64
Twenty miles from ground zero, the airborne clouds of smoke and ash filtered down unabated across the homes, boulevards, and farmhouses. In one house, Thelma Rogers and her husband became thoroughly alarmed. They immediately got their kids, Donna and Larry. The four of them packed up and jumped into their car. In minutes, they were on the way to the airport where they were determined to purchase four fresh airline tickets to Los Angeles, California where their friends lived. Several of their end-time neighbors waved to them and smiled. They were at the airport for the same reason. These friends met with them at their weekly survivalist meetings in the town where they had learned the wisdom of leaving their homes at the first indication of danger. They were the happy part of America known as the survivalist fringe. Nothing seemed so important to them as did their own survival in the midst of national and local adversity.
“Thelma, we are on our way along with our friends of so many years,” her husband Ralph Rogers said. He smiled. “We are going to live, Thelma, and all those rat’s asses who have made fun of us over the years will be history. Soon, our critics will be dead, and we will be alive. I call that justice, Thelma. It just took a little knowledge and planning.”
“Ralph, we are doing the right thing,” Thelma said. “Something terrible was starting to happen back there, and we surely needed to leave and let others find out the truth. The rule of survival is number one, just get the heck out of of Dodge when the chaos first raises its ugly head.”
“I’ll miss my friend, Tom,” Larry Rogers, their son, said. Larry was fourteen, and Tom was his best friend. They played baseball, street hockey, and fished each summer until the cows came home.
“Cynthia won’t know what to do with herself,” Thelma Rogers said. Donna was thirteen. Cynthia’s entire world revolved around Donna and visa versa.
“How do we know the place we are going to isn’t going to be nestled inside an even bigger crapper than this one, Dad?” Donna asked.
“We don’t.”
“So, why are we running?”
“Running from a dead city like the one we were a part of is one of the smartest moves we can make, honey. Besides, everything’s a gamble now that the chaos is starting.”
“I want to stay here,” Donna said.
“Me, too,” Larry complained. “I have everything back there that I want.”
“Tough,” Thelma said. “We are going, and that is that.”
Soon, they were high in the air and leaving those ominous death clouds behind them. The four of them sat on the airliner and watched the fields below them. They could see cars and farm animals moving slowly through the streets and along the highways. “It looks nice down there,” Larry said.”
Everything seemed so much cleaner at 32,000 feet. There were no scraps of discarded paper flying about down there, because the Rogers Family were too high above ground to even see those trivializing anomalies of civilization that often polluted the world around them.
Now that all of them were a safe distance from the impending battle field down below, everything destructive in their previous world seemed weak and extremely obscure. In such a way, soldiers heading to battle are often lulled into complacency by the sounds of heavy artillery only to meet their deaths when unloaded like lightly armed cattle from boxcars into the deadly fusillades of incoming shells.
“Looks fine down there,” Thelma said. “We might have been wrong to leave.”
“That’s the trouble with making decisions soon enough to do any good. By the time you find out those left behind are dead, you’ve already put thousands of miles of danger behind you. Even if you were mistaken and the people where you lived hadn’t perished in the chaos you escaped from, they might have. Sure, you might look stupid if they hadn’t been badly injured enough so that they passed away, but what if they had? Then, you truly escaped your fate. Nothing was ever so rare in this world as a good tactical desertion that worked.” Thelma said.
“I hope Tom survives back there,” Larry said. “And that we get to go back.”
“If things are all right at home, we’ll be going back, Larry,” his dad said, “or I’m not Ralph Rogers.”
“Promises,” her daughter Donna said. “We aren’t going back ever. I know we aren’t.”
“Now don’t be so negative, honey,” Thelma said. “You just never know.”
Hours later, the jet landed at L.A. International Airport, and they worked their way to the baggage area. After that, they rented a small Geo. If things bottomed, they’d just keep the car, and Hertz could stuff it. Ralph hoped against hope that this tactical withdrawal was just a false alarm and that they’d turn the car back into Hertz in a few days and head back home.
“Let’s listen to the news,” Thema said. She dialed through station after station until she found the World News Network.
