Go-Ready

by Ryan Husk

  “Uh, Steven, it’s still me. I gave you my name, so…yeah, it’s Paul. Paul Edison. Over.”

  “How long you lived in Canton, Paul?”

  A moment. “A few years.”

  “A few years. And you don’t know your ex-mayor from your current high school quarterback?” He chuckled. “And that accent. Not very convincing. No, not too good there, Paul.”

  “I’m…not too sure what you’re getting at here, Steven. Over.”

  “What are you people up to?”

  “What do you mean? Over.”

  “Look…look, I know you’re just doing your job. I know you are. I’m ex-military, as well. Army. STB, special troops battalion. I won a Purple Heart. I’ve done it all. Weapons specialist, vehicle repair, military working dogs, I even did a little bomb disposal. So, from one soldier to another, give me the scoop. Stop pretending, and tell me what’s going on. You can at least do me that favor.”

  Silence.

  “Listen, I know you’ve probably got a superior looking over your shoulder. If that’s the case, and you’re too afraid to go against orders, then hand the mic over to him or her and let me speak with them. Soldier to soldier.”

  Silence.

  “By your silence I take it that I’ve at hit the nail on the head?”

  Silence.

  “How many other ham radio operators have you deceived with this? Huh? You coax them into revealing their positions and then a helicopter swoops in to ‘save the day’ and then that’s it? Where do you take them? Can’t be anywhere nice if you’re having to lie to them to take them there. How important is this little secret of yours that you won’t even let ham operators speak to one another? What’re you guys hiding?”

  Silence.

  “You know what, Paul? Fuck you.” Edward suddenly grabbed hold of the entire ham radio and flung it as hard as he could to the far side of the road. It smashed against the concrete and slid into a shallow ditch. He stood looking after it. The others remained silent for a time. Then, the old-timer spoke.

  “Young man, what’s going on here?”

  It was Edward’s turn to go silent for a time. When he turned back to them, he said, “What’s going on, Colt? I’ll tell you what’s going on. We’re alone. Utterly. I mean, I always figured the government wouldn’t much care about casualties one way or another, just the continuity of government, and the effects on the economy to keep it all running. I assumed that much. What I didn’t assume is that it would actually be against us. I didn’t think that—” He stopped. Listened. A noise. It was deep and rhythmic, not too far away. Edward knew that sound. Once so welcome, once the sound of friends coming to help. But now…

  “Choppers,” Wade said. “More than one, by the sound.”

  Marshall stepped away from the Wrangler, listening. “Reckon they traced the signal somehow?”

  “Edward?” said Janet, stepping up beside him. She tugged on his hand. “What’s happening?”

  Atlas started to growl.

  “Maybe they’re coming to help us,” said Gordon. “I mean…they won’t just leave us in here, not with the fallout coming.” To Edward, the older man didn’t even sound sure of himself.

  Edward listened a second longer. “We need to move.”

  “Where to?” said Gordon. “If you’re right, there’s nowhere left to go. Even if we do get clear of the roadblocks, the Cohutta Wilderness is not an option, not if they catch up to us—”

  “We’ll figure out where we’re ultimately going later. Right now, we can’t stay here. We gotta move.” All roads were being closed to them, all options abrogated. “We head for Madison Farm. We can pull over and re-discuss once we’re shot of here. Let’s get going, people! Move like you got a purpose!”

  Colt turned to his wife. “Let’s move it, girl,” he said.

  Edward ripped the map off his hood and handed it to Gordon, who stuffed it into the glove compartment. He had to help Atlas up into the back seat. Wade and Marshall took the lead, as they had agreed. Edward and his Wrangler were right behind them, with Colt and Greta bringing up the rear in their little blue Chevy.

  From the back seat, Janet asked again, “What’s happening, Edward? Gordon?”

  “Just sit tight, young lady,” Gordon told her. “And take that injection. You said you needed another, right?”

  “Yeah but…Edward, what’s going on?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “That’s bullshit, you know something. Or you suspect it. I see it. We all do.”

