Go-Ready

by Ryan Husk

  What have I brought them to? It wasn’t the first time he’d thought it, this idea that he’d only prolonged the inevitable. He thought about his blog, Apocalypse How, and now realized his original plans for surviving the Apocalypse was really just a means for himself to survive it. Because he could be a misanthrope at times. Had been ever since leaving the Army, after realizing he couldn’t trust anybody. But some human compulsion had forced him to bring these people alone and now the food in this cavern, which might have lasted him decades with careful rationing and frequent hunting of forest vermin, would run out in only a few years. Because I brought them all with me.

  That truth could not be avoided.

  And now we’ve added two more.

  Sergeant Lopez’s story made it seem like humanity was now an anthill being kicked around by two titans. Like Godzilla versus Mothra. And we’re all just spectators. It made him feel small in a way that he was not comfortable with.

  “I’m going to go talk to Janet,” he said. “Check on her.” Because he had nothing else better to do. “If you go back in there, tell Lopez I’ll be back in half an hour, after the ibuprofen and wine have set in, and then we’ll check out that leg.”

  Wade nodded. “Hey. You okay, Ed?”

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “I just…we’re always askin’ the girls how they are, the boys, too. Askin’ how Greta and Marge are, how they’re a-holdin’ up. But we never really ask you. You okay, pardner?”

  Edward sighed. He would be lying if he said he didn’t feel some kind of relief in just the asking of the question. Maybe it was because no one had asked him that since his mother or Bradley.

  Bradley.

  He had left his friend to fend for himself weeks ago and now had no way to find him. Ever. With no electronic communications, there would be no way he could ever locate Brad again. They were now permanently estranged from one another. Everyone else, too. The world had been one way, and now it was another. For everyone. He wondered if he had really sat and dealt with that. Would it haunt him later, as he’d seen it done with friends of his when they were reached their fifties or sixties?

  “Yeah,” said Edward. “Yeah, I think I’m good. Thanks for asking, Wade.”

  “Hey, we all gotta look out fer one another, right? Ain’t nobody else gonna.”

  He gave Wade another almost imperceptible nod, one that communicated gratitude, agreement, resignation, and a mission statement all in one. Then he turned away and walked down the hall to Corridor 2, where Janet’s room abutted Marshall and Margery’s. Edward had his own tactical flashlight, and moved down the quiet halls, marveling at the notion that one day this could be the last vestiges of humanity.

  We came from caves, and we’ll die in caves.

  Atlas seemed to know where his master was going, and led the way, sniffing at the ground as he went. Greta was sitting in with Janet, reading to the younger girl by candlelight. Some kind of old hardback, probably one of the first-editions they’d found stored down here.

  “How are we doing in here?” he asked. Both ladies looked up. When Greta put down the book, Edward saw that it was The Catcher in the Rye. “Holden Caulfield, huh? The original angsty teen. You’ll like him,” he said to Janet. A second later, he realized the joke might not have landed. He recovered clumsily, “That’s a hell of a collector’s item, if it really is a first edition.”

  Greta held it up. “Signed edition, to boot.”

  “No shit? Jesus. Didn’t think Salinger was the signing type.” He looked over at Janet. “How’s things, kiddo?”

  “I’m good. Heard you guys rounded up some new guys on your outing.” Atlas trotted over to lick Janet’s face, and she smiled wanly and gave him a hug.

  “We did. A Marine and some other guy. We’ve been talking to them, figuring out what they know.” He looked over at Janet. “Heard you had some kind of scare earlier.”

  Janet turned her face so that only half of it was facing Edward, a motion he had come to associate in shame in young people. “It was nothing. Least, I think it was. Marshall and Margery searched all over. Wasn’t anything down here. Probably just a, uh…auditory hallucination?” she said, looking at Greta, who nodded and shrugged. “Yeah, an auditory hallucination. I’ve never had them, but Greta says one of her sons did, and that it’s, like, possible if you’re real hungry and blood-sugar’s all outta whack.”

  “What did you see? If you don’t mind my asking. Maybe you did see something strange but your imbalance only made it worse.”

