Summer of the Apocalypse Page 5

  “Did to,” said Dodge. “We figured you know some great scavenging, like a treasure trove we talked about. Caught up to you this morning. Still don’t know how you guessed us out.” Rabbit turned back to them. “All the good stuff’s gone.”

  Eric chewed on a tough piece of jerky thoughtfully. “You hear anything last night?” Dodge blanched. “Nothing.” Eric recognized Dodge’s lie. At ten, Dodge didn’t have a poker face. Rabbit said without flinching, “Some thunder.”

  “You didn’t hear anything like this?” Eric howled.

  Dodge’s jaw dropped. “That was you?” He looked at Rabbit and then back at Eric. “You?” Rabbit slapped his thigh. “Told you it wasn’t ghosts.”

  Dodge snapped back, “I didn’t say they were ghosts. I said it sounded like ghosts.”

  “You were scared.”

  “So were you.” Dodge looked back at Eric again. “How’d you do all that?”

  “It wasn’t all me, son. It wasn’t all me.” He wouldn’t say any more about it. They finished lunch.

  “So what about the treasure trove?” asked Dodge.

  Eric thought about the library at Boulder. Thousands of books: books on farming, metallurgy, medicine, astronomy. “I guess maybe you’re right about that,” he said. “I’ve got a treasure in mind if I can get to it. If it’s still there.”

  Dodge said, “You’re gonna need help carrying it back, then, right?” Rabbit nodded in agreement. Eric picked at a piece of meat jammed between his front teeth. “Your dad…”

  “Dad’s scared your gonna teach me something he don’t want me to know,” said Dodge. “You ought to hear him go on. He’s asking me all the time, ‘What’s he saying to you now? What’s the old man saying?’

  And he keeps telling me to stay away from you.” Dodge bit his lip. Eric thought it a sad expression. It was a habit Troy had when he was young. He’d bite his lip so often that sometimes it’d turn blue from the bruises underneath. “I don’t want to stay away from you, Grandfather.” Eric explained why they couldn’t go, how the trip might be dangerous, how an old man who knew the ways of the world would be safe but if he had to look after two kids that they all might get hurt, how their parents would worry about them. He used all his best arguments, so it was with more than a little amazement, when he reached the intersection of Bowles Avenue and C-470 and moved up the hill towards the stone hut, that he realized the boys were still with him, and that he had agreed to take them. As they cleared trash off the hut’s floor so there would be room for their sleeping bags, Rabbit said, “You know, somebody’s been watching us.”

  Eric said, “Excuse me?”

  Holding the corners, Rabbit snapped his ground cloth out and it settled gently to the stone floor. “They been spying on us since lunch. Surprised you didn’t notice.” It was the longest speech he made all day.

  Chapter Four

  HOLDING HANDS

  Four days after the motorcycle thugs shouted their parting curses, hopped on their motorcycles and roared away, traffic on the highway stopped. The night before, the bumper to bumper parade had crept west, headlights glinting from the chrome and windshields of the cars in front of them, taillights winking bright red as they tapped their brakes. Sometimes someone would beep, and the horn echoed from the granite wall across the stream. Two or three hours after sunset, Eric’s mother relieved him. They’d been keeping twenty-four hour watch of the path to the cave. But in the morning, when Eric took the lookout again, the empty, silent road greeted him. He put on his headphones and thumbed on his radio for news, hoping that the batteries had somehow recharged in the night, but they were dead. Three days later, when he took the morning watch, he still wondered what no traffic meant. Had they cured it? Did the doctors fix everything and no one was scared? He sighed. There was no way to know without a radio. He couldn’t believe that Dad would have had the foresight to store all the food and other supplies in the cave, but forget to include a radio. He looked around at the familiar terrain. A thin coating of frost covered the shaded part of the rocks. A quarter-inch band of moisture marked the boundary between the shade and sun. He pressed his hand against a rock and left a five fingered shape in the frost. He pulled the useless headphones around his neck. The cold metal raised goose bumps on his legs and arms. He tried not to touch his hair, which felt heavy and flat. Oil coated his skin like paint. Dad had said they’d wash at the river, but he hadn’t said it was safe yet. He said he didn’t want to risk being seen on the road. Eric believed himself lucky that Dad let him brush his teeth.

