Kent Kelly - End of Days

The siren.

Death. The Angel of Death. O, clarion.

The siren.

The emergency klaxon sounded, on and on. Far off behind the town of Black Rock, toward Rollinsville and up by the ranger’s tower, it sounded that keening signal which Sophie had always loathed, but had learned in time to ignore. The klaxon that always made Lacie cry, that startled her from napping. It was the one siren that was always tested on the first Wednesday of every month, meant to presage tornadoes and forest fires, simple and tiny disasters from a yesterday-world that soon would be burned to ashes.

The cry of the siren, it raged in Sophie. It spoke to the most primal part of her.

Flee. Flee.

There would be no more tornado warnings, no more warnings for wildfire. This was the final cry of war, This is war, this is really happening , and the missiles were coming down.

Halfway around the world and they’re almost here.

We’re going to die, Tom is dead, we’re all going to die.

Oh, Lacie. Oh, Lacie I’m sorry I ever gave birth to you.

I never meant for this to happen to you.

This isn’t the ending I promised you, oh I love you.

I’m sorry for the world, for bringing you here, oh I am so sorry.

Never did I believe they would…

they would actually

never

never never

Time had become so tangible, so weighty and slow. The emergency bulletin was on again.

“Twenty-three minutes and fifty seconds…”

“Warning! Impact is imminent…”

I’m not going to make it.

Sophie heard herself give a choking cry. She was going to be sick, her stomach was twisting in upon itself, the coffee was gurgling, welling up and burning her esophagus. Her cheeks puffed out with a moan of nausea.

Can’t stop

can’t stop

She hit the gas. Looking down the road, it was right there. The waterfall was real, the shelter, it was actually there.

I’m not going to.

Driving as fast as she dared, she aimed the H4 directly toward the waterfall that marked the road’s dead end. The Hummer swerved of its own accord as its right front wheel caught a rainwater-tumbled rock on the edge of the wheel rut, then came down with a slippery thud and locked itself into the rut again. The Hummer veered toward the right-side canyon wall. Sophie yelped as the passenger-side mirror collided with the rocky face, shattered, and snapped one of its metal supports in two. The mirror there dangled and bumped against the passenger door, as Sophie steadied the H4 away from the wall.

Faster.

Thirty yards away from the waterfall, twenty.

The waterfall was little more than a few stringy gouts of white water cascading down, but they sprayed up enough of a mist to obscure the cave behind to just about anyone, and Tom’s cleverly-painted canvas hid the cave entirely. The only thing strange about the scene, a counterpoint to the icy and guideless waters and misted stone, was the little radio antenna tower propped up on weathered girders far above.

“Twenty-five minutes and twenty-six seconds…”

“Warning! Impact is imminent…”

The deepening mud caused the H4 to lurch into an engine-throttling crawl. Fifteen yards until the H4 would run its way under the waterfall. Twelve.

No time.

No time

no time no time —

There was a crackle on the radio, and Sophie took her foot off the gas involuntarily as the emergency bulletin was overtaken by a frantic babble, words coming out in a broken torrent and constricted into a single voice that couldn’t breathe the words out fast enough. She knew that voice.

Jake Handler was yelling, “War! War! Pike’s Peak! I can see the contrail! The warhead is splitting up! Oh, Jesus! Save us! Cover your eyes! Get the fuck away from the windows! Get—”

The H4 lurched to a stop just before the waterfall, in the shallow pool before the cave. Sophie could not control her stomach anymore. Her cheeks puffed out again, her breath rushed out of her nostrils, and she vomited coffee and eggs and the undigested remnant of last night’s dinner over the wheel, over her hands, over the dash and into her lap. She could taste coffee and cream, hot stomach acid and the horrible taste of bile. Of terror. She vomited again, but nothing came out the second time.

Shaking her head, tapping the gas and clutching the dripping wheel with shivering fingers, she edged the H4 under the sheets of icy and pelting water, through the parting seam in the camouflaged tarp, and into the blackness of the cave. She flicked on the headlights, and in that moment the entire world behind her turned shock-white beneath a photonegative sky of tiered and burning clouds.

Airburst.

It’s coming it’s coming—

What if she had not been in the canyon? The cave?

That thought lingered, resonating upon the hovering and fragility-infected length of one, shell-shocked moment that went on and on forever, a moment of blinding light and nothing else, soundless and impossible.

The white light pierced through the waterfall, the darkness, it turned her rear-facing mirrors into squares of snowblind purity, sunburst utter white and utter glory. The radio died in a huge burst of static. The wailing klaxon was silenced upon the mountain.

Some voice of reason deep inside her, Tom is that you? Are you here? Are you alive? , was whispering to her in its silence, Think, Sophie. Not impact yet, it’s airburst. Airburst. Knocking out communications, the—

The blinding light turned scarlet. The one moment fractured.

A wave of heat swelled through the waterfall, spinning its arcs of water into gouts of ice and steam. The H4’s tinted windows flared and turned to deepest black. Sophie hit the brakes to avoid hitting the end wall of the cave. She went blind. She took in a breath to scream, but the shock of it all was stolen from her as an immense thunderclap shook the cave walls, made the mountain groan and set the H4’s windows juddering and quaking in their frames. Somehow the driver’s door lock sprang up and a little dying alarm went off, two chirps then done and gone.

The sonic boom of the airburst nuclear strikes — over Denver and NORAD and the Air Force Academy and Colorado Springs — turned into a long, cascading tide of overlapping waves of roar and thunder.

It’s happening. It’s really happening.

Seconds had passed, eternity.

At ten miles an hour, with tinted windows blinded off and doused in the savage light of the aerial nuclear explosion, the H4 crunched into the far wall of the cave. One of the airbags, the passenger airbag of all things, went off with a bang and puffed away half of Sophie’s interior space.

She coughed, a gargling sound. She swallowed stomach acid.

The windows began to de-tint themselves. One headlight was broken, the other casting a garish light directly against the cave wall. Back behind her, outside, the airburst fireball flickered the mirrors once more, and the windows all went dark again. Thousands more nuclear warheads were soon to fall. The real strike, the ground strike, would come down now in mere minutes, with no defense systems or aircraft operational to stop them.

Everyone in Black Hawk would burn. The world.

As if disembodied, thinking but unable to act, trembling there with vomit dripping down her silk blouse and down her ankles, Sophie wondered: if millions of people were to scream at once, all crouched down in their basements and their office building shelters, would she be able to hear it there, miles away?