Go-Ready

by Ryan Husk

  People had started calling 911 at unprecedented rates. More than five hundred calls an hour, and with only ten operators to field them, most emergencies had gone unanswered. Jake often wondered what happened to all of them. He imagined most of them had been calling in to report seeing the mushroom clouds, and the Face, and the demonspawn. As if 911 could do anything about that.

  He remembered those fretful few hours when the world had suddenly fallen apart. The quavering voice of a mother demanding Jake tell her the best way to get to her daughter’s school since all the usual roads were blocked. The man begging that Jake somehow send the Marines, as if he had them on speed dial.

  His coworkers were constantly leaving their seats and gawking out the windows. Jake had only taken a peek, but kept mostly to his cubicle. After five years working for the ERC, he had heard it all. A woman calling because she had forgotten her email password. A man calling because he’d gotten his dick caught in the filter at a public swimming pool. A child calling to report his mother for making him go to bed early. Then there was the famous call from the woman calling while in the process of being raped, her rapist allowing her to go on with the call even while he did his business.

  It wasn’t that he was unafraid of the Face—quite the contrary, it had terrified him—but it had seemed a logical conclusion to the end of humanity. He couldn’t say how. Perhaps, since he dabbled in fiction writing, and had been raised to believe in Sovereign, in a God and a Devil who both plagued mankind, he had, in his own way, seen this coming. He didn’t know why or how but here it was, and as frightening as it was, it was also like seeing a sick parent die after an excruciatingly long battle with cancer. You’re almost relieved when the end finally comes.

  Jake wasn’t a misanthrope. He didn’t wish for an end to society, he had just always assumed it would come during his time. Asteroid. Nuclear war. Plague. Had to happen eventually.

  So he kept fielding calls. He kept fielding them until the power went out and the phones all went dead. Then, he had gathered up his things and left out. When his boss had asked him, “Where…where are you going?”, Jake had responded, “Don’t know.” Then his boss said the most ridiculous thing. “Have you clocked out?” Jake had laughed, and hadn’t stopped laughing until he was outside the building.

  He had hopped inside his gray Toyota Tundra and made it home using back roads. There, he gathered up as much as he could think to take, including his thousand-dollar Zweihänder sword. He had a cutting competition coming up next month. Probably wasn’t going to make it, judging by the evil Face in the sky, but he didn’t own a gun and he imagined he would need a weapon. He had trained for ten years in HEMA (Historical European Martial Arts), focusing mainly on the bastard sword and Zweihänder, and now predicted there might be a more direct application of his skills needed soon.

  The world had ended. He was way ahead of everyone on that. He accepted it instantly, without fear or hesitation. The only thing that disturbed him was the Face, and even that was slowly beginning to make sense. Yeah, sure, why not? As big as the cosmos is, as vast as the multiverse is purported to be, how could this not eventually happen?

  Call it a defensive reflex, but it worked. He started driving south. He tried calling Deena. She didn’t answer. He left her a voicemail telling her where he was going and how to get there. He didn’t think she would make it to Silvid Valley. Somehow, he knew she was staying with her parents and four sisters. They were all so close. Jake didn’t amount to much compared to that, she wasn’t going to follow him, not after only dating him three months. Still, he left her the offer.

  He turned on the radio. He didn’t want to listen to the play-by-play of the end of the world. Plenty of time for that later. Still smiling at his boss’s last words, he had activated his phone’s Bluetooth, directing his music into his truck’s radio and speakers. He selected the Dell Vikings. First song was their 1957 hit “Come and Go With Me.”

  Sorry, Sammy, he thought, smiling at the Great Red Eye that was peeking from behind the clouds. That payday’s going to have to be put on permanent hold.

  Knowing he was experiencing some cocktail of panic and melancholy and hysteria, Jake Marler patted his sword, rolled the window down, and hung one arm out the window, singing as he passed panicking motorists.

