by Ryan Husk
He’s right, she thought. This is gonna be full in probably thirty minutes, maybe an hour, absolute gridlock. Somehow, Janet had always thought her people would be tougher than this, more stolid, more unafraid. The faces on the other drivers told a different story, though. Rats looking for a way off a sinking ship.
A man outside her window stood outside his car, laughing as he looked up into the sky and took pictures of the Face. What the hell is he laughing about?
She gripped the dog’s fur, pulled him close into a tighter hug.
The jeep swerved. Janet looked for something to hold onto. Edward had dashed around a car putting on its brakes. The driver was preparing to make a right turn off the road—Probably going to pick up another friend or family member before evacuating—and Edward seemed to believe every second counted. “Outta the way, already,” he muttered. Then, all at once, he put on the brakes. “Jesus!”
Janet looked up. It sounded like a thousand howling sirens coming their way. She saw the flashing lights all mottled together. Here they came, a caravan of them, with about a dozen police cars interspersed between them, and two HERO trucks.
“How many you count?” Edward asked. She had the feeling he was talking to her.
They went by so quickly she felt she might’ve missed some. Edward pulled to the side of the road, which made it easier to count. The looks on the faces of the ambulance drivers looked intense, worried, frightened. “Somethin’ like…thirty-seven?” Janet offered.
“That’s what I got,” he said. “And eleven police cars.” Looked at Gordon. “Thirty-seven ambulances, two HERO trucks and almost a dozen police cars. None of ’em able to find a way into Atlanta. As lost as we are. That’s a bad sign.”
“You reckon traffic’s really that bad?” asked Gordon.
“I reckon traffic’s really that bad.” Edward left the jeep parked, engine running. He looked at the new mushroom cloud in the north, then checked his GPS again.
While Edward did that, and while Gordon generally just looked around at the trees and some of the open countryside in bewilderment, Janet tried her parents one more time. Still nothing. And no new texts from Jesse, despite her having sent three more to him while on the road. She tried Twitter again, but it didn’t work this time.
Gordon suddenly huffed. “Turn the radio up again,” he said.
“Be my guest,” Edward said, too busy with his GPS. “But you’ll get the most useful information from the hand crank.”
“I want to hear what the normal people are saying.”
“Suit yourself.”
Gordon reached forward and turned the dial slowly up. “—the largest mobilization of its kind in recent memory, maybe ever,” an anchorman was saying. “The Secretary of Defense has issued a state of emergency. There has been confirmation of a second detonation…and…yes, in south Tennessee. NEST has been mobilized for…looking for confirmation of…” It was all just coming out of the anchorman’s mouth so quickly, without pattern, unrehearsed. Stream of consciousness, Janet thought. That’s what her English teacher Mrs. Abernathy called it when people rambled on. “Again, if you’re just joining us, there have been two confirmed detonations on U.S. soil, both of them of nuclear nature, one of them either in or just outside of Atlanta, the other believed to be on the Georgia-Tennessee border. NEST units have been mobilized—”
“What’s NEST?” Janet asked.
“Nuclear Emergency Search Team,” Edward said, still moving his fingers around the GPS’s touch-screen, but never too busy to answer. “Made up of scientists and terrorism experts. Stationed around the country. The government started them up back in ’79 to look for loose nukes. They’ll deploy seven-man response teams that can be go-ready in about two hours. There’s only about four hundred members nationwide.”
Gordon snorted. “What, do you just stay on their website, memorize everything?”
Edward glanced at him…and maybe at his gun, too. Janet had seen her parents fight before, had seen Mrs. Abernathy get testy with Coach Holloway, and had come to recognize that tense moment just before adults started arguing. There was a precursor moment, when each of them wondered if the other was joking, if there was some underlying sarcasm or humor that they were missing. It was a check. Each one wondering how the other was thinking.
It made for uncomfortable silences, and more often than not was dismissed after the silence had passed.
