Disaster In The ‘Burbs - Chapter 3
‘It’ was a slow traveling, relatively small as large things of such nature go, totally unexpected, Near Earth Object, that no one knew was near Earth until two days before the sun began to break it up and the pieces started impacting earth like a gigantic shotgun blast of buck and ball.
The two days of warning probably caused as much panic and problems as would have occurred without it. People began dying literally minutes after the announcement of the pending impact came from the UN Secretary General in a world-wide broadcast at Noon, New York time. Some people with bad hearts that couldn’t stand the stress of the news just keeled over.
Right on the heels of that, came killings, from simple euthanasia to hard core murder, with almost as many reasons for the killings as there were killers. Including a large number of would be killers being killed when they tried to kill someone that didn’t like the idea of dying.
Darlene was working a temp job as an order picker in one of the remaining Electrical/Plumbing/HVAC warehouse operations in the area. It was going to be a pretty good placing, Darlene thought a couple of days after she’d taken the job. Since the warehouse was just about the only source of parts in the area, they were getting almost all of the existing business in the trades in the area. The pay was decent, the warehouse cool even in the worst of the summer heat, and her co-workers were a pretty good bunch.
So, when someone yelled at everyone in the warehouse to come the reception area to listen to the broadcast happening at that moment, and Darlene heard what was about to happen she said probably only the third bad word she’d ever uttered in her life.
“What do we do?” the receptionist asked.
“I’ll answer that,” said the General Manager of the large operation. “You keep working until we find out more.”
It seemed to have the opposite effect of what the GM wanted. The room was almost empty in two minutes. Only the GM, the receptionist, and Darlene were left in the room. The GM went on a cursing streak that lasted fully a minute and a half and had words in it that Darlene had never heard, much less knew the meaning of.
Finally he stopped, looked at Darlene and the receptionist, and said, softly. “Might as well go home until day after tomorrow. I expect you back at work when all this nonsense is over.”
The receptionist almost knocked her computer keyboard off the desk in her hurry to leave.
The GM looked at Darlene. “What about you?”
“I’ll wait until the panic in the streets calms down some. Last thing I want is to get run over on my bicycle by a frightened motorist trying to get home to his or her family.”
“Yeah. Real or not, that’s what is happening out there. You want a drink while you wait?”
Darlene shook her head and suddenly decided that maybe being out in traffic might just be better than being here with the GM now that his eyes were glinting. She turned and ran into the warehouse. Grabbing her work BOB off the Paratrooper bicycle and putting it on, Darlene then pulled her bike from the rack just inside the loading door. She looked around. The GM was just watching from the office door she’d just come through. He just stood there as Darlene put the feet to the pedals and sped away.
It had been an easy ride to and from the warehouse the two days she’d worked there. And just like her projection of the dangers, Darlene had to be very careful not to get hit by the high speed, uncontrolled traffic on the streets.
But she made it home all right. After carefully locking the garage, Darlene went inside and turned on the TV. She happened to have commercial power at the moment. Every station that wasn’t completely pre-programmed was carrying the news. Experts were hastily brought in to studios and were giving their opinion about the situation. That it was going to be a planet killer, or wouldn’t have much effect except for pretty meteor showers. The opinions ran the gamut. On just about every show, since it wasn’t politically correct to just stick with an opinion. Every side had to be given fair time.
Darlene watched calmly. At least outwardly so. Inside she was wracking her brain to try to figure out what else she could do to prepare for the event. If the things did hit, and she happened to be at ground zero of one of them, there wasn’t much she could do to prevent or avoid it.
If one hit close, her shelter would give her some protection, but not as much as an underground one. Not enough time to do that. Probably every piece of earth moving equipment is already in use.
If a hit was at some distance, she had a good chance of surviving the impact itself. The aftermath wasn’t a sure thing.
If any and all impacts were well away from her, the odds went up for surviving the event, as did surviving the early post impact timeframe. Long term… She was as ready as she had been able to provide for.
Thoughts of going to get a ‘few more things’ crossed her mind, but she weighed the pros and cons and the cons won out. Too big a risk for too small a reward. Best to batten down the hatches immediately and go with the flow, no matter what happened.
Darlene got up, did a couple loads of laundry that needed doing, made herself a bit of lunch, worked in the garden, orchards, and greenhouse, and then checked the TV again. Same ol’ same ‘ol.
