Chapter 12

In the Dark.

When the Tsar Bomba exploded four thousand feet above

Colorado Springs, there happened to be a weather system sweeping
in from the Gulf of Mexico. It roared its way across the Texas
plains, bringing with it thunder and lightning and rain, then
twisted on through the Oklahoma panhandle and Southern Kansas and
finally up into Colorado.
The winds took hold of the cloud and pushed the fallout up
and over the central Rockies. In a very real sense, this was an
act of Providence. The upper interior west -- Wyoming and Montana
and Idaho and Utah and Nevada -- is among the least populated
areas in the country. So when Ivan’s poison scorched the earth,
choking the skies and burning the crops and pine forests with its
acid rain, from Denver to Provo to Battle Mountain and Winnemuca
and then up across Pocatello and Boise and Spokane and Butte and
Missoula and through all the little hamlets, villages,
unincorporated townships, and rural municipalities in between, the
relative number of dead was, when you really stop to look at it,
not terrible. Statistically speaking, it could have been much
worse.

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 At first, the northward drift of the fallout was slow. It
lumbered for a day or so on the light breeze, amassing itself in a
vaguely northerly direction with no real sense of hurry or
purpose. It was, in many ways, like a lion with its belly full
after a fresh kill. This gave several thousand screaming frontier
folk enough time to move out of its way. Most of those who could
went east on the basically well-founded assumption that whoever
had hit us would have no reason to take out Nebraska and Kansas
(forgetting, of course, the silos, but we’ll get to that later).
Those who went west found themselves trapped like a piece of soft
wood in a vice between the new coastal wastelands and Ivan’s
implacable march toward the Pacific.
A great many folks headed north, up into Canada and Alaska.
Most of them survived, at least until the first winter. A very few
went south and, for the most part, were never heard from again.
Ivan sat there for a day or so, content to lay back and lick
the meat from its paws, but then the winds took hold of it and
reawakened the bottomless pit of its appetite. Those who were
caught in its path and either stopped, like a small animal too
stupid to recognize the saliva-slick sheen of a great cat’s teeth,
to watch it coming, or who simply found themselves stuck with no
place to go and no one on the way to rescue them, pretty much died
where they fell.
Those who did survive were, for the most part, right-wing
militia types, paranoid survivalists, Unabomber admirers,
Birthers, Truthers, Tea Partiers, occasional McVeigh apologists
who took refuge in the bomb shelters that had been dropped into
the middle of potato fields by their fathers and grandfathers back
in the 1950s.
This may not be entirely fair. It’s certainly true that not
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every human being who took refuge in those lead-lined shelters
during those first weeks and months of Ivan’s advance were gun
nuts and Republicans. But most of them were. They went down there
with cases of water and tins of potted meat and automatic weapons,
and they sat in the dark with their AR-15 assault rifles across
their laps and empty cans of Spam and vienna sausages piling up
around them, and waited. And waited. And waited some more.
Many starved. When sequestered in groups of more than five
they often reverted to a sort of Lord of the Flies primitivism
which in turn led, in more than a few instances, to murder and
outright cannibalism. Their bones were still being pulled from
their tombs decades after Ivan, and those doing the pulling were
horrified at how many bones came out in shards, with bite marks
and the marrow missing from their cores.
Others simply sat in their silent, sealed bunkers and fiddled
with their ham radios and waited for the thing above them to pass
and for some authoritative voice to talk back to them from the
buzzing darkness.
There was a man in one of these bunkers named Orem Dufresne.
