Authors: Thomas Koloniar
T
he biggest
trouble for Marty and his friends during their trip had been traveling along
I-25 north of the Arizona border. It was jammed with deserted, bumper-to-bumper,
ash-coated traffic, all of it pointing south on both sides of the highway. Even
in the Jeep they’d had trouble negotiating their way through the logjam of cars
and over thousands of ash-coated, frozen bodies along the road.
“What killed them all?” Emory wondered.
“Pressure wave,” Marty said. “Those who weren’t
killed outright likely suffocated in the vacuum.”
By the time they reached the outskirts of Denver,
the cars were nothing but burnt frames and the bodies no more than grizzled
skeletons.
“This is where the firestorm first began to lose
its intensity,” Marty said. “Everything north of here is likely burnt to a
crisp.”
They drove into downtown Denver and got out and
stood looking at the scorched remains of the once fair city.
“It used to be such a clean town,” Emory said. “Now
it’s an ashtray.”
“Smells like one too,” Sullivan said, hawking up a
mouthful of phlegm and spitting it onto the street.
They drove into the suburbs, where it turned out
that Marty had been largely correct about being able to forage canned food. They
saw living people here and there, darting in and out of houses in ones and twos
with sacks over their shoulders, all of them ragged and filthy-looking, wretches
for the most part. No one came near the trio, however, and there seemed to be
very little sense of danger. Still, they kept their eyes peeled. Some of the
houses had mysteriously escaped the flames entirely, while others were
completely incinerated. They stood talking in the drive of a brick home that had
gone largely undamaged, their mouths covered with green triangular bandages
against the ash blowing in the breeze.
“Traveling is going to get more difficult from
here,” Marty said. “We’ll still find food but before long the highway’s likely
to be covered with ejecta.”
“Won’t be any gas north of here,” Sullivan said.
“Not with the cars all burned up.”
“But there will be in the underground tanks,” Marty
said. “Beneath the gas stations.”
“How do you propose to get it out of the
ground?”
“We can go to Home Depot or someplace like that,”
Marty said. “All I need is some PVC pipe, some glue, and a few other things, and
I can make a hand pump.”
Sullivan stood looking at Emory.
“We’ve got nothing better to do, John.”
“I disagree,” he said. “Okay, he was right about
the food. But he’s wrong about heading any farther north. We should be
scavenging all the food we can. We can hook a trailer to the Jeep, find a place
south of here to hole up for the winter, a house near some trees with a big-ass
fireplace in it.”
“He’s right, Shannon. That’s exactly what you guys
should do.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means I’m pressing on,” Marty said. “I’ll find
a four-wheel drive somewhere in Denver that didn’t burn up.”
“You’re nuts!” Sullivan said.
“I’ll be one less mouth to feed.”
“Um, no,” Emory said. “I don’t like that idea.”
“I’m not asking you guys to come with me,” he said.
“But it’s the only thing left that makes any sense for me.”
“Then I’m coming with you,” she said. “John L?”
He shook his head. “No, Shannon. I’m sorry. That
way is a total dead end and there’s nothing up there I care about. Not
anymore.”
“
I’ll
be there,” she
said, her eyes grinning over the bandage.
“Sorry,” he said. “I’ve only got so much faith to
sustain me.”
“Well, if it’s a matter of faith,” she said,
grabbing his belt and pulling him off toward the house.
“Shannon, what the fuck are you doing?” he said,
trying to pry her hand loose, but not terribly hard.
She towed him through the door and into the
kitchen, pushing him up against counter and reaching down with one hand to
unbutton his trousers.
He stood looking at her, his arousal increasing.
“Shannon . . . what are you doing?”
She freed his manhood and began to massage him.
“Restoring your faith.”
“This isn’t going to—”
Sullivan drew a deep breath and slid his arm around
her, quickly giving in to her touch. He took off her helmet and pulled the
bandage down to put his nose into her hair, breathing her in. Even after so many
weeks without bathing, there was still the unmistakable essence of a female.
“Goddamnit, that feels good,” he said with a
sigh.
“I know what guys like,” she said, stroking him
more vigorously until she got him groaning into her ear.