“They search with radiation sensors disguised as briefcases, to reduce paranoia,” Edward explained, as he went back to surfing his GPS. “They’ll also mount larger sensors discreetly at the back of rental vans, drive around and search for the next possible bomb.” He looked up and around, out at the fields of grass blowing in the wind. “That’s their greatest fear right now. Wondering if there’s another one.”
“This isn’t happening,” Gordon said. Janet looked at him. He was sweating. Reverting back to denial, she thought. The older man used his free hand to pinch the bridge of his nose, the way her mom sometimes did to alleviate a migraine.
Edward didn’t seem to notice. He continued on, “In October 2001, a CIA operative codenamed Dragonfire told CIA and NEST that there was a bomb in New York City smuggled in by al-Qaeda operatives. Dragonfire said that al-Qaeda got the bomb from the former Soviet Union. Hundreds of NEST members flooded the streets of New York, looking for the bomb using their equipment and tactics. Came up zilch.”
“That’s it, then?” Gordon said, looking up suddenly. “That’s all we’ve got? Four hundred men in vans searching for nukes somewhere in the whole United States?”
“That’s it, brother,” Edward said, smiling. “Feeling the danger yet? We got hit hard, and all we’ve got to protect us from getting hit again is a couple hundred guys.” He glanced in the rearview mirror at Janet. “You all right back there?”
“I’m okay.”
“How’s the knee?”
“Stopped bleeding. Thanks for the bandages.”
“Contact anybody yet? Parents? Friends?”
Janet shook her head.
“How about you, Gord-O?”
“No. I can’t get a solid connection.”
Edward nodded. “Satellites aren’t equipped to deal with the influx of calls. Everybody all over the planet is calling somebody right now, freaking out about World War Three.”
“And the Face,” Janet muttered.
Edward nodded. “That, too.”
“I’m texting with Jesse.”
“Jesse your brother?”
“He’s…a boy I know.”
He nodded. “Got it. What’s he saying?”
“They’re holding everybody up at the school, inside the gym.”
Edward sighed. “I guess that’s the best thing right now. They won’t be going anywhere for a while. None of us will. I shouldn’t have stopped for Bradley.”
Janet looked up at him. “Who’s Bradley?”
“Old friend o’ mine.”
“You stopped to pick him up?”
“Yeah.”
“What happened? Why isn’t he with you?”
Edward shrugged, continued fiddling with the GPS. “He wanted to wait for his girlfriend. I knew we had to get on the road and fast, or else we weren’t going anywhere. But Brad wanted to stay. He made his choice and I made mine.”
“You…just left him?”
Edward nodded.
“Why?”
He glanced over his shoulder at her. “Look around you. Talk a long looksee,” he said. “Take as long as you want. When you’re finished looking, tell me what about our situation isn’t desperate.” The GPS made a chime. He turned his attention back to it. Gordon was watching him, then exchanged glances with Janet. “In this kind of situation, you don’t hesitate, you don’t prolong or prevaricate, you act. If others aren’t willing to do what’s necessary, you cut ’em loose.”
“Just cut anybody loose that’s slowing you down, huh?” Gordon asked.
The GPS chimed again. Edward’s brow crink
led in consternation. He was thinking on something. Janet saw his eyes flit to one side. They might’ve flitted over at Gordon, but she couldn’t be sure. “That’s right,” he said. “And you’ll learn to do the same if you wanna make it outta this.”
“Yeah,” Gordon said. “You’re a real model citizen. In desperate times like these, if people don’t work together they lose their heads.”
“Says the man who put a gun to my head to catch a ride,” Edward said, laughing.
Oh no, Janet thought. She saw what the laughing did to Gordon. The older man clenched his jaw, a thing that she’d seen boys do when they were trying to keep their cool, or perhaps thought they needed to appear like they were keeping their cool, she’d never determined which.
“Listen up, Edward, my friend,” Gordon said sarcastically. “I’ve had about enough of—”
“No, you haven’t. You’ve put up with it this far and you’re gonna continue to do so.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Because—” All at once, Edward sent the back of his elbow into Gordon’s face. Janet yelped, jumped back. Quick as lightning, Edward’s right hand shot out to seize Gordon’s wrist, twisted it, and disarmed him. The Glock was in Edward’s hand almost before she could blink, and he had it pressed against Gordon’s left temple.