  He eyed her in the rearview mirror, and she looked away grumpily, rummaging through her diabetic bag.

  “I’m thinking about the images you showed me,” Edward said. “The ones from space. A cloud around the earth.”

  “Yeah? What about it?” Janet said.

  “We saw people being scooped up, torn apart. Coming to pieces, small particles.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’m thinking…I’m thinking maybe it’s an ecophage.”

  “A what?” Janet said.

  Gordon said, “What the hell’s an ecophage?”

  “Hard to explain. But it’s the least likely end-of-the-world scenario I ever believed possible. I’m thinking it’s an ecophage, or something like it.”

  “What is an ecophage?” asked Janet.

  “I’ll explain when we get somewhere. Right now, I need to focus on driving.”

  Thankfully, neither of them pressed him further.

  They drove for about a mile before coming across Orson’s Road. They took it, headed north, looking for La Grange Road, and from there this farm that Wade claimed to know well. Edward kept glancing in his mirrors, searching the sky for helicopters, for the Face, and saw nothing but dismal clouds. Gordon stuck his head out the window, looking around. Neither one of them saw any sign. They couldn’t hear the approaching sounds anymore.

  He checked his watch: 12:20 PM. To Janet, he said, “Reach into the big jug again, fetch us some more of the potassium iodide pills.”

  Janet started to dig for the jug, then stopped. “Why didn’t you share the pills with everybody else when we were stopped?” she asked. She waited for an answer, and when one didn’t come, she prodded, “Edward?”

  Gordon looked at Edward, then turned around in his seat to look at her. “It’s because he’s not decided yet.”

  “Decided what?”

  “Whether or not he’s going to keep them. Isn’t that right, Edward?”

  Edward glanced at Gordon, then stared directly ahead. Finally, he looked at the girl in the back seat, and said, “Just get the pills, Janet.”

  “Okay, but…Edward?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Can we really not trust the Army now?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “We’re in trouble now, aren’t we? Like, really big trouble.”

  He didn’t answer.

  After a few seconds of heavy silence, Edward heard Janet mutter something under her breath. It sounded like, “I want my dad.” She reached for the pill jar, handed them to Gordon, then gave herself an injection and took a couple of her own lisinopril pills. Then, Edward watched her curl up into a fetal position in the back seat, and buried her face in Atlas’s fur.

  IX.

  Two and a half hours ago, Colt O’Hare was a former lawyer listed with the Bartow County Bar Association, enjoying semi-retirement with his wife of thirty-two years, while earning a little extra money on the side consulting for Daniels, Pontley & Associates, the law firm he had helped found with his college friends Clifford Daniels and Alan Pontley twenty-eight years ago. He had a house in the suburbs, three grandchildren grown and doing well in different states (the youngest practicing law in Florida, the eldest and middle sons practicing it in Mississippi), he read the newspaper every day, never missed the articles on politics, and was enjoying the fantasy of running for the mayor’s seat in Cartersville next year.

  Colt came from a simple background. The baby child of ten children, all raised on a
farm in Adairsville. Every morning it had been the same. Get up, feed the chickens, milk the cows, bail the hay, and, if it was the season for it, pick cotton. His family had had one of the last great cotton farms in America. It meant little money for him growing up, but after inheriting the land in the wake of both parents’ death (within two years of one another; his Uncle Seth said Colt’s father had “Gone chasin’ after his beloved in heaven”), Colt and his six brothers and three sisters had plenty of money to chase after certain dreams. Not all of them had chased, but Colt had. At first, he was to be an artist. But something changed for him in the tenth grade.

  In 1968, at Adairsville High School, Colt met a boy named Simon Barnes, a fellow who would become Colt’s best friend. Simon came from a troubled background, an abusive father, a distant mother, and he was always moving schools because of constant fighting. He and Colt became fast friends for whatever reason, perhaps because they both understood what it was like to be constantly neglected? In any case, when Simon went into prison for a year for assault, and then exited into a halfway house, the whole process piqued Colt’s interest enough to drive him into law. Simon had been a good kid in Colt’s estimation, he was just steered in the wrong direction by a terrible upbringing, and he soon came to find out that many (not all, but many) of his fellow halfway housers had a similar story. It was then that he reversed his beliefs on “guilty until proven innocent.” To Colt, the slim majority of cases were those who were innocent (at least of being truly evil), and had merely been misguided.

