The Monster You Know

A short story

Evie Harding’s hand shook as it hovered over the atomic bomb’s detonation button. Sweat cascaded down her face, arms, chest, back, and legs, filling her silvery heat protection suit’s boots with a salty ocean. The digital thermometer strapped to her aluminum sleeve read 209 degrees Celsius. The suit would protect her for thirty minutes at 1,093 degrees Celsius, but the rope that secured Evie to the rock face would undoubtedly melt before she did. 

One hundred and ten feet down was as far into the volcano’s crater as she could climb. 

Steam from the interior walls of Mount St. Helens’ crater vented around her tentative perch on this fourteen-inch ledge. Red rivers of lava flowed below her and her colleague, Arjun Patel. 

She inspected the steel and titanium webbing and six pitons that secured the one-hundred kiloton W70 to the rock face, a brushed metal gray bomb shaped like a sideways ice cream cone. On top was a rectangular box that held a digital display, currently off, as well as a keypad and keyhole. She curled her gloved finger inside the webbing, tugging on it to determine if any play might cause the bomb to slip out. When she found none, she gave a thumbs-up to Arjun. 

They had one bomb and one chance.

A low roar, like overlapping voices, filled the space beneath them—lava rushing through magma chambers and tunnels that extended almost six miles down. Arjun had heard it before, but this was Evie’s first time surrounded by a volcano’s eerie discord. Despite the volcano’s intense heat, the roar chilled her.

“Are you sure this is the right spot?” Arjun asked, shouting through the gold-coated, glass face shield.

“No, I’m not sure. I’m not even sure the bomb won’t spontaneously detonate when I activate the timer or if this crazy idea will succeed.”

“Why can’t we just drop the bomb into the crater?”

Evie shook her head. “The heat will fuse the firing mechanism. Besides, this is a timer bomb, not an impact-detonating one. It won’t work if we drop it.”

“We’re relying on you. You’re the expert.”

“I’m not an expert. I’m just a writer who wrote novels about nuclear terrorism,” Evie replied. “Everything I know is from Google.” 

“That research makes you our only nuclear expert. Google doesn’t exist anymore.”

Evie was the brains behind the plan to shield the sun; Arjun was the expert mountain climber who, in the before-time, had scaled not only Mount Saint Helens but every major peak in Washington and Alaska, as well as challenging climbs in South America, Asia, and Europe. Netflix even featured him in a documentary about the world’s greatest mountain climbers. 

Evie screamed as her left foot slipped, sending loose rocks tumbling into the crater.

Arjun grabbed her arm, although the rope would keep her from falling. Probably.

“Thanks.” Her heart beat like it was trying to escape her chest. Heights scared Evie, but in the apocalypse, fear was relative. 

Arjun continued, “The timer is set for—?”

“Set for sixty minutes. That’s plenty of time for us to climb out and bike a safe distance away. Any longer and we risk the bomb coming loose or a random lava flow destroying it. We should be nearly back to Kelso by the time it goes boom. The crater will contain the blast and radiation, so we’ll be safe from any fallout.” 

“What about being safe from them?” Arjun pointed to the two zombies hoisting themselves over the crater’s rim. How did they climb the mountain? Arjun thought. 

“Don’t worry. They’ll fall far away from us, and even if the lava doesn’t kill them, it will melt enough muscle and bone to render them harmless.” 

The two zombies, followed by two more, slipped over the rim and plummeted into the fiery abyss. Unlike humans, the monsters did not scream; they fell into the volcano as if it were the most natural thing in the world. They didn't fear death because they were already dead. 

Evie and Arjun’s colony—and the dozens of other surviving colonies of humans—had been at war with zombies for four years, but if their mission was successful, they would finally defeat the monsters who had killed billions.

March 3, 2023 was the day the end began. In the movies, nobody knew who patient zero was, but in the real world, it was six-year-old Gilbert Hall from Owensboro, Kentucky, whose parents, fearful of vaccines, said no to their pediatrician’s plea that Gilbert get vaccinated against diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, measles, hepatitis, chickenpox, and other diseases. Gilbert caught covid, and on top of covid, the raging monkeypox virus did a genetic tango with measles. When his fever passed 104 degrees Fahrenheit, his parents took Gilbert to the hospital, where he died the following day, then reanimated and bit a nurse. Within a week, the zombie plague had spread to every country.

Could today, March 3, 2031, be the day the world declared victory against the zombies?

When Evie proposed exploding Mount St. Helens to create a sun shield, she didn’t think the Council would go along. The idea was far-fetched, crazy, and required figuring out how to detonate an atomic bomb, calculating the best place to locate the bomb, designing a system to secure it, and a dozen other indeterminate variables. Fortunately, finding a nuclear explosive was easy—there was an Air Force base with nukes only a few miles outside Kelso. 

Evie’s plan evolved from her discovery that shining a bright light into zombies’ eyes disoriented them long enough to escape or kill them. Like many great discoveries, it happened by accident. A zombie cornered her in a supermarket during a food run to Amboy, thirty-seven miles from Kelso. She had a gun but didn’t want to use it because its bang would attract more zombies. She also had a hunting knife, but close-quarters fighting was risky, especially when you were tired, and tired didn’t begin to describe Evie’s condition. 

