The End Is Now

Our current safe haven was parked at the bottom of the hill: a mid-sized U-Haul truck with a generator in the back and a full tank of gas. I unlocked the back while Nikki checked the cab to be sure that no one had tried to interfere with the truck while we were away. I hated letting her out of my sight for even the few seconds that this required, but I didn’t have much of a choice. Keeping ourselves alive was too much work for just one person, and Nikki needed to be involved with her own survival. It was the only thing that kept her moving. That kept either one of us moving, really. If we stopped, even for a second, we would both die.

“Clear,” she said, trotting back over to where I waited. I nodded, undid the padlock, and lifted the back gate of the truck.

The inside looked like something out of a paranoid fantasy. Tin foil lined the walls and floor, covered with a layer of Saran Wrap, so that everything was slick and gleaming in the overhead light, which came on as soon as the gate was lifted. The bulb was UV, and Nikki and I waited outside for a full count of ten before stepping inside and pulling the gate closed again behind us. Every moment in the open was a risk, but so was entering the truck before it had been decontaminated, however poorly. We couldn’t leave the lights on when we were gone—not without running out of fuel and possibly burning out our precious, hard-to-replace bulbs—and so we had to take the next best option. Everything was a risk these days. It was all a matter of knowing which risks were important enough to be worth taking.

“Pool,” I said. Nikki nodded, and ran across the truck to awkwardly peel a plastic kiddy wading pool off the stack leaning against the far wall. We’d pilfered them from the downtown Target, before it became so thoroughly riddled with mold that even setting foot in the parking lot would have been a death sentence. Each one had been washed down twice in bleach and then wrapped in plastic, and we still disposed of them after we used them. Anything else would have been taking unnecessary risks. I was all about avoiding unnecessary risks. Especially now.

We dumped our bags of pilfered goodies out into the little pool, stirring them with glass rods from the modern art studio that had been across the street from our house. Mold couldn’t grow on glass. It was one of the only truly safe surfaces we had, and even it had to be constantly cleaned and sterilized to keep particulate matter from building up that the mold could grow on. After spending my life running from the specter of my own unending need to clean, I was stranded in a world where cleaning and compulsion were the only things that stood a chance of keeping me, and Nikki, alive.

We flipped each candy bar, each pack of chips and tiny packet of pills three times before we were content to accept that it was devoid of visible mold. Then I picked up each one in its turn with a pair of tongs and dunked them in a bucket full of rubbing alcohol. Again, not perfect, but every precaution took us a millimeter closer to safety. Maybe if we took enough of them, we’d live.

“Mom,” urged Nikki.

“I’m going as fast as I can,” I said, and dunked another bag of chips. “If you’re antsy, change your suit.”

Nikki shot me a venomous look. Then she turned, whipping her head in a way that would have snapped her ponytail at me, back before we’d both cropped our hair short, and stalked to the relative privacy of the chemical shower.

I was endlessly fascinated by the way she could change from terrified obedience to petulant rebellion in the blink of an eye. As soon as she felt safe, she withdrew into the persona she’d been constructing for herself ever since high school started: too cool for the situation, and far too cool for me. I didn’t really mind anymore. It gave her something to focus on that wasn’t our situation, and I was the mother of a teenager. I could handle a little scorn.

I pulled the last bag of chips out of the rubbing alcohol and added it to the pile of safe supplies. “Dinner’s ready,” I called. We would eat our fill, and then load the empties into the wading pool and dispose of the whole mess by the side of the road. It was an imperfect solution for an imperfect world, and it was the best thing we had.

Nikki emerged from the shower, wearing a fresh set of surgical scrubs and carrying her shucked-off “moon suit” in a plastic garbage bag. She dropped the bag into the wading pool as she walked past me to the food, where she then sat, cross-legged, and began ripping into our haul.