  His inheritance was summarily spent in law school, and though his grades hadn’t been exemplary and it had taken him two runs at the bar exam to pass, Colt had gotten into the world of law and never looked back. He had become the representative for his friend Simon, as well as hundreds of others just like him through his career.

  Colt had kept in correspondence with two college pals, both of whom were go-getters in his book. They opened their firm together, with hardly any real experience of their own besides internships and consulting work. O’Hare, Daniels, Pontley & Associates was the name. (Twenty-eight years later, when they dropped his name after his retirement, he would not hold it against them.) Together, they had had many unsensational cases, though they had once gotten clemency for a client bound for lethal injection, and it was Colt’s proudest achievement.

  Colt’s siblings all remained farmers, and as a result were all mostly destitute. They still told him that it had been a bad move, even though he had met his wife when establishing his law firm. Greta Mosby had walked through the door with legs reaching to the ceiling, and before she even opened her mouth, Colt knew he was going to hire her as the firm’s first paralegal. Two months later, they were dating. Six months later, they were engaged. A year later, married and with their first child on the way. Things were looking good, even though his siblings all told him it was a vicious, evil world he was getting into.

  In the intervening years, one sister had died of alcoholism, another had committed suicide, and two of his brothers were in prison (they refused to be his clients). The rest of the family were scattered, most of their portions of their family land sold off to developers long ago, with tiny strip malls cropping up where cotton once grew so plentifully. Colt didn’t shed a tear. He wasn’t the nostalgic type. However, when he first saw the flash, and then went to the window to see the mushroom cloud rising over the trees, and the Face in the sky, he had wept. Greta, too. They had collapsed together in the kitchen, holding one another, crying for all those lost souls, and for the coming trials for their nation. And Colt had cried for all their friends they had surely lost, for they knew many in Atlanta.

  It had taken everything they had to climb up off that floor. Literally, climbing. Reaching for desktops, tables, the overhang on the kitchen countertop. One hand after another, both of them crying. Then, Greta had gotten hold of him, and shook him by his collar. “They’re not dead! The boys ain’t dead! They’re in Florida and Mississippi! We have to get to them! We’re not lost yet, old man!”

  Old man. Her pet name and occasional invective, often flung at him, either in moments of great joy or great rage.

  In those years between meeting Greta and the present, they hadn’t just attended funerals of his two sisters, and they hadn’t just worried over Colt’s two brothers gone off to prison. No, Colt and Greta O’Hare had had tragedies of their own. Two miscarriages, their middle son stricken by spinal meningitis and nearly killed. Greta’s only sister had been struck by a car, lived in a coma for seventeen years, and finally died quietly in her bed. They had almost divorced one another four times, and each time made up by remembering who they had been when they first met, thinking of the children, and often finishing the argument by making love.

  They had paid their damn dues. And now this.

  Now this. They had done their work, lived their lives, and kept quiet. And now this, he thought again. How many others had lived such simple lives, suffered enough tragedies, and were now cast into a world where the Face existed?

  “Watch it, old man,” Greta said, pointing out the window.

  Colt saw that he was drifting off into the ditch, then suddenly jerked the wheel back to correct. He had become lost in reverie, which had always been his habit, even while standing in front of a jury and making his most pivotal arguments. It was why he had almost become an artist, he had the mind of a dreamer. Now, realizing some of those dreams had actually come to pass, realizing that his fanciful thoughts on the end of the world had now materialized, he could hardly keep focused.

  “Just stay calm, old man,” Greta told him, patting his arm and sniffling. “Remember that they’re okay. The boys are all right, and we can still get to them. We will get to them,” she affirmed.