When a zombie approached Evie, she tried to make herself invisible by squeezing into a corner. That didn’t work. When the zombie was ten feet away, she clicked on her flashlight and blasted the blinding light at the zombie. To Evie’s surprise, the zombie stumbled, tripped over a shopping basket, and tumbled to the floor, giving Evie time to escape.

Over the next twelve hours, Evie’s brilliant idea took shape. It was like writing a novel again, only the reward wouldn’t be a publishing contract—it would be salvation. 

The idea gave Evie purpose. Before this, she helped anyone who asked her with random tasks—milk cows, make bread, hand wash clothes and bedding, dig water wells, go on supply missions, and babysit. Her life was ad hoc; she was an unessential accessory. Sometimes, Evie had nightmares about being cast out of the colony. In her nightmare, colonists marched her at bayonet point to the colony’s gates and said, “We don’t need you; we’ve never needed you.” The Kelso colony wanted farmers, mechanics, engineers, pharmacists, physicians, soldiers, and radio operators. But writers—what good were they in the post-apocalyptic world? 

As it turned out, possibly a lot of good. 

A small explosion—hot lava launching a rock high in the crater—pulled her attention back to the present.

Arjun patted her arm. “Your idea is going to work, I’m sure of it. Shining a bright flashlight into zombies’ eyes to disorient them is the break we need. Pre-apocalypse, I watched every zombie movie and television show ever made, but nobody thought of flashlights. But it makes perfect sense. Zombies must see us to bite us. The movies and TV shows portrayed how zombies zero in on their victims by sound, and they do, but they also require sight, just as any predator, be it a lion, shark, or grizzly, needs vision to render the kill.”

“But flashlights are useless in the daytime.” 

“That’s where your plan to turn day into night by igniting a massive volcanic eruption to block sunlight comes in. Darkening the sky for a year will buy us time to win the war against the zombies.”

Kelso’s radio operator broadcast their plans via shortwave to other survivors, bouncing a signal off the ionosphere to send it worldwide: Bright lights blind zombies. We are igniting a volcanic eruption to block the sun to blind the zombies twenty-four-seven. Victory to the humans!

Humanity awaited Evie’s plan.

“Ready, Arjun?”

“I am. Let’s set the timer and get the hell out of Dodge.”

Evie entered the detonation code, slipped the bomb key into the keyhole, and twisted it to the right. Instantly, a red countdown timer illuminated: 60:00, 59:59, 59:58. Evie pointed up, and they ascended out of Mount St. Helens’ crater. 

They made good time on their bikes, better than on the way to the volcano, because a heavy backpack with an atomic bomb didn’t slow Evie, and climbing gear didn’t weigh Arjun down. Now, they only carried water and weapons, each with a bolt-action Ruger American Ranch rifle slung over their shoulder, a Glock in their holster, a knife, a hatchet, and a 20,000-lumen Nitecore TM20k flashlight. 

A mile outside of Kelso, where their colony of seven hundred odd survivors was located, next to a billboard for McDonald’s on I-5 defaced with red paint that said, “The Dead Are Here,” Evie raised her hand in a stop gesture, tapped her wristwatch and said, “Ten seconds. Cover your ears and look away from Saint Helens.”

“For how long?” Arjun asked.

“I don’t know. I never researched that part. Just do it now.”

The nuclear blast etched their shadows into the pavement. The boom rattled the sign, their bikes, and their ears, and it shattered the unbroken windows of the abandoned cars around them. The flash lasted a second, the deafening noise a half minute. 

Mount St. Helens expelled thick ash. Evie and Arjun craned their necks as the debris rose in a perfect, vertical column. Within an hour, the ash would reach the zone between the stratosphere and mesosphere, where it would encounter fast-moving atmospheric winds. The ash would circle the world in the following days, and over the next few weeks, day would become night. 

Arjun turned to Evie. “What now?”

“Now we go home and shoot them dead-dead-dead.” Evie smiled. “You’ve got good aim.”

“Anyone who’s still alive has good aim. Let’s—” Arjun interrupted himself with a shriek. He jumped backward, raised a shaking arm, and pointed to the writhing line of... something traveling from the volcano toward Kelso. Simultaneously, they brought their binoculars to their eyes. 

A parade of creatures scurried down the side of the volcano. 

Evie thought that the creatures moved impossibly fast, nearly one hundred miles per hour. They raced on spider-like appendages as long as a human’s leg. Dangling next to each of the eight black legs was a purple tentacle, and on each tentacle were dozens of undulating suckers. Atop their cephalothorax was a humanoid head, bald, pig-skin pink, and with a massive mouth displaying two rows of fangs. 

The creatures skittered and clicked as they ran. 

“What are those? Did we do that?” Arjun asked as he rested his hand on Evie’s shoulder. “Did the nuke release those things from inside the earth?”

Even from a distance, they could make out the agonized screams from Kelso, followed a minute later by total silence. 

There hadn’t been a single gunshot. 

Arjun’s legs folded, and he collapsed to the ground. “We opened the door for these monsters.”

Evie sat beside him, cupped her hand under his chin, and raised his head. “Arjun, we have to go now.” Evie’s eyes glowed with urgency. 

“Go where?”

Evie dropped her hands onto her lap, opened her mouth to speak, but said nothing because she had no answer. 

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If you enjoyed this story, I think you’ll also like my story, Sharks.