by Ryan Husk
Maybe it was only paranoia, but the three cars pulled into the middle of the road didn’t look haphazard. A silver Toyota Sienna minivan, a lime-green Ford Focus and a black Ford F-350. They were put bumper-to-bumper, like a roadblock. And while the Focus was smoking with a crushed front end and looked undrivable, in what seemed to be an innocent accident, Edward’s unease went up a couple of notches.
Maybe Atlas sensed this, because he gave vent to a deep, guttural growl.
“What’s going on?” Janet asked.
There were eight people in the road, and Edward could tell who went with what car just by the way they were dressed. The father with his two kids hovering around him worriedly obviously went with the minivan, the yuppie salesman-looking guy in the suit and loosened tie went with the ruined Focus, and the four fellas in the dirty overalls no doubt went with the F-350, which was filled in the back with paint buckets.
Out working when the bomb went off, Edward thought. But the suitcases piled high on top of the truck indicated they’d already swept by at least one of their homes. Headed for the hills, too.
One of the men in overalls hustled up to their jeep. “Get that Glock o’ yours ready, Gord-O,” Edward told the older man.
Gordon looked at him, uncertainty in his eyes. “Why?”
“We don’t know what they want.”
“What do you mean? They probably just—”
“Jesus fuckin’ Christ, boys!” shouted the fellow running up to his window. “Ya seen that shit on TV? Ya seen them mushroom clouds? An’ that face! Fuck me, there’s a face in the sky! Like a fuckin’ demon! Gone behind the clouds now, but it’s gotta be Satan his fuckin’ self! Did you see it?”
“Hard to miss,” Edward said evenly. The clouds were just starting to turn a normal color, yet the light of day was dimming considerably. Getting dark early? Not likely.
“We got into a bit of an accident,” said the man. Even from this distance, he smelled like fuck-sweat, as Corporal Dunne used to say. His overalls had flecks of paint, and the hand with which he pointed towards the mushroom cloud looked to be covered in oil. It was blood. He didn’t even care.
“I can see that,” Edward said, glancing at the .44 tucked in the man’s waistline.
The country bumpkin didn’t seem to notice Edward’s glance, and instead looked his jeep up and down. “Look like you fellers been in one, too.”
“We have.” Edward glanced at Gordon.
The man took a second to give the jeep another appraisal. “Ye’ve not just been hit, this thang looks like it’s…fuck, the paint’s bubbled. How close were ya to the blast?”
“Can’t say exactly.”
“Mind if we ride with ya fer a spell—”
“Sorry, man—”
“My truck was already on its last leg when that fuckin’ feller in the tie over thar came outta nowhere—”
“Sorry, can’t help you.”
The bumpkin looked him up and down, halfway between offended and pissed off. “Hey, c’mon now, man,” he said, taking a step towards the window. He reached out, but didn’t quite touch the jeep. “We’re in an awful way here. Ya see how we are.”
“I do. But I’m sorry, we’re full up.”
Then, Edward privately slapped Janet across her teen emo face when she said, “We’ve got some room. I can scoot over, put the dog in my lap, and, like, they can sit on top of the bug-out bag.”
The man smiled rows of perfect teeth that, now that Edward saw the darkened gums, were probably replacements for those he lost to meth. Emerson, Cartersville, Adairsville and beyond were havens for meth labs. What crack had done for African-Americans meth had done to Caucasians in this area. Edward was suddenly reminded of why he’d distanced himself from all of these people, though his roots were in communities just like this one. “Yeah, see?” he said. “We can squeeze in the back—”
“We don’t have room.”
“The girl jes said—”
“The girl doesn’t know what she’s saying,” he said. “Now, I’m sorry, friend, but—”
“Friend? Ya call me a friend, leavin’ us here like this?” He took another step closer, his frown hiding those pearly whites. “Listen here, boy, we all gotta pitch in here. Ya know what days these are? These are the End Fuckin’ Times? Ya seen that face? You folk go to church, don’cha?”
