In The End: a pre-apocalypse novel

In The End

a
pre-apocalypse novel

Edward M Wolfe

This is a work of fiction. All of
the characters, organizations, events and locations portrayed in this story are
either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.

ISBN: 9781496176127

Text Copyright © 2013 by Edward M
Wolfe

Cover design by Amygdala Design

All Rights Reserved

http://edwardmwolfe.com

DEDICATION

Shaelee and Zachariah,

I love you guys and I hope you never experience an
apocalypse outside the pages of fiction.

“It is forbidden to kill; therefore
all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound
of trumpets.” — Voltaire

“If that was World War Three, it wasn’t as bad as it was
cracked up to
be
,” Jim said. Those nearest him, Josh
and Hailey, had no reply.

They were on the bottom floor of a condo
cabin which faced a mountain in the west and had windows on both floors facing
east toward Denver in the back.

Angela, who was sitting on the
other side of the room looking out through the window at a mushroom cloud on
the horizon, turned to Jim and said, “Are you insane?!”

Jim cocked his head and scrunched
his eyebrows as he looked at her without responding.

“Millions of people could be dead
or dying right now!” she shouted.

“You say that like it’s a bad
thing,” he said, getting up from the floor and stretching his back by leaning
backwards as far as he could. “I’m gonna go see if I can find a radio.” He
headed toward the stairs that led to the upper, street-level floor.

“You are such an asshole.” Angela
glared at Jim as he walked past her.

“I’m just going to look for a
radio.
Geez.
Calm down, Angela.
Think about how this vacation just got extended indefinitely. How cool is
that?”

She almost yelled up the stairs,
“Fuck off, Jim. For real this time!” but it occurred to her that maybe this was
Jim’s way of coping. Maybe she should give him some slack. But she was still
upset about what he said. She turned to Josh and Hailey and asked, “Can you
believe him?”

Josh slowly shook his head. Hailey
was leaning into Josh with her head on his chest where she had cried herself to
sleep. Josh continued to gently stroke her hair and stare intently at nothing.

When Jim reached the top of the
stairs, he hesitated for just a second before opening the door, thinking that
he might be walking into nuclear radiation. He dismissed that thought as
quickly as it came to him. The nuke was too far away to affect them here on the
mountain. He was sure of it. He opened the door and sniffed the air, then
smiled at his own stupidity. He wasn’t going to be able to smell radiation.

He walked through the doorway,
turned right, and entered the kitchen. There were no sounds coming from the
cabin or from anywhere outside. There weren’t many neighbors in the area since
it was adjacent to a resort that catered only to beginning skiers, but still,
at any given time one might hear someone chopping firewood, or a snow-plow, or
cars with chains on the tires.

Now, there was nothing. It sounded
like it was the middle of the night. He looked at the clock on the microwave
which should’ve been giving the time in glowing LCD light, but it looked like
nothing more than a rectangle of black glass above the control buttons. 
It wasn’t even blinking 12:00. Either the microwave was broken or the power was
out. He flipped the kitchen light switch. Nothing happened. He still wasn’t
convinced. He thought too rationally. Maybe the bulb was burned out. Maybe
several bulbs were burned out. Finding the radio would give him a definite
answer regarding their power situation.

He remembered that he’d seen a
radio when they arrived in the cabin and he’d looked in the various rooms
checking the place out. He tried to shut out thoughts of Denver and what it
meant that there was a nuclear explosion there. He needed to think. He got an
image in his mind of the radio sitting on a dusty shelf. Now where was that?

He had thought it was in the
kitchen, but it wasn’t. He crossed the kitchen, exited on the other side and
turned into a short hall with two closed doors. One door led to a bedroom that
no one was using and the other led to a laundry/utility room.

Now he remembered. The radio was
sitting on a shelf above the washer and dryer. He went into the room and walked
straight to the shelf. He saw that the electric cord from the radio was plugged
in to an outlet. He turned the volume/power knob all the way to the right.
There was no sound. He turned the tuning knob rapidly to the right. The red
tuner indicator traveled in small bursts with each flick of his fingers from
the 540 starting position all the way to 1600 at the other end of the spectrum
and it stayed silent the whole time.

Jim wondered if the batteries were
disabled while the radio was plugged in to the wall. He unplugged it then
turned it off and then on again. There was a small popping noise when he turned
it on and Jim thought the radio was coming to life. But then he heard another
pop and realized that the sound was coming from somewhere outside.

He turned the radio around and
removed the back cover. There were batteries, but he didn’t know if they were
good or not without obvious signs of corrosion, and these weren’t corroded.
Carrying the radio with him, Jim headed back to the kitchen and set the radio
down to search for new batteries.

