At the End - a post-apocalyptic novel (The Road to Extinction, Book 1) (5 page)

I scanned towards the door: there was
nothing but blackness. It held, solid. That’s why they had named it
the Apocalypse Room. I wondered if it did anyone else any good. The
alions took people so fast, and who knew how they did it; I
certainly didn’t.

Finally, I let Tortilla’s warmth overwhelm
me. It soothed me into sleep, and there I stayed, probably for the
rest of my life.

I rolled over, startled. I thought I had
heard a roar. I thought I had heard that deep, monstrous roar. My
leaden eyes stared at nothing, a void of black. Somehow, I had
broken loose from Tortilla’s clutch, so I labored to my feet, using
the frozen wall as a prop.

The handle wouldn’t budge, as if it were
jammed. I tried over and over, useless. There were buttons on a
keypad by the handle, so I fiddled with those, but they were
useless, too. Until I hit a big one, like a space bar. All of a
sudden, there was a computerized click. Pushing the door open, a
sliver of light came in through the crack. It was devastating. I
pulled back on the door again to reduce the harshness. After a
minute or two, I kicked it open. It barely swung. A few of the
hinges were bent, so I was happy that it moved at all. We could
have been trapped in there, but maybe that would have been for the
better.

I turned around and saw Jelly. He was
staring at me, and the burnt room behind me. There were goggles on
the floor next to his feet, and for a second I wondered if he had
worn them while we were in the void. I hoped not. I really hoped
not.

“We didn’t die,” he said, his voice sounded
like gravel.

I smiled. “No, we did not. The sun is
shining.” I pointed up to the hole in the ceiling and the roof
above it. The walls all around us were black.

“Yeah.” He smiled. He looked relieved and
burdened, burdened by something I knew he wasn’t going to tell me
about.

My stomach grumbled, using its weird
digestive speech. “Did we eat yesterday?”

“I don’t want to remember yesterday.”

I nodded. That was fine, I guess. “Well, we
need to eat today at least. Probably nothing left upstairs, but the
neighbors might have something.”

He turned around and grabbed a granola bar
from a shelf. “And the Apocalypse Room. There’s lots of food in
here.” He tossed me the bar.

I caught it, unwrapped it, and started
munching away.

Jelly walked over to Tortilla, bent down,
and shook his shoulder. “Hey, dude. Wake up.”

“No thanks,” Tortilla said, then rolled to
his side, facing the wall.

“All right, suit yourself.” Jelly attempted
to wake Jacob, but he didn’t stir. “He’s still breathing.”

I nodded. “Good. You want to look
around?”

“I guess so, not really, though; I don’t
want to see what’s out there.” His eyes told me that he wanted to
stay in the Apocalypse Room for the rest of his life, where it was
safe. Safe. As safe as one could be in that cozy little box of a
room.

“That’s fine, I can go myself.” The granola
bar was in my belly now, so I grabbed two knives and headed to the
adjoining room, a long hall that ended with stairs on one end and a
sliding glass door at the other. The stairs were wrecked,
impossible to climb up them, so I went and checked outside. Water
pooled in the house, signaling that it had rained last night, which
must have extinguished the fires from the propane tanks. Jelly was
behind me, but it didn’t seem like he was paying attention, almost
as if he was dazed or something.

The air outside was cool. It felt nice on my
lungs as they expanded. None of us had used the inhalers last
night, and my chest had been tight, my throat had closed, for most
of the time. Now I could breathe.

“Looks the same,” Jelly said. He sat down in
a black patio chair. The sun briefly smiled past the clouds then
disappeared.

“Doesn’t feel the same, though. Feels like
it’s dead out here.” The air was calm, no animals . . . where had
all the animals gone? I plopped down into a chair next to him.
“What should we do next?”

He cleared his throat. “You’re the idea
maker. The planner. I’ve got nothing.” He unscrewed a lid to one of
his water bottles and took a huge gulp. He started to unwrap a
granola bar when he twitched in his chair.

“You see something?”

He eyed me, disturbed. “I always see
something these days. Whether or not they’re there, now that’s
something I don’t know.”

I surveyed the area, but I didn’t see
anything, so I seated myself again and drank some water. “I guess
we don’t have to search for the stupid telescope anymore. I don’t
know why we did after we knew they were here.” I heard a noise at
the sliding glass door, and I whipped my head around and saw
Tortilla bump into the frame. My blood instantly warmed at the
sight of him.