  Janet shrugged. It was obvious she didn’t want to talk about it. “It was, like, this tear in the air. Like a hole. A portal, whatever. Somethin’ reached through, like it was coming for me. It kept saying ‘no shit’ over and over again, like it was mocking me, because I had said it just a few seconds before when I found the missiles and rocket launchers.”

  Edward’s eyebrows retreated to his hairline. “Rocket launchers? Missiles?”

  * * *

  Gordon had been counting cans of soup when Edward stuck his head into the stockroom and said, “Yo, Gord-O, you up for a field trip?” Gordon had shrugged and said “Sure” and gladly, if stiffly, pushed himself up off the floor. In truth, he had volunteered for inventory duty not because it was especially important (a general count had already been taken, so a super-accurate count wasn’t of paramount importance), but because he needed something to occupy his mind. And maybe the Campbell’s labels also gave him something familiar, a sense of normalcy. It was the one thing in the cave he knew.

  They moved now through F Wing, Gordon holding the electric lamp and Edward forging the way with his tactical flashlight. Edward said he was just following Janet’s directions as they passed room after empty room, walked down a flight of metal stairs, and searched for the chamber. The caves had stopped creeping Gordon out. He was occasionally worried about getting lost, but he never wandered far from the group. Other than that, he was fine. He had never really believed in spooks. Well, not enough to believe they could influence the physical world. He had just never seen it done. Molly had believed. She had been more afraid of ghosts than intruders, she kept nightlights and burned incense to ward off bad energies, but Gordon would be damned if she gave two shits about remembering to set the alarm at night, or lock the front door.

  Gordon used to say to her, “How many toe tags have you seen on corpses saying ‘Killed by poltergeist’? But you know three people who were shot and killed, yet you’re more worried about Casper the Friendly Ghost?” That didn’t go over well with her. Logic rarely went over well with superstitious people. He had told her that, too. That also didn’t go over well.

  Maybe that’s why she left me. It no longer felt like self-pity to think like that. Now it felt like assessing the facts. No problem with that.

  “—and so we’ll need to watch these two,” Edward was saying. “Make sure they don’t somehow get a message out to their friends that Silvid Valley is a sanctuary for them. I took these two, I’m not taking any more.”

  Gordon noticed he said I took these two. Not we. Edward seemed like a team player more these last two weeks, but it was obvious he still saw himself as being in charge. And that was well. Everybody else seemed to be of the mind that they should let him. Hell, somebody’s gotta lead.

  “So let me know if you see them do anything suspicious,” he went on.

  “Sure thing,” Gordon said.

  “I didn’t like how Colt just blurted out that we were from Silvid. ‘Cat’s outta the bag now,’ I figured. What’s done is done,” Edward said, turning down another passage. A sign on the wall said GRA BORING COMPANY – COMPLETED PASSAGE READY FOR INSPECTION. “Eh, I guess the old man means well. We need to be more careful, though.”

  “Did they say anything about fallout? Which way the fallout cloud went? Or the amount of devastation in all directions?”

  “Lopez doesn’t seem to know specifics, just knows which cities have been hit, and that this thing takes a nap every few days over Kansas
, just like Rebel News said.”

  Gordon sighed. “Jesus. And nothing’s left out there?”

  “Nope. Just sludge, they say. Gray goo.”

  Gordon tried to imagine it. Couldn’t. It didn’t fit within his known human experience, not even close. “It’s so much worse than I ever imagined. I figured…I mean, I really thought we’d all make it. You know, humanity?”

  “Scientists used to talk about the Great Filter,” Edward said, leading him down another passage. “The theory went that if there was intelligent life out there somewhere, there must be some kind of unknown filter that kills them all before they reach a maturity level that they can travel across the stars. All advanced civilizations must go through this filter and not survive. Lots of people think the Great Filter is nuclear war, others think it’s natural disasters like asteroids, that an asteroid strike is just bound to happen and wipe out all intelligent life. Some think it’s just time itself—that the time it takes for a civilization to overcome all its problems and build an interstellar starship is so great that its sun would go out first. But I think,” he said, leading Gordon down another passage, “we may have just found the Great Filter.”

