The Third Apocalypse: Together At The End: Book One, page 2
“We saw smoke, that’s all. I’ve seen animals fry transformers before,” he told his friends once he slotted into the dinette.
“That’s the weird thing, though,” Gil said. “Satellite internet is never out. They use that shit on Everest, man.”
“And?” June asked, still shivering in Colin’s hoodie.
“Garfield has power forever. Kimberly does, too. I overbuilt both our solar power systems,” Gil explained. “But if satellite internet is down, even the president can’t get online, man.”
“Clatty equipment?” Colin asked, keeping his eyes on Gil while sidling June against his chest, passively pinning her with his curled bicep.
“That’s the first thing I thought of. Three other buses here have a satellite setup like mine, man. Everybody’s shooting blanks.”
“The diesel mechanic from Edinburgh is back out here tomorrow, probably before sunup. Tony’ll know what happened. Best to build a cozy fire yourselves and stay easy, yeah?” No one had a rebuttal, so Colin adjourned the informal meeting with a hearty nod.
After their guests left, June tiptoed behind the frosted glass slide that separated the bathroom and the bedroom from the living area to have a shower. Colin tackled the futon-style couch, sliding it out until the backrest flattened to form a full-sized cushion mattress. He opened the stove to reorganize the charred wood with a pair of barbeque tongs until fingernails grazing his back turned into June’s voice, whispering in his ear.
“Sheets and everything,” she cooed. She put her pajama-clad bottom on the new bed and scooted backwards into the corner where the mattress met the walls.
He pressed the tongs into her hands. “Please let me be better at making fires than you, Miss Five Languages.”
Six, she signed. Pushing him toward the bathroom, she continued signing. Don’t keep me waiting.
He showered and threw on tomorrow’s t-shirt over a pair of boxers on his way back to the living room. “That bus next door is gone, Lash,” he said, rounding the frosted glass. “Looks—”
A knock on Kimberly’s door interrupted the update. Colin took three tentative steps toward the front of the bus until he recognized the face in the dirty glass as one of the festival organizers.
Dean was waving a cell phone like he was trying to scrub dirt out of the air. Colin opened the door and let in the wide-eyed man wearing two five o’clock shadows.
He gasped his words. “You… need to… see this.” His fingers swept across the battered phone, attempting to resuscitate the cracked screen. “My girlfriend took this video before she left L.A. last night. It’s hard to see because it’s around midnight, but…”
Windows of buildings were glowing orange, billowing smoke into the night. Roaring fires degraded to violent white noise and overlapping cries blending over the phone’s tinny speaker scored the soundtrack. Halfway through the video, the largest structure in the frame collapsed into a sparkling fireball.
“That was the Bradbury building!” June shrieked. She turned away from the phone and into Colin. He wrapped his arms around her and continued watching, his chin resting on her head.
When the clip ended, Dean pocketed his phone and said, “Aiden, my lady, heard Vegas looks exactly the same, the whole city bombed out.” He stepped back to the door. “Everyone else is going or gone. I guess we’re cutting things short this year.”
Chapter two
June
The rainbow of buses covering the campground before the festival director made his midnight ride had receded like an ominous tide. A queue had formed on the single lane entry and exit road running into the grounds, but June’s bus was not in line.
The traffic swell was working itself out naturally, as there was only one copy of Dean’s video. With no internet to share information, phones became autonomous camcorders. The news spread, but half the campground was asleep while the grapevine swelled. Kimberly and Garfield were in the back of the place, so the dayglo caravan of skoolies had already surged onto the highway when they started searching.
The quiver returned to June’s voice as she stood in the tire tracks of her dreams. “It’s gone! We forgot to leave a note, and he’s gone.” She uttered a string of curses. “I knew it, I knew it.” She balled her fists in the kangaroo pocket of Colin’s former hoodie, her knuckles protruding like mossy green foothills. “I quit L.A. I was going to Oregon to work on the bus and then… do what you do.” June’s gray eyes widened. “Was it nuclear? What if Portland?… That guy said Las Vegas got attacked, too.” She kicked a rock into the wind, which sent a bolt of pain shooting up her foot. “Fuck!”
