The End Is Now

The Jeep was no sports car, but she was pretty sure she went from zero to eighty in record time. Dust and chunks of turf, pebbles, and demolished brush slammed into the windows and scraped along the sides of the vehicle. The right tire hit the drunk bumps on the side of the road and Lucy aimed straight, keeping the ridges beneath them so she could feel her way down the road. Pale flashes of the white lines on the road through the smoke helped keep her on track.

The air cleared after a few miles, and she found herself praying under her breath as the headlights lit upon dark asphalt. She pulled the Jeep back left, into the road proper.

“You’re lucky you didn’t blow the tires,” Jack said. His voice sounded more awed than reproachful.

“Driving by Braille,” Lucy said, shooting him a quick smile. A pain hit her heart. That saying was something her mother always said, usually to excuse the way she often wandered on the road a little, her brain lost in some scientific minutia.

“Did we just survive a meteor strike?” Heidi asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“We good on gas?”

Lucy checked the gauge. “Yeah. I can keep driving. Though now I gotta pee.”

“That’s all of us, after that,” Heidi said.

No one slept again that night, though Lucy guessed Jack could have. He was the only one of them used to this. She finally asked him as they neared Elko around dawn.

“This is like war, kinda, huh? Are you going to be okay?”

They didn’t talk about his service. Jack had joined up after his parents were killed in a car accident when he was seventeen. He’d told her he was a helo pilot, and the one time she’d asked him if he’d shot anyone, he just shook his head. Lucy was glad about that. She might have been raised in Montana where being able to walk meant you were old enough to learn to use a gun, but she didn’t like the idea of them, and her politics leaned further left than even her extremely progressive parents’.

“This is nothing like the war,” Jack said. The look on his face closed that line of conversation, and Lucy kept driving.

Elko was silent, the houses shuttered and nothing open. They drove another hour, the gas light flickering on, and debated using one of the tanks. Jack voted they should wait and see if one of the little stops between Elko and Wells had anything.

Before Wells, where they would turn north onto US-93, they found an open gas station and everyone got out to stretch and check their phones.

“Those won’t work,” the attendant said. He was a middle-aged man, on the small side, barely taller than Lucy, with a big round belly and white beard any mall Santa Claus would’ve been proud of. He’d come out of his little booth to chat, seemingly glad to see live people on the road. “Got a brother with the Sheriff’s office. Said that all stable frequencies for the radio and phones are being routed for emergency personnel only.”

“So how the hell do you call 911?” Heidi asked.

“Times like these?” He motioned up to the clouded-over sky where small flashes still glinted every now and again in the diffuse morning sun. “You don’t.”

Lucy shook her head. The roads had been clear so far, other than some plant debris and dirt. They were moving, however, toward heavily forested areas. Remembering the pictures of the Tunguska Impact, she climbed back into the Jeep to study the map again.

A big truck roared into the station as Jack was finishing with the pump. Three big white men, mid-twenties to thirties, jumped out, whooping. Two of them were carrying machetes.

Lucy froze as the one without a knife grabbed Heidi and swung her around, pulling her tight against his body.

“You just back off, old man. We’re commandeering this station. It’s the end of the fucking world, don’t you know?” The oldest-looking one, a man with a reddish beard and blue overalls, waved his machete at the attendant.

“That isn’t a good idea,” Jack said. His voice was all steel, his hands at his sides, but Lucy knew the look of readiness when she saw it. He was going to get himself killed, the big damn soldier.

She let the map drop slowly to the seat and followed it down. No one was looking at her; their eyes were on Jack and the attendant. With her right hand, she felt under the driver’s seat until she found Jack’s gun case. Still bent low, she slid the Glock from the case, checked the magazine and made sure a round was already chambered. Her heart raced miles ahead of her fear, but she shoved away all the anxiety, the shake in her fingers.

Instead she reached for her dad’s voice. “Never point a gun at something you aren’t willing to shoot,” he had told her. “Never point a gun at a man unless you want him dead. If you aren’t willing to make him dead, you might as well put the gun in his hand and tell him to pull the trigger.”

She didn’t want to kill anyone. But the way that man was groping her sobbing friend, the way Jack looked ready to try to take on three big men with no weapons, well. There were no police to call. No one to stop this. Just her.