A Sacrament

As promised, one of those rather short short stories I write in an hour or two and inflict on you people.

I can see how you look at me, don't think that I can't. I hate journalists. Used to be that every year a new batch of you found me, found out about my story. You followed the trails of rumor and hearsay, the grateful memories of the ones that got out because of me or maybe you just honed in on the one house this close to ground zero with a working cable up-link.
You would come in ones and twos, with recording equipment, scavenged or home-brewed, or just a notepad and a well worn pen. You wanted my story then, hungered for it, and there were times that I was tempted to give it too you.
I opened my doors and ushered you in and offered you tea. I sat down, robe carefully wrapped about myself and tried not to take offense at your averted eyes. I did, I think, all that could have been expected of me.
And then the questions would start. Perhaps you would begin with the ones that I asked myself, over and over again. “Why did you go back?” “Were you afraid?” “Why not stay behind the mountains like everyone else?” and these I would answer the same way I answered them for myself after the first impacts. No one else was going back, everyone was afraid, that fear did not give us license to ignore the suffering of our fellow men.
Of course you were not happy with that, there were so many hero's back then, it was such an extraordinary time... You had your pick of the blond haired, muscle bound types, the photogenic ones with an eye for advertisement and self promotion. If you wanted to tell a feel good story they were always there with a quick one liner that they had rehearsed until they could deliver it like improvisation and a smile that would drive anyone, that didn't immediately swoon, to the bottle.
From me you people always wanted, well, something else. Or so it seemed, when the questions turned to matters of “How?” “How could I do this to myself?” “How could I call myself a rescuer when I carried a Kalashnikov and charged for my services?”
Back then that was my cue to ask you to leave, and to activate my defensive systems if you refused. It was always rewarding somehow to see your faces change as you realized that even in my state I could still be threatening.
Of course as the years went by the people who actually do things got tired of living in the past, they began to work, to rebuild, and they lost the taste for your endless investigations and explanations. Gradually you stopped coming so often, a year would go by without my hearing the click of a shutter lens or the accusing questions of an “impartial” reporter. I'm growing old now, ten years after the impacts, and I don't think that I will live to see the vicennial.
I was glad to hear the sentry guns cycling up in the front yard, I was afraid you had forgotten about me, and these claws will no more hold a pen than they would a woman. So, come in, sit down. Turn on your little device and listen, but do not speak, as you did not act when you had the chance, and I will tell you my story. Then you will go.

That's better, are you comfortable? Good, good, tea? No? Coffee? You can nod, that's alright. Despite appearances I am not a monster. No? Very well, then I will begin.
These days there are those who can not remember the day of the first impacts, and worse still there are those who would rather forget. I can not, and no one should. Those first days were terrifying, we thought they were atomics, smuggled into the country by terrorists, or thrown across the ocean by some enemy that we had overlooked. There were hours, after the first impact, in which I am convinced that not a soul moved that wasn't ordered to, we were glued to our televisions, our podcasts. The DHS twitter feed was broadcast in Times square, a thousand inch television screen dedicated to a hundred and forty characters, insanity.
But those were the hundred and forty most important characters at any given moment to any one of us. It was only when Canada got the fourth, and then seventh impacts that we knew it wasn't an enemy of ours. No one's aim could be that bad.
Of course, after that the search was on. It didn't come from the CIA though, not the DHS, not the FBI that's for fucking certain. No, it came when you guys finally decided to see why two researchers, kids really, at the Palo Alto Observatory were so insistent on giving a press conference. You stopped assuring them that you would be there “As soon as the present crisis was averted.” long enough for them to string three words together, and they told you what was going on.
Of course by the time we knew that this had started when we were buzzed by an “impossible energy signature of unknown origin” precipitating the hail of irradiated material, half the western hemisphere was ablaze. Of course, for a while, people were in all sorts of panic about alien invasions and other such pulp nonsense, but while you were ignoring them those two students were doing some calculating, figuring out trajectories and prevailing winds, and they came up with the evacuation plans.
At that time those plans did precious little good to an awful lot of people. “Hide behind the rockies” is all well and good until you realize that there's a swath of heavy radiation eighty miles long, and a dozen wide between you and there, and you only know about that one because of the bones, who knows where the others are. Couple that with the fact that most of the cars that were in any shape to start after the EMP's had been driven, in a panic, through those self-same dead zones and you've got a pretty dire situation for most of the men and women stranded in the mid-west.
I was one of the lucky ones, found myself in Seattle when the debris started to fall, but I was almost trapped. I had moved out west from Minneapolis just a month and a half before. Of course, being a Somali immigrant in the first place I had to wonder whether it wouldn't have been safer, all things considered, just to stay in the old country after all...
So I took my van and I headed east, for reasons I made clear to you at the door, and I loaded people up, and I brought them back west. I made maybe thirty, forty trips, I lost track eventually, just kept turning around and plunging back in whenever I caught wind of a pocket of survivors. A couple of times I got a caravan to follow me, once I even got a UN escort, which worked out real well.
Now, I carried a gun, because I learned my lesson after the first trip. I went in real naïve, I figured I would be lucky to even find a dozen people with which to fill the van. Of course the first real group I found was stuck in South Dakota, right up against the Third IZ, was fifty odd strong. I realized right out I had a problem.
Most of them were real survivors, you see, the sickest of them hadn't even made it that far, and the dumbest were lost in the IZ. I told them I had room for twelve, maybe fourteen, that I wanted to take the healthiest, families if possible and at first it looked like I might be able to roll away peacefully. At the last minute though one idiot rushed the van, grabbed on back. It only takes one to start it, he went and so did everybody else the second they thought he might get away with it.
I floored the van, got away eventually. That little stop took me four days. I got four days radiation, and burned through four days of rations. By the time we were back across the mountains we were sick, tired, and hungry enough to go Donner party on one another.
Of course, I had to keep going back, but that second time I went north instead of south, sure it was cold that time of year, and the roads were worse, but I'd gotten used to that, living in Minnesota a couple years. I went north and, at an abandoned border crossing I was able to take the pick of their armory and evidence room. It was in the later, of course, that I found the Kalashnikov.
That was the first time I charged a fee too, because, well, it said $4.50 Minimum Fare on the side of the van and it got them self selecting. The survivors would pool their money, put the people with the best chance on board, and I'd shoot anybody that tried to hitch a ride. Fast, easy, relatively safe.
Of course when the IZ's started to open up that rifle got a hell of a lot more play, but I don't like the way that you perked up there, I wasn't one of your action hero's carving his kill count into the stock of my gun. The rifts disgorged their residents, aliens, daemons, whatever you want to call them, and the rescues got that little bit more dangerous. That's all.
I never fought unless I had too, but I kept going back. That was my sacrifice, my sacrament, to the country that saved my life, to the ungrateful bastards that let me bring my family after me.