“Hey,” Tortilla said, his throat was dry and
raspy. “Can I get some water?”

I offered him the bottle. He drank what was
left of it in a hurry. “Good?”

“Real good,” he replied. He dragged a third
chair around to the door, so that he could view the backyard and
beyond. I don’t think anyone wanted to put their back to it, I sure
didn’t. “What are we going to do now?”

“Not sure . . . but we should probably wait
for Jacob to wake up,” I said. For some reason, all I wanted then
was for Tortilla to hold me, to say that it was going to be all
right. I needed that, but I knew he wouldn’t do that in front of
Jelly.

Tortilla glanced over at Jelly. “You okay,
bromigo?”

I saw that Jelly’s face was upset. He
actually appeared to be angry, as if he were about to clench his
fists. He didn’t, though.

“Yeah, I’m fine. Just a lot to take in, you
know.”

“Yeah, I know,” Tortilla said, smirking. “I
think we should be dead, there were a lot of those propane
tanks.”

“But we’re not,” I reminded them. “We have
to make a plan.”

“Uhrm. You do that,” Jelly replied in a
heated tone. His face was changing to the color of chili peppers,
red hot, maybe even hotter than that.

“You sure you’re all right, you look like
something is bothering you,” Tortilla said.

“No, I’m not all right. Everyone is dead,
and we’re not. I thought I was going to die, but I didn’t, now I
have to live another day like a rabbit.”

“You want to die?” I asked him.

“I can’t do this. Can you do this? Fuck, I
don’t even know what we’re doing!” he yelled, springing to his
feet. “Uhrm. I . . .” He was struggling to breathe. He gulped in
air. “I—I don’t want to live like a rabbit. Uhrm.” He wobbled
around on the grass.

I bolted to my feet. “Get an inhaler!” I
screamed.

Tortilla sprinted down the hallway and came
back with an inhaler, shaking it the entire way. He put it in
Jelly’s right hand.

Jelly pumped the inhaler once, sucking in
the medicine in a deep inhale. He let it out and did it a second
time. “I’m okay . . . I’m okay.” He looked up at the sliding glass
door, surprised.

I turned. “Jacob.”

Jacob was staring at Jelly. “Darrel?” He
staggered, wiping his nut-brown eyes. His longer brunette hair was
as messy as the ruined house.

“Yeah, man. It’s me. You look pretty
bad.”

“I bet. I feel pretty damn bad.” Jacob
examined us. “Félix?”

Tortilla nodded at him.

Jacob looked at me again. “I don’t remember
you, do I know you?”

“Not really. We went to Squalicum together,
but that’s it,” I answered.

“That’s Maggy Li,” Tortilla introduced
me.

He stumbled back, almost fell over, but
Tortilla caught him and guided him to a chair.

“You need water badly, I’ll grab you some,”
Tortilla said. He came back from the Apocalypse Room with a few
bottles and a giant bag of turkey jerky.

“Thanks, I needed that,” Jacob said after he
drank his fill. “What the hell happened? How did you get here?”

“We walked here,” Jelly told him. “Well, we
also ran and boated across the lake.”

“Didn’t take a car?”

Jelly shook his head. “Didn’t want to make
any noise, draw any needless attention on to us. I don’t know how
to turn off those fake engine sounds the cars make.”

“But you boated across the lake?”

“That was a last resort situation. We had no
other choice. Aliens were gonna kill us,” Jelly responded.

“Alions,” I corrected.

“Right. Alions were gonna kill us,” he
said.

“What are you talking about?”

“They’re here,” Tortilla said. He sat down,
and Jelly and I followed suit. “Aliens that look like lions, that’s
what’s taken all the people. You haven’t seen them? We thought that
was why you drank yourself to death.”

“I drank myself to death because there was
no one else around. Everyone was gone, vanished, poof, you know. I
drank because I didn’t have a gun.”

We all looked at him, his green face, bowls
for eye sockets, stringy hair that looked as if it was falling out.
He was in bad shape.

Silence overtook the patio.

“So what are you doing here?” Jacob asked
after a while.

“We first saw the spaceships on TV,”
Tortilla said. “And we thought we would come here and use your
telescope to see if it was true, you know, because your dad works
for NASA and all.”

“I have no idea what happened to my
telescope, probably sold it in a yard sale.”

