The Third Apocalypse: Together At The End: Book One, page 1
The Third Apocalypse
Together At The End: Book One
Ben Boven
Copyright © 2024 by Ben Boven
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law. For permission requests, contact Ben Boven via Instagram @benbovenbooks
The story, all names, characters, and incidents portrayed in this production are fictitious. No identification with actual persons (living or deceased), places, buildings, and products is intended or should be inferred.
Book Cover by Sienna Arts
Edited By Samantha Jayne Proofreading
First Edition 2024
To Becky
Thank you for keeping one foot in the forward with me. I love you so much!
Contents
1. Colin
2. June
3. Colin
4. June
5. Colin
6. June
7. Colin
8. June
9. Colin
10. June
11. Colin
12. June
13. Colin
14. June
15. Colin
16. June
17. Colin
18. June
19. Colin
Epilogue
About the author
Coming Soon: The Acoustic Apocalypse (Together At The End Book Two)
Chapter one
Colin
The fiery plumage of the desert cardinal clashed with the emerald green of Colin’s bus like a forgotten ornament on a curbed Christmas tree. A loud ornament. Striding toward his tiny house on wheels, he sucked in the parched desert air and whistled his best imitation at the brash male. Undaunted, the bird flitted into the elbow-high scrub brush in front of the hood and continued its proclamations.
“Isn’t life too short to be sparring with me, featherweight?” Stretching his fingers to the winter sky sent waves of relief splashing across his crackling joints. “Maybe before the sun sets, you’ll find a new love, too, little one.” The cardinal heeded Colin’s advice and flew across the bohemian festival, bobbing and weaving across the triangular campground lodged in the armpit of intersecting Arizona highways.
The Woodstock rainbow of converted school buses rumbling across Skooliepalooza created an eclectic flock of its own. It was the only time of year Colin relished the scent of so much diesel in the air, when all of his far-flung friends came together to celebrate their oddball lifestyle.
Pushing the bus’s door open, he paused at the faded photograph taped in the windshield’s corner—a candid shot taken the day before his Cora died. Their daughter Kimberly had been a month from birth, round and ready in her belly. He pulled the photo away from the glass, splitting the scotch tape, leaving behind four neat half-strips of yellowed adhesive.
He took the Polaroid to the couch to ease the throb in his knee. Kimberly would be a year old now, if that drunk bastard had t-boned his side of their van instead of Cora’s. The arthritis that bloomed in his right side seemed more an insult from God than an injury.
Dissecting those thoughts a thousand times over the last thirteen months brought no relief. The beautiful woman waiting for him outside didn’t push the ruminations away or crowd the memories out. She seemed to be the answer to the questions that tormented him, neutralizing the guilt like Alka-Seltzer. She was full of life and beauty and she was… kind. She understood.
“What do you think, Kimmy? It’s never too soon for June.” He chuckled at the rhyme. “See, with a name like that, she’s got me writing poetry. She is a refreshing lash of rain, though, isn’t she?”
Putting down the picture, he screwed a purple haze cartridge into his vape pen and chuckled. “I didn’t say it was good poetry, you cheeky lass.”
He rose and pressed the photo back against the windshield, turning Cora’s ginger face to the sunset. After sucking in a half breath from the pen to check its battery, he grabbed his hooded sweatshirt and opened the door to June.
He stumbled, caught staring, and his lungs lost grip on their charge. A vaporized THC cloud rolled over June like perfume before he could reach the rail to steady himself.
“Are you fading or falling for me again?” she asked through a starlit smile. She smelled of coconuts, lime, and lust, enough to constrict Colin’s chinos. Chopsticks held her sable tresses together in a messy bun, letting only the thin, copper-dyed braid usually hidden underneath her darker mane lie loose against her collarbone. “My phone’s completely dead, but that guy is supposed to be coming tonight with the bus I want to buy. Will you come with me to look at it?” She bounced off Garfield, the tiger-orange bus she had been resting her laurels against, and let momentum carry her into his chest.
“Of course.” Offering her the vape pen, they followed the power lines overhead to the bonfire. “Did you forget a charger? I might have one somewhere you can have.”
“No, I’m charged. The network is down.” She slid her arm between Colin’s left and his ribcage. She wriggled her hand until her fingers curled around his in the front pouch of his hoodie. “Gil says his satellite internet is down too, and that’s never supposed to happen.”
“Gil, technology, and frustration are a sick love triangle. I stay away from all that shite.”
“You’re a man of mystery, Colin O’Rourke, and I like that about you. But the fact that you got your first smartphone ever—” June shuddered in faux-terror, “because three months long distance would have sucked even more without FaceTime, means you can change. I like that even more.” She booped Colin’s nose and snickered.
The sky was a classroom map of stars over a sedan-sized bonfire. Laughing, clay-streaked children flitted through clusters of adults, clutching sparklers that looked like Jurassic fireflies navigating the night. Coyotes rallied in the distance as Bob Marley wailed through a boombox.
