: 14 :
7 HOURS LATER
They took turns driving, stopping only twice; first at a RaceTrac, to fill up the gas tank and siphon both gasoline and diesel into gas cans, and then at a Walmart, to go in and grab several sets of clothes for both themselves and Kayla, in different sizes, for when she (or any other children that might be at Silvid Valley) grew bigger. Things you never considered when you imagined yourself at the end of the world, Jeremy thought, as he jogged morosely from aisle to aisle.
The lights were still on in the Walmart, and there were about forty or fifty large puddles of sludge, but besides that it was quiet, empty, and they had it all to themselves. They stuffed the Blazer full of tools, Advil, Excedrin, Band-Aids, and whatever insulin was behind the counter at the pharmacy. They also grabbed antibiotics, which, according to Google, expired after two or three years (For all the good it will do you, Jeremy thought).
They had no idea what all would be in the Silvid Valley caves once they got there, if they would be the only ones or if there would be hundreds of people. So they grabbed bread, milk, and sandwich meats, knowing that those would expire soon but they could eat those on the go, saving the canned foods for later. They scooped up sodas for Kayla’s sake, in case her blood glucose plummeted.
Jeremy scoured the electronics section. On a whim, he grabbed a dual DVD/VHS player and threw it in the passenger seat with him. They had left Walmart with the Blazer absolutely stuffed to the rafters.
Presently, as the sun came up, Jeremy was driving. The girls were both sleeping. Alysse had dozed in the passenger seat, and Kayla was keeping warm in the back using a thermal blanket they’d gotten from Walmart. Jeremy watched the sun come up alone, watched it bathe a wide-open expanse of melted landscape. Maybe every nine or ten miles he’d see a patch of greenery, and once he thought he’d spotted a dog walking in someone’s yard, but it ran off into the woods when it saw their vehicle coming.
He listened to Marc Thompson narrate the adventures of Princess Leia as she escaped kidnappers sent by Grand Admiral Thrawn, and listened in a detached sort of entertained state as Chewbacca came to her rescue once more. John Williams’s music, so much a part of Jeremy’s life growing up that it may as well have been the soundtrack of his youth, soared and carried him through.
Yes, The Force Suite, his favorite piece of all time, was what got him through this dreary mess, where he saw the gooey remains of his world, often driving through that goo, up over hills and past the places that had once been bucolic and festive. It ought to be spring right now. But Jeremy was in a new world now, one in which spring would never return, there would never again be birdsong or alarm clocks waking him up, no last-minute dipping into Starbucks to grab a coffee and muffin before going into work.
There were houses partially eaten, the surviving wood and furniture looking wet and gray, smoke coming out of the gaping wounds on their sides like gunshot wounds in an old Western. They came to a five-mile stretch of land where flames were on both sides of the road, a wildfire, blowing hot and angrily across the gray sludge. They kept their windows rolled up, and thankfully only Alysse ever woke up to see it. Kayla slept through this scary ordeal entirely.
They drove through a town called Sandersville, then through Melbutte and Hargrave, and then, at last, to the outskirts of Huntsville, and into a small town called Hinderle. And here, finally, according to the GPS lady that had guided the whole way, was Silvid Valley.
: 15 :
Clyde had warned him in a message that the entrance to the limestone caves might be hard to find. And indeed, it was. Jeremy drove down a long dirt road, flanked by trees on one side, a devoured wasteland on the other. He took out his phone and handed it to Alysse. He gave her his password and told her to check his email. “Look for one from Reddit, from a guy named Clyde. Give him my number to call me back.”
“Okay,” Alysse said quietly, as if they were in a submarine and she thought that just by speaking the enemy would be able to hear her.
Movement in the back seat. Jeremy glanced in his rearview mirror and saw Kayla waking up. She looked around bleary-eyed, rubbing her head, fixing her hair. “We there?”
