James Van Pelt - Summer of the Apocalypse

Eric woke slowly and saw a slim shaft of dust-filled light slanting across the stone room. He thought for a moment he was back in the cave high above the river and that the soft bubble of breathing by his cheek was his father. “Dad?” he whispered in the dark room. How could light come into the cave? A crack in a wall we’ve never seen before? A place from where bats come and go, the seam invisible every day of the year except this one when the long hole in the wall lined up exactly with the sun? He puzzled over this question until slowly he remembered he was in a hut a few hundred yards from the intersection of Bowles Avenue and C-470. He closed his eyes and savored the feeling of being fifteen, of sleeping beside his father and mother. But the image slipped away until he barely felt it, until all that remained was the breathing, the gurgle that reminded him of Dad, but wasn’t. It was Dodge, head covered in his sleeping bag. Today they’d start north.

Eric rolled and the stiffness in his back woke him further. Rabbit slept beside Dodge, the scar side of his face down. In the shadows of the room, Rabbit looked angelic, like a baby and unlike the silent, brooding boy he was.

Outside the hut Eric grunted through his morning exercises, his breath fogging the cold morning air. Seven miles east, the Platte River glimmered like a golden ribbon in the rising sun. From this vantage point he saw all south-west Littleton. Most of the buildings along Bowles Avenue were burned down, and even huge structures like South-West Plaza Mall sprawled, a pile of broken bricks and rusted girders on its own weed-covered parking lot, but many buildings miles away seemed untouched by the years. Glass still glinted in their windows. They stood solid and geometric, and Eric could envision them as they had been. People would be going to work about now; cars would stream purposefully along the road. Eric guessed by the sun it was past six o’clock. Helicopters would be buzzing above the main roads, reporting on the traffic. People would be buying donuts to take to the office. Eric had a sudden, solid memory of Winchell’s donuts. Cinnamon Crumb. He used to stop on the way to school for two Cinnamon Crumb donuts, still warm. Even late in the morning after sitting through three or four classes, he might find a grain of brown sugar clinging to his shirt, and his fingers smelled of Cinnamon.

“What’s that?” Dodge asked. He pointed down the long stretch of four-lane highway. Ahead of them the top of a sign peeked over a hill. As they walked closer, more and more of it showed until Eric recognized the familiar logo.

“It’s a gas station. A Phillip’s 66.”

“What was their slogan, Grandpa?” The slogan game was one they played often. Dodge skipped ahead. Eric guessed that Dodge didn’t feel the weight of his backpack the way he did.

“You can trust your car to the man who wears the star.” Eric tightened his waist belt to take some stress off his shoulders.

Dodge laughed. “No way. That’s Texaco. Was it the ‘Hottest brand going’?” Eric said, “Conoco.” He thought as they walked closer. “I don’t know. Maybe they didn’t have a slogan.”

“We can find out in the books at Boulder, can’t we?” asked Dodge. They climbed into a gully that had washed away fifty feet of the road. Eric said, “I suppose, but there’s much more important information in books.”

Dodge nodded agreeably as he scrambled up the loose bank and back onto the blacktop. “Books will tell us everything.”

Eric watched where he put his feet, making sure there were no wobbly stones, planting his step firmly before putting his weight on it. More old folks die of broken bones, he thought, than anything else. They’re doing fine right up to the time they break a hip; then they’re doomed. “Well, maybe not everything. Books don’t know everything.”

Dodge grabbed his arm and pulled him the last step. His strength surprised Eric. Good grip for a ten-year-old. Dodge said, “You told us books got stuff about the Gone Times, like cars and computers. What else we need?”

Rabbit had found another spot to get out of the gulch and squatted on the road waiting for them. He had stripped his shirt and tied it around his waist. Sweat glistened on his chest. Eric thought, they’re like horses. He realized that the pace he set must seem terribly slow to them. They were only twenty-two or twenty-three miles from Boulder now. If the boys were on their own, they’d make it by sunset. He figured he might make it by tomorrow evening, but that would be pushing it. A ten-mile day was a lot of walking.

He took a long drink from his canteen. “I’ve been reading books for sixty-five years, and I’ve read amazing passages. Poetry, mostly, and fiction. Beautiful stories about wonderful people living adventures. And there were books on science, and picture books.”

Dodge grinned, “Tell us about how you see pictures in your head.”

“Not really pictures. I mean, reading is like being there sometimes. I’ll be reading along, and I’ll forget that I’m holding a book. Suddenly I’ll be Joan of Arc, or Moses rolling back the Red Sea.” He hadn’t had much luck teaching Dodge to read. Unlike most children his age, Dodge could work his way through a page of a book, but it was painful and slow as he sounded out each word. Troy had been partly successful at limiting Eric’s influence on the boy. Eric could only teach Dodge and Rabbit two or three times a week. He suspected that Rabbit had picked up on the lessons better, but he seldom read out loud.

Dodge said, “I never see pictures.”

“It takes practice. You’ve got to keep doing it. Then one day you’ll be reading along, and the words will vanish off the page and you’ll be in the story.”

“Like that television stuff, right? And all the magic from the Gone Times are in the books, right? Like ’lectricity?”

Rabbit cleared his throat. “You said books can’t tell us everything. What’s wrong with books?” He wondered where to start. He’d spent days and days reading books after his parents had died. There was no place to go, and in the books he could get lost. Later, he’d read for information, for medicine, for mid-wifing. He’d delivered Troy on his own. He remembered the sun streaming through the rips in the rotted curtains in the living room where Troy was born, how the sun heated his back as he supported Troy’s tiny, slippery head, but the books hadn’t told him enough and Leda died an hour later. She was small hipped and thirty-nine years old, and they’d assumed that one or both of them were sterile. The pregnancy surprised them. They’d been together for fourteen years. He marked her grave with a stone he took from a mortuary storehouse and an epitaph that had taken him a week to carve: LEDA

“We don’t need last names no more.”

Eric said, “Reading about life isn’t the same as living life.”

The Phillip’s 66 sign, maybe a quarter mile away he guessed, looked odd. He studied it. At first he thought part of the sign was broken out, but as they got closer, he saw that a piece of plywood covered some letters, so now it read Phil’s. No signs of the gas station remained other than the low concrete benches where the pumps would have been.

Dodge said, “Do you hear that?”

Eric stopped and turned his head from one side to the other. “What?”

“That.” Dodge pointed up the slope to their left. A huge brick building, its windows boarded, sat at the end of a footpath that started at the Phil’s sign. Eric heard it now, a soft, quick thumping. He listened intently.

“An engine,” he said. “I’ll be darned! A diesel engine.” He started up the path. Dodge dashed ahead. Rabbit ran to Eric and grabbed his arm, then looked at the building and shook his head. The boy said,