The day after: An apocalyptic morning (5 page)

              "I don't think she meant that we should..."

              "Look goddammit," Skip jumped in, taking a step closer. "I'm sorry about your parents, I really am. I lost my entire family to this comet as well as my best friend. You'll forgive me if I seem less than compassionate with you - its not really my nature - but we don't have time to sit here while you posture and whine at me about this fucking trailer. We need to get moving as soon as possible and I'm not going to allow you to stay here, with or without guns. I'll drag your ass out of here forcefully if that's necessary. So let's drop this worthless discussion about staying or going. We're going. Do you understand?"

              "You don't even know us," Jack cried, holding his ground. "Why do you care what happens to us?"

              Skip had to admit the little shit had huevos. "What else do I have to care about?" he asked in reply. "Twenty minutes ago I was all alone and about to blow my brains out, to give up. Now, a couple of people need help and I'm the only one around who can give it. I can't turn my back on you now. I couldn't do it even if I hadn't promised your mother that I would look after you. We're all probably going to die anyway, and soon, but if there's a chance for you two to live for a while, I'm it. Okay?"

              Reluctantly, Jack nodded, his tough expression fading a little.

              "Good," Skip said. "And if you want to live, you're gonna have to let me make the decisions here and you're gonna have to do what I say, when I say it. Little boys aren't going to be able to cut it. You need to be a man. All right?"

              "All right," he mumbled, taken, as Skip had known he would be, by the challenge to "be a man."

              "Good enough. Now, what kind of supplies do you have in that trailer?"

              As it turned out, the trailer was a virtual treasure-trove. Whoever it had belonged to before the apocalypse, they had stocked it with enough canned food and dry goods to last for a while. There were nearly a hundred cans of Chef Boy-R-D pastas, Campbell's soups, various vegetables and fruits, and even pie filling. There were bags of rice, beans, flour, sugar, coffee, and powdered milk. There were vitamin pills and aspirin and Tylenol. There was even - glory of glories - two bottles of Jack Daniels and a half a case of Budweiser.

              "There is a god," Skip said, seeing all of the supplies.

              The two kids both had backpacks which Skip directed them to fill with as much of the canned and vital dry goods as they could fit in there. He dumped out another backpack, which had belonged to their father, and began to fill it as well. Even with all three filled to capacity, there were still numerous supplies left over. Skip would have liked to haul them out of the trailer and bury them somewhere for a rainy day (no pun intended) but he felt the time slipping away from them. Any moment a group of armed bikers could come bursting out of the forest.

              He rolled up the sleeping bags that were in the trailer, noting with satisfaction that they were the waterproof kind, and tied one to each backpack. Into his he carefully slipped six of the beers and both of the bottles of JD. Strictly for medicinal purposes, he told himself with a grin.

              "Okay, let's get out of the trailer," he said, once they were ready. "One last thing to do before we go."

              After they stepped outside, packs firmly upon their backs, Skip went and collected two of the rifles and pistols. He searched each body for ammunition, finding a total of six magazines of M-16 rounds and eight of .45 rounds. He shoved all of it into his backpack along with the cans.

              "Do you guys know how to use guns?" he asked them.

              They both shook their heads. "Our dad doesn't... uh didn't believe in guns," Christine said sadly.

              Skip raised his eyebrows a bit and looked at the .38 pistol that was lying next to his body. Christine followed his gaze over there. "It wasn't his," she explained. "He found it in the trailer. When the men came he pointed it at them but they just laughed. He fired at them a few times when they kept coming and they..." She couldn't continue.

              "It's okay, honey," he said soothingly. "Your dad was obviously a very brave man. He tried his best. But in any case, you guys need to take these." He handed each of them an M-16, after removing the chambered rounds.

              They took them very doubtfully. "I don't know how to fire this," Jack said. "I've never shot a gun in my life."

              "Me either," Christine echoed.

              "I'll teach you everything you need to know about them later," he said. "I was always in favor of gun control before. There were simply too many goddamn weapons out on the streets. If you had asked me last week, I would have said melt down every last one of them, including mine. But now, this is the kind of world where you're gonna have to learn how to shoot if you wanna stay alive. For now, just lug em. Sling 'em over your shoulders like I have."

              They did as he asked.

              "And take these too," he said, handing each of them one of the holstered .45 pistols. "Run the holster through your belt."

              When they were all armed up and ready to go the kids took one more look at their dead parents, tears falling from their eyes. Christine had asked Skip if they could bury them before they went but he vetoed that idea. There simply wasn't enough time. And so they left them there, lying beside the dead bikers.

              "Goodbye, Momma, goodbye, Daddy," Christine said as they walked away. Jack looked over his shoulder once, but offered no words of parting. Both of them were sobbing as the campsite faded from view behind them.

              Two hours later they were nearly a mile north of the camper, having trudged mostly uphill to where the woods were thicker and the problem of landslides was not as severe. Skip had a full stomach for the first time since the impact. After leading his new charges out of the zone of immediate danger he had stopped for ten minutes and inhaled a can of cold ravioli. That greasy, tinny tasting concoction of pasta, processed meat, tomato sauce, and imitation cheese had already been written into the log of his brain as the finest meal he had ever consumed. He had eaten every last scrap, even going so far as to run his finger over the inside of the can to gather up the stray sauce. Now, with food in his belly and working its way into his malnourished bloodstream, he felt himself a new man, full of energy, ready to take on the world and everything in it.

