Mrs. Queen pressed her nose against her neighbor’s front window as she tried forcing her eyes to adjust to the slivers of darkness found between the curtains. She could hardly discern the outlines of furniture in so much shadow, but Mrs. Queen thought she caught a glimpse of something like a shoulder fleeing into the unseen hall.
“Lacy? I baked you another batch of cookies. Is everything fine?”
Thunder boomed over Mrs. Queen’s head, and the gusting wind nearly tossed the tray of cookies from her hand. Mrs. Queen doubted Lacy would’ve gone anywhere, for Lacy had called no more than two hours ago to complain about the lingering discomfort in her shoulder. Why then had Lacy locked her door? Mrs. Queen prayed nothing was wrong with her neighbor. She knew that prescription pain relievers were very strong, and were on occasion known to spark severe side effects. She didn’t know the phone numbers to any of Lacy’s family. She worried she hardly knew what to do should something had happened to her friend.
“I’m going back across the street, Lacy. It’s raining too hard and the wind is picking up too much for me to stand any longer on your porch. I promise I won’t eat any of your cookies. Call if you need anything.”
Mrs. Queen convinced herself that Lacy was only sleeping, that it must have been a sleeping pill that prevented Lacy from hearing her knock at the front door. The sky looked menacing to Mrs. Queen as she hurried through the arriving storm to return to her house. The clouds hung so oppressively low that Mrs. Queen thought she might be able to stretch upward to touch their rumbling mists, and the sky had taken on the greenish tint that came with only the wickedest of thunderstorms. The first of the hail struck her shoulder just as she hopped onto her lawn and rushed into her parlor. The television had shrilled weather warnings all morning long about the unprecedented line of destructive tornadoes tearing across the land towards her community. The trees were bending in the wind by the time Mrs. Queen closed the last of her windows, and she took a breath as the town’s sirens started to wail a wink before her home lost its power.
Mrs. Queen had just opened the kitchen door to her basement when someone pounded on her front door. She expected to find that Lacy had strayed across the street for some company through the storm. She held her breath when she saw her son and grandson wincing in the rain and wind.
“My Lord, Maven! What are you thinking, travelling in a storm like this? Hurry inside!”
Mrs. Queen pulled Maven into her parlor, and she nearly strangled David in the embrace she wrapped around her grandchild. David trembled in her grip, and Mrs. Queen saw there was fear in the boy’s wide eyes. She looked to Maven, and her heart skipped a beat upon seeing her son’s pale features. Mrs. Queen turned cold when she caught the scent that drifted from Maven.
“Have you been smoking again, son? I smell it on your jacket. And you’ve been drinking. Drinking the liquor like your father used to. I smell it all over your face. What’s gotten into you, Maven? You haven’t touched either in years, and you even have David in your company. I must say I’m disappointed.”
Maven’s eyes darted back and forth. “Where’s your emergency radio?”
“I put the terrible thing in the hall closet just as you advised. I didn’t need it buzzing all the time with all my anxiety. It was sure to start humming again if I sat around listening to it.”
Maven ran his hand through his thinning hair. “You haven’t heard?”
Mrs. Queen felt something stirring in her gut. “Heard what?”
Maven hurried to the hall closet and tossed shoes and coats over his shoulder while David continued to shake in his grandmother’s arms.
“I don’t know how to tell you, mom. We’re staring at the end.”
“The end of what, Maven?” Mrs. Queen squeezed David’s shoulders. Was her son not thinking how he terrified his child?
“The end of everything, mother.”
Maven gripped the radio’s power chord and yanked it into the hallway. He clutched David’s hand and pulled his boy down the basement stairs as Mrs. Queen hustled to follow. Maven failed to say anything more while he fiddled with the emergency radio’s antennae in the basement’s dark. The timbers of Mrs. Queen’s home popped and cracked. The wind whistled through the windows. Maven turned the radio’s volume up to the extreme; and though Mrs. Queen wished her son might have played music to distract them from the weather’s fury, the voice from the speakers only enhanced her fear.
