Geoff North - How the World Ends

“Yeah, Max. He didn’t deserve to go like that. None of them did.” Hayden dug into a cardboard box pushed up against the wall. He pulled out a can of beans along with an opener. “You hungry?” Jake nodded emphatically. “Stupid question.”

Jake shovelled the cool contents into his mouth and swallowed without chewing. Some of it fell out of the opening where his cheek used to be, and he scooped it back in. “You said Mandy was here. Where’s my wife, Hayden? Where is she now?”

Hayden lit a second gas lantern further in. Trixie came back into view, kicking at a pile of loose straw in a corner. “I’m trying to conserve the fuel; God only knows how long we’ll be stuck in here. I don’t know much about nuclear fallout and radiation, but I’m betting we have enough food and water stored in here to last a month, maybe a little less.”

Jake stumbled towards him, pleading with his hands. “Please… just tell me.”

“She didn’t make it. She went out before the big one hit.”

Jake stopped. “Before? That doesn’t make any sense. Mandy was at home with Nicholas. She came here after the blast… didn’t she?”

Hayden dunked a pail into the horse’s water trough. He pulled it back out, half-filled, and sat down on a plastic milk crate. He met Jake’s eye with a grim gaze. “Mandy had come to see me the morning it happened.” He pulled up a second milk crate and motioned Jake to come sit in front of him. “I have half a dozen twenty-four packs of drinking water. We’ll have to go through those sparingly. I’ll clean the worst of your wounds with this. Considering you were drinking from an irradiated river when I found you, that shouldn’t be an issue?”

Jake sat on the crate and watched him wet a piece of cloth into the pail. Hayden wrung it out with his big hands and questioned Jake with raised eyebrows. Jake nodded and Hayden started to dab the cold cloth gently to his skull. “My son found me… not you.”

“Nicholas snuck out while I was sleeping,” Hayden explained. “I warned him how dangerous it was outside, told him the air was all wrong… that it would make him sick. I came across you first, washing up in the river.”

Jake looked over to his son. Nicholas had curled up into the same straw pile Trixie was rooting around in. The boy’s eyes were heavy, beginning to close, but they never left Jake’s form. “Mandy and I were having trouble,” Jake whispered. “We’d been fighting for months. I never really understood why… thought it was all my fault.”

Hayden rinsed the cloth in the pail and pressed it against the less ravaged side of Jake’s face. “It’s no one’s fault… not really.”

“Is that what you told yourself, Hayden? Did it lessen the guilt some?”

“It wasn’t something I was looking for. Mandy was here all the time when I was still married, visiting with Teresa. After we split up, Mandy kept coming over… she said she was just as concerned about me as she was with her best friend.”

“I’ll bet.”

Hayden didn’t argue. He dunked the cloth in for a third rinse, and Jake took it from his hand when he went to raise it back towards his face. “I grabbed as many supplies as possible before we left the house. I didn’t have any medical dressing or bandages, but I do have some clean linen sheets. I could tear some into strips and wrap up the worst of your burns.”

Jake rubbed the cloth down the bridge of his nose. Blackened skin peeled away with it. “Why bother? I’ll be dead in a few days. Save your fucking sheets.” Hayden tried offering him one of the bottled waters. “Save that, too.”

Hayden sighed and stood. If Jake was going to take a swing at him, he probably would’ve tried it by now. Hayden was almost six and a half feet tall, and just shy of two hundred and fifty pounds. Jake was no match for him, before or after the blast. “She left the shelter to go find you.”

“What?”

Hayden covered a small blanket over Nicholas’s sleeping form. “I tried talking her out of it… told her there wasn’t time. She went anyway.”

Jake tried to picture how Mandy’s last minutes had been; speeding down twelve miles of back roads trying to find him—trying to save him. She had been cheating on him with another man, but in the final moments of her life, Mandy had come looking for him . Jake wept into the damp cloth, his tears mixing with the blood and horse’s trough water.

Hayden pushed one of the shelter doors open a crack. The sky was heavy with clouds. They were swirling about like massive whirlpools in an ocean of radioactive grey and green. Clouds like that brought frightening storms with them, the kind that spawned twisters. The weather patterns were all fucked up, adjusting to the garbage in the atmosphere, and extremely unpredictable. He’d only left the shelter twice, once to chase after Mandy, the other after her son. Both times Hayden had encountered strange weather; hot winds and cold winds, dust devils the color orange, and a spatter of rain that smelled chemical. The old earth didn’t know what to make of the change, so she tried to adjust the best she could.

How long would it be before they could set out? How far would they have to travel to even find another survivor? Hayden pulled the door shut. Judging from the color of the sky, they’d be waiting a long time.

The lanterns had been snuffed out. It was pitch black inside, like a cave deep inside the biggest of mountains, stifling and claustrophobic. He could hear Trixie clomping her hooves restlessly in the straw. She needed to get out worse than the rest of them. She needed room to move, and pastures to run through. Somewhere near his horse, Jake was sleeping next to Nicholas. Jake’s dying. As horrible as it sounds, I hope it happens soon. The boy will be devastated, but the man has suffered enough already.

Hayden crawled to the nearest corner and found the blanket he’d yanked from his bed a few days before. He lay on his side in the dry dirt and pulled the comforter up over his shoulder. He rested his head against a balled up sack that once held oats. Mandy and Nicholas had been with him when he ran throughout his home gathering supplies. It had been her idea to bring the sheets and blankets. Hayden wished she’d thought of grabbing some pillows as well. It would’ve been softer than an empty feed sack.

The doors started to rattle. The wind had picked up. Batten down the hatches, a storm’s blowing in.

It picked up, and the doors shook continuously for the next half hour. Hayden kept one eye trained on the strip of grey light. It had grown darker outside, and nightfall—such as it was since the dust had started to settle—was still hours away. There was nothing Hayden could do about it. They were in the safest place left known to him. He closed his eyes and prayed the noise wouldn’t waken Nicholas. He prayed that Jake was already dead.

Hayden thought more about the pillow that had burned up in his house. If he had it with him now, he could crawl over and smother the last bit of life away from Jake. It would be a mercy. End his misery… end Nicholas’s fear and confusion. Hayden winced in the dark. Mandy had sacrificed her life in a hopeless attempt to save her husband, and here Hayden was now, planning to kill him anyway. What would she think of that? What kind of monster was he?

He listened as the wind roared down the hill and pulled at the doors.

Hayden could hear something hissing. He opened his eyes to a bright yellow light, and shielded them with the back of his hand. The gas lantern… it was off when I went to sleep, I’m sure of it. Something cold and hard jammed up under his chin. Hayden pulled his hand away and saw the barrel end of his hunting rifle. Jake was on his knees, holding the gun in both hands. Hayden tried to speak and Jake pushed harder.