  “Did you hear what that guy Edward was saying?” he asked. A tear escaped his eye. Colt had kept his cool ever since that initial breakdown in the kitchen, but now it felt like the floodgates were about to open again. “That’s, uh…well, it ain’t reassuring, girl.”

  “He’s just scared. We all are.”

  “I don’t know. Sounds like a man who knows his stuff, though. Did you see how fast he picked up on that fake radio operator? I wouldn’t have guessed that anybody was trying to trick me, not at a time like this! My mind’s in a million different places, but it ain’t fixated on trying to keep myself from getting conned.”

  “He’s just paranoid, and he got lucky.”

  “Luck didn’t have anything to do with it. He knew. You saw it in his eyes. He knew it didn’t feel right.”

  “He said he was a soldier. I’m sure he’s been trained to pick up on lies and stuff like that.”

  “No, I’m trained to pick up on lies. I did it for almost thirty years. Man’s got one hell of a bullshit detector on him, that’s for sure and for certain.”

  Colt saw the brake lights on the Wrangler flare up, then the turn signal. They turned down another street, dipped quickly across a dirt road, and then came onto another paved road. “And what was all that about? That…uh…that business with us being kept inside here. Do you reckon he’s right?” Colt hadn’t asked many people for advice in his life, but the one he’d gone to regularly was his wife. Greta was often calm. Calmer than him and ready with an answer for anything.

  “I reckon the young man has seen a lot,” Greta answered sagely, softly. “How many times was he shot at? How many times did grenades go off near him? How many friends has he seen die? You heard him say he had a Purple Heart. They don’t give those away because you can make Rice Krispie treats.”

  Colt glanced at her, snorted out a nervous laugh, then laughed wholeheartedly. She has a way of putting things.

  He rolled his window down, listened. “Don’t hear the choppers anymore.”

  “If they even were choppers,” Greta said.

  Colt looked at her. “You don’t think they were choppers?”

  She sighed. “I think he heard something, and that his fears might’ve just jumped into the minds of that b
ig bearded fella. Paranoia and suggestion will do that.”

  Colt rolled his window back up, and searched his rearview mirror. “Well, for our sake, I hope you’re right, gal.” A tear suddenly dropped, and he reached up to catch it, hopefully before Greta could see.

  She saw, though, and touched his arm. “Hey. You listen to me, old man. They’re okay. We’re getting out of this and we’re all going to be okay. Got that?”

  Colt freed an arm up from the wheel, patted her hand, and said, “Yeah, girl. I got it.”

  * * *

  Margery’s head was splitting. She was clutching Marshall’s waist as they took the next slow curve, but she chanced freeing up a hand to touch the bridge of her nose and pinch it. It relieved the headache only about five percent, but that was a welcome reprieve. God help me. Don’t you let me die. Not now. Not now that I’ve come this far. Marshall might still need me. And that girl…

  Janet’s face flitted across her mind’s eye. In a flash, Margery had been transported back in time, and it was as if she was looking into a mirror. It was all there. The numb stare, but the underlying intelligence in each glance. The quiet withdrawal from the group, especially from adults. That slightly mistrustful look that Margery thought was so healthy for young girls to survive.

  And those eyes. A little lost and glazed. It wasn’t just trauma, and it wasn’t just her diabetes. Margery had seen something ugly when she was about Janet’s age, and she recalled looking out at the world with new eyes just after that event was over. In a flash, in the span of a few seconds, she grew up. She had to. She still is. She doesn’t even know it yet, but she’s already in transition. The real world’s been revealed to her, the curtain hiding all the ugliness pulled back, and now she has to cope.

  Margery looked over her shoulder, caught glimpses of the expanding gray-black cloud coming for them, in fact looming over this region somewhat, like an angry god seeking out those that had displeased it. It had certainly spread fast. Having been back on that old decrepit road, their view blocked by the trees all around, they hadn’t witnessed its continued metamorphosis. Like the dark cloud of a sorcerer in some Lord of the Rings-type movie, it moved with a quickness now than Marge had ever seen clouds move with.