He heard another pop from outside
and this time he recognized it as the sound of a small caliber pistol. 
Looting, already? Jim frowned at this thought. No way. People can’t be looting
up here. Not yet, anyway. He headed out of the kitchen, through the cabin’s
main room and went outside. This time he didn’t think of radiation before opening
the door. When he stepped outside, he sniffed the air for the scent of
gunpowder but he detected nothing but the smell of fir and pine trees.

He looked around, wondering where
the noise could’ve come from. There was another cabin across the road and twenty
yards to his left. That’s the only place it could be, he thought. If he was
right and the sound was in fact gunshots, then he felt he needed to check it
out.

The air was cold and he wasn’t
wearing a jacket, but he didn’t think of going back for one. If someone had
fired a gun three times, something was going on, and it could be bad.

Jim started to jog across the road
to the other cabin. He didn’t bother looking either way before crossing the
road. It was too quiet for there to be any cars coming. There was a nice car in
the driveway of the cabin he was approaching.  Jim slowed to a walk as he
reached the front door. He thought he heard something coming from inside. The
closer he got, the clearer the noise became. It sounded like a retarded kid moaning
or whining. Jim imagined a developmentally disabled kid with a firearm. If ever
there was a recipe for disaster… He mentally sang a revised version of a song
by a comedienne named Julie Brown.

“Everybody run. The retard’s got a
gun.”

He smiled, thinking this could be
really fucked up and not funny at all. He didn’t know why he always thought of
the most inappropriate thing he could possibly say in every situation. That was
just where his mind went, and to him, it was funny. He heard the moaning sound
again.

He opened the storm door and
started to knock on the wooden door with his knuckles. His hands were already
cold and rapping on the hard wood hurt. He grabbed the brass knocker and banged
it against the metal plate a few times, then let go. The moaning/whining sound
grew louder and more insistent. Jim was sure that something was seriously wrong
in there. It sounded like someone needed help. He tried the doorknob. It turned
in his hand. He pushed the door open and saw the source of the moaning.

There were two people inside. One
was making the awful moaning noise and one was dead silent. Lying on a bearskin
rug in front of the crackling, warm fireplace was a young blonde woman who Jim
assumed was probably pretty hot before she took two bullets to the head.

Further from the fireplace and
closer to Jim was a man lying on the ground, slowly turning in circles. He was
bleeding from the head and looked like he was trying to walk with his right
foot, while lying on his side. He would place his foot on the ground and then
try to get traction. His body would spin a little on the polished wood floor
and then he’d try it again. His arms lay useless on the floor. Each time he
used his foot and caused his body to spin a little more counter-clockwise, he
moaned, possibly in frustration, as if he was trying to do something other than
spin in circles and continuously failing.

Jim said, “What the fuck are you
doing?"

The man’s active leg jerked as if
he was startled by Jim’s voice. After another partial rotation the man was able
to see Jim looking down at him. He began moaning in earnest now. He looked
around wildly and his eyes widened when they spotted the gun not far away from
where he was, but still out of reach since he couldn't move his arms. He looked
at the gun, then at Jim, and groaned two syllables.
“
Ooooo
ee
!”

He repeated this several times.
Although his face was frozen in place with the left side of his mouth pulled
back far enough to expose his back teeth, and the right side closed, Jim sensed
the man was pleading with him.  He saw blood dripping from the man’s
temple onto the floor and realized what had happened here.  It was a
failed murder-suicide. Partially failed anyway; the woman appeared to be dead.

The man on the ground spun himself
until he could reach the gun with his foot,
then
tried
to kick it toward Jim. It went in a general direction somewhat toward Jim –
enough for him to understand what "
Ooooo
ee
" meant. He wanted Jim to finish the job for him.
"Shoot me," he was trying to plead, minus consonants.

Jim said, "Fuck you,"
then turned around and walked out. He was pissed off now. After what that
bastard had done to the blonde woman, he didn’t deserve help dying. He deserved
to suffer. Jim was so angry he considered going back in and shooting the
sonofabitch with his own gun to vent his anger, but he refused to put the man
out of his misery.

They were obviously a couple and
had come to the cabin together—maybe for a romantic getaway. The nuke happened
and the guy freaked out. Jim wondered if they could have possibly discussed
committing suicide. No, he thought. She had been shot in the back of her
head.  The bastard had decided on her behalf that life was too terrible to
live now. That should’ve been her choice to make.

He looked back over his shoulder
and yelled, "Asshole."

Angela was standing at the foot of the driveway, hugging
herself to keep from freezing when she saw Jim emerge from the doorway. She was
scared that something had happened to him and was relieved to see that he looked
unharmed.

“What were you doing over there?
Did something happen? I thought I heard gunshots after you left the room."

Jim stood there, looking down at
the ground and not answering her.

“Jim, what happened?”