Colin wrapped his brawny arms around her and she buried her face in his chest so no one else heard her screams. They vibrated through Colin’s ribs and left some drool on his shirt. “I am at your service, M’Lady.”
She was safe, and she knew that Colin was a safe man to be stranded with. Her grandfather had insisted that she know everything about the men she dated, whether or not she wanted the front-loading. It had always been that way with Declan Mclaughlin, ever since June was in middle school. He had the intelligence resources to put any local precinct to shame and used them to vet everyone in his grandchildren’s lives. That he had known who Colin was the first time she mentioned his name had terrified her, knowing the company her grandfather kept—but it turned out that he followed the underground boxing scenes in Boston, New York, and Chicago more closely than she knew. Declan had, of course, dug past Colin’s short and scandalous boxing career and discovered his blood relation to several prominent Real IRA members, but seemed content that they had indeed put him in the wind to fend for himself after what had happened in Boston…
Colin squeezed her elbow, bringing her back to reality. “Here come the boys.”
Jacob and Gil were arm in arm, wearing matching maroon bathrobes to shield against the midnight chill. With bloodshot eyes, they shuffled like religious acolytes across the emptying lot. Jacob’s cheeks were damp, his sorrow reflecting in the ambient glow of concentrated headlights. He was in nurse mode. “June, baby, we’re still going to Santa Cruz to see if Gil’s family is all right before we go to Santa Rosa. We can try to get you back into Los Angeles, but…”
“What if everything is all… nuclear there?” she asked, her wide eyes welling. “I just want to go home. My grandfather…”
Her grandfather, for all his power, could not have known of the attacks before they happened, otherwise he would have sent the Cessna to fly her back to the Mclaughlin compound in central Oregon. She looked up at the gray sky, but there was no loud, little airplane coming to her rescue.
Colin answered her. “Easy, peasy, lemon-squeezy, Lash. I’ll take you wherever you want to go. How about we make some tea on the bus?”
She spoke before the scowl on her face retreated. “Why are you so fucking calm?” Shaking her head, she apologized with her eyes. Colin was calm because this was no different from his everyday nomadic life, and he already knew that he would do anything for her. When she truly thought about how smitten he was, she tingled. She was his only priority, and she was safe, so he was calm. She sighed and attempted to match his breathing. “Yeah... no, good. Tea.” Her eyes squeezed shut with the effort of her mantra: “We… are all… stardust.”
Kimberly and Garfield were visible across the spartan campground after the mass exodus, but they weren’t the only rigs left on the lot. A dozen scattered vehicles had battened down, waiting for daylight.
“We want to leave as soon as we can,” Gil said. “Jacob is supposed to be in Santa Rosa on Monday.” He paused, then shrugged. “It’s not like I can sleep, anyway.”
“Sorry, lads, I can’t do that.” Colin rapped his knuckles against his temple. “Too many shots in the ring. Headlights blind me at night; driving’s just not safe.” He grimaced at the unintentional irony.
Jacob nodded. “We can’t stay, though. Gil’s dad is on oxygen now…” He rubbed Gil’s back when his partner’s eyes went to the ground.
“Shite, Gil. You didn’t say…” Colin shook his head and looked at June. “I could teach you to drive Kimberly on the fly if you want to leave right now.” He didn’t sound confident.
She shook her head. “That’s no safer than you driving blind, and I’m already anxious.” She broke the circle to hug her friends like a little girl squeezing her teddy bears. “Go. You can catch up to the caravan before they break up. We’ll go with the morning people.”
Back inside Kimberly, Colin set a cup of tea in front of June and slid in across from her at the dinette with his own. “I don’t have anything herbal.”
She sipped, unable to hide a reflexive pucker at the unadulterated black tea. “It’s hot, and you made it for me. I love it.”
“What do you want to do?” Colin asked, savoring his tea. He seemed happy to give June the reins.
“I don’t want to be in this timeline,” she said. “In my timeline, we FaceTime almost every night and you help me build my bus and the first place I drive her to is you.” Her toe thudded double time against Colin’s shin. She pursed her lips at his bewilderment. “I daydreamed. It happened once, okay?”
