Day 6 is going up early, tonight. I guess I was a little inspired?

Jack reached into his pocket and withdrew his cellular phone, flipped it open and turned it on. It powered up quickly and still possessed three bars of battery life, even with the device draining slowly over the last few days of disuse. It was just a matter of picking which number to call.

His father was out. This was obvious, as he’d buried the man himself.

His sister was still in school, or would be. She was halfway across the country. Even if she was unaffected, the line wasn’t equipped for long distance calls.

It would have to be his mother, then. He scrolled down to her entry and switched to the work phone, the number for the hospital and her specific extension. She worked further north near New Haven, so there was a distinct chance that she was alive as the damage seemed to peter out the further they moved in that direction. The bombs had clearly been held in reserve for the more populated cities closer to New York and in the Empire State itself.

The tones were familiar, the ringing — God, it was actually ringing! — cut short by the hospital’s automated answering system.

Language: One.

Do you know your party’s extension? One.

Enter extension: 8143.

Connecting… “Hello?”

“Mom!”

“Jack? God, honey, are you all right?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m okay. Dad’s gone, though, and I don’t know about sis. Have you heard anything?”

“She’s fine. She called as soon as she found out. Jack, it’s all over the news. Everything from Connecticut to Maryland is gone, and California is on complete lockdown, expecting to be hit any minute. Where are you?”

“I’m somewhere around Stratford with some other survivors. We’re in a gas station. The landlines are all that are left out here.”

“Oh thank God. I’m… Well, I guess I’m relieved, but it’s hard to believe what’s happened! They still don’t know who did it, Jack.”

They assured each other that they would be all right, then hung up with the promise that he would head up to the hospital, if only so they could check him and his new friends for any symptoms of radiation poisoning. As he put the receiver back up, Jack breathed a sigh of absolute relief for the first time in a full week, his shoulders slumping as his body deflated in the most positive manner imaginable.

Thanks were offered and the gas station attendants were invited up to the Stratford area, an invitation that was extended to the Bridgeport branch in due course. They bid their goodbyes as Jack, Don, Zach and Megan squeezed back into their car and puttered off into the distance, over the horizon.

The drive was as uneventful as ever, but even a journey devoid of exciting circumstances can be offered levity by a positive end, so near in sight and distance, both. Jokes flew back and forth for, weary as they were, their spirits soared high as the blackened clouds and human ash, clashing with the somber reality of their situation.

But it wasn’t so widespread, it wasn’t so terrible as they had feared it might be and, for that, they were thankful. Only as the tall, unscathed monoliths of Stratford loomed high on the horizon did they allow the reality to hit them and voice the question they had held in thus far, the one that, until this moment, there had been no cause to answer.

“So, what are you guys going to do now that it’s over?”

Zach’s voice seemed to hang in the silence of the car, air suddenly thick with the weight of the future. It settled on their heads and rolled down to their shoulders, sunk in through the skin and filled their stomachs where it coiled in on itself and condensed into a dense pit. Don was the first to speak.

“There’s rebuilding to do. I’m not gonna let them do it without me, not out of laziness and certainly not out of pity.”

Megan nodded and Jack stared intently at the road, letting the older man’s words sink in, images of the hard manual labor ahead flashing through his brain, the bodies and the trucks in which they would be carted off, to be separated and identified later, their families piling into crowded morgues and crying on available shoulders, heads intertwined with others in similar states of distress and misery.

The hospital was a glorious sight, standing tall and brilliant before and even more so now that their minds parsed it with what they had seen. The juxtaposition was striking — its clean, sterile halls against the torn and ravaged cityscapes of south-western Connecticut. The reunion between mother and son was a sweet one, flavored with days on days of worry and trepidation that melted away in choked sobs and flowing tears, tight hugs and heartfelt words.

It was here that the survivors of the Stamford devastation were given warm rooms for the first time in a week and hot showers and baths, food that didn’t look like it had come from a can, or taste that way, and the requisite tests for latent radiation.

Cleared, clean and free.

