The Postmortal (38 page)

I ordered Solara to hand me the shotgun. She passed it over, and I traded her the pistol. She gripped it for dear life as the soldier worked tirelessly on the window. I saw the cracks spreading, the glass like a sheet of brittle candy banged against a countertop. I lowered my tinted window and he didn’t notice. Solara talked to me but kept her eyes on the growing web. She whispered to me, “What are you doing?”

I unbuckled my seat belt, reached out the window, grabbed the roof with one hand, and hoisted myself up so I was sitting on the car window with my feet resting on the driver’s seat. I took the shotgun and aimed it right at the soldier. He looked up just as I was firing. His head blew apart and he fell from view. I heard Solara yell “holy shit!” and I sunk back into the seat and rolled the window back up. The crack was still there, the window dabbed with blood and unidentifiable bits of human shrapnel. I moved the car forward and squeezed Solara’s knee.

“Jesus Christ, John.”

“It’s all right,” I said. “No one will mess with this car after that. There’s a Kevlar vest and some duct tape in the duffel. Take it out and maybe we can reinforce the window.”

She did as I requested and frantically patched up the window. It wasn’t two hundred yards before the road clogged up again, with no passage within eyeshot. She monitored the power meter nervously. “We can’t stay in here,” she said.

“We have a couple of days.”

“Not if we’re not moving. I can’t stay boxed in like this. I feel like I’m gonna miscarry. There’s gotta be a compound we can go to. Somewhere safer than out in the middle of this.”

“Okay. Why don’t you rest, then? Rest now, even if you can’t sleep. Just close your eyes, and when morning breaks, we’ll go. We’ll have the light.” She nodded and closed her eyes. The parade continued all around us, but the car stayed serene.

“Still wanna marry me?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“But time is running out.”

“I know. That’s why it’s all that matters.”

She opened her eyes. “Okay.”

“So we’re married.”

“Yeah. We’re married. I’m your wife, and you’re my husband. Does that work?”

“Yes.” The car remained in park. I leaned over and kissed her. “I won’t leave you,” I told her.

“I know.”

I heard a growing scream and saw the first RMU soldier on his way back to the plug-in, with a scorched dent in his bulletproof camo, cursing and shrieking like a rabid animal and unwilling to take no for an answer. He took a tire iron from another plug-in and lashed the window again and again. No more honeymoon. I felt no fear. Doubly strong. I rolled down the driver’s-side window again and propped myself up with the gun, but he knew in the nick of time and raised his own handgun up at me.

“Put your fucking gun down!” I screamed at him.

He didn’t budge. “Gimme your food and gimme the fucking woman!”

“I’m going to count to three.”

“FUCK YOU!” He cocked the gun. I held fast on him. Then I felt a pair of hands grab my vest from the back. In an instant, I was thrown to the ground by another RMU soldier. He rolled me over and pressed my face into the sand, and I heard the first soldier circle around the car and try to get through the window. I heard a blast from the passenger seat, and the fucker fell right beside me. I stared at the hole in his head, the little flaps of bloody skin, moist and glistening and exposed. His head cracked and oozing, like a dropped egg. His colleague sprang up and shouted at Solara. I felt another set of knees pinning me to the earth as the second soldier threatened my wife. He screamed at her, “You fucking bitch!”

She didn’t flinch. “I am pregnant and I will fucking shoot you if you don’t back off!”

He drew his gun on her. “Give me your food!”

“I SAID I WILL FUCKING SHOOT YOU!”

The soldier walked two paces to the left, out of Solara’s firing range. He took out his gun and extended it with his left hand. He could shoot her, but she couldn’t shoot him. I struggled to get up, then felt a boot on my temple. The soldier cocked the hammer. “You asked for it, honey.”

“NO!” I screamed.

And just then—whiteness. A sickening flash of white, as intense as the back of your eyelids after you’ve stared at the sun for too long. A white that absorbed everything in its path and turned it inside out in a blinding squall. Like being welcomed to a heaven you know can’t be real. Then it began to fade, and I heard the monstrous clap of burnt thunder—as if all the clouds had converged on the world at once. The ground pulsed, rippling like water in a disturbed reflecting pool.

