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7~Seven~7
Turnabout
In those fleeting moments when the day finds itself overrun by night, trampled to dusk by the relentless cycles of twilight, Justin thought that a person might find themselves with cause to recall a small pleasantry that set the day apart, something simple, yet priceless that made the day seem more than ordinary. A lover’s gentle morning kiss or a surprise visit from an old friend came to mind. Perhaps a long-ago fireside evening spent in the company of loved ones…
Sometimes the little things could make a bad day seem good. Or at least not as bad.
But such was not the case with him this evening. Can I get a Amem? he thought bitterly. He was standing at the foot of the cliff walls in Hanging Rock Canyon some forty miles northeast of Vault 13, shivering; flipping stones flecked with crimson at a broad alluvial fan and staring miserably at a cloud, drifting slowly across the western horizon. Its fleece-white outline was filled with the last fires of sunset, and never had he felt so cold…so alone, watching scarlet hues dissolve into rich purples, then to deep cobalt, as he picked up the bloodstained towel by his pitiful fire.
He was whipped, and even the ground felt cold as he lowered himself down, dreading the approach of night and the stream of recollections that was sure to come with it. He dabbed the towel against his raw fingertips, grimacing…and wishing he were somewhere else.
He was two days on his own now, and killing himself quite nicely on this switchbacking, son of a bitch of a road that Herm had endorsed – the same shoddy trail that your bouncing, brainless head nodded its approval of, Justin reminded himself for the umpteenth time. See how it cuts up and through the northern end of the park? Herm had pointed out. I’d imagine that was why some people called it Death Valley Road…
“No shit, Herm,” Justin mumbled. What a mistake that had been. But hey, no problem…he was sure he could add it to the list. He tossed the towel into the fire, hearing it sizzle wetly as ever so gently, he pulled a clean one from the pack. He looked at his poor fingers…and instead he saw mound after mound of uncleared rockslides, blocking what seemed like every bend in this road. And he had, since leaving the Vault, decided that the “Death” part of the nickname fit all too well.
He found this to be of little consolation…and wondered what the hell it was he had been thinking when he agreed to come this way. The parks system had suffered even before the war, after much of their funding was slashed during the fed’s hack-and-salvage budget cuts of the day. While still in use by those who could afford gasoline, the parks had been in a state of disarray when the war canceled everyone’s passes, and then left a vastly rearranged terrain as part of its cinematic wake.
Justin shook his head, disgusted with himself. He could have shot up 168 and then over on 266 with no problem, and avoided these headaches. There were more cities and towns up that way, and he hadn’t seen a living person yet. Not one – that alone was reason enough. He could have taken that route and should have, but it was too late to change it. He was committed to this snakepit of a road, and all of what he should have considered had been brought home in painful fashion, when he scrambled onto the first major slide, a mini-mountain cave in dumped over two lanes of heaved asphalt west of Joshua Flats.
Refugee from Big Pine, he had thought, and then hurriedly pushed the thought away, hoping as he navigated the slide that the stone and sediment had settled. But no such luck – the footing wanted to be evil and had been. The rock ledges were dangerously loose and unstable, constantly shifting underfoot, inviting him to slip and break a leg, or freefall into an adjacent canyon. As neither was terribly appealing, he had slowed his pace and finally cleared the stone behemoth, wringing wet from exertion, and trembling from the nerve-wracking ordeal…only to find himself welcomed by an even larger blockade less than a quarter-mile later.
And one after that…and another...and another.
The routine had been the same, separated only by changing light. And he was sick of it. Day or night, it was aggravating as hell; digging frantically at boulders after sunup, dodging irate Panamint rattlers, panting like a dog, while the sun pounded him unmercifully. And then freezing at 10,000 feet when the night closed in, when the visions of a shattered namesake town clung tighter to his memory than his grip on the rocks.
Big Pine was five blocks of powdery skeletons that would not let go of him – it was a desecrated cemetery with no headstones or crosses. Justin thought it was full of unburied Jamisons and wished he had never gone there. But he had…and had left under the tight winding-sheet of Death, his head reeling, staggered by the enormity of how it all had ended with such shocking suddenness.