It was as he sat in a bed in his own hospital room, television on and images of cartoons and dramas broken with updated reports of the carnage that he had encountered first hand, that the idea that had been swirling around in his brain, gaining both momentum and mass, fully gestated into a desire, a full-fledged want that he felt compelled to pursue. When his mom arrived, calmer since their nigh-hysteric reunion, he turned off the TV and rested the remote at his side, turning to look her in the eyes.

“Mom, I know what I want to do.”

She looked at him as though she dreaded the next words she knew he was going to say, but he felt the need to push forward regardless. This wasn’t about her desires. It was about his expectations and a burning, passionate drive within.

“I’m going to help with the rebuilding. I’ll sign up with one of the construction companies hired to do the work — Don can vouch for me — and-”

“Okay.”

“I’ll… Okay? It’s really okay?”

“Yes, Jack. It’s okay. I’d be proud of anyone who could do that, much less my son.”

He stared blankly at her, eyes tightly focused on her face for any betrayal of guilt, any iota of untruth or distrust hovering beneath the surface, but he could find nothing other than her motherly concern and, despite the duck-patterned hospital gown adorning his form, she seemed to be taking him seriously. His blue eyes wavered in their sockets, unwilling to blink until, finally, he snapped his head around and down, boring into the sheet in front of him with his eyes.

“… Thanks. Thank you, mom. I don’t know what else to say, but thank you.”

He felt her arms circle him, her cheek press against his as she hugged him tight, held him close.

“You don’t have to say anything else, sweetie. It’s your life and your decision. I’m glad you’ve made it.”

They sat alone for a bit longer, contemplating the weight of his decision in separate, tangential ways as seconds passed, a long moment that ended when his mother kissed his cheek and rose from the hospital bed, gave him one more hug, and departed to see if any of the other survivors needed anything.

He lay awake late, that night, thinking ahead to a future of hard, voluntary labor and the horrors he was likely to see therein. The corpses of people and the society within which they had lived, joined together in a final death embrace… But the thought no longer brought about the twisting and churning nausea he had associated with it for so long, just a silent and heavy weight of defeat and finality.

Well, he would just have to do something about it.

The sun was high, almost directly overhead in the late morning sky as it completed the first half of its arc and anticipated the descent. For a brief moment, Jack wondered if going downhill was any easier than going up for a 900,000 mile wide flaming orb of cosmic gas. He shook the thought from his head and hoisted the shovel from his side once more, rammed it into a crack between two slabs of concrete, and pushed down, leveraging his force against the tail of the shovel and forcing the head up and, with it, the concrete. Don stepped in and wrapped his fingers around it, lifting and pushing simultaneously until it had rotated off of the other block, revealing the crushed bundle of tattered clothing and decaying flesh within.

The shovel fell with a clatter as Jack wiped the sweat from his cheeks, arm scratching against fleshed out stubble. The stench had stopped bothering him weeks ago, but the sight never truly got old. Every time he thought he had seen it all, nature found a new and interesting way to demonstrate the full capacity of basic physical law for grotesque mutilation. This was not particularly bad, though – even if the deceased had been pressed as flat as a hotcake. The fluids and waste around him had solidified, meaning they were the first thing to go as he was exhumed from his prison and transported, by an extremely cautious crane operator, into the bed of a truck. Full, the top of the bed was covered with a tarp and the truck took off in the direction of the morgue. A shrill cry — the artificial shriek of a steel whistle — marked the end of the morning shift.

Jack worked the kinks from his arms and legs as he stood in the trailer they had co-opted. Formally outfitted as an office, it nonetheless made an excellent site for mid-day naps, rest, and a remarkable sick bay. Injured or otherwise incapacitated workers were welcome, though the beds were empty at the moment.

“Then again,” thought Jack, “that’s hardly a bad thing.”

He felt something shifting around in his pocket - a low-key buzzing that rattled his keys - and pulled his cell-phone out, checking the display. One of the first things they had done upon returning to Norwalk was to set up a makeshift cell tower, so that workers could easily communicate with each other and their families or other loved ones. “Home” flashed once, twice, three times on the outer screen before he flipped the phone open and put it to his ear.

“’Sup?”