“Mandy isn’t here,” Hayden said when Jake started for the doors. Jake turned and gave him a questioning look. “I’ll be straight up with you... she was here, but she isn’t anymore.” He stepped past Jake and lifted a wooden beam from the rusted brackets holding the doors closed. He pulled one of the doors open and the three stepped into blackness.
“Give me a second,” Hayden muttered. There was a flicking sound followed by a light hiss, and then a small orange flame jumped into life. “It’s an old Coleman gas lantern. I think it was my Dad’s. Never thought it would be of any use... but then again, I wasn’t expecting the world to take a nosedive into oblivion any time soon, either.”
Jake stared into the shadows all around him. He had never actually been inside the shelter before. The first six feet of walls above the dirt floor were concrete, above that, thick wooden beams kept the earth in place. More beams ran overhead, sloping down into the heart of the hill. Something snorted in the dark and stepped forward. The horse looked Jake over suspiciously, sniffed at his tattered shirt sleeve, and then backed off into the shadows again.
“Trixie was the only animal that made it,” Jake said. “My other two horses were outside when it happened. So were over a hundred head of cattle... and my dog.”
“Max.” Jake remembered the big, slobbering black lab from the family barbeques.
“Yeah, Max. He didn’t deserve to go like that. None of them did.” Hayden dug into a cardboard box pushed up against the wall. He pulled out a can of beans along with an opener. “You hungry?” Jake nodded emphatically. “Stupid question.”
Jake shovelled the cool contents into his mouth and swallowed without chewing. Some of it fell out of the opening where his cheek used to be, and he scooped it back in. “You said Mandy was here. Where’s my wife, Hayden? Where is she now?”
Hayden lit a second gas lantern further in. Trixie came back into view, kicking at a pile of loose straw in a corner. “I’m trying to conserve the fuel; God only knows how long we’ll be stuck in here. I don’t know much about nuclear fallout and radiation, but I’m betting we have enough food and water stored in here to last a month, maybe a little less.”
Jake stumbled towards him, pleading with his hands. “Please... just tell me.”
“She didn’t make it. She went out before the big one hit.”
Jake stopped. “Before? That doesn’t make any sense. Mandy was at home with Nicholas. She came here after the blast... didn’t she?”
Hayden dunked a pail into the horse’s water trough. He pulled it back out, half-filled, and sat down on a plastic milk crate. He met Jake’s eye with a grim gaze. “Mandy had come to see me the morning it happened.” He pulled up a second milk crate and motioned Jake to come sit in front of him. “I have half a dozen twenty-four packs of drinking water. We’ll have to go through those sparingly. I’ll clean the worst of your wounds with this. Considering you were drinking from an irradiated river when I found you, that shouldn’t be an issue?”
Jake sat on the crate and watched him wet a piece of cloth into the pail. Hayden wrung it out with his big hands and questioned Jake with raised eyebrows. Jake nodded, and Hayden started to dab the cold cloth gently to his skull. “My son found me... not you.”
“Nicholas snuck out while I was sleeping,” Hayden explained. “I warned him how dangerous it was outside, told him the air was all wrong... that it would make him sick. I came across you first, washing up in the river.”
Jake looked over to his son. Nicholas had curled up into the same straw pile Trixie was rooting around in. The boy’s eyes were heavy, beginning to close, but they never left Jake’s form. “Mandy and I were having trouble,” Jake whispered. “We’d been fighting for months. I never really understood why... thought it was all my fault.”
Hayden rinsed the cloth in the pail and pressed it against the less ravaged side of Jake’s face. “It’s no one’s fault... not really.”
“Is that what you told yourself, Hayden? Did it lessen the guilt some?”
“It wasn’t something I was looking for. Mandy was here all the time when I was still married, visiting with Teresa. After we split up, Mandy kept coming over... she said she was just as concerned about me as she was with her best friend.”
“I’ll bet.”
Hayden didn’t argue. He dunked the cloth in for a third rinse, and Jake took it from his hand when he went to raise it back towards his face. “I grabbed as many supplies as possible before we left the house. I didn’t have any medical dressing or bandages, but I do have some clean linen sheets. I could tear some into strips and wrap up the worst of your burns.”
Jake rubbed the cloth down the bridge of his nose. Blackened skin peeled away with it. “Why bother? I’ll be dead in a few days. Save your fucking sheets.” Hayden tried offering him one of the bottled waters. “Save that, too.”
Hayden sighed and stood. If Jake was going to take a swing at him, he probably would’ve tried it by now. Hayden was almost six and a half feet