He had groped with it, tried to come to terms it. And couldn’t. It was too huge, like trying to swallow a doorknob. Dying was a part of living, and this he knew well. But the dying he knew had come in twos, and there had been countless people inside every spinning disk and every rolling tape…countless people left behind, left off the manifests…left off the old sheets of flimsy. He knew the toll…he knew the numbers…but it was all just plastic and paper…and that had separated him from the awful truth of it.
Not anymore, he thought, flipping the towel away. The truth was visible now: it was in the ashes of the people in Big Pine. They had fled there after the troops drove them away from the Vault. It was nearby, and they had gone there in desperate, horrified waves, seeking refuge at first, then praying at the last in a tourist hole where they had died by the thousands.
And that was only one isolated town out of thousands across the land. He was remembering the heat of this afternoon, how it bore down on him when he stopped and looked across Eureka Valley. The great cities and metropolitan areas, the icons of the other time, lay somewhere south along the Pacific coast, and he had stood under the sun, staring at miles of buttes and sand dunes, trying to convince himself that Santa Barbara and Los Angeles and San Diego were still there…and knowing better. Sprawling cities and their dense populations would have been the preferred missile targets. They would have been high on the aimpoint list, and if the untargeted towns couldn’t survive the blast effects, then what chance would a primary target have?
“Not much,” Justin said miserably. The bombs fell, then God himself called it quits. Sorry chil’uns, but you’re on your own. He thought that much was true. What a christless mess he’d jettisoned himself into. He could gawk at blank valleys and wonder about the living in other cities, but here there was nowhere to hide, no escaping the reality of it – it fell on him in Big Pine, a crushing, almost suffocating sense of finality that books had never revealed, that holotapes had never shown – that none of it could begin to approach. Trying to describe it to himself, trying to cram it into his head and make it fit, was like trying to describe the indescribable. No words seemed suitable, nothing seemed to fit. It had happened so unbelievably fast, as if every fragment of the town had, when the flash descended, been frozen, caught in a blistering snapshot, entombed in itself as all life was instantly drawn from it, then left dead for all time, yet somehow alive.
He had envisioned that day as he walked solemnly down 395. Main St. they had called, this sea of grinning specters he saw along the lifeless avenues. And they were everywhere…behind the starred and broken windows of the crumbled restaurants and steakhouses, draped across shattered plates on peeled countertops, curled up on filthy floors, propped up in dry-rotted booths…so many tarnished crucifixes and melted rosary beads, clutched by so many skeletal fingers…waiting for all eternity for a safe haven they would never see.
They were piled on the streets, bones wiped clean, as he crossed the bridge at the center of town. They were stacked like driftwood in the dry streambed south of Dewey St., their shiny skulls stuffed full of sand. They were in flattened motels and resort cottages, their ashen lobbies vacant but for bony hands and toothy smirks in the rubble.
On and on it went…through the charred scraps of paper, wind-blown and brittle, darting past worthless mounds of trash and junk. On and on…to the intersection of Main and Walnut, where his nerve had faltered amid the disheveled row of automobiles, sitting wrecked and forsaken along buckled lines of curbing, some upright on vulcanized tires, others overturned…all of them rusting, skeletal hulks, half-buried in scratching drifts of sand.
He shifted miserably, reliving the day and damning the memory, as he saw the colossal accident farther south, at Blake St…four leveled blocks where busses, cars and trucks had piled up like melted jackstraws…windows blown out…door seams jammed shut as interiors exploded while the occupants were ravaged by a passing shard of thermal pulse. The war didn’t care what it ate, had come to him then, his stomach a rolling knot, as he spun away from the tragedy. He’d seen more than enough, and was on his way out…fast…when a flash in the wreckage caught his eye.
And there; below the crumpled door beams and galvanized flooring, was a tiny skeleton, stuffed into a corner of a rear deck in one of the bottom cars, its fragile bones gleaming obscenely, bleached white by the immortal sun.
Justin shivered, and edged closer to the fire. “The damn glass,” he whispered hoarsely to the darkness, his head bowed, eyes stinging, as again, he saw the sliver of deck glass, protruding from a hopelessly blank eye socket.
