: 12 :

2 HOURS LATER

It took far longer than he thought it would take to reach Alysse’s location, the cars clogging I-285 were in worse shape than all other roads he’d crossed yet. The storm clouds had almost completely subsided, but now there was a soft twilight that fell over the city of Atlanta, making the skyline look ghostly, supported by the twisted silence that accompanied the scenery. No more screaming humans, no more death, no more dogs or cats or mosquitoes. With a sudden and stark optimism that surprised him, Jeremy wondered if all of the viruses in the air had been eaten, too. Had the Ecophage literally eaten every piece of biomass it touched, save him and a few others?

That thought actually made him laugh. The cure for the common cold. Somebody finally found it.

Jeremy turned on his headlights. The Blazer slewed when he tried to get around another car-b-cue that had pulled onto the shoulder of the road, and the Wars were playing on his phone, and occasionally the GPS lady would speak up and offer him a shortcut. Turned out, the GPS in his phone was also directed by satellite feed, which was directed by AIs that were programmed to closely watch camera feeds from public CCTV cameras and predict traffic patterns. The cameras were feeding the public transit system’s monitoring devices, updating them with ETAs based on the standstill traffic. So, surprise surprise, humanity’s machines were still able to direct Jeremy towards shortcuts.

Bots talking to bots, he thought. We’re all dead, but they’re still talking.

While he was looking for his next turn onto Peachtree Industrial Boulevard, another thought suddenly occurred to Jeremy, and that was this: While everything is still working, I’d better take advantage of all that I can. He thought about his money. It was technically useless…or was it? If everything was still working, he could, for a limited time only, buy things online and it wouldn’t matter that he couldn’t technically afford it. Of course, he couldn’t order anything material, nothing solid, but he could buy information.

He pulled slowly to the side of the road, hydroplaning through sludge, and quickly logged into his Audible account and began purchasing every Star Wars novel he could find in ebook form, every Stephen King and Douglas Adams book, every Neil Gaiman, Brandon Sanderson, J.R.R. Tolkien, H.P. Lovecraft, H. Beam Piper, Isaac Asimov, James Clavell and Jack London novel he could grab.

Who cared? Not like he needed the money to pay for rent anymore. Or food.

Or anything.

He drove on, going against his instincts not to text and drive, downloading audiobook after audiobook before they were all gone forever. It was almost like one of those local late-night shows that sold off everything from a repossessed home. NOW, FOR A LIMITED TIME ONLY, OUR END-OF-THE-FUCKING-WORLD FIRE SALE! GET EVERYTHING – LITERALLY EVERYTHING – AND TAKE IT ALL HOME! BUT, ONLY SO LONG AS IT’S DIGITAL!

Jeremy was laughing again, despite everything, despite himself. He laughed because it was a going-out-of-business sale for the entire planet. HUMANITY, NOW CLOSED FOR BUSINESS! All of Earth was now, as far as he’d seen, like a great big Goodwill, except even cheaper.

“Go past this light,” said the GPS lady. “Then, at the next one, turn right onto Peachtree Industrial Boulevard.”

Jeremy did that, easing his pretty new blue Blazer through a giant puddle of human sludge and having to use his windshield wipers to see.

“Your destination is on your left,” said the GPS lady. “Thirty-eight seventeen Peachtree Industrial Boulevard.”

Jeremy pulled into what looked like a wine distributor’s warehouse, partially under construction. He drove through a not-yet-paved parking lot, towards the far end where a dozen or so Port-a-Johns stood, and he started honking his horn and flashing his headlights. He called Alysse on his phone.

“Hey! Is that you we hear honking?” she said.

“Yeah, I’m here. Where are you guys?”

“Here!”

“Where?”

“Over here!”

Suddenly, he saw a waving light. A flashlight. A woman came staggering out from behind the Port-a-Johns looking filthy from the knees down, all of it covered in chunks of the sludge. Alysse didn’t look very much like her Tinder pics. Her hair was done up in a ponytail, and as Jeremy drove closer he saw that her face was smudged with dirt or mud. She wore a green backpack that looked stuffed with supplies. She waved her flashlight high in the air with her left hand, while in her right hand she was pulling along a small dark-skinned girl with braids.

“I see you!” Jeremy said. “Holy shit, I see you!” He was laughing, realizing just now that he’d half expected her not to exist at all, that all along Alysse had been some dude catfishing him, using a voice disguiser to talk to him over the phone maybe, or else she’d somehow been an AI bot on Tinder, or a ghost, or a figment of his imagination. “I see you, girl! Holy shit, I see you!”

