Go-Ready

by Ryan Husk

  “What’re you trying to say?” said Greta.

  He didn’t even bother looking at her as he tugged on his own pair. “Aw, go on. Just slip them on, see how they fit. Looks like there’s a couple different sizes here, and Ed says we need to get these wet clothes off.” He checked another shelf, ran his hand along a top mantelpiece. His hand touched something familiar. He pulled it off the shelf. A rifle. A very familiar one, too.

  That guy Gordon came walking up. “Find anything good?”

  “Ruger, the Number One Varminter,” Colt said, blowing the dust off of it.

  “You know your guns?”

  “My youngest was looking at buying one of these five, six years ago. They stole the show at the 2004 gun tests, and he’s wanted one ever since. Don’t know if he ever actually bought one. His wife was giving him all kinds of hell about it.” He opened the breech, made sure it wasn’t loaded. “Besides a little neglect, looks like she’s been handled well.” Colt braced it against his shoulder, looked down the barrel.

  Gordon looked up at the shelf where he got the Ruger from. “I see more boxes. Shells, maybe?”

  Colt reached up, pulled them down, inspected them. “Yep, some .204 Ruger cartridges.” He looked down the barrel again. “Not a bad piece for killing vermin.” He started to put it back.

  Gordon reached out to stop him, his hand on the barrel. “Might wanna hold on to that, Colt.”

  “What f—?” Colt suddenly recalled the military guys shooting at them. He suddenly saw a premonition of their vehicles being stolen, or swamped by desperate looters down the road. He didn’t like that image, he didn’t like thinking of people doing those things, but he had seen a lot in his day. He had been in a blackout in New York City once, he remembered the looting. He nodded and said, “Sure, sure. Guess it makes sense. Doesn’t seem right, though, to just take all this stuff without paying for it.”

  Gordon smiled sadly. “You could leave your credit cards on one of the tables with a note explaining, but somehow I don’t think it’s ever going to matter again.”

  “You think it’s that serious, too? You think it’s this bad everywhere?”

  Gordon shrugged, and walked away, conducting his own search of the garage.

  Colt set the rifle aside, and pulled out a few more dirty overalls from a laundry bin, then decided to haul the whole bin out of the closet. Behind it was a tall, rollaround toolbox, as well as an old washing machine, a stack of classic Playboy magazines (nothing newer than the late 80s, by the look of them), and beside that stack was a pile of comic books; Iron Man, Captain America, The Fantastic Four, Daredevil, and The Amazing Spider-Man. Colt picked up a few of the comics, rifled through them. In his younger days, he’d been a comic fanatic, and in his elder years he’d kept up the habit of collecting. Mostly stuff from his era, the so-called Golden Age of comics, Kirby and Ditko, when things had gotten more mature, yet there hadn’t been so much murder, rape, and violence tossed into the stories. Heavy on the concepts and character interactions, low on the pathetic attempts at shock and horror.

  The rain was still coming down outside. It was impossible to hear what anybody else was saying if they were ten feet away and speaking normally. Colt was stepping out of the closet with a few copies of Marvel Tales. These were all reprints of other classic comics, not worth much of anything, but they still had the first appearance of characters like Sandman, Mysterio, and the demonic-looking Venom.

  “Oh, gosh, here he goes,” said Greta, rolling her eyes as soon as she saw the comics in his hand.

  “Not going to take them,” he promised her. “Just…interested.”

  “Interested in what?” Wade had just ambled over to them. “You folks got ya some more duds, huh? What’s all this?”

  “My husband has a fascination with comic books,” Greta said.

  “Yeah? Me too. A bit early to go lootin’, though, huh?” He chuckled.

  Colt smiled wanly back at him. “I’m not looting. I’m an attorney, and despite what people say, some of us lawyer types do respect the law to its letter. I just…I saw them there, you know. Comic books. You know, I’ve heard it said that comic books are our modern mythology, like the cave paintings in prehistoric times, or the tales of Hercules and Achilles.” He shuffled through the comics in his hand, looking down at Marvel Tales #146, a reprint of the first appearance of Electro.

  “What’s got ya bugged there, Colt?” asked Wade.