He loved how kids saw everything in black or white: no mucking around in muddy shades of gray. No, sir. They were untainted versions of adults, mini-people, bouncing and crawling, toddling then walking and running in wide-eyed wonder, every day a fresh and exciting adventure, as they grew and learned. Children were light and hope. There was magic in youth, and he had stood there for a very long time, watching a tiny part of show’s end while the sun beat down, unable to tear his gaze from a single forlorn infant that seemed so denied, remembering lions and the lambs led to slaughter, knowing how their cages had opened, and still wondering why, as the glass winked indifferently at him.
Too much of what he didn’t want to know was answered there. He had explored nothing else since.
Was it any wonder why the all-clear had never sounded? He didn’t think so, not anymore, as he rubbed his eyes and laid next to the fire. The world had been blown inside out and then turned upside down. Shake, stir and then pour out a powder-dry refuse heap he’d mortgaged his hopes on. The Big “Q”. How da ya like the answers? He thought mockingly.
He didn’t, but this is what he’d bargained for. He’d asked for what he got, for what he now had, and he now had to find a way to get through it. He had told himself that these would be the common sights. He had told himself that he had better get used to it. He had told himself until he was blue in the face, but it seemed that no amount of mental padding could soften the blows from a purposeless devastation that had laid claim to almost everything. In all he had experienced before, this was beyond his reach; just too much to grasp all at once. Even as living conditions in the Vault decayed, there was always that dash of familiarity within the people there, that reassuring sense of Life, no matter how mundane or hectic it was.
Then he had walked out, braced and ready, or so he thought – and then slammed face first into what he couldn’t conceive.
It was a 180° turnabout, but fantasy and reality had collided, and the wreckage was all too sobering. He thought that culture shock – or just plain shock – would best describe his overall condition. It seemed ironic how only days earlier he had been a closet advocate of restoration, secretly sure of it, and of himself, babbling on about rejuvenated societies that were nowhere, anywhere, in view. But that was yards of safe PermaSteel ago. Talking about the outside world had been one thing – living in it was an entirely different matter. The barrenness he had seen was total, a parched, lunar scape, reaching unbroken in all directions, more vast than his worst thoughts had ever imagined. There was no end to it…or to the unshakable feeling of permanence within it, a gripping doom sense that chafed him much worse than the blowing sand.
Now a part of him wondered if he was the only person out here. The sense wouldn’t leave…and laying here, shivering, as the embers burned low, surrounded by this unrelenting, barren expanse, he could feel the first stirrings of real urgency. Vault 13 needed a chip and he needed another way, but that was the two loneliest, coldest nights he had ever spent ago, and now he needed something more.
He needed another Vault – Vault 15. Quickly – like now. He wanted badly to make contact with it, just to know it was there – just to know that people were there. He could almost hear the grind of the door opening, and wasn’t surprised to find himself missing the reassuring sound of voices other than his own.
But he knew he was a long way from being there, and that basically sucked. The caverns rats had been his only encounter on this trek through never-again land. He was happy about it, but felt stuck in the middle of this dreadfully pocked nothingness, and desperately wanted out. It had been slow going to this point, and having to hoof it over some of the highest peaks in the former 49er state hadn’t helped his progress – or his mood. The quiet was so damned unnerving, but he was closing in on Nevada, and with the nosebleed elevations finally at his back, he felt that the worst of the slides should be behind him, and that he should be able to make better time.
Hopefully so, he thought, then a cavernous, sleepy yawn escaped him. Had he ever felt fatigue like this before, the bone-aching kind that never quite left? He propped himself against the pack and decided that his workouts were never like this – the days of tanning berths and two minute micro-showers were in the sweet by-and-by for a while. All of it was. Everything around him had changed – now his life was as upside down as those who had come before him.