“Almost,” Jeremy said. “We’re in the right place, I think. Haven’t seen a sign yet, but—”
“There!” Kayla said. “I see I sign!” She shot forward and pointed past the windshield. Jeremy strained his eyes to see through the sun’s glare, held up a hand to block it. He did indeed see a sign, high on top of a verdant green hill that had somehow remained untouched, with what appeared to be a gas tanker someone had parked, minus the truck. The tanker just sat there collecting dust.
Jeremy slowed down. He didn’t want to scare anybody who might have gotten here first. Might be like those gun-toting assholes he’d heard about during Hurricane Katrina, parking their vehicles in front of a Walmart and shooting anyone that came close, thinking it was the end of the world. Rednecks did weird shit when they thought it was the end of the world, and this time it actually was.
His phone chimed.
“Clyde just emailed you back!” Alysse exclaimed.
“Read it.”
“He says ‘Glad you made it, partner.’ Then he gives his phone number.”
“Call it.”
It was a brief conversation. Clyde sounded about like what Jeremy had imagined, a good ol’ Southern boy who was short and to the point, but was also hollering at someone in the background. In a hurried speech, he told them to come on up to the hill, the one with the tanker on it, he’d be out to meet them shortly.
When they crested the summit, they found three RVs and more than a dozen trucks, SUVs, and sports cars. Jeremy parked the Blazer next to an RV, and the three of them got out. Underneath a beautiful blue Alabama sky, they stood facing twenty or so people, men and women of all ages, children of every color and clothing style, all milling about with various versions of the same frightened gaze. They were all so wary of each other, and now they were all wary of these three newcomers.
A man peeled away from the crowd. He was wearing overalls, half his face covered in old burn scars, bald as a billiard ball, middle-aged, smiling through a mouth missing maybe a quarter of its teeth. “You Zoinks?” he said.
Jeremy blinked in confusion. “Huh?”
“The Jedi Master. Zoinks. That you?”
It took a second for Jeremy to remember that had been his Reddit handle. “Oh. Shit. Yeah.”
“May the Force be fuckin’ with you, cocksucker. Welcome to Silvid Valley. Welcome to the end o’ the fuckin’ world. We’re goddamn glad to have you!”
: 16 :
30 MINUTES LATER
They made their way towards a hillside entrance, which had once been concealed by trees and kudzu, but some of that had been eaten away by the Ecophage, and the rest of it had been torn away by men and women who stood in the ankle-deep sludge all around the wrought-iron gate, on the other side of which was nothing but a short stretch of road going uphill, with some parts paved. Jeremy took in the serene beauty of that grassy hill, wondering how much longer it would stay that way. Just like the Internet, and gas, and the power grid, and Kayla’s insulin supply, time was running out. The Ecophage meant to eat all of them.
The path terminated halfway up the hill, where the loading dock had been built. The doors were chained closed. Perhaps not surprisingly, Clyde had himself some bolt cutters, and a simple application of those allowed them admittance. There was a twenty-foot-long, pitch-black corridor inside. Clyde had six flashlights, and distributed them to Jeremy and a few others. A short rotund guy with glasses, who looked like he’d just come from an office job, had a go-ready bag of his own and pulled out three more flashlights.
They walked to the far end of the corridor, which was cold, damp, and made of rock, with only two steel beams giving the roof support. That made Jeremy very nervous. He looked back at Alysse and Kayla. Acting on some primal instinct, Jeremy reached out to grab her hand, and Alysse looked grateful for it. She grabbed Kayla’s hand with her other, and Jeremy thought the three of them probably looked like a family walking in.
They came to the blast doors. Two-foot-thick, solid steel doors. There was a control panel on the wall. Clyde inspected it. Jeremy came up beside him to have a look. Thankfully the control panel wasn’t asking for a six-digit access code or anything like that. There was a green button and a red button. The green said OPEN. Clyde looked over at him, smiling wide by the haunting glow of his flashlight. “Here goes nothin’!”
He hit the green button. There were three loud chimes, and then the blast doors slid smoothly open. Though, he could hear rusty gears moving achingly within the walls.
