Final Chaos

16

Aly sat in the back of the crowded Subaru, completely wracked with guilt. Guilt like she’d never felt before, guilt that she hoped, somewhere deep down inside of herself, that she’d never feel again. Ever.

She’d stopped sobbing. Her throat felt dry and almost as if she was choking, as if it was partially constricted. Her face felt flushed and tingly, and her hands felt like claws, as if she couldn’t properly move her fingers. She’d felt those effects before, during an especially bad anxiety attack in which she’d hyperventilated. There was some physiology term for what had happened, but she couldn’t remember what it was.

Her mind was nothing but a fog. There were still tears in her eyes, and her heart was pounding.

How could she do this? How could they do this? Leaving her mother like that, lying on the floor in her own home. What would happen to her body? Would it just rot? Would someone open the house again in a few weeks to be met by a horrendous stench? The bugs would swarm and start to devour the corpse.

Her death was a shock, but it really shouldn’t have been. She took heart medication, and had taken it for years. Maybe she’d forgotten it that morning, given what had happened. Or maybe the disease had finally progressed to the point that the medication wasn’t any good.

Aly couldn’t focus on the conversation in the car. Jim, Jessica, and Rob were talking about possible routes to the cabin.

It was good Jim knew how to get there, because Aly felt as if she wouldn’t have been able to talk coherently. If she’d been the only one who knew the way, she doubted she’d have been able to get them all there.

“But the highway’s faster,” Rob was saying. “And look, we don’t have that much gas. And from what you’re saying, it doesn’t sound like the gas pumps are going to work.”

“Can’t we siphon gas from them?” said Jessica. “The gas is still there after all. It’s just that the pumps don’t work.”

“I don’t know how we’d get at the gas,” said Jim. “It’s in underground tanks. It’s not like we can just stick a tube in there and start sucking away. Plus, the tanks are below ground. It’s not like the gas is going to just magically flow up into our own tank.”

“Gravity,” muttered Rob. “Damn gravity.”

“I’m doing the best I can with the gas,” said Jim. “We’ll get better gas mileage at about 50 MPH. I think we can get there on what’s left in the tank, even if we take the back way.”

“You really think the highway’s going to be packed full of cars?”

“Think about it,” said Jim. “Everyone who was driving on the highway, well, they’ll still be there, for the most part. And people who’ve figured out something is wrong, they’ll be on the highway, too. The ones with working cars, that is. It’ll be a mess.”

“Can’t we just drive by and check it out?” said Rob.

“You mean go through the on ramp and then get stuck there, with no way out for miles until the next exit?”

Rob didn’t answer.

Aly found herself slipping back into her memories. Her eyes felt impossibly heavy, and they closed slowly. She drifted off into something resembling sleep. But she was still awake.

It’d happened to her before, towards the end of an anxiety attack. Her body had been so exhausted by the hyperventilation, the intensity of the thoughts, that she’d closed her eyes and sunk into a trance-like state.

Memories of her mother flashed before her eyes. Memories from when Aly’d been a little kid. They hadn’t grown up in Pittsford. In fact, she’d grown up in one of the roughest, poorest neighborhoods of Rochester.

When Aly’d been a kid was around the time that Rochester had gone through its most severe economic crisis. The big tech companies in the area, which had supported the economy for so long, had started their huge layoffs. Suddenly, huge swaths of the local, loyal workforce were sitting around with nothing to do, with no hope and no prospects.

Aly’s parents had been hit as hard as anyone. Her father hadn’t been the type to just sit around and do nothing. He’d had his pride, but it hadn’t kept him from getting the first job he could find, which was bagging groceries. He’d said it was a fine job, that there was nothing wrong with it. And that was true, but when Aly’d gotten older she’d realized how hard it had been for him to make the transition from engineer to grocery bagger.

Her mother had gone back to school, gotten her teaching certification, and become a kindergarten teacher.

It was only when Aly’s grandparents had died and her parents had inherited quite a bit of money that they’d moved to Pittsford.

Her father had kept bagging groceries, saying that he needed something to keep busy, until he’d died.

With the memories flooding through her, Aly was only vaguely aware of something going on in the car around her. Fragments of conversation reached her, and she recognized her husband’s voice, but she didn’t really register on the meaning of the words. They were just that, words.

At some point, Aly drifted off to an exhausted sleep. It was her body trying to protect her, trying its best to protect her from the horror of what had happened, of what was happening.

Strange dreams filled her head. A man without eyes was walking near her on the road, speaking to her in a strange, robotic voice, saying “I wear this veil because I know I must protect you.”

Then the man vanished, and her dreams shifted to the city. To Rochester. Aly was walking down the normally deserted street near the bar she used to go to when she was younger.

In her dream, the normally empty street was now full of people. And they were chanting and screaming. There was an excitement in the area, but it was a terrifying kind of excitement. It was anger, intense and amplified by the huge crowd of people. There was something that they wanted, and they were going to do anything they could for the chance to have it again. Their demands weren’t clear, but their intensity was. And Aly knew intuitively, in that dreamlike way, that the crowd would destroy anything just to get a glimpse of what they wanted.

And what did they want? She thought it might be the life that had been taken from them, the life of apparent comfort and ease, the life where bad thing only happened to people on television and in the newspapers, where safety reigned and life and death were subjects for books and movies.

In her dream, Aly was fleeing the crowd. On foot. Barefoot, for some reason. She ran down the street, away from the crowd, away from the towering empty skyscrapers. Her bare feet slapped against the pavement and soon her feet were bleeding. When she turned behind her to look, there was a trail of the blood that had flowed from her feet.

Somehow, she’d run so far that the crowd was nothing but a pinprick off in the distance. She wasn’t tired in her dream, and she wasn’t in pain, despite her bleeding feet. But when she turned around to look, she could see the skyscrapers as clear as a day.

And they were burning. Billows of blackened smoke surged upwards and around the buildings. Intense orange flames lapped at the sky as the buildings were engulfed in fire.

“Aly,” came Jim’s voice. “Aly, wake up.”

His hands were on her, shaking her awake.

“What?” said Aly, waking up suddenly. “What’s going on?”

Adrenaline pumped through her.

Her heart was beating fast. Pounding.

Her eyes were wide, as she looked around frantically.

She was looking for the threat.

Her body was in survival mode.

And they all were.

The reality of the situation had finally hit home for Aly. It might have happened before, but this time it was for real.