  “You mean the Face?”

  “The ecophage,” Edward corrected. “This sucker must have gone through God knows how many worlds, destroyed God knows how many ecosystems, to get this large, this powerful, and be able to sale across the galaxy.”

  “What about the Clockwork Man, then?” Gordon posed. “What is—?” He stopped when he tripped over a groundswell, nearly fell over before he recovered in time. “What is he? If the ecophage is the Great Filter, what is the Clockwork Man?”

  “If he’s even real and not just some mass hallucination,” Edward said, “I imagine he’s a DustBuster.”

  “A what?”

  “You know, like a Black & Decker—”

  “I know what a DustBuster is, but you’re saying he’s sent as, like, some kind of antidote?”

  “Lopez seems to think so.”

  “What about you? What do you think, Edward?”

  Edward came to a stop, looked around to get his bearings, and jerked his flashlight around to get a look at the chamber they had just walked into. “I think if some alien race got big enough to build self-replicating nanites, then it’s entirely possible that some other civilization built something to fight back. Chase it down. Or maybe Mr. DustBuster was built by the same people who made the ecophage, a contingency plan to stop it in case the swarm got out of control.” He shrugged. “We’ll probably never know, Gord-O. We’re ants. Always remember that. We’re the ants now.”

  Gordon didn’t like thinking like that. He knew it was true, but he didn’t like thinking like that. It made him concerned that Edward had no plan except to live as long as he could then die. In fact, he felt it was exactly this kind of talk. Resigned to his fate. It worried him enough to ask the younger man what it was he expected to get out of all this in the long term. “Hey, so, what exactly is our strategy for—”

  “I think,” Edward said, holding up a hand as he pulled short, “this is it.”

  Gordon peered through the doorway, into another dark chamber. Edward pulled out his own Glock and held it up with his flashlight in a Harries hold. Like he’s expecting trouble inside. Gordon wondered what in hell he could be worried about down here. Had he taken Janet’s hallucination seriously, or was it just good habit? All his questions evaporated when he saw the stockpile. It was just as Edward said Janet had described. Large black cases, some of them steel, some of them plastic, as big as coffins. Some bigger. Looked to be thirty or forty of them.

  “Huh,” Gordon said. “Well I’ll be. Looks like the military had started stockpiling this place, after all.”

  Edward made no comment. He moved silently into the room, with slightly bent knees, his weapon up, panning with the flashlight. He walked around the room, scanning all corners. The room smelled of dust and was chilly, just like most of the Silvid Sanctuary. It was like they were stepping into some tomb, like the ancient pyramids that had been mostly raided down through the centuries, leaving almost nothing but unimportant relics.

  Edward finally approached the cases and read the labels. Gordon was right beside him. They spent a couple minutes reading the labels and calling out to one another what they had found.

  Gordon whistled. “Wow. Heh. Guess we won’t want for home protection.”

  “This was the beginnings of a major stockpile,” Edward said, walking around and looking at the largest case. He read the label, opened it up, and looked taken aback.

  “What is it?” asked Gordon, walking over to join him.

  Edward didn’t say anything at first, just squinted as he slowly ran his flashlight’s beam up the length of the weapon inside, as if he could not believe his eyes. What Gordon saw was a steel cylinder, as big around as a basketball, and as long as both his arms spread out from each other. It looked like there was a shoulder mount, and two handles for triggers, as well as a heavy laptop made out of steel and two cables running from the computer to the cannon-looking thing.

  “What is it?” he asked again.

  Edward found a sleeve inside the case where a large user’s manual was tucked. It about as thick as a textbook. “LRAD,” he said, flipping through the pages. “It’s a wave cannon.”

  “What’s a wave cannon?”

  Edward ran his fingers gingerly over the mirror-sheen barrel, like a man while trying to soothe a skittish horse. “Ultrasonic weapon. Produces extremely loud noise. Up to five, six miles away. Usually used for deterrent and crowd control. This one’s heavy duty, though. We used them in Fallujah a couple times.”

  Gordon looked at the giant contraption. “That stuff really works? Loud noises actually makes violent people scram?”