The Blazer came to a slow roll in front of the Port-a-Johns, and Jeremy climbed out almost before it had stopped. He stood there, looking at Alysse and her niece. They both stared back at him, while from the Chevy there came Marc Thompson’s voice, mimicking that of Anthony Daniels’s role as C-3PO.

Jeremy took two steps, slipped in the sludge of God knows how much grass, trees, flowers and construction workers that had been present when the Ecophage attacked. Then he righted himself, crossed the distance between himself and Alysse, which had long seemed interminable and still almost did. Almost. When he reached her, he wasn’t sure what he was going to do, and neither was she, it seemed.

But once they were standing there, they embraced. It was quick, and it was warm, a little more than just cursory. She whispered something in his ear that he didn’t quite catch, because a cold, ammonia-filled wind suddenly kicked up in that moment, but it sounded like she said something like “Thank you” or maybe even “I love you.”

Jeremy didn’t want to seem stupid for not replying, or for replying to the wrong thing, so he chose to kiss her. Just a small peck on the cheek, then he cupped her face in his hands to make sure she was real.

Then he heard a whimper.

Looking down at Kayla, Jeremy quickly knelt and said, “Hey, you okay? You both okay?”

“Yeah, we are,” said Alysse. “We think so. You?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh, God…oh, God, I can’t believe we found someone…I can’t believe we…”

“Listen,” Jeremy said, feeling awkward for cutting her off, but they had so little time. “We have to go. I’ve got lots of gas and we need to make some distance from…” He waved generally at the destruction all around them. He coughed from the strong odor, then cleared his throat and said, “So, here’s the plan. We go to the nearest Walmart or Target or wherever, we stock up on all we can, just get buggies full of food that can last. Canned soup and stuff like that. Health bars. And lots of water. Water’s gonna be polluted all over the world, I’m guessing.” All over the world, he heard himself say. All over the world. God, how it kept hitting him anew, even when he thought he was used to it.

“Yeah, yeah,” Alysse nodded eagerly. “Yeah, we pile it in your car, then we, uh, head to…where was it again? Alabama? Limestone caves?”

“I’m afraid of caves,” Kayla said meekly from Alysse’s side. “I don’t want to go into the caves!” She looked about seven, she wore a pink shirt with a kitten on it, blue jeans, and Timberlands. Clothes, he thought suddenly. We’ll need clothes for her to grow into. It was all hitting him just now, that once they went into those limestone caves they probably weren’t coming back out, and there may never be any clothes manufacturers ever again. And he wanted to protect this young girl, who he’d only just met. He wanted to protect them all because—

Luke Skywalker would. It was a dumb thought, but how much crazier was it than what was happening all around him?

“We’ll work it all out when we get there, Kayla,” said Alysse. “I promise, sweetie.”

“Who is this man, Annie?” Kayla said, pulling away from him.

Jeremy smiled and said, “I’m Luke Skywalker, I’m here to rescue.”

“Huh?”

“Nothing, it’s a joke—eh, bad timing? But I am here to rescue you. My name is Jeremy, Kayla. I’ve got your back, but I need you both to have mine, too. Get it? Like, uh…like the Avengers, or the X-Men. Powerpuff Girls? We gotta back each other’s play, is what I mean. We gotta help each other right now.”

If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.

Alysse knelt beside Kayla and kissed her forehead. “That’s right, Kay. We have to go. We have to get somewhere safe.”

“Why can’t we go home?”

“Because it’s not safe—”

“I want my daddy!”

“Sweetie, I told you,” Alysse said, her voice cracking, tears welling up. “Daddy’s gone. We have to go somewhere safe. The things that came for your dad…they’re still out there, sweetheart.” She stroked her niece’s hair. Jeremy wanted all of this mess to hurry up and be settled so they could go, but he waited patiently. He was on their time now, he had to wait for them to trust him.

From the Blazer, Marc Thompson’s voice was still blaring. He waited underneath the stars, looking up at them while Alysse consoled Kayla. He wondered if they were up there. The nanites. His yellow vision had eased up enough but most things were still suffused in it. And now he was feeling a bit nauseous again, like he had right after taking the injection at Mickey’s.

Jeremy started sweating. Swaying on his feet, he leaned against the hood of the Blazer.

“Okay,” Alysse said. “We’re ready. You okay?”

“Yeah. But I think you’d better drive. Just feeling…a little tired.”

“I can do that. You can take the passenger seat. Kayla, you need some rest. You can sleep in the back seat.”

Kayla shrugged, forefinger between her lips, fretting. “M’kay.”