“Just like that?” Jeremy whispered.
“Guess so.”
“No way,” Alysse gasped. “It’s like stepping inside a spaceship.”
“I imagine somewhere there’s an alarm a-goin’ off,” said Clyde, pointing to a sign that said THIS INSTALLATION PROTECTED BY DESANTO SECURITY, INC. Clyde laughed, “But I bet there’s no one anywhere to hear it! We best get movin’. Albert, you comin’?”
It appeared the rotund guy with glasses was Albert, because he answered, “Hell, I guess so. Nowhere else left, is there? Unless anybody knows of a Holiday Inn nearby?” All around him, people laughed.
Gallows humor, Jeremy thought. At the end of the world, what else do you have? “Where are you from?” Jeremy asked Albert as they stepped through the doors.
“Kentucky. You?”
“Georgia. How’d you get here?”
“I’m friends with this crazy fucker on Discord,” Albert said, gesturing at Clyde. “Never met him before in real life, but he and I were always swapping stories about how we’d fare at the end of the world. We even played a roleplaying game—you ever play roleplaying games? Like D&D? Well, we played one called It’s the End of the World and We Feel Fine. An indie game. And hell, here the fuck we are, at the end of the world.” Albert laughed, shaking his head ruefully. “The irony. The goddamn irony, man.”
Jeremy heard Kayla whimper, and tried to quell the tension by saying, “I’m Jeremy. This is Alysse. And this little gal here is Kayla.”
“Well, hey there, Kayla,” said Albert pleasantly. “Pleasure to meet you.”
Kayla barely squeaked out “You too” and then went quiet.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
Behind them, more people were arriving. Jeremy could hear people shouting at the mouth of the entrance, “Over here! The entrance is over here!”
At the end of the corridor was a cage elevator. Inside the elevator, they could see, were two pallets of shrink-wrapped containers. Clyde shined his light on them. “Dodson’s MREs,” he said appreciatively. “The best made anywhere. And lookiee-lookiee, these packing slips say they was put here last here. Hot damn, if there were fresh supplies bein’ brought here as early as last year, we ought to by-God have a good stash down below. A good fuckin’ stash, indeed.”
This meant nothing to Jeremy, whose only concern at the moment was Alysse and Kayla. He kept looking back at them, making sure they were okay, making sure they were real.
“Don’t get ahead o’ yerself, cowboy,” said a tall, broad-shouldered woman who stepped up. To Jeremy, it looked like she’d been cornfed from the cradle. “If they ain’t no power, then this elevator ain’t goin’ nowhere.”
“Jedi Master?” Clyde said to Jeremy. “Care to help me do the fuckin’ honors?”
At first, Jeremy didn’t know what he meant, but then he saw Clyde bracing himself to open the cage doors of the elevator. Jeremy got on one side, while Clyde got on the other. Together they pried them open very easily. They stepped inside, shining their lights around. Jeremy found a control switchboard hanging from a wire. He picked it up, saw one that said POWER. He flipped it, and the rest of the lights on the switchboard lit up. On the wall, a panel lit up, detailing the areas of the Silvid Valley Underground Installation.
In his hands, the switchboard had two big buttons that were lit up brightly: UP and DOWN.
“A’ight, then,” Clyde said, clapping Jeremy on the shoulder like they were old buds. “Let’s get goin’, then.”
“I think only a few of us should go down first,” Jeremy said. “Just to make sure it’s safe. I mean,” he lowered his voice so that only Clyde could hear, “the elevator could get jammed, could fall. I don’t know. So maybe we leave some people up here to keep hailing survivors, and just a few of us go down to check out the place.”
Clyde’s bottom lip curled. “Good fuckin’ plan. A good fuckin’ plan. Hell, let’s do it.”
