Good morning.
Today is the final installment of this story. Posting it here has given me a lot to reflect on, ideas for how to rework it. Part of that is because I’ve been piecing together the truth from the fiction that spiraled from that seed. Next week, I’ll post the true story of Bob. It’s not fantastical. No haunted radio. But it occurred to me this week that the real events might be better. More human. They hit harder.
If you’re just tuning in, you may want to start this story at the beginning. This is “Flat Tire, Over”, a short story I wrote a couple of years ago. It tells the tale of Bob, a man bent on survival against all odds. His dedicated prepping has led him to an isolated, lonely existence. His days are spent obsessing over the end of the world, so much so that he’s overlooked basic things, like keeping a spare in his car, an oversight that will cost him everything.
Last week, we ended with Bob increasingly bombarded by memories of his father, the man who taught him to fear the end of the world. The car battery is disconnected and the radio plays on, static giving way to memory. Not a car has passed on the highway, and the sun beats down mercilessly, leaving Bob to try and save himself. He has survival supplies, but not the one thing he needed to fix his flat.
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4
The walk had done him good. Let him sweat out his anger and fear. It was stupid anyway, the radio thing. Obviously something had happened when he crashed. A circuit that should be closed wasn't. Was drawing power from the battery and broadcasting the only signals it could pick up in the desert. He would need to disconnect it. Try to save it so he could start the car once he got new tires.
He watched the road as he walked back. There hadn't been a single vehicle since he crash landed. He was surprised, but unexplainably. The lack of people was what drew him out this far to begin with. The old road had been all but abandoned in favor of a new interstate decades earlier. It was Country. Rural. Middle Of Nowhere. All of them applied.
His throat hurt. The place was dusty. Bone dry and lifeless. He needed water. Something to eat. He would get to that after the radio was off. He couldn't concentrate with the sounds coming through. The static and wish-wash of voices. He could hear them growing as he stepped closer.
"It's not just the noise," he said to no one.
What he thought was, it's what the voices are saying.
"Yeah, well maybe it's who's sayin' it."
He stopped for a second and closed his eyes. Thought, don't talk to yourself, and kept walking. Dirt kicked up in clouds around his feet. He wore combat boots, ones he bought from an outfitter store that sold discontinued military supplies.
"Discontinued don't mean bad," the owner had told him. He was in a warehouse. Shelves of all sizes lined the walls, created aisles filled with supplies. "The government's always wasting money. New don't mean better."
Bob shook his head yes. Agreed. He walked out with those boots three years earlier. He didn't wear them often. Only when he went far from his property. Somewhere where he was vulnerable, away from his supplies. A high pitched buzzing filled his ear for a second. He slapped at it out of instinct. Pulled his hand away and stared. There was a line of dead smeared across his palm. A gnat maybe. A mosquito. He looked around. There wasn't any water as far as he could tell.
What could a mosquito be doing—
The thought was interrupted by a wapping. Helicopter blades blinked against clear blue sky. It was more than one. There were a lot of them. Sand brown and headed east. Bob shielded his eyes against the sun so he could watch their approach. One, two, four, six. There were two dozen. They were spread out and flying high, all headed in the same direction together.
Their shadows fell on Bob as they flew over, lit him in sun before shading him again and again. Their blades whirred. They were close enough now that Bob could see men, paratroopers he guessed, sitting on the edge of the open sides. Their uniforms blended with the metal. Tiny like the army men Bob played with when he was a kid. Then they were past him. The sound dissipated and the helicopters grew small in the distance.
Bob stared for a few minutes after. His brain was like those blades, whipping at 400 rotations per minute. Scouring the files of his mind for the right information. Something had happened. Something bad enough to send the military out towards the city.
Could be training.
How long had he lived out here? Years. Had he ever seen training sessions like this one? Nope. He kept looking for some alternative, eager to find the answer. He broke from his trance and walked while he thought. There were no cars coming. No rescue mission that would get him his tire. It was just him out here. He had water and food. He had a tarp and tools. And the radio. He had the god damned radio.
He set out at a jog towards his blue car. He might be able to pick something up on the AM stations. Find out some news. And there were the transistors. He could see if someone else, a semi driver or some radio nerd knew something. He threw the door open and sat heavy in the driver's seat. Static still poured out steady, but the voices were gone.
Bob set his fingers on the tuner, twisted it gently. He was hunched, his ear leaned into the speaker as far as it would go. His brow was creased. Droplets of sweat collected in the lines, then dripped down his temples. His nose. He kept listening. Nothing.
