At first, most of her body had been trapped, only her right arm, chest, and head free. But the agonizing screams had motivated her to push past her exhaustion and try to get free. Only then could she try to do something, anything to make the sounds stop.
Her helplessness beat at her, goading her, filling her with guilt as she scrabbled with her free arm, clearing dirt away handful by handful. Her feet had wiggled, safe within the hard soles of her boots, and she worked them back and forth until her thighs ached with effort. Whenever she rested, she spoke to him, to the other body that lay half-smothered next to her, the head turned away, unable to move.
Beneath the tumbled stone, she still felt the tight clasp of their hands.
He’d been the one who knew, who’d somehow felt the difference deep in his body and awareness. He’d grabbed her hand and told her to run, and she had, blindly trusting him, even though she didn’t believe it would make any difference. He’d held her hand when she stumbled, refusing to let go, and pulled her up and down steep inclines. His hand became her link to sanity, the warmth a reminder of the love they fought to preserve.
Yet in the end, they were betrayed by his belief. They couldn’t outrun the destruction. Wild with fear, he tried to push her ahead, to protect her body with his own from what he knew was coming. But she’d refused to let go – she needed him. He was the strong one, the one who knew.
So when it came, blasting them down, following them to the ground, they both became trapped instead.
She thought that was the worst of it. She was alive, if bruised and aching. She had lived through it. She needed only to escape the confining prison of rock.
But then the earth settled into itself and the screams began. They were wordless, full of agony and terror. Her head turned, searching for the source, and she saw him, her beloved, his head turned away.
She begged with him, pleaded, promised him whatever he asked, if only he would live.
“Gary, honey, you just have to give me a little more time and I’ll be able to help you. You’ll see. I can be your rescuer this time. Just hold on, honey, please. Honey? I love you. Honey… please, just answer me. Honey… Gary… please…”
As the hours passed, her pleas became tinged with angry desperation.
“Gary, just stop screaming. Please, I promise I’ll get you out. Please. Just. Stop. Screaming. Stop it… stop!”
Gradually, hours or minutes later, his screams turned into whimpering sobs, then groans. It was then that fear truly hit her. He never cried, never gave in. He was the strong one. He wouldn’t give up.
“Gary, give me a little more time, okay? I’ve got my leg free now. Just hold on.”
Then later, as he began to hoarsely wheeze.
“Don’t leave me, okay Gary? I’ll get free in just a little while, and I’ll be able to help you.”
Still later, when she felt her shoulder start to shift and his wracking breaths became quiet moans.
“See, I’m almost free. You just have to wait a few more moments.”
She continued pulling and struggling, digging and flailing her arms, forcing her abused body to keep moving. Whenever she was forced by shortness of breath to stop and take a break, she spoke to him, reassuring him.
“See, when we’re free, and you get better, we’ll find a new place to live. Who knows, maybe there are still some other people. Doesn’t that sound lovely?”
But he never answered, never said a word, and never acknowledged her frantic digging and loving voice. He was too busy drowning in his pain. Too busy dying.
During one break, when she closed her eyes briefly to rest, she thought of how she ended up trapped beneath a piece of broken mountain.
~*~
When the end first began, she had refused to believe in it. Gary had always been a bit of a pessimist, so much more than she. He was always listening to the doomsday prophets and their predictions. One day he’d decided to go and buy a gun. Then he started watching shows about surviving in the wild. Then he’d spent weekends camping out in the wild. She tried to go a few times, but she was so much a city girl she stopped after only a few times.
She used to joke about it with Gary.
“Honey, it’s not as if I can even light a fire without a lighter and pre-treated wood. Not to mention all the bugs!”
He just shook his head and sighed.
“Fine, Lynne, I’ll just go without you.”
Perhaps their relationship would’ve died of its own accord had not Gary been proven right. When the lights flickered and started to die, when the skies became jaundiced and clouded with fog, when the ground started to tremble, Lynne clung to Gary’s strength, even as she found herself still convinced deep down inside that everything would turn out all right. It can’t be real, she thought to herself. Not the end, although she at least admitted that there was something happening. A change of some sort.
Lynne simply refused to see how deep a transformation it would be.
So when Gary insisted that they leave, flee upwards to the mountains, escape from the treacherous cities – lit as they were with the electric hiss of broken wires and pipes – to the supposed safety of the forested slopes of the nearby mountains, Lynne balked.
“I don’t see why everyone is panicking.”
Gary addressed her while continuing to pack.
“You do see the color of the skies? The fact that all the birds and rats have disappeared?”
He spoke calmly, with little inflection.
“Of course I do.”
“Then why isn’t that enough proof?”
She had sat silently, thinking, watching him move methodically, pulling out shirts and pants, discarding what he believed to be useless, folding what he intended to take. She noticed he was packing only his clothes. If she wanted to go with him, she would have to take action.
He was making a point.
After a while, she sighed.
“I guess it’s just easier not to think about. Like, that everything is going to go back to normal again, you know? Kinda’ the way I never think about politics. I mean, no one actually knows what’s really going on. So why think the worst?”
