Kent Kelly - End of Days

That had to be it. None of this was real.

The words have been spoken, she was telling herself. All alone now, until you can wake up. This is the End of Days. This is the nightmare.

All she could do was drive, drive until her daughter Lacie kissed her awake and another perfect Sunday morning began as Tom snuck out with a wave and a grin, shifting his golf clubs onto his muscled back while he stretched and breathed in the frigid, sweet mountain air.

Get to the shelter , sang a girl’s voice in her mind. But it was her own voice from another time, from when she had been innocent, and kind, and giving and unbetrayed, and never raped, never touched, selfless and mousy and loved by momma and tortured by the other girls at Academy.

The shelter. Get to. Get to.

Child-Sophie, no longer real, sang to the bitter woman who had become her. Trilling, a gentle insistence of allure, a girl-melody of urgent secrets.

Get to, get to.

At some point, she must have turned the radio back on. Jake Handler was no longer on the air, but some strange bluegrass and Appalachian jazz piece was lulling her into a surreal and droning flick of scene from scene, highway to forest to mansions back to canyon and rainy blur, all over and back again.

Somehow, in frigid vaults of the nightmare, all the mountain roads were just as they were supposed to be.

Sophie hummed to herself, another tuneless lullaby of the haunted and the broken. Her fingers trembled and flicked through some chilly, curious moisture upon the wheel.

On the radio a dire, piercing klaxon broke over the song, silencing the lilt of fiddles and twang of a mandolin.

It was the voice of a perfectly cultured young woman, something like the automated train announcer at Denver International Airport, or perhaps the submissive intonation of a Star Trek computer. Pleasant, dignified, absurdly calm, utterly without terror despite the urgent precision of the woman’s words.

Sophie was forced to listen as the whistling klaxon buzzed its way into silence. Unreality began to melt away.

This was real.

“This is not a test.

This is an urgent bulletin from the Emergency Broadcast System.

Seek interior shelter immediately.

Do not remain outside; do not seek cover in or beneath any vehicle.

Take only the most vital essentials and shelter in place at once.

We repeat, this is not a test.

If you are currently situated in a building that is equipped with a fallout, earthquake or tornado shelter, go to the shelter immediately.

If you are driving, pull aside at once and seek shelter in the nearest concrete building, with your face pressed down and your hands interlocked behind your head.

Do not shelter in doorways, or near windows.

Seek as much cover as possible, disregarding unauthorized access signage or restrictions of any kind.

If you can greatly improve your shelter by running for less than sixty seconds, do not panic or delay in evacuating your current location.

Should you have immediate access to water, food, battery-powered light sources or medical supplies, take as much as you can carry with all haste.

A thermonuclear launch has been confirmed by NORAD with an estimated impact time of twenty-five to twenty-eight minutes following the beginning of this message.

One minute and seventeen seconds have now elapsed since the beginning of this bulletin.

We repeat, this is not a test.

This is an urgent bulletin from the Emergency Broadcast System.”

The klaxon on the radio once again, this time broken by three horrible droning buzzes more felt than heard, the harbinger sounds of a tornado approaching, or a flash flood thundering down the canyon.

Real. Tom is dead. Alone and oh, this is oh it can’t be oh God, this is real.

An unfamiliar, incongruous smile spread across Sophie’s face.

Lacie, Mitch, grandma, me. Pete, Jake, Mrs. Claverdale. Mrs. Claverdale’s grandson, deaf and waving from the driveway. Home-baked cookies, lemonade. Signing, thank you. Thank you, Michael.

Someone was giggling, then crying. Sophie drew in a spasming gulp of air. The crying stopped.

We’re all going to die.

As she drove the same emergency bulletin repeated, every beat and lilt of the young woman’s voice a pulse of calm and panic, each reiteration changing only in its time signature at the end.

“Three minutes and twelve seconds have now elapsed since the beginning of this bulletin.”

“Four minutes and forty-eight seconds have now elapsed.”

“Six minutes and twenty-four seconds…”

Time seemed to blur as Sophie guided the H4 up roads which were both familiar and unknown to her, misted and rain-spun tiers of isolate forest and asphalt which blurred together and away, away, seeming to coruscate along the radiant and uncoiling absence of her senses.

No touch no sight no sound, no, I, there is no one here, her mind sang. I am no one. There is no one inside me any longer.

Reality shunted aside the fleeting visions of curves and trees, and Sophie hit the brakes as she flew around a curve at too high a speed, wheels squealing and mud flicking up against the guardrail, and almost veered into a police car that was pulled up into a muddy turnaround.

How fast had she been driving? Where was she? She blinked as she passed the police car at fifty, looking back into her rearview to see if the officer was going to pull her over.

What she saw didn’t make any sense at all. The officer was sitting in the back seat of his own car, staring at his shotgun over the front seat and running his fingers over his balding head. His shoulders were shaking. Was he sobbing?

The road curved to the right, a constant ascent now, forcing her to pay attention to its course. The police car faded into the mist and sleet curling far behind her.

What was happening to her?

“Nine minutes and twenty-six seconds have now elapsed since the beginning of this bulletin.”

It can’t, it can’t happen, no. I’m going mad. We’re all, we’re all going. Going to.

“Focus,” Sophie whispered. “Three. Three six nine twelve, fifteen eighteen twenty-one. My name, name, is Sophia Ingrid Saint-Germain. I am thirty-eight years old. I live in, I live… my… my Social Security Number is five three one—”

Another curve, a brief blossom of sunlight reflecting off the mountain road as two wind-parted clouds tossed away in separate directions and the sun poured down for some few beautiful seconds. Sophie slowed again. Some kind of Lexus, flying toward her in the opposite lane doing at least eighty, swerved on the road, corrected and whipped by her. Sophie caught a glimpse of a young woman with shell-shocked eyes and thin, silver-ringed hands clenching the steering wheel.

“My Social, my Social is five three one, six two, two…”

Her voice tapered out as the tears came again. She could not stop them this time.

War.

“Eleven minutes and two seconds…”

Surely the news was just about everywhere by now. She continued doing all that she could, the only thing. She kept driving, kept breathing, kept thinking as little as she dared to keep her comprehension of the world and its forthcoming annihilation to the merest sliver of awareness, motor skills and rote memory taking over, knowing that any moment should could collapse into full realization — Nuclear war — and curl away into a ball, helpless, useless, veering toward the cliff-side with only the guardrail to keep the Hummer from plunging down into—