He gripped her tight against him. “Ohh
. . . fuck!”
When he was finished shuddering, she stood back and
took a handful of dust-covered paper towels from a roll hanging beneath the
cupboard, grinning at him as she wiped her fingers clean. “Too bad you’re not
coming along,” she said. “That’s as easy for me as shaking your hand.”
He finished buttoning his pants and stood looking
at her. “You know it’s a one-way trip,” he said helplessly. “You have to know
that?”
“Go ahead and consider that my thanks for what
you’ve done for us.”
“Shannon, think about this. Seriously.”
“Already have.”
“Jesus Christ,” he muttered, grabbing his carbine
from the table and walking out of the house. Without saying a word, he walked
past where Marty stood in the yard, got into the Jeep and shut the door.
“What’s his problem?” Marty asked as Emory came
walking out with a self-satisfied smile on her face.
“He’s got a crush on a lesbian,” she said. “What
about you? You need a crank before we go?”
“Stop it,” he said, turning away, but she grabbed
his jacket.
“I’m a practical woman, Marty. You need one or
not?”
“Not today,” he said quietly, embarrassed. “But
thank you.”
She bumped him on the shoulder. “We’re buddies,
right?”
“Yes,” he said. “We’re buddies.”
“Okay then. Me and you stick together.”
“Of course. What about Sullivan?”
“Sullivan . . . well, he’s sorta fucked,”
she said with a laugh. “ ’Cuz I play dirty.”
T
wo
days later Sullivan slowed the Jeep and came to a stop in the middle of a
back-country road twenty-five miles north of Cheyenne, Wyoming. The boulder
resting in the center of the road was over ten feet tall and twice as wide.
“Sweet Jesus,” he muttered.
“See what I’ve been telling you guys!” Marty said,
jumping excitedly out of the Jeep and running up to the monolith.
Emory and Sullivan got out and stood looking at the
rock.
“That flew up in the sky and then came back down,
right?” Emory said.
“Sure as hell did!” Marty answered, running around
the side of it, trying to calculate the weight. “Definitely igneous rock,” he
muttered. “Hey, either of you guys know the unit weight of granite? I’m not
sure—no, wait—about a hundred pounds per cubic foot.”
They followed him around it and were shocked by
what they saw in the distance.
“Now that’s a goddamn debris field!” Marty
shouted.
For as far they could see to the north, the barren
landscape was scattered with boulders, though not all were as big as the first
one, and there were great gashes in the earth where they had come to land,
inexorably altering the landscape with their presence alone.
“See those cars out there?” Marty said, pointing
far off the highway where a dozen vehicles lay scattered like broken toys.
“That’s where the blast wave threw them. Which means we can cross over to the
interstate now. It should be mostly clear.” He turned and paced off the size of
the boulder. “Finally, some numbers I can work with.”
Sullivan looked at Emory. “He doesn’t have his head
on right.”
“Let him go,” she said. “He’s a got a thing for
numbers.”
“Just look at it, Sue,” Marty was muttering. “Just
look at it, honey!”
He came back over to them after nearly fifteen
minutes of mumbling to himself and stood scratching his growing red beard.
Okay,” he said. “Judging from the size and
estimated weight of this monster, speed and angle of attack, we shouldn’t be
much more than five hundred miles from the point of impact.”
Sullivan looked at him disbelief. “You’re telling
me the explosion threw this fucking thing five hundred miles?”
“That’s an estimate.”
“Well, shit, how close can we get to the crater
before the road’s all blown away?”
“That won’t be the problem,” Marty said. “The road
will be buried. But that’s what the Jeep is for.”
They were towing a trailer now loaded with fuel and
food, so they were set for a long drive.
Emory smiled at Sullivan. “You have to admit, it’s
kinda cool.”
He nodded grimly. “My parents were up in
Montana.”
“Well, for what it’s worth,” Marty said, “they
never knew a thing. It was instantaneous.”
“You’re sure?”
“Positive,” Marty said. “That thing hit with a
force equal to five or six teratons of TNT. That’s five or six
trillion
tons.”
“How did we even survive a blast like that?” Emory
wondered.
