Page 11 of The Last Stars in the Sky
“He’s upstate,” Daniel says quickly, automatically, as if I don’t know this. As if it makes a difference. Does it? “I think it’s far enough away from, you know, the radioactive cloud…”
Radioactive cloud? I have another urge, utterly inappropriate, to laugh. We can’t possibly, seriously be talking about radioactive clouds. This is some awfulwould you ratherscenario, the kind that Sam likes to suggest over dinner.Would you rather be in the epicenter of a nuclear strike, or one hundred miles away? Cue the debate about radioactive cloudsand nuclear fallout. Mattie wants to be incinerated in the blast; Ruby would prefer to live underground for five years until it’s safe to come out.
No.No. This can’t actually be happening. The TV screen suddenly goes black, and it feels as if we have been plunged into silence even though there had been no sound.
A panic is creeping over me like a mist, blurring the edges of my mind. My heart is thundering; I’m hyperventilating. I take a few, deliberate, even breaths.Think, Alex. My gaze moves to the window; outside the sky is blue, the lake is gleaming in the morning light.
Without even knowing why, I run to the door, wrench it open, and then stumble outside, the cold air hitting me hard in the face. There is a loon on the lake, swimming placidly, cutting a smooth ripple through the water. The world is still.
I glance at the horizon, half expecting it to be a livid red, a mushroom cloud billowing up, but it’s as calm and blue as the rest of the sky. I stand there, shivering, clenching and unclenching my fists, my mind a frightened blank. I’m trying to think, but I physically can’t. Everything is buzzing static, getting louder and louder until I have the urge to press my hands to my ears, block it all out, but I can’t because it’s inside me.
Behind me Daniel steps outside, closing the door carefully behind him. We stand there in the freezing cold, my back to him, the lake, shimmering and beautiful in the dawn, before us. Neither of us speak.
Finally, I ask in a wooden voice, “What do we do?”
Daniel doesn’t answer for a moment. “We need to find out more,” he says at last. He sounds calm, but also resigned. Unshakeable, even in this, and it occurs to me how I’ve counted on that about him, for so long. No matter how I veer or vacillate, he remains steadily the same. It is why, I know, I took his lyingso hard; it was so completely out of character for him. But that hardly matters now.
“See if the US has retaliated,” he continues, “or if there have been more strikes. How…damaged everything is, I guess. I have no idea what the—the consequences of this are. Will be. I don’t even know who sent the missiles, what happened to cause…” He trails off, sounding dazed. “No one could have seen this coming.”
“How do we find out those things?” I ask in that same wooden voice. I feel as if I have no idea how to do anything anymore; as if I need operating instructions for absolutely everything, even breathing.
“I’m not sure.” He sounds more certain now. We are both trying to be practical because that feels stronger. “The TV isn’t working, besides what you saw. But the internet still might, since it’s connected to satellite, and not a router.”
I whirl around to face him. “We need to call Sam.”
I haven’t bothered much with my cell phone since we arrived at the cottage, since there is no signal here, but now I race to our bedroom, practically pushing past Daniel to get inside, and then fumble among the detritus on the bedside table—my watch, a glass of water, a tube of hand cream. When I press the button on my phone, I see that the battery is dead, and I let out an anguished cry.
“Mine works,” Daniel states quietly, from behind me. He thumbs a few buttons while we both wait, breath held. He can’t make a call without a signal, but he tries to load a web browser. Already painfully slow at the best of times here, the Wi-Fi, such as it is, cannot load a single page. That’s not unusual, up here, but it still frightens me.
“The landline,” I practically gasp.
But when we race to it, in the kitchen, like two children on a treasure hunt following the clues, the line is dead. “I think,” Daniel says hesitantly, placing it slowly back into the receiver,“the electromagnetic pulse from the strikes would have taken out the phone lines, along with the electrical grid. Everything’s connected between southern Canada and the US.”
I have a feeling he’s garnered that kind of information from the many sci-fi movies he’s watched, but right now it’s all we have.
I shake my head slowly, my mind still racing yet unable to keep hold of a single thought. “We have to go and get Sam,” I say, because that’s all I can think about. I can’t bear to think about all the others yet—my brother, my sister, my mother, my friends. Mattie’s friends. The girls’ teachers. Daniel’s old work colleagues, university friends, aunts, uncles, cousins…Everyone, absolutely everyone, we ever knew—what’s happened to them? Are they dead? Injured? Stumbling around in some apocalyptic universe I can’t even envision? “Daniel.”
“Alex…” He looks at me helplessly. “I agree with you, of course I do, but how? He’s about three hundred miles away.”
“Still.” A plan is forming—unthinkable, maybe impossible, but still. “We’ll drive,” I say. “We’ll drive to him. You said upstate New York will be safe from the—the nuclear fallout, right?” It still feels ridiculous to say it, tomeanit. “We have to get him back up here.” Because the cottage, I realize suddenly, might actually be the best place we could be right now. It’s the one place we know of where we might be safe. Althoughwillwe be safe? Or will some nuclear ash cloud drift its way up here?
Is this the kind of scenario where we all think we’re fine, laughing in relief, and then in a couple of days our hair will start to fall out, our skin will turn black and begin to bubble? A horrible mash-up of movie snippets and scenes from books is running through my mind—a documentary on Chernobyl crossed with some action movie with Tom Cruise, with Nevil Shute’s grim tomeOn the Beachthrown in for good measure.A montage of Armageddon moments drifts through my mind, untethered yet presenting itself as anchored in fact.
“Alex,” Daniel says, and I realize I’m hyperventilating, gasping for air. “Alex.” He puts his arms around me, and I press my face into his chest, hard enough to hurt, because I need some kind of escape from this, some kind of distraction, if just for a few seconds. I crave comfort, even though the empirical part of my brain knows there isn’t any.
Daniel doesn’t murmur that it’s going to be okay, or that we’ll figure this out, because of course those sentiments are absurdly, offensively paltry. He just holds me, and for a few seconds, I let that be enough.
Eventually, I ease back, take a deep breath. My eyes are dry, my breathing even. “We need to get Sam,” I state again, a fact, one I refuse to argue or debate.
Daniel nods. “We don’t have enough gas,” he says slowly, thinking through it. “To get all the way there and back.”
It hits me again, how much has happened. How much has changed. Will there not be gas stations along the way, will there not begas? Will it be anarchy from here to his college, a fiery world of violence and chaos, death and destruction?We’re only one generation from extinction, I think, and then wonder who said it. Some president, maybe, during the Cold War. It seemed alarmist, an exaggeration, even then, but right now, amazingly, it feels true. It might even be understatement because maybe everything has already ended, I realize numbly. Life as we know it. Society, structure, culture, government, laws…it might all be gone, and I have no idea whether we’ll ever get it back.
“Can we listen to the radio?” I ask suddenly. “There might be someone transmitting somewhere, right? Someone who can give us more information about what has happened out there.” Again I’m thinking of various vague sci-fi scenarios, the lone pilgrim in an apocalyptic world, fixing up their ham radio, trying to findanother person out in the wilderness.Can you hear me? Can you hear me? Come in…
Daniel nods, his forehead furrowed. “Maybe,” he says. “It’s worth a try.”
The only radio is the one in the car. We sit huddled in the front seats, our breath coming out in frosty puffs, as Daniel twiddles the dial.