The only difference was, he was here. A little frazzled around the edges and a lot disillusioned, but still here. And why are you here? He thought, rolling onto his back, the voices of a distant home coming to him, while the stillness of solitude hung on him like a ill-fitting cloak. Why are you here, he asked himself again. The question lingered, and he felt it important to find some shred of an answer. It seemed that most of those answers lay in a place of the living, forty desolate miles west of him. There were cordwood stacks of bones up the road who had never known what he knew, never had what he had. The wheel spun, then the numbers were drawn in another time. The bones lost out, but he ended up winning after somebody plucked his great-grandparents’ numbers off the stack. Enter the Vault and live on, or be turned away and die.
It really was like some crazed raffle. Life itself had become the grand prize, and he hadn’t seen anyone with a winning payoff. Except himself. He had thought himself as being alone before, until the contrast had been laid out for him in stark blacks and whites. Now he really was alone; he was on his own…and perhaps perspective really was aided by distance. He poked idly at the coals, stirring them…and thought as a golden shower of sparks flared overhead, that with what he had seen, there was no reason to feel that every facet of him wouldn’t be affected in some manner. How could he not be touched by this?
How could anyone not be touched by it?
Learning to adjust, if there was such a thing, would take some time, but all things considered, he decided he was doing okay. He checked his pack when he stopped for the day, and a month’s worth of replicated foods were at hand. He wasn’t starving – or foaming at the mouth – and his water supplies were holding up, albeit barely. A deck of cards would work well about now, but being alive beat that any day.
And tomorrow is another day, he thought, slipping closer to the fire, cheered by knowing that the sooner he was up and moving, the sooner he’d be on his way back. There was something good to be said for pep talks…and the little things. That was what he had to work with, and he thought it would keep him going for a while. Hugging himself tightly for warmth, he closed his eyes, and was wishing mightily for a coat, when he fell asleep…
And dreamed.
He could see it on the horizon. It was far away…but the air was warming, and the day was brighter.
And he knew it was coming for him…he knew what it would do, but he stood and watched it as another column appeared. And another. And another. And another…high and white…fleece-white in the distance.
Now the air was heavy with heat as a thousand suns burned to the east. It was closer but he was young and strong. It would not claim him. He would outlast it – they would outlast it together.
He knew they could. “Just one more step,” he told the town, as he began to walk. “I know the way”, he said, as the columns rose around them.
It was closer.
“You can do it!” he shouted at them. “Just be a little faster, that’s all!” But they would not move. They only cried and moaned, and called out a thousand wrong numbers. Someone spat the word “Thirteen” out like a pariah and then turned away.
And it was close, so much closer as he turned and ran through the static charged air. He would have to outlast it alone…then he raced it in long, determined strides, past the weeping faces in the restaurants, past the glistening crucifixes in the steakhouses. Tufts of earth flew at his sides, then a shrieking woman threw a Bible as he panted beneath the gathering nova, the spraying gravel and stone chips shining like mirrors, as his feet tore across the steaming ground…
Then the nova exploded, and he knew it was useless…he knew it was here.
He could feel the torture in his legs, the desperate, searing burn in his lungs as he faltered and slowed. He staggered down the street as it closed, and the curdling screams from resort cottages and motels were a winded blur in his ears, as he looked over his shoulder, hearing his own futile scream splitting superheated air as a blinding sky chased him down…
“Run!” he brayed. “Hide! Run! Ohhhh God!…RUUUUUN!…”
He stumbled…and it pounced on him, pinning him beneath its suffocating weight before it lashed down and boiled him to slag.
The fire…FIRE!…He was the fire, a spreading mass, engulfed by flames…crawling and dragging himself through a relentless inferno…hotter and higher…the screaming…they screamed as the buildings erupted in rocketing sheets of flame around bodies burned beyond recognition…lions and lambs he saw, laid before the altar of silver stars and dress blues…four-two-zero-niner…coordinates confirmed…it was a child! he wailed…the baby!…it was only a child…it was…
No no please no more! he sobbed and pleaded as he rose, begging on his blistering knees…arms thrust skyward, a breathing, blazing sacrifice, charred tongue tasting choking black soot in the flames, his bubbling skin peeling from his body, writhing and screaming as the world burned and he fell into a thick abattoir of baked blood and sand…hands flailing…clawing…his own dim light fading, as his blackening bones rode away on a thunderous wave…
Turnabout
In those fleeting moments when the day finds itself overrun by night, trampled to dusk by the relentless cycles of twilight, Justin thought that a person might find themselves with cause to recall a small pleasantry that set the day apart, something simple, yet priceless that made the day seem more than ordinary. A lover’s gentle morning kiss or a surprise visit from an old friend came to mind. Perhaps a long-ago fireside evening spent in the company of loved ones…
Sometimes the little things could make a bad day seem good. Or at least not as bad.
