2020: Emergency Exit Read online

  Kate leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. “I’ll see you in the morning,” she said loud enough for her mom to hear. Her brown eyes twinkling, she winked at Danny before she stood and headed towards the stairs. Danny smiled and kicked his feet up on the table, turning his attention back to a Saturday Night Live rerun. He laughed as Peyton Manning hurled a ball at a little kid. This is one of the best SNLs ever! He heard the door close at the top of the stairs.

  A couple minutes later he heard the basement door reopen. That was fast. She usually waited an hour before coming back down. Must have forgotten something. Then he saw two sets of feet come down the steps. He sat up. Kate’s were the first set of feet. His fourteen-year-old sister was right behind her, soaked and hysterical.

  Danny jumped to his feet. “Hayley, what’s wrong?” He walked quickly to her. “What’d he do?”

  She shook her head. “Dad didn’t do anything, Dan.” She choked up, covered her mouth and began sobbing again. “It’s Mom…”

  Danny knew what she was going to say before she said it. Now he knew why Dad had been calling.

  “She’s−” Danny pulled her into his chest, muffling the last word. He didn’t want to hear it.

  Four years later. Sunday, October 18, 2020.

  Northern Minnesota.

  Danny shook his head, and raindrops scattered off his hood. Dad had been first on the scene and held her in his arms as she died. She’d only had a few minutes left, but Mom had asked Dad to “please call Danny.” Dad had tried. Nine times. But Danny had deliberately ignored him. That had always haunted him. If I’d only listened to Kate! He knew what Mom would have said. She would have asked him to forgive Dad, to please do it for her. He wouldn’t have wanted to hear it, but maybe it would have gotten through to him. The one thing Danny did know is that he would have given anything to have heard his mother say, in person, that she loved him. Supposedly those were her last words. “Tell him I love him.” That’s what she said to Dad. Why couldn’t you have just picked up? He chided himself.

  Instead, the last thing Mom knew before she died was that her son wasn’t willing to give his dad a chance. Now, standing in the rain on what would have been Mom’s fortieth birthday, they were saying goodbye to her again.

  As he watched his dad kneel by his mother’s grave and place his head on her tombstone, Danny couldn’t help but hate how cold he’d been to his father for so many years. It didn’t take a psychologist to know his dad’s remorse had been genuine. A little growing up in the Marines had allowed Danny to realize that and forgive his dad for leaving them, but it still hadn’t allowed him to forgive himself. “I’m sorry, Mom,” Danny whispered. “I’m still sorry.”

  He walked over and tapped his dad on the shoulder. I’ll take care of him, Mom. Promise. “We need to go, Dad.”

  TWO: (Ryan) “Over and Over”

  I nudged a lock of long blond hair off her freckled shoulder. She had her back to me, sleeping peacefully, sunlight sprinkling in through the shuttered window. I leaned forward and gently kissed that smooth shoulder as she shifted, and a wave of her beautiful hair splashed down on my pillow. I traced a finger down the small of her back and kissed her naked shoulder again. This time she turned all the way to face me and opened her eyes. “Good morning,” I said. She didn’t respond. She never did. I never got to see more of her. I always woke up then, and the cold of the mattress where she used to lie would slice through my hand, and my heart, like a knife. She was never there. It was always that same damn dream. I’d squeeze my eyes shut as quickly and tightly as I could, but she wouldn’t come back. The sobering truth never let me go back to sleep, and reality never let Sophie wake up.

  Today was Sophie’s birthday, but she was dead. I shook my head as I knelt by her tombstone in the rain, rehashing that dream I’d had so many times. It was a flashback to the morning after our final night at the cabin together. The last weekend of summer vacation, three months before she died. The night she’d told me she was pregnant. It was the happiest I’d seen her in years.