They strolled past skoolie after neatly parked skoolie until they arrived at a giant circle of buses. The rigs surrounded a hearty bonfire and an eclectic assortment of loaned chairs circled the flames. Sound-checks trickled and sputtered from a bluegrass band wearing matching tuxedo t-shirts on a stage flanking the fire. A few hundred people were buzzing around the stage or fading in the fire’s glow. Small pockets of murmuring nomads honeycombed through the gathering all the way to the stage, cell phones held in the air like glowing antennae.
“There they are,” June said. Even seated, Jacob’s shining ebony dome rose taller than most, light-housing them through the wood smoke and patchouli-infused crowd.
“Look who came out for the second night of festivities,” Jacob said, nudging his glazed husband out of a pyro trance. “It’s nice to finally see a smile on your face, Coli-Flower. I was beginning to think your scowl would freeze that way.”
June laughed. “I don’t let him do that anymore. I tell hilarious jokes.”
Jacob laughed louder. “No, you don’t, honey. He just lov—” He fanned his face like the preacher glared at him from the pulpit, then looked to the sky. “Oooh, look at these stars! I didn’t think you’d be able to see them with the fire, but they’re so bright! I think that one’s Cassiopeia…”
Gil came to the rescue. “What’s happening, man? Did June tell you about the phones and everything?” He passed Colin the folding chairs squirreled between his ankles and the stump he sat upon.
“She did, thanks. I’m sure it’s nothing, mate. That mobile stuff goes on the blink all the time out here.”
“People are saying the power is out in town, man.” Without breaking eye contact, Gil cracked his knuckles and began drumming a beat on his denimed thigh.
“We’re in a primitive campground, mate. There’s nothing to plug into anyway out here. Everyone has solar panels, or a generator with loads of fuel. They’re just twitchy because they can’t hashtag pictures online for a few minutes. There’s one electric plant around here for hundreds of miles. One little widget in that plant goes pop, the whole county goes dark until they come out and put in a new widget. Everything will be right as rain, you’ll see.”
Colin retrieved his vape pen and inhaled a long, ceremonial draw before passing it. “Unplugging is why we’re here.” A scratch at his ribs turned his attention back to June, who was covertly signing a request in perfect ASL honed from growing up with a deaf sister.
I have to pee. Come talk with me. The single worry line between her eyes caught a firelight shadow, and he found his head nodding. They waved a passive goodbye to their friends and began the trek across the cold, dusty campground.
“What’s wrong, Lash?” he asked, once they escaped earshot. He signed the question as well. He wasn’t as fluent, since Cora’s deafness had been his only exposure to the culture, but he tried to keep up.
“Will you walk with me, see if this bus is here yet?” June curled her arm around Colin’s, sending her shivers through his spine. “It’s sort of an all my eggs, one basket situation, as you know.”
“Fair enough. We need to be careful with those,” he said with a snicker. He stopped walking when she started leading them behind their buses and was jerked toward the brush when she didn’t let go of his arm.
She looked back at him and rolled her eyes before
She won. Colin shuffled behind Garfield to continue their conversation and stand guard. The coyotes were still sending intel across the sands, close enough to choir the bluegrass band.
“Which language was that, Lash?”
“Romanian.”
“Which is my favorite, again?”
June paused to start her stream. “You like Portuguese, meu carinho. The sexiest one.”
“Yes, you are.”
“Ha!” she sprung up when she finished. “Your flattery amuses me. I’ll allow it.”
They walked through the fleet of skoolies that arrived too late to claim a coveted shade spot near the brushy outskirts. The technicolor insects had lined themselves up in swaying, uneven lines in the middle of the grounds, as though a toddler with a twig were trying to draw their straightest lines in a sandbox. The rows created shaded alleys during the day, where people constructed picnic and privacy areas away from the winter sun’s glare.
Three blue buses were the wrong blue bus until June exclaimed “Hallelujah!” three-quarters of the way through the grid. Hers was a faded, forty-foot-long, flat-nosed beast.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Colin said, cupping his hands to the dusty glass door and peering inside the gutted steel tube. “I thought you only needed space for two salon chairs and a shampoo station, Lash.”
He eased down to a knee and rolled over onto his side. Grabbing a piece of fender, he pulled himself under the chassis. “No rust that I can see,” he called, rolling back out and dusting himself off.
The band was playing a ragtime bluegrass blend that was infectiously toe-tapping. Colin and June improvised a loose waltz around the bus, inspecting the tires and checking for red flags. While burning June’s energy, they hoped the breeze would blow the owner back around.
When the song came to a natural but abrupt conclusion, she lit up with worry again. “I don’t remember what he looks like. He took me on a video tour, but I can’t remember if he showed his face.” She pulled herself into his embrace.
“We can leave a note,” Colin said, trying not to be turned on by June growling into his chest like a wolverine. “He might be three sheets to the wind, dancing with the band by now.”
“Jacob locked Garfield, do you have paper in Kimberly?” She rummaged through both the cargo pockets of her thin fleece pants, coming up with chapstick, a lighter, and a joint. She applied the chapstick, lit the joint, then offered them both to Colin.
