Jeff Brackett - Half Past Midnight

Megan interjected before I could figure out what to say. “She didn’t have time to get away from Houston, Zach.”

“She did too!” Zachary turned back and forth between his sister and me, his quivering voice practically begged for reassurance. “Dad?”

“No she didn’t.” Megan’s voice took on a bitter tone. “No one who was still there got away. Everyone we knew is gone.” She looked at me, tears streaming freely down her cheeks. “Aren’t they?”

I couldn’t help it. My own eyes began to fill at the thought of my father, and the likelihood of my mother also being dead. No! Time enough for that later. Trying to be discrete, I coughed and wiped my eyes on my sleeve. I swallowed the lump in my throat and took a deep breath. “I don’t know.” Pulling Zach onto my knee, I wrapped my arms around him. “We’ll probably never know. All we can do is hope.”

Debra leaned over and put an arm around Megan, who buried her face in her mother’s shoulder. “Josh is dead, isn’t he?”

I felt two feet tall. I’d completely forgotten her boyfriend, and things had moved so quickly that I’d never thought to talk to her about him. Debra answered, “I don’t know. It’s like your dad just said, we might never know.”

Zach turned his face up to me, suddenly realizing the further implications of what we were saying. “What about Jeremy. Or Kenny?”

Ken spoke from his hammock. “I have a brother in California. He lives in the mountains, in Sierra City. I wonder what happened there.”

Zachary turned his attention to Ken as Ken sat up and smiled kindly at him. “I like to think he’s over there on the other side of the country in a nice cabin in the mountains. I’m sad that I won’t ever get to talk to him again, but I think he’s probably okay.”

“Why won’t you get to talk to him again?”

Ken came over and sat on the dirt floor next to us. “You remember how the electricity went out before you came here to see your nanna?” Zach nodded. “Well, if what your daddy says is true, I think the electricity probably went out all over the country, even in California. And without the electricity, a lot of things won’t work, things like the telephones, and radios, and a lot of cars and gas stations. There’s just a whole lot of stuff that got broken and, without that stuff, I don’t have a way to talk to him anymore.”

“But you think he’s okay?”

Ken nodded. “I’ll bet he is. I bet he’s up in the mountains wondering if I’m okay, and sorry he won’t get a chance to tell me.”

Zachary got up from my lap and hugged Ken. “We’ll find a way to talk to him again.”

I caught Ken’s eye over my son’s shoulder, and mouthed, “Thank you.” Ken just nodded.

Things were pretty reserved for the rest of the day but, after another day of moping, the kids had adapted as well as could be expected. We all knew we had to keep ourselves occupied to keep from dwelling on our losses, so we found different ways to entertain ourselves. We took turns reading our favorite authors aloud by the light of twelve-volt bulbs hooked to the car batteries. It turned out that Cindy was an avid reader of Nostradamus’s prophesies and had searched his works for portents of things yet to come. By her estimation, things didn’t look too good.

“Here’s another one,” she proclaimed one evening. “Quatrain number ninety-one in the second book of Centuries translates like this:

At sunrise one will see a great fire,

Noise and light extending towards Aquilon

Within the circle, death, and one will hear cries,

Through steel, fire, famine, death awaiting them.”

Her voice rose in pitch as she tried to convey the importance she placed upon this prophesy.

Ken groaned. “And I suppose the ’great fire, noise, and light’ is a nuke?” He and Cindy had evidently had similar conversations in the past. I could understand his jaded outlook. I had only had to listen to The Centuries for a couple of nights. He had probably been forced to listen to them for years.

“Well, doesn’t it sound like it to you?” She turned to me for moral support. “Leeland?”

“Oh no, you don’t.” I laughed. “You’re not dragging me into a family argument.”

“It sorta sounds like it to me.” Megan volunteered from her hammock. When the rest of us turned to her, she seemed to regret having spoken, as if she feared being ridiculed. “Well, you gotta admit that the other morning looked like a lot of ’steel, fire, famine, and death’!”

None of us had a rebuttal to that.

“So then, where is Aquilon?” Ken’s mocking tone was aimed at his wife. “No town around here with that name.”

“That’s because he was from France, so most of his stuff related to France. Aquilon was an ancient city there, but with everything that’s going on, who’s to say what’s happening?”

We played various games. Ken played the guitar, and Cindy, who had the best voice, was a pleasure to listen to when she sang.

We took vitamins, drank Gatorade, ate lousy food cooked over Sterno cans, and did our business in a covered bucket around the corner. We made a man-powered recharging device for our car batteries by attaching a hand crank to an antique automobile generator that Ken had owned.

We all took potassium iodide tablets to prevent our bodies from taking in radioactive iodine, all of us except for Debra, who had a severe allergy to iodine. In general, we tried to remain optimistic. Usually it worked, but not always. There were bad days, dark, dismal, dreary, and depressing days full of anxious and paranoid musings about the type of world to which we would emerge.

Once a day at noon, whichever adult had accumulated the smallest dose would bundle up in rain gear, rubber gloves, boots, and gas mask, all sealed with duct tape, and go outside to dump the waste buckets and take a reading with the fallout meter. Fallout readings had reached their worst on the day after we went underground, reading twenty-four rems per hour. Cindy had gotten the job of taking that first reading. I had gone over all of the charts with everyone; she knew that anything over ten rems was too dangerous, so she came back in immediately after taking the reading. The next day at noon, Debra reported twenty-three rems, and the day after that I got twelve rems. The next day was Thursday, and Ken reported a reading of seven rems. Readings decreased rapidly after that.

Actually, we got off pretty easy. The fallout wasn’t nearly as intense as it could have been, and nowhere near fatal in such small doses. If anyone had been unsheltered through all of it, though, they would probably be dead within a month.

A long and excruciatingly painful month.

***

After nine days, our PDRs no longer glowed when we went outside. On the twelfth day, it took an hour to get a recognizable reading on the KFM, and even then, it was less than one rem per hour. Simple calculations showed we could stay outside for over seven weeks before things even got close to being dangerous. The next day, the reading was point-oh-three rems per hour… five months of “safe time.”

It was time to see what was left of the world outside.

We already knew most of the chickens had made it through all right. Each day at noon when we had emerged to read the fallout meter, we had taken the five minutes necessary to scatter feed for them to ensure our long-term food supply. Several of the hens had even nested in the house, though none had laid eggs. They did seem to have a natural resistance to the radiation.