The Second Intelligent Species: The Cyclical Earth (5 page)

We needed to get water and fast. With this elevated heat we wouldn’t travel much further unless we got some water, and food. I had to sit and think about it. I had to think about it for a long time. All the Seven Elevens were out of business. The rivers and streams were so full of soot and ashes, the water had to be bad. The rain had stopped, and when it had been raining, I hadn’t thought of
catching it. I had been hoping that help would be around the next corner.

“I think we have to help ourselves from now on. Stay here. I’m going to look for a pizza place. You want anchovies?” I wasn’t sure if the timing was right for comedy, but I had to try to get some life back into her eyes.

“How long are you going to be gone?” She was still pissed at me for leaving her alone at the door earlier.

“Not too long. I’m going to see if I can find something at the supermarket, try to find some water, or a cold beer.” I tried one more time at the comedy thing. Getting the same response, I turned to go into town. “Be right back.”

“Get me one too,” she said with barely enough enthusiasm to get the words out.

I’d take it. She retained some of her sense of humor, although it was buried beneath layers of other emotions.

I walked to where I thought the corner store was, and carefully stepped into the debris. No door was necessary. I immediately stepped on a nail, through my sneaker, and into the thick part of my foot, luckily not too far into the skin.

I needed to see. I searched for more wood to use for a torch, and quickly found enough, along with the fire to start it. It wasn’t the brightest, and I had a hard time keeping it going. I found that
by holding three boards together, the fire would last longer. I walked back to the store and carefully picked my way around the debris and the dead bodies. People had run into the store when the firestorm came, but it was no escape. The remains no longer resembled bodies, more like bones surrounding a pile of guts that smoldered and emitted the stench of death. I’d been getting so used to death, these were just more obstacles to step over.

It took a while to find a couple of good cans lying in the rubble, a few were protected from the majority of the heat. Labels were burned off, but they looked fine other than that. Any other cans I found were opened by the heat or crushed when the roof collapsed.

I tiptoed to where I thought the front of the store was, and rummaged around for a while. The glass to the display case lay shattered on the floor. Looking through the ashes and coals, careful not to get too close to the hot ones, I noticed a familiar shape.

“That’s a knife,” I said aloud, as if there were somebody listening. I reached down and picked it up, then just as quickly dropped it. It was still quite hot. I picked it up again and blew on it as if it were a piece of hot corn on the cob. I put it in my pocket once I was sure it was cool enough. It went straight to the ground. Both pockets had the
bottoms burned out. I should have known. I was suffering with blisters there on both legs.

The knife had a hole for a strap. I needed to devise a way to hook it to my jean’s belt loop. Copper wire lay all around, power no longer flowed through it. My new knife was assigned its first job: cutting wire. I was careful to use the part near the handle. That way, the rest of the knife would stay sharp. A valuable find. The blade was in good shape and it still locked in place.

I fashioned a makeshift strap out of copper wire. I carried three cans of food and a new knife. Water still escaped me. I would have to think about that one a while longer.

I made my way back to the training building, or “smokehouse,” to find Beth with a faraway look of hopelessness, staring at the fire and its reflection flickering on the wall.

I tried to walk in without frightening her, but as soon as I spoke, her body convulsed like she had received an electric shock.

“Damn it. You could’ve let me know you’re back.”

“I found some food…sorry didn’t mean to scare you. Found three cans. Don’t know what they are. I found a knife too…see?”

“Did you find a can opener, Einstein?” Her sarcasm was the first sign that she had some of the old Beth left in her, thank God.

“Yes, I told you I found a knife. It’s not a Swiss army knife but it will work.”

“It smells different in here,” she said, but I wasn’t paying attention. I was too busy trying to open one of the cans. I was starving now and really wanted to know what was in this can.

“What did you say?” I said, concentrating on opening the can, careful not to cut myself.

“It smells different in here. Outside you smell burned rubber, plastic, and death. In here the only smell is burned wood or hay. If I have to choose between the two, I pick in here.” She didn’t know about the two men I pulled to the back of the building out of her sight.

I pried with the knife to open the first can. “It’s corn.” I reached out my arm and handed the can to Beth. “Here, drink the juice too. It may be the only source of water we’ll get for a while. It smells okay and it’s still warm. Be careful not to cut yourself on the jagged top.”

She smelled her corn.

“You eat that one, and I’ll take the next one.” I started to open the second can. I’d already learned to put the can on the floor and open it from the top by kneeling directly over the can, pushing the blade straight down. Once it started to cut, I pushed down on the back hard, then rotated the can and repeated the process until I got back to where I’d started. Not pretty, but it got the food
out. Funny to think I had been so careful not to ruin the blade when I was cutting the wire. Now look how I abused it.

“You take half of this. Maybe those other ones are spoiled,” Beth said.

I had already finished opening the second can. “That’s okay. I’ve got this one open already. This one’s corn too. I’ll eat this one, and you can eat the last one.”

I tipped the can back, and it tasted like corn that could have been served to the Queen. “I hope the next one is T-bone steak in a can.” My guess was corn.

Three tries into this, and I could open a can in about one minute. “Save these cans. We need to collect some water.” We both had diarrhea from the water we drank in the culvert, and I knew we were dehydrated.

“Why bother, Nick? What’s left to live for? The kids are all dead. Everyone’s dead. Everything is gone. Burned. It’s all gone, Nick. We’ve been blown back to the Stone Age. I think I’d rather be dead than try to live in a world like this.”