“The situation is critical at the scene of the bombing. Thousands of families have left, but many others have hunkered down for the long haul. Military spokesmen have indicated they will not be entering the area until they are sure it is safe. Instead, food and water are being shoved into boxes. The food rations are then jettisoned from huge supply planes and parachuted to those down below. It is believed that dangerous toxins might have been released in the hundreds by secondary explosions at the plant. Hospitals are filled to the brim with victims. Tents have been erected to take the excess. Those who can travel have been placed in buses and taken to other cities. Some have been taken to airports so that hospitals hundreds of miles away can care for them. Local hospitals are filled, but the distant ones still have the beds, medicines, and staff to treat the injured, so they ready themselves and await their new arrivals. We have received additional reports that many hospitals in the area and far beyond it are already filled and beyond their capacity to care for people in the states closest to the immediate aftermath. The devastation was wide spread and extends more than sixty-five miles from the original scene of the explosion. Authorities say it was not an atomic blast, but that it was so large that a deadly mushroom cloud of poisons had developed which extended up into the sky for as high as fifteen miles. The heat inside the cloud was so intense that it literally lifted itself along with the debris and dust into the very threshold outer space. It continues to leech its fallout into the surrounding counties and states.
“Authorities say it is nothing to be alarmed about, but many do not trust what the government says. Some say they remember that first responders to the World Trade Center on 9/11 were told the same thing by the government only to become sick and die a few months and years later. “We will no longer be lied to,” said an activist for survivalist rights. “We will assume everything the government says is a lie, because that way, when the truth comes out, those who heeded caution and rejected the government’s speeches that were filled with false hope might still be alive. Those who didn’t exercise sufficient skepticism have done so at their own risk.”
“Speaking of risk,” the announcer went on, “those who have been scheduled for operations and stays in hospitals need to check with their physicians. The Obama Care program continues to reject applications for medical treatment in hospitals due to overwhelming demand over the past year which has depleted the funds necessary to pay for the medical procedures, rooms, labs, medicines, and physician charges. The so-called death squads of Obama Care according to activists have met and decided that more people need to stop trying to exploit the system for services that cannot be paid by the government. Instead, they should understand that procedures that were regularly used last year and the year before are no longer economically possible.
“According to the head of the organization of insurance companies, the procedures that are being eliminated were strictly performed for profit. These companies claimed those procedures were worthless. They merely benefited physicians and hospitals. They said that patients in general were actually better off and lasted longer when such stringent and unnecessary interventions were done away with.
??
?According to the Surgeon General, in his own voice and words, ‘Our statistics demonstrate that those on the poorest rungs of society actually lived longer and more productive lives.’
“The surgeon general told the house of representatives, that those who went to doctors and hospitals on a regular basis actually died sooner than those who didn’t. The surgeon general testified that those visits inadvertently opened these patients with insurance plans to medical dangers which they should never have faced in the far saner system of Obama Care. He said that unscrupulous physicians in search of profits pampered their patients literally to death with their expensive and unnecessary procedures, and their patients may died in far greater numbers due to infections they picked up in America’s hospitals. In fact, these insurance companies have told us that we now know from statistics compiled for Obama Care that doing little or nothing is usually more beneficial to the patient, and, of course, the cost is quite negligible to Obama Care when people are kept from expensive beds, surgical suites, and rest homes, all of which are billed at outrageously sky high figures in the older time of medical excesses.”
“Meanwhile, in New York and Washington, the scenes of major destruction at the Lambrecht Theater and Nationals Stadium, the authorities believe that more than ninety percent of the victims have been located and removed but others have not been reached yet. ‘The question is where do we go from here?’ said Alfred Sloan, head of homeland security. ‘Is this the end or merely the beginning? We just don’t know. Only time will tell us, and we might be running out of that,’ Mr. Sloan told us. Meanwhile bills were passed in congress which curtailed a number of guaranteed freedoms in the name of national security. One bill came from the Rassmussen firm of Madison Avenue fame. Already famed for its contribution to the Patriot Act, Rassmussen’s highly edited bill is said to be more than two thousand pages in length and far more stringent in curtailing Americans’ rights guarantees.”
Having deplaned an hour ago, Thelma and her family drove through L.A. and marveled at the massive number of palm trees.
“They are going to destroy us all,” Thelma said. “We predicted it, and now here we are. The nation is going right down the tube. But we as a family are going to survive.”
“I need to visit the restroom,” Cynthia said.’
“Then, go,” Thelma said to her daughter. They pulled over at a filling station and waited. When she came back, they proceeded to their so-called safe house.
65
Ellis and Mary Peterson had lived in Littleton all of their lives. Now, the place seemed dangerously sinister. Many of their friends were succumbing to an illness that might be related to the bombing of the factory ten miles from them. The two of them had not been feeling well.