“Shock cocoons,” Marty said. “Small areas of
limited damage within a broader area of mass devastation. That’s how they
explained those firemen surviving the World Trade Center falling on top of them.
Shock cocoons even allowed for a few buildings to remain standing after the
Hiroshima blast. There can be all sorts of reasons for their occurrence. In our
case—meaning Arizona—I’m guessing the Rockies had a mitigating effect on the
pressure wave no one ever anticipated. Maybe the Grand Canyon did too. We could
probably study this impact for decades and still not know everything. You know,
it’s kind of like finding a living Tyrannosaurus rex and realizing we were only
half right about what they looked like . . . God, I wish Susan were
here!”
“Well, can we get going, Mr. Scientist? We’re
burning daylight.”
“Why not?” Marty said. “It’s only going to get more
interesting.”
They crossed back to the interstate, and it turned
out that Marty had been largely correct about that too. There were hundreds and
hundreds of cars, but most of them had been blown well clear of the highway.
T
he
trip to the Canadian border took another four days and nights of driving over
rough and rocky terrain. The interstate was completely covered by the blanket of
ejecta that fell from the sky after the impact, obscuring the landscape. Most of
the highway signs had been leveled by the blast wave along with every other
man-made structure north of the Wyoming border. They kept track of their
progress by stopping to brush off—or in some cases to dig up—fallen or buried
highway signs.
At last, Sullivan stopped the Jeep and they sat
gaping at a massive hole in the earth extending well beyond the horizon north,
east, and west, stretching like an empty ocean basin for as far as the eye could
see. “Holy Christ,” he whispered, awestruck.
Marty and Emory got out. Neither said a word as
they walked the thirty yards to the crater’s edge and stood looking nearly a
mile down into the empty chasm blown in the earth’s crust, its sloped and rocky
walls lined with the same colorful striations as the Grand Canyon. They saw no
sign of a past civilization, heard no sound but the cold breeze in their
ears.
There was a tremor in the earth then, and they
hurried back from the edge as rocks broke away and tumbled down, hitting speeds
of sixty mph before finally reaching the bottom far below, well out of view. The
tremor did not last long, and when the earth stood still again they returned to
the rim and watched the last of the tumbling rocks and boulders careening out of
sight.
“This wound will take a very long time to heal,” he
said quietly.
“Marty, what’s that?” Emory said, pointing roughly
three-quarters of a mile around the rim at an orange dot.
Marty trotted back to the Jeep with her on his
heels, grabbing his carbine and finding the orange splotch of color through his
scope. “It’s a tent!”
“You’re kidding,” Sullivan said, getting out of the
Jeep and raising a pair of high-powered binoculars. “Who the hell else would be
stupid enough to . . . you’re right.”
Emory had her own carbine now and was glassing the
site as well. “It’s an encampment, all right. Is that a truck of some kind in
defilade to the right of the tent, dark green maybe?”
“I think so,” Sullivan said. “Let’s mount up and
get a little closer. Everybody keep your fucking eyes peeled for an ambush.”
They drove to within four hundred yards of the
encampment and Sullivan climbed up onto the roof with the binoculars.
“John, somebody could blow your ass right off
there.”
“Not worried about me, are you, Shannon?”
She looked at Marty and rolled her eyes.
“Looks deserted,” Sullivan said. “There’s another
tent. It’s green.”
Emory raised her weapon. “Let’s get over there
before it starts getting dark.”
Marty drove the Jeep slowly along, with Emory and
Sullivan walking twenty and thirty yards out in front to guard against ambush.
When they drew within fifty yards of the encampment, Sullivan signaled Marty to
halt and stay in the Jeep as he and Emory advanced into the site, weapons
ready.
“Hear that?” Sullivan said.
“Yeah . . . sounds like gas.”
They looked around the corner of the tent and saw a
small aluminum camp table with a Coleman stove resting on it, a large propane
tank beneath it on the ground. A blue flame hissed beneath a red enameled
coffeepot. Emory trained her weapon on what turned out to be a four-door, hybrid
Chevrolet SUV. Sullivan advanced on the big orange tent and looked inside,
seeing the limbless torsos of a man and a woman, their eyes open, staring
sightless at the ceiling of the tent.