slid inside his car. He rolled down his window, but kept backing out.
“Gordon! It’s a bomb! They blew up Atlanta!” she screamed.
“Okay,” he said.
“They’re saying the face is some kind of—”
“Okay.” What the hell was he supposed to say? Nadine looked at him dumbly as he backed out into the street, turned towards the end of their neighborhood, and peeled out. He picked up his phone and dialed Molly again. Ring ring ring ring ring ring, nothing. Voicemail. “Damn it, Molly, you’ve got to tell me something! Talk to me, girl! Call me back!” He hung up, and started dialing once again. While he had the phone pressed between shoulder and ear, he drove with one hand and managed to turn the radio on with the other.
“—can’t be sure, we’re not wanting to rush to absolute, ah, conclusions at this point,” said a female journalist on NPR. “But, ah…yes…yes, we have a confirmation on the attack. The attack itself, yes.”
“Come on, come on!” Gordon shouted. “Tell me something! Who’s been hit and who’s not?”
“The videos we are seeing online from posters are showing us…yes…Jesus…we’re seeing mushroom clouds. Donna, are you seeing this? Are you seeing this, Donna?” In the background of the radio studio, a woman could be heard gasping. “It looks like two clouds, or maybe one cloud split into two. Once again if you’re just joining us, we are waiting on confirmation from the president or any senior officials of his joint chiefs of staff, but it looks like there has been an attack on Atlanta. Some sort of large, ah, explosion. A detonation that’s certainly far too big to be a simple, ah, car bomb.”
“No shit, Sherlock!”
“And there are widespread reports of…of some kind of, ah, illusion, or object in the sky that appears to be…well, it’s…”
She didn’t want to say it. She didn’t want to say there was a face peeking out from behind the clouds. Gordon looked up through his windshield, and saw one of the red-glowing eyes peeking out from behind a cloud. And that wide, silvery grin.
Gordon turned on to Tennessee Street, nearly hitting a van that came barreling out of a dirt road that led out from the woods. He was forced into the other lane until he corrected it. Everybody’s doing it, he thought. It’s a mass exodus. They’re getting the hell outta Dodge. Who could blame them? Just like Gordon, they all had someone to worry about, family or friends to check on or get to safety. The thought had just started creeping in on Gordon that he might not be able to make it to Molly’s parents’ house.
“—detonation certainly looks very large from the images and video we’re seeing online. The images are coming from all over Georgia, as far away as the North Georgia Mountains, where the mushroom cloud is still clearly visible. A yellowish, ah, sky…y
es…yes, I see that Donna, thank you. Uh, okay, if you’re just joining us, the government is confirming that this is no hoax or, ah, anything like that. There has been a detonation of a powerful bomb in Atlanta, and there are now satellite images showing…goodness, look at that, Donna. My God, I…” Silence from the radio for almost a full minute. Then, the news lady started sniffing. “Um…I’m very sorry to our listeners, um…it appears that this bomb…I can’t…I can’t do this, Donna. You’re gonna have to…”
Gordon turned the Camry onto Highway 41, and was halfway to Main Street when—
“Jesus Christ!”
Up ahead, all of Cartersville had changed. Right around the Taco Bell and the Super K-Mart, Main Street had been slammed. It looked like someone had played bumper cars with more than forty vehicles and three eighteen-wheelers tossed in for good measure. Some looked like they’d been crushed in a monster truck rally. People were getting out, walking about in a daze. Like pictures they showed us in school of people walking away from Hiroshima after the bomb…
One car-b-cue was going, the flames licking at other vehicles as they passed. Several people were aiming their phones skyward, recording the evil eye appearing from behind the clouds.
As Gordon approached, he slowly applied his brakes. He spied one man wasting no time after wrecking his Mazda Miata; he was getting out and walking around the ever-growing pile-up, tugging out a suitcase from his back seat and flagging down any cars that drove around the intersection. An elderly woman sat with her dead husband in her lap, looking up at the sky, at the mushroom cloud in the south, crying for deliverance. One man must’ve been riding his bicycle when it happened, because he and the bike were underneath the tires of a Walmart eighteen-wheeler, tugging ineffectually at his leg to free it. The rest was a twisted mesh of fiberglass and aluminum, shattered glass, and one body flung from its windshield. Farther up Main Street, the line of cars went for another mile, some of them cutting across the median, shooting across the Kroger parking lot and trying for East Main Street.
Like when the first snows come, he thought. This mania was worse than that, but still indicative of Southerners’ proneness to panic. Since the blizzard of 1993, Southerners everywhere had become afraid of being cut off from the rest of the world. Now, whenever they heard about the slightest possibility of a snowstorm, they rushed local grocery stores and Walmarts and practically raked goods right off the shelves. For all their talk of surviving when others could not, of being simple country folk who weren’t afraid of anything, they scattered like cockroaches when they saw the least sign of the world ending.
Gordon looked over his shoulder, out the back window at the mushroom cloud, so black and ominous, spreading out over the sky faster than he would’ve ever imagined. Other cars had started piling up around him. Gordon backed up, honking his horn. A red Chevy S-10 shot around him, the truck slamming into his rear bumper. The Camry lurched forward. “Son of a bitch!” Now, seeing how vulnerable he was, others took advantage. Next came a Volkswagen, then a Ford F-150, then another Chevy truck, all of them shooting around him while he fought for a way through. Gordon honked his horn. “Motherfuckers! Let me go! I have to—“
Something plowed into him from the left side. It was an old Ford Bronco. The driver’s side door collapsed, and he was pushed to one side of the road. The glass in the driver’s side window shattered. The Bronco’s driver honked at him the whole time. Gordon put on the gas and got out of its way, cursing the Bronco’s existence the entire time. He almost went into the ditch. The Camry didn’t have a lot of traction in pure dirt, and it was a struggle getting out. Once he was back on the road, two more cars clipped him along the side. Gordon was already beyond thinking about the condition of his car, and so was everybody else.