“Wait!” Gordon yelled.
“No!” Janet screamed. Her hand went over her mouth, the other one sticking out in a futile “halt” gesture. Beside her, the German Shepherd was barking like mad.
The older man sat there, quivering, pressing his body against the door as if that was far enough away from the gun to be safe. “P-please…please, don’t do this,” Gordon said, hunched forward. Janet couldn’t see from the back seat, but she figured he was injured, perhaps a broken nose. She’d heard a crunching noise when Edward’s elbow slammed into Gordon’s face.
“Do what?” Edward asked. “What am I doing, Gord-O? Huh? You tell me.”
No one spoke. Atlas kept barking. Outside, a car sped by, an Acura Integra full to bursting with luggage and with a small girl in the back seat in a blue dress, leaning her head out the window and waving at them. No one inside the jeep moved. The Acura disappeared down the road, the people inside off on their own desperate attempt at survival.
The gun never wavered. Gordon turned away, not wanting to face Edward. “Hush, Atlas.”
The dog obeyed.
To Gordon, Edward said, “In your panic, you picked up a girl you didn’t even know. In your panic, you slammed into me because you weren’t watching where you were going. In your panic, you pulled a gun on another human being because of your fuck up!” Edward hissed.
Janet’s heart was racing. Her cellphone was gripped in her sweaty right palm. Her mind was going back to the guns she’d seen in the bug-out bag, particularly the big-ass AA-12. Just then, her phone buzzed. Another text from Jesse, no doubt.
“Your mistake cost me time,” Edward said. “My own mistake, going after Bradley, cost me time.” Then, Janet became very, very scared. Because Edward smiled. A genuine, broad grin, as sinister as the one looming in the sky. “So now we’ve both learned from our mistakes, haven’t we? I’ve learned not to stop for nobody, and you’ve learned never to point a fucking gun at me.”
With that, he pulled the gun away from Gordon’s head. Edward put the gun in the compartment of the driver’s side door. He never took his gaze off of Gordon, who turned his head even farther away, sighed and leaned it against the window. In her hand, Janet’s phone buzzed again.
“You wanna get that?” Edward asked irritably, looking back at her.
Janet was frozen to her seat.
“Maybe…” Gordon croaked. “Maybe you’re right. This was a mistake…and maybe me and the girl…we ought to just get out here…”
“Maybe you should.”
“No!” Janet said. They both turned to her. Tears were coming freely now. She no longer knew what she was most afraid of. The world was shifting beneath her feet, the skies were turning to madness, and her head was swimming. “I-I-I mean…we can’t. We don’t…we don’t have a car. If we get out and walk now, we won’t be fast enough to get away from the fallout cloud if it comes this way.”
“We’ll get a ride from someone else,” Gordon said, reaching for the door handle with one hand and stopping the blood flow from his nose with the other.
“What if no one stops for us?”
“It’s no more dangerous than inside this jeep.”
“Why?” Janet said. “Because he pointed a gun at you? You did the same thing to him.”
“That was different, that was…”
“That was you,” Edward pointed out. “Yeah.” He chuckled mirthlessly as he put the jeep into drive, and pulled forward, back onto the road.
* * *
The time on Edward’s dashboard read 10:57 AM. Still time to get clear, he thought. Plenty of time, long as we have no more setbacks and we find the right roads. He thought he had the right path figured out. It was a combination of a few minor roads and what appeared to be back roads with no connection to anything else. Dead ends. However, his GPS was a newer Magellan Triton with 3D topographical maps, which allowed him to zoom in and get a look at the lay of the land. There were two nameless dirt roads that had fields with sparse woods. Edward had spotted one possible way to get to I-20 by cutting through such an area. It was two miles up, southeast of them. He wasn’t familiar with this section of the town of White, so it would be a gamble going that way, potentially wasting precious time.