  He looked at the comic book in his hand. “I had a friend who was a college professor, taught evolutionary biology. He said that about seventy thousand years ago, a ‘bottleneck’ happened in human evolution. There’s this theory, called the Toba supereruption theory—ever heard of it?”

  Wade shook his head, his red beard hissing against his chest.

  “It says that Lake Toba in Indonesia was once a volcano, and that it erupted with a blast like a comet hitting the earth, and that it caused a volcanic winter across the whole planet. After that happened, there were maybe only two thousand human beings left in the entire world. Just a thousand mating pairs. My friend said that they’ve done DNA tests to show that human beings today only have so many genetic divergences, and that if you go back far enough, such a sudden drop in genetic diversity matches up exactly with the Toba supereruption.”

  Wade nodded. “And so…?”

  “So, humans almost went extinct. But, we’ve found caves that have preserved old cave paintings. But paper…it decays so rapidly.” He held up the Marvel Tales comic. “I mean, I know it sounds silly at a time like this, but maybe we really ought to start thinking about preserving our mythology. As much of it as we can, anyway.”

  A flash of lightning jolted him. Greta jumped, too. Colt held her hand, and looked outside. He looked at the red-glowing Eye. “I wonder if this is how those tribespeople felt when the Toba volcano erupted,” he said. “When that explosion went off, it was probably heard over half the earth, and the nuclear winter was felt everywhere. They must’ve thought an angry god had come to punish them all.”

  * * *

  “What now?” said Jeb. Edward looked at him. He saw the skepticism written on the man’s face. Of all of Wade’s crew, he seemed like he cared least for Edward.

  “Plan C,” Edward said, pulling out the maps again. He spread them over the hood of a John Deere tractor. Checked his watch: 1:47 PM.

  Jeb looked at him. “What the fuck’s Plan C?”

  “Thought Wade had taught you about that language,” he said.

  “Wade ain’t my fuckin’ nanny. What the fuck’s Plan C? For that matter, what the fuck was Plan A an’ B?”

  “Plan A was me getting out with my friend Bradley, or at least getting north as fast as possible, beyond the roadblocks. That fell through, so then Plan B was getting to Alabama, then cutting north, back to the North Georgia Mountains, but it looks like that won’t do, either. Too many chances for more roadblocks, and getting caught out in the rain where there are no gas stations—we could get stranded in the middle of nowhere.”

  “So what’s Plan C?”

  “We got a Plan C?” said Janet, who came walking out with Margery. Edward gave her a look. The girl didn’t seem fazed by their last exchange.

  “What’s going on?” asked Gordon, walking over.

  “Edward’s got a Plan C,” Janet said.

  “What’s Plan C?”

  “S’what I wanna know,” said Jeb.

  Edward said nothing as he unzipped his bug-out bag. He rummaged past the flashlight, flares, jugs of water, twine, and the AA-12 to get to an orange bag half the size of his go-ready bag. He unzipped it and took out a couple of the map books inside. He licked his fingers and thumbed through some of the pages he had dog-eared. After a minute, he had what he was looking for. He went to the others and waved them near. “Gather round.” They obeyed. Edward tossed the book onto the hood of the jeep, leaving it open on the desired page. “Silvid Valley,” he said.

  They all leaned over. Janet craned her head, an
d Gordon moved to one side to let her get a better look. They looked at the road map, and the page directly adjacent to it: a color picture of a well-lit cavern, looking smooth and almost industrial, only it was bereft of any machinery.

  Jeb looked up at him. “What’m I lookin’ at?”

  “The caverns underneath Silvid Valley, Alabama. They were created by the Gilberto Limestone Mining Company in the 1870s. The company couldn’t make enough profits to cover the overhead, they went under, and the Army bought it. Used it for storage for almost a hundred years. They put it up for auction in the 1980s. No one made a bid for over a decade. No one wanted it. It was useless. Then in 1992, the Army dropped the minimum bidding price to one-point-two million dollars. An investor named Joshua Collinsworth purchased them to create a little private getaway for survivalists who wanted to train in survival skills, and even the wealthier ones who wanted to reserve a private room.”