A good supper, long bath, and one last check of the TV before going to bed. At least there was consensus that there would be no impacts before approximately five in the evening the following day, New York time. The initial impacts, if there were any, would be on the dark side of the world.
Darlene went to bed, and surprisingly, fell right to sleep.
She was up early the next morning and checked the news again. The opinions weren’t quite as wide spread. Yes, there would be impacts, but they would all be small. No, the planet wouldn’t be destroyed completely, but human kind still might perish.
Darlene spent the day tidying up things, especially outdoors. She didn’t want anything blowing away if she could help it. She readied the shelter, though there wasn’t that much to be done.
By five New York time, like billions of others that had a TV, Darlene was in front of it, to see what could be seen, if anything.
“There was something,” the particular on-camera newswoman said, pointing up into the dark sky of central China. “There! There’s another!”
The screen went white for a moment, and then another news reader came on, also out in the open, pointing at the many streaks showing up in the sky.
Another white screen and the anchor man came on. He was in the network’s offices. “I’m sorry, Ladies and Gentlemen. We seem to be losing contact with our crews as the earth turns into this onslaught of extraterrestrial material slowly but surely. We hope to have…”
The screen went white and then black. When nothing happened for several seconds, Darlene tried another channel. It went black almost immediately. Communications were failing faster than she could switch channels. Finally she just turned the TV off, looked at her watch, and then went outside into the twilight that would soon be full dark.
Darlene checked her fence gates. Locked tight. She triggered the security remote and the security shutters on the doors and windows began to close, except for the walkway door into the garage from the driveway. Taking the lawn chair she’d left out when putting things away earlier, she put it on the driveway where she could look east.
Sipping from a glass of iced tea, she talked to a couple of the neighbors that had come outside themselves and saw her sitting there.
“How can you just sit there?” asked Mandy Benson. She was Darlene’s west side neighbor. They knew one another enough to carry on a conversation, but that was about it. The only real dealings Darlene had had with Mandy and Archibald Benson was about the fences, such a long time ago, it seemed like now.
“Nothing I can do,” Darlene said with a shrug. “We get hit or we don’t.”
There was a long period of silence as more and more people came out to watch for the impending impacts. Assuming there would be some. For some reason the majority of those people close came over to stand around Darlene’s driveway gate.
“How long are you going to wait?” someone asked, directing the question to Darlene. It was someone she didn’t know from down the block.
“Just until I see one in the sky, or see an impact.” The words were barely out of Darlene’s mouth when the eastern skyline lit up. “Like that,” Darlene added. “I’m going inside. I suggest the rest of you do, too.”
Calmly Darlene got up, folded the chair, picked up the iced tea from the driveway, and turned to the garage. The others erupted into panic as one streak of light zoomed over their heads with a screaming sound.
Darlene opened the door into the garage, closed the security door after she closed the regular door, set the chair aside, and went into the shelter, locking the two heavy wood and steel doors behind her. One at the outside entrance and the other at the entrance from the baffled entry hall. She was sealed in.
With only one battery powered LED light glowing, Darlene went to her knees, looked up at the ceiling of the shelter, brought her hands together, and then began to pray, her words barely audible.
The long prayer done, Darlene got into one of the four bunks in the shelter and laid down, wrapping herself in the blanket that was on the bunk. She turned to face the wall and waited, eyes closed, for whatever might come.
Darlene felt the shelter shake many times, one time violently. After what seemed an eternity, but was actually only three hours, the shocks stopped.
She tried one of the security cameras that had a feed into the shelter. It faced the street in front of the house, and several houses across the street from her. Everything looked fine, except for it being very dark, even at night. The commercial power was off again. She tried a camera that pointed east. She could see more of the sky. Such as it was. Just one ugly blackness all the way to the horizon. She could see the reflections of flames on the bottom of the dust cloud.
Checking the remote reading radiation meter, Darlene discovered that there was only background radiation. Then she looked at the weather panel. Ad first she thought everything was normal, but when the display changed to outside temperature she gasped. It was almost one hundred and fifty degrees outside, while still only seventy-one inside.
Determined to stay inside until the temperature came down, Darlene fixed another glass of iced tea, and sat down at the counter that held the computer, radios, weather instrument, and inside air quality monitors.
The CO2 level was still within limits but rising slowly. She didn’t have a headache yet. Opening up the laptop computer, Darlene did some reading of the various prep information she’d gathered from the internet and boned up on CO2.
