Cates 04 - The Terminal State (41 page)

We chew and wash down the thick, military nourishment with drinks from our canteens. A red-tailed hawk circles above. A breeze gives the pines a steady sigh. A large tree branch cracks and falls to the ground. It hits with the sound of a falling body. We reach for our guns. We stand ready, our canines gleaming, our nostrils fl ared, until we’re sure we’re not under attack. We put down our guns and sit until the fringes of our sweaty clothes take on a hint of ice glitter, then we resume our march.

 

The first terrorist bombs were detonated two weeks ago in Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, and New York. Back before people became so untrustworthy, we heard news reports on a survivalist’s radio. The survivalist’s name was Roger Romain. Nobody thought he was paranoid, under the circumstances. His eyes were blue and sometimes they sparkled. He carried a pistol in plain sight and shifty people came to him for advice about guns and tactics and food storage techniques and improvised explosives, and he must’ve been in survivalist heaven.

Every morning Roger Romain used his old Underwood manual typewriter to print out what he’d heard on his radio. The government claimed its investigation had uncovered all the answers. Al Qaeda terrorists had manufactured the bombs with enriched uranium from North Korea. The bombs were thermonuclear devices of Pakistani design. They were smuggled into the country in the holds of oil tankers. They were loaded onto trucks and detonated at ground level. All the facts were so quickly and clearly laid out that nobody believed them. But we believed the government reports about its overwhelming counterstrikes overseas, because the clouds steadily grew thicker and swollen with death.

The cycle continued. We hit them. They threatened us. One day, Roger Romain nailed this note to a tree:

Seattle, Portland, San Francisco? Scratch them off the list.
And then people went all to pieces. There were plenty of guns and not enough food, and so here we are.

 

But just after the cars stopped, I thought that everything would be okay. Jerry would retire, as we’d planned, and we’d take cruises to Alaska and Mexico and the Caribbean, dancing and dining and walking alone to private cabins that held no kids but plenty of time. The sky was clean and sweetly blue before everything circled back around. I couldn’t believe anything bad had happened. There weren’t any mushroom clouds and the trees were picture-postcard green, but Jerry was adamant.

“Only one thing could’ve caused this.”

“There’s only one thing that can make cars break down?”

“All of them? All at once? Yeah, pretty much.”

Melanie said she’d watched a show on the History Channel about mega-disasters. She said we could’ve been hit by a small gamma-ray burst, flying at us from outer space, but her eyes wouldn’t settle on anything when she said it.

“I don’t think so,” Jerry said. “And listen, what we need to do now is watch the people around us. We need to be ready to defend ourselves when they start going bad.”

“You’re
such
an asshole,” Melanie whispered, and I was thinking it, too. Jerry winced, but he didn’t respond. We sat without talking, nursing our glares, and I didn’t want to believe that people couldn’t be trusted.