“Hm. Mine was a little different,” Colin said. He reached out and pulled her stealth braid through his fingers before letting it swing back into her shoulder. “Maybe we put on a movie in bed? Try to sleep until daylight?”
She grumbled. Yesterday morning, they had physically met for the first time since Jacob had introduced them over a chance FaceTime call three months prior. Chatting on their own bloomed into sexting nearly every night in less than a month and they had promised to do so many scintillating things to one another, but… “Bring the maps. I want to look at the route if the GPS is out.” Someone had to plan their escape, and even a satiated Colin was no good at organization, from what she had seen.
It was a valiant attempt, but no amount of dim lighting, pheromone-laced body heat, or road map staring contests were enough to lull either of them to sleep. Colin’s stiffening joints and June’s jimmy leg convinced them to take another hike to the overlook before the movie’s plot could thicken.
“It doesn’t look any different,” she said, once they’d reached the summit.
Colin glassed Edinburgh from the mountaintop. “No emergency vehicles, no crime scene tape.” He bent down to tie his shoe. “The fuel station is still dark and now there are bags on the pumps.”
Despite the hike, June was like a boxer jumping an invisible rope, her twitchy hops jarring the speech out of her mouth. “What if we can’t get gas? This a disaster, right? People panic.”
Colin swung his pack around and fished his hand through its opening until a rattle sounded. He shook a single blue pill out of the bottle and dropped the drugs back in the bag.
June gasped. “That wasn’t Viagra, was it?”
“Aleve.”
“Oh, Birdbrain!” She stopped her cardio routine and sat beside her broken boxer, wrapping her arms around his middle and resting a cheek on his shoulder. “You hate taking that shite. We shouldn’t have done this.”
He smiled at her annoying pet name. “I usually like Mary Jane in this situation, but I don’t think Cheech and Chong make it too far in the disaster movie.”
She squeezed her arms against Colin’s unyielding abs until they shook. “What am I going to do?”
“Kimberly’s tank is full. We could follow the boys to Santa Rosa. Go north from there.”
“What was your daydream?”
“What?”
“I need to talk about something else for a second. Your fantasy doesn’t end with us in Santa Rosa.” She swung and scooted on their natural bench until her head was in his lap.
Colin laughed. “Fantasy? Ah. My place in Utah is lovely this time of year. Colder than this, but…”
She gasped. “Oh shit, I have no clothes! All my stuff is in a storage locker in Glendale. I was going to pack the bus there on the way home.” She turned her face into Colin’s stomach. “All my eggs in this one basket!”
“I like that sweater on you anyway,” he said, reaching out to trace the Audubon Society birds on the front of his pilfered hoodie. “Forest green is so versatile.” He popped his knee back into place and rocked her into standing with him. Boxing had turned his strength graceful and sometimes she loved getting carried around like King Kong’s damsel.
“We should—hold on,” Colin dropped to one knee and swung the daypack to the top of his foot. He grabbed the binoculars and focused on the highway, where a dusty orange Twinkie was hurtling toward the campground.
“We need to get back to camp,” he said. “That’s Garfield."
***
“We drove for over an hour, man,” Gil said, chattering. “We thought you were asleep. Nothing is open. Nothing is on!” Sweat steamed around his head in the frigid air. Garfield was rumbling behind him, re-parked next to Kimberly before nature’s etch-a-sketch could erase the tread marks of their exit.
“We had half a tank when we left,” said Jacob. “That might have gotten us to Santa Barbara, which isn't even halfway.”
The foursome slipped into Kimberly, the backup heater blowing BTUs across the soft cork floorboards and their stockinged feet. Colin rearranged the front guest bed back into a couch while June built a fire in the mini potbelly stove.
“Everything’s deserted?” Colin introduced his backside to the still-frigid sofa behind the driver’s seat and trilled a chickadee’s ‘Fee-Bee’ call to June.
Without turning around, she thrice whistled the short answering song and lit her masterpiece before closing the stove door. She side-stepped to the tall, skinny refrigerator, on double-duty as a heat-shield beside the woodstove, and retrieved a box of Ho-Ho’s.