It would be some time before she needed to hang CO2 absorption blankets, and more time than that before adding oxygen from the bottles stashed between the back wall of the shelter and the garage wall. The absorption blankets and oxygen equipment had been the hardest items to get for the shelter, and the most expensive items. Though she’d had to fudge the truth a little, and eat light for a couple of months, she’d managed to get them.
When the CO2 alarm sounded, Darlene was starting to get a headache. She put up the curtains and waited for the CO2 to drop. It did, slowly, but steadily. The oxygen level was down, but still adequate. The humidity was up so Darlene turned on the small de-humidifier in the shelter. The temperature inside the shelter was up to seventy-three degrees. Outside temperature down ten degrees to one forty.
Over the next couple of days Darlene napped for a while when she added oxygen to the shelter or hung fresh absorption blankets, as it gave her time to get some real sleep without worrying about the shelter environment for a few hours.
She didn’t even think about going outside until the outside temperature was down below one hundred twenty. When it had fallen that low, Darlene transferred the various atmospheric sensors to an isolation cabinet she’d made from an acrylic fish tank and a few parts from Radio Shack.
Opening a small valve, Darlene turned on the small fan that drew air from outside, through the isolation tank, and back outside. The sensor changed readings slightly, but, to Darlene’s great relief, oxygen, CO2, and carbon monoxide were within safe limits.
Still, when she stripped down and put on a lightweight Tyvek coverall with attached booties and hood, Darlene donned a respirator, too. Hesitating only a moment, Darlene wrapped the gun belt with the holstered Redhawk around her waist and buckled it in place. There had been no indications of hard radiation, but she made sure she had her pocket alarm in her pocket before she went outside.
Hesitating a moment, Darlene then opened the sealed door to the entry hall, and locked and sealed it behind her. Next she opened the door into the garage. She stopped there and looked around in the light from the bright six D-cell Maglight flashlight. So far, so good. A few things had been jostled about by the ground shocks, but nothing critical was damaged.
Crossing her fingers, Darlene tried the security door remote. The walk through door shutter began to open. “Yes!” Darlene said. There was still power in the battery bank for the house. There were some dead fish, and the water level was low in the fish tank.
Darlene stepped out into the faint light and looked around. There was enough light to see so she slipped the flashlight into a deep pocket in the coveralls. She made a circle around the house. Only on the east side did anything look amiss. The wall of the house and the roof looked different, somehow, and the trees in the orchard had shriveled leaves on their east facing sides.
The rabbits were dead in their hutches. There didn’t seem to be many worms, but there were some.
Next Darlene went out into the street and began to check neighbors’ houses. She stopped after the sixth house full of bodies. There had been a couple of bodies out on lawns and in the street, but their faces were so badly blistered from the flash that must have occurred, and the heat afterwards, she couldn’t tell who they were, even if she might have known them.
Lightning began to flash and Darlene felt a hot breeze. It looked like it would storm.
Turning around, Darlene went back to the garage. After taking out the dead fish and taking them out to the garden spot, she drained the tank down until the remaining fish were flapping around in an inch or so of water. Darlene activated the well pump and refilled the fish tank.
Just be before she went into the shelter, Darlene lifted the respirator and took a deep breath. The air smelled of char and heat and dead fish, and was hot in her lungs, but she didn’t pass out or feel ill. She took another breath just to be sure and then went in, sealing the doors behind her again, ready to take some pure oxygen to flush her lungs if she did react.
She monitored herself for several long minutes, but felt no ill effects from having breathed the outside air. Then, bathed in sweat from the heat outside, she stripped off the coverall and stepped into the shower in the small bathroom in one corner of the shelter.
Refreshed, Darlene fixed a bite to eat, checked the air in the shelter again, and laid down for a nap. That heat had just sucked the strength out of her.
When she woke, Darlene began scanning the Amateur Radio bands. Nothing but static at the moment. With as much particulate matter as was obviously in the air, and the possibility of electrical phenomena in the turbulent atmosphere, such as the heavy lightning, she really wasn’t expecting anything for several more days.
She slipped into a routine similar to that she’d followed before going outside. Before she explored further she wanted the outside temperature to come down more, and hopefully some of the dust to drift out of the atmosphere. She would still need a dust mask and goggles, but hopefully she wouldn’t need the respirator.