But such was not the case with him this evening. Can I get a Amem? he thought bitterly. He was standing at the foot of the cliff walls in Hanging Rock Canyon some forty miles northeast of Vault 13, shivering; flipping stones flecked with crimson at a broad alluvial fan and staring miserably at a cloud, drifting slowly across the western horizon. Its fleece-white outline was filled with the last fires of sunset, and never had he felt so cold…so alone, watching scarlet hues dissolve into rich purples, then to deep cobalt, as he picked up the bloodstained towel by his pitiful fire.
He was whipped, and even the ground felt cold as he lowered himself down, dreading the approach of night and the stream of recollections that was sure to come with it. He dabbed the towel against his raw fingertips, grimacing…and wishing he were somewhere else.
He was two days on his own now, and killing himself quite nicely on this switchbacking, son of a bitch of a road that Herm had endorsed – the same shoddy trail that your bouncing, brainless head nodded its approval of, Justin reminded himself for the umpteenth time. See how it cuts up and through the northern end of the park? Herm had pointed out. I’d imagine that was why some people called it Death Valley Road…
“No shit, Herm,” Justin mumbled. What a mistake that had been. But hey, no problem…he was sure he could add it to the list. He tossed the towel into the fire, hearing it sizzle wetly as ever so gently, he pulled a clean one from the pack. He looked at his poor fingers…and instead he saw mound after mound of uncleared rockslides, blocking what seemed like every bend in this road. And he had, since leaving the Vault, decided that the “Death” part of the nickname fit all too well.
He found this to be of little consolation…and wondered what the hell it was he had been thinking when he agreed to come this way. The parks system had suffered even before the war, after much of their funding was slashed during the fed’s hack-and-salvage budget cuts of the day. While still in use by those who could afford gasoline, the parks had been in a state of disarray when the war canceled everyone’s passes, and then left a vastly rearranged terrain as part of its cinematic wake.
Justin shook his head, disgusted with himself. He could have shot up 168 and then over on 266 with no problem, and avoided these headaches. There were more cities and towns up that way, and he hadn’t seen a living person yet. Not one – that alone was reason enough. He could have taken that route and should have, but it was too late to change it. He was committed to this snakepit of a road, and all of what he should have considered had been brought home in painful fashion, when he scrambled onto the first major slide, a mini-mountain cave in dumped over two lanes of heaved asphalt west of Joshua Flats.
Refugee from Big Pine, he had thought, and then hurriedly pushed the thought away, hoping as he navigated the slide that the stone and sediment had settled. But no such luck – the footing wanted to be evil and had been. The rock ledges were dangerously loose and unstable, constantly shifting underfoot, inviting him to slip and break a leg, or freefall into an adjacent canyon. As neither was terribly appealing, he had slowed his pace and finally cleared the stone behemoth, wringing wet from exertion, and trembling from the nerve-wracking ordeal…only to find himself welcomed by an even larger blockade less than a quarter-mile later.
And one after that…and another...and another.
The routine had been the same, separated only by changing light. And he was sick of it. Day or night, it was aggravating as hell; digging frantically at boulders after sunup, dodging irate Panamint rattlers, panting like a dog, while the sun pounded him unmercifully. And then freezing at 10,000 feet when the night closed in, when the visions of a shattered namesake town clung tighter to his memory than his grip on the rocks.
Big Pine was five blocks of powdery skeletons that would not let go of him – it was a desecrated cemetery with no headstones or crosses. Justin thought it was full of unburied Jamisons and wished he had never gone there. But he had…and had left under the tight winding-sheet of Death, his head reeling, staggered by the enormity of how it all had ended with such shocking suddenness.