“Repeat. This is not a test of the emergency broadcast system. Repeat. This is not a test. Take immediate shelter and remain on this channel for additional broadcasts from civil defense. This is not a test.”
“What does it mean, Maven?”
“You pick today, of all days, to hide your emergency radio in the hall closet.”
“I’m only trying to do as you suggest. I’m only trying to take control of my hum.”
“Maybe it’s just as well. Do you have any drinking water?”
The old fear choked Mrs. Queen. That familiar feeling of paralysis made her knees shake. She felt her fingers fidget, and then she felt her hands shake. But she still did not hum, no matter how David’s grip on her tightened, no matter how the fear in her son’s face only increased.
“Tell me, Maven. What’s happened?”
The words spilled from Maven in a flood. “Eastern warships in international waters this morning fired upon and destroyed one of our stealth reconnaissance planes, killing all three pilots aboard. Our aircraft from a nearby carrier responded, destroying the complete Eastern battle group responsible for tracking and firing upon our plane. Everything’s escalated to the brink. Everyone’s on a hair trigger. The silos are open. Intercontinental, ballistic missiles could launch multiple, thermonuclear warheads at any moment. We’re looking at nuclear holocaust.”
David pressed his face into his grandmother’s hip, and Mrs. Queen’s heart broke when that child’s fear made him hum.
“Do you have to leave that radio on Maven?”
“Don’t you think we should know what’s going on?”
“I’m not sure we should.”
Mrs. Queen closed her eyes. She was too frightened to cry. She had tried so hard to convince herself that all her worries were but figments of imagination. She had finally believed that the nightmares that haunted her sleep had not tainted the wakened world. She had tricked herself into thinking that all her anxiety was but the result of a mind whose natural balance of chemicals was slightly off-kilter. She had regained the confidence that had been lost to her the day her husband died. She had come to believe that the world was touched more by hope than it was by doom.
But in that basement, feeling her heart thunder in her chest, feeling her body grow old as her limbs trembled, Mrs. Queen realized that she had been sanest when she had hummed. Prescription pills could not wash away the world’s monstrosity. Everyone else was mad. Everyone who went through their days without shaking and humbling were the insane ones. Mrs. Queen squeezed David and wished it all would go away.
“Do you feel something?” asked Mavin.
The world suddenly seemed to collapse beneath Mrs. Queen’s feet. The ground shook, and she gripped David all the more tightly as they both struggled to remain standing. The walls vibrated to a terrible din, casting all of the antique tools Mrs. Queen’s husband had collected while living – the tools his widow had carried into the basement and hooked upon those concrete walls following the collector’s burial – to the floor, where they clattered and rang as the ground continued to tumble. Mrs. Queen’s pile of laundry fell from the dryer, and the storm water the failing sump pump could not jettison from the foundation stained the bath towels and garments. The basement’s ceiling buckled. Towers of cardboard boxes, holding the ornaments and decorations Mrs. Queen’s family once assembled during the holiday season, toppled and shattered.
The rumble intensified, and Mrs. Queen held her breat
h as she watched cracks splinter across her basement walls. The storm continued to howl outside, and Mrs. Queen heard her home’s timbers pop and snap beneath the strain of wind and earthquake. The voice from the emergency radio continued to warn that furious nations prepared their weapons of Armageddon. Mrs. Queen closed her eyes, gripped David as hard as she could, and waited for her home to collapse upon her. What shelter could be expected to stand beneath the fury of such destruction?
But a second before she thought the earth directly below her would open to swallow her into the planet’s bowels, something broke within Mrs. Queen, and all the confidence and strength she had amassed during her struggle against her anxiety flooded away from her heart.
With David sobbing against her hip, and with the walls crumbling all around her, Mrs. Queen hummed.