Six soldiers in NBC suits mount the crest of a low hill. There was nothing—and more importantly, nobody—in the ruined cabin they came across a quarter mile back. Now they find themselves looking down upon a dairy farm (or what remains of it). The ground is barren char. Wind whips the dust in fitful gusts. Cow carcasses, cooked but eerily preserved by radiation, jut out from the rubble of a barn; a few dot the hillside, rigid limbs extended, as though some prankster has just tipped them, but they never got back up.
Across the pasture, a kitchen sink pokes out of a destroyed house, gleaming in the weak light of day. A few feet away sits a battered refrigerator. One of the soldiers picks his way over to it and kicks open the door: a spoiled Christmas turkey tumbles out.
"Here!" another soldier says into his communicator. The others jog over to his location, halfway between the barn and the house. He is crouched beside the body of a young man. His phone is still pressed to his shriveled ear, but his clothes are gone, his skin baked. The soldiers fan out from the body, shouting for survivors, but there is no reply.
"A few more minutes, and I'm calling the Bird," the sergeant tells the others. "We've got a lot more ground to cover. Can't afford to waste any more time on this tip."
"Wait—look at this."
Just a few feet from the body is a pair of steel doors set into the ground, waxy and bubbled like poorly tempered chocolate. The private stomps on them with his boot, but there is no response from within. The sergeant gives him a wary look.
"Let's get this over with."
He nods at the private, and together they heave back on the twisted handles. The doors clatter open to reveal a dark stairwell. Scope lights swinging, the squad descends.
The cellar is empty.
"Clothes, radio...vomit? At least some of them made it to the shelter."
"I wonder how long the poor bastards stayed down here."
"Must've split weeks ago, at least. These jars are all dusty. Still some food left though. Pickled beet, anyone?"
"Hey, I'm just glad they didn't wait for things to get desperate. Not gonna lie, looking at the state of those doors, I thought the worst. Miracle they held."
The private can't keep the relief from his voice.
"Fuck miracles. I'm never getting that basement in Pine Bluff outta my head—"
"Hope they didn't go north to Bentonville."
All the soldiers exchange looks, expressions dark under their masks.
"Bet they did. You almost hope the radiation got to them first..."
"What do you make of this?"
The private holds up a sheet of paper. Another snorts and sets it vertical in his hands.
"It's an eight, you moron. They were probably counting the days. Or drawing lots."
The soldiers pick over the cellar for a few more minutes—flipping through a child's sketchbook, cracking open an empty shotgun, remarking on the expensive phones someone had pried open with a flathead—before clearing out. The private squints at the paper, reorients it sideways, and sets it down where he found it. The sergeant reappears on the stairs.
"C'mon, Connolly," he says. "There's nobody here."
YOU ARE READING
The Floating Cradle
Science FictionSixteen-year-old Sarah hasn't seen her sister Allie in nearly a decade thanks to a family feud she can hardly remember. But the world waits for no grudge; around the time of Sarah's birth, a race of aliens known as the tanta made first contact with...