  Gordon looked across at him. “A private room for what?”

  “For the end of the world, Gord-O.”

  The group fell silent for a moment. Then, Marshall snorted, “You’re kiddin’.”

  Edward smirked. “Nope. Caverns like this have been built for similar purposes in Kansas, Arkansas, and Utah. The most paranoid wealthy people keep ’em in business, but they usually go belly up, which is exactly what happened to Mr. Joshua Collinsworth. He built it up for a couple of years, but couldn’t attract enough of his fellow investors. He held onto it for another twenty years before his other businesses went under, and the bank finally foreclosed. The Army bought it, wanted to use it to stockpile oil reserves, but for some reason it never went through.”

  “So…nobody lives in it?” said Margery. “Am I hearin’ that right?”

  “Nobody should be living in it,” Edward corrected. “I imagine one or two desperate sorts might seek to run there and hide, but not many. These places are often built to look inconspicuous so that no one but the people who reserved space really knew where to look for an entrance. There’s about three and a half miles of eight-foot-high chain-link fence, topped with razor wire. The area above the caverns looks indistinguishable from the rest of the hills and trees that surround it. The only entrance is a nondescript loading dock nestled discretely into the wooded hillside. There’s an elevator that goes down—”

  “This is insane,” said Margery. “What would we go here for? How’s it gonna help us any better than—”

  “The caverns are 150 feet below the surface, cover about 63 acres, and they have a constant natural temperature in the low seventies,” he said, karate-chopping one hand into the palm of the other to emphasize his points. “The entire complex can hold more than a thousand RVs. The caverns are supported against collapse by limestone pillars that are about ten times stronger than concrete. There are even blast doors there. Those doors are built to withstand a two-megaton nuclear explosion from ten miles away.” Edward shrugged. “Hard to find a more ideal spot. I wanted to get to my family’s old property in the mountains, but that doesn’t look like it’s gonna happen, not for a while anyway.”

  “What would we eat?” asked Wade. The red-bearded biker had leaned over the tractor’s hood, put his elbows up on it and interlaced his fingers as if in prayer, deep thought, or both. “Assumin’ we made it out to these limestone caves, what the hell would we eat?”

  “That’s the reason I focused on this place when coming up with my contingency plans. In my research, I found that there’s shitloads of pallets of canned food that’s just sitting in storage up there, left there from when the bank took it from Collinsworth. The bank had nowhere for it to go, and hardly any investors interested in buying the place—about the only thing it’s good for is as an end-of-the-world shelter, or as a place for mass storage—so the food is just sitting there.”

  Nobody said anything.

  Edward added, “It could keep us protected. Not just from acid rain and fallout.” He gestured at the window. They all looked outside, at the world that looked tinged by fire. The light from the giant Eye.

  “This could be fortified enough to keep us from radioactive contamination. And from what I understand, there are medical supplies there, a makeshift infirmary, so…”

  “An’ all that food an’ medical supplies, it would still be there,” Wade wanted confirmed.

  “It was when the article I read was published. That was two years ago. I read there are also stored generators, barrels of oil—”

  “What if it ain’t there no more?” asked Jeb.

  “Got a better idea, Jeb?” Edward posed.

  “We could hole up here, wait until…”

  “Until what?”

  “Until the gubment finally lets us through! They can’t keep us here forever!”

  “And if they do? How long do you think the food will last?”

  “We could make daily runs to the grocery store,” Jeb countered, a little heatedly. Edward’s attempt to wipe the skeptical smirk from his face had succeeded, but it had brought out the stubborn child just beneath the surface of every man.

  “How long have you lived in Georgia?” chuckled Edward. “Have you seen how quickly food flies off the shelves when people think there’s a snowstorm coming? An event like this, I’ll bet the shelves are bare before midnight tonight. Might be some mayonnaise and some porn mags left, maybe.”

  Jeb snorted and pointed his finger, started to say something.

  “Assuming,” Wade interjected, “that we wanted to do this, how the heck are we supposed to get there? Didn’t you say this place was in Alabama? Ain’t that where we were headin’ towards in the first place in your Plan B? An’ didn’t you say it’s likely to be cut off by roadblocks?”

