by Ryan Husk
“I don’t see what this has to—”
“He’s talking about fallout,” the girl in the back said. Edward raised an eyebrow, smiled, and looked back at her. “Right? Like, the radioactive fallout and, like…we’ll be sitting ducks.”
Edward looked back at the road. “Obviously somebody’s been paying attention her whole life,” he said. Pistol Man still had that stupid look on his face. Up ahead, a Toyota truck had collided with a Chevy Blazer, and a Mustang had somehow wound up off to the side of the road, front end tore to shit, utterly totaled, the driver stepping out with blood running down his forehead.
Edward swerved around him. “Radiation destroys the cells in the body, stops replenishing the blood supply,” he told Pistol Man. “Some people will survive for weeks before their bodies finally shut down. White blood cells which prevent infection, and red blood cells which carry oxygen, die off and aren’t replaced. The lining in your intestinal tract pretty much gets eaten; you get severe diarrhea, lethally dehydrated, and die horribly.”
“I-I get it…I get that radiation is bad,” said Pistol Man. He was sweating bullets. “I’m not stupid. But th-there’s…there’s miles between us and—”
“We’ll be sitting in traffic, going nowhere,” Edward told him. “And if the wind blows even generally in our direction all that fallout just rests on top of our cars. It comes in even if we leave the air conditioning off. You breathe that shit in, it’s only a matter o’ time. Weeks. Months. You might make it a couple years. Eventually, though, the cancer’s gonna get you.”
They drove on in silence for a few minutes, nobody saying anything. Perhaps it was finally starting to sink it.
“What are your names?” he asked them.
The girl was the first to answer. “I’m Janet.”
The man said nothing. Edward glanced at him. “And you, Doc Holliday?”
Pistol Man swallowed. “Gordon.”
“Well, Gordon and Janet, I’m Edward. The dog is Atlas. Pleasure to meet you. Now,” he added, “get that fucking gun outta my face.” For a moment, Gordon just looked at him, then at the gun. Edward watched the road mostly, but kept giving the older man meaningful looks that said, I’m driving this thing. Don’t try me any further, old man. It’s been a bad day for all of us.
“Oh…God…” Janet breathed.
“What?”
“Is…is that another one?”
“What do you m—” Edward cut himself off. Directly ahead, there was a brilliant light rising up over the trees. It was another flash. As impossible as that seemed, there it was. Nobody said anything. It wasn’t as bright as the one half an hour earlier, which meant it was farther away, but it was definitely there, and it was directly north of them.
“Oh my god!” breathed Gordon.
Edward stared at the bright, beautiful ball as its brilliance receded, replaced by another cloud that looked to be made out of cauliflower. “Reach into my glove compartment,” he told Gordon.
The old man didn’t hear him.
“Gordon!” The old man blinked, looked at him. “Reach into the glove compartment, and get out my GPS finder.”
“What…I don’t…is it…I…”
The girl leaned between the seats, over the Glock, and opened the glove compartment. She reached inside and handed Edward the GPS finder. “We’re, like, cut off now, aren’t we?”
“Yes.”
“This is, like, really, really fucking bad, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“The interstates between here and there are gonna be, like, clogged both ways, aren’t they?”
“Yes.”
“We’re gonna need another route?”
“We’re gonna need another route,” he confirmed.
“That’s another explosion!” Gordon exclaimed. “Another…another bomb!”
“Yep,” said Edward. And, to his surprise, the girl Janet said it almost in unison. He glanced back at her, smiled. She didn’t smile back…at least not at first. When she did, it was so brief it could barely be said to have happened, and it was far outweighed by her grief and fear. But it was there. Well, well, well. Another survivor.
Edward checked his watch: 10:16.
We can still make it.
Above them, the clouds parted and the face smiled.
III.
Gordon believed he was still working on dealing with his own shock. There was a numbness to his every action. He looked out his window, up at the sky. The sinister grin was visible in parts, and every black cloud was tinged with a sickly yellow color. “What the fuck is going on?” he asked no one in particular. No one inside the jeep answered him. In the back, the German Shepherd growled at something.
