James Van Pelt - Summer of the Apocalypse

Dangling his feet while gazing east, Eric sat on the cool stone. A line of clouds on the horizon flashed sporadically with lightning, but was too far away for him to hear thunder. A breeze kept the mosquito away. He pressed his hands into the small of his back and arched. Muscles cramped, and he awkwardly rubbed them until they relaxed. His legs throbbed.

Seventy-five, he thought, is a lot of years. He gingerly crawled into his sleeping bag, lay on his back and watched the sky. Troy, he thought you will see what the old learning is worth. You’ll learn that lesson you never knew.

By the time the last shades of daylight disappeared, and the stars shone like bright ice, he was asleep.

Eric mashed his Cheerios with his spoon until the milk was a uniform tan color. The end of the world, he thought, that’s what they’re calling it. Everyone is heading to California and I’m stuck in school. He turned his cassette player up another notch. The sun poured through the windows, silhouetting his father, and casting a bright morning glow on his mother’s face as she read a magazine. The very image itself, Mr. and Mrs. America in their perfect little home, riled him. So he concentrated on the headphones, where he was at Red Rocks Park listening to U2 playing “Sunday, Bloody Sunday.” He lifted his bowl and turned the pages of The Denver Post, looking for school closure listings. Over the top of the paper, Eric noticed Dad’s grimace. Dad wrote for the Rocky Mountain News, and Eric’s subscription to the rival daily irritated him.

Long articles about the disease’s progress on the East Coast dominated the front section. The banner headline read “80% FATALITIES!” The only pictures were of an overcrowded hospital in Boston and a panicked crowd at an unidentified airport. He turned past them. Boulder schools closed two days earlier, and today was the last day for the Colorado Spring schools. He didn’t find a listing for Denver, though. He pulled the head-phones around his neck. “I’m staying home,” he said. Mom, a heavy woman with three chins and hair streaked with gray—Eric thought of her as a white Aunt Jemimah—reached across the table and felt his forehead. He jerked his head away. “You’re not feeling sick, are you?” she said.

Dad folded the classified ads of his own paper and laid them in his lap. He had been reading the classifieds a lot lately. Eric picked them up once after Dad was done and saw that he had circled various gun ads, mostly shotguns. As far as Eric knew, the only gun that Dad owned was a funny looking over/under 20 gauge that he used to hunt pheasant years ago. Eric had a hard time imagining Dad hunting anything. He reminded him of Barney Fife and Walter Mitty rolled together. Dad looked through his bifocals at Eric for a long time, and then rubbed his own forehead. “Today’s as good as any, I suppose,” he said. “Let’s pack.”

“Are you sure?” asked Mom.

“Take all the practical clothes,” Dad said. Eric hated it when his dad didn’t answer questions. It made him sound stupid, like he didn’t know, so Eric had made it a point of honor to never ask Dad anything. Eric filled his box, the only box Dad would let him take, with personal items. At the bottom he layered thirty comic books, all Conan the Barbarian adventures; then his slingshot and a marble bag filled with steel ball bearings; beside that, his cassette player and tapes (Run DMC, the Rolling Stones, Men Without Hats, The Cure, AC/DC, U2, and a Willie Nelson tape that none of his friends knew about); two paperbacks (The Hobbit and The Stand); a rabbit’s foot; one hundred and forty seven dollars saved from his paper route; a Playboy (November, 1992); a Blue Oyster Cult tee shirt; a picture of a Porsche 911 he had lovingly cut out of Car and Driver magazine the month before. A NUKE THE

GAY WHALES FOR JESUS bumper sticker. A small frisbee (the competition-weight disk was too large for the box); a thick bundle of wallet-sized photographs that his friends in the Eighth Grade had given him in the last two weeks (Mostly girls who signed the backs with “Have a nice summer,” or “It’s been a blast having you in class this year.” None mentioned the disease). He topped the bundle with an old MTV towel of Martha Quinn at the MTV beach party. He looked at the posters on his bedroom walls that the black light made glow like nuclear accidents, the rest of his books and tapes, and everything else he had to leave behind, forlornly. He went into the kitchen to help Mom. Eight hours later, near sunset, the van, filled not only with boxes and suitcases of clothes but also with all the food from the cupboards, pulled off U.S. 6 next to Clear Creek in a canyon west of Denver. Traffic passed them sporadically, heading west. Eric supposed that most people stuck to the newer, multi-lane I-70 rather than the two lane, winding, older highway.

“What are we doing here?” Eric asked Mom. “You’ll see,” she said. The canyon wall across the highway rose steeply to their right, and the thirty-foot-wide stream tumbled noisily over the rocks to their left. Other than the pullout their van almost filled, nothing seemed distinguishable about this stretch of road. “Do you feel like some climbing?” said Dad. Eric decided he definitely didn’t feel like climbing by the time he was far above the highway, as the sun set, one hand bleeding from cactus needles and his back burning under an overloaded pack. He stepped into a space between two rocks where Dad pointed. He handed Eric a flashlight. “Help your mom set up house.” He turned away and started down the “trail,” which Eric couldn’t believe Dad had led them up. Mom leaned against a boulder, breathing heavily.

“How is it in there?” she said.

Eric shrugged off his pack, held his flashlight in front of him, and crawled into the hole at the boulders’

base. The light penetrated deeply into a room that quickly grew wider and higher the farther in he went. Far from being empty, boxes lined the walls, each marked with thick felt-pen labels in Dad’s handwriting: soup, tuna, ham, beans, corn, chili, spaghetti, sterno, gas, kerosine, charcoal, and dozens of others he couldn’t see. Light reflected off something big wrapped in black plastic. Eric pulled a corner of the sheet off the shape revealing three mattresses stacked on each other.

Another light cast sharp shadows around him. He pointed his flashlight at the entrance, and his mother, just getting off her knees, shielded her eyes. “You all right?” she said. They used the plastic as a ground sheet and put the three mattresses side by side on a relatively flat spot on the floor.

Eric said, “What is this place?”

Mom pulled the lid off a box and looked inside. “A fault cave. Your dad learned about it when he was at the Colorado School of Mines.”

“Fault cave?”

“Caves normally form in limestone, but this is granite. Not many people know about it. Your dad has a map of all the passages and entrances. We can explore it later.”

She found sheets and blankets in one of the boxes and just finished making the last bed when Dad crawled into the room. “Why didn’t you light one of the Coleman lanterns?” he said. Later, with the lantern extinguished, Eric snuggled deeper under the blankets and sleeping bag Mom had spread over him. He strained his eyes, but saw nothing. He remembered once when the family had toured Cave of the Winds at Manitou Springs. The guide had turned out the light. After the group had stood in the velvet darkness for a minute, he said, “This is what a blind man sees every day of his life.” Dad breathed softly next to him. Eric guessed he was asleep. He couldn’t hear Mom. After a long while, when he almost felt the rocks of the mountain creaking beneath him, when he was sure that snakes or scorpions or demons were hovering in the air, he said, “Mom…” His voice sounded flat and small in the cave’s space. “… are you awake?”