  Dom dom dom dom dom

  Dom be dooby

  Dom dom dom dom dom

  Dom be dooby dom

  Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa!

  I love you darling

  Come and go with me

  Come home with me

  Baby I’m to see

  I need you darling

  So come go with meeeeeeee!

  * * *

  No more paying bills. Think of it that way. He drove past a five-car pile-up, watching a bald-headed dude in overalls getting ready to assault a big dude with an ax in his hand. No more insurance payments on my truck. No more paying for my tag every September. No more paying taxes. That part sunk in once his brain had finished fighting him on what was real and not real. He glanced up at the Face, winked at it. No more going to work.

  That part was nice, but also a little scary. Without work, he wouldn’t get paid, and without money, how would he survive?

  Money won’t matter, Jake realized as he turned up the Bobby Darin tune on his radio. It suddenly struck him. This was the end of the world—that end of the world, the one that everyone was always talking about and he had been expecting. It kept hitting him in waves. In a few days, money would be paper worth less than Steno pads. At least you could write on Steno pads.

  It was all slowly sinking in as he crossed state lines into Alabama. It sunk it deeper and more completely when he first spotted the low-flying F-16s. It really sunk in when he saw his first pair of demonspawns ripping a family to shreds, peeling off their clothes first, then plucking an arm or a leg off, watching them flail about. Jake had seen it happening beside the road, positive his eyes weren’t lying to him. He’d driven away once one of the things tried chasing after him, rolling like a bowling ball in his wake.

  Jake had looked at his hands. They weren’t shaking. Laughing, he had turned the music up.

  I said I want

  (yeah-yeah, yeah)

  A girl

  (yeah-yeah, yeah)

  To call my own

  I want a dream lover

  So I don’t have to dream alone

  * * *

  Eventually, he did turn off the music and switch over to NPR, listening to the frenetic flow of updates, each one sounding like a joke, and yet terrifyingly serious. When it started rainin, he parked his truck under an overpass. He reclined his seat all the way back and just lay there, knowing that the world had come to an end. It was…romantic? Was that it? There was something liberating about knowing it was all over.

  Then it hit him that his family might not be safe. He had a brother that was a junkie and a sister that ran off to L.A. or someplace to become an actor. He hadn’t seen or heard from either of them in years. His dad was dead, but his mom and stepdad were currently journeying around the world, scratching Stonehenge and the pyramids off their bucket lists. His mother had pretty much disappeared when she remarried. She probably wasn’t thinking about him at all. If she was, it would be a first.

  When the rain let him, Jake had hit the road again, following the roads he remembered his father talking about when he had invested in Silvid Valley ages ago. He wondered if any others had made their way up there. Probably not. Who the hell had ever heard of Silvid Valley?

  * * *

  A bullet in his tire gave him a flat. He had driven for about two miles on it before pulling over. It was hard to believe he had been fired on by American troops. That wasn’t what his tax dollars were paying for. Then again, he supposed they were. It had been a frantic mess, that conglomeration of cars, all trying to get around the roadblock. People had been leaping out of their cars and demanding to know what the hell was going on. Jake had been ten cars back when the first car tried to m
ake a break for it. Chaos ensued. When he thought he saw an opening, he gunned it. The soldiers opened fire almost immediately.

  Then he was walking until nightfall, his Zweihänder flung over his shoulder like a hobo traveling with a guitar. He fell asleep in a forest in the middle of nowhere. He woke up, walked four more miles, coming to a Chevron station, in which he walked right in and took stuff off the shelves. Chips, drinks, bread, bananas, energy bars. He used paper sacks from behind the counter to take his haul. No proprietor was present. No one had locked up before they fled. The end of the world had its advantages.

  On to the next stop.

  * * *

  Six days of walking, seeing nothing of real interest. Nothing besides the Face, that is. Uncertain whether or not it was looking at him, each time the eyes were revealed through the clouds, Jake took cover under a tree, or inside a building, or beneath a parked car. For all he knew, it had no effect whatsoever. For all he knew, the Face was an illusion.

