From the Fire II by Kelly Kent David

Author:Kelly, Kent David [Kelly, Kent David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wonderland Imprints
Published: 2012-05-19T04:00:00+00:00

* * * * *

Hours, a newfound Thermos of water and a cup of spinach, a can opener and a food heater. It was strange how the world would fall away when she was reading, no matter how grim or daunting the tale set out before her. The only difference in Tom’s writings — as opposed to the horror tales she favored on her own — was that the hypothetical, the unthinkable, had become the real.

She made her way through printed survivalist forum threads, Wikipedia articles, NSA briefs (many still printed “SECRET” and one even “EYES ONLY,” surely it had been criminal in some way to be gathering these outside the agency), and she began to fathom just how the world had ended.

The reports on estimated fallout drift in event of a thermonuclear war were by far the most disturbing. Prevailing winds would come from the west and in high spring, with many winds and temperature changes, air currents would cause wide swathes of radioactive dust to wash over the entire eastern United States. The withering deluge would move in sky-corrupting tides like a sandstorm, like the black choking fog that had roiled out of the Dust Bowl in the Thirties. And what was the dust composed of? Pulverized buildings, molten cars, disintegrated corn, splintered trees, shattered earth, and tiny motes of radioactive flesh and bone and hair, the cinder-remnants of incinerated people.

For two weeks at least, or perhaps for years, cyclones would form and spin their way from west to east, scattering remains out over the Atlantic Ocean and leaving only the Gray Death in their wake, a wasteland where nothing would ever grow again. The more optimistic reports (including a rather idealistic survival book written in the Eighties by an Oak Ridge research engineer) theorized that the fallout cyclones would remain fatal for weeks, and present for several years; while the more menacing reports suggested that the storms would become the atmosphere, would coil and lay waste to the entire world for centuries.

Whatever the truth, if there were to be any survivors at all, the message to them was very clear: Keep away from once-populated areas. Avoid cities. Stay on rural roads whenever and wherever you can. Never go east. And, if you happen to be along the eastern face of the north-west spinal Rocky Mountains, go to the plains. Go north to the Dakotas, Montana, Wyoming.

Go north.

And a note on the last page in Tom’s hand read in scarlet ink, “See (g)RAND TETON / (s)HOSHONE / (y)ELLOWSTONE.” The title of another binder.

She had stopped reading for awhile once she made her way into the binder’s second major section, (i)MPACT EVENT. There was a very “Tom” touch on that section’s inner divider, a taped-in photograph of Bruce Willis thumbs-upping in Armageddon, accompanied by Tom’s helpful words, “Yeah right / As if.”

The last section was about Nemesis, a highly radioactive brown dwarf star that was supposed to roll its way through the solar system every twenty-six million years, causing mass extinctions and spilling cataclysm across the fractures in reality.

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