He was fifty-seven years old, and owned a ranch that lay just
south of Pinesdale, Montana. Orem Dufresne was a member of the
Brethren, and he sat surrounded by his four wives -- Rebecca,
Katherine, Sarah, and Ruth -- and their thirteen children --
Nathan, Eli, Mary, Joseph, Beth, Abigail, Jaclyn, Malachi,
Gabriel, Levi, Eben, Kaleb, and little Cora (who had just turned
two the week before) -- in a large bomb shelter that was carved
into a hill on the eastern edge of his property. The children and
the wives were not allowed to speak unless he permitted it, so
they mostly sat in silence as Orem preached to them about prophecy
and God and the niggers, whom Joseph Smith had taught were
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descended from the people of Laman, and who had been cursed with
their black skin because they rejected the mighty teachings of
Jesus Christ. For behold, they had hardened their hearts against
Him, Orem would paraphrase, over and over and over again, and they
had become like unto a flint, wherefore, as they had been white
and exceedingly fair and delightsome, the Lord God did cause a
skin of blackness to come upon them....
These niggers, Orem preached, were why God had dropped His
mighty hand upon us. The great orange light to the south, and the
shaking of the earth and the scorching of the skies, was God’s way
of ridding us of the niggers once and for all.
They sat in the dark, all eighteen of them, and Orem at first
let Levi play with the radio until they finally picked up a
transmission -- weak of signal and submerged under fathoms and
fathoms of hissing AM static -- from a woman named Cherry, who was
somewhere up north and who sang the sort of Godless nigger music
that had brought The Hand down in the first place. Orem smashed
the radio and declared that the only thing they were to listen to
were the words of the Lord Himself, as spoken to them by their
father.
After a month, first-wife Rebecca, who was fifty and had
never been particularly strong, died from some sort of bleeding
pain in her abdomen, and Orem declared that God was angry and that
Rebecca’s blood was on her children’s hands because they had not
prayed hard enough for His grace and forgiveness. So they prayed
harder, and then second-wife Katherine succumbed to some sort of
lung infection six weeks later. She was placed in the meat locker
along with Rebecca, who was by then only dust and a few bits of
dried meat clinging to bones.
Two weeks later, Orem announced to his children that the
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angel Moroni had come to him in a dream and revealed that God had
visited this punishment upon the Earth because the Brethren had
become corrupt and worldly, and that Orem himself was to be the
next true prophet of Christ. Orem was, Moroni had continued, to
take unto himself a fifth wife.
Mary, who was seventeen, was Rebecca’s only begotten
daughter, and after Orem had explained God’s plan to the rest of
the family, he pulled Mary aside and revealed the last part of
Moroni’s proclamation. It was she who was to become the fifth
mother, the first mother-sister, to this brood. It was she who,
with her father-husband Orem, was to help seed the Earth with the
next and last wave of God’s chosen people.
She would be, Orem told her, like Sarah of Abraham, mother to
the Hebrew people.
Tears stung Mary’s eyes as her father whispered these words
to her and caressed her shoulder and neck with his calloused
rancher’s hand. She wanted to be happy, to proudly fulfill her
duty as one of God’s children, but she felt the tickle of Orem’s
hot breath on her cheek, smelled the meat and desire that rode
upon it, and as she felt the light clasp of that anxious hand upon
her skin, her flesh began to prickle and crawl. When her mind took
to imagining what it would mean to fulfill her new wifely duties,
there was the sudden flutter of something like panic in her chest.
She wept quietly and confessed these sins to her new father-
husband, and upon hearing them he struck her once across the face
and told her that she would mind him and mind God and that would
be that.
That night, she lay beneath her father-husband as he
performed his duty and she bled her virginity out upon the sheets
of her little cot, and as she bled she closed her eyes and gritted
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her teeth and, for the first time in her short life, prayed for
the warm comfort of death. She didn’t want a child, she decided.
She wanted only to be sitting up in Heaven at Christ’s right hand,
with her two deceased mothers smiling by her side.
*****
In another bunker, this one much smaller and buried in the
back yard of a little two-story cottage in Sandy, Utah, another
man received a vision from the angel Moroni.