Yet another reason to leave these alarmist hillbillies alone. Oh, they believed the world was coming to an end, all right. They just believed it was because America had elected its first black president and God Almighty was wroth with them for doing so. This not-quite-reformed meth head also probably didn’t buy the same president’s birth certificate, figured the Patriot Act had him on full surveillance because of his porn habits, and believed Trump’s inauguration drew the biggest crowd in history.
“I don’t have time for this,” Edward said, and put the jeep in reverse.
“Hey, friend,” said the country boy, touching his silver .44 and taking a step closer to him. It was a slight move, just the fingers tickling the handle. He probably didn’t even know he’d done it, just his instinctive backwoods answer to a panicked moment, to anyone who didn’t automatically give him his way.
Edward paused, looked at him.
“I don’t think yer listenin’.” Behind the hillbilly, his three partners were walking up. One of them inexplicably had a deer rifle hanging loosely from his shoulder by the strap, and the other one had a pair of pistols holstered on his chest in a way that would’ve been comical if the situation had been different. “We’re at fuckin’ war here. What do you think this is, huh? They bombed us! Twice! This is fuckin’ war!”
“I thought it was the devil,” Edward said calmly.
“It’s both, dumbass! The End Fuckin’ Times!”
Fuck me, of all the roads for us to blunder on, we come across an accident with the same assholes who tied anyone with a funny religious hat to the back of their trucks after 9/11 and drove them across six county lines.
Edward figured the hillbilly and his friends were the sort of folk to presume anyone not a flag-waving Republican was out to destroy the Second Amendment. Alarmists, he thought with disgust. More dangerous than the ones not prepared.
Edward cleared his throat. “Listen—”
“No, you listen! We got us a plan, now. My friend Reggie over thar’s got a cabin up in the woods in Fairmount. Now, if ya let us come along with ya, then all you folks’re welcome to stay with us until this thang settles down.”
“You’re not getting in my jeep, friend.”
“This is fuckin’ war!”
“We are at war, yes,” Edward tried to reason. “But not with each other.” Then, he nodded to Gordon, who had the Glock in his hand even if he wasn’t doing much with it. “At least, not yet,” he added.
The country boy seemed to see Gordon’s pistol for the first time, then looked back at Edward. When he spoke again, his tone was calm, but sarcastic. “A’right. Well then, how ’bout please? Pretty please. With fuckin’ sugar on top. Or how ’bout as one fuckin’ human bein’ to another? Eh? We’re in a bad spot here. The engine was already almost dead on our truck ’fore that yuppy hit us! We got no place else to go. What’re we s’pposed to do?”
“Should’ve thought of that before the bomb dropped,” Edward said, backing the jeep up. He made enough space to go around the accident. He watched the country boy carefully, muttered to Gordon, “Get ready to fire that thing.”
The old man stammered. “Wh-what for?”
“Just be ready. Just in case.”
They eased by the accident, went a bit into the ditch and even into someone’s empty front yard to get around it. All eight of the people involved just watched them go. The man with the suit and tie had a cellphone in his hand and looked like he was trying to make it work. He ran after them, waving his arms, trying to flag them down. Edward avoided him as much as he would a plague victim. He didn’t relax until everyone had shrunk in his rearview mirror to nonexis
tence.
No one in the car spoke until Edward checked his GPS finder again, turned down another street. It was Janet who broke the silence. “You could’ve at least tried to help them.”
“No, I couldn’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because they’re infected?”
Gordon looked at him, and blanched. “Infected with what?”
“Desperation. Panic. Stupidity. Ignorance. When you’re trying to take off you don’t keep dead weight with you, and you sure as shit don’t bring along a pit bull that’s just as likely to bite you as anybody else. If this thing gets worse, those will be the cannibals.”
“Worse?” Gordon said.
“Cannibals?” Janet said.