Keeping an eye on the outside by the cameras and monitor, Darlene saw the sky lighten just a bit every day, with light to heavy rain coming every day or so. It was washing some of the atmospheric contamination out of the sky, but Darlene decided it would be years, if not decades, before it all back down on the ground. Darlene said a little prayer to ask that there be enough sunlight for gardens to grow.
Nine days after the fact, with the temperature outside a bearable ninety-five degrees, Darlene dressed for the heat, armed herself, and went to check more of the housing tract. She’d tried the car and it had started right up, but she didn’t want to use it yet. Partly because of the dust, but also because she could see and go places on her bike she couldn’t if in the car.
There was enough light to see, and Darlene could easily tell where the sun was, but things were a long way from normal.
The bodies she found were highly desiccated. The extreme heat had dried them out before they could begin to decompose. Even those that had died inside were mummified, for the most part.
It took her three days to check every house in the tract that she could get into. If the place was locked up tight she left it as it was. Only those houses that had at least one door unlocked would she enter. She kept a log of what she found, including bodies. Something would have to be done about them, but there was no way she could handle it on her own.
It was eerie riding the bicycle around. It was almost totally silent. No birdsongs, traffic sounds, insects chirping. Nothing. Except for the thunder. That came often, often loud enough to hurt Darlene’s ears. Whenever she heard thunder, even if she didn’t see lightning first, she found overhead shelter. The lightning was horrific and the thunder just as bad. The rains came down in sheets, hot and muddy still.
Darlene finally took the Subaru out of the garage and left the tract to see what might lie outside of it. More of the same, mostly, she discovered. And then she found the first survivor besides herself.
It was a young woman and when she saw the Subaru she ran into the large C-store she’d been standing in front of. Darlene pulled into the parking lot and stopped. When she got out the Redhawk was in the holster on her belt, and she gripped the Marlin in her right hand.
“Hello!” Darlene called, opening the door a fraction. “Hello! Are you there? I’m not going to hurt you. Come on out!”
“Are you a girl?” came a quivering voice.
“Yes, I am,” Darlene answered, opening the door a bit more.
“Are there any guys with you? I won’t come out if there are any guys with you.”
“No. I’m alone. Are you all right?”
Slowly the woman stepped around the corner of the stores walk-in cooler. When she didn’t see anyone besides Darlene she ran forward and hugged Darlene before Darlene could react.
“Hey! Hey! It’s okay. You’re all right now. What happened here? How did you survive? What’s your name?”
“Milly.” That was all for a few moments. Then Milly stepped away from Darlene and took a look out the door of the store.
“You really alone?”
“I am. Can you tell me what’s been going on? How did you survive?”
“I was on late shift. I saw the things in the sky. And then it got even darker than night and really hot. I got in the walk-in cooler with a couple of the customers. But they didn’t stay. They talked about it and said they were going to make a run for it. I never saw them again.
“I just stayed in the cooler, drinking the drinks and water and eating the sandwiches.” Her nose turned up for a moment. “The toilet wouldn’t work and I used one of the plastic buckets from the fast food part of the store to go to the bathroom. It stinks.”
Milly seemed calmer, but she suddenly tensed. “Two days ago I was out looking around. Two guys chased me, but I got away and hid. They just kept looking and looking and looking and telling me what they were going to do to me when they caught me. They’re still around here somewhere. That’s why I hid when I saw you.”
“We are for a fact, still around,” came a voice from behind Darlene. “And there are two now, Harry. We each get one.”
“Yeah. And then the other one.” Both men laughed.
Darlene didn’t hesitate. She knew she couldn’t afford to. Survivors like these two would make living in the new world untenable. Moving quickly and fluidly, Darlene spun around, raising the Marlin to her shoulder at the same time. As soon as the front sight touch human form she fired and worked the lever, and continued to swing the gun in an arc.
She heard a shot that wasn’t her gun, and then her sights were crossing over another human form. Again she fired. The first man had gone down immediately. This second one, hit in the shoulder was able to fire his pistol again.
Darlene felt a burning sensation on her left leg, but had worked the lever of the Marlin again automatically and drew another bead. That heavy .44 Magnum hollow point slug took the top of the man’s head off from the nose up.
Darlene didn’t realize Milly was screaming and screaming again until the action was over. She went over to Milly and put her arm over her shoulders, turning her away from the carnage of the two men. The first man had taken the hollow point at the base of his throat, into the spine, half decapitating him.
“Milly,” Darlene said, “Wait right here. I need to check them.”