It suddenly occurred to Jeremy that this man wasn’t traumatized at all. Indeed, he looked to be having the time of his life. He supposed some people flourished in chaos, or else had been waiting for the end of the world just so they didn’t have to pay taxes anymore. In any case, he was glad to have someone with good cheer like Clyde. Though, he did notice the Glock 19 strapped to his right hip, and the SIG Sauer strapped to the tactical holster on Albert’s left thigh.
“You’re going down alone?” Alysse said, her voice tense.
Jeremy looked at her. “You can come if you want, but…” He glanced down at Kayla.
Alysse understood. She nodded. “No, we’ll stay here. Wait for you.”
He gave her hand a squeeze. Then he kissed her. Not on the cheek this time, but on the lips, and she kissed him back.
This was, Jeremy thought later, and for the rest of his life, the weirdest first date ever.
: 17 :
10 MINUTES LATER
Four of them went down the elevator: Jeremy, Clyde, Albert, and the big blonde woman who had spoken up earlier named Mathilda. They could actually see the limestone walls as they traveled down through the cage. Their flashlight beams illuminated those craggy walls. On the wall panel, there was a screen that showed numbers counting up in increments of ten. First 40, then 50, then 60. “Our depth?” Jeremy asked. Clyde nodded quietly. It cold silence, they watched those numbers climb. When the panel read 140, the elevator slowed. The cage rattled, swayed, then rattled some more. The sound it made carried differently now. They were in total darkness, but Jeremy knew they were now at the bottom, inside the caverns.
They shone their lights around, and found what appeared to be a front desk, and a window with a perfect circle cut into it, almost like the glass that protected the cashier at a late-night gas station. The rest of the room had the feel of a cheap dentist’s waiting room, with chairs arranged around small, circular plastic tables. Each of those tables had magazines wrapped in plastic. Exactly like a waiting room, Jeremy thought, in wonderment.
In an adjoining room, there were plastic crates, shrink-wrapped on pallets. Orange Naugahyde chairs stacked against the wall gave this room the feel of a school janitor’s closet.
“We shouldn’t let the doors close,” said Mathilda. “Maybe somebody should stay here, make sure they don’t close and never open again.”
“Let’s use that desk to keep it open,” said Albert. “What do you think?”
“Sounds good to me,” said Clyde. “C’mon, Jedi Master, let’s put them muscles work.”
They moved the large, kidney-shaped desk into the elevator doors to keep them from automatically shutting, and then they stepped into the caves.
They moved cautiously, like blind people in a minefield. The first corridor was wide open, with scant desks here and there, a few stacks of crates with no packing slips. Mathilda produced a crowbar from her own go-ready bag (Jesus, was everybody prepared for the end of the world but me?) and pried open the top of one tote. She found a few pamphlets talking about basic survival. There were two maps along the wall that mapped out the entire facility. Jeremy took pictures of them with his phone for later reference.
“Good fuckin’ idea,” said Clyde, and he did the same. They all did.
Jeremy put his finger on the part of the map that said YOU ARE HERE, and followed the paths away from there. Then he found what he thought they were looking for. “There it is. Let’s go.”
“There whut is?” said Clyde. Jeremy showed him, and Clyde nodded excitedly. “Good fuckin’ idea, Jedi Master.”
They came to a T-junction. Here, they looked in every direction, saw the walls of every corridor lined with stacks upon stacks of plastic totes, all shrink-wrapped. There were closed doors in every hallway, and a wide corridor that had numbered parking spots. For the RV-driving survivalists that never invested here, Jeremy thought. Man, I bet they wished they had invested now. At the end of the corridor, there was another cage elevator, but this one was much bigger than the one they’d come down. “This must’ve been where they expected to bring their vehicles up and down,” Jeremy said. “We can use this to bring all our cars down later.”
Clyde, Albert, and Mathilda nodded.
“Look around for light switches,” Clyde said. “Let’s keep it movin’, people.”
Jeremy nodded, and groped along the cold stone walls. So far, he hadn’t found any switches. More corridors splintered off from theirs. More doorways, more huge parking spots.
“Goddamn it, this place is a maze!” said Albert. “Which way?”