  We never did find out the baby’s gender. We had with all the other kids, but we wanted to be surprised this time. She was only a few weeks into her second trimester at the time of the accident. She was finally starting to show and we were going to tell the kids that weekend. I never did. Losing her was more than enough pain for them. That morning though…man…she’d never looked so beautiful. She’d never looked so serene. I always seemed to have that dream up here. It made sense, I guess, in some odd way. We weren’t lying all that far apart. We were just in different cold beds. I’d always treasured those tender moments of remembered warmth. And I would even more now, not knowing if I’d ever be back.

  Danny tapped my shoulder. “We need to go, Dad.”

  I traced a “+1” sign on the ground for our unborn baby, rose to my feet, and planted one last kiss on her headstone. “I’m sorry, Sophie,” I whispered. “I don’t want to leave.”

  “She knows we have to, Dad,” Danny said, gently pulling on my arm. “She understands.”

  I nodded, closed my eyes, gave her one more “I love you,” added a “goodbye baby,” and then turned to my twenty-year-old son. Man, he looked so much like her. “Okay then,” I sighed deeply. “Let’s go.”

  The others were gathered around the vehicles as Danny and I approached. My daughter, Hayley, had turned eighteen a couple weeks ago and was holding the new compound bow she’d received a few days ago from my parents. She had an arm around Mom—Grandma Ollie—next to Dad’s black pickup. That girl and her bows. She’d been Katniss Everdeen for Halloween in both fifth and sixth grade, and been in competitive archery since then. I used to spend hours tossing empty cans in our backyard while she practiced shooting them out of the air. She was surprisingly more accurate with moving objects. Incredible hand-eye coordination. I shook my head and smiled. Another gift from Sophie.

  Cameron, Kate, and Jenna were chatting on the back tailgate of Cameron’s pickup. Kate hopped down and approached us, “You two good?”

  I nodded and walked past, gently patting her shoulder. Danny stopped to talk to her. She looped her arm through his. “Yeah,” he said as I walked away. “I think he’ll be all right.” He paused. “He hasn’t left the cabin since we buried her. Never for more than a day or two at least.”

  “I know.” She replied. Kate cleared her throat. “Danny…”

  “Yeah?” He started leading her towards the rest of us.

  “I don’t understand why we have to leave,” she whispered, looking up at him. “Can’t we at least go home and see if anyone survived? Mom could be…”

  “Kate.” He stopped walking and turned to face her. “There’s no way. It’s just not safe.” He looked into her sad brown eyes. “I’m sorry. But we can’t. Your mom wouldn’t want you to come back. Not now. If it’s like this all the way up here in Ely, imagine how it’d be around Rochester.”

  Danny was right, of course. We’d all heard the radio message. It clearly said there was nothing left. Some sort of mass chemical attack had decimated the American population. It was too surreal for any of us to fully grasp. But from what we’d seen the day before, we knew it wasn’t a hoax. This was dead serious.

  We’d all gone, unsuspecting, into the small northern Minnesota town of Ely for ice cream at The Frozen Moose. We were intending to celebrate a number of things: Sophie’s fortieth birthday, Danny and Cameron qualifying for the Marines’ Scout Sniper Squad, and Hayley’s runner-up finish in the State Archery Championship. It was a festive mood, which quickly soured to horror with what we discovered. Dead animals littered the highways and ditches. There was a rank odor that just…well, it just…I don’t know. I can’t even describe it.

  Minor car wrecks were scattered throughout town—their lifeless passengers still trapped inside—ghostly faces pressed up against the windows, bodies slumped over steering wheels. More bodies were lying in the streets, with others on the sidewalks. Every last one had their mouth wide open, life appar
ently choked right out of them. Many were clutching their own throats, the whites of their eyes transformed into a dark dried-blood shade of red. Only Jenna was brave enough to approach and touch one of them, feeling for a pulse, but finding none. She reported their skin as leathery and cracked along the vein lines—like old clay—varyingly dark brown and gray, with spongy bruises everywhere. It was a haunting scene, and vomit-inducing for many of us. We couldn’t help it. So much death, so much shock…so much, so much. It was too much. Given the limited amount of people in the open—and that every business but the gas station and a few coffee shops had their doors closed—it definitely seemed to have happened at night. And it seemed to have happened quite suddenly. But when? What day?

