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New Green Things

When the neon green radiation detectors on the corners of the buildings started blinking more than five times a day, I said maybe we should get out of the West.

By Lacey DoddrowPublished 3 years ago 7 min read
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New Green Things
Photo by Albert Antony on Unsplash

When the neon green radiation detectors on the corners of the buildings started blinking more than five times a day, I said maybe we should get out of the West, head to Boston or DC or New York. The cloud was coming our way, straight off the coast through California toward the Gulf, and Tucson was right in the hot zone.

But Wes said no. The economy out here had nosedived into oblivion and we were two broke kids, only a few years out of college and still a few years into debt, living in a two-story six-bedroom in the foothills for pennies. All the money went east when the cloud started creeping in, and we knew if we left we’d be lucky to find a place at all.

And it was easy enough to ignore the flashing green lights, or pretend that their neon glow signaled something besides a slow but inevitable death. After all, their bright, lime colored shine wouldn’t have been out of place in a cool club, if those still existed anymore.

Besides, we loved the house, a modern adobe with a big porch up top where Wes could practice as loud as he liked, because I couldn’t hear him when I was downstairs at my work desk in front of the big bay window. I build and repair woodwinds. I don’t play, really. Music isn’t my thing. I like the tinkering, the precision, the tiny parts that are useless junk until I put them together just right. I met Wes when he brought his sax into my workshop with the neck screw bent up. That man collects instruments like my grandmother collected teapots, and then he’s got to learn to play them all. Right now it’s the violin. I know it kills him to date a girl who isn’t a musician, but he can’t help loving me, so he’s stuck. He’s got coffee-brown eyes under black hair he grows out like a mop and his whole face is sharp, sharp little chin, sharp little nose, sharp little eyes, and I think he’s gorgeous. But I do hate to hear him practice the violin.

By Sam Healey on Unsplash

When we first moved into the adobe the cloud wasn’t anywhere near. It was just the rich people who abandoned their houses and ran east as soon as the detectors went up. No one else was scared. The cloud was supposed to dissipate before it even reached California.

Rich people are always paranoid - like they thought the radiation plume wanted to rob them. When we moved into the house it had three different alarms I had to disable. All the money left when the rich ran out and then the whole city opened up to us. Suddenly everything was cheap enough for us, which was good because the first thing to dry up in a nuclear disaster is the market for music lessons and instrument repair. So we lived like we owned the place while we waited for the scare to settle and for things to return to normal.

But the cloud didn’t dissolve over the Pacific. It came right toward us. The detectors appeared on buildings, electric green buzzing with warning. The more they blinked, the more the surrounding area was irradiated. Blinking once or twice a day meant normal. Blinking more than thirty times meant fatal. Little counters next to them kept track, but pretty soon every corner that had a counter also had a homeless person standing there watching them. They’d tell anyone how many blinks they’d seen since midnight, even if no one asked.

The detectors started blinking three, four times a day. I wanted to leave. Most of the families had gone by then, heading down to Mexico, south of the hot zones. The only people left were ones like us, too poor and too cocky to get out of the cloud’s path. “Let’s go,” I told Wes one night while I cleaned out the keys on an antique oboe I’d never had time to work on before. That morning I saw a counter that said six, but the woman watching it swore it had really blinked eight times. “We should head east before it’s too late.”

“It’s crazy out there now. We’d never find a place to live.” Wes was on the white leather sofa eating a banana from the freezer. There was still produce in the stores, hardier fruits from south and east of the cloud.

“I think we ought to try.” I leaned in over the oboe. It smelled like all old wind instruments: dust, soured fabric, stale saliva. “I wouldn’t mind a smaller place.”

By Levi Midnight on Unsplash

“That’s what you say now. It's very hard to live in a studio apartment in Manhattan with a man who's learning to play the violin.”

“That’s what I’ll tell the police when I hand over the empty revolver. No one would convict me.”

Wes’s smile was full of melting banana. “Ah, you wouldn’t shoot me even if we lived in a phone booth.”

“We should leave here. Soon.”

“Let’s wait a while longer. It’s not supposed to get here for another couple of weeks, and by then the densest parts will have spread out. The counters won’t go up past ten, trust me.”

But they did, their green glow flashing insistently: go, Go, GO. and by then it was too late. There was nowhere to go. Everywhere east of the Appalachians was full. News photos showed hotels packed like slums and tent cities along the highways heading toward the Atlantic. Even people from outside the hot zones were running east. And no one would take refugees from the hot zones anymore even if there was space. We could be carrying cancer in on our clothes, on our skin. My mother cried on the phone as she told me, all the way from Canada, that we couldn’t join them. Back in Tucson, the hospitals evacuated, then closed, but no one cared because they’d already run out of potassium iodide. There was no milk, then no bread, then no canned goods, then the stores closed entirely. Red patches bloomed on our skin and they itched like hell. The densest center of the cloud was still on its way. We hated the men who cried The end is nigh! on the sidewalks with their signs because we knew, finally, that they were right. They knew, too, and they gloried in it. The earth dries up and withers, the world languishes and withers, the earth is defiled by its people. La tierra languidece y se marchita; el mundo se marchita y desfallece; la tierra yace profanada, pisoteado por sus habitantes. And we’d say, yeah man, you don’t have to tell us twice, while we coughed up a lung, or what looked like one. The only thing we repented of, though, was not leaving our house when we had the chance.

By Liz Harrell on Unsplash

No one cared when the food ran out about a week after the grocery stores closed because we couldn’t keep it down anyway. The counters were all at twelve or higher. The red on our skin was fading, which only meant worse was coming. All the algae in the pool out back died and the water turned rust-red. El tercer ángel derramó su copa sobre los ríos y los manantiales, y éstos se convirtieron en sangre. The city was crawling with doomsday prophets. One called me a whore, and Wes punched him. After the scuffle the sidewalk was covered in hair. In the neverending green light of the counters, it looked like a bunch of caterpillars, or maybe vines. I scratched at my own flaky scalp and wondered what fresh green tendrils would rise up from this dead ground, what new life might look like once it finally found its way back here.

Sci Fi
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About the Creator

Lacey Doddrow

hedonist, storyteller, solicited advice giver, desert dweller

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