James Van Pelt - Summer of the Apocalypse

Eric yelled, “Dodge! You can come out now.” He heard frantic whispering. “You too, Rabbit.” Sheepishly, the two boys stood. “How’d you find us, Grandfather?” asked Dodge. Rabbit said, “I told you he was too smart for us.”

Eric smiled at them. “You boys eat yet?”

When they finished lunch, Dodge showed Eric their inventory. Dodge had packed five one-pound packages of beef jerky, a roll of dried crab apple leather and a package of rock candy. Rabbit’s pack, which Eric decided must weigh sixty pounds, had twice as much food, two knives, a first-aid kit box filled with various herbs, a tool kit complete with hammer and saw, a hundred-foot length of rope, a tent, a shovel, and a complete change of clothes for both of them. “I like to be prepared,” he said.

“You can’t come with me, boys,” said Eric.

“I knew he’d say that,” said Rabbit. He scowled and turned his scarred face away. Dodge wasn’t bothered. “Where you going to anyway?” He sucked on a piece of candy. “Dad don’t even know your gone. He’s going to bust a bow string for sure.”

Dodge told him that they’d discovered him missing the day before, probably only minutes after he’d left, and they decided to go after him. They’d run home, packed, and been on the road for an hour when nightfall came. They’d slept in a Chevy van that was partially protected by a collapsed garage. “Old man will kill himself if we don’t catch him,” is what Dodge said that Rabbit had said. “Said no such thing,” said Rabbit.

“Did to,” said Dodge. “We figured you know some great scavenging, like a treasure trove we talked about. Caught up to you this morning. Still don’t know how you guessed us out.” Rabbit turned back to them. “All the good stuff’s gone.”

Eric chewed on a tough piece of jerky thoughtfully. “You hear anything last night?” Dodge blanched. “Nothing.” Eric recognized Dodge’s lie. At ten, Dodge didn’t have a poker face. Rabbit said without flinching, “Some thunder.”

“You didn’t hear anything like this?” Eric howled.

Dodge’s jaw dropped. “That was you?” He looked at Rabbit and then back at Eric. “You?” Rabbit slapped his thigh. “Told you it wasn’t ghosts.”

Dodge snapped back, “I didn’t say they were ghosts. I said it sounded like ghosts.”

“You were scared.”

“So were you.” Dodge looked back at Eric again. “How’d you do all that?”

“It wasn’t all me, son. It wasn’t all me.” He wouldn’t say any more about it. They finished lunch.

“So what about the treasure trove?” asked Dodge.

Eric thought about the library at Boulder. Thousands of books: books on farming, metallurgy, medicine, astronomy. “I guess maybe you’re right about that,” he said. “I’ve got a treasure in mind if I can get to it. If it’s still there.”

Dodge said, “You’re gonna need help carrying it back, then, right?” Rabbit nodded in agreement. Eric picked at a piece of meat jammed between his front teeth. “Your dad…”

“Dad’s scared your gonna teach me something he don’t want me to know,” said Dodge. “You ought to hear him go on. He’s asking me all the time, ‘What’s he saying to you now? What’s the old man saying?’

And he keeps telling me to stay away from you.” Dodge bit his lip. Eric thought it a sad expression. It was a habit Troy had when he was young. He’d bite his lip so often that sometimes it’d turn blue from the bruises underneath. “I don’t want to stay away from you, Grandfather.” Eric explained why they couldn’t go, how the trip might be dangerous, how an old man who knew the ways of the world would be safe but if he had to look after two kids that they all might get hurt, how their parents would worry about them. He used all his best arguments, so it was with more than a little amazement, when he reached the intersection of Bowles Avenue and C-470 and moved up the hill towards the stone hut, that he realized the boys were still with him, and that he had agreed to take them. As they cleared trash off the hut’s floor so there would be room for their sleeping bags, Rabbit said, “You know, somebody’s been watching us.”

Eric said, “Excuse me?”

Holding the corners, Rabbit snapped his ground cloth out and it settled gently to the stone floor. “They been spying on us since lunch. Surprised you didn’t notice.” It was the longest speech he made all day.

Four days after the motorcycle thugs shouted their parting curses, hopped on their motorcycles and roared away, traffic on the highway stopped. The night before, the bumper to bumper parade had crept west, headlights glinting from the chrome and windshields of the cars in front of them, taillights winking bright red as they tapped their brakes. Sometimes someone would beep, and the horn echoed from the granite wall across the stream. Two or three hours after sunset, Eric’s mother relieved him. They’d been keeping twenty-four hour watch of the path to the cave. But in the morning, when Eric took the lookout again, the empty, silent road greeted him. He put on his headphones and thumbed on his radio for news, hoping that the batteries had somehow recharged in the night, but they were dead. Three days later, when he took the morning watch, he still wondered what no traffic meant. Had they cured it? Did the doctors fix everything and no one was scared? He sighed. There was no way to know without a radio. He couldn’t believe that Dad would have had the foresight to store all the food and other supplies in the cave, but forget to include a radio. He looked around at the familiar terrain. A thin coating of frost covered the shaded part of the rocks. A quarter-inch band of moisture marked the boundary between the shade and sun. He pressed his hand against a rock and left a five fingered shape in the frost. He pulled the useless headphones around his neck. The cold metal raised goose bumps on his legs and arms. He tried not to touch his hair, which felt heavy and flat. Oil coated his skin like paint. Dad had said they’d wash at the river, but he hadn’t said it was safe yet. He said he didn’t want to risk being seen on the road. Eric believed himself lucky that Dad let him brush his teeth.

He thought about Amanda Grieves, a girl he liked at school. What would she think of him now, dirty and hiding in a cave? She sat next to him in the band, the flute section, an instrument he’d picked two years earlier because Ian Anderson, the lead singer for the group Jethro Tull, played it. She was second chair; he was third. Each day he’d think about how close they were. Their legs sometimes touched. He felt her warmth through his jeans. He had dreamed about holding her hand for weeks, but he didn’t tell anyone, not even his friend, Mike, who talked about “scoring” constantly. “I really bagged one last night,” he’d say. “We back-seat bopped till we dropped.” But Eric just wanted to hold Amanda’s hand. He imagined them walking down the hall, fingers intertwined.

Rocks clattered behind him and he jumped. His dad was coming toward him, methodically kicking pebbles on his way, keeping his head down as if he were purposefully clearing the path.

“Quiet?” Dad asked.

Annoyance flared in Eric. The canyon was empty from end to end. Obviously it was quiet. He considered something clever like, “You just missed the floats and bands,” but said nothing. Dad rested his hands on the boulder Eric used for a watch post. As big as a refrigerator on its side, it offered a perfect view of the only approach to the cave and was easy to hide behind. Dad bent his elbows until his chest met the rock, doing a kind of leaning push-up. Eric doubted his dad was strong enough to do a real push-up, then he thought about the boxes in the cave: cases of canned fruits and vegetables and the other supplies. He still marveled over the mattresses. No matter how he tried, he couldn’t imagine his scrawny, unatheletic, bookish father muscling the mattresses up the scrub oak choked trail from the road. A black holster hung from Dad’s belt. Eric couldn’t imagine his dad carrying a gun either, but there it was, dark wooden handle sticking out of the dark leather. Dad said, “I have to go to the van.”