Sploosh . . . 

Great round boulders and ancient fractured rock faces line the creek. Soft dark green mosses cover the rocks, and water mist glistens on the tufts of mosses. Sunlight sparkles across the whole area and lights it like ten million tiny crystals. Water drips from condensed mist rivulets that run down the rock and return to the pool.

A wisp of smoke curls out from the rock overhang and sounds of gentle activity can almost be heard above the rush of the mountain spring.

The mountains of North Georgia were a frequent refuge for Kathe and Milo. They thought of it as little Switzerland because, one theory held, long ago the tectonic sheets that are Europe and North America had collided, slipped and ground past one another smoothly but once had stuck to each other and violently wrenched off a large chunk that remained behind, welded solidly onto the side of an Appalachian mountain, a piece of the Alps in North Carolina. Kathe had been born and raised in New Bern, North Carolina, a town originally settled by Swiss immigrants from Bern, and she thought that was special.

Kathe and Milo had been deep in another cave when the end came. They thought it was an earthquake. They rushed out of the cave and watched in disbelief. They could see only a narrow ribbon of sky from where they were near the creek bottom, but they saw all they needed to see. Black one second, then white then purple and then again, and full of electricity – like a thousand of the worst thunderstorms imaginable and a thousand tornadoes scoured entire forests, buildings, cars, people and everything else on the surface.

It sucked the air from around them. It nearly sucked them from the cave. The firestorms were consuming all the air on the surface and sucking the air from the network of underground caverns. This air sustained them, and would for the next few days until the surface air mixed burned air and unburned air. Though there was a lot less oxygen in the air, it was still breathable at low altitudes. You could get ‘mountain sickness’ from lack of oxygen at 1,000 ft altitude.

And they knew it wasn’t an earthquake – the rumbles were from MIRVs over Atlanta and the area’s numerous military bases. One after another after another for hours.

Inaudible gasps grew into involuntary moans, ‘Oh, no, oh, no, oh, no.’ And they turned and ran back into the deep cave.

‘What do you think?’ was the question neither asked but each looked into the other’s eyes and knew.

Kathe and Milo gathered all their camping equipment and headed for the depths of the cave. Both wanted to deny what they saw, both knew with certainty what had happened.

They were silent for a long time, and then Milo spoke and confirmed the thoughts of the other, and then Kathe spoke and confirmed the fears of both.

‘We have to stay here for as long as we can,’ Kathe said.

‘How long?’ asked Milo.

‘We’ve got food for the weekend – we can make it stretch to four days, I think,’ Kathe offered.

‘I want to go take a look,’ Milo said.

‘Me, too, but we can’t. There’s gotta’ be radioactive dust falling for days, don’t you think? Don’t you think we ought to head for the deep cave where the air will probably be better, you know, where the roof fell in and there’s that big open area?’ Kathe didn’t like going really deep into the cave, even though it was a single tunnel. ‘I know you think I’m silly but I want to leave a trail of rope for a guide, help me unravel this one.’

They didn’t have much rope, but after the three strands were unlaid, and each strand was divided into fours, there was enough to go maybe a third of a mile.

Three days later, out of food and nerves stretched like wire, they emerge from the cave to stand blinking in the gloom of day.

It doesn’t look that much different from before. Most of the debris had been carried over, across and past the narrow valley, and many of the bushes along the creek had come through without damage. Only once in a while would you catch the sharp scent of decay in its earliest stages, stuff that settled out as the wind and fire storm diminished.

‘Cover your mouth and nose like we talked about – don’t breath any dust,’ Milo reminded Kathe.

They walked cautiously down the short path to the trail head. The car was there, covered with a layer of fine dust. Except for the dust and shredded debris everything looked like it had before, only early twilight at 2 PM.

They got into the car and shut off the air vent and fan and kept the windows up even though it was warm. They drove as far up the road to the first ridge as they could, then climbed over and under the broken trees to the top. With a gasp, their breath left them involuntarily. Everything had been flattened. Everything was shredded. For as far as they could see trees were down, all the trunks lined up in the direction away from the blast winds that knocked them down. All was gloom, all was destroyed.

The road was gone. It disappeared into the forest of shattered trees that now lay across it. It was as they knew it would be. They went back to the cave in shock. 

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Kathe and Milo had worked their way down the creek, crawled over boulders, walked though the shallow water, stayed off the ridges and got to the store at the junction with the river. It was deserted, but not ransacked, and there were canned goods on the shelves. Milo took all the food and gathered it into a tarp and dragged it off into the bushes behind the store. They had done a little exploring and had found the owners, dead, just down the road, last words scratched in the sand, ‘can’t breathe.’

Milo took a good look around and gathered things he thought might be useful, a hatchet, a .22 rifle and several boxes of bullets, a small radio, flashlight, Coleman lamp and fuel.

They had way too much to carry back to the cave, and didn’t want to go further down the river, thinking that the more time they let go by, the better off they would be. They carefully hid most of the food a good ways away from the store and took as much as they could carry and started back to the cave.

Kathe and Milo knew what had happened and had made the adjustments, had talked about the dangers, had predicted that the biggest danger lay in encounters with other survivors they might meet, had realized they had no plan, and decided that for right now and the foreseeable future, to be alive was enough. If they could make it through the next three months, they thought, things might be different.

They returned to the cave and set up housekeeping. They were careful to leave no sign outside that the cave was inhabited, and always placed logs and noisemakers across the entranceway tunnel to their new home.

One day, Milo took the radio up to the ridge and turned it on, tried the FM band and heard nothing, switched to AM and there, sure enough was a signal, weak but there. He couldn’t tell what it was, but found it both comforting and frightening to know there were other people.

That evening, Kathe and Milo climbed back up to the ridge and tried it again. The first station was much clearer now, and was a nut case ranting about the end of the world that had just come, extorting all listeners to prepare to meet Jesus.

Carefully they explored the rest of the band, and heard what they had feared, what what had hoped to hear, heard that they were not alone, and that all was chaos.

They also heard that there were some known facts. The United States was pretty much totally destroyed, but not all. The mountains of the east had pockets of survivors, like them, some of the smaller towns were intact, not much was known about the west coast, lawlessness was to be expected, there was no government. The radio station would be able to stay on the air for as long as the generator and equipment worked, but would transmit for two hours in the morning and two hours in the evening.

A loose network of information sharing was established through every kind of communication equipment – radios in boats, airplanes, truck dispatch centers, CB radios, short-wave, everything.

They weren’t alone.

They didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

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