He got out of the car and was walking to the trunk when his foot stepped on something bulky. He moved his tan boot aside and saw his wallet. Folded, dark deer hide stitched together in the middle of desert. An idea sparkled, quieted him with its shimmer.
Tucked in with the old photos was a yellow card, hard plastic dotted with rectangles of varying shades of green. There were numbers on them. 50 to 4,000.
The RADTriage 50, a radiation detector that Bob kept on his person at all times. It provided instant detection of radiation from fallout, meltdowns, dirty bombs. Approved by the Department of Homeland Security. Made and tested in the United States.
Back home, Bob had mylar bags full of them. Some he kept in the freezer to ensure a longer shelf life. Others he threw in bugout bags he had scattered around the property. He always made sure to keep one in his wallet. In case shit hit the fan when he was indisposed.
That was why he didn't have a spare tire. He had pulled it out and shoved extra supplies in the well. A bug out bag to go. He wiggled the card out. There was an indicator. Dotted and green. Once it hit all black that would mean the thing had expired. From the olive shade he guessed it might be a year old.
He had stared at dozens of these. Taken them out and held them in his hand. Sometimes in the middle of the night after a nightmare. He would go out to feel the air on his face. Distance himself from times before that still hung thick in his dreams, and the present. Take it out to make sure nothing had gone down while he slept.
The strip in the center had always remained yellow. Anything else would mean trouble. Sure, it could be a spike in radiation due to a nuclear leak somewhere. A base maybe. An issue with a reactor. But it could be something more. All out war. The end of the world as we know it. Mutually Assured Destruction.
His hand hovered over the card, shading it from UV contamination. The center strip, usually canary colored, was a light green. Bob held it up above his head. He used his left hand to shade his eyes, make sure he wasn't seeing things. Green. Not dangerous yet. Somewhere between 50 to 100 millisieverts. Still.
He tucked it back into his wallet, his hands moving fast. He looked to the east, the direction those helicopters had flown in. Something had happened. Something big. He opened his trunk. He needed to get a count on the supplies he had with him. His hands were shaky as he moved through boxes, pushing aside batteries and rope. Cans of food and pill bottles.
He could build a fallout shelter here. He'd seen diagrams of that in books he bought. What people didn't know, didn't take the time to learn, was that fallout was the dust that blew on air currents and settled. Pieces of irradiated dirt kicked up in the initial blast. They would float through the air, carried by currents, and land on your little piece of paradise. On your skin. In your mouth.
Bob had a shovel. Tarps. It wouldn't be easy in the sun. He could wait until dark. He turned and looked east again. A breeze blew against his face, so slight it didn't bring any relief from the sun's rays. He closed his open mouth. Pulled his shirt up over his nose. The shovel was in the carved round of the tire well. He grabbed it, and started to dig.
By the time he had gotten down a foot or so, a thick mote surrounding the car, the radio had come back. It wasn't strange voices (his father's) anymore. Music was playing. Stuff Bob liked. In all his years in the desert he had never heard this station, tuned to 88.1, but he was glad for it. The battery could wait. Would have to. Until he figured out what was going on.
His shirt had come off more than an hour before. The sun wasn't noon high, but it was still burning him up. He worked in pace to The Rolling Stones, singing along with Mick Jagger when he had the breath. Then it was Bob Marley and the Wailers. And he shoveled in time to the syncopated up strum of reggae guitar. Three little birds on my doorstep.
The strip had darkened to a pale grass green. Still not dangerous, but close to 200 now. He grabbed the spade he had thrown next to the driver's side door. The earth was hard and dry. Not easy to dig through even with the pointed metal and all 180 pounds of him. Digging underneath was going to be harder.
"Singing don't worry," he sang in time with Marley. Him and the Wailers kept going, but Bob couldn't. He tucked his chin to hold in a laugh, the spade two inches into earth just behind the front tire that had landed him here in the first place. It bursts out then, a dry, coughing chuckle, and the spade drops from his hands. He howls then, to the tune of Every Little Thing Is Gonna Be Alright.
It echoes out into desert. Falls on no ears but his own. The wind kicks up around him, and he laughs more until tears stream down. He is laughing so hard he doesn't hear the change in station, the whine of a signal tuning, listening. Then it crashes in hard, sudden static abruptly cut by his father's voice. The old adage, the thing he said to him that day.
"Put your money where your mouth is."
