James Van Pelt - Summer of the Apocalypse

Out of sight from the cop, but where Eric could see, the passenger door swung quietly open. Slowly, a sneakered foot, then a bare leg slid into view. The ghost cop struggled to cuff the other hand, but the mechanism seemed jammed. Beetle-Eyes blubbered, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Don’t hurt me.” Stunned by the nearness of his own death, by the violence of the shooting, Eric watched slack jawed, as if the event were television. Whatever anger had motivated him to confront Beetle-Eyes was gone. A short-skirted woman hefting a baseball bat emerged from the door. She raised the bat above her head and ran around the corner of the van where the ghost cop knelt over Beetle-Eyes. Eric snapped out of his lethargy. “Watch out!”

Arching her back like a woodsman, the woman paused before swinging the bat. The ghost cop rolled, fired; the woman fell.

Beetle-Eyes stretched for his gun, got it, swung it around.

The ghost cop fired.

Two puffs of smoke floated away like carnival balloons.

Dusting his pants off, the ghost cop trudged back to the cruiser, gun hanging from his hand as if it weighed a hundred pounds. From the back of the car he took two of the black plastic tarps Eric had seen earlier and unfolded them. They were body bags.

As Eric watched, the cop uncuffed Beetle-Eyes, fitted a bag over him and rolled him over so he could close it; then he bagged the woman. He tossed her bat in the bag with her and drug both of them to the side of the road along with the other bodies. Everything he did, he did tiredly, seeming to barely have the strength to move himself from place to place.

Stooping over the last bag Beetle-Eyes had robbed, the ghost cop placed the hands inside and zipped it up. He moved to the next one and did the same.

Eric turned and looked behind him at the hundreds of open bags and beyond them where oily black smoke poured into the sky from the Coors plant. A meadow lark lilted through its notes again and the sun shimmered in waves off the road. Eric went to the nearest bag. Trying not to look in, he gripped the large, square zipper tab and pulled it shut. Soon the cop caught up with him and, not speaking, they worked together moving from body bag to body bag, softly putting hands back inside and closing them. An hour or so later, when they finished, Eric straightened painfully and rubbed his back. The cop’s face was an agony of exhaustion lines, the skin sallow and muscleless.

Eric said, “Maybe you should go home.” The mirrored sunglasses reflected blankly back at him.

“Nobody will know.”

Wind flicked hair across Eric’s eyes. He brushed it back. The cop said, “I haven’t been relieved.” And that seemed to settle it for him.

They walked back to the cruiser. Eric collected his bike and backpack from the road. When he left, the cop was sitting in the car, door open, his hands wrapped around the steering wheel. At the top of the hill, where Illinois Ave. met U.S. 6, Eric looked back. The line of body bags stretched almost to town, a black border on the road. Distinctly, Eric heard a car door slam and an engine start. Then the cruiser rose out of a valley in the road and headed for Golden’s smoke and fire and emptiness. Eric watched until it vanished from sight.

Our fourth morning, Eric thought, and we’re still in good spirits. Dodge led, dashing from side to side to pick flowers, Indian Paint Brush and Rocky Mountain Bee Plants. Rabbit hung back and whistled tunelessly. Eric strode up the highway, pleased by the hardness in his leg muscles that a few days of activity had given him. He did a skip step. Highway 93 roller-coasted generally uphill north out of Golden in front of him along the foothills to Boulder. Eric compared the landscape to what they had passed through before; this was the first that had not been a part of the suburbs. Ruins of shopping malls, subdivisions and shopettes dominated the ten miles west from the Platte River, and the fifteen miles north to Golden. But here, he hiked through real country. Clean of brick walls, concrete foundations, or houses in varied states of decay, the grasses dropped away from the road through a gentle valley to lap against a scrub pine shoreline at the foothills a mile away.

He rubbed his sun-warmed right cheek. Four days of stubble scratched his palm. He felt poetic. Perfect weather, he thought.

Sun rises… like a great red whale.

Mid-afternoon: cloudless, arching blue

storm builds on mountain

cool breeze wipes the day.

He shook his head at that last part. Weather poems, he thought, are never as good as the weather. That bit about a red whale, though, that’s nice.

He remembered last night’s sunset. The clouds broke and bands of color flowed from the west, first yellow, then orange and red, then indigo and violet. What a spectacle! As he hiked, he found himself thinking about dust in the atmosphere. The dawn and evening displays this year reminded him of the first few years after… plague, when the sun rose and set in sullen glory, which he attributed to ashes from fires in cities filled with the dead.

By midmorning, Eric’s legs that he’d been so proud of burned with fatigue. He bit his lip and struggled not to limp. He envied the boys’ energy to run back and forth across the road in front of him, showing each other things they had found: a length of PVC pipe, a glass telephone line insulator, a rusted hammer head without a handle. They’re as fresh as the first day, he thought.

Pain rose for another half hour, each step driving spears into his hips and calves. Small fires embered behind his knee caps. Head down, he watched his foot placement. A flat step hurt less, but any roll to either side flared new pains. I’m just plain old, he thought. Old and out of gas. The phrase made him smile. Dodge used it occasionally, so did Troy. Neither knew what it meant. Several expressions came to him: “Run it up the flag pole and see who salutes.” “Give me a ring.” “Drop me a line.” “That does not compute.” He said aloud, “Put the pedal to the metal boys.” Dodge looked back at him. Eric shook his head. “Nothing, son. just a thought.”

He concentrated on walking. Heat radiated off the buckled and fractured asphalt, and the weeds that grew with such enthusiasm a few miles earlier, looked dispirited. Everything about the landscape now seemed beaten down and tired. By the road, large parcels of caked and cracked ground were free of grasses altogether. He imagined how the dust must kick up here on windy days. Only bushes, laurels and what his dad used to call greasewood, thrived. He struggled with why the look of the land would change so drastically in just a couple of hours of walking, but his legs’ pains messed up his concentration. Step, step, step, he thought; even the sky has lost its color. It pressed down like a slab of gray slate, and the sun pulsed in its midst, its edges fuzzy. He kept his eyes down, watching his feet. Dust covered the road. Little puffs marked each footfall. Dodge’s small sneakers left perfect imprints and made Eric think of black and white photographs from the moon, where he supposed the astronauts’ footprints still existed around the pile of unrusting equipment they’d left behind.

He bumped into Dodge, who had stopped. I’ll never get momentum again, he thought, and almost snapped at the boy until he looked up and saw what was in their way. Three wooden poles jutted from the asphalt, and impaled on their tops at eye height, animal skulls. Suddenly grateful for the rest, Eric fingered one, a cow skull, bleached and toothless. A fringe of bone pieces dangled on short strings threaded through holes bored in the back of the skull. He stuck a finger through an eye socket and wiggled it for Dodge mid Rabbit to see. The bone fragments clattered against each other.