The only thing I couldn’t accept was to hear her give up, because without her I wouldn’t have a reason to go on. “No!” I had to put a stop to this right now. “Shut up right now. God damn it. We spent how long in that fucking tunnel? How far have we come to this spot? The kids are gone, everyone’s
gone. That’s right, there’s nothing anybody can do about it. Didn’t you see those firemen? Those bastards fought for the last breath they got, in both towns. They were torn between saving their own lives and saving the lives of other people running up to them on fire. They were pumping water out of trucks that were fully involved in flame. They had too many victims to save. This ex-fireman only had one life to save, and I did that, in that tunnel, and I’m going to keep doing it no matter what you say. There’s got to be someplace that wasn’t hit as bad. We’re going there tomorrow, we’re going somewhere tomorrow.” I drank the last of my corn juice to cool my temper. It wasn’t enough to quench my thirst, but would keep me going until I got some sleep. We were both exhausted. We needed rest.

“Now please eat your friggin’ corn. I love you so much.” I offered her share of the last can to her.

She silently looked up at me… then down into her can of corn.

Chapter 7

Scavenging

I awoke to a shower of sparks and Beth’s scream as she ran out the door into the dark.

“Why didn’t you tell me there were two dead guys in there? Why didn’t you drag them out?” She threw the burning board she was using for light right at me, just missing my head. More sparks fell to the ground.

“I didn’t want to scare you last night.” I picked up the stick of wood and blew on the embers till a flame rekindled.

“I’m not spending another night in there!”

“Alright, we’re going to head for Syracuse.”

“That’s over two day’s walk, Nick.”

“Do you want to stay here?”

Her lack of response was her answer. “Wait here and I’ll make up a torch or two.” I went back inside to see what could be found for material. The two firemen’s street clothes had not suffered any fire damage. Stripping them took more stomach than I could manage for long. I took off the T-shirt of each and went back out with Beth. Disturbing the bodies released an odor I could no
longer deal with, but the two shovels inside were going to be our handles once the bottom was broken off. The smell was tolerated until the job was finished. The fire trucks still had baked-on grease around the undercarriage. I scraped off enough to take with us.

Beth held up some burning wood for light. “Nick…what do you think happened?”

Setting the cloth downwind, I answered, “I thought it was a bomb at first, but now, I don’t know.” I couldn’t think and work at the same time.

“You know what I think it was, or do you? You never listened to me when I talked about science before. You probably don’t want to hear what I think happened. You listened to your minister talk about God more than you listened to the things I talked about.”

“That’s not true, dear. I can’t help but hear the things you preach to me. You are very persistent.”

“I think it was some kind of impact, like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs.”

“Come on, Beth. Everything in space has been found and they’ve been tracking stuff like that for years.” Spreading the crusted grease on the cloth, I went back to work.

“Only amateurs are looking. All the big telescopes are shut down. Even though the space junk and asteroids we know about are being watched,
a comet could have snuck through, but I think an amateur astronomer would have found it. Someone must have noticed it. Why wasn’t there a warning?”

“Could it have been something from the sun?”

“I thought maybe because of the fire, but that doesn’t explain the earthquake.” She blew on the makeshift torch to increase the light. “It could be the result of something mankind has never experienced.”

I set the finished torch down. “What do you mean by something we haven’t experienced?”

“I’ve told all of this to you before. This proves you’ve never listened to me.”

“I’m listening now!” I said.

“There are things in space that could affect us here on earth, even though they’re many light years away. It could have been a gamma ray burst, but again the earthquake doesn’t make sense. A supernova of a star closer could have accounted for both I guess, but I think we would continue to get hammered by shock waves.” She looked down and all my attention was on the second torch. “You’re not listening again! I don’t know why I bother.”

“I’m sorry, hon. I was caught up with this.”

She slammed her fist down on her leg. “What gets me is that they might have seen it coming. Those bastards are probably hunkered down in
some bunker somewhere. We’ve been left to fend for ourselves. There was no warning whatsoever. This is a mass extinction event. They had to have known it was coming.”

“Now you’re getting stupid. I agree the impact thing, or the solar flare thing or whatever, could have happened.” The embers from the proto-torch ignited the newer improved version. “But we’re not extinct, and we’re not going to be. We are a lot smarter than the dinosaurs. See, could a dinosaur do this?” The light from the newer model outshined the old one, tenfold.

“Nick, do you know there have been at least five mass extinctions in the past? It’s all in the fossil records.”

I knelt there in silence thinking. The only sound was the wind blowing the flame on our new torch. That’s when I realized the magnitude of our situation. I just looked off into the darkness, until some hot grease splattered onto my wrist to bring me out of it. “We’re going to find more people, we can’t be the only ones left alive. We need to get a whole bunch of food and supplies. We need to find clean water. We need to do this now. C’mon let’s go back to that store.”

I helped Beth get up and led her by the hand, out of the last structure we might see standing for miles.

The store I had visited the night before was still open, so we just walked in. The floor was difficult to find because the roof had collapsed, and the steel took on twisted shapes that no longer contained right angles. Beneath the steel were hot coals, so we didn’t look there. There were areas where the rain stopped the fire before it could ruin everything. Cans of food that survived were found in those places.

I pawed around in the rubble for cans, then tossed them to Beth who was standing outside the building‘s perimeter, ever alert for boards containing nails. She would pile them to avoid stepping on one. She also stacked the cans until we could find something to carry them in.

“Look for a can opener… and pots or pans. Cast iron cookware doesn’t burn.”