February 11th, 2013
Rawlings, Wyoming
1
"You don't know who to call even if you fix it."
Jonathan Harmon, M.D. flinched at the sound of his wife's voice echoing loudly across the dim, carpetless living room. He put a hand to his chest, trying to get his breath back.
"Sorry."
John smiled at her, thinking she had finally gained a little weight in the month they'd spent hiding in their home together. Anne was probably half of his 240 lbs, with hair still mostly brown instead of his salt and pepper. She looked good for 58. He hadn't been as lucky.
"You did that a'purpose," he accused with a grin in his voice.
Anne nodded, brown eyes twinkling above fine age lines, as she set the large afghan she was knitting on the recliner's matching brown end table. "I had to. You look so sad."
John turned back to the only window in their large, two-story farm house that they hadn't covered in layers of thick plastic. Stalling, he took off his glasses and laid them on the cord he really didn't know how to repair, aged blue eyes frowning at the Discovery Channel special going on in their muddy front yard.
Their neighbor's dog had collapsed and died near the barn yesterday. The Collie's beautiful coat was bloody from what was probably a gunshot, the carcass now a carpet of swarming, mutated ants, with bloated bodies twitching in effort and obvious communication as they struggled to move the food.
Backdropped by a view of the Rocky Mountains that was now hazy from the layer of grit in the darkening sky, the foraging ants were each the size of a quarter. The biggest he had seen around here yet, their bodies were constantly changing from all the radiation and chemicals they were ingesting from the carrion. All nests were getting regular doses of contaminated miracle-grow now and John hated to think about what it was doing to the snakes and spiders. Once Nature finished cleaning up, leaving only bones, these predators would move on to other food sources - like people - and though only time would tell, he was sure their bites would be poisonous.
The final waves of radiation sickness would be the next in a long line of dangerous viruses to mutate, but it would make smallpox and bird flu seem minor in comparison. The death toll from this man-made hell wouldn't end for a century or more.
His eyes looked over rangeland covered in prairie grass that was permanently bent from the wind's onslaught, fields ready for a planting season that would never come. Everything had changed. It had been 38 years since he and Anne were in the army, medics at the same MASH unit in Vietnam, but he had to remember what had kept him alive back then, so they could use it now.