While they drove, Edward glanced intermittently at Gordon. The older man’s nose was bleeding, maybe broken. There was definitely swelling. Edward hadn’t had the foggiest clue that he was going to attempt to disarm the old man until he had done it. Yet, he had been watching for an opening of some kind, always aware of his environment. When the opening had presented itself, old training had taken over. It had been several years since he’d been through Combatives, but it was all still inside him. Muscle memory.
At least my time with them wasn’t a complete waste.
Gordon sniffled, touched his nose, his fingertips coming away covered in blood.
“Janet,” Edward said. “Reach back into my bug-out bag. Get some cotton balls out for Gordon here to stuff into his nose. Should be in a blue box with a red cross on it.”
Janet moved to obey.
“I’m not taking anything from you,” Gordon growled.
Edward looked at him. “You will if I say you will. If you’re riding with me, I don’t want you bleeding.”
“If you believe in cutting off all dead weight, then why are we still with you?”
Good question, Edward thought. He glanced at Gordon, shrugged. “Call it what you like. You’re here already. Went through all the trouble of kidnapping me at gunpoint and you at least tried to help this girl out. You can’t be all bad.” Edward checked his GPS, made sure he was still on target. “But make no mistake. Fuck with me again, and you’re out on your ass. Or dead. Makes no matter to me. Just think on that.”
Flashing lights in the rearview. Edward looked up, saw two police cars approaching from behind. They zipped around the jeep. They were Adairsville City Police. Adairsville wasn’t too far from White, almost butted right up against it.
“More lost cops?” Janet said.
“Maybe,” he said. “Or maybe on their way home, looking for their own families and just using their sirens to get people out of their way.” Edward shrugged. “The thought would’ve crossed my mind if I were them.”
“That’s you,” Gordon put in. “Other people are normal. Human. They care.”
Edward looked at him. “I’ll let that one slip, Gord-O, since I know you’re under a lotta stress right now about your wife.” He added, “But watch it.”
The road he was looking for was up ahead. It was a pitiful little thing that might have been important twenty years ago. It still had pavement, a street sign declaring it Townsley Drive, a single abandoned house wi
th boarded-up windows. The pavement probably hadn’t been repaired in a decade, grass and small saplings grew from the cracks and crevices.
Edward slowed down. Not a soul on this road. The trees broke on the side just enough for him to see an open field…and the skies beyond. The mushroom cloud that marked Atlanta’s end rose high into the nose of the Face. It was almost comical. Made the Face look like it had a Pinocchio nose, one that extended all the way to the ground, spearing the earth. One red-glowing eye peered down at the world, the other was ensconced behind yellow-black clouds.
Jesus, Mary and Joseph, what am I looking at?
They all just stared at it until both eyes were again concealed. Atlas whined, and licked the back of Edward’s ear. He barely felt it.
“What the hell is it?” the girl whispered.
Edward tried focusing on what he understood. He looked at the mushroom cloud, still flattening and expanding. The cloud seemed even more impressive now that they’d been a while without having a clear view of it. The power of the atom right there, he thought. The power of Man. No one in the jeep spoke as he drove them off the road and took off across the wild field. This had obviously once been an ideal spot for squatters. Coolers, cans, and Styrofoam cups left by vagrants littered the scene.
Then, all at once, here came a pickup truck breaking through the trees ahead of them. It was a rusty old Ford, the back of it filled with luggage, trash bags bursting with clothes, a refrigerator, and strangely enough, a big-screen TV. The truck was headed right for them, on their way to Townsley Drive, which Edward and gang had just left. “That’s not good,” he said. “They look like locals. If they’re going this way, they must know something we don’t.” He slowed the jeep down.
“What are you doing?” Gordon asked.
“Asking the locals what’s up.”
“You didn’t want to stop for us,” he said, pointing at himself and Janet, “or for that country fella back there—”
“Didn’t want dead weight. This is potential intel.” Edward pulled the jeep to a stop before Gordon could say anything else. He waved his left hand out the window. The truck came to a stop. A thick-jawed young man who looked like the type who had just started up a family stuck his head out. In the passenger seat beside him was a woman breastfeeding an infant. “What’s the word, friend?” Edward called out.