“Not everything,” Gil said. He and Jacob loaded themselves like shotgun shells into the booth space on either side of the dinette, across from the matching couch. “It was either crazy or deserted. Car crashes and bottlenecks and guns going off at the border…”
“People were past horns,” Jacob added. “But no flashing lights or sirens anywhere. The highway is chaos, but every exit looked like a dead limb.”
June passed out snack cakes like communion wafers before snuggling into Colin. They ate in silent unison for twenty seconds until the heater clicked off. She rummaged for her phone and replaced the low breathy whooshing of mechanical warmth with her comfort music via the Bluetooth system.
Colin traced the western meadowlarks tattooed across the inside of her forearm, three little birds reminding her that every little thing was going to be all right. “You’ve got how much diesel?” he asked the table.
“Third of a tank,” Gil answered. “We’re getting eight miles to the gallon.”
“Then we need to go to Tony’s,” Colin said, not waiting for questions before continuing. “He’s the mechanic that comes out every year, you’ve seen him. Looks like a piece of leather come to life, but he’s pure class.”
Gil nodded. “He sold you that starter you were putting in yesterday morning.”
Jacob swatted across the table and snagged the empty cellophane wrapper from Gil’s hands before the crinkling reached a critical level. “I don’t follow.”
“Like I said, he’s pure class. I had to convince him I rebuilt Kimberly’s engine myself, so he could go help someone who needed it.” Colin readjusted to recirculate his numbing ass and rearrange the unavoidable erection June’s derriere gave him. “He warned me that corner gas station always runs out with a full campground here. Said he’s got a pair of manual pumps behind his shop, said if I got in a jam getting out of town, I could deplete some of his reserves.”
Gil grinned despite the mood. “Pays to shop local.”
Colin squeezed June’s grip off his hand and wiggled his fingers. “If you’re worried, come to my place until this all blows over.”
“What if that takes weeks?” June moved to Colin’s forearm and continued her nervous kneading. “I told my grandfather that I would be in Portland next week at the latest, but I was going to call him along the way. Now I can’t even do that.”
“What about Gil’s parents?” Jacob asked.
Gil shook his head and pulled Jacob’s hands across the tabletop and into his. “Oxygen tanks don’t need electricity, Nurse Johnson. And they live in a house. It’s not like mom has to chop wood or wrestle a salmon out of a grizzly’s mouth for dinner.”
“There’s no way of knowing what’s on the other side of the Rockies,” Colin said, extracting himself from June’s grip to stand up and flex his limbs. “But Dean’s video… We might only add to the mess.” He walked past the couch and dinette into the kitchen and busied himself with the kettle.
Jacob’s fingers drummed on the dinette’s Formica. His eyebrows rose to an amazing height before he spoke, enunciating every word. “Which is why I should go.”
Colin stared out the window at the ridgeline, stoic in the starlight. “What if it’s nuked? It’s safer to stay east of the mountain, especially in January.” He looked at each of his friends. “My place is six hours away, in the middle of nowhere. I have—”
June tugged on Colin’s sleeve. “Sit, you’ve been limping since we got back from the hike.”
He obliged her and campaigned to their companions. “It could get worse before it gets better.” June cringed beside him. “I have a well we can set up for solar.”
Gil’s forehead was a mess of lines, his mouth parted for questions he couldn’t push out until something clicked and his face relaxed. “It’s likely nuclear. Probably an EMP detonation and ground missiles. A one-two punch like that? Russia could do it. So could China. The west coast is—”
“The obvious choice,” Colin finished. “So we go east.”
With everyone begrudgingly in agreement on caravanning to Utah, Jacob and Gil left to prepare for the drive.
June sighed with resignation. Telling Colin her family history would forever change the dynamic of their brand-new relationship, but in case of disaster, the Mclaughlin compound was the safest option available. The state-of-the-art security systems, her grandfather’s ample collection of firearms, and the area’s isolation in the Oregon mountains should be more than enough to convince her boyfriend to drive them to the Pacific Northwest. She doubted they would withstand a nuclear attack, but the interconnected network of underground offices and warehouses beneath the family’s luxury lakeside resort business was an even better way to stay off the broken grid. Add a fleet of vehicles, dozens of watercraft, and pair of airplanes to the package and June’s grandfather had all the ingredients to become the founder of a brave new world in the Beaver State.