  I had enough wits about me to step inside a coffee shop and grab a newspaper off the rack. It was from Monday. Could this really have happened five or six days ago without us knowing anything about it? There were no signs of electricity anywhere. We found no evidence of any other life around town, other than a single sickly crow. No other human survivors. This didn’t make any sense! There was no other destruction, no other sounds, no one passing through. Whatever had killed everyone was either invisible or gone.

  Stephen King couldn’t have made it more horrific. We didn’t know what to think. Our best guess was that it had to be a chemical reaction of some sort, but accidental or intentional, we didn’t know. If it were an attack, we hadn’t seen or heard any signs of it. Then again, our cabin was a remote twenty-five miles away on a heavily wooded lake. Danny claimed he’d heard a few distant airplanes the previous morning, but nothing else. Right now, it felt like we were the last ones living in the End Times, which was equally frightening since we all thought we were Christians. If that were the case, then either God didn’t exist, or He had left us behind. No, in all likelihood, this had nothing to do with the end of the world.

  The date on the newspaper suggested it had happened sometime Monday or perhaps Tuesday at the latest. We’d been at the cabin for nearly a full week, four days longer than expected, having been surprised by the boys showing up for Hayley’s tournament. They had a few extra days before they left for their first Special Ops assignment, and we figured we’d all spend it together. Hayley should have been in school and Jenna and Kate back at college, but we didn’t know when any of us might see the boys again. It was a legitimate enough excuse for everyone to play hooky from his or her responsibilities for a few days.

  But how could we not have known anything about this until now? That question kept nagging at me. Wouldn’t we have heard about it from someone, somehow? The only people who had left were my parents’ friends, and they had been heading home to Wisconsin. We hadn’t been expecting them to return, so we thought nothing of it when they didn’t. But they didn’t call us either. Were they dead now too? I shivered suddenly. As I’d been living at the cabin for years, and everyone had brought some supplies up with them, we had no reason to go into town. Call it dumb luck or whatever, but we had no idea what was going on. We had no idea what we’d missed.

  As soon as we returned to the cabin from Ely, we all tried calling various people with our phones. The only cell tower for 50 miles was less than half a mile from us, but even that convenience did nothing for us now. No one answered. We turned on the computer to check our satellite Internet for further information, but it was also down. We didn’t know what we should do next. Mom put out some snacks, but no one ate. Half of us just sat around stunned, and the rest of us were asking questions no one could answer. Eventually, we all settled into a zombie-like stupor around the fireplace. Was there even anyone else out there? There had to be!

  Dad turned on the high frequency shortwave radio Danny had given me a year ago and scanned all the channels for any sound of human operations. There was no music, no conversations, nothing but static, nothing at all. He, Danny, and Cameron took turns scanning the dial throughout the night and into the morning. Finally, at 4 a.m. on the dot, on the first notch of the AM dial, Dad heard a deliberate static pattern and called for Danny and Cameron. The rest of us crawled from our sleeping bags and beds and gathered around them. Dad suspected it was military code and hoped the boys might understand it. It was, and they did. Mom handed Cameron a notepad and pen as the choppy static ended. Fifteen seconds later it started again. Danny decoded, and Cameron wrote the message out.

