We Are the Ants(16)
China, taking advantage of the chaos, launches its full arsenal of nuclear weapons at key US targets, initiating a full-blown thermonuclear war that ultimately renders the planet a desolate wasteland incapable of supporting life.
The only survivors are the contestants of Bunker, forgotten by Fox producers after the show’s cancellation. Unaware of what has occurred on the surface, they eventually run out of food and draw lots to decide who they’re going to eat first.
14 September 2015
I woke up laughing. For a few disorienting seconds, I thought I was still on the spaceship. The sluggers had shown me a projection of the earth exploding again, along with the big, red button, but they hadn’t shocked or blissed me. They simply offered me the choice and waited to see what I would do. Maybe that’s why I was laughing. Averting the apocalypse shouldn’t be so easy. It should require elaborate schemes hidden from the public to keep them from panicking. It should demand sacrifice and tearful good-byes and Bruce Willis.
Obviously, I didn’t press it.
When I regained my senses and realized I wasn’t on the sluggers’ ship anymore, the laughter died in my throat. My back was damp, and something sharp dug into my hip. My hair, my boxers, and my chest were wet. I stank like stagnant canal water. When I sat up, I spit, in case some of the water had gotten into my mouth.
The moon was dark, and clouds obscured the stars. I had no idea where I was. I remembered being at Marcus’s party, sitting by the pool—then I was on the ship—but I had no idea how I’d ended up floating on a sea of sandspurs and goose grass. The sluggers had stolen my jeans and Jesse’s shirt, but at least they’d left me my boxers. A teenage boy running around Calypso in his underwear is odd, but a teenage boy running around Calypso naked is a felony.
My legs trembled as I stood, and I listed dangerously. I focused on the horizon like Jesse had said to, but without the moon, the sky and ground bled into one another. Eventually, my eyes adjusted, and I was able to pick out a few distant shadows. I set sail for those.
I walked for ten minutes, carefully picking my way through the weedy field, forced to stop occasionally to pluck a spiny sandspur from the tender skin between my toes, cursing the sluggers for never dropping me off anywhere interesting. I hope before the world ends, they drop me off somewhere I’ve never been—Paris or Thailand or Brazil. Anywhere has to be better than Calypso.
The shadows turned out to be jungle gym equipment. Towers and monkey bars, the various structures connected by wooden bridges. I didn’t recognize the playground, but I did recognize the Randy Raccoon mascot painted on the wall of the nearest building. This was my old elementary school. It had changed since I was a boy. There used to be a metal geodesic dome that I’d climb to the top of and leap from, trying to break my ankle so I’d be sent home. I wasn’t Space Boy back then, I was Hillbilly Henry because of a cowboy hat I’d worn every day for weeks. I don’t even remember where I got it, but I hardly took it off. Not until Matt Walsh stole it during recess and pissed on it. No one but me had seen him do it, and Mr. Polk—my third-grade teacher—accused me of peeing on it myself and trying to blame Matt. When my father picked me up from school and asked me where my hat was, I told him I lost it. He spanked me so hard with a wooden spoon, the handle broke.
Ben Franklin Elementary was too far from home to walk, so I trudged to the front of the school. I was exhausted, my legs ached, and my head felt like the sluggers had unspooled my brain through my ears and then stuffed it back in wrong so that it resembled a bowl of gray linguini. Needless to say, I was overjoyed when I saw a pay phone next to a wooden bench near the student drop-off area. The phone booth was decorated with faded stickers for bands I’d never heard of and brands that sounded only vaguely familiar—relics of rebel kids long since assimilated into adulthood. I picked up the receiver, trying not to imagine the hundreds of snot-nosed brats that had probably groped it, and prayed it still worked. The dial tone was the most beautiful sound I’d heard in ages.
My finger hovered over the numbers. It was late, but I didn’t know how late. It had been eleven or twelve when I was sitting by the pool—those shots had skewed my perception of the passage of time—but the sluggers could have kept me for an hour or five. Waking up my mother was out of the question, and Charlie would sleep through the end of the world, so I knew he wouldn’t answer his phone. I didn’t know my father’s number or if he even still lived in Florida, and Audrey was the last person I wanted to see. I only knew one other number.
The first indignity was having to call collect. Pay phones should be free. If you’re desperate enough to need one, it’s probably an emergency and you don’t have change. It’s not like boxer shorts come with pockets. I hadn’t even known that you could make collect calls until Jesse explained it to me one morning after the sluggers had dropped me off near his house. The information had seemed about as useful as Latin, until the first time I actually needed to use it.
I pressed zero and followed the prompts, first dialing Marcus’s number, then speaking my name into the receiver, and, finally, waiting.
The second indignity was hearing Marcus ask who it was three times and then pause, as if he were actually considering whether to accept the charges, before muttering a weary yes. His voice was drowsy and annoyed. “Henry?”
“Were you sleeping?”