“Because that’s the only choice that gives us a chance of surviving, no matter what the circumstances.”
He finally stopped and turned to face her.
“Lynne, I know things have been uneasy between us lately, mostly because you can’t see what I see. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want you with me, that I don’t want to give you that same chance, too. Because I do. You know that, right?”
Lynne was, in her own way, strong and stubborn. She didn’t want to admit that he might be right, that she was, in this case, mostly wrong. Instead, she stood up and began packing, too.
When they finished packing and closed up the house and locked the doors of their former life behind them, they loaded up their bikes and headed out. Fuel had, after all, been gone for quite some time.
It took them most of that day and the next to reach the foot of the closest range of mountains. They discussed abandoning their bikes, but in the end, decided to keep them, in case they needed – or could – go back to the city.
To Lynne’s surprise and Gary’s grim expectations, there were already people there, crowding the lower slopes. They climbed higher until they found a clearing in which to settle. But they were not alone for long. Over the next weeks (or months, as they had no way to truly mark time’s passage), people streamed to the mountains, two or a dozen at a time, until they shared their clearing with hundreds.
Gary decided to move higher for, as he reasoned, there would be less inhabited places with more space to hide. So they packed their tent and blankets and moved, occasionally riding their bikes, occasionally walking. But wherever they went, they found others.
One evening (as they supposed it must be), sitting quietly in their tent beneath the dim, sepia light of the sky, Gary thought about the crowded mountain slopes, speculating aloud to Lynne about them.
&nbs
p; “Everyone must’ve left. The cities must be completely empty.”
Lynne had nodded sadly, and then looked at him in confusion.
“But no one knows why.”
Gary did not nod his head in agreement with her. Instead, he looked away, through the open flap of the tent, and tried not to show the terror he felt growing. He was meant to be a survivor – he knew why they ran. He knew it deep inside, past his psyche and imagination, to the place where his instincts swarmed, screaming silent warnings at him. He wasn’t allowed the bliss of ignorance – only the burden of knowing.
Gary turned back regarded Lynne in the sickly light, his face once again clear of his inner turmoil, and wondered why she still refused to see what was so clearly in front of her. For the first time, instead of feeling exasperated, he felt jealousy mingled with pity. What must it be like, he had asked himself, to be so supremely unaware? To not know exactly how bad it was going to be? To be so unprepared?
But underneath that envy lived the regret that he was not built that same way.
Later – another day perhaps – he was present to hear the final radio broadcast, though he only caught snatches of sound through the silent crowd.
“…We do not know yet who or what placed these destructive devices deep inside the earth, nor what has triggered them, because, according to our limited sources, they appear to be exploding on every continent on the planet. Sadly, we have no way of knowing if they will continue until the ground is completely broken and we are all swept away…”
It wasn’t enough, by any means. No real explanation. No real offering of hope. Something inside him died then, something civilized and cultured. In its place surged his instinct and will to survive the coming catastrophe, a baser version of his self that had no place in the world he’d known his whole life. As he turned away from the sorrow surrounding him, he looked around with new eyes. The crowds, which had always bothered him, suddenly became competitors in the survival game, rival predators that would put him down if they could. He shoved and pushed his way through the unresisting crowd, hearing the sounds of guns and heavy pursuit in his head. When there was enough space, he began loping to his congested campsite.
As soon as he arrived, he starting taking down the tent and packing.
“Lynne!”
She came out of a neighboring tent and stopped abruptly as she saw Gary collapsing their tent.
“What are you doing?”
Gary kept working.
“We have to leave, go someplace else.”
“Why? What did you find out?”
He stilled and bent his head. The dwindling part of him that grew up in a technologically savvy world cried out at the horror of what it imagined happening, of a people who knew enough to destroy an entire planet without any hope of ever being able to fix it. His shoulders dropped for a moment.
“No one is coming to help us.”
The blood drained out of Lynne’s face.
“No, that can’t be… that’s not right! The government –”
“Is powerless.”
“How can you say that?
“Back there on the really crowded slopes away from the trees, there was someone with a radio. They caught something. I heard…”
His voice trailed off and Lynne ran up to him.
“What did it say?”
Gary shook himself and let civilization fall back away. He pushed Lynne roughly away.
“We don’t have much time. Get your things.”
Lynne wanted to argue with him, but he turned away and started folding up the tent, his face distant and cold. She recognized nothing in it.
But she had followed him out of the city, up into the mountains, campsite to campsite, trail to trail. She could see in his eyes, hear in his voice that he was leaving – with or without her. And if she stopped following, she would end up alone.
So she scurried around, packing up her spread blankets and clothes recently hung out to dry. She stumbled after him wordlessly, more confused and annoyed than worried, as they moved and travelled. What Gary searched for Lynne did not know, but he wouldn’t stay longer in any place for more than a night.
And still it wasn’t enough.