  “I don’t care how badass you think you are, if this thing is pointed at you, and you’re within a mile of it, you’ll clap your hands over your head and run away. Your eyes will vibrate inside your skull and you’ll get an instant migraine that’ll last hours, maybe days. You’ll piss yourself. If you’re close enough, or if your exposure is prolonged, you’ll have permanent hearing loss. Turned all the way up to 140 decibels, you won’t just go deaf, you’ll lose your balance, start vomiting, fall over. You’ll wish you’d never done whatever it was you did to get this thing pointed at you.”

  “Jesus. What about the person using it? Won’t they go deaf, too?”

  Edward shook his head. “Doesn’t work like that. For one, there’s hearing protection here, but you really don’t need it because an LRAD sends sound straight forward in a beam, say about thirty meters wide. If you’re outside of that invisible beam, you can barely hear it.” He opened the manual again, started thumbing through it.

  “Looks like you’re really interested in this thing. More so than the other equipment.”

  Edward didn’t say anything.

  “Ed? What’re you working on?”

  He closed the book and shrugged. “This could be useful.”

  “You mean against the Face? That thing orbits Earth in the upper atmosphere. Doubt this thing can reach that far.”

  “No. But it’s made to be shoulder- or vehicle-mounted.” He looked at two cases behind it. “There’s three of them here. If we mount all of them to our trucks, then maybe…I dunno.”

  “It could protect us when we go out hunting, or head back into town for gas and whatnot?”

  “Maybe.” Edward looked at the rest of the arsenal. “You, me, and the boys will have to work on hauling all o’ this out of here in the next few days, and see about attaching them to the trucks. Hopefully these LRADs still have good batteries. We can train everyone on how to use them, maybe do some training on the rocket launchers, too. Shouldn’t be too hard, it’s controlled by Xbox controllers.”

  “You’re shitting me.”

  “Nope. The U.S. Navy replaced their periscope controls in all new submarines with Xbox controllers, and even their maneuvering boards, since
the last two generations grew up on video games and know how to use them without need of training.” Edward held up one of the controllers. “Simple as pie.” Suddenly, he clapped Gordon on the shoulder, something Edward rarely did to anyone. “Maybe the ants will have stingers the next time the giant foot comes to kick over our hill.”

  They were chatting about all the potential all the way back. Gordon thought Edward seemed in unusually good spirits. Before, he had always had a blunt matter-of-factness about their situation, a dim kind of dread, and always that resignation, easily accepted, about their future. But now he spoke of fortifications, defenses, developing some kind of personal agency outside of just surviving.

  When they returned to the main hub of the cave, all that deteriorated when Colt came jogging over to them, his flashlight bobbing up and down in the darkness. When he came close, Gordon saw fear painted on him.

  “It’s Margery,” he said.

  V.

  These weren’t the days in which she was supposed to die. This was never how Marshall imagined it. Not even remotely. A hospital bed? Maybe. She had never liked hospitals and had begged to not be in one when she went. Or how about her own bed, with friends and family gathered around? Yeah, that’s the way. That’s the way. Dying in her comfy bed with her rock band posters surrounding her and friends smiling and saying goodbye, and with a world that was still mostly sane just outside her window. Not like this. She would want to hear Tom Petty, “Mary Jane’s Last Dance,” or something upbeat like “Runnin Down a Dream.” That’s the way. That’s the way.

  Her eyes were open, but only fractionally. She lay on her back on the cot, occasionally spasming. Marshall took a towel and gathered up the drool leaking from the edge of her mouth. The others were whispering nearby. A former soldier, a former lawyer, a former detective, former housewives. Not one of them a former doctor. A couple of them knew a thing or two about combat medicine, but nothing that could help Margery or even ease her suffering.

  The unreality of the moment was upon him. Margery had been with him so long. She was imprinted on him now, a permanent fixture in his life. They were never married but might as well have been. She didn’t care about a ring. “I only care about you, ya big dummy,” she had said whenever he brought it up. It was impossible to see tomorrow, impossible to envision it without her. Like trying to imagine true nothingness, the concept simply didn’t fit anywhere in his brain.