“It’s time to visit Aunt Lucy and Uncle Ed,” Mary said. “It isn’t safe here. I think we’re being poisoned by the air. We better leave for a vacation, if you ask me. We have a place to go, after all.” Mary was referring to another family of Petersons. The clan had been quite large at one time, because most of them lived in the country and had little else to do but to reproduce more of themselves. Some of them did it merely to pass the time.
Mary’s husband, Ellis Peterson, had been feeling rather puny of late, also. His problems started right after he saw the huge mushroom cloud out of their kitchen window. “I told you that cloud was going to kill us, and we’d better run for it, Mary. Now, it might be a tad too late. We are already sickly, and so are our friends,” Ellis said.
Mary was worried about him. If he had gotten any worse, she was going to have to pack up and take him to a hospital. The trouble was all of the beds were full up on account of what had happened.
“I told Aunt Lucy and Uncle Ed all of the hubbub about people getting sick, and she said she wasn’t concerned at all. She told me to tie you up if I had to and drag you out of here and over to their place. It’s a good three hundred miles from here,” Mary told her husband, “so it ought to be safe up there.”
“We better leave right now, then,” Ellis said, “because I already feel pretty sickly from whatever was inside that cloud. I knew it was bad news the minute I saw it.”
“I didn’t particularly like it, either. It stood up there on its darkening haunches so high in the air it looked like it was black Satan looking down on us, and I thought I saw something like horns coming up out of its head,” Mary said.
“I never seen no Satan and no horns. You must be imagining that,” Ellis said. “The trouble with you, hon, is you are too darned romantic. You make everything you see out to be bigger than life.”
At any rate, they agreed to flee the place. Packing was easy. They had always been piss poor and clothes minus. All they ever wore were the shirts on their backs, and that was about all they possessed to take with them. When push came to shove, all they had to do was turn the key, start the car, and back out of the driveway down to the road. Ellis looked carefully at the road, because lots of cars had been driving past as fast as they could go. It seemed like a general panic was in effect. Everyone was getting out while the getting was good.
“I’d have liked to stay a few more days,” Ellis told his wife. “I like the place. I’m going to miss it a lot.”
“I don’t plan on staying for very long with the Peterson clan, but sometimes we just need to count on relatives to help us out a little,” Mary said. “That’s what family is. Family are the only people who help you in an emergency. I’d do the same for them.”
“Me, too,” Ellis said.
The two of them reminisced over their lives in Littleton. They remembered their five children who ran away just as soon as they were sixteen and could get out. They weren’t stupid. They knew a hovel and a bad deal from the moment they had been born into this one and opened their eyes to see it the first time. The Petersons were just about the poorest people in the region. In addition, several members of the extended family who had the last name of Peterson had been in and out of jail for fighting, poaching, robbery and general debauchery.
“I remember Jerry Peterson. The moment he was picked up for fighting, I knew he was guilty. I’d met him several times, and I can tell you that he wasn’t a fit person. Jerry ain’t all there. You know what I mean? Besides, I think everyone knew it from the day he was born. His mom told me that he was jerky like a robotic idiot his first two or three years. He wasn’t right from the starting gate.”
“I know. In and out of trouble. He even fought his own mom several times. Had to be dragged off her even. I’d have disowned him and sent him to reformatory.”
“For sure,” Mary said. “Kids who are off their rocker need to suffer for it. The earlier the better. I’d not have put up with it.”
“We put up with plenty of it,” Ellis said. “I tell you, being a parent is never pleasant. We’d been to the principal’s office with Jamesmy, Bobby, and Ruth a thousand times if we went once. It was one damn thing after the other with our kids.”
“I know. But I still love them.”
“I do, too. They say you always love the ones you hate the most.”
“I guess that’s what makes families stay together, Ellis,” Mary said. “It’s the hatred, the love, and all of that pushing back.”
Ellis pulled over. “I’m feeling bad again,” he said. He got out of the car and walked fifty feet into the woods. There, he bent over and tossed up what he had eaten for breakfast. The puke tasted awful, and he felt a sort of dizziness all about him.” He got back into the car. “We should have left as soon as that damned cloud rose up on top of us. I hate this whole thing.”
“Me, too, Ellis.”
“You need to drive, Mary. I’m a bit dizzy now.”
“All right, dear. Let’s do it.”
They continued to drive for several hours. Eventually, they stopped for gasoline. It wasn’t much. It was what country folks generally call a gas dump. The place was just another broken stump tied to some trashy roadside businesses, most of them hand built by persons without a common dot o
f sense in them on how to do build properly, so the buildings were haphazard and expressed their builders’ general mental decrepitudes as people said in those parts.