Jeremy pulled up the map on his phone, zooming in on their location. “Down here,” he said, pointing to a hall on their left.
Fifteen minutes of exploring yielded only more large doors, which opened easily with a push and squeaked on rusty hinges, revealing more bored-out corridors. Several doors led to more stalls, some large enough to fit several RVs. Jeremy found a couple light switches, flipped them up and down, but no lights came on. However, a couple of large bay doors had standard chains, like you’d see in a hangar. When Mathilda pulled on them, they rolled up, revealing only more shrink-wrapped boxes and totes. Jeremy examined the packing slips, and found the totes were full of spare parts for something called a PILLMAN’S NATURAL-11. No one in their group seemed to know what it was. One bay contained large steel drums, the sides of which had labels that warned FLAMMABLE and COMBUSTIBLE.
“Fuel,” Clyde said. “Some diesel over here. Some of it’s dated less than two months. Less than two months! Hot damn, that’s sorta lucky!”
“Lucky,” Mathilda said, shaking her head. “Yeah, we’re real lucky, all right.”
“Well, ain’t we? I mean, of all the people on the fuckin’ planet, it’s us who lived. Nobody but us. Just us! Heh!”
Jeremy glanced at Mathilda and Albert, who all just shook their heads in morbid amusement. “Let’s keep looking.”
Another ten minutes of searching, and they found a room filled with pallets of MREs, water bottles, and two small diesel-powered generators. Upon finding these, Clyde dropped the straps of his overalls and started twirling them like a stripper, squeezing his nipples and doing a sexy dance. He could not have been more comfortable being one of the last lucky fuckers left alive on Earth. Jeremy wondered again if it was shock or just how Clyde was built.
Another large bay door opened easily, and inside they found several boxes labeled MEDICAL. They checked a few of the boxes, and found sumatriptan, odansentron, ampicillin, cephalexin, and many other bottles with labels Jeremy had never heard of it. He looked out for any sort of insulin, but of course didn’t find any, as insulin expired far too quickly. That made him feel despondent, but he kept focusing on the installation map on his phone, looking for the most important room.
“This way,” he said.
“If you say so,” Clyde laughed. “I’m following you! Use the fuckin’ Force, Luke!” He guffawed at his own joke, slapping his knee like he was at a comedy show.
Down the next corridor, there were unlocked doors leading into offices that looked like they had been in various stages of preparation before the original project had been shut down. The Silvid Vally Underground Installation had been a mining operation, then an Army operation, then a luxury getaway, then a Doomsdayer’s escape, and then an Army operation again, so it looked alternately convenient, inviting, sterile, warm, and coldly utilitarian.
In every office, blue tarps and white sheets were thrown over a few computer monitors, some CPU towers, and more tables with stacks of boxes and MREs.
“Think we can get Wi-Fi down here?” Mathilda snorted.
“I expect whatever they had going, it never got finished,” Jeremy said. “So, no.”
“I was joking.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
They went down a set of metal stairs, through a set of double doors. Jeremy suddenly noticed Mathilda had a small pistol in her hand, and was holding it and her flashlight in the “Harries Hold,” which he’d once learned when he interviewed a detective at the Cobb County Special Investigations and Response Division, for research in a term paper. It seemed Mathilda likely had been in law enforcement or the military.
They stepped onto wide metal scaffolding that overlooked a room filled with boilers, tall coolers and a generator the size of a small car. “Bingo,” Jeremy said.
“Hot damn! A Jedi Master! We got ourselves a gen-U-wine Jedi fuckin’ Master, boys!” Clyde danced a little jig again, then descended the stairs to approach the generator, which was cylindrical, extremely dusty, and covered in panels and dials. “I read about this big fucker on the website! Three diesel-powered generators in one! And each one cranks out eight hundred fuckin’ kilowatts apiece!” His hands moved over a few of the dials. To Jeremy, it didn’t look like he knew what he was doing.
It was Albert who said, “Uh, anybody know how this shit works?”
