Эллен Гилкрист - Black Winter

First published in Fantasy & Science Fiction , June 1995

I am writing this from the cave, grandchild of mine, baby boy I left behind. If you live, if you are alive, over there, in Germany, where I pray the skies are clear. Strange, it began the day you were to be born. February 27, 1996, as we measured time. Will there be time when you read this? Is Europe there? Is anybody there?

I must not waste paper. We have ten bank envelopes and the notepad that was in the car and the grocery bag and The Tulsa World. We will learn to make paper, if we survive. We swore that last night, Tannin and I, when we divided up the paper that we have. I love you, James Ingersol Martin. If she really named you that, after what has happened. If you were born, if there is a world and you are in it. It is so dark here. There is light in the middle of the day for five or six hours sometime. We have a watch. A Timex I put on for a joke that morning. I never wore a watch. We almost bough t a watch at Saks in Utica Square, also for a joke. We wish we had. And we wish we had bought the coffee we looked at there. Godiva Coffee, Hazelnut, not to mention the candy we didn't buy, We might have had a pound of Godiva chocolates with us instead of the junk we did finally grab, in that last ten minutes, in the convenience store by the filling station.

We had gone to Tulsa to see Four Baboons Adoring the Sun , which was playing at Eton Square. I adore Stockard Channing. So does Tannin. Tannin McCaslin, from Nashville, Tennessee, age twenty-six, your grandmother's protege and best friend in this her sixtieth year to heaven. I am writing to you, James Ingersol, because I think you are my best bet to be alive. The other ones are, or were, in the state of Mississippi. From the one conversation we have had in the last months, I don't think Mississippi is there anymore.

We still have a small amount of gasoline but we are afraid to use it, even to keep the battery in the car running. It's a terrible problem, trying to decide what to do about the gasoline. We're in Oklahoma, for God's sake. Surely we could find some gasoline if we looked for it. Unless it all blew up. We don't think the clouds look like they came from gasoline fires. They are thick and nearly cover the sky but have no smell.

We were about five miles from downtown Tulsa. We had stopped to get gasoline, on our way home from the movie. The sirens were going off everywhere. They didn't stop and I knew what they were. I had been watching the news. I knew what was going on in Russia, in North Korea, in Iran, in the Ukraine. Tannin had been writing all week. He wasn't well-informed. “Go in there and get some food,” I said.

I'll say this for him. He didn't question me. “Get what?” he asked.

“Anything” I answered. “Run.”

He ran. He came back in a few minutes with a sack of food. There had been no one to pay for it. Cars were driving strangely everywhere. I wanted Tannin to drive but I was behind the wheel. “Get out the map,” I said. “Tell me how to go to the most desolate place outside of town.”

“What's happening?”

“I think it's nuclear war.”

“Take I-44. The Cherokee country is as desolate as it gets.”

Then I drove. Did I mention the coat? I had just bought a full-length fur coat on sale at Saks. Tannin had bought some jeans and a summer sweater at The Gap. That is a store we used to have, when Oklahoma was here. Eight months ago. When you were born. If you were born. I'm getting tired. I tire easily now. There's so little sun. So little food. I'll write more tomorrow. When there is light.

The sun came out for a while this morning. Tannin thinks the clouds are growing thinner. I think so too, in the day. In the afternoon it all seems so hopeless. We think we should go southwest, but in the desert is where we had the silos for our missiles. It might be worse there. Probably it's the air currents that matter most. We have drawn what we remember from television weather maps on the wall of a dry part of the cave. The currents changed all the time, of course, and the force of the explosions could have caused more changes. Not to mention the heat. We used to have clinical, rational discussions about such things. A few months ago. But now we are just trying to survive. We haven't given up. We just quit pretending to be left-brained.

This morning we had a chicken. Tannin catches them in the woods now and then. Traps them. There must have been chicken houses around here because the woods are full of chickens. They have grown very large and are quite noisy, nesting in the pine trees. It makes us sad to kill them. Also, we boil the meat until it is almost tasteless. I don't know what all this boiling is about. Radiation is not bacteria, but we are twentieth-century primitives and boiling is all we know to do. Tannin thinks we should stay inside as much as possible and cover our skin when we go out. His father and brother are physicists at Vanderbilt, or were. We don't talk about our families. We're going to talk about them, but not yet. But anyway, we boil those chickens to smithereens.

If we had been exposed to radiation we'd be dead by now, If we were exposed why would those chickens still be alive? Here is where we were after the sirens went off. In a convertible for an hour and forty minutes going east. Then in a stone church near Lincoln, Arkansas, for ten days. Then in the car for an hour. Then we were in the cave. But I need to go back to the beginning.

Tannin threw the sack of groceries in the car and I started driving. Most of the other cars had stopped. People were running into steel buildings. We drove I-44 to the Cherokee Turnpike. By then the radio stations were all static. We had been listening to NPR. I thought that meant that New York and the east coast had been hit. There was never any reception after the sirens went off. Only static. “Don't drive too fast,” was the only thing Tannin said. “We don't want to use up all the gas.”

“Where should we go?”

“I don't know.”

“Who is bombing us?”

“I don't know. North Korea. China.”

“If we aren't at ground zero we want to get away from the prevailing winds. I think south is the best way to go.”

“The turnpike only goes one way.”

“We should find shelter, Rhoda. We shouldn't be in a convertible.”

“I want to find a side road and head for the woods. There will be rioting. I don't want to be where people are.”

“We'll be in Siloam Springs pretty soon. We could go to that park by Lake Wedington.”

“We need to find a building.”

“It might be too late for that.”

“We didn't see a burst of light.”

“Is this happening?”

“Just drive the car. Find us a place to hide.”

Forty minutes later we were on a back road leading to Lincoln, Arkansas. It was a road I knew from when I had a hippie boyfriend. He had had friends who built themselves a sod house on this road.

The skies were clouding up. Nuclear fallout? We didn't know. Everything was ominous now. There were no cars anywhere. Where had all the people gone? Why were no cars on the roads? What had they seen on television that had made the houses and the roads so still?

Seven miles down county road 385 we found a stone church and decided to take shelter there. We pulled up to the door and unloaded part of our supplies and went inside and lay down on the floor.

“Is this happening?”

“Yes.”

“Will we die? Are we going to die?”

“Maybe not.”

“If we're radiated our skin will fall off. There will be holes in our skin.”

“We didn't see anything. We didn't see the flash. Maybe it's just the east coast. It will take a while for the radiation to get here,”