This man’s name was Victor Rooney. He was twenty six, a
third-year law student at Brigham Young University, and married
for the past two years to Caryn Rooney, who used to be Caryn
Nguyen, born and raised in Seoul, the daughter of a high-level
South Korean diplomat, and who had converted in her teen years --
to her mother’s strenuous disapproval and her father’s apparent
disinterest -- to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
when she was seventeen. Caryn found LDS after befriending an
American girl who was the daughter of a U.S. senator and who
attended the same English school as she. The girl never pushed her
faith on Caryn, but after Caryn began to ask questions -- at first
merely inquisitive, later with a force and need she could not
quite explain -- the girl passed on to her a copy of the Book of
Mormon. Caryn read that, cover to cover, then read it again. Then
she read the Doctrine and Covenants, began attending Sunday
services with her friend, and eventually -- after convincing the
Senator, who was probably hoping to avoid an international
incident, that her parents would not protest -- was baptized into
the church.
Caryn Nguyen was a thoroughly modern woman, quick to laugh
and even quicker to criticize, determined to have her career as a
civil engineer alongside her life as a wife and mother, and not
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one to easily accept the notion that a woman’s duty was first to
obey her husband. Vic Rooney often felt that she had married below
herself. He knew her parents -- who refused to speak English
around him, even though he knew they could -- thought so. His own
father, who had amassed some wealth of his own through a franchise
of lumberyards outside Sacramento, was quick to remind Victor that
he was more than a little bit blessed that a woman like Caryn
could possibly find it in herself to love someone like him, who
had been an unremarkable student in high school, who had staggered
through his undergraduate days at the University of Nevada/Las
Vegas with the aimlessness of the truly unmotivated, who had only
just begun to find the reserves within himself to battle his way
successfully toward a law degree and (hopefully) passage of the
bar after a great many false starts and truncated ambitions. He
had, at various times, imagined himself a writer-in-training, an
FBI recruit, a proto-businessman, even (at one point) a
psychotherapist. He found he had little talent for any of these
disciplines, or even much interest once the work got hard. He was
still unsure how he would fare as a lawyer. But having Caryn
sleeping beside him every night -- her hand on his chest, her
breathe against his shoulder -- was all the motivation he needed.
If he could make her happy, make her proud to have married him and
to bear his children, he would die a satisfied man.
Unlike Caryn, Vic had been raised within the church, albeit a
slightly more liberal, California-ized incarnation than what he
found at BYU, and while he knew there were apostates like Orem
Dufresne and his family out there in the world, he would have
found very little that was recognizable in the Brethren’s callow
interpretation of Joseph Smith’s teachings. Vic knew about the
Lamanites as well, but he also knew that they had nothing to do
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with Africans and were instead among the earliest people that
Christ had come to in the New World. Like most of the Mormons he
had grown up with he was a little uneasy with the “they had become
like unto a flint” line, but also knew that the passage continued
to proclaim that God “denieth none that come unto him, black and
white, bond and free, male and female,” and that “all are alike
unto God, both Jew and Gentile.” As an undergrad he was often
forced to defend his faith to his (as he called them, with an
affectionate smirk on his face) “secular-liberal” friends, and he
would quietly remind those who accused that the early Mormon
Church was among the first organized groups of abolitionists, and
that it was this fact -- as much as their commitment to the notion
of plural marriage -- that had led to the wars in Illinois and
Missouri and Joseph Smith’s assassination and the subsequent
exodus across the continent to Utah.
Vic was comfortable in his faith, didn’t think a lot about it
most of the time and spent almost no mental energy questioning it,
and he was, every so often, a little nonplussed by the fervor with
which Caryn had taken to it. He was happy enough to occasionally
skip a Sunday service and catch a game instead during football
season, to drink a very rare light beer with his friends and smoke
an even rarer cigar, but after Caryn came into his home such
practices were quickly ruled to be out of the question. He was
expected to mentor young boys in the ward, to participate fully in
stake activities, to say grace before every meal with his eyes
closed and his arms folded and his mind turned inexorably toward
Christ. Caryn presided over his faith like a field marshall. He
loved her, more than he had known it was possible to love another
human being, and so was happy enough to let her do it.