I felt the knees burking me lift away and saw the RMU soldier fall to the ground, clutching at his eyes. A hot gust rolled over us, and I didn’t dare breathe it in, thinking it might set my insides ablaze. It passed, and the whiteness receded to reveal an artificial and unwelcome dawn—a Bengal-orange glow on the eastern horizon that signaled to my brain and guts that something was now irrevocably wrong and horrible.

The other RMU soldier fell to the ground. I got up and reached into the plug-in for Solara, who was shielded from part of the flash by the tinted windows. She grabbed my hand, I pulled her out, and we began to run. I looked back and saw a flat, white, billowing corona in the far distance, like the scalp of a star twenty times larger than the sun. The angel of death’s halo. The rest of the sky grew darker by the second, and my rods and cones were slow to adjust as everything in front of us appeared only in darkly obscured shapes and blobs. My eyes still strobing from the flash, I viewed the world as if staring through a broken nickelodeon. I tripped and got back up repeatedly. I looked back again and the sky grew sour. Under the orange, a thick black bar emerged. Convex. A rolling, expanding wall of dust and ash.

We sprinted, and I held Solara’s hand hard enough to shatter it. Along the way I saw people still bound to the ground, and I reflexively helped them up and prodded them west. Entire families sat in front of their plug-ins, grasping at one another and seemingly incapable of movement. We moved away from the highway, squeezing through the dazed throng and stepping over the blinded and catatonic. At the bottom of a steep embankment we came to a strip of woods and stepped over the dry and cracked branches as best we could. Solara rolled her ankle and screamed in pain. I took her arm and held it fast around my shoulder, carrying her through the mess of brush and rocks.

I looked back, and now the blackening rift had consumed the horizon entirely. I thought of the people I knew who were probably trapped inside. Matt. Ernie. Virginia Smith. All of them burned down to the pure carbon. The thought zipped away, and we came to a wire-mesh fence with no razor wire on top. Beyond, a planned community of tiny Monopoly houses. A loosey-goosey compound. We scaled the wall, along with dozens of other refugees eager to abandon the highway. All the homes were dark. Most of the parking spaces were empty. We bolted for a seemingly abandoned house and others followed suit. A family of six joined me as I busted down the door to the house, and we piled inside. Others came from behind and flooded into the house, as if trying to catch a train about to depart. I pulled down the shades in the living room and searched for a basement entrance. There was a flimsy wooden door next to the kitchen, and I grabbed the loose knob and turned it to no avail. Three of us kicked at the door, and it split in half. We ran down, and a dozen people were already there, making the basement a temporary habitat, cowering in fright.

I apologized for the intrusion. They said it was okay. I found a corner for Solara and me to huddle in and the basement packed tighter. She sank against the conjoined walls, and I offered her the nasty drink tucked inside my vest. She drank most of it, then gave me a look as if to offer me the rest. I shook my head, and she finished it.

We all waited. Someone asked if it was a nuclear bomb that had gone off, and the room replied yes, that’s precisely what it had been. A roaring pulse of atomic wind blew over the house, and I could hear the bits of dust rapping on the windows and roof like a plague of locusts eating their way through the countryside. There was a light tremor and people screamed. I held Solara tight and pressed my lips into her hair. I will never leave you. Don’t let this be the end. Not when I’ve just figured it all out.

A bright light emanated from the basement staircase. I wondered if the power had come back on. A man in the kitchen screamed down to us all. “It’s another one!”

The sky howled, and we all sank down, and here we remain, paralyzed.

 

The real dawn arrived, but few of us trusted it. Solara fell asleep for seconds at a time, while I stayed tight beside her. The basement was unfinished, and my legs and butt grew numb from being bolted to the dusty concrete flooring. Moms and dads consoled their screaming kids. Those without children deliberated about what had happened and what to do next. Do we go now? Is everything radioactive? Is the bombing over? What if there were bombs dropped on the nation’s midsection? Is there anywhere safer than right down here? One man constantly checked his WEPS screen to see if a connection had been restored—something to let him know that things could be set back in their proper order. His wife badgered him to put it away.