“All right, then,” Alysse said, shouldering her backpack. “Let’s go.”

: 13 :

4 HOURS LATER

While Alysse drove into the night, west on I-285, Jeremy lay reclined in the passenger seat. At first, they had exchanged a few horror stories about all they’d seen, but then Alysse said they shouldn’t do that with Kayla in the back. Jeremy agreed and was glad not to do much talking since it seemed like he was getting a fever. His head was warm, sometimes it almost seemed hot enough to cook bacon, as Mom used to say, but then it would cool down and he would only feel a little dizzy and nauseous, sort of like he had to throw up.

To occupy his mind, Jeremy checked out Google, looking for any more posts on any other social media sites that might indicate a safe haven for survivors. So far, nothing was popping up. Jeremy checked to see if Clyde had gotten back with him again, but so far no new updates. He then did a search on the limestone caves in Alabama, and found himself falling into a rabbit hole.

Jesus Christ, Clyde couldn’t have found a better spot to go to at the end of the world, he thought.

The caverns underneath Silvid Valley, Alabama, were a prepper’s end-of-the-world dream. They were created by the Gilberto Limestone Mining Company in the 1870s, but the company couldn’t make enough money to cover the overhead, and so they went under. The Army bought the property rights, and used the caves for storage for almost a hundred years. They had temporarily been in the hands of the Confederacy, used to store munitions. The Army had put it up for bid in the 1980s, and no one made a single bid in over a decade, that was until 1992, when the Army dropped the minimum bidding price to $10.2 million. An investor by the name of Joshua Collingsworth planned for the caves to be a little private getaway for survivalists who wanted to train their survival skills, and even the wealthier ones who wanted to reserve a private room for the end of the world.

Reading further, Jeremy learned that caves like just like those in Silvid Valley had been built in Kansas, Arkansas, and Utah, and always went belly up. Every single time. Because while money kept getting pumped into them, there always seemed to be a little problem: the end of the world kept not happening. So, money was being thrown into a sunk cost fallacy made incarnate, and eventually people just ran out of money to invest in something that obviously wasn’t going to happen.

And that’s exactly what happened to Mr. Joshua Collingsworth. He built it up for a number of years, but couldn’t attract enough of his fellow investors to believe in it. The article Jeremy read said the Army started renting certain spaces back from Collingsworth, storing munitions in there again, as well as MREs and other gear, even vehicles. But it didn’t pay enough for Collingsworth to turn a profit. The bank finally foreclosed, the Army bought it back for a song, and the only entrance was now a nondescript loading dock nestled into the wooded hillside.

According to another article written by a journalist in The New York Times, the United States Army was looking to sell the Silvid Valley installation again, and, at least at the time the article was printed back in 2019, it was just sitting there, fully prepped, with air-conditioners, several diesel generators, enormous bored-out stalls ready to receive RVs for the wealthy, gigantic hangars that contained missile parts, guns, vehicles, and even sonar equipment meant to be tested in an experimental submarine that was never built.

The caverns were a hundred and fifty feet below the surface, covered a little over sixty-three acres, and had a constant natural temperature of seventy degrees. The caverns were supported against collapse by giant limestone pillars that were ten times stronger than concrete. There were even blast doors—Close the blast doors! he thought, smiling to himself—and those blast doors had been designed by Collingsworth to withstand a two-megaton nuclear explosion from just ten miles away.

“Jesus Christ,” he chuckled, pinching the bridge of his nose to try and relieve some of the pressure from his eyes. The headache was now pushing against the backs of his eyes.

“What is it?” said Alysse, glancing in her rearview mirror like she expected someone to be following her. What was she looking for, the police?

“The caves,” he said, sitting up slowly, the headache easing up a little. “They’re not just caves. They’re not at all what I pictured.”

“What are they?”

“They’re—I mean, if these articles are all accurate, they’re exactly what we need against…this.” He looked out at the piled remains of Atlanta racing past them. “These caves have been decked out beyond belief. Jesus, it says here there are enough stalls to fit over a thousand RVs. There are MREs—meals ready to eat—and those can last, like, five years, I think. If you keep them cold enough, that is.”

“Uh huh, that’s great,” she said, glancing into the back seat. Alysse looked at her watch. “Kayla, sweetie, wake up. It’s time for you to eat something. And check your glucose, okay? Can you do that, Kay?”

“Mmmm, yeah,” the girl said, waking up groggily.

