Shaun Harbinger: Rain

“You don’t sound so sure.”

I shrugged. “Let’s try the radio again. There might be a better signal here.” I rolled onto my stomach and pulled the radio out of my jacket where I had draped it over my rucksack. I clicked it on.

Lucy got onto her stomach next to me, her blue eyes on the radio. Our hips and shoulders were touching. I could smell her light perfume. Concentrate, Alex.

Static filled the tent. I turned the dial slowly. Silence. Then a voice. “This is the BBC emergency broadcast. Stay in your home. The military and police are dealing…”

“It’s the same broadcast,” Lucy said. “It must have been playing all day. Over and over.”

I searched for more stations but got nothing. Turning off the radio, I said, “So what do you think? Are we in the middle of a very realistic military training exercise or is this for real?”

She looked at me and there were tears in her eyes. “I think it’s real.”

Her conviction made me realize I had been fooling myself. This had to be real. If the army wanted to train their soldiers and deny them media access, they would simply take away their radios, phones and any other devices that allowed access to cyberspace. They wouldn’t blackout the entire area.

“I think you’re right,” I admitted. That admission broke through a dam that had been holding back the emotions inside of me. I thought of my parents, my brother, Joe. My friends. Were they safe?

Reflecting my thoughts, Lucy asked, “What about our families?” Tears rolled down her cheeks.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Please hold me.” She pressed herself into me.

I turned so we faced each other, her head buried against my chest. Her arm went around my waist and I put mine around her shoulders as we both cried in the pale lantern light. This was it. The end. Something had happened to finally put an end to society as we knew it. This was real.

Game over.

I woke up when sunlight hit the tent and the birds started their chorus outside. Just like any other day. Just like yesterday. But yesterday was gone and all we had to look forward to was a very different tomorrow. I opened my bleary eyes to find Lucy asleep next to me. Somehow we had fallen asleep last night and ended up tangled together in the sleeping bags. Her head was on my chest, her eyes closed. She looked so peaceful. My arm was trapped beneath her body and it felt dead. My back ached from sleeping on the ground all night. The sleeping bags had hardly provided a layer of comfort.

I moved gently, dragging my arm from under Lucy. I extricated it and waited while the blood returned, sending pins and needles shooting through my hand and fingers. The tent smelled of sweat and tears with an undercurrent of Lucy’s perfume. I sat up. It was cold. At least the rain had stopped.

Crawling to the tent door, I unzipped it and climbed out into the chill morning. There was no sound from Mike and Elena’s tent so I assumed they were still asleep.

Thick mist shrouded the tops of the mountains and also drifted along the ground. It was like one of those old horror movies where the set was covered in dry ice.

Apart from the calling of the occasional bird, there was no other sound. I staggered across to the ravine, rubbing my aching back, and relieved myself behind a tree.

It was too quiet. Could this silent world really be a place in which some event happened yesterday, some disaster?

In the distance, a helicopter whirred. It came up along the ravine. The dull green paint job distinguished it as military. The men in that chopper probably knew what the hell was going on. As it passed over us, the noise from its rotors seemed to fill the air, killing the silence.

Mike appeared, looking up at the sky, his eyes bloodshot. The helicopter passed over us and continued on over the mountains. As it disappeared into the distance, the unnerving quiet settled over us again.

Mike came over to me. He was wearing just a T-shirt and boxers. He must be freezing but he didn’t seem to notice the cold.

“Dude,” he said as he approached, smiling, “how was your night? Mine was fucking awesome.”

Ignoring his question, I said, “We’ve decided it’s real, Mike. The warning. Everything.”

“For fuck’s sake, not this again. So now you’ve convinced Lucy with your paranoid delusions.”

“I’m not paranoid.”

“Like fuck you aren’t, Alex. You couldn’t just come out here and have some fun, could you? You had to go and turn it into one of your games. You can’t just come out here and hike around the mountains for a couple of days, you have to make it the end of the fucking world. Well here’s some news for you. This is just a normal day like any other. Tomorrow you’ll be back at work like every other Monday. Same old shit as always. So let’s enjoy today and make the most of it.”

“Mike, we think it’s real.”

He glared at me and shook his head. “You really are crazy.” He stalked back to the tents and picked up a saucepan and spoon. Crashing them together, he shouted, “Come on, ladies, it’s time to get up and get moving. We have to go home today.”

Elena and Lucy appeared, blinking against the sunlight.

“Let’s get all this packed up.” Mike’s attitude was brash and loud. “Got to get back to the cars by this afternoon. Move it, people!” He tossed the pan and spoon into the grass. They clattered as they rolled across the grass then went silent. Mike walked away from the tents and stood staring up at the misty mountains.

I went over to him and put a hand on his shoulder. “Mike…”

He shrugged me off and took a few steps away. His eyes had tears in them. I had never seen Mike cry. Never.

“You’ll see,” he said, waving a finger at me. “We’ll get to the cars and go home and everything will be just fine. And we’ll be telling this story in the pub with our friends, telling them how Alex thought the fucking world had ended. And they’ll laugh and drink to your paranoid delusional fucking conspiracy theories.”

I went back to the tent without a word. Climbing inside, I shook my head.

“What is it?” Lucy was rolling the sleeping bags up.

“Mike doesn’t believe us. Except maybe he does but can’t admit it.”

“What do you think we’ll find when we get back home?”

“If something really bad has happened, we won’t make it home, Lucy. If there’s a virus, the army will have checkpoints, quarantine. They’ll try to separate the infected. I suppose they’ll set up emergency hospitals.”

“But we’re not infected.”

“No, but they won’t know that. They’ll probably put people in quarantine for the duration of the incubation period of the virus. That’s the only way they could separate the healthy population from the infected. Unless there’s a blood test or something.”

“This is so fucked up.”

“Look, maybe we’re wrong. Maybe we’ll get back home and everything will be normal like Mike says.”

Neither of us believed that.

We packed up the tents and gear into the rucksacks and left the campsite, heading along the hiking trail as it ran through a sharp-smelling pine forest. Mike had said we should be back at the cars by late afternoon. After saying that, he had gone quiet, walking ahead with Elena while Lucy and I trailed behind. Our little group, which yesterday had been split by physical fitness, was now split by beliefs.

The shadows among the pines made me think of the man who had attacked me yesterday and one word kept repeating itself over and over in my mind: infected. If the people infected by the virus became violent, that would explain the warning on the EBS to lock all doors and windows.

Lucy was quiet as we walked, her mind obviously on her family and thoughts of home.