Copyright 2008
‘It’ was a slow traveling, relatively small as large things of such nature go, totally unexpected, Near Earth Object, that no one knew was near Earth until two days before the sun began to break it up and the pieces started impacting earth like a gigantic shotgun blast of buck and ball.
The two days of warning probably caused as much panic and problems as would have occurred without it. People began dying literally minutes after the announcement of the pending impact came from the UN Secretary General in a world-wide broadcast at Noon, New York time. Some people with bad hearts that couldn’t stand the stress of the news just keeled over.
Right on the heels of that, came killings, from simple euthanasia to hard core murder, with almost as many reasons for the killings as there were killers. Including a large number of would be killers being killed when they tried to kill someone that didn’t like the idea of dying.
Darlene was working a temp job as an order picker in one of the remaining Electrical/Plumbing/HVAC warehouse operations in the area. It was going to be a pretty good placing, Darlene thought a couple of days after she’d taken the job. Since the warehouse was just about the only source of parts in the area, they were getting almost all of the existing business in the trades in the area. The pay was decent, the warehouse cool even in the worst of the summer heat, and her co-workers were a pretty good bunch.
So, when someone yelled at everyone in the warehouse to come the reception area to listen to the broadcast happening at that moment, and Darlene heard what was about to happen she said probably only the third bad word she’d ever uttered in her life.
“What do we do?” the receptionist asked.
“I’ll answer that,” said the General Manager of the large operation. “You keep working until we find out more.”
It seemed to have the opposite effect of what the GM wanted. The room was almost empty in two minutes. Only the GM, the receptionist, and Darlene were left in the room. The GM went on a cursing streak that lasted fully a minute and a half and had words in it that Darlene had never heard, much less knew the meaning of.
Finally he stopped, looked at Darlene and the receptionist, and said, softly. “Might as well go home until day after tomorrow. I expect you back at work when all this nonsense is over.”
The receptionist almost knocked her computer keyboard off the desk in her hurry to leave.
The GM looked at Darlene. “What about you?”
“I’ll wait until the panic in the streets calms down some. Last thing I want is to get run over on my bicycle by a frightened motorist trying to get home to his or her family.”
“Yeah. Real or not, that’s what is happening out there. You want a drink while you wait?”
Darlene shook her head and suddenly decided that maybe being out in traffic might just be better than being here with the GM now that his eyes were glinting. She turned and ran into the warehouse. Grabbing her work BOB off the Paratrooper bicycle and putting it on, Darlene then pulled her bike from the rack just inside the loading door. She looked around. The GM was just watching from the office door she’d just come through. He just stood there as Darlene put the feet to the pedals and sped away.
It had been an easy ride to and from the warehouse the two days she’d worked there. And just like her projection of the dangers, Darlene had to be very careful not to get hit by the high speed, uncontrolled traffic on the streets.
But she made it home all right. After carefully locking the garage, Darlene went inside and turned on the TV. She happened to have commercial power at the moment. Every station that wasn’t completely pre-programmed was carrying the news. Experts were hastily brought in to studios and were giving their opinion about the situation. That it was going to be a planet killer, or wouldn’t have much effect except for pretty meteor showers. The opinions ran the gamut. On just about every show, since it wasn’t politically correct to just stick with an opinion. Every side had to be given fair time.
Darlene watched calmly. At least outwardly so. Inside she was wracking her brain to try to figure out what else she could do to prepare for the event. If the things did hit, and she happened to be at ground zero of one of them, there wasn’t much she could do to prevent or avoid it.
If one hit close, her shelter would give her some protection, but not as much as an underground one. Not enough time to do that. Probably every piece of earth moving equipment is already in use.
If a hit was at some distance, she had a good chance of surviving the impact itself. The aftermath wasn’t a sure thing.
If any and all impacts were well away from her, the odds went up for surviving the event, as did surviving the early post impact timeframe. Long term… She was as ready as she had been able to provide for.
Thoughts of going to get a ‘few more things’ crossed her mind, but she weighed the pros and cons and the cons won out. Too big a risk for too small a reward. Best to batten down the hatches immediately and go with the flow, no matter what happened.
Darlene got up, did a couple loads of laundry that needed doing, made herself a bit of lunch, worked in the garden, orchards, and greenhouse, and then checked the TV again. Same ol’ same ‘ol.
