Hours, a newfound Thermos of water and a cup of spinach, a can opener and a food heater. It was strange how the world would fall away when she was reading, no matter how grim or daunting the tale set out before her. The only difference in Tom’s writings — as opposed to the horror tales she favored on her own — was that the hypothetical, the unthinkable, had become the real.
She made her way through printed survivalist forum threads, Wikipedia articles, NSA briefs (many still printed “SECRET” and one even “EYES ONLY,” surely it had been criminal in some way to be gathering these outside the agency), and she began to fathom just how the world had ended.
The reports on estimated fallout drift in event of a thermonuclear war were by far the most disturbing. Prevailing winds would come from the west and in high spring, with many winds and temperature changes, air currents would cause wide swathes of radioactive dust to wash over the entire eastern United States. The withering deluge would move in sky-corrupting tides like a sandstorm, like the black choking fog that had roiled out of the Dust Bowl in the Thirties. And what was the dust composed of? Pulverized buildings, molten cars, disintegrated corn, splintered trees, shattered earth, and tiny motes of radioactive flesh and bone and hair, the cinder-remnants of incinerated people.
For two weeks at least, or perhaps for years, cyclones would form and spin their way from west to east, scattering remains out over the Atlantic Ocean and leaving only the Gray Death in their wake, a wasteland where nothing would ever grow again. The more optimistic reports (including a rather idealistic survival book written in the Eighties by an Oak Ridge research engineer) theorized that the fallout cyclones would remain fatal for weeks, and present for several years; while the more menacing reports suggested that the storms would become the atmosphere, would coil and lay waste to the entire world for centuries.
Whatever the truth, if there were to be any survivors at all, the message to them was very clear: Keep away from once-populated areas. Avoid cities. Stay on rural roads whenever and wherever you can. Never go east. And, if you happen to be along the eastern face of the north-west spinal Rocky Mountains, go to the plains. Go north to the Dakotas, Montana, Wyoming.
Go north.
And a note on the last page in Tom’s hand read in scarlet ink, “See (g)RAND TETON / (s)HOSHONE / (y)ELLOWSTONE.” The title of another binder.
She had stopped reading for awhile once she made her way into the binder’s second major section, (i)MPACT EVENT. There was a very “Tom” touch on that section’s inner divider, a taped-in photograph of Bruce Willis thumbs-upping in Armageddon, accompanied by Tom’s helpful words, “Yeah right / As if.”
The last section was about Nemesis, a highly radioactive brown dwarf star that was supposed to roll its way through the solar system every twenty-six million years, causing mass extinctions and spilling cataclysm across the fractures in reality. There was even an especially erudite and passionate thread-essay which Tom had printed out for the binder and carefully preserved inside vinyl sheet holders, which had been written by an astrophysicist who apparently harbored a half-joking reverence for Howard Phillips Lovecraft and the Mythos of Cthulhu.
She began reading with bitterness and bemusement, then grew intrigued as the pieces began to fit together. The theory sounded real, almost too real, but all of that was useless now. No fallen star, spitting Apocalyptic cascades of poison down in blood tears upon the waters, would ever spell the end of Man; no. God had been overthrown, Man had grown weary of waiting for the judgment of dark angels. Man had destroyed himself.
And after the Nemesis section, a strange cluster of handwritten pages was stuffed into the binder’s back pocket. Sophie realized that this was Tom’s improbable catastrophe binder. The top yellow sheet in the back had been titled “Evil Endings,” and under it in his own curlicue script — a style which Tom reserved for writing silly notes when he was going out early to golf — Tom had written, “That spells evil. Oh, laws, yes.”
Which meant nothing at all. Surely it was some joke, but for who?
There was only a little more. After that first page in the back there were only tables of hastily-written columns, “Revision,” “Update,” “Sync,” “Refute” and a series of hundreds of page numbers. One last Post-It note reading “Shift to New” was stuck on the last page. And there, oddly, Tom had also written a date: September 11, 2013. With a question mark.
Move to new binder. Update. Revise. Tom had had some reason to believe that the nuclear holocaust scenario had become much more likely.
The last seven months of Sophie’s life began to make sense. Last September. That was when Tom’s mood had shifted and he had almost never been at home, always on NSA assignment. Whenever he was home he was always packing and preparing to drive up to the shelter, or planning on the drafting table. That was when he had started yelling at Lacie, when the fights had begun, when Lacie had started crying and not been able to sleep through the night without hugs and water, when she had started wanting to stay with grandma, when Sophie had turned back to the pills…
Sophie closed the binder.
She looked down at her left hand spread open upon the cover, and saw that at some point she had tucked a corner of bloody gauze beneath her wedding ring as an anchor.
And that was when she started crying.
She slid her way off the clothes, and pressed her face against the floor. Her crying turned to sobbing, uncontrollable, her chest heaving, she was crawling then and her hands were moist with spilled water and pierced by invisible bits of glass. She cried out, “Not alone. No. I can’t, I can’t…”
And only the echoes were there to answer.
II-4
DYING CRIES
She woke once more, lying on her back against the concrete floor. Her left-hand fingers were curled around an empty Thermos, and a leather jacket was tucked underneath her head.
She had been dreaming of Tom, not a fantasy-dream but a real one, a memory of experiences recently in ending, experiences made all the worse by the understanding that she was asleep and living the past all over again; that the past was now, and her suffering would be redoubled in its judgment, and she would never be able to change a single detail of what had been.
She was sitting in the H4 by the Athanasiou Valley Airport, with her hands clutching the wheel and the spring rain sleeting down a mist of gray and rainbow. Tom was on the phone. He was yelling at her.
“Promise me!” He sounded desperate, tottering near some precipice of mind.
“I — I promise.”
“Good. Mitch, Mitch picked up Lacie from grandma’s, he knows what’s going to happen. She’s safe.”
What?
“Tom, slow down. Mitch picked up our daughter? What place are they in?”
“Listen to me!”
“What’s happening?”
“She’s safe. Get to the shelter as fast as you can. Call Mitch on the way as soon as you lock and seal, do you understand me? He’s waiting for you to call. He’s going to help you, Sophie. He’s going to make… to make sure you get through this. For Lacie. For me.”
Get to the shelter.
Sophie had had nightmares about those very words. Like a dream.
A dream.
Sophie began to stand. She almost fell when her right hip socket popped, but she went to all fours, clenched her teeth and stood there over the drain clamped into the great room floor. She walked over the hose, around the shattered light fixture, and sat down on the stool before the work table.