  He thought about Amanda Grieves, a girl he liked at school. What would she think of him now, dirty and hiding in a cave? She sat next to him in the band, the flute section, an instrument he’d picked two years earlier because Ian Anderson, the lead singer for the group Jethro Tull, played it. She was second chair; he was third. Each day he’d think about how close they were. Their legs sometimes touched. He felt her warmth through his jeans. He had dreamed about holding her hand for weeks, but he didn’t tell anyone, not even his friend, Mike, who talked about “scoring” constantly. “I really bagged one last night,” he’d say. “We back-seat bopped till we dropped.” But Eric just wanted to hold Amanda’s hand. He imagined them walking down the hall, fingers intertwined.

  Rocks clattered behind him and he jumped. His dad was coming toward him, methodically kicking pebbles on his way, keeping his head down as if he were purposefully clearing the path.

  “Quiet?” Dad asked.

  Annoyance flared in Eric. The canyon was empty from end to end. Obviously it was quiet. He considered something clever like, “You just missed the floats and bands,” but said nothing. Dad rested his hands on the boulder Eric used for a watch post. As big as a refrigerator on its side, it offered a perfect view of the only approach to the cave and was easy to hide behind. Dad bent his elbows until his chest met the rock, doing a kind of leaning push-up. Eric doubted his dad was strong enough to do a real push-up, then he thought about the boxes in the cave: cases of canned fruits and vegetables and the other supplies. He still marveled over the mattresses. No matter how he tried, he couldn’t imagine his scrawny, unatheletic, bookish father muscling the mattresses up the scrub oak choked trail from the road. A black holster hung from Dad’s belt. Eric couldn’t imagine his dad carrying a gun either, but there it was, dark wooden handle sticking out of the dark leather. Dad said, “I have to go to the van.”

  “I thought you’d got it all.”

  Dad grimaced and pushed himself upright. “Is your radio working?” Eric shook his head.

  “I’m going to find out about this.” He waved his hand at the road. “Then I’ll drive into Idaho Springs. I want you to go with me.”

  Normally, before this horrible, weird week, Eric hated driving with his father, partly because Dad braked a half block earlier than he needed to, as far as Eric was concerned, and he always took the shortest route, even if a slightly longer one had ten fewer stop lights. He also hated driving with his father because of the silence. Long, dry, uncomfortable minutes would pass, and neither of them said anything, then Dad would say something stupid like, “How’s school?”

  In Idaho Springs, though, Eric could buy batteries. “Sounds great. Let’s go!” He slid his arms into his pack straps and followed Dad down the path.

  A half mile east of the cave, US Highway 6 went through a short tunnel. Dad had hidden the van down a weed-choked access road that cut away from the highway right before this tunnel. He’d parked it behind a thick stand of Cottonwoods. Eric walked ahead, though Dad kept urging him to stay back. The air smelled wet and cold next to the river. By the cave, a hundred feet above the canyon floor, it smelled dusty, like pinyon.

  Eric was thinking of Amanda again. She had baby-fine blonde hair that brushed her shoulders. When she played the flute, her head tilted to the side and he could see the pulse in her neck, the way her lips pursed over each note. He had wanted more than anything to hold her hand in the hallway, so he made a plan, a stupid
plan, now that he remembered it, but the only one that he thought might work. The door out of the band room was wide enough for two people to walk together. If he left the room the same time she did, if he let his hand swing as he walked, he could time the swinging of his hand with her hand, then naturally, oh so naturally, let them meet. Then, they would be holding hands.

  “Eric, stay back,” repeated Dad. The darkness of the tunnel loomed before them. It amplified the river, making the splash of water on rocks sound like clapping. They turned onto the access road. A patch of brambles caught Eric’s sock. He bent and carefully brushed them away. Dad walked past him. When Eric caught up, Dad stood to the side of the road, his arms crossed on his chest. The van, Eric saw, rested on four flats. The windows were broken in and the hood was up. Eric didn’t need to look at the engine to know that it too was vandalized. “Sheesh. Now we’re in for it.” Eric peered into the van, careful to keep his hands off the jagged edges around the windows. The seat covers were slashed and white stuffing pushed out of the slits. Dad climbed the slope above the car and rolled some rocks off a pile.