A good supper, long bath, and one last check of the TV before going to bed. At least there was consensus that there would be no impacts before approximately five in the evening the following day, New York time. The initial impacts, if there were any, would be on the dark side of the world.
Darlene went to bed, and surprisingly, fell right to sleep.
She was up early the next morning and checked the news again. The opinions weren’t quite as wide spread. Yes, there would be impacts, but they would all be small. No, the planet wouldn’t be destroyed completely, but human kind still might perish.
Darlene spent the day tidying up things, especially outdoors. She didn’t want anything blowing away if she could help it. She readied the shelter, though there wasn’t that much to be done.
By five New York time, like billions of others that had a TV, Darlene was in front of it, to see what could be seen, if anything.
“There was something,” the particular on-camera newswoman said, pointing up into the dark sky of central China. “There! There’s another!”
The screen went white for a moment, and then another news reader came on, also out in the open, pointing at the many streaks showing up in the sky.
Another white screen and the anchor man came on. He was in the network’s offices. “I’m sorry, Ladies and Gentlemen. We seem to be losing contact with our crews as the earth turns into this onslaught of extraterrestrial material slowly but surely. We hope to have…”
The screen went white and then black. When nothing happened for several seconds, Darlene tried another channel. It went black almost immediately. Communications were failing faster than she could switch channels. Finally she just turned the TV off, looked at her watch, and then went outside into the twilight that would soon be full dark.
Darlene checked her fence gates. Locked tight. She triggered the security remote and the security shutters on the doors and windows began to close, except for the walkway door into the garage from the driveway. Taking the lawn chair she’d left out when putting things away earlier, she put it on the driveway where she could look east.
Sipping from a glass of iced tea, she talked to a couple of the neighbors that had come outside themselves and saw her sitting there.
“How can you just sit there?” asked Mandy Benson. She was Darlene’s west side neighbor. They knew one another enough to carry on a conversation, but that was about it. The only real dealings Darlene had had with Mandy and Archibald Benson was about the fences, such a long time ago, it seemed like now.
“Nothing I can do,” Darlene said with a shrug. “We get hit or we don’t.”
There was a long period of silence as more and more people came out to watch for the impending impacts. Assuming there would be some. For some reason the majority of those people close came over to stand around Darlene’s driveway gate.
“How long are you going to wait?” someone asked, directing the question to Darlene. It was someone she didn’t know from down the block.
“Just until I see one in the sky, or see an impact.” The words were barely out of Darlene’s mouth when the eastern skyline lit up. “Like that,” Darlene added. “I’m going inside. I suggest the rest of you do, too.”
Calmly Darlene got up, folded the chair, picked up the iced tea from the driveway, and turned to the garage. The others erupted into panic as one streak of light zoomed over their heads with a screaming sound.
Darlene opened the door into the garage, closed the security door after she closed the regular door, set the chair aside, and went into the shelter, locking the two heavy wood and steel doors behind her. One at the outside entrance and the other at the entrance from the baffled entry hall. She was sealed in.
With only one battery powered LED light glowing, Darlene went to her knees, looked up at the ceiling of the shelter, brought her hands together, and then began to pray, her words barely audible.
The long prayer done, Darlene got into one of the four bunks in the shelter and laid down, wrapping herself in the blanket that was on the bunk. She turned to face the wall and waited, eyes closed, for whatever might come.
Darlene felt the shelter shake many times, one time violently. After what seemed an eternity, but was actually only three hours, the shocks stopped.
She tried one of the security cameras that had a feed into the shelter. It faced the street in front of the house, and several houses across the street from her. Everything looked fine, except for it being very dark, even at night. The commercial power was off again. She tried a camera that pointed east. She could see more of the sky. Such as it was. Just one ugly blackness all the way to the horizon. She could see the reflections of flames on the bottom of the dust cloud.
Checking the remote reading radiation meter, Darlene discovered that there was only background radiation. Then she looked at the weather panel. Ad first she thought everything was normal, but when the display changed to outside temperature she gasped. It was almost one hundred and fifty degrees outside, while still only seventy-one inside.
Determined to stay inside until the temperature came down, Darlene fixed another glass of iced tea, and sat down at the counter that held the computer, radios, weather instrument, and inside air quality monitors.
The CO2 level was still within limits but rising slowly. She didn’t have a headache yet. Opening up the laptop computer, Darlene did some reading of the various prep information she’d gathered from the internet and boned up on CO2.