He had groped with it, tried to come to terms it. And couldn’t. It was too huge, like trying to swallow a doorknob. Dying was a part of living, and this he knew well. But the dying he knew had come in twos, and there had been countless people inside every spinning disk and every rolling tape…countless people left behind, left off the manifests…left off the old sheets of flimsy. He knew the toll…he knew the numbers…but it was all just plastic and paper…and that had separated him from the awful truth of it.
Not anymore, he thought, flipping the towel away. The truth was visible now: it was in the ashes of the people in Big Pine. They had fled there after the troops drove them away from the Vault. It was nearby, and they had gone there in desperate, horrified waves, seeking refuge at first, then praying at the last in a tourist hole where they had died by the thousands.
And that was only one isolated town out of thousands across the land. He was remembering the heat of this afternoon, how it bore down on him when he stopped and looked across Eureka Valley. The great cities and metropolitan areas, the icons of the other time, lay somewhere south along the Pacific coast, and he had stood under the sun, staring at miles of buttes and sand dunes, trying to convince himself that Santa Barbara and Los Angeles and San Diego were still there…and knowing better. Sprawling cities and their dense populations would have been the preferred missile targets. They would have been high on the aimpoint list, and if the untargeted towns couldn’t survive the blast effects, then what chance would a primary target have?
“Not much,” Justin said miserably. The bombs fell, then God himself called it quits. Sorry chil’uns, but you’re on your own. He thought that much was true. What a christless mess he’d jettisoned himself into. He could gawk at blank valleys and wonder about the living in other cities, but here there was nowhere to hide, no escaping the reality of it – it fell on him in Big Pine, a crushing, almost suffocating sense of finality that books had never revealed, that holotapes had never shown – that none of it could begin to approach. Trying to describe it to himself, trying to cram it into his head and make it fit, was like trying to describe the indescribable. No words seemed suitable, nothing seemed to fit. It had happened so unbelievably fast, as if every fragment of the town had, when the flash descended, been frozen, caught in a blistering snapshot, entombed in itself as all life was instantly drawn from it, then left dead for all time, yet somehow alive.
He had envisioned that day as he walked solemnly down 395. Main St. they had called, this sea of grinning specters he saw along the lifeless avenues. And they were everywhere…behind the starred and broken windows of the crumbled restaurants and steakhouses, draped across shattered plates on peeled countertops, curled up on filthy floors, propped up in dry-rotted booths…so many tarnished crucifixes and melted rosary beads, clutched by so many skeletal fingers…waiting for all eternity for a safe haven they would never see.
They were piled on the streets, bones wiped clean, as he crossed the bridge at the center of town. They were stacked like driftwood in the dry streambed south of Dewey St., their shiny skulls stuffed full of sand. They were in flattened motels and resort cottages, their ashen lobbies vacant but for bony hands and toothy smirks in the rubble.
On and on it went…through the charred scraps of paper, wind-blown and brittle, darting past worthless mounds of trash and junk. On and on…to the intersection of Main and Walnut, where his nerve had faltered amid the disheveled row of automobiles, sitting wrecked and forsaken along buckled lines of curbing, some upright on vulcanized tires, others overturned…all of them rusting, skeletal hulks, half-buried in scratching drifts of sand.
He shifted miserably, reliving the day and damning the memory, as he saw the colossal accident farther south, at Blake St…four leveled blocks where busses, cars and trucks had piled up like melted jackstraws…windows blown out…door seams jammed shut as interiors exploded while the occupants were ravaged by a passing shard of thermal pulse. The war didn’t care what it ate, had come to him then, his stomach a rolling knot, as he spun away from the tragedy. He’d seen more than enough, and was on his way out…fast…when a flash in the wreckage caught his eye.
And there; below the crumpled door beams and galvanized flooring, was a tiny skeleton, stuffed into a corner of a rear deck in one of the bottom cars, its fragile bones gleaming obscenely, bleached white by the immortal sun.
Justin shivered, and edged closer to the fire. “The damn glass,” he whispered hoarsely to the darkness, his head bowed, eyes stinging, as again, he saw the sliver of deck glass, protruding from a hopelessly blank eye socket.