“That’s okay,” I spoke up. “We know it’s
true now.”

“So what are you going to do now?”

“Not
we
?” I asked. “You don’t plan to
stay with us?”

“Hell, I don’t plan on living another day. I
got a hundred bottles waiting for me upstairs. I thought I drank
enough last night, but I’ll be damned if I don’t tonight.”

“Actually, you don’t,” Jelly said.

“What do you mean, I don’t.”

“You don’t have any more booze upstairs.
Really, you don’t even have an upstairs anymore.”

Jacob ground his teeth. “What’s that suppose
to mean?”

We all glanced at each other, nervous. “They
were breaking into the house—the alions—so we lined up those green
propane tanks from the kitchen to the Apocalypse room, put one in
the oven, and well, you don’t have any more booze.”

“Fuck! You blew up my booze!”

“And saved you,” I added.

He looked at me as though he were thinking
of strangling me. He jumped out of his chair and started pacing
back and forth on the lawn, muttering curses. He really wanted to
die, wanted to drink himself to death.

We left Jacob alone to calm down, outside on
the grass. I gathered up our things in the Apocalypse Room, while
Jelly and Tortilla looked at the food supplies on the shelves and
hidden away in deep cupboards spaced along the back wall. “We
should see where his dad is, maybe he could help us,” I said,
squatting next to our backpacks.

“I don’t think he’ll tell us, he’s pretty
lit.” Jelly shuffled some canned goods around. “He doesn’t want to
help us.”

“I never said I didn’t want to help you.”
Jacob stood by the door, arms folded across his chest. “I just said
I didn’t want to be a part of your plans. My dad is in Pasadena, or
at least he
was
in Pasadena. He was working at the Jet
Propulsion Lab there, but I haven’t talked to him in a few
weeks.”

We all turned to him. “You think he would
help us?” I asked.

“Help you, how?”

“Help us get to somewhere safe. He might
know somewhere we could go, to get away.”

“I don’t think there is anywhere to get away
from these things. You’ve been outside, you traveled, have you seen
anyone else?”

“We’re alive, so others must be too. Why
would the four of us be the only people who have not been taken?” I
countered. “I don’t know of anything else to do.”

“We should go to a military base. That makes
more sense. They are armed and trained,” Jacob said.

“
We
?” Jelly said. “I thought you
didn’t want to be a part of our plan.”

“I didn’t, when I said that, but I thought I
had a ton of fifths then. Now I don’t,” he growled. “Now I
don’t.”

“Can’t you get more?” Jelly asked.

Jacob laughed. “Are you serious? I was part
of the raiding on the first day; the liquor from all the stores was
cleaned out, the grocery stores and the electricity stations, all
of them. I think a few others had the same idea. I went to seven
stores to get what I had. That was on the first day . . .”

“So you’re coming with us now?” Tortilla
asked.

“Look, I can drink myself to death, but I
can’t shoot myself. I can’t hang myself . . . I can’t . . . so
yeah, I’m coming with you. I don’t want to wait around to die.”

“Sounds good to me,” I said. “But there is a
flaw in your plan, the military bases will be primary targets,
don’t you think. Yeah they are trained, and yeah they are armed, so
why wouldn’t the alions hit them hardest?”

Jacob shook his head. “I didn’t think of
that. I suppose you’re right. These things seem smart?”

“Smart and tough, incredibly tough.” I
snatched up the saw that I had used on the alion; it was slightly
bent. “I tried to cut off one of its limbs last night, only made it
halfway before it decided we weren’t worth the trouble.”

We all stared at the blade. None of us had
any idea what had happened to the saw after the door closed, not in
the pitch black.

“So what’s
your
plan?” Jacob
asked.

“We should go into the city to gather some
weapons and other supplies, then start down I-5. It’s a straight
shot to LA, nice and simple, assuming no one else knows a safer or
quicker route?” I received only silence. “You think your dad could
help us?” I eyed Jacob, desperate for a reassuring yes. He gave it
to me with a nod. “Head down I-5 until we get to Pasadena; it is
near LA, right?”

“Yeah, it is. I’ll also tell you that my dad
was working on unmanned fighter spacecrafts for the IPDA, so he
might know something about what’s going on. That is if he is still
alive.” Jacob bent down and grabbed another bag of turkey jerky,
opened it, and bit into a delicate piece.