It would be some time before she needed to hang CO2 absorption blankets, and more time than that before adding oxygen from the bottles stashed between the back wall of the shelter and the garage wall. The absorption blankets and oxygen equipment had been the hardest items to get for the shelter, and the most expensive items. Though she’d had to fudge the truth a little, and eat light for a couple of months, she’d managed to get them.
When the CO2 alarm sounded, Darlene was starting to get a headache. She put up the curtains and waited for the CO2 to drop. It did, slowly, but steadily. The oxygen level was down, but still adequate. The humidity was up so Darlene turned on the small de-humidifier in the shelter. The temperature inside the shelter was up to seventy-three degrees. Outside temperature down ten degrees to one forty.
Over the next couple of days Darlene napped for a while when she added oxygen to the shelter or hung fresh absorption blankets, as it gave her time to get some real sleep without worrying about the shelter environment for a few hours.
She didn’t even think about going outside until the outside temperature was down below one hundred twenty. When it had fallen that low, Darlene transferred the various atmospheric sensors to an isolation cabinet she’d made from an acrylic fish tank and a few parts from Radio Shack.
Opening a small valve, Darlene turned on the small fan that drew air from outside, through the isolation tank, and back outside. The sensor changed readings slightly, but, to Darlene’s great relief, oxygen, CO2, and carbon monoxide were within safe limits.
Still, when she stripped down and put on a lightweight Tyvek coverall with attached booties and hood, Darlene donned a respirator, too. Hesitating only a moment, Darlene wrapped the gun belt with the holstered Redhawk around her waist and buckled it in place. There had been no indications of hard radiation, but she made sure she had her pocket alarm in her pocket before she went outside.
Hesitating a moment, Darlene then opened the sealed door to the entry hall, and locked and sealed it behind her. Next she opened the door into the garage. She stopped there and looked around in the light from the bright six D-cell Maglight flashlight. So far, so good. A few things had been jostled about by the ground shocks, but nothing critical was damaged.
Crossing her fingers, Darlene tried the security door remote. The walk through door shutter began to open. “Yes!” Darlene said. There was still power in the battery bank for the house. There were some dead fish, and the water level was low in the fish tank.
Darlene stepped out into the faint light and looked around. There was enough light to see so she slipped the flashlight into a deep pocket in the coveralls. She made a circle around the house. Only on the east side did anything look amiss. The wall of the house and the roof looked different, somehow, and the trees in the orchard had shriveled leaves on their east facing sides.
The rabbits were dead in their hutches. There didn’t seem to be many worms, but there were some.
Next Darlene went out into the street and began to check neighbors’ houses. She stopped after the sixth house full of bodies. There had been a couple of bodies out on lawns and in the street, but their faces were so badly blistered from the flash that must have occurred, and the heat afterwards, she couldn’t tell who they were, even if she might have known them.
Lightning began to flash and Darlene felt a hot breeze. It looked like it would storm.
Turning around, Darlene went back to the garage. After taking out the dead fish and taking them out to the garden spot, she drained the tank down until the remaining fish were flapping around in an inch or so of water. Darlene activated the well pump and refilled the fish tank.
Just be before she went into the shelter, Darlene lifted the respirator and took a deep breath. The air smelled of char and heat and dead fish, and was hot in her lungs, but she didn’t pass out or feel ill. She took another breath just to be sure and then went in, sealing the doors behind her again, ready to take some pure oxygen to flush her lungs if she did react.
She monitored herself for several long minutes, but felt no ill effects from having breathed the outside air. Then, bathed in sweat from the heat outside, she stripped off the coverall and stepped into the shower in the small bathroom in one corner of the shelter.
Refreshed, Darlene fixed a bite to eat, checked the air in the shelter again, and laid down for a nap. That heat had just sucked the strength out of her.
When she woke, Darlene began scanning the Amateur Radio bands. Nothing but static at the moment. With as much particulate matter as was obviously in the air, and the possibility of electrical phenomena in the turbulent atmosphere, such as the heavy lightning, she really wasn’t expecting anything for several more days.
She slipped into a routine similar to that she’d followed before going outside. Before she explored further she wanted the outside temperature to come down more, and hopefully some of the dust to drift out of the atmosphere. She would still need a dust mask and goggles, but hopefully she wouldn’t need the respirator.