He loved how kids saw everything in black or white: no mucking around in muddy shades of gray. No, sir. They were untainted versions of adults, mini-people, bouncing and crawling, toddling then walking and running in wide-eyed wonder, every day a fresh and exciting adventure, as they grew and learned. Children were light and hope. There was magic in youth, and he had stood there for a very long time, watching a tiny part of show’s end while the sun beat down, unable to tear his gaze from a single forlorn infant that seemed so denied, remembering lions and the lambs led to slaughter, knowing how their cages had opened, and still wondering why, as the glass winked indifferently at him.
Too much of what he didn’t want to know was answered there. He had explored nothing else since.
Was it any wonder why the all-clear had never sounded? He didn’t think so, not anymore, as he rubbed his eyes and laid next to the fire. The world had been blown inside out and then turned upside down. Shake, stir and then pour out a powder-dry refuse heap he’d mortgaged his hopes on. The Big “Q”. How da ya like the answers? He thought mockingly.
He didn’t, but this is what he’d bargained for. He’d asked for what he got, for what he now had, and he now had to find a way to get through it. He had told himself that these would be the common sights. He had told himself that he had better get used to it. He had told himself until he was blue in the face, but it seemed that no amount of mental padding could soften the blows from a purposeless devastation that had laid claim to almost everything. In all he had experienced before, this was beyond his reach; just too much to grasp all at once. Even as living conditions in the Vault decayed, there was always that dash of familiarity within the people there, that reassuring sense of Life, no matter how mundane or hectic it was.
Then he had walked out, braced and ready, or so he thought – and then slammed face first into what he couldn’t conceive.
It was a 180° turnabout, but fantasy and reality had collided, and the wreckage was all too sobering. He thought that culture shock – or just plain shock – would best describe his overall condition. It seemed ironic how only days earlier he had been a closet advocate of restoration, secretly sure of it, and of himself, babbling on about rejuvenated societies that were nowhere, anywhere, in view. But that was yards of safe PermaSteel ago. Talking about the outside world had been one thing – living in it was an entirely different matter. The barrenness he had seen was total, a parched, lunar scape, reaching unbroken in all directions, more vast than his worst thoughts had ever imagined. There was no end to it…or to the unshakable feeling of permanence within it, a gripping doom sense that chafed him much worse than the blowing sand.
Now a part of him wondered if he was the only person out here. The sense wouldn’t leave…and laying here, shivering, as the embers burned low, surrounded by this unrelenting, barren expanse, he could feel the first stirrings of real urgency. Vault 13 needed a chip and he needed another way, but that was the two loneliest, coldest nights he had ever spent ago, and now he needed something more.
He needed another Vault – Vault 15. Quickly – like now. He wanted badly to make contact with it, just to know it was there – just to know that people were there. He could almost hear the grind of the door opening, and wasn’t surprised to find himself missing the reassuring sound of voices other than his own.
But he knew he was a long way from being there, and that basically sucked. The caverns rats had been his only encounter on this trek through never-again land. He was happy about it, but felt stuck in the middle of this dreadfully pocked nothingness, and desperately wanted out. It had been slow going to this point, and having to hoof it over some of the highest peaks in the former 49er state hadn’t helped his progress – or his mood. The quiet was so damned unnerving, but he was closing in on Nevada, and with the nosebleed elevations finally at his back, he felt that the worst of the slides should be behind him, and that he should be able to make better time.
Hopefully so, he thought, then a cavernous, sleepy yawn escaped him. Had he ever felt fatigue like this before, the bone-aching kind that never quite left? He propped himself against the pack and decided that his workouts were never like this – the days of tanning berths and two minute micro-showers were in the sweet by-and-by for a while. All of it was. Everything around him had changed – now his life was as upside down as those who had come before him.
