There was no time.
We all got out of the vehicles.
On the horizon, a dome of light, huge, brightening, was rising. The second nuke had already implanted into the ground. Another trail of light was dissipating as it shot further up in the south.
Salt Lake
, I thought morbidly.
This was followed by an eerie calm. We
all looked at one another, surprised, silent, and fearful.
Far on the horizon we could see a dark line moving toward us. It wasn’t an actual line stretching across the horizon, but an uplifting of dirt. It started out small. As it got closer we all realized that it was a wave of destruction coming our way. This wave was not water. It was dirt. It was cars. It was boulders. It was anything that the line touched.
Basically, the horizon of the earth was being destroyed, thrown up into the air. It was hurtling toward us at supersonic speeds.
This was our death.
As it came closer, it grew taller and taller.
“Get in the cars!” I screamed.
Wind started to suck in toward the horizon as it approached. I was able to jump into the
Xterra
and slam the door. Mindy was able to make it in and snap her seatbelt on. The wind was so strong it caused her door to slam very hard. It barely missed her foot.
I didn’t see what happened to Ski and Cindy. The last thing I knew they were standing there still watching as the horizon came over us. Their clothes were rippling in the wind.
They were holding hands.
THE MOUNTAIN
The wave of destruction hit us with a massive jolt. In the car, the airbags deployed. The wave carried us in the
Xterra
for what felt like a very long time even though it may have been just a few seconds. The
Xterra
flipped over from end to end as we were pushed. I held onto the ceiling and braced my feet on the floorboards, but it was very difficult to hold on – thank God the airbags had deployed. The force of the flipping was intense. All of the groceries were flying all over the inside of the car. I was being pelted by cans. The small barbeque was banging like mad inside the hatchback. The outside of the car was being battered. Loud bangs echoed in our ears as the car was struck. I tried to look over at Mindy but it felt like my head was jammed against a wall.
As quickly as it started, the destruction ended. The
Xterra
was back on all fours. Outside the cracked windshield all I could see was dust.
I looked over at
Mindy. She was looking at me, tears on her cheeks. She was breathing hard. She had a small trail of blood running down the side of her face. She asked “You ok?”
I nodded slowly. “I think so. You feel ok?”
“Yeah but I think I got knocked in the head with a can of soup.” She swallowed. “I think that was the end of the world…again.”
I agreed. “I think so, too.”
We sat waiting, watching the dust clear. The airbags deflated.
Everything we had seen in Davenport was gone. The
Safeway
was gone. The gray hotel was gone. The gas station and every tree, every building, was gone. All that was left over was the ruined earth littered with broken trees, smashed vehicles and splintered buildings thrown off of their foundations. Smoke rose here and there but there were no fires.
The damage looked worse than any hurricane or tornado damage I had ever seen.
It looked like the earth had been wiped clean by a huge hand as it swept dishes off of a table and onto a dirty floor.
Mindy cried for a long time. Cindy and Ski were gone. Everything she knew in life was gone.
I felt like crying, too, but I needed to be strong for Mindy. As far as I knew, she and I may have been the only people left alive on earth.
The destruction was so intense.
The sky was brown. Even though it was daytime, I couldn’t see the sun. There wasn’t even a bright spot in the sky where the sun would have been. Everywhere there were splintered trees reaching up to the brown sky. The ground was pitched and cracked and covered in all kinds of trash. There were deep house-size holes everywhere, almost as if the ground had blown itself o
ut. Nothing was recognizable.
I wondered how far this destruction went.
Unbelievably, we both felt fine, even after going through such a hell. Mindy’s head hurt a little due to a gash from a flying can, but I think the airbags saved her. I was achy from my body being thrown around in the car – even though I had braced myself. The muscles in my sides and shoulders hurt.
We abandoned the SUV. All the tires were flat and the frame was bent. There were other cars lying around, but there was nothing drivable. Even if we did find a car to drive, there was no road to be seen.
We were walking hand-in-hand toward the east, avoiding deep holes, stepping over brokenness as we went.
We slept in a lower lying area. The damage was still impressive. It looked like when the horizontal shove passed over, it didn’t go down into a valley or ditch; more or less went right over it.
We were in the flatlands of eastern Washington. In the dusty eastern horizon ahead I thought I could see mountains in the distance, but who knew for sure. I wasn’t even exactly sure if we were going east – and honestly I didn’t know why we were even
going
east. Maybe to find the edge of the damage? Mindy and I didn’t talk much. Most of the time we were too busy climbing over the destruction.
We didn’t eat much, either. Sometimes we would find something lying in the dirt or
stacked against the bottom of a broken tree. Most of the time the cans didn’t have labels or weren’t pop-open tops.
There was no wild life. There weren’t any deads, either, thankfully. We stumbled over many dead bodies, all broken or ripped apart. We would scavenge things off of them if they were useful. Mindy was sad about a boy we found. He was a boy scout with a backpack. In his pack we found some papers and a pack of crumbled Oreo cookies. His legs were broken forward at the knee.
We continued on. It took a long time to notice, but as we went the damage started to become less. Still, there was nothing recognizable as a town. It looked like the trees weren’t as damaged.
“Dan, look!” Mindy said softly.
I looked where she was pointing. Ahead of us there was a mountain. It wasn’t natural. It was a mountain formed from the end of the horizontal shove. This is where all of the damage from the nuclear blast had finally come to rest.
The mountain looked to be about a mile high. It stretched as far as I could see from north to south.
We started to climb.
As we approached the top we both looked around to see where we had come from. It was desolate destruction.
I looked north and south. This mountain stretched far into the distance; it was part of a gigantic circle. I imagined that this circle was complete. It was probably 500 miles
in circumference; the center being the exact same spot where this whole nightmare started for me: atop the mountain at Snoqualmie Pass near the red roof of the hotel.
