They’d assigned her to watch the mountainside on the upper-north boundary of the Homestead. Every few minutes, she scanned the mountainside with her binoculars, looking for trespassers. She couldn’t put her tunes on because she had been ordered to listen for anyone sneaking up behind her, as though that was ever going to happen. She hadn’t seen a soul trespassing after many hours on duty.
The edges of the Homestead were pocked with dank, little spider hole look-outs like the one she sat in now. At the onset of the collapse, before Emily made it home from med school, someone had dug these hidey-holes where two people could sit, spying for trespassers. She was assigned to “Position Eight North.” Someone had nailed a little sign on the lip of the six-by-six redwood shelf below the observation slit. The sign must have been there in case a guard forgot where he was. Since all the positions looked exactly the same, and since the guards were in the process of slowly going bonkers with boredom, such a precaution seemed sensible to Emily.
Would anyone ever make a French macaroon again? Emily loved Paris. She had visited many times with her parents, basking in the precious neighborhoods of Montmartre and Saint-Germain-des-Prés.
Emily shared Position Eight North with Don something-or-another. She didn’t know who decided it was a good idea to stick her in a dirt box with a guy as old as her dad. They couldn’t talk; that was also part of the rules, so the old man became a piece of background furniture to her, like the binoculars on the tripod or the shelf full of Meals Ready to Eat stacked in the corner.
Right now, Don something-or-another snoozed in a camp chair against the dirt wall of the spider hole, his mouth gaping open. They alternated resting and scanning every thirty minutes for six endless hours until their shift change showed up. Their replacements would silently creep in the trenched backdoor of the hole, buried into the forest. The idea was to make it difficult for anyone to spot their location or observe the change of guard.
Emily holstered her handgun, worried that Don Sleepyhead would crack an eye and see her looking down her gun barrel. It might freak him out.
Amidst the boredom, Emily’s mind wandered to her friends. By her reckoning, every one of her friends right now must be living in terror. Either back east at Johns Hopkins or in Salt Lake City, every person she cared about outside her family must be facing a gut-wrenching doom. Most of her friends probably wouldn’t have begun to starve yet, but some would likely be hungry. More frightening, perhaps, would be the growing knowledge that their dreams for the future had, with the drop of a couple of bombs and the flip of a stock market, turned to ash.
Why go on living in a world without a future?
Emily didn’t consider herself the typical millennial. She’d listened to her dad carp on millennials for years—the same carping old men had done about young adults for eons of time. She begrudgingly admitted, though, that she and her peers had a problem with entitlement. They had grown up in a world that granted their every wish. They had felt loved and supported, winning shelves of participation trophies, and rarely experiencing the sting of their own failures.
The new future, the one that loomed, demanded more work, more effort, and certainly more risk of failure than the world before. To say that this world demanded “more” effort was a gross understatement. If this Apocalypse stuck, millennials would be living in an alien environment, a world where they would die if they didn’t take care of their own needs.
Like stock markets and housing markets had for centuries, the self-esteem market would also experience a correction. Emily could feel it happening at the Homestead itself; people were judged and esteemed based on the value they created. Nothing more; nothing less.
Something about this new world scared Emily to death. And it excited her. She knew that she had always been an obsessive-compulsive value creator—a high achiever. After all, she had clawed her way into a top ten college for her undergrad degree and she had clawed her way into a top ten med school. Among entitled millennials, she stood out.
None of her friends had been prepared for a world gone mad. They hadn’t run marathons like Emily, hardening their bodies and their minds. They hadn’t shadowed dozens of surgeries to prepare for med school. They hadn’t backpacked miles and miles in the backcountry, living out of their packs and summiting mountains. And they hadn’t gone to combat shooting schools to learn the oily charms of the AR-15 rifle.
Emily had hung around Zach and the Ham Shack enough to know that the last couple of days had been brutal on the eastern seaboard. Even if her friends made it back to their hometowns, spread across the east and the south of the U.S., those populations were turning on themselves, going savage within mere days of the stock market crash.
The big cities had reverted to barbarism with rampant murder, rape and looting. Emily felt certain that her friends from the big cities―Atlanta, D.C., New York and Philly―had made it out to their summer homes and family farms in the countryside. But the shortwave radio told of masses of desperate people flooding into rural areas, devouring everything in their path.
Emily’s mind recalled pictures from the space station, where the city lights of the U.S. looked so beautiful, so festive from two-hundred-fifty miles in the sky. She remembered how the lights in the western U.S. spread apart, like a gauzy spider web. Back east, though, the lights crammed together, clumping into a solid blot of population, brighter and denser around the big cities and filling in almost every millimeter except for the Appalachian Mountains and a small spot over Maine. From the Mississippi River to the shores of the Atlantic, Americans lived tightly packed.
Emily feared, if things kept devolving from order to chaos, Americans would die tightly packed as well. They were probably dying already. She wondered if any of her friends had died yet, and the thought sent a chill down her spine. She imagined Dotty, her vivacious roommate at Johns Hopkins, dead on the lawn of her parents’ summer home outside Baton Rouge. The terrifying thought made her reach for the reassuring heft of her Glock, as though the gun could put distance between herself and horror.
The news from Europe, when it skipped across the ionosphere and fluttered down upon the huge antennas of the Homestead, could not be imagined. The horrors were too great. Europe had imploded into a charnel house. With the stutter-step of world markets, and the twin blasts of nuclear bombs, hard-core Muslims had gone berserk, overtaking helpless populations of city dwellers. All major cities in Western Europe were being overrun. Reports from Europe claimed that people were eating people. ISIS rose as the only surviving organization once government power vanished. Religious organizations in Europe had dissipated over the last twenty years, all except for Islam. Now that a social gap appeared where any organized group had tremendous leverage, Islam became a powerhouse. ISIS was the organizational arm of Islam, and ISIS had been sitting on a plan for this moment for decades.
Emily couldn’t accept the injustice. Europe had been so accommodating, so kind to Islamic refugees. Without exception, she and her friends considered Europe the front line of compassion, social welfare and forward thinking. But Europe had been the first to be consumed by savagery. How could that be?
Emily shuddered and pushed the thoughts away. She pulled up her binoculars and began her scan of the dips and rises of the mountainside facing Position Eight North.
Scan left to right. Bump down five degrees. Scan right to left. Bump down five degrees. Scan left to right.
She settled into a rhythm. Thoughts of death and horror receded into her subconscious, gathering into a dark cloud that had no intention of abating.