  But he knew better.

  He came to a patch of land that took his breath away, for it was bare, no grass or trees, just dirt and a few puddles of gray and brown sludge. Like something had eaten all the vegetation and then taken a huge dump on the land. It smelled strongly of ammonia and formaldehyde, and made him gag.

  At the fringes of all this sludge and devastation, he came across an Abrams tank that had been smashed to pieces by some unknown agent. Looks like the Hulk got a hold of this thing. There had been no detonation, there were no oxidation marks, no signs of shrapnel, it was just bent and twisted all around. A little later he found the dead soldier, his body shredded to pieces, only his head, his spine, and some of his body armor were left to identify him: SGT. FITZPATRICK, S. Jake searched the armor for a weapon, came up nil.

  He kept on moving.

  Not too far away from the dead soldier is where he found the living one.

  II.

  Gordon woke with a start and reached for Molly by reflex. She was gone. He remembered the note and everything else and rolled over. He was on the same cot he’d been sleeping on for days. He’d uncovered it after rummaging around in some of the supplies in a subbasement that Wade and Jeb found after some exploring on their second day. He fumbled around for his shoes. It was dark. To conserve power, they were keeping all the lights in unused rooms switched off, and even in rooms where there wasn’t a lot of group activity going on. There were eight cases of candles someone had stored in the subbasement, and Edward had had several lighters between his bug-out bag and go-ready bag, and Wade and Jeb had their cigarette lighters, so that worked out well.

  The candle he had snuffed out the night before was beside his cot. He found the lighter right beside it, lit it, and looked around at his living area. He had everything situated in a way he had memorized, so that he could know where everything was in the pitch-black. In a row along the wall, he had a couple of bottles of water, a stack of MREs, his Glock, and his blue button-up. For two weeks he’d been wearing the same thing he wore when he ran out of the house upon seeing the Face. There were three separate pumps in one of the rooms near the infirmary, and he and the others went there to get buckets of water to wash their clothes. So far, they hadn’t found a way of drying them, so they hung them up or laid them somewhere.

  By flickering light Gordon looked around at his new living room, perhaps the prison cell he would spend the rest of his life in. He reached up to scratch the beard he was growing. No razor blades down here, unfortunately. Edward had offered to loan him his, but Gordon had turned him down.

  There was a mirror on his wall—scavenged from a bundle of crates someone had left in the subbasement, potentially to decorate the many incomplete restrooms—and his reflection looked like a different person. The eyes were sunken, tired, aged twenty years, maybe more. There was a despondency that had never lived in those eyes, but had now taken up residence. The beard was uneven, scraggly, unkempt. If Molly hadn’t wanted him before, she sure as shit wouldn’t want him now.

  He ate an MRE. Stale, but nourishing. Then he headed out into the corridors.

  The air in the limestone caves was cool, the ground and walls mostly smoothed out by large machines that were long gone. There was a forklift, which Wade had tested days ago and was happy to find still working. It stood lonesome in the center of the massive cavern. It was one of the landmarks down here, a means for people to tell which way they were going. He made it to the restroom on E Block. There was a sign on the wall that said LADIES. Gordon had hoped there would be tampons in there, for the sake of Janet, Margery, and Greta, but there weren’t any. He wondered how they were going to fare without those.

  Just one more problem to figure out as we go, he supposed.

  The first few days they had been here, they had had to go up top to use the restroom, but Gordon had worked with Edward and Wade on figuring out the pumps, which were near the boiler room, and had so far managed to get water moving through only this ladies’ room. Gordon knocked on one of the limestone walls before he entered, and said, “Anybody in here?” His voice echoed creepily.

  The stalls had been completed and he stepped inside of one to drain the lizard, setting the candle on the floor by his foot. The silence in the cave was broken by his meager spillage, and after he had flushed, the eerie silence returned. He picked his candle up, and stepped back out into the corridor.

  And he screamed.