~*~
As Gary laid there, every nerve in his shredded, crushed legs screaming out to him, he felt himself consumed by the pain. There was no thought, no ability to access any of his five senses. All that he was turned inward to focus only on his agony. There was no fighting, no struggle to survive, no will to resist - simply complete immersion in the parts of his body that only functioned enough to tell him how much it hurt to still feel them. Of the voice at his side or the person desperately fighting to free herself, he was unaware. There was only the suffocation of his senses, the drowning of his self in pain.
As hours wore on, sliding into yet another day, and another, he became exhausted. The pain dimmed enough only to let him dream of release, to beg his body to let go so his spirit would be freed from the prison that tortured and refused it rest. Still he had no other thoughts, nothing at all of the woman who was trapped next to him, whose life he had saved at the cost of his own.
But gradually, as his legs died more completely, the pain started to loosen its stranglehold. As it did, Gary was able to form more and more nearly-coherent thoughts. He pictured his life and saw his memories changing shapes as they flickered in his mind. He believed that he had been happy before the end had come. He’d enjoyed his work and his free time, had hobbies and friends. There was a girl, too, but her name refused to come. He let it slide past, all his decisions and beliefs, up to the point the skies turned on him and he decided to leave the city. Civilization was ending, but he had made all the right choices. He should have survived.
So why hadn’t he?
At his side, Lynne finally pulled herself free of the rock. Her foot was twisted and possibly broken in several places, and her shoulder sat strangely on her back. But she managed to crawl forward, unclasping her hand from Gary’s frozen grasp to move closer to his head. Finally, she reached him and looked him in the face. His eyes were open but they looked empty. If it wasn’t for the barest whisper of his breath, she would’ve sworn he was dead.
“Gary, look, I’m free. Told you, didn’t I? Now I just gotta pull you out, right. Gary?”
She placed her scraped hand against his cold, dry cheek. Tears welled in her eyes as she leaned over to kiss him softly.
“Honey, I love you. Please, don’t leave me now.”
Slowly, Gary’s eyes began to focus and gain awareness. As they did, his brows drew together. He was angry.
“Why… didn’t you… listen?”
Lynne shook with guilt.
“I’m so sorry, honey, I swear. I’ll make it up to you. Just don’t leave me.”
The anger fled suddenly, replaced by another emotion.
“You gotta… survive now. Don’t make it… mean nothing.”
Tears poured down Lynne’s face.”
“Promise me, girl. Promise.”
She whispered in-between her sobs.
“I promise. I love you.”
Confusion spread over his tortured visage.
“I… ”
His eyes lost their focus, leaving his gaze bleak and passionless as he finally, gratefully, stopped breathing.
And because Lynne was, in her own way, stubborn and strong, she closed his eyes, struggled to her feet, and started moving, the tumbled rock her crutch instead of a warm hand clasping her own. Without direction, she moved. She wasn’t allowed to give up. Not anytime soon.
She had a promise to keep.
~*~
6. Drip of Moonlight
By
C. M. Bratton
Danny huddled in on himself, holding his sobs tightly to his frame, his chest aching with the need to cry out his fear and pain. His anger. It was dark and cold, though he was covered in sweat. Still, he shivered. From pain. From loss. From shock.
For the first time in his short life,
he understood he was truly alone. And he had never been so completely cut off from all he knew – his family, his home, even simple sunlight. He had turned away from it all, obeyed the command to go, run, hide, without really understanding what that would eventually mean. Not until he was curled up in some lightless hole did he truly begin to comprehend his choice.
And wonder why.
Why did I leave mama? And Jenny? I thought they were right behind me. I told them they had to go faster, that I knew a way. I told them. Hurry up, I said. And I ran. But when I turned to show them the place I found, all I saw was rocks. Falling all over. Even on me. I had to keep running.
Just then a deep roar filtered through the air and Danny felt the rocks around him start to move. He covered his head and breathed through his arms, his small body tense and expectant. He kept waiting for something bigger to fall on him, to break apart the tiny black hole he’d found and let in the questing, devastating, killing light – light that used to be his friend. He didn’t know someone could live with so much fear, or why he was so determined to keep breathing.
But though the ground shook and the rocks swayed, his little haven remained secure. After a while, the awful noises stopped and silence once again returned, the earth falling back into itself. Danny, however, refused to move. For a long time he lay, trembling, afraid, unwilling to move despite the thirst in his mouth. Hunger pangs twisted his stomach for a long while before they, too, died away.
If only he could take one last magnificent sip of water.
He tried to distract himself. Not by thinking about his mom and little sister, no. He wasn’t ready for that. He thought, instead, about a game he’d been playing with his best friend, Robby, just a few days before. It involved building walls out of sticks and twigs and mud to protect his people (made out of rocks) from being attacked and invaded by the other side.
He never wondered why the other side attacked, why there had to be fighting, why he was right and the other side was wrong. He never wondered why the rules existed there in his head, making everything so much more important to him.
Robby had been trying to sneak some of his rocks closer and they had started arguing. Danny kept repeating that Robby was breaking the rules and Robby kept saying that wasn’t true.