              "Can we take a rest for a few minutes?" Christine asked as the reached the top of the latest hill. They were in an area of dense forest and underbrush. Many of the trees had been knocked down by the wind but most were still standing, towering above them and rocking gently back and forth.

              Skip was in the lead, taking the point on their journey, his M-16 locked and loaded and held out before him. He stopped and looked at them, seeing that they were on the verge of exhaustion. Though they were younger than him and had been better fed over the ensuing week, they probably were not accustomed to lugging fifty pounds of gear uphill through the mud. "Sure," he told them, pointing to a fallen log that was half buried in the mud. "Let's take ten. I could use a breather myself."

              Christine and Jack unshouldered their packs and set them down in the least muddy place they could find. They set their unloaded rifles down next to them and then planted their weary bodies on the log. Skip, after setting down his own pack, grabbed a seat on another fallen log a few feet away. He kept his rifle cradled in his lap.

              Christine put her hands in the small of her back and pushed her hips forward, stretching out her spine. There was an audible pop as she reached the limits of her stretch. She grimaced a little and then took her baseball cap from her head, freeing her blonde hair. It was damp and spotted with mud, the bangs and the ends knotted in stringy lumps from the lack of recent care. She ran her fingers through it a few times before bunching it back up and replacing the hat. Her face, though dirty and rapidly acquiring the thousand-yard stare of combat fatigue, was pretty and had an undercurrent of innocence about it. It was a face that boys had probably pined after not too long before, that they had dreamed of kissing.

              They had not talked a lot on their journey so far, the effort of movement making idle conversation a waste of precious energy. Now that they were at rest however, Skip made an effort to get to know his new friends.

              "Where are you two from?" he asked, directing the question at no one in particular, but looking more towards Christine.

              It was she who answered him. "Berkeley," she said softly. "Dad was a professor at the university."

              Skip nodded. "And what brought you up here? Wasn't it a school day when the comet hit?"

              "We come up here every year at the beginning of hunting season," she told him. "Mom was a wildlife photographer. When the hunters started filling the woods, all of the deer would go into the national forest to get away from them. That was when she got her best shots." She sniffed a little at the memory.

              "Yeah," Skip said, feeling a pang of sadness of his own. "I came up here for the start of hunting season every year too, although I was always one of the ones chasing the deer into the national forest. It's kind of funny, isn't it? How we're alive now just because of an annual tradition?"

              "Yeah," she said bitterly. "Real funny."

              "Were you both in high school there?" he asked next, trying to ease the subject to a less painful track.

              "I was a junior," Christine said. "Jack was a freshman. I was gonna study medicine when I got to college. UC Davis has a top-rated medical school. I guess that's not really gonna happen now, huh?"

              "I guess not," he said.

              "What is going to happen to us, Skip?" she asked next. "Is there anyplace we can go, anything we can do? There had to be someplace safe, doesn't there?"

              He sighed, wishing she had not asked that. It was a question he hadn't even wanted to ask himself. "I think civilization on planet Earth is pretty much over," he told her.

              "Over?" Jack said. "How can it be over?"

              "Most of the major cities are probably gone along with all of the people in them. For those that were anywhere near the coast, that's a given. For those that were inland... well, people build cities near rivers so they have a water supply and a means of transporting goods. They build them on low, flat ground. Those rivers are all swelling up to ten, twenty times their normal size because of all this rain. Those that weren't swamped in the initial strike when their dams broke are now probably underwater from torrential flooding. Without those cities, there is no structure to base society on. A lot of people probably survived the impact - I imagine there are groups like us all over the place - but they're scattered all over and soon, they're going to start starving. There will be no crops, no food production or transportation, no organization of any kind. Everything has collapsed to rubble."

              "So are we all going to die then?" Christine asked. "Are we going to starve to death when we run out of food?"

              "Millions of people will," he said after a moment's consideration. "But that doesn't mean we have to be among them. Are you familiar with the theories of Darwinism?"

              She scoffed. "Are you kidding? My dad's a college professor at Berkeley. I've heard about Darwin since I was in kindergarten."

              This got a laugh out of Skip, the first he'd had since flaming rocks and mud had started to fall from the sky. "I see your point," he said. "Anyway, we're living in a Darwinian system now. There is no law. There is no civility. There are no hospitals or schools or jobs. There is only survival of the fittest. I think that the human race can survive this little episode. Eventually these clouds are going to clear away and we'll be able to grow food again. We'll be able to rebuild a society and start feeling safe again. But the ones that are left to do that are going to be the ones who can live through the next year or so. In order to live through the next year, we have to be strong enough and smart enough to keep ourselves alive in a world that wants us dead."

              "And how do we do that?" Jack wanted to know.

              "It's simple," Skip said. "Food is life. We have to find a way to keep eating even though there is no more food being grown or produced. As you can see from the little stock you found in that trailer, there is food in cans to be had. The trick will be finding it and keeping others from taking it away from us."

              "And how are we going to do that?" Jack asked next.

              Skip offered him a cynical smile. "As soon as I figure that out," he said. "You'll be the first to know."

              They continued to work their way northward throughout the rest of the day, stopping every hour or so to rest and regain their strength. They saw no one although several times they came across the remains of tents, trailers, and SUVs. In each case they made a search for usable supplies and in each case they found someone had been there before them, stripping away anything that was even remotely useful. These findings served to confirm Skip's belief that there were other survivors all around them.