The others were gathered around the vehicles as Danny and I approached. My daughter, Hayley, had turned eighteen a couple weeks ago and was holding the new compound bow she’d received a few days ago from my parents. She had an arm around Mom—Grandma Ollie—next to Dad’s black pickup. That girl and her bows. She’d been Katniss Everdeen for Halloween in both fifth and sixth grade, and been in competitive archery since then. I used to spend hours tossing empty cans in our backyard while she practiced shooting them out of the air. She was surprisingly more accurate with moving objects. Incredible hand-eye coordination. I shook my head and smiled. Another gift from Sophie.
Cameron, Kate, and Jenna were chatting on the back tailgate of Cameron’s pickup. Kate hopped down and approached us, “You two good?”
I nodded and walked past, gently patting her shoulder. Danny stopped to talk to her. She looped her arm through his. “Yeah,” he said as I walked away. “I think he’ll be all right.” He paused. “He hasn’t left the cabin since we buried her. Never for more than a day or two at least.”
“I know.” She replied. Kate cleared her throat. “Danny…”
“Yeah?” He started leading her towards the rest of us.
“I don’t understand why we have to leave,” she whispered, looking up at him. “Can’t we at least go home and see if anyone survived? Mom could be…”
“Kate.” He stopped walking and turned to face her. “There’s no way. It’s just not safe.” He looked into her sad brown eyes. “I’m sorry. But we can’t. Your mom wouldn’t want you to come back. Not now. If it’s like this all the way up here in Ely, imagine how it’d be around Rochester.”
Danny was right, of course. We’d all heard the radio message. It clearly said there was nothing left. Some sort of mass chemical attack had decimated the American population. It was too surreal for any of us to fully grasp. But from what we’d seen the day before, we knew it wasn’t a hoax. This was dead serious.
We’d all gone, unsuspecting, into the small northern Minnesota town of Ely for ice cream at The Frozen Moose. We were intending to celebrate a number of things: Sophie’s fortieth birthday, Danny and Cameron qualifying for the Marines’ Scout Sniper Squad, and Hayley’s runner-up finish in the State Archery Championship. It was a festive mood, which quickly soured to horror with what we discovered. Dead animals littered the highways and ditches. There was a rank odor that just…well, it just…I don’t know. I can’t even describe it.
Minor car wrecks were scattered throughout town—their lifeless passengers still trapped inside—ghostly faces pressed up against the windows, bodies slumped over steering wheels. More bodies were lying in the streets, with others on the sidewalks. Every last one had their mouth wide open, life apparently choked right out of them. Many were clutching their own throats, the whites of their eyes transformed into a dark dried-blood shade of red. Only Jenna was brave enough to approach and touch one of them, feeling for a pulse, but finding none. She reported their skin as leathery and cracked along the vein lines—like old clay—varyingly dark brown and gray, with spongy bruises everywhere. It was a haunting scene, and vomit-inducing for many of us. We couldn’t help it. So much death, so much shock…so much, so much. It was too much. Given the limited amount of people in the open—and that every business but the gas station and a few coffee shops had their doors closed—it definitely seemed to have happened at night. And it seemed to have happened quite suddenly. But when? What day?
I had enough wits about me to step inside a coffee shop and grab a newspaper off the rack. It was from Monday. Could this really have happened five or six days ago without us knowing anything about it? There were no signs of electricity anywhere. We found no evidence of any other life around town, other than a single sickly crow. No other human survivors. This didn’t make any sense! There was no other destruction, no other sounds, no one passing through. Whatever had killed everyone was either invisible or gone.
Stephen King couldn’t have made it more horrific. We didn’t know what to think. Our best guess was that it had to be a chemical reaction of some sort, but accidental or intentional, we didn’t know. If it were an attack, we hadn’t seen or heard any signs of it. Then again, our cabin was a remote twenty-five miles away on a heavily wooded lake. Danny claimed he’d heard a few distant airplanes the previous morning, but nothing else. Right now, it felt like we were the last ones living in the End Times, which was equally frightening since we all thought we were Christians. If that were the case, then either God didn’t exist, or He had left us behind. No, in all likelihood, this had nothing to do with the end of the world.
The date on the newspaper suggested it had happened sometime Monday or perhaps Tuesday at the latest. We’d been at the cabin for nearly a full week, four days longer than expected, having been surprised by the boys showing up for Hayley’s tournament. They had a few extra days before they left for their first Special Ops assignment, and we figured we’d all spend it together. Hayley should have been in school and Jenna and Kate back at college, but we didn’t know when any of us might see the boys again. It was a legitimate enough excuse for everyone to play hooky from his or her responsibilities for a few days.
But how could we not have known anything about this until now? That question kept nagging at me. Wouldn’t we have heard about it from someone, somehow? The only people who had left were my parents’ friends, and they had been heading home to Wisconsin. We hadn’t been expecting them to return, so we thought nothing of it when they didn’t. But they didn’t call us either. Were they dead now too? I shivered suddenly. As I’d been living at the cabin for years, and everyone had brought some supplies up with them, we had no reason to go into town. Call it dumb luck or whatever, but we had no idea what was going on. We had no idea what we’d missed.
As soon as we returned to the cabin from Ely, we all tried calling various people with our phones. The only cell tower for 50 miles was less than half a mile from us, but even that convenience did nothing for us now. No one answered. We turned on the computer to check our satellite Internet for further information, but it was also down. We didn’t know what we should do next. Mom put out some snacks, but no one ate. Half of us just sat around stunned, and the rest of us were asking questions no one could answer. Eventually, we all settled into a zombie-like stupor around the fireplace. Was there even anyone else out there? There had to be!
Dad turned on the high frequency shortwave radio Danny had given me a year ago and scanned all the channels for any sound of human operations. There was no music, no conversations, nothing but static, nothing at all. He, Danny, and Cameron took turns scanning the dial throughout the night and into the morning. Finally, at 4 a.m. on the dot, on the first notch of the AM dial, Dad heard a deliberate static pattern and called for Danny and Cameron. The rest of us crawled from our sleeping bags and beds and gathered around them. Dad suspected it was military code and hoped the boys might understand it. It was, and they did. Mom handed Cameron a notepad and pen as the choppy static ended. Fifteen seconds later it started again. Danny decoded, and Cameron wrote the message out.
Run (stop) You not safe (stop) Get to Hawaii (stop) Tuesday attacked (stop) United States Canada both (stop) Chemical bombs (stop) Every city (stop) Every town (stop) No US forces (stop) No electricity (stop) Comm grid theirs (stop) Army coming (stop) Kill all Americans (stop) No hoax (stop) Save yourself (stop) Tracking you (stop) THIRST tech (stop) Leave now (stop) Trust none (stop) Run (stop)