Recursion(81)

A receipt in one of the cup holders has combusted.

Smoke pours through the vents.

The Jeep is resting on the passenger side, and he’s still buckled into the seat, at a sideways attitude to what’s left of the world. He cranes his neck to look up at Helena, who’s still strapped in behind the wheel, her head hanging motionless.

He calls her name, but he can’t even hear his own voice in his head.

Nothing but the vibration of his larynx.

He unbuckles his seat belt and turns painfully to face his wife.

Her eyes are closed and her face is bright red, the left side of it covered in glass-shrapnel from the window.

He reaches over and unbuckles her seat belt, and as she falls out of the seat onto him, her eyes open and she takes a sudden, gasping breath.

Her lips move, trying to say something, but she stops when she realizes neither of them can hear a thing. She lifts a hand turned red from second-degree burns and points at the glassless windshield.

Barry nods, and they climb through, struggling finally onto their feet to stand in the middle of the road, surrounded by devastation only fathomed in nightmares.

The sky is gone.

Trees turned to skeletons and molten leaves drifting down from them like fire-rain.

Helena is already stumbling up the road. As Barry hurries after her, he notices his hands for the first time since the blast. They’re the same color as Helena’s face, and already forming blisters from the white-hot flash of thermal radiation.

Reaching up to touch his face and head, he comes away with a clump of hair.

Oh Christ.

Panic hits.

He comes alongside Helena, who’s limp-jogging now over the pavement, which is covered in smoking debris.

It’s evening-dark, the sun invisible.

Pain is encroaching.

In his face, his hands, his eyes.

His hearing returns.

The sound of his footsteps.

Car alarms.

Someone scream-crying in the distance.

The god-awful silence of a stunned city.

They turn onto the next street, Barry figuring they’re still a half mile from the firehouse.

Helena stops suddenly, bends over, and vomits in the middle of the street.

He tries to put his hand on her back, but when his palm touches her jacket, he instinctively pulls it away in pain.

“I’m dying, Barry. You are too.”

She straightens, wipes her mouth.

Helena’s hair is falling out, and her breathing sounds ragged and painful.

Just like his.

“I think we can make it,” he says.

“We have to. Why would they hit Denver?”

“If they unleashed their full arsenal, they’re striking every major city in America, thousands of warheads, probably hoping they get lucky and take out the chair.”

“Maybe they did.”

They move on, closer to ground zero by the looks of the towering cloud of ash and fire, still roiling and pluming in the indeterminate distance.

They pass an overturned school bus, the yellow turned black, the glass blown out, voices crying from within.

Barry slows down and starts toward it, but Helena says, “The only way you can help them is for us to get home.”

He knows she’s right, but it takes everything in his power not to at least try to help, even with a word of comfort.

He says, “I wish we’d never lived to see a day like this.”

They jog past a burning tree with a motorcycle and its driver blown into the branches, thirty feet up.

Then a woman staggering hairless and naked in the middle of the street with her skin coming off like the bark of a birch tree and her eyes abnormally large and white, as if they’d expanded to absorb the horror all around her. But the truth is, she’s blind.

“Block it,” Helena says, crying. “We’re going to change this.”

Barry tastes blood in his mouth, pain slowly encompassing his world.

It feels like his insides are melting.

Another blast, this one much farther away, shakes the ground beneath them.

“There,” Helena says.

The firehouse lies straight ahead.

They’re standing in the midst of their neighborhood, and he barely noticed.

Because of the pain.

Mostly because it doesn’t look anything like their street.

Every house built of wood has been leveled, power lines toppled, trees blow-torched and stripped of every hint of green.

Vehicles have been strewn everywhere—some flipped onto their roofs, others on their sides, a few still burning.

It’s raining ash and fallout that will give them acute radiation poisoning if they’re still in this hellscape by nightfall.

The only movement anywhere is from blackened forms writhing on the ground.

In the street.

In the smoldering front yards of what once were homes.

Barry feels a surge of helpless nausea as he realizes these are people.

Their firehouse is still standing.

The windows are shattered-out, gaping-black eye sockets, and the redbrick has been turned the color of charcoal.

The pain in Barry’s face and hands is exquisite as they climb the steps to the entrance and move inside over the front door, which lies cracked and flattened across the foyer.

Even through the pain, the shock of seeing their home of twenty-one years like this is devastating.