thousand mile drive and he never once asked his ten-year-old son if he knew what an eclipse was!
Dad must have continuously assumed I knew things. Mom said Dad never shared what he thought, but there, at the end, he tried. He made it home to leave me a message, not knowing whether I’d find it or not. He died not knowing.
That knowledge hurt.
Dad left it anyway, Eric thought. At the end, he must have realized what Mom knew, that he assumed too much from me. At the end, he wanted to leave one thing, and this is what he left. It must have been the most important thing.
Eric reached up. Leda handed him the note. He read it for the third time. In shaky script—recognizable but not firm: not well—it said, “I have always loved you. Dad.”
“There’s advantages to the downfall of civilization,” said Leda as they walked out of the Littleton Target with new clothes, backpacks and supplies. She had chosen a man’s blue work shirt and had tucked them into her jeans. Eric thought the look complemented her. “I don’t need to go to work in the morning.” Eric struggled to fit the stiff, surgical tubing over the aluminum rods of the new sling-shot while at the same time carefully picking his way between the tumbled and smashed shopping carts that littered the parking lot. “No driver’s license test for me,” he said.
“No April 15th.” She led them toward the river. “We ought to find a place close to the water. Bottled stuff we can drink, but bathing could be a problem.”
“Sounds good,” said Eric. “You can forget Superbowl Sunday hype.”
“Yeah, and Christmas decorations up before Halloween.”
“Or elevator music.”
“Rock and Roll rules,” she said.
The late afternoon sun turned the river a mellow gold, and they walked south along its bank until they found an empty house with unbroken windows. After knocking loudly several times, Eric pried open the front door with a crowbar. “Useful tool,” he said. “We don’t need keys anymore.” Leda checked the bedrooms, and Eric looked into the basement. Her voice floated down the stairs. “I don’t need to remember my social security number.”
They met in the living room. “All clear,” she said. “This will do for now, but we’re going to have to do some planning. Find other survivors. Set up for the long haul.”
“The government should send help eventually.” Eric shrugged his shoulders out of his backpack, letting it drop to the carpet.
Leda seemed to contemplate that comment for a bit before saying, “Could be a while.” She crouched next to her pack and began removing canned goods, big cans in back, little ones in front, like kids for a school picture, which Eric thought amusing. He realized there was much to learn about her. He opened the drapes and windows. Having dropped below the mountains, the sun turned the clouds violet and pink. Light painted the foothills a soft blue and the plains a dusky yellow. “You know,” he said without turning from the window, “I don’t know your last name.”
She stepped beside him. An empty road between them and the river followed its contours in both directions until it was lost to sight. No traffic. Not a single, mechanical or human sound. Farther up stream, the water rushed over and around the broken cement of what once was a bridge.
“We don’t need last names anymore,” she said.
That sank in for a while. Then, he nodded in agreement.
Later that night, long after he’d drifted to sleep in a four-poster single bed decorated with beige lace, with the windows open and the river mumbling its secrets in the dark, his bed moved, jarring him awake. Leda snuggled against him, and they made love. In the midst of it all, in the heated, passionate ecstasy of it all, Eric imagined their sounds echoing among the empty buildings, the silent town, with no one to hear.
Chapter Twenty-one
ALEXANDRIA
Lost in shock, Eric was shrouding Pope’s face with a clean smock that had been draped over the back of a chair, when a young man rushed into the radio room. Eric ignored him. The motion of hiding the face felt studied and graceful. He released the smock’s shoulders and the cloth settled on Pope’s features. Only the hands resting on the armrests remained uncovered. “He asked me,” said Eric, and he waved at the switches, each with its ominously glowing light above it. He added, “You know, they killed a boy.” The man stared at the dead librarian, his mouth open. Finally, he stuttered, “We only have a minute or two. Hurry.” He hustled Eric out of the room and down the stairs. Apathetically, Eric allowed himself to be led.
At the basement entrance, the young man blurted to the elderly woman what he’d seen and heard, then joined a line of people heading through the basement door. She turned to Eric. “You helped him?” Eric nodded. “Thank you,” she said. Her lined eyes scrunched closed for a second. “He was a visionary. The staff will miss his guidance.” She gripped his hand tightly, then returned to directing the line of people.
“I’m sorry,” Eric said to her back. He thought, I should find this fascinating. Where did these people come from? What were they doing in the library? But he felt numb. He could see Rabbit running across the quad to save the burning books. The unyielding surface of the glass still rested on his palms. He thought of a term from the Gone Time, the slow motion replay, and that’s what was happening in his head, over and over, Rabbit dashed toward his death. Everything else seemed to be happening too rapidly—events rushed— and he didn’t feel he could keep up.
“Quickly, quickly,” she said and coughed. An acid bite flavored the air. She patted each person on the shoulder. All wore white smocks. Most were young, under thirty, and several children took their place in line. A few carried boxes, a few, one or two books, but most were empty-handed, their faces nervous but controlled. The evacuation seemed rehearsed. Noxious smoke billowed across the ceiling. Within a minute, the last one passed through. Eric bent low to avoid the fumes.
“You need to hurry too,” she said.
Age and brittleness overwhelmed him. Joints ached—elbows, knees and fingers—skin and muscles dangled from his bones. He felt like an empty vessel. Eric sat on the floor. Flame crackled but he couldn’t see it through the murk. This seems fitting, he thought. He didn’t have a plan, just an urge to quit, to let the library burn all around him. Rabbit died, he thought, because of me. I brought him here, and he died for nothing. I destroyed the library. The long journey’s a failure. We can’t be helped. The effort to keep his head up seemed too much. “I’ll stay,” he said. Metal groaned from deep in the smoke, and then something crashed heavily.
“Come on,” she said urgently, and pulled at his arm. “The building’s doomed. You’re not.” She dragged him backward a few feet, and mostly through her effort, not his own, he clambered through the trap door and into the tunnels.
“Move,” she said. Low wattage bulbs lit the tunnel until it curved out of sight. The last of the other people disappeared around the turn as he watched. “We have to be beyond the campus before the perimeter goes up.”
“Perimeter?” said Eric dully.
“Yes.” She pushed him in the back, almost knocking him over. He staggered forward through the shallow water, splattering gray splotches onto the curved walls. She said, “We’ve extended the tunnels.”
“The perimeter!” Eric could see again the scene in the quad, but instead of Rabbit, he watched Teach carrying Dodge and Ripple into the greasewood, the thickly wooded, dry brush that choked nearly all the open space in Boulder. Eric picked up his pace, outdistancing the elderly woman. “Teach is with my grandson out there. I’ve got to warn them!”
Eric turned into the first cross-tunnel, even though no lights illuminated its length. Blind, he ran forward, brushing his hand against the wall, feeling for a ladder. He pictured Pope’s map on the wall, each number representing a bomb in the outlying buildings and the spaces between them. Even on a still day, the ring of fire would close in and burn out the center. The fire would create its own draft. Federal and his men would be trapped —that would be Pope’s Pyrrhic victory—but so would anyone else. Behind him, the elderly woman shouted, “It’s too late. If they’re within the perimeter, it’s too late.” Sound and touch guided him as the rough cement ripped at his
