By the time Rachel returned, whorls of flame were fanning out from the center of the explosion, smoke boiling up into the turbid air until the wind caught it, whipped it seaward. The crackle became a roar, and within minutes the back wall of the church shimmered with flames.
Rachel nodded, her eyes closing. “Ashes to ashes…”
Mary Hope stared into the flames, mesmerized by their shapes. Like the waters of a stream flowing over boulders, they too flowed, always the same and never the same, giving form to processes. Ashes to ashes. Yes, it was fitting; fire was fitting as an end.
Rachel knelt by the stove and put a piece of wood on the fire as if it were an offering. Mary blinked. She wasn’t looking into the flames of the church. The cast-iron Franklin stove. The basement. The cave.
She pulled the blanket around her, hands clenched in the rough wool. Her face was hot; the cold crept up her back. She felt the shift of the big, round hassock as Rachel sat down beside her. Rachel said nothing, and the weight of her silence drew Mary’s eyes to her face. The fire gave it a glow of color that was illusory. The truth was in her eyes, where there was no light except the reflected glint of fire.
Mary turned away, watched the currents of the flames, felt the cold outside scratching at the windows. It infiltrated the earth and the walls of this cave, and only the fire kept it at bay. But the cold was patient; as patient as death.
Yet it wasn’t cold that killed the people at the church. It was something hovering at the edge of life as it was defined: a virus, invisible as the cold and equally deadly.
Had anyone at the Federal Emergency Management Agency taken that invisible factor into their calculations when they considered the survivability of a nuclear exchange?
Mary gazed into the fire, and she had a vision of the heart of this continent: the vast plains where the wind swept unimpeded out of the Arctic. She saw the bombed cities, black cankers of ruin, and she saw the cities, towns, and villages that had not been struck by that terrible, swift lightning. How many were within the fallout plumes? That factor had been calculated. She remembered the maps FEMA had published. On those maps most of the eastern third of the country, from the Mississippi to the Atlantic, was blackened by overlapping plumes. How long does it take to die of radiation poisoning? She remembered the columns of figures expressing that horror statistically. That factor FEMA had calculated to the last decimal point. By now it was over for most of the people in the black plumes.
But in the heart of this continent there was a town that was in the white of the map. A town where tens of thousands of people had survived the war. But how would they survive the invisible armies of disease? Had FEMA calculated that?
There was a hospital in this town. No lights in its windows now, no electricity to run the miraculous machines, no fuel for the auxiliary generators, no medications after the first onslaught of sick and injured. And there never had been a medication that would cure Lassa.
And had FEMA calculated the factor of anarchy, of madness: the madness unleashed out of terror and despair, as explosive and as destructive as the bombs? Would that small plains town, untouched by the bombs, still be a burned-out ruin? Yes, she could see the blighted blocks of rubble. Not all of the town had burned. No. There had been a war in its streets, and someone had won. Road gangs, Klan, NRA, American Legion, National Guard, Army, Apies—the lines were vague now. And who would maintain law and order when all that weighed in the scales of justice was survival?
She saw the town under a dusky, frigid sky, desolately isolated. The communication system that had been the warp and woof of this nation had succumbed to EMP. Electromagnetic pulse, the nemesis FEMA had tried to deny as it had nuclear winter. A few radios were working. They buzzed with static and pleas for help.
No one in this town could answer those pleas. Burned buildings marked out the grid of vacant streets. No vehicles moved, no one walked in those streets, nothing lived in any of the places where people had gathered to seek help and comfort.
There were still some survivors crouching in storm cellars or basements. They had survived cold, disease, and anarchy. But they would not survive hunger—not when the last of their stored or scavenged food was gone, when they looked out of their caves and saw nothing but snow and ice for a thousand miles in every direction.
And Mary saw this town replicated ten-thousandfold around the world. A world enshrouded in death.
No. Perhaps not an entire world. The southern hemisphere might be spared some of the devastation. But no southern nation would survive without catastrophic disruptions in their climate, their food and energy supply systems, their economic and social structures. And would they survive Lassa? Mary remembered a newscaster coolly reporting at least a week before the End that two million people had died of Lassa in Australia and five million in South Africa.
I guess we deserved it. We treated this lovely planet so negligently, we treated each other so cruelly.
We deserved it.
“No, we didn’t deserve it. There were billions of people who never did anything in their lives to deserve what happened to them.”
Rachel’s words roused Mary, bewildered her because she didn’t realize she’d said anything aloud. She wondered how much of what she’d been thinking she had spoken. She said nothing more now.
Rachel sat hunched in her down jacket, hands spread in front of her to catch the heat. Shadow nuzzled her knee for reassurance, but she had none to offer. She said, “We’ll have to move one of the wood stoves into the garage, or we’ll lose all the rabbits and chickens.”
Mary closed her eyes, and she was surprised that the first sound to emerge from her mouth was an approximation of a laugh.
“Of course, we’re going to lose them, Rachel. Sooner or later we’re going to lose…” Everything. We’re going to lose us. Sooner or later.
The wind, the voice of the cold, echoed its dirge in the chimney. Eventually Rachel spoke again.
“Strange, isn’t it? I left for Shiloh this morning with very little hope. I came home with very little hope. You left with a great deal of hope and came home with none.”
Mary pressed her hands to her eyes, and for a moment she couldn’t get enough breath.
“Why? Why should I still have any hope? Hope for what? This is what they call nuclear winter, the winter of our ultimate discontent. The last winter because it will never end! This is—so why… why…?”
I want to cry, she thought as the words poured out like sand from a rusted cup. I want to cry, but I can’t even do that. Dry. All dried up and shriveled inside, dead already. Brain dead. Soul dead.
Rachel was watching her. Mary could feel that, but she stared into the fire, and at this moment she felt detached from herself, from Rachel. She looked down, as if from a distance, on the two of them in a beleaguered island of warmth and light in the chill darkness. And Rachel said, “I’ve been thinking about what separates homo sapiens from its animal cousins.”
Mary didn’t attempt a response to that. She listened from far away to the sounds of the words.
Rachel said, “I’ve been told that animals can’t imagine. Yet they dream. Isn’t a dream imaginary? I’ve been told that animals can’t imagine their own deaths, so they don’t dread death. It’s easier to believe that, I suppose, if you have to kill animals. Or if you take pleasure in killing them. But if that were true, the gazelle would just stand quietly while the lion breaks its neck. No, when it comes to death, what separates us from our cousins isn’t the capacity to imagine and dread it. The difference is choice.”