  “Cut off to vehicles, yes. But it can’t be completely cut off by foot. It’s just not possible for them to have manned the entire fence they’re putting up around these zones. It’d take a massive recall of soldiers from across the country, probably even overseas, since a lot of their forces probably got wiped out when Atlanta and the other cities got hit. They’ve gotta be scrambling. Silvid Valley is a lot closer, and since we’re going in on foot, we need something clo—”

  “Wait, wait, wait,” said Marshall. “We abandon our vehicles?”

  “If we have to. Depends on how the roads in that area are. We drive right up to this cemetery here,” Edward said, pointing to a map that was in an old Silvid Valley brochure he’d obtained, “and we abandon the vehicles up the road. We hop out—assuming there’s no forthcoming rainclouds, of course—then, we hoof it, hard and fast. There can be no stopping here, folks. No lagging behind, no pee breaks.”

  “What about the fence itself? How do we get over it?”

  Edward nodded towards the bug-out bag. “Bolt cutters in the bug-out bag,” he said.

  Janet looked up at him. “You, like, thought of everything, didn’t you?”

  He shrugged. “Some people collect stamps. So, what do we all think?”

  Jeb raised a hand. “Uh, heh, has anybody given any fuckin’ thought to the soldiers that shot at us? What happens if more of ’em are ’tween us an’ this Silvid Valley?”

  “I expect we’ll be shot,” Edward said. The bluntness struck everyone. “What? Is anybody surprised by that? After what happened at the roadblock? After everything else we’ve seen and heard?”

  “We’ve got a little girl with us,” said Margery. “Ya can’t just put her at risk like that—”

  “Putting her at risk by a bullet is no different than putting her at risk of dying here of radiation seeping into the water all around, or of some plague taking hold of us, or of her insulin running out. At least at Silvid Valley there’s an infirmary, and maybe some insulin in the freezers, or more lisinopril. Wouldn’t be much of an infirmary if they didn’t plan on diabetics.” He shrugged. “Besides, we got guns, we can shoot back.”

  “How far is this thing?” asked Jeb. “I mean, exactly how far are we talking, here?”

  “If these brochures are correct, it’
s about, oh, I dunno, forty-five, fifty miles from here, just at the border.”

  “And you think we can make it that far?” asked Gordon.

  “I think we can drive far enough to the camp grounds themselves,” he clarified. “At some point, though, we’ll probably have to abandon the vehicles and hoof it. And before anybody asks, yes, if it starts raining before we get to a car or a house for some cover, we’ll be exposed to the rain. And if the military tries to stop us, we may have to shoot them.” He shrugged in a what-can-ya-do sort of way.

  No one said anything. The world had stopped turning, even for Edward. Right here and now, they had several decisions to make. If they went with him, they were going against the wishes of the United States government. Their government. As rebellious as any of them had ever been, they had probably never imagined they might have to fire at U.S. soldiers in order to survive.

  Edward looked at each of them in turn. “Well, what do we think? I’m going no matter what. You all need to make your own choices.”

  A small voice, an old woman’s voice, came out of nowhere. “Let’s do it.” Everyone turned to look at the old couple, at Greta, who had a resolute look on her face.

  Colt smiled over at his wife, then looked up at Edward. “Well, if she’s in, I’m in. No waiting. Right now. Let’s go.”

  “That’s two votes,” Edward said.

  “I’m all for it,” said Janet.

  “What about yer family, girl?” said Margery, looking a little wounded, if Edward was any judge.

  Janet shook her head, swallowed, and pushed a lock of hair behind her ear. “They’re not…I can’t…I can’t just, like, wait forever, ya know? I just…” Tears. She stopped them quickly, though. She was toughening already, and Edward knew why. Psychologists could tell you how fast kids grew up when they lost a parent, especially both. They’ll be angry, sure, who wouldn’t be? But they’ll also mature at breakneck speeds, thinking far, far ahead of the rest in their age group. A tragedy, Edward figured, that they lost their childhood in the blink of an eye. And even though Janet couldn’t be sure about her parents, she had to know it wasn’t looking good.