“You don’t want to know,” he
replied and walked past her.

“Jim! What happened?” she asked,
turning to follow him.

Jim stopped, turned around and
said, “I told you—you don’t want to know!”

“Obviously, I do want to know, Jim.
That would explain why I asked you.
Twice, even.”

“Let’s get back to the cabin. We
can talk about it there. You’re gonna freeze.” Jim wished he had brought a
jacket, just so he could give it to her. But she was as stupid as he was for
coming out in the freezing cold without one.

He felt molten anger boiling inside
of him over the murder of the blonde woman, but being near Angela had a calming
effect on him. She had a way of always making him feel something like
compassion. He put his arm around Angela’s waist and resumed walking back to
their cabin. Angela did not resist, even though she was not happy with him.

To their mutual surprise, Angela
and Jim walked into the cabin to find that Josh and Hailey had gotten off the
couch and were moving around, for the most part, like normal people again. They
had gathered their belongings and brought them upstairs. They looked like they
were ready to leave.

“What’s going on, you guys?” Angela
asked.

“We’re going home,” Hailey replied.
“Our vacation is clearly ruined so there’s no point in staying here for two
weeks.” Jim looked at her and started to say something about how utterly stupid
that sounded, but he just shook his head as he entered the cabin, passing them
and heading downstairs. “Screw it,” he muttered as he went down.

Angela looked at Jim and then
turned back to Hailey, speechless for a moment.
“Hailey!
Everything is ruined! That was a nuclear bomb down there. Do you hear what
you’re saying?”

“Angela, I understand that
something terrible has happened to Denver. But we live in Boise, and we’re going
home. If you want to stay here and ski, that’s up to you.” Hailey scanned the
room to see if there was anything of hers she might have missed and picked up a
copy of People magazine from a small table with a lamp on it next to the front
door. She turned to Josh and said, “I think that’s everything. Are you ready?”

Josh was standing a few feet from
the doorway—a center-piece between four suitcases. He nodded slowly. His
expression hadn’t changed from that which he had worn downstairs as he watched
the mushroom cloud over Denver, growing, rising and expanding.

“We’ll see you back in Boise,
Angela.” Hailey walked to the door, opened it, then turned to Josh and said,
“Come on! Let’s go.” Josh responded like an android coming out of rest mode and
picked up two of the four suitcases as Hailey opened the door wide. She grabbed
the other two suitcases and carried them outside.

Angela was stunned. Their vacation
was ruined? They were just going to go home now? They were insane. Jim said
some pretty crazy shit, but he actually knew what he was saying and doing. Josh
and Hailey weren’t making any sense at all. Angela ran out after them, feeling
like she had to bring them to their senses.

“You guys! We could be in the
middle of World War Three right now. You can’t just go driving back to Boise.
Bombs could be going off everywhere. This is probably the safest place we could
be. We’re on top of a freaking mountain. Hey! Are you even listening to me?”

Josh opened the back of his Isuzu
Rodeo and hefted one suitcase in, then the other. Hailey set hers down next to
Josh and he dutifully loaded those in as well. Finished with his known,
immediate task, he turned and stared at Hailey as if awaiting new instructions.

If Hailey said nothing, he looked
as if he was prepared to stand there overnight and into the next day until
commanded to do otherwise.

“Hailey!”
Angela yelled, walking over to her best friend. “You can’t leave. Even if Boise
is safe, it’s not safe to drive there. Do you think you can just drive through
a radiated Denver like it’s nothing? Please stop and think about what you’re
doing!”

“Let’s go!” Hailey barked at
Josh.  “I don’t ever want to come back here.” Josh robotically complied.
He turned away from her and dutifully walked to the driver’s side of the
vehicle.

Angela thought she finally
understand what was wrong with them. “Hailey!” she yelled, as the other girl
opened the front passenger door. “Listen to me. You’re in denial. You don’t
know what you’re doing. And Josh…Josh is in shock. He’s not thinking at all.
Come on you guys,” she pleaded. “Please come back inside. Let’s talk about
this. Let’s at least find out what they’re saying on the news. Okay? Come on,
I’m freezing. Let’s go in and listen to the news.”

Hailey slid into the passenger
seat, looked at Angela and said, “Good-bye,
Anj
. Tell
Jim I said thanks for ruining our vacation,” and she slammed her door shut.
Angela watched as Hailey turned her head toward Josh and said something she
couldn’t hear. A second later the engine came to life. The small, white reverse
lights came on at the back of the vehicle, and the truck backed down the
driveway, turning to the left when it reached the road. The brake lights flared
for a second, the reverse lights went out and the truck moved forward and
slowly gained speed as it headed downhill.

Angela stared, dumbfounded, until
she could see the truck no more.  “Unbelievable,” she muttered to no
one.