“Maybe he’s more keen on partying than business, but I’m sure he’s looking forward to a wad of cash, Lash.” Colin giggled at his second poem of the day and took another puff before applying the chapstick. “Unprofessional, if you ask me.” Colin smacked his coconut lips and passed everything back to June. “I taste like you.”
Once the chemicals worked their magic and rendered Colin’s arthritis impotent, he convinced June to go on a hike up the only ripple of elevation for miles around to further ease their anxiety. Walking half a kilometer across the crystalline flats, they dissected her future mobile salon’s plumbing needs and the logistics of adding a bathtub to the floor plan, until the terrain started rising and pulled their breath away from conversation.
A picnic table bolted into a biscuit-colored plateau a thousand feet above the campground beckoned at the halfway point. The festival, lit by the bonfire, buzzed below them. Three times as many people absorbed its glow the second night, but Colin was absorbing June.
She was working wonders with her hair and his backpack bandana. Her concentration was charming; it looked as though she were trying to sort a Rubik’s cube behind her head. Her cotton dragnet didn’t snare every lock, so wispy escapees danced with her copper hoops like a silent wind chime.
“I remember this hike being shorter last year,” he huffed.
Save your breath, she signed, using lingual ambidexterity to catch hers.
You’re twenty-nine. I’m old. His fingers felt arthritic, rehearsing the pirouettes and swales for individual words. He shook his hands out after his first full sentence in almost a year. June swooped them up in hers and squeezed, using leverage to pull herself across the smooth metal bench to Colin’s hip.
“You’re thirty-six, Gandolf. Did you catch your breath yet?” she asked, narrowing her eyes.
“I did.” He leaned in to kiss her, but her bewitched nose twitched away.
“Good.” She pushed his shoulders to the tabletop. “It’s best we do this before we get into any more elevation,” she said with a wink, straddling his hips. She removed her sweatshirt and everything underneath in one graceful flick before grabbing his hands up to cover her breasts.
He pulled June into his arms. “You’re going to freeze, Lash.”
“Be quick, then—free pass,” she responded, before beginning on his zipper. Once he was freed, she undid the drawstring on her fleece pants and kicked them into the grit. She grabbed his hips like a pommel horse and rocked forward to kiss him. She rocked back, and he was inside her.
“Now.” She sighed, returning his hands to her breasts.
The afterglow wasn’t warm enough to last long. When goosebumps and chattering ruled out any more pillow talk, they shrugged back into their clothes and continued to the summit.
On the ridge’s peak, the quiver in June’s voice returned. She put the edge of her hand across her brow and swept the landscape from two thousand feet above the desert.
“I don’t see it,” she said.
“It’s there, it’s just dark.” Colin knelt to rifle through his daypack. Grasping the compact binoculars hidden in an inner sleeve, he unfolded the lenses and stood up. “It’s dark,” he repeated, glassing the horizon where the glorified RV park that was Edinburgh slept. There was some scattered soft lighting from campers, but none of the gas station glare guarded the edges of the rest stop village. There were a few convenience stores wedged between the thinning parking lots blending into one another along the Colorado River, but the darkened signage was hard to pick out, with no string of streetlights eating into the shadows.
“Look.” He extended the lenses to June.
She bobbed under the string around his neck and took the frames in her hands. “Oh, there’s the Texaco we were at. It’s a weird time of year for brownouts, though.”
“I’ve never seen one this far east, either.” He squinted and brushed June’s arm. “Can I spy those?” She placed the binoculars in his hand and pressed her back into his ribs. “There’s smoke, a half a dozen spots, scattered around.”
“Backyard firepits, probably?”
“Bang on, but the biggest plume is the substation. Smoke coming from the water treatment plant past the north side of town as well. That’s the only thing out there.” Colin sat on a bulbous outcropping and offered June his rock.
“Don’t scare me—you already got laid.” She joined him and pulled the hood over her head.
“Nothing to fear, Lash. Leg it back down the mountain? You’re shivering again.”
Gravity and the brass monkey weather chased them to the campground, where Jacob paced in front of their buses like an angry parent trying to get their kid out of the house.
“Where were you? We saw smoke and people were leaving, so we came back and you two were gone…”
“Breathe, bud, we’re fine,” Colin said. “We just went on a hike, is all.”
“We went to the mountaintop,” June answered. “We saw where the smoke was coming from. Colin said it was the electrical place and the water treatment plant. Those are the big ones.”
“You went to the mountaintop?” Jacob relaxed, shaking his crown as subtly as a bobblehead just before the light turns green.
Gil wrapped the nervous nurse in a bearhug. “Focus.” His kiss to the cheek received a grumble from his partner, so he turned to Colin. “What did you see, man?”
“Can we please do this indoors?” June chattered.
Kimberly’s interior was as brisk as the air outside. Colin bee-lined to the mini wood stove and struck a match to the bundle of tinder sticking out of a compact teepee of kindling. Once the fire was stable, he sandwiched three teacup-sized chunks of wood into the blaze and closed the display glass.