Mathilda shrugged. “I used to work on car engines.”
“Not the same thing.”
“I know that, I’m just sayin’. That’s about all I got.”
“They’s a fellow up top said he was an engineering student at Georgia Tech,” Clyde said. He snapped his fingers at Mathilda. “Matty, go fetch him, bring him down here! His name’s Corey—no, wait, Cody! That’s his name. Cody. Go fetch Cody! Shoot that flashlight o’ yers over here, Jedi Master Zoinks, I wanna get a better look at this big bastard.”
Mathilda sighed and shook her head. “I’m not going back up by myself. I’ll get fuckin’ lost.”
“I’ll come with you,” Jeremy said. “Albert, you help Clyde with…with whatever. We’ll be back soon.”
It took twenty minutes to find their way back out, and during that time, Jeremy and Mathilda went quiet, and tense, obviously both of them wondering if they were lost. At last, they came to the elevator and removed the desk from the doors, then went up and fetched Cody Tyler, who, it turned out, was built like Chris Hemsworth and with a face like Gerard Butler but with thick glasses.
“Know anything about boilers and diesel-powered generators?” Jeremy asked him, before explaining what they needed from him.
Over the next two hours, they ferried people up and down the elevator. Jeremy discovered eight more people had shown up during the time they were messing with the generators, and Alysse and Kayla were sitting in the grass, playing a game with old Pokémon cards Alysse had collected as a girl. “Ya know,” she said when Jeremy found them, “these were once worth a few hundred dollars each. Now…what even is a dollar?”
He sat next to them for a while, and asked Kayla to teach him how to play. That seemed a good way to distract her from everything. Around the time the sun was going down, Mathilda came back up and asked for everyone to join them down below. Mathilda said, “I’ll stay up top, in case any stragglers show up during the night.”
Jeremy nodded, and guided Alysse and Kayla into the elevator. And together, they headed down into the darkness. When he went to check on Clyde and Cody, he found that they were joined by a fellow by the name of Stewartson, who, it turned out, had been in the military and was explaining, “—we had to get power up in some bad areas. Bombed-out cities, power plants that the workers abandoned because they got tired of hearing the warning sirens every day. Fallujah was a blacked-out town during the April siege.”
“So, you know all about these big bastards?” Clyde asked.
Stewartson shrugged. “Sort of. These are a bit different. A generator like this ought to be able to pump out enough energy to power four or five hundred homes for a while, especially if we watch our consumption.” He then located something called the primer, and then the primer set-pump, and directed Clyde, Cody and Jeremy to help him label some of the switches with tape, so he could remember what they all did, and, more importantly, so everyone else would know how to work it if something happened to him. (They were already making plans on how to survive in the event others in their group started dying.)
They watched Stewartson pump it six times, and then the big machine started to hum, vibrating loudly, shaking the floor, the scaffolding, and then finally settling down to a low whirring noise. A few dials lit up. Stewartson went to those, consulting an instruction manual someone had found under the main station, all wrapped in plastic. He flipped something called the Main Mixture Switch. The generator roared again, shaking, then stabilized.
Then, all went quiet. A hissing sound. Then the generator started whirring again. All at once, every single light on the control panel lit up. Then, it was just a matter of following the blinking lights. That’s the way it seemed to Jeremy, anyway, who felt useless just watching.
Suddenly, the entire room lit up. Halogen lights everywhere splashed on, bathing them in an almost blinding and heavenly aura.
“There we go!” Albert shouted.
“We’ve got power?” Jeremy said.
“We’ve got power,” said Stewartson, sighing and wiping a sweaty brow.
Cody high-fived Jeremy. Then, they heard squealing, and when they turned around, Clyde was doing his stripper dance again, and frolicking all around the power room shouting, “Praise God! Praise the fuckin’ Force, Obi-Wan! We are in bidness, folks! Yessir! Praise Buddha and his fat fuckin’ ass! Praise God and little baby Jesus! We! Are! In! Bidness!”