“Oh Jesus,” Mindy muttered. She pointed at a blue KC baseball cap in the debris. “Was this Ski’s?”
“No. It’s not his,” I said, taking her hand.
“I know,” she said, her head lowered. “I just miss them.”
“I do too. Come on.”
At the top we were able to see down on the other side. There was a large lake.
It looked like the mountain had stopped rolling in the middle of a city. To our left, the mountain had piled up against the side of a six story hotel.
Down below there was a large parking lot full of undamaged cars. There was a marina on the lake with yachts under rows of blue awnings along several long docks. The grass of the hotel and marina was well manicured.
The lake was crystal clear.
We hurried down the mountain of trash, almost running. It was like we had just stepped out of a nightmare into the real world.
The air smelled clean.
I led Mindy down to the marina. There were many different yachts to choose from here. All of
them looked brand new to me.
I tried several of them but none of them would start.
“They all out of gas?” Mindy asked.
“No, there’s something wrong.”
We went back to the parking lot. We looked inside several of the cars but of course none of them had keys in their ignitions.
We walked up to the unburied side of the hotel. Inside there were no lights on. There were no bodies either. The place was deserted.
“There must have been an evacuation,” I guessed.
“I hope so. I don’t want this side to be dead, too.”
“Me either.”
Back outside we looked up
at the mountain of destruction. The mountain was resting against the hotel about 4 stories up. Trees and debris stuck out oddly here and there in the trash. I saw part of a destroyed yacht crashed through some of the building’s windows. A splintered telephone pole with lines still attached stuck up oddly at the sky.
“Do you feel sick?” she asked.
“No” I said, still holding her hand. “Why? Do you?”
“No, but…don’t you think there’d be radiation from the nuke?”
I said “I think if there was, we’d be dead already.”
“Maybe the nuke was radiation-less…” she asked.
“If that’s even a word.”
“It’s hard to
say what any of this is, Mindy,” I said. “I mean, I haven’t felt sick at all, and Washburn said we had some MCON virus or something.”
“Yea I haven’t felt sick,” she nodded.
“Who knows what’s really going on? I’m just glad we’re out of that ring of destruction. I’m also glad there’s no more deads around.”
“Do you think the nukes got rid of the deads?”
I looked at her. “I hope so, Mindy, because I really don’t want to lose you.”
“I don’t want to lose you either.”
I held her.
In the lobby, we found leftovers from a continental breakfast. All of the fruit had gone bad. We both ate three small boxes of dry cereal. Mindy found some sealed bottles of
Starbucks
cappuccino that we drank. After we ate she said “I could really use a shower.”
I laughed. “Yea, me too, but I don’t think there’s any running water around here.”
“Let’s look around for something.”
We explored the bottom floor of the hotel. Signs led us to an indoor swimming
pool. Light was spilling in from some side windows. Mindy stripped naked in front of me, smiled, and dove into the pool.
“Oh God its cold!” she screamed.
I took off my clothes and hit the water, too. It
was
freezing. I swam over to her. She turned to me. She smiled as she wrapped her legs around me.
She whispered, “Let’s warm up.”
There were a bunch of clean towels set around the pool on benches. We threw a bunch of them into a big pile. We made love on top of them. The whole room was quiet except for the sounds of our love making.
Our love was real and not quick. We were actually into one another making deep, passionate love. Her body shuddered as we came together. Her voice echoed loudly in the room.
Afterwards, she lay on my chest, my arms around her.
“Why did it take the end of the world for us to meet, Dan” she asked quietly.
I didn’t have an a
nswer for her. I didn’t know.
Finally I said, “I don’t know, Mindy. But, if I had to go through
all of this
just so I could meet you, I would do it all again.”
She cried. “I would, too, Dan!
I would!”
I held her as she wept, as her cries echoed through the room. After a while, we went back over by our clothes to get dressed. When we were done, we headed back outside hand in hand.
We went through a lot of the cars in the parking lot again, but none of them started. I wondered if some kind of electronic pulse from the nukes going off had killed all of the power. I was thinking of asking Mindy if she wanted to get into a yacht and just float out into the middle of the lake when we both heard the engines of approaching motorcycles.
We heard the revving of the bikes as they got closer. Two motorcycles came around a bend in the road near the lake. Both of the riders didn’t have helmets. The bike in front was being driven by a real thin bald man with a short graying beard. He didn’t have a shirt on. Behind him was a thin woman who was wearing driving goggles. She had long dark gray hair. She was wearing a ragged looking biker jacket with a large Harley emblem on the back.
They didn’t see us standing in the parking lot. They were too busy looking up at the mountain of destruction, awed at the way it had come to rest against the tall hotel.
“Holy!” he said as he shut off his bike. “That’s one mountain of shit!”
The woman nodded as she lit a cigarette.
“Might be some good stuff in there, though.”
We walked up behind them. They still didn’t notice us.
I said, “Unbelievable, isn’t it?”
The man turned around so fast on the seat of the bike that I thought he was going to knock it over. As he turned, he pulled a pistol from his side.
I held my hands up. “Whoa! Take it easy.”
The woman had pulled a shotgun out, too. She was pointing it at Mindy.
The man asked, “Where’d you two come from?”
“We were over by those cars,” I said, nodding toward
the ones we had just checked.
“Did you drive here?” he asked.
“No we came over that,” I said, looking up at the mountain of trash.
“Horse shit!” he said. “No one could have survived that!”
The woman was still looking at Mindy, her left eye squinting as cigarette smoked rolled up her face. She asked Mindy “You come over there, too?”
Mindy nodded.
“You’re both a bunch of liars. Ain’t no one come over that mountain alive!”
I asked “Can we be civilized here, please. We aren’t looking for any trouble.”