A kind of caravan was created, with the Bronco at the front. The Bronco’s driver seemed to know a way around. In such a situation, people just followed the guy who looked like he had a plan. Gordon was no different. Trying uselessly to wipe the shattered glass from his lap while also checking on his arms and legs to make sure nothing had been broken, he followed after the very same vehicle that had rammed him out of the way.
The Bronco cut across the median to a small road that ran parallel to 41, one that led over to Goodyear Tire and the veterinary hospital that had been there for thirty years. The Bronco cut through the parking lot of Goodyear Tire and then went over into a grassy ditch, drove around the Taco Bell, and cut through Super K-Mart’s parking lot. Gordon and the others just followed, Gordon almost getting stuck in a ditch again since his Camry wasn’t built for this. He passed the old Blockbuster Video building, an empty husk left behind after the Internet and Netflix took over the world.
East Main Street was actually pretty wide open, and that probably had to do with the pile-up behind them. Other people’s misfortune had given Gordon a way out. He hated to think of it like that, and felt guilt ripping at him even as he drove straight past the old woman waving for someone to stop.
Can’t stop now, or I’ll never get out of here.
Gordon gave a glance to the sky. Jesus…that face. It was a horror he hadn’t allowed himself to take in. A red, lidless eye, which looked out over the world. Occasionally, the clouds swirled in such a way to reveal the rest of its terrifying visage. A malicious face, like that of a monster from a storybook, grinned down at the struggling humans. It was black and twisted and scarred and uneven, stretching impossibly over the whole damn world…
Molly!
The thought came back to him all at once. He lifted his cell, dialed her up again. “Hi, you’ve reached the voicemail of Molly Devereux—”
“God damn it, Molly!”
“I can’t come to the phone right now, but if you’ll leave your name, number, and a brief message—”
“Fucking bitch!” He’d never talked about his wife that way before. He flipped off the phone and flung it onto the dashboard. “Tell me something! Call me! Let me know you’re all right! Something!”
Gordon slowed down to avoid hitting a pair of cars that had come from north 41, cutting across the Kroger parking lot. He pulled to the side of the road to permit them, a brief moment of clarity and neighborly goodwill taking hold of him. Then, he slammed on his brakes when he spotted a young girl on the shoulder of the road. She had black hair with pink highlights, a black jacket with all sorts of weird designs, a pink skirt, and blood running down her left leg. She was dragging a school backpack behind her. And she was limping.
Gordon tore around her. He was only a quarter of a mile to Interstate 75…that’s when another moment of sanity hit him. And when it hit, it did so with the suddenness of the bomb on Atlanta, of the note Molly had left on the refrigerator. The brakes seemed to slam themselves. Gordon looked in the rearview mirror.
Then, a snap decision.
He pulled to the side of the road, backed up thirty feet or so, and leaned over to open the passenger door. The girl with the pink highlights was running past, but peered in through the door curiously. “Get in!” he shouted. She looked at the seat. Gordon followed her gaze. He realized he’d left his Glock lying there. He leaned over and picked it up, tossed it on the dashboard along with his phone. “C’mon! Just get in! You’re hurt!”
The girl looked down at her leg, the blood leaking from her knee. She shook her head. “I’m fine…my dad’s coming to pick me up.”
“In this?” Gordon waved around at what was going on around them.
“Yeah, he’s—”
“Look, sweetie, just get in! I’ll take you to your dad!”
She shook her head, but she didn’t look so certain. Her eyes went to look behind her, in the west, where the pile-up was. Then she looked up at the sky. “What…what is it?” she asked no one. A tear fell down her cheek.
“Were you in that wreck?” he asked.
“What? No, I was—”
“Look, just get in, I’ll take you to your dad, I swear! You see that mushroom cloud? We gotta get going!” Gordon point
ed. The girl turned, her pink highlights flapping lightly in the wind. She looked at the doom in the south, then to the demonic face in the sky, then turned back to him. It was only then that Gordon noticed she was wearing a “Schmoyoho” T-shirt. He had nephews who were into that. “Sweetie, I can get you home if you just—”
“Drive!” she said all at once. She flung her backpack into the floorboard, leapt inside and shut the door.
Gordon floored it, only glancing at his rearview mirror once he was back on the road. “Are you okay? What happened to your knee?”
“I…I think I hurt it when I fell down?” She didn’t seem so certain. Her hands were shaking.
“Are you from the school?”
“Cartersville High, yeah…”
“Where do your parents live?”
“Joe Frank Harris Parkway,” she said.
That’s no good. Gordon looked at her. The girl looked sixteen, maybe seventeen, and was blinking a bit too much, looking down at her knee, out the windows, then at her phone. “What happened? Is it, like, the real thing?”
Gordon shook his head. Shrugged. Reached forward and turned up the radio. The news lady still hadn’t returned after losing her shit on air. “I don’t know, sweetie,” he said.
“Is this, like, a World War or somethin’?” the girl said. “We gotta get someplace fast. The fallout cloud will kill us.”
“The fallout…what?”
The girl looked at him like he was crazy. “The fallout cloud. You know about that, right?”
Gordon looked at her, then back at the road. He laughed. He actually laughed again. I’m losin’ it. I’m absolutely losing my goddam mind. I can feel it slipping. This is what it feels like. I always thought a person wouldn’t know what it felt like until it was too late, but this is it and I’m witnessing it. “I don’t know shit about shit today, sweetheart,” he said, seeing I-75’s onramp just up ahead.