He looked at his hands. His fingers were going numb, sort of like what happened when Molly’s note had started sinking in. Those words…so fucking far away now, weren’t they? I’m dreaming, he thought, alternating that thought with, I have to find her. Then, he would think, I just pulled a gun on another human being. Trading that thought off with, I don’t know where I’m going.
The other cars ahead of them seemed to be getting the idea. The flash in the north meant something to them, too. Red brake lights shot from more vehicles, even those that were moving along fast on both shoulders of the road. They’re rethinking this.
Just as Gordon was.
A boom shook the truck. The ground trembled. A low growl, like a tiger waiting in the reeds. It grew louder and louder all around them.
“How far away do you think that is?” he asked Edward.
The younger man was in his mid to late thirties. Short dark hair, farmer’s tan, a business casual suit, minus the jacket, suggesting he’d been off to work when all this started. His pursed lips revealed a thinker, his fingers, which tapped lightly on the steering wheel, gave him an impatient air. His countenance was considerate, to say nothing of his eyes, half squinted, as if he saw something far off that no one else could see. He wasn’t just looking at space, but time.
To underscore this, Edward checked his watch, then slowed the jeep enough to maneuver around others who were pulling to a stop, uncertain of their fate. “Blast like that’s visible up to three hundred miles away,” he finally answered. He looked in his rearview mirror. “If we compare the two mushroom clouds and assume the same kind of bomb was used, I’d say that’s a hundred, maybe a hundred and fifty miles north.” Gordon thought he spoke calm enough to be the narrator for a documentary on The Discovery Channel, intrigued by his own words but speaking hypothetically. “That puts it between us and the Tennessee border.”
“Jesus fucked me in the asshole,” Janet said. Both Gordon and Edward turned to look at her. “Sorry. Somethin’ that, like, my friends say…ya know? Like holy shit. I just…”
Gordon looked back at the sky ahead of them. Half of the Big Smiling Face’s grin was visible through a part in the clouds. “What do you think it is?”
“Likely an attack made by Russia, possibly North Korea, if they have the backing of the Russians.”
“Not that,” Gordon said. He pointed at the face in the sky. “That.”
Edward shook his head. He had no comment on that. It was obvious he didn’t like not having an answer for things.
“What do we do?”
Edward turned on the radio. Already, they were getting reports of other witnesses calling in to the stations. “—getting that right now. Yes…yes, we’re getting reports of a second detonation. Another explosion somewhere in northern Georgia…we’ll try to get some confirmation on that for you—”
“None necessary,” Edward said, pulling them off the road. Up ahead was an offramp for the city of White.
“You goin’ Twenty?” Janet asked.
“Yep.”
“Where?” Gordon didn’t appreciate being ignored. He didn’t appreciate a lot of things, not the least of which was an unappreciative wife who left because she didn’t know if she ever loved him and waited decades to tell him that she was angry about not havin
g kids. He also didn’t appreciate that Edward and Janet appeared to have a rapport already, one that he didn’t share. Is it because I’ve got the gun? Once again, his mind jumped from that thought to, Molly. I have to find her.
“Interstate Twenty,” Edward answered him. “Goes west all the way to Alabama. It doesn’t have as many lanes for as long as I-75 does, but it’s our only play right now.”
“Alabama…?” Gordon struggled to keep up. He didn’t know it, but he’d already lowered the Glock. Any threats towards Edward were billions of years in his past, back at the start of the universe. “I…I have to find Molly.” Why didn’t they get that? What part of that didn’t they understand? Were they as confused as Molly was when she wrote that letter? I’m dreaming, he thought. Then, on the heels of that, Am I in shock? He looked up at the sky, half of a gigantic red eye, wreathed in flame, peered down through clouds. Have to be dreaming. Have to be.
“Molly’s gonna have to take care of herself,” Edward said. He looked into the rearview mirror. “Little Miss Janet, can you do me a favor?”
“Uh…sure.”
“I want you to reach back into my bug-out bag. Inside you’ll see a portable hand crank radio. You know what one o’ those looks like?”
