In The End: a pre-apocalypse novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

Bogart
voice.
    “Hey!” she called out. He looked
back at her with his eyebrows raised. She said, “I wants some too.”  Jim made a sound like a small amount of air being released
from a tire stem.
    “Oh, it’s okay for you to smoke,
but not for me?”
    Jim didn’t answer. He disappeared
into the dark corridor where the restrooms and vending machine were. He came
back a few minutes later and tossed a pack at Angela who was still sitting at
the table.
    “What are these?” She said, looking
at the unfamiliar brand in a silver package.
    “Cigarettes,
dumb-ass. What you asked for.”
    “I know they’re cigarettes, Jim. I
meant, what brand? I’ve never seen these before.” She took a deep breath and
silently encouraged herself to ignore his attitude. He really wasn’t a jerk,
she told herself. He just acted like one – perfectly.
    Jim and Angela opened their
cigarette packs; neither of them thinking about the fact that being
non-smokers, they did not have lighters or matches. Jim realized it first and
got up from the table. As he started walking toward the kitchen, he almost ran
into Terry coming out.
    “Have you got a light?
    “No, but there are long stick
matches by the grills.”
    “Thanks.” Jim walked past him and
into the kitchen. Terry went back to the main room carrying his radio and smiling.
Angela saw the radio and Terry’s smile and she smiled in return.
    “It works?”
    “I think it will. I think the
cooler would’ve shielded it - if there was an EMP.”
    “Great!  So the batteries are
still good.”
    “Actually, no. I didn’t have any batteries. I was using A/C this morning.”
    “Oh.” Angela’s smile dropped away.
With no power and no batteries, the excitement of the radio was now lost.
“Maybe we can find some batteries,” she said, afraid to hope.
    “No need. Watch this.”
    Terry and Angela heard Jim coughing
and turned to look toward the kitchen. Jim came walking toward them, coughing
and smiling, enjoying his smoke despite the trouble he was having getting used
to it again.
    Terry turned a knob on the bottom
right side of the radio and a green LCD panel lit up. Angela’s eyes lit up
also. “You do have batteries!”
    “Nope.”
    “Oh, come on. You have to. The
radio is on.”
    “Nope. No
batteries. You see that mirror over there?” Terry pointed to his left at a
mirror on a wall.
    Angela squinted her eyes and frowned, wondering what the mirror had to do with anything. “Yes,”
she said.
    Jim sat down next to her, took a
cigarette from her pack and lit it with the end of his own, then handed it to
her. She took it, but just held it, still looking at Terry.
    “And you see that one over there?”
Terry pointed to another, larger mirror on his right.
    “Yeah?”
    “And you know what happens when you
look at the reflection of one mirror in another mirror, right?”
    “Well, yeah. They keep reflecting
each other for as far as you can see.”
    “Exactly. It’s called the Infinity Effect. Wherever you have an Infinity Effect, you have
a particle wave, which carries energy. With this radio sitting between the two
mirrors, there’s enough energy generated by the Infinity Effect to power the
transistors.”
    Angela looked from one mirror to
the other, then to the radio and back to Terry. “That’s amazing! I never heard
of that.”
    Jim couldn’t hold it any longer and
burst out laughing. Angela looked at him, wondering what was so funny.
    “What?” she asked.
    Jim took a drag from his cigarette
and started coughing again. Between coughs, he was still laughing.
    Terry smiled and said, “I’m just
kidding. The battery is charged by a hand-crank. I charged it before I brought
it out here. That’s what took me so long.”
    Despite the disaster of that day,
and the possibly bleak future they all faced, the three of them laughed briefly
for the first time in a while. If they found it strange to be laughing under
the circumstances, they also found that it helped them to