The only difference was, he was here. A little frazzled around the edges and a lot disillusioned, but still here. And why are you here? He thought, rolling onto his back, the voices of a distant home coming to him, while the stillness of solitude hung on him like a ill-fitting cloak. Why are you here, he asked himself again. The question lingered, and he felt it important to find some shred of an answer. It seemed that most of those answers lay in a place of the living, forty desolate miles west of him. There were cordwood stacks of bones up the road who had never known what he knew, never had what he had. The wheel spun, then the numbers were drawn in another time. The bones lost out, but he ended up winning after somebody plucked his great-grandparents’ numbers off the stack. Enter the Vault and live on, or be turned away and die.
It really was like some crazed raffle. Life itself had become the grand prize, and he hadn’t seen anyone with a winning payoff. Except himself. He had thought himself as being alone before, until the contrast had been laid out for him in stark blacks and whites. Now he really was alone; he was on his own…and perhaps perspective really was aided by distance. He poked idly at the coals, stirring them…and thought as a golden shower of sparks flared overhead, that with what he had seen, there was no reason to feel that every facet of him wouldn’t be affected in some manner. How could he not be touched by this?
How could anyone not be touched by it?
Learning to adjust, if there was such a thing, would take some time, but all things considered, he decided he was doing okay. He checked his pack when he stopped for the day, and a month’s worth of replicated foods were at hand. He wasn’t starving – or foaming at the mouth – and his water supplies were holding up, albeit barely. A deck of cards would work well about now, but being alive beat that any day.
And tomorrow is another day, he thought, slipping closer to the fire, cheered by knowing that the sooner he was up and moving, the sooner he’d be on his way back. There was something good to be said for pep talks…and the little things. That was what he had to work with, and he thought it would keep him going for a while. Hugging himself tightly for warmth, he closed his eyes, and was wishing mightily for a coat, when he fell asleep…
And dreamed.
He could see it on the horizon. It was far away…but the air was warming, and the day was brighter.
And he knew it was coming for him…he knew what it would do, but he stood and watched it as another column appeared. And another. And another. And another…high and white…fleece-white in the distance.
Now the air was heavy with heat as a thousand suns burned to the east. It was closer but he was young and strong. It would not claim him. He would outlast it – they would outlast it together.
He knew they could. “Just one more step,” he told the town, as he began to walk. “I know the way”, he said, as the columns rose around them.
It was closer.
“You can do it!” he shouted at them. “Just be a little faster, that’s all!” But they would not move. They only cried and moaned, and called out a thousand wrong numbers. Someone spat the word “Thirteen” out like a pariah and then turned away.
And it was close, so much closer as he turned and ran through the static charged air. He would have to outlast it alone…then he raced it in long, determined strides, past the weeping faces in the restaurants, past the glistening crucifixes in the steakhouses. Tufts of earth flew at his sides, then a shrieking woman threw a Bible as he panted beneath the gathering nova, the spraying gravel and stone chips shining like mirrors, as his feet tore across the steaming ground…
Then the nova exploded, and he knew it was useless…he knew it was here.
He could feel the torture in his legs, the desperate, searing burn in his lungs as he faltered and slowed. He staggered down the street as it closed, and the curdling screams from resort cottages and motels were a winded blur in his ears, as he looked over his shoulder, hearing his own futile scream splitting superheated air as a blinding sky chased him down…
“Run!” he brayed. “Hide! Run! Ohhhh God!…RUUUUUN!…”
He stumbled…and it pounced on him, pinning him beneath its suffocating weight before it lashed down and boiled him to slag.
The fire…FIRE!…He was the fire, a spreading mass, engulfed by flames…crawling and dragging himself through a relentless inferno…hotter and higher…the screaming…they screamed as the buildings erupted in rocketing sheets of flame around bodies burned beyond recognition…lions and lambs he saw, laid before the altar of silver stars and dress blues…four-two-zero-niner…coordinates confirmed…it was a child! he wailed…the baby!…it was only a child…it was…
No no please no more! he sobbed and pleaded as he rose, begging on his blistering knees…arms thrust skyward, a breathing, blazing sacrifice, charred tongue tasting choking black soot in the flames, his bubbling skin peeling from his body, writhing and screaming as the world burned and he fell into a thick abattoir of baked blood and sand…hands flailing…clawing…his own dim light fading, as his blackening bones rode away on a thunderous wave…