“Yeah, my dad’s got one. Found it!”
“Get it out, put it in the seat next to you.”
“Okay.”
Gordon was watching him. Edward had the look of a fox, intent and predatory, but calculating his chances against a larger prey, or his chances of creeping up on something unbeknownst. Eyes darting back and forth, not in a panic, but intense nevertheless. Excited? “What do you need the hand crank radio for at a time like—”
“That explosion ahead of us has an EMP of its own,” he said. Pulled up onto the White exit, turned west. HERO trucks were there waiting to get on the interstate, none of them able to get anywhere, all of them lodged between other blocking cars. Highway Emergency Response Operators, and none of them able to respond to any emergency. “More knocked out circuits, cars, radios, telephones, airplanes,” Edward went on. “Nothing’s going to work. The people who need to hear the emergency broadcasts the most won’t be able to hear them at all. A lot of emergency warning stuff will be broadcast on the news but it’ll come through faster on the hand crank radio. HHS and DHS will be monitoring the plume, giving updates.”
“HHS…plume…?”
“The Department of Health and Human Services,” Edward said. “And the Department of Homeland Security. Both will coordinate with IMAAC—that’s the Interagency Modeling Atmospheric and Assessment Center. IMAAC will issue reports to HHS, who’ll then put the plume warnings out on thirty-seven pre-selected radio stations. Those thirty-seven stations have been prepped to broadcast the official emergency messages. Those stations are called PEPs, primary entry points.”
“Plume warnings?” Gordon said, shaking his head. “You’re…you’re going to have to spell it out, I’m afraid.”
“Clearly.” The younger man was perturbed. He sped around a slow-moving truck with furniture and food piled high in the bed. “Barring any bombs dropped directly on top of us, our greatest threat is the fallout cloud. Like I said. The plume. The absolute most important thing for us is to stay on top o’ wind direction and listen to what HHS and IMAAC report as far as plume direction.” Edward looked at him. “The plume is all that matters. We stay ahead of the plume, we live. If we don’t…” Shrugged.
“What about that?” Gordon said, pointing at the red-glowing eye, now mostly ensconced by swirling black clouds.
“One thing at a time,” Edward said.
Gordon looked at the sky, and shivered. For the first time he allowed himself to consider that this was real. And when he did, he felt himself shrink, and the universe expand. He felt the towering creature above them all, looking down at humanity like mice, or perhaps fleas. It made him feel small, insignificant, and more terrified than he’d ever been in his whole life. Not even childhood fears of monsters under the bed compared. No nightmare came close.
It’s just an illusion, he kept telling himself. All in your head.
He tore his gaze away, intent on disbelieving his eyes. “Why hand crank radios?”
“Because everything is out, Gordon!” Janet suddenly shouted. “Jesus, haven’t you been listening? The EMP is, like, knocking out all other local stations and radios and cell phones, and those that are still working will get lots an’ lots of interference from the cloud an’ there’ll be all sorts of, like, conflicting reports from the bullshit news stations that, like, report all kinds of shit on rumor without verifying it first! IMAAC will, like, have the most dependable information, and we’ll hear it first on this.” She patted the radio.
Edward smiled. “Sweetie, your daddy taught you good.”
She looked down at her bloody knee as though seeing it for the first time. “God damn straight,” she muttered.
Edward took the jeep across the overpass. When he did, Gordon looked to his right, out the window, at the monstrous traffic they had just left. From up here, they had the overview. “My God,” he whispered. “It’s already too thick to move.”
Edward said nothing. Those eyes, still so calm, yet so intense. The world was still rumbling, the mushroom cloud rising higher and higher in the north, and this man showed no paucity of determination. He looks like he’s familiar with this.
As they moved onto Highway 411, the trees blocked the view of the cloud. “Is this way going to be much better?”
“Bunch o’ rednecks out here,” Edward said. “You can be damn sure a lot of ’em hit I-75 ten or twenty minutes ago and are already gone. But those that haven’t left will start clogging up the main roads and back roads here as they start realizing their only way out is I-20. At least, if they wanna stay mobile enough to move away from the plume when the winds shift.”