He looked at them both, shook his head. “Don’t tell me your daddy never talked about nuclear winter,” he said. Reached forward, flipped the radio back on, turned it up so he could hear. “If things get really bad, the clouds cover the sky, the world goes dark, photosynthesis stops, plants die. What’s left are food sources too irradiated to eat. Then what happens? People eat what canned foods are still around. When they’re out of that, they’ll eat their pets. When that runs out…” He shrugged.
“You’ve been reading too many books,” said Gordon.
“You haven’t read enough,” countered Edward. He glanced out the window, at the new mushroom cloud in the south. Then at the Glock in Gordon’s hand. Thought about making a play for it. Decided to wait. “These might be just two isolated incidents, a group of terrorists finally getting one off. Six million people may just permanently relocate someplace else, putting a major hamper on other states’ economies. Lack of jobs and food will put us in an economic crisis like we’ve never seen. Some people will leave the U.S. entirely, go to Canada. America will flounder, sink. And maybe that’ll be all there is to it. Or,” he added, turning onto a road paved with cracked cement, “maybe the redneck was right.”
Janet looked at him in the rearview mirror. “About what?”
He glanced over at Gordon’s right hand, the one holding the Glock. Yeah. Best to wait. “The End Fuckin’ Times,” he said.
Two minutes later, they passed someone else on the side of the road, a man and a woman readjusting the suitcases they had tossed into the back of their truck. After they’d driven past, Edward looked in his sideview mirror. Two seconds later, the man was snatched up by a tentacle that reached down from the sky, peeled his clothes off, then his flesh. He came apart in particles, just dissolved in midair, like salt dissolving in water. The woman ran screaming, but she was snatched up, too.
Edward looked away, certain he’d seen it wrong.
Looked at his hands. They were shaking.
Checked his watch: 10:42. One hour since the first detonation.
IV.
The hand-crank radio was the only thing in the vehicle that could pick up the message. All that was happening on the jeep’s radio was more general official-sounding rumor-mongering. The news anchors continually claimed that they were receiving photos from people all over the state and even into Alabama and Tennessee that could see the Face. The president had released a three-sentence statement about praying, something about coming together as a nation, and hadn’t been heard from since.
Janet had sent off another message to Jesse, asking if any other developments had happened. So far, he hadn’t responded. Neither had her parents. However, her phone finally found a connection to the Internet and she sent off several e-mails to her parents, posted on her Twitter account, but wasn’t able to log on to Facebook.
With one hand she continued wrapping her leg with bandages, and with the other she scrolled through the Twitter feeds of some of the people she followed.
Jeremy Ozzel @JeremyOzzelSays
N E body else freaking out about these new images CNN released? #DrakeEquation
Ricky Thoreau @RThoreau
You can see the footage from the International SS here, guys. Link: did.bc/dEk2P
Javonn Hadfield @ChucklesTheClown
HOLY SHIT! THESE PICS ARE INSANE! #DrakeEquation
Susan H. Pendergast @SusanSmells
Wow! Gnarly! They’re live streaming from International Space Station now, that’s insane!!!
Janet tapped her screen, accessing the links that everyone was sharing. Her mouth gaped at the images that were coming in from NASA, CNN, FOX News, and the ISS live stream. Large swaths of dark, rock-like clouds were coating the earth. The ISS was in orbit 254 miles above the earth, and because of that, they had a top-down view of the large mass that was covering the planet. Her heart raced as she rewound the footage.
“Look at this,” she said, and held her phone between the two front seats so that Edward and Gordon could see. They both looked. Neither of them spoke for a time.
Finally, Gordon said, “Could be faked. Photoshopped.”
Janet pointed out the window at the Face, half of which was visible through black-and-yellow clouds. “Does that look like it was Photoshopped?”
“Whatever it is, it did the trick,” Edward said.
“What do you mean?” Janet asked.
He glanced at her in the rearview. “Two bombs. Both strategically placed before detonation.”
“So?”
“Whoever created that…thing…” He nodded towards the sky. “They got nations firing at each other. Someone thought they were under attack. The object…it probably set off alarms all over NORAD. Someone launched a nuke up at it—either us or one of our enemies—and the others assumed it was all part of some coordinated attack. Someone somewhere got antsy. They saw other missiles being launched, thought it was all meant for them. That’s my guess at this point, anyway.”