Keeping an eye on the outside by the cameras and monitor, Darlene saw the sky lighten just a bit every day, with light to heavy rain coming every day or so. It was washing some of the atmospheric contamination out of the sky, but Darlene decided it would be years, if not decades, before it all back down on the ground. Darlene said a little prayer to ask that there be enough sunlight for gardens to grow.
Nine days after the fact, with the temperature outside a bearable ninety-five degrees, Darlene dressed for the heat, armed herself, and went to check more of the housing tract. She’d tried the car and it had started right up, but she didn’t want to use it yet. Partly because of the dust, but also because she could see and go places on her bike she couldn’t if in the car.
There was enough light to see, and Darlene could easily tell where the sun was, but things were a long way from normal.
The bodies she found were highly desiccated. The extreme heat had dried them out before they could begin to decompose. Even those that had died inside were mummified, for the most part.
It took her three days to check every house in the tract that she could get into. If the place was locked up tight she left it as it was. Only those houses that had at least one door unlocked would she enter. She kept a log of what she found, including bodies. Something would have to be done about them, but there was no way she could handle it on her own.
It was eerie riding the bicycle around. It was almost totally silent. No birdsongs, traffic sounds, insects chirping. Nothing. Except for the thunder. That came often, often loud enough to hurt Darlene’s ears. Whenever she heard thunder, even if she didn’t see lightning first, she found overhead shelter. The lightning was horrific and the thunder just as bad. The rains came down in sheets, hot and muddy still.
Darlene finally took the Subaru out of the garage and left the tract to see what might lie outside of it. More of the same, mostly, she discovered. And then she found the first survivor besides herself.
It was a young woman and when she saw the Subaru she ran into the large C-store she’d been standing in front of. Darlene pulled into the parking lot and stopped. When she got out the Redhawk was in the holster on her belt, and she gripped the Marlin in her right hand.
“Hello!” Darlene called, opening the door a fraction. “Hello! Are you there? I’m not going to hurt you. Come on out!”
“Are you a girl?” came a quivering voice.
“Yes, I am,” Darlene answered, opening the door a bit more.
“Are there any guys with you? I won’t come out if there are any guys with you.”
“No. I’m alone. Are you all right?”
Slowly the woman stepped around the corner of the stores walk-in cooler. When she didn’t see anyone besides Darlene she ran forward and hugged Darlene before Darlene could react.
“Hey! Hey! It’s okay. You’re all right now. What happened here? How did you survive? What’s your name?”
“Milly.” That was all for a few moments. Then Milly stepped away from Darlene and took a look out the door of the store.
“You really alone?”
“I am. Can you tell me what’s been going on? How did you survive?”
“I was on late shift. I saw the things in the sky. And then it got even darker than night and really hot. I got in the walk-in cooler with a couple of the customers. But they didn’t stay. They talked about it and said they were going to make a run for it. I never saw them again.
“I just stayed in the cooler, drinking the drinks and water and eating the sandwiches.” Her nose turned up for a moment. “The toilet wouldn’t work and I used one of the plastic buckets from the fast food part of the store to go to the bathroom. It stinks.”
Milly seemed calmer, but she suddenly tensed. “Two days ago I was out looking around. Two guys chased me, but I got away and hid. They just kept looking and looking and looking and telling me what they were going to do to me when they caught me. They’re still around here somewhere. That’s why I hid when I saw you.”
“We are for a fact, still around,” came a voice from behind Darlene. “And there are two now, Harry. We each get one.”
“Yeah. And then the other one.” Both men laughed.
Darlene didn’t hesitate. She knew she couldn’t afford to. Survivors like these two would make living in the new world untenable. Moving quickly and fluidly, Darlene spun around, raising the Marlin to her shoulder at the same time. As soon as the front sight touch human form she fired and worked the lever, and continued to swing the gun in an arc.
She heard a shot that wasn’t her gun, and then her sights were crossing over another human form. Again she fired. The first man had gone down immediately. This second one, hit in the shoulder was able to fire his pistol again.
Darlene felt a burning sensation on her left leg, but had worked the lever of the Marlin again automatically and drew another bead. That heavy .44 Magnum hollow point slug took the top of the man’s head off from the nose up.
Darlene didn’t realize Milly was screaming and screaming again until the action was over. She went over to Milly and put her arm over her shoulders, turning her away from the carnage of the two men. The first man had taken the hollow point at the base of his throat, into the spine, half decapitating him.
“Milly,” Darlene said, “Wait right here. I need to check them.”
Copyright 2008
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