“Nice place,” Mary lied.
“Yep. My grand daddy built it.”
“It’s a corker, all right.”
The owner laughed. “Yep, it’s that all right. He only built it, because the depression got his stupid job lost forever due to the shut downs. So he cut three huge oak trees into boards, and now we got this creaking piece of shit. Nicest thing is that its paid for. In fact, it never cost us a dime.”
“It’d be a shame to have to pay for it.”
They all laughed.
“Jesus, lady, you are sure funny. I’ll give you that.”
They bought some bologna and bread to eat along the way and filled their water bottles before pulling out onto the road. The Petersons were as broke as the owners of the flimsy filling station.
“It had character,” Ellis said.
“Yep.”
66
At the Peterson house, they were greeted with fresh water and biscuits. Later, more homemade food came to the table. The Peterson clans had always survived on cheap ingenuity, because that way they never had to work much. Welfare, food stamps, and Medicaid were the inherited mainstays of their family life style. Out in back the chickens and goats made their usual noises. The garden was more than big enough for the family and for selling and, when necessary, giving away free vegetables to their closest neighbors when they were in need. They took in a few hundred dollars each year for eggs, nuts, and fruit. They also raised pigs. Hog meat was the mainstay of many a farmer’s food stock.
“We been feeling a bit sickly from the explosion,” Ellis said. “I think that cloud it sent up poisoned us a little. I told Mary we needed to leave right then and there, but she wouldn’t do it.”
“I like my home, that’s all.”
“Glad we could invite you here. After it clears up, which should be in a few weeks, I expect you’ll be able to get back there and take up where you left off. There’s nothing in the world like your own home. I’d feel lost if I had to pack up for awhile and leave. Glad it’s you that had to leave home and not me. No offense meant, you know.”
As the days went by, the Petersons settled in and began helping with the farm chores. Ellis, however, kept getting sicker with each passing day, and now Mary seemed to be catching it. What seemed easy to do just days before now became very hard for her to complete. “Every time I bend over, I get dizzy. Just the way it started with Ellis. Now, he can’t seem to even shit without me helping.”
“I’m feeling a bit midlin’ myself,” Lucy said. None of them knew what midlin’ meant exactly but it had something to do with feeling a bit sickly or so they thought.
Before long, all of them were pretty much bed ridden.
Whatever the had caught, it was going around. That was for sure. If they had radios or electricity, even, they might have figured they had caught what millions nationwide were infected with, which was a set of diseases unleashed into the atmosphere when the back of the plant broke in half and several sets of viruses were set free. As people ran from the threat of deadly diseases that the government had been developing, the disease spread far and wide. There was no escaping it. It wasn’t just the Peterson’s in the area who were sick. Others were sick for miles, even lots of people who had no contact whatever with Ellis or his wife. It was getting around.
Things got worse for Ellis when he stopped getting up from sleep, and just stayed in bed day and night. He was mostly unconscious, lost weight, sweated day and night and needed constant attention. Then, suddenly, Ellis was gone. Dead. His skin was still wet, even though it was icy cold to the touch. So they buried him in the family graveyard a hundred feet from the house. It was tough, because Mary was half asleep, and the other two were weak and sweating. Obviously, they were in great difficulty. Traffic on the highway was down to nothing, so the Petersons just hunkered down until both of them weakened and died. Lucy was the last one to die, and there was no one to bury her. Fortunately, her grave and Ed’s were already dug in anticipation of the coming end. After she capped Ed’s grave with dirt, she was so tired, she just tossed some fresh dirt into her own grave and crawled inside and waited. It didn’t take to long before she passed away. She had placed a heavy screen and a gate over the top of the grave to keep dogs from getting to her. Months later, someone would surely walk by looking for them and find the grave, the piled dirt and the shovel and dig her in permanently.
In her hand, Lucy held a bottle with the family’s new graves identified and the names of the dead in them curled inside. There was a bit of money inside, and a plea for someone to be kind enough to finish her burial and to carve some tombstone markers out of wood to identify them. It was the best she could do. She figured the rest of it was up to God and Satan. At the end, Lucy was so sick, she never really gave a damn which one. In fact, Lucy was so sick she didn’t care if anyone ever dug her in later. The tiny drab niceties of life just didn’t seem to matter to her anymore. She climbed down into her grave and lay on her back. She held the bottle with the instructions in her hands. “I’m coming home,” she said to her family. Then, she turned her head and vomited one last time into the newly shoveled soil. Shortly afterwards, she handed over what little was left of her sick little self to Jesus.