The Dead

“Maybe we’d better get outside,” Linda said.

“Yeah,” Gary replied, and flung the covers over the foot of the bed.

But with amazing abruptness, the quake stopped; to Gary it felt uncannily as if a huge hand had closed about the house. The rattle of the blinds softened to a faint buzz, before fading altogether. Gary stood slowly, listening, looking warily about. Only the curtains were still moving, brushing drily against the window-sill.

“They don’t have earthquakes in New Jersey,” Linda said.

Gary laughed. “Nope.”

“Maybe I’m still asleep… I was dreaming about an earthquake.”

“Me too,” Gary said.

“Worst nightmare I’ve had in a long time,” Linda continued. “Like I was at the Last Judgment, or something.”

That brought Gary up short. “Last Judgment?”

“Okay, maybe I have been watching the 700 Club too much…”

He turned toward her. “And you were just about to hear the verdict?”

“When I woke?”

“Yes.”

“Oh God,” she said. “How did you know?”

“I had the same dream,” he answered.

It was a long time before they got back to sleep.

Gary woke seconds before the alarm rang at eight. When the bell started, Linda mumbled something about sleeping some more, shut the alarm off, rolled over, and drifted away again-if indeed she’d ever really awakened to begin with.

Gary could hardly blame her. Neither of them had gotten much (or good) shuteye after the quake. He would’ve joined her, except that he could never sleep later than eight, no matter how tired he was.

The alarm was for Linda, of course. She’d said she really intended to get up early. She had lesson-plans she wanted to deal with. But sleeping past eight was no achievement for her. Gary rose, put on his bathrobe, and went out into the kitchen. He expected find his mother puttering around, but she was nowhere to be seen. Normally, their internal clocks were perfectly in sync; even so, he didn’t give too much thought to her absence. Losing her husband of thirty-five years was a pretty strong inducement to oversleep.

What the Hell is she going to do with herself? He wondered.

He heard the TV down in the rec room. That would be Max; Mom never did anything recreational in the rec room. There was a big steel door set in the west wall, and on the other side was the fallout shelter. Mom had never been averse to the idea of the shelter, but the possibility that it might ever have to be used terrified her. Max wasn’t so queasy. He had a poster of an H-bomb explosion on the wall of his office down in Maryland; “A little memento mori” he’d explained to Gary with a grin.

Rattled by the shootdown of KAL 007, Dad had wanted to move the family to somewhere off in the boonies, but Mom had put her foot down, and the shelter was their compromise-he’d started building it in ‘84. Working on it in his spare time, even after things changed in Russia, (“You never can tell,” he said) he’d drawn on material and equipment from his construction business, sometimes bringing employees home to help him. He’d made alterations and improvements as survivalist theories went in and out of fashion; even though Gary had never followed the literature, he guessed the shelter must be pretty much state of the art, well-stocked with supplies, ammo, and guns. His father had even, quite illegally, converted two Heckler and Koch assault-rifles to full auto. Gary considered it all crazy bullshit-although, if truth be told, he had jumped at a chance to go out to the piney woods in Jackson Township and spray junk cars full of holes with those guns.

Man, Gary thought, making himself a sandwich, that was an afternoon. Chugging beers with Dad and Max, emptying clip after clip, he’d almost found himself looking forward to end of the world.

He took his first bite.

And the Last Judgment, Gary? He asked himself. Looking forward to that?

The food went tasteless in his mouth.

Of course, maybe you don’t need to. Maybe you’ve already been there. Memories of last night’s dream flooded into his mind with an almost hallucinatory vividness.

You have been weighed in the balance and found-

“Jesus,” Gary said, putting the sandwich down. What in hell was going on with his subconscious? Two horrific nightmares in two nights-it was really out of character.

And then there was the weird side of it. Even though he didn’t believe in clairvoyance, it was hard to accept that the first dream and his father’s death had been mere coincidence. Telepathy was nonsense-but he and Linda had shared that second nightmare, he was sure of it. It was all too much, and he did not want to think about it.

To distract himself, he grabbed a copy of Time magazine out of the drysink. It fell open to a truth-is-stranger-than-fiction piece about a coalition of fundamentalists and neanderthal Catholics who had discovered that the Antichrist had arrived in the person of Harrison Foldsbury, an undersecretary in the U.S. Department of Education; Foldsbury had narrowly escaped death in a commando-style raid on his home, apparently organized by the above-mentioned loonies. But the wildest twist of all was a connection between the nut jobs and Israeli Intelligence; there was some reason to believe that some of the fanatics had been trained near the Dead Sea at a top-secret base.

Gary finished the story feeling a nasty mixture of black amusement and anxiety. These washed-in-the-blood morons and their Spanish Inquisition cohorts were so bizarre that you just had to laugh, even if they were trying to kill people, even if the Mossad (acting on some no-doubt Byzantine motive) took them seriously enough to train. But the story, with its wacked-out apocalyptic overtones, didn’t help at all to distract him from memories of the Last Judgment…

“Last Judgment dream,” Gary corrected himself. His stomach crawled; he was definitely not going to eat the rest of his sandwich, though that made him feel a little guilty. Waste not, want not, he could hear his mother saying.

I’ll put it in the fridge, ma, he thought. Finish it later.

He got up, wrapped it in foil and stashed it. After doing his dishes like a good boy, he went down the stairs to the rec-room.

Max was down there as Gary had guessed, doing Marine-style pump-and-clap push-ups in front of the Today Show. He was wearing sweat-pants but no shirt; Gary, who was rather powerfully built himself, felt his usual twinge of envy at the sight of his brother’s physique. Where did the bastard get that muscle-tone?

“Hundred eighty,” Max was saying. “Hundred eighty-one…” He stopped at two hundred, rolled onto his side, and propped his head up on one hand, smiling at Gary with his usual brotherly disdain before blowing the sweat from his upper lip. His cheeks and chin were bluish with stubble.

“Hey dork,” he said. “What’s up?”

“You are, I see,” Gary answered.

“Family curse,” Max said.

“How’s Jane Pauley?”

“Real foxy, as always. Shame to waste her on that Trudeau turd.”

“Any big news?”

“Yeah. Local story, too.”

“What?”

“Plane crash. Off Bayside Shores.” Bayside Shores lay immediately south of Bayside Point.

“Jetliner?”

“747, bound to Philly from Madrid. Two hundred and eighty Italian tourists aboard.”

“Whoa,” Gary said. “Wait’ll Linda hears about this. You know how she hates flying? She’s going to this conference in August, and-”

“Shh,” Max said, sitting up, nodding toward the TV. “They’re talking about it now.”