  “Hah! They missed our stuff though.” A corner of a box showed between two of the stones. “We’ll get this later.” He looked at the van for a moment. Eric tossed a handful of pebbles into the creek where the foam swallowed them without a splash. He thought they might hitchhike to town, then he remembered there was no traffic. “Sheesh!” he said again.

  Dad covered the box, then slid down the slope. “We walk,” he said and moved resolutely up the path to the highway.

  When they passed the hidden trail to the cave, Eric was thinking again of Amanda. She smiled often. Sometimes, when they played a section of music particularly well, she smiled at him, but they didn’t ever talk. He didn’t know what to say once he got past “Hello,” and “How are you?” He thought, why did I think she’d hold hands with me? He blushed remembering how his plan hadn’t worked out, and he was glad his father was ahead of him.

  School this year was so weird anyway, he thought. Everybody talking about the disease. The newspapers called it “Mega-cold” or “The Austrian Cold,” or “Beggar’s Fever,” because doctors first identified it among the homeless in Vienna. We were still cheering at football games when the T.V. started reporting the disease. It was a curiosity, something happening to people far away. First they’d act as if they had a cold, sniffing and coughing, then, after a week or so, the fever would start, and within twenty-four hours they’d be dead. The fever wouldn’t break, even after they died, the newspapers said. For hours afterward the virus ate at the body, creating its own heat. The disease’s progress was simple: two weeks contagious, one week of the cold, one day of fever, then death. He’d heard that airborne droplets from coughs transmitted the virus a mile downwind. So did sweat. Brian Knudson told him, in a horrified whisper, just touching a doorknob an infected person had handled a week before gave one the disease.

  Adults acted funny too. The band director, even, told everyone in the woodwind section not to swap reeds. All the fuss, though, didn’t touch Eric. Teachers talked about the disease. Students staged benefit concerts, and the school nurse gave talks in class about health issues. But Eric could only think about Amanda’s hand, Amanda’s beautiful, remote and lonely hand.

  He shook his head ruefully. Four days in a row he’d tried for it as they left the band room. The first time, Theresa Ortiz got in the way. The next three times his nerve failed him, but the fifth time, Friday, the last week in May, he lined himself perfectly. They reached the door, shoulder to shoulder. He smelled her perfume, he was so close, and underneath that, he imagined, something else, lilacs, like her bath soap perhaps. The thought made his head swim: her bath soap! He could in a moment be walking in the hall, hand in hand with Amanda Grieves, the prettiest girl in the flute section. Heck, the entire band. She wasn’t like those women in the Metallica posters, the Prince posters, with black mesh stocking and metal studded leather bikinis. She was real. His forearm brushed hers. He wiped his hand on his leg, then timed his reach. There! He caught her hand in his. For a second, all was perfect. He had her hand. Then she stopped, jerked it away and said, “What do you think you’re doing?” She looked at him, puzzled. “Were you trying to hold my hand?” she asked. He couldn’t speak. Someone bumped her from behind, and she joined the crowd in the hall. Other band members pushed past him where he stood, blocking the doorway.

  Later, Eric sat in the lunch room poking at his Salisbury Steak. At the table next to his, a couple sat facing each other, foreheads almost touching, holding hands. He wondered, how do they do it? How do people ever get to hold hands?

  A few weeks after that, he got a girlfriend, but he couldn’t shake the sight of Amanda’s sculpted and impossible fingers, lightly curled, brushing her thigh as she walked.

  The high tech, straight-as-a-mountain-road-could-be multi-lane I-70 replaced the old, curvy, two-lane US Highway 6 in the mid-1960s. Until 1991 when Colorado made small stakes gambling legal in Black Hawk and Central City, only slow-paced tourists and fishermen used the old road that followed the course of Cripple Creek, crossing occasionally. When the road builders could figure no other way, the road dove through short tunnels where children in station wagons urged parents to beep their horns. The scenic route ended where the old highway merged with the new via a long, steep entrance ramp. Just before noon, Eric trudged up this ramp behind his dad, who had not rested since they began hiking three hours before. The creek gurgled over rocks to Eric’s left. Other than their feet scuffing the asphalt, the lively chatter of the water was the only sound he had heard since they left the van. Neither Eric nor his Dad had spoken. The wet sounds reminded Eric that his throat ached from thirst. His shoulders throbbed where the pack weighed them down. His feet hurt; he could feel blisters forming where his perspiration-soaked socks rubbed on each step. He glanced at his dad. A broad swath of sweat stained the back of his shirt to his belt.

