Нэнси Кресс - The End Is Now

The cessation of road noise woke her.

“Where are we?” she asked Jack. Heidi wasn’t in the driver’s seat.

“Outside Darby. We’re on a side-road. Some guys were heading out to try to clear a rockslide or something on the highway, so they told us to detour down this Old Darby Road. Heidi had to pee.” He motioned out the window with a grin.

“You stopped and talked to people and I didn’t wake up?” Lucy rubbed her eyes and caught a whiff of her morning breath. She sat up and reached for a water bottle.

“A regular sleeping beauty,” Jack said, pushing some of her hair from her face. “Speaking of that, you’re Puerto Rican?”

“Half,” she said, making a face. “My parents named me Lucita, but I hate it.” It seemed so trivial now. All through middle school and high school, she’d just wanted to be one of the pale, pretty blondes. She’d bleached her hair, worn contacts, put on foundation that was two shades too light for her complexion. Gone by Lucy instead of Lucita. Lucy Goodwin had tried so hard to leave everything of her mother and her mother’s history behind. Her language. Her culture. Her religion. Her science.

And now all I want to do is get home and tell her how sorry I am and promise we’ll never argue again. Ever.

“Wait,” she said as Jack started to get out of the car. “Darby? That means we’re like an hour or so from home.” She threw open the door and came around to his side, pulling him down for a kiss as he climbed out and wrapped her in his arms.

“I can’t believe you are from a place called Lolo.” He grinned.

“The farm is outside Lolo. Geez.”

“A farm like this?” Jack motioned around them.

Heidi had stopped along the road at a gravel driveway that stretched back down a lane of poplar. In the distance Lucy could make out the roof of a farmhouse, one of the classic two-story ones, probably made with stone and logs, the roof looking like slate from this distance in the hazy afternoon light. The air was dusty but cool, carrying an almost metallic tang. Looking up, Lucy couldn’t find where the sun should be.

“It should be a lot hotter this time of year,” she said.

“Too much shit in the atmosphere, I guess,” Jack said. He let her go and walked a little ways toward some bushes. “Heidi, you get eaten by a bear?”

“Oh my god, are there bears around here?” came the shrieking reply.

Lucy mouthed asshole at Jack, who grinned.

A high whining noise broke the still air, as though a jet engine had materialized somewhere above them. Before Lucy could do more than look up and then back at Jack, a cracking boom sounded, the reverberations rattling through her bones and teeth like thunder from the worst summer storm she’d ever seen.

“Get back in the car,” she yelled. “Heidi!”

It was too late. The road rippled, and the trees seemed to burst apart on the far side where they hadn’t been cleared for farmland. A wave like the one before, this one churning and brownish-gray, descended on them. Lucy tried to get into the Jeep, but the wave caught her, throwing her into the air and over the low wooden fence. She hit the ground with a crunch that knocked away what little air was left in her lungs. The shockwave smashed her flat and she clung to the ground, her arms around her head, her eardrums pulsing as though she’d dove too deep into water.

Then it was gone, the horrible pressure lifting, her ears ringing and throbbing. Lucy uncurled slowly, wiggling her fingers and then her toes. Nothing seemed broken, though her mouth tasted like grit and blood. She spit and pulled her torn, grimy tee-shirt up over her nose and mouth.

Dust clogged the air, stinging particles rasping on her skin. She squinted and shaded her eyes with one hand, trying to make out anything.

It wasn’t just the ringing in her ears. Someone was screaming. Lucy moved toward the voice, stepping over the scattered remains of the low wood fence. The Jeep loomed ahead and appeared mostly intact. She couldn’t see Jack or Heidi.

She stumbled toward the screams and nearly fell down the embankment into what was left of the bushes Heidi had been using as a makeshift toilet. A smear of blue and red caught her eye, and Lucy kicked her way through the debris.

Heidi lay half on the ground, half-impaled on the jagged remains of a sapling. Blood gushed, dark and lazy, from her chest and trickled out of her gasping, screaming mouth. Jack was kneeling at her side, his tee-shirt off, revealing a back bloodied with cuts.

This time, Lucy didn’t freeze. She pulled off her own shirt and ran forward, offering it to Jack to help stop up the blood oozing from around the stick in Heidi’s chest.

He shook his head and tried to say something, but coughed instead. That was when Lucy saw his left arm. At first her brain refused to make sense of it. She thought he had a piece of tree sticking out of his arm and made an aborted motion to pull it free from his skin.

That was when she realized it wasn’t a stick. That was his left arm. Or at least the bone. The humerus, she remembered from high school biology. There was nothing funny about it. Giggles tightened her chest and she turned her head, vomiting water and bile into the dirt.

Jack yelled again and she made out that he wanted her to tie off her shirt around his upper arm. Blood ran in a dirty crimson river down his useless hand. Sucking in a breath that was more grit than air, Lucy did as he asked, amazed he didn’t pass out.

“Big damn soldier,” she muttered, knowing he couldn’t hear her.

“Hey,” a voice boomed from the haze, followed by two people, a man and a woman. They had on gasmasks and goggles over their eyes. The woman had a rifle.

Lucy blinked grit from her eyes and waved to them. If they wanted to kill her or do something all Texas Chainsaw Massacre, she wasn’t in any state to stop them. She just had to trust now that her dad was right, and that most people were good people.

He was right. They were good people.

Maddie Grace and her son Victor managed to get Heidi free of the tree, cutting the sapling out from under her. She was bundled into a quilt for the short run back to the farmhouse, where Victor’s wife Angel waited with two scared but curious kids. Lucy found out their names as she was bundled into a comfortable country kitchen. Gas lamps were lit and Angel got to work on cleaning Lucy’s cuts.

Heidi had stopped screaming. Angel said that Victor was a paramedic, had been with the army, too. He’d see to her friends.

Lucy didn’t argue, though she felt like a coward. She didn’t think she could face more blood and pain. Every cut, every bruise, every ache and pain woke up and tried to voice how much her body hated her all at once. Her ears wouldn’t equalize, and she wasn’t sure she could hear at all from the left one.

Maddie Grace appeared in the doorway, grief and determination etched in the heavy lines of her face.

“You’ll be wanting to say goodbye,” she said.

“Jack? But it was just his arm—” Lucy stood up too quickly and the world spun.

“No, not your man. The girl.”

Guilt wracked Lucy, but she shoved it away. It was like Jack said. Act now, process later.

“Of course,” she said. She walked forward, following Maddie Grace into what had been a utility room but was now a makeshift surgery. A folding table, the kind you might use for a picnic or impromptu card game, held Heidi’s still body. Bloody rags were gathered in a tidy pile to one side, and Victor stood, his head hanging, tears dripping off his thick nose.

Jack lay half propped in a folding chair, his arm still wrapped in her tee-shirt. He looked up at Lucy and held out his good hand to her.

She ignored it, going to Heidi’s side on the table. Lucy wrapped her fingers around her friend’s and was surprised when Heidi’s eyes flickered and she weakly squeezed back.