“The plume,” Gordon said.
Edward nodded. “Finally sinking in there, Gord-O?”
It was finally sinking in. He couldn’t say how, considering all that was happening, but it was. There was still the echo of the man wanting to find his wife, if only to save her, even if he never got to ask her why she left him. She’s with her parents…the bitch! That last part surprised him, caused his heart rate to spike. That wasn’t good. Dr. Abrams had told him about his blood pressure, heart rate, how bad it could get after his last little episode.
I almost killed myself this morning. He was back to bouncing between thoughts. Put a gun in my mouth and everything, just thirty minutes ago. Gordon looked down at the Glock in his hand. His hand lay resting in his lap, the gun mostly limp. Every so often, he caught Edward glancing at it. He leaned back in his seat, put the gun down at his side between him and the door so the younger man couldn’t reach it, and closed his eyes.
* * *
Janet checked the time on her phone: 10:24. She tried calling her parents again. Oh, God, please let me get through! Nothing. No answer. It didn’t even ring, really, just kind of made a weird twittering noise, then a high-pitched squeal and then silence. Part of her was growing frightened, yet something else inside was rising up to meet that panic and fear. Call it a “Daddy’s Girl” thing, but she’d spent enough time listening to her dad talk about exactly this sort of thing and now that it was here it kind of seemed inevitable. This was always going to happen, she thought.
And she wanted her dad. He was strong, confident, and always prepared. And her mom…she always remembered the things Dad forgot. The little things, the molehills that added up to mountains.
She tried texting Jesse again—if his phone worked, maybe he could call Janet’s parents for her—but as her fingers touched the keys, they started trembling again, exactly like they had after the first flash. My blood-sugar, she thought, and while Edward moved the jeep around some other obstacle, she went for her purse, and her kit inside, her all-important kit, her lifeline. She plucked out a single vial of Humolog, her fast-acting insulin. She had it all memorized by now, and
it took as little as fifteen seconds to give herself the injection on the left side of her stomach.
Edward’s eyes flashed in the rearview mirror, not missing a motion. “What’s that?”
“My insulin.”
In the mirror, his eyes widened, then narrowed. “Diabetic?” he said. Janet nodded. “What type?”
“Type one.”
He muttered something under his breath. It sounded like it ended with “fucking great” but she couldn’t be sure.
The world all around them grumbled. The boom coming from the north still shook the ground, the jeep, the windows, everything. Janet watched Gordon shut his eyes and turn his head away. She looked at Edward. “Is he, like, in shock?”
Edward glanced over at him. “Maybe. You still with us, Gord-O?” A grunt from the old man. “I’ll take that as a yes.”
Janet looked down at her phone. She reread Jesse’s last text to her: I like when u smile :)
It occurred to her to try calling someone again. She tried calling her mom first, then her dad. Neither one picked up. She went back to the text message from Jesse. She must’ve reread it ten or twenty times before it started sinking in. The tears came, she held them off before they became a waterfall. Janet texted him: U ok? The seconds went by unbearably slow. Nothing. No response. She texted again: R u ok? Please tell me somethn.
More waiting. No response. She tried texting both her parents. Waited. No response. Where is everybody?
As if reading her mind, Edward said, “People have already evacuated these areas. Travel’s gonna be tougher the farther away we get from these small towns. But we gotta go through a few big towns to get to the small mountain towns.”
“People are evacuating this fast?” Gordon asked.
“Yeah, and they’ll keep evacuating, too. During the Three Mile Island scare up in Pennsylvania, more than 200,000 people evacuated, which was far more than the 3,000 people the government recommended to evacuate. Same thing with the Fukushima plant in Japan after the tsunami,” Edward said, glancing at his GPS finder and checking the road signs. “Those are called ‘shadow evacuations.’ Causes gridlock for days. Meanwhile the plume spreads more and more. Explosions this big, you can expect millions of people north of us that aren’t even in any danger to hit the roads anyway, which will have interstates backed up across state lines. If we want to get the fuck outta here, we gotta do it now.”