  Run (stop) You not safe (stop) Get to Hawaii (stop) Tuesday attacked (stop) United States Canada both (stop) Chemical bombs (stop) Every city (stop) Every town (stop) No US forces (stop) No electricity (stop) Comm grid theirs (stop) Army coming (stop) Kill all Americans (stop) No hoax (stop) Save yourself (stop) Tracking you (stop) THIRST tech (stop) Leave now (stop) Trust none (stop) Run (stop)

  We had the timeframe right. That was no surprise. The rest of the message, however, was nothing less than stunning. After breaking the entire message down, Danny explained THIRST technology as military grade (Thermal High-frequency Imagery Radar Sonar Technology) systems that could track any form of warm blooded movement anywhere from a yard to fifty miles, dependent on the power of the individual box. It wasn’t yet hand portable but could operate from any military vehicle or aircraft. The enemy would be able to track our movements, no matter where we were, if they were close enough. We would be at an incredible disadvantage against it, but he did know of a few ways to misdirect and/or limit it.

  The coded message played through a few more times—always the same—and then it never came back on that frequency. We all sat silent around the table, listening to it repeat each time, hoping for something more, or for something different. It never changed. Only when it stopped did anyone react.

  Jenna started crying. Then Mom. Then me, and I don’t even know why. Everyone I loved was right here. Kate and Hayley were huddled together, perhaps praying. I couldn’t be sure. Cameron and Danny were talking to Dad, and although I could hear them just fine, none of their words made sense. It was like a stun grenade had gone off in my head. My ears were ringing, and the room was blurry. Everyone seemed to grasp why we couldn’t reach any other family members or friends. There may not have been anyone else out there. If the message were as honest as we feared, anyone who had survived had to just be as lucky as we were. Or as unlucky.

  At some point I must have needed air because I walked outside barefoot, in shorts and a T-shirt, and didn’t even notice the cold. I trudged up the small hill to the bench by Sophie’s headstone overlooking the lake. I closed my eyes, put my head in my hands, and started a one-sided conference call with Sophie and God. Hayley came out a short while later and brought me my jacket. She stayed with me for a few minutes and then led me back inside. I couldn’t even tell you what was said. I just poured my heart out.

  I felt better walking back into the cabin even though nothing had changed. I joined Danny and Dad at the table where they were still discussing the radio message, specifically its origin. Dad said it could have been next door or a thousand miles away. He figured someone with military experience was floating the message randomly around state by state, or region by region, hoping to help whatever survivors were still out there, but not make it too obvious. Using static was clever, but at some point the enemy was going to catch on. The messenger was, after all, using an international code. The enemy would know survivors were heading towards Hawaii. They could just sit on the West Coast and wait. But the message seemed to indicate the army would be on the move, coming from everywhere, to anywhere Americans might be. It wasn’t enough to cripple us with the chemicals. They wanted to wipe us out completely. Why didn’t our military fight back? Or did they and it didn’t matter? The message had emphasized we had no forces left. Maybe they were caught with their pants down like everyone else in America. If the decimation we’d seen on a small scale in Ely was what it was like nationwide—which we figured was likely the case—it wouldn’t take much to finish the country off now. In our case, it didn’t make sense to sit and wait for what might happen. We had the same chance of dying, stay or go, s
o we might as well go. And go now. One problem—I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to lose Sophie again.

  THREE: “Last Supper”

  I couldn’t imagine going back to sleep. Didn’t seem anyone else could either. Everywhere I looked someone was busy doing something to distract from the elephant in the room. The problem was, the more we talked and thought about the many challenges we were facing, the more elephants seemed to occupy the room. The more elephants the more stress. The more stress, the shorter the nerves. Eventually there were too many elephants in the room.

  “I can’t just leave,” a male voice said loudly, snapping me out of my own haze. “And I don’t understand how you can expect me to.”

  It was Cameron and he was talking to Danny. Jenna and Kate were standing by them, looking back and forth between their faces.

  “It’s not about that,” Danny replied. “Jeez. Don’t you get it?”

  “Get what? We don’t know for sure this is real. We don’t know everyone else is dead. Just because our phones don’t work doesn’t mean anything,” Cameron retorted.

  “Come on, Cam. Don’t be stupid,” Danny said, and I saw him roll his eyes.