  Eric broke their sustained silence with, “When are we going to get there?” Dad stopped, put his hands on his hips, the right hand cupping the holstered gun, and sighed loudly. He didn’t turn to face Eric, but looked up the ramp until Eric reached him.

  “We better talk,” Dad said.

  Eric closed his eyes for a second. Dad’s “talks” were always a bore, or bad, or both. He opened them and tried to look interested. “Okay.”

  “Your mom is sick. I’ve been trying to figure a way to tell you while we’ve been walking, and I don’t know any way but this.”

  It hadn’t occurred to Eric to wonder what Dad was thinking. Hours of silence from him weren’t unusual. Eric assumed he wasn’t thinking. The idea that Dad was churning something in his brain at the same time he was struck him peculiarly, like finding out that escargot was snail. Then the words themselves sunk in. Mom is sick.

  Dad continued, “She’s sick; maybe you and I are too, so we’ve got to get to Idaho Springs for medicine. They may have a doctor and a clinic. We can bring her into town if there’s room. Perhaps it’s not the… the…” He paused, searching for a word. “…disease, but it might be. We can’t be too careful.”

  “We should be with her.” Eric wanted to run down the ramp and back toward the cave. He could almost see her, alone, frightened, a big, heavy woman who needed someone to care for her.

  “She’ll be fine. It’s just a cough now, an itchy throat. She has aspirin. She wanted you to go with me.”

  “But she would have expected us hours ago. She’ll think we’re dead.” Dad wiped his face with a bandanna he pulled from his back pocket. Then he tied it around his neck.

  “She’s a tough bird, Eric. Besides, she saw us go by this morning.”

  “I didn’t see her.”

  “You weren’t paying attention. She waved from the lookout. Anyway, we may not be walking much longer.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Listen.”

  Eric turned his head side to side, like a hound dog catching a scent, then he hea
rd a rumble over the cascade of water. It rose in volume, then fell, and Eric realized he’d heard the sound several times while they were standing on the ramp.

  “It’s trucks on I-70. We can catch a ride. We’re only a couple of miles away, now, but I’m getting tired,” said Dad. Eric started toward the highway. Dad caught his arm like a clamp. Eric tried to shake him off, an automatic response. He hated his dad to touch him. It made him feel like a baby. Dad said, “We’re not done talking.” Eric relaxed in his grip. Dad let go. “If we get sick, son—I mean your mom and I—we’ve made some preparations, some things at the house you need to know about.” Dad fished in his pocket. Eric heard the clink of coins, then Dad handed him a key. “This opens a drawer in the back of my desk in the office. It’s not likely anyone would find the drawer, even if they broke into the house. In it are instructions for you.” Eric looked at him uncomfortably. Dad continued, “You know, if we do get sick.”

  Eric put the key in his pocket. “You’ll be okay.” He looked away. He didn’t know how to deal with this. He thought maybe he should hug his dad. Dad coughed into his hand.

  “If things don’t work, you’ll have to make decisions on your own. We’ve got plenty of supplies in the cave to get you to winter, but I think you’ll need to go back to Littleton before the snows hit. I’m thinking the worst will be past by then. The disease will have burnt itself out. Do you understand what I’m saying, about us getting sick, about what you should do?” Dad put his hand on Eric’s arm again, but he didn’t squeeze it this time.

  “Sure, Dad. I got it.” Dad’s hand pressed a shade harder on Eric’s arm, and Eric looked directly into Dad’s eyes behind his glasses. They were dark brown with little flecks of brightness like gold in them. He couldn’t remember ever looking into his dad’s eyes like this before. “Sure, Dad.” Dad pulled his hand away.