Solara and I shared a box of stale popcorn that she had had tucked away in her pocket, the caramel fused together from the noxious flood of sudden heat from the bombs. She broke off chunks and handed them to me. My hands grew sticky and dirty, and I knew they’d probably stay that way for a good long time. A handful of people left the basement to venture outside. Others came to take their place. A teenage boy went up and came back down to report to his dad. He said there was an exodus in progress. The father said they should wait for it to subside. I did not share his opinion.

“Do you want to leave here?” I whispered to Solara.

“Yes,” she said.

“You sure you’ve got the strength for it?”

“Yes.”

I wrapped her ankle with a torn-off shirtsleeve and jammed it back into her sneaker. She handed the rest of the popcorn block to a boy next to her, and his father thanked us. I stood and gestured to Solara to help her up, but she waved me off and rose on her own, using the shotgun as a cane. We said our goodbyes and good lucks to the room and ascended.

As we reached the kitchen, I could hear a cacophony of voices. I looked over the kitchen sink, through the cheap, sheer curtain covering the window, and saw a bedraggled army of the living staggering by. I moved the curtain aside, and the tension rod holding it up fell to the counter. The sky was dirty and gray, as if belched up from a smokestack. A dull rain fell on the window, wet soot suspended within the big drops, like water carelessly thrown onto a grease fire. Other people milled about the kitchen and looked out the window with us. Few said much of anything, besides “Jesus Christ” and “holy shit.” I didn’t mind hearing it or saying it multiple times.

Solara and I walked out of the house and into the human wave. From the east, a rolling mass of humanity flushed out from the trees and roads crept along the landscape like raging floodwaters. The air was thick and choking, as if the atmosphere had been swapped with that of Venus. Thousands upon thousands of people were moving farther inland, compressing the population. Teeming. Swarming. Stretching to the horizon, like a rock-festival crowd waiting for a show that will never go on. Most everyone was armed. Those not on the move were either sleeping on top of plug-ins or on rooftops in the subdivision. Hanging in makeshift rag hammocks from the trees. Dangling there, like large, overripe fruit. Others slept in the tree branches, and the old oaks now appeared to have been built with living masonry.

The crowd lurched west, and I found an odd comfort and security in its enormity. The limp mesh fence of the compound had been trampled. Solara and I joined the gallery and moved forward, never letting go of one another. I breathed in and the air felt liquid, like I was inhaling everyone else’s sweat. Everything seemed precarious. Packs of stray dogs squeezed their way through the bodies, like mice through cracks in drywall. The fuselage of an electroplane lay smoldering half a mile away, papery and broken open like a split cigar. Large circles of fresh sheep-flu dead dotted the landscape like crop circles. Every open spot was covered with humanity—a topography of flesh.

I saw bonfires and groups of drunken people dancing around them. I saw one guy, buck naked, holding up a sign that said WELCOME TO THE END. Another guy, with blond hair, drunk and stoned on hydro, sidled up beside us. “Where are you going?” he asked.

“We don’t know,” I said.

“Why don’t you just stop and chill, brother? Enjoy the time you have left?”

“I don’t know.”

He took a swig of Popov and yelled at me. “Don’t you fucking get it, man? Don’t you understand? We’re rock stars, man. We are
all
rock stars. We’ve lived fast, and we’re all gonna die young.
All
of us! We’re all going out at our peak! We’re all gonna be legendary. FUCKING ROCK STARS!” He tripped over a sleeping woman and didn’t bother catching up with us again.

We came to a major freelands thoroughfare, and I saw all the plug-ins frozen in place. The ones with any juice left were boxed in permanently and good as dead anyway. Every chain store and restaurant had its windows broken and doors kicked in. We passed secessionist forts with armed men perched atop the walls, defending them from intrusion. Tiny city-states, home to citizens who fancied themselves independent but were ruled by us all anyway, whether they liked it or not. I motioned to Solara to move west by southwest, away from the complexes. We began jagging to the left through the crowd and over the curbs. I looked up, and the sky grew darker and more haunted.

Then we heard gunfire. It came from back east, and I saw a herd of gang members mowing quickly through the crowd, a self-contained riot. Little green heads dotted the mosh. Those in front of them turned to look and fled in panic, pushing forward. The trampling began. Anyone frail or poorly balanced was overrun, and people tripping over them got trampled in turn, until the area swelled with large mounds of the dying. Mountains with no king.