“It’s coating the entire planet,” she said, scrolling through more images.
“Some kind of weapon. That Face…gotta be some kind of psychological warfare,” Edward said.
“What do you mean?” Gordon asked.
“Well, you saw it at work. Those rednecks thing it’s fucking Satan in the sky. It’s creating greater panic. Nobody’s gonna be able to agree on what the real cause is, or who the culprit is. Whoever launched it will be poisoning the Internet with fake news articles. Misinformation campaign’s gonna be in full swing.”
Janet looked back at her phone.
Perry Limon @PerryKnowsBest
And they called me crazy!!! #GetYourFactsStraight #DrakeEquation
Susan H. Pendergast @SusanSmells
@PerryKnowsBest Um…at this point, we don’t know WHAT it is?
Jeremy Ozzel @JeremyOzzelSays
@SusanSmells Anybody got a ride to get my mom & I out of Atlanta. I can pay gass $$$$
Ricky Thoreau @RThoreau
Fuck! My neighbors just killed themselvs! No joke, we herd the gunshots & my dad went to check. Fucking ded!
Perry Limon @PerryKnowsBest
@SusanSmells This is the end, my friends. This is what I warned everyone about. #DrakeEquation
“What the hell is Drake Equation?” Janet asked. “Everyone keeps hashtagging that.”
Gordon snorted. “An equation that tries to predict whether or not we’re alone in the universe. I guess some stupid folks think we’re under attack by aliens.”
“Is that any dumber than a fucking Face staring down at us from fucking space?” she said.
Gordon said nothing.
She looked outside, and was thankful that the Face was once again vanishing behind clouds. She checked Facebook, but it remained out-of-service. The message she received again and again was “Sorry, but we are having technical difficulties due to the amount of traffic to Facebook. We hope to have the situation resolved and apologize for any inconvenience.”
The hand-crank radio had a single, static-filled message that kept repeating. Janet cranked it herself, turned the volume up per Edward’s command. “Attention! This is an urgent health message from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services,” a man with a deep, officious voice said. “A nuclear weapon has been
detonated in or outside of Atlanta. The HHS and Department of Homeland Security urge you to find shelter. If you can see the mushroom cloud at all, or if you were close enough to see the flash from where you were, it is advised that you seek shelter for no less than twenty-four hours. Radiation is your greatest threat right now. You cannot see, feel, or taste radiation. You may not know if you’ve been exposed—”
Janet finished wrapping the bandages around her knees. She looked around. This was Gaines Road, a road she was familiar with. Her grandparents used to live here, and her mother’s best friend Susan moved out here after her divorce. Janet’s constantly drunk uncle Peter also supposedly had a place out here somewhere beside the lake where he parked his camper. Doubtless, he would be on the move now. Though he drank and whored with the best of them, he was an incredibly religious man who could quote the Bible (“We are all bound in error” he quoted to Janet’s father one Thanksgiving when he’d accused Peter of wallowing in his addiction).
“Hey, I have an uncle named Peter out this way. Maybe we should go talk to him, see if he’s heard from my parents.”
“No time for that,” Edward said.
Janet wanted to argue, but didn’t. She looked at her hands. They were trembling worse.
The time on the dashboard read 10:51 AM. She looked outside at the Face, its two red eyes becoming just slightly visible, and she felt a primitive fear that went deep, deep inside, and she shed a couple of childish tears. Beside her, the dog licked her face, whined, and wagged its tail at her.
The highway had almost no stoplights, and went up and down, up and down, over all the famous hills of Georgia. Hemlocks and pines swayed in a powerful, directionless wind. Quite a few cars were pulling onto I-20 from small dirt roads and side streets. Right at that moment, the interstate didn’t look nearly as bad as I-75 had, but it did look a mite busier than Janet had seen it during rush hour.