Bob's laugh catches in his throat. A few higher pitched chuckles escape before—
He is standing across from his father. His mother is on the couch behind him. She holds her face. Blood leaks from her nose, fills her hands, turns the blue torn fabric dark with red. Bob's fists are raised. His blue eyes, bluer than the dark fabric turning black under his mother's face, stare into his father's.
His father is laughing. Laughing hard and loud like Bob told him the best joke he ever heard. Like he's at a bar with his buddies. But he's laughing at Bob. At his raised fists. He is only fourteen years old. It's between the time of the stairway stabbing and the goal scored on neighbor boy's face. The time when his father will realize the TV glass did change him. Allowed Bob to watch and see his father as he was.
His laughing is fading. His eyes do not smile at all. His head cocks slightly in a direction Bob and his mother hear nothing from. But he knows his father does. Bob shifts on his feet. The skin in his heel is rounded with the clear shimmer that entered on Christmas Eve and never left. The gift that keeps on giving. That gives him the gift of sight.
His father, dark in sunlight but darker in this room where the curtains are drawn, squares his own fists. He turns and spits, a trick he taught Bob when Bob was only five or six years old. His dark brown eyes, black in the lack of light, look into Bob's. And he says, "Put your money where your mouth is."
Bob scrambled up, pushing off the ground and lifting onto his feet. His long, tan dreadlocks bounced off his back, yellow-skinned from lack of sun. He grabbed the black box of tools that he put into his car for the Just In Case, the scenario that he's been living out since he was small and had to calculate his proximity to danger.
A socket wrench rolled out, the extender already lengthening it. He popped the trunk, heaved it open like it was the world he's pushing up and over, throwing out into infinite space. The static repetition of his father's warning echoed out of the radio as he loosened the nut on the black terminal, black like his father, the negative.
The hug-shaped metal let go of the terminal, and Bob pulled it off, set it to the side. He went to work on the red, his mother's bloodied nose, the positive. He disconnected it, felt relief like his bus ride out of the ghetto of St. Louis, and into another one in Chicago, but that one of his own choosing.
The static stopped. Bob sighed, looked into the engine, and smiled. He stepped back from the open hood, stared into sunrise horizon, and was stunned to see what was there. The sun was rising again in midday. A white ball peeked over the edge of the world and filled it, beautiful and light like he's never seen. It flashed like a camera. A final memento before the end of all things. It wasn’t happening like he'd imagined. The end of the end of the end.
The realization hit and he fell to his knees and looked down, happy to know he wasn’t blind from staring into that light. They always said the flash would get you. Burn out your retinas, even if you looked at it for only a second. He sat head bowed, palms open on his denim jeans. The glass in his foot, scarred over a hundred times, started to burn hot in the glowing orb of the end.
"Bob, I'm sorry."
Bob looked up, realized it was the radio again. Coming in loud. Coming in clear.
"Dad?" he asked, words he hadn't uttered in this new lifetime of his.
In the distance, he saw a man walking toward him. A black man, tall, in converse tennis shoes, the ones he wore when he was medicated. When the TV got inside of him. When he put it there, but not on purpose.
Behind him, the earth is cratering and exploding upwards, moving tons of dirt in a fission blow, the atoms expanding out, out, and out.
"Is this the thing you dreamed of?"
Bob's dad didn’t answer, kept walking toward him, smiling. He was close enough now that Bob could see his eyes. They were honey brown and all peace. There was no flit to the side to hear paranoid ramblings about the dreaded future. About the end of the world. He was there. For the first time all there. Undimmed by medication. Unsoiled by mirages of voices. Living nightmares whispered to him day and night.
“Is it like you thought it would be?”
He didn’t hear the answer as radio static clipped in with the Emergency Alert. THIS IS NOT A DRILL. Instead, a splash of water. A glimmer of summer passed through his mind just before the flesh of his body was obliterated. A quiet pond, the pink glow of evening bathed in cricket song. His father beside him. A bet on who could catch more fish, and the smile on his dad’s face when he looked at Bob and said, “Put your money where your mouth is.”
Closure is what I see. I choose not to take your ending in Armageddon literally. I think Bob constructed a scenario that would call out his father's memory. And he has found the father who loved him and whom he has been running toward in that one joyful memory. A memory where he chooses to wrap the both of them into oblivion in that happy instant. Always looking for the happy ending Shaina!
Wow, this was vivid and enrapturing. I couldn’t snark in my restacks because this whole thing felt reverent and sad and poignant. What a story. What a well told story. Thank you for this 🙏