Jeremy turned to look in the back seat, and saw Kayla rummaging in her bag until she brought out a device that looked almost like a tricorder from Star Trek. His cousin Rob had had to do this, so he knew what to expect. He saw her take out the lancet to prick her finger, then squeezed the tip of her finger to put a drop on the test strip. After a few seconds of running it through the meter, it beeped, and she held it up for both of them to see.

The meter read: 102 mg/dl.

“Okay, that’s good,” Alysse said. “That’s good, that’s good. Okay, put the meter back. Eat a little something. One of the snacks we got from the store.”

Jeremy looked over at Alysse. Tears were in her eyes. Is she still working through the shock? He reached over to touch her hand on the steering wheel. She gripped his fingers, gave them a squeeze, and smiled briefly at him before putting her eyes back on the road. This isn’t a relationship. This isn’t how relationships are supposed to start. This isn’t how anything is supposed to start.

Jeremy sifted through his brain for something, anything to say.

He put on a smile, and looked at her. “So, uh…you’re a prequel girl, huh?”

She looked over at him and laughed a little, wiping her eyes with one hand. “Yeah. Yeah, I guess so.”

“But you never watched the OT? How is that possible?”

“You sound like my brothers. They were always like, ‘Alysse, girl, how can you call yourself a true fan if you haven’t watched them?’ I’ve seen pieces of them, I just…never got around to it.”

Never got around to it. Jeremy wondered how many things they’d all put off because they “hadn’t got around to it” and now never could? Is this what regret feels like, in real time? Like, instant regret? He wasn’t sure he’d ever felt instant regret before. “I know what you mean. I used to say I was going to take up the guitar. Used to play the hell outta Guitar Hero. I swear, it was my calling.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Money. Time. The usual.”

She nodded in complete understanding. “I’m guessing this puts a hold on me going to Julliard.”

Jeremy smiled, but then he noticed she wasn’t smiling and so he stopped. “How long have you been playing the violin?”

“Since I was, like, six or seven?”

“Wow, that young?”

“Yeah.”

Jeremy couldn’t think of anything else to add. Thankfully his phone prompted him about a turn up ahead, and he said, “Take a right up here.”

They drove on in silence for half an hour. Eventually, Jeremy heard snoring from the back, and looked back to see Kayla, her eyes closed, lying on her side and drooling. Her body shook as the Blazer jounced and slewed.

Jeremy looked at Alysse. “Did it happen fast?”

She knew immediately what he meant. “Yes. We heard screaming upstairs. She and I were down in the basement, packing some of her old toys in case we needed to leave. Michael—her father, my oldest brother—Michael said he’d heard the roads could be opening soon, and that both Florida and Georgia’s governors were talking about a mass evacuation. He’s got friends in the Army, they were prepping, doing training exercises in case there was a run on the banks.”

Jeremy winced. “On the banks?”

She shrugged. “Someone said people in China were panicking, storming their banks, demanding to have all their money taken out. I don’t know if it was true, but apparently some people were afraid it would be like the toilet paper thing during Covid, only worse. You know, that there wouldn’t be any left? And that coupled with a mass exodus from both states….” She trailed off, shrugging. “I don’t know, I guess they were concerned about raiders, people toting guns like they did after Hurricane Katrina.”

He nodded. “So, you guys were storing some of Kayla’s toys in case you had to leave, so they’d be in a safe place when you got back?”

“Yeah, and some of our parents’ old family albums were down there, so I wanted to take those with us in case…in case we never came back.”

Jeremy nodded again, and glanced back at Kayla, making sure she was asleep. He whispered, “You said over the phone that you had to leave the basement finally because she needed insulin.”

Alysse nodded. “That’s right.”

“You were in the basement the whole time? That why you couldn’t get my calls?”

“Yeah.”

“But you had to leave for insulin.”

“Yeah.”

Jeremy swallowed. He wondered if he should ask this next question, and almost didn’t. He looked back to check on Kayla again, making sure she was still asleep. He whispered, “I’ve been looking up how long gas and diesel lasts, how long the Internet can last without people. I…I guess I should ask…I mean, just so I know. How long can insulin last?”

Alysse’s hands gripped the steering wheel. She never took her eyes off the road. “About a month,” she said. “Maybe a couple months, if it’s stored well.”

“And…which Type is she?”

“Type One.”

Type One, he thought. The worst one. Fuck.

Jeremy reached over to touch her hand again, and this time he gave a bigger squeeze. Tears fell down her face, and this time Jeremy understood. He understood that Alysse wasn’t crying over her dead brothers, or even the death of the world, or even the fact that she’d been polyamorous and surely her other lovers were all dead. She was crying because she wasn’t done losing people yet.