  Gordon leapt back from the dog, almost dropping his candle. “Atlas! Jesus!” he breathed, clutching his chest. The dog stepped forward, sniffing his feet. He gave the dog a pat on the head. “You gotta stop haunting these halls, boy.” Atlas had been restless since the first night they spent down here, constantly roaming the corridors, even in the pitch dark, as if on some patrol.

  Edward had explained that he had been an MWD, a Military Working Dog. Edward and Atlas had been a team for almost two years before the bomb ended both their careers. A lot of times, handlers are able to adopt their animals when both of them leave the service. Atlas was old, gray-haired, and walked with a limp, but he had steely eyes and a companionable presence. Gordon liked him well enough, but the damn creature could sneak up on the Grim Reaper.

  Atlas followed Gordon as he started walking towards the cafeteria, where he could already hear some dishes clanking. Probably the O’Hares. They had taken it upon themselves to start sorting out the kitchen. He saw the flickering candlelight from the doorway as he approached, like a suggestive gateway into Hell. When he peeked in, though, he found Colt and Greta O’Hare standing beside each other, their backs were to him, and they were swaying lightly as they hummed some song or other. Their hands were in the sink, washing plastic dishes they had found the day before in the subbasement. Gordon watched for a bit. He and Molly had never swayed like that.

  He made his way through the corridors, just checking in here and there, Atlas moving like a ghost in his wake. A few lights were on. There were occasional groaning sounds. Distant machinery coming to life. Pipes rattling, making sounds like far-off banshee wails. The end-of-the-world shelter was being slowly brought to life like a mechanical beast being given its first jolt.

  When he crossed a T junction that led to the many empty RV parking stalls, Gordon spied two wavering candles coming towards him. Wade and Jeb were returning from a bit of exploring. They never saw him, just headed down another vein in the cave, lugging a crate of pallets, which they had lifted using the pallet jacks they’d found in another room.

  Three weeks down here, and there was still much to uncover. There were more rooms in this place than in a hotel, with lots of stalls, closets, chambers, and would-be recreation areas. There was a hole dug out for a pool, but with no water in it. Gordon glanced into a fitness center, where dozens of weight machines sat in dusty boxes, unassembled, unopened.

  He passed the doorway into Marshall and Margery’s room. Margery was lying down on the floor, resting her head on Marshall’s lap while he read a book to her by flashlight. Marshall looked up at him an
d nodded as he went by. Margery had a washcloth over her head, dealing with a migraine, no doubt.

  Gordon never had any plans for these walks. He just went where the spirit led him. Sometimes he found something new, usually he just retreaded the same places. He felt like a spirit haunting this place. He very well could be. The world had gone topsy-turvy, so who was to say what was what, what was real and unreal?

  “There you are,” a voice said, piercing the silent darkness. Gordon turned, found Edward walking towards them. Atlas limped over to him. “And you found Gord-O, too.” He gave the dog a pat. In his left hand, Gordon noticed Edward had the Ruger that Colt had found at the farm’s garage, and the ham radio was in his right hand. “Wanna go up top with me?”

  “You asking me or the dog?” Gordon said.

  “Both of you. I’m going up top, take a look around.”

  “I’m sure it’s the same as yesterday.”

  “Take that as a no, then.” Edward nodded, and snapped his fingers for Atlas to follow.

  Gordon watched them go. “Actually, I’ll come with.”

  “Got your Glock?”

  He did. Gordon had started to tuck it in his waistline each morning by reflex. No one told him to, and it wasn’t a conscious effort on his part. After seeing the demonspawn and what it was capable of, it had seemed sensible.

  The three of them stepped inside the cage and they went up top. This was the fourth time Gordon had been up top since they arrived, and each ride in the cage made him nervous. Should the elevator break down, there was no maintenance man coming to fix it, no fire department coming to bail them out—they would be trapped a hundred feet up or more, inside a limestone cave, their whole battle to escape the Apocalypse ended because of a glitch.