When Ivan fell, Vic’s car was in the shop with a busted
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radiator. Caryn was eight and one-half months pregnant. It had
been a difficult pregnancy, defined in the later months by
hypertension and near-constant bed rest. Most of his neighbors and
the members of their ward were packing their cars and leaving,
heading south or north, and several begged Vic to grab Caryn and
come with them. But Vic was terrified of the toll such a trip
would take on his wife and unborn daughter, and so -- like one of
those furry animals -- he resisted, believing at first that the
wall of the Rockies between Provo and Colorado Springs would
protect them.
Finally the head of his ward, a 50ish ex-Marine named Bud
Hendricks, gave Vic the keys to his parents’ house in Sandy and
the bomb shelter in the back yard. “May God be with you, Brother
Rooney,” Bud had said, and left.
Vic spent two days in his apartment with Caryn, and they
watched the scattered and delerious reports on TV and listened to
what they could pick up on the radio, and when the weather system
came in and it became clear that the mountains were nothing but a
paper wall against Ivan’s fury, Vic decided that it was time to
take Caryn down into the shelter. But he had no car, and so --
asking God for forgiveness -- he broke into his neighbor’s house
and stole the keys to the battered old pickup in the garage. He
loaded Caryn, two suitcases, and the heaps of baby clothes they
had received the previous weekend at Caryn’s baby shower into the
truck.
The shelter, he found, was well stocked. He estimated that,
between the three of them, they would have enough food and water
for two years, if necessary. There was even condensed baby formula
on the shelves. Brother Hendricks’s parents were nothing if not
meticulous.
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 One week after they went into the shelter, just as Ivan
swirled above them, Caryn went into labor. For thirty-six hours
she screamed and bled and squeezed Vic’s hand, and Vic talked to
her in soft tones and wondered how much of that blood was normal.
After eighteen hours, it occurred to him to search the
bookshelves, where he found that the Hendricks’s had included a
medical textbook. Vic scanned the chapter on childbirth quickly,
dug out what few medical supplies there were, and got to work. He
was disturbed at how low Caryn’s blood pressure was, but could
think of nothing to do about it.
After another six hours, Caryn’s golden skin was white and
her lips were blue and the baby still hadn’t come. She continually
passed out between contractions, began to speak incoherently, to
shout at the walls in Korean, and Vic went from nervous to afraid
to panicked.
That’s when Moroni appeared. Vic was pragmatic enough to
later think it possible that the angel was nothing more than a
product of his fatigued and embattled mind. But that did not
lessen the sense of peace, the well-spring of renewed strength,
that bubbled up from within.
The vision was a simple one. Moroni smiled at him, and by the
angel’s side stood a little girl in a pinkish dress with brown
hair and fair skin and slightly slanted eyes. The girl laughed,
and her giggle was like the the tinkling of two piano keys played
in perfect harmony. There was nothing in the vision about either
himself or Caryn. But he knew then that his daughter would live.
After thirty-six hours, the baby came screeching into the
world on a wave of blood and shit and pus, and Vic held her in his
arms and tried to show her to Caryn. But Caryn’s eyes had gone
glassy and weak, and the last words Vic heard her say were in
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Korean. He could tell by the uplift at the end of the sentence
that it was a question, and he imagined that she was asking him if
that was really her daughter that he was holding, and all he could
think to say was “yes! Yes! Yes!”
Caryn died an hour later in that dark, cold place with Victor
sitting beside her, with the world choking on ash and Ivan tearing
up the earth above them. Victor held their daughter, whom he had
decided by then to name Emily, after his mother, in one arm, and
he clutched Caryn’s limp hand with the other. He wept when the
last breath oozed out of her and the life slowly leaked from her
eyes, which had rolled over in her last moments to stare at their
baby, and he promised her that he would do everything he could to
raise Emily as well as he could without her, and he determined
that he would see her again someday, when the time came, up in
God’s glorious kingdom.

©2008 by Scott Milder

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