Mike Mullin

“The most important part of seeing Darla every night wasn’t the fooling around. It was the few minutes we talked while holding each other, the feeling of security I got with her, the feeling of being understood and loved. Before the eruption, I wouldn’t have believed that I could cuddle up every night with the girl who starred in my dreams and not be totally preoccupied with sex. But the trek across Iowa had changed something. I wanted, needed to see her so badly that it woke me up at night. But making out was incidental to my need – nice when it happened, but secondary to the simple pleasure of sleeping beside her.”

“The bookcase was filled with computer games, history books, and sci-fi novels in about equal proportions. Odd reading choices, maybe, but I just thought of it as past and future history.”

“I both laid and sucked eggs? That didn't make sense.”

“I never would have guessed that matches and lighters would be among the things I'd miss the most if civilization collapsed”

“A night spent spooning with your girlfriend isn't nearly so exciting when your uncle is curled up against your other side.”

“A librarian can’t live by books alone, and I wouldn’t eat them if I could. Feel too much like cannibalism.”

“I felt bad about dirtying their comforter with my nasty clothes, but who knew what might happen later. If something else bizarre went down and I had to run, I sure didn’t want to do it butt naked.”

“But unlike thunder, this didn’t stop. It went on and on, machine-gun style, as if Zeus had loaded his bolts into an M60 with an inexhaustible ammo crate.”

“That whiff of smoke was enough to transform my sithere-trembling terror into get-the-hell-out-of-here terror.”

“I used to think that teachers who gave homework on weekends should be forced to grade papers for an eternity in hell.”

“Condoms instantly shot to the number-one position on my mental list of must-find survival supplies, far ahead of food, water, and a way across the Mississippi River.”

“For the first time ever, I felt ashamed of my species. The volcano had taken our homes, our food, our automobiles, and our airplanes, but it hadn't taken our humanity. No, we'd given that up on our own.”

“Hunger of choice is a painful luxury; hunger of necessity is terrifying torture.”

“I wanted, needed to see her so badly that it woke me up at night.”

“I didn't care much for being called stupid and softhearted. But the boyfriend bit I could live with.”

“But even more than I wanted to check out and give my emotional wounds time to scab over, I wanted to live.”

“I'd never heard any noise quite so welcome as the click that a shotgun made when it wasn't killing me.”

“I didn't say anything - just held up my hands and shuffled backward toward the door. Antagonizing a little old lady holding a shotgun seemed like a very bad idea.”

“Maybe we were ghosts of a sort, spirits from the world that had died when the volcano erupted.”

“The next few hours were, well, how to describe it? Ask someone to lock you in a box with no light, nobody to talk to, and then have them beat on it with a tree limb to make a hideous sound. Do that for hours, and if you're still not bat-shit crazy, you'll know how we felt.”

“Then, we waited. Waited for the noise to end. Waited for the house to fall on our heads. Waited for something, anything to change.”

“I hate to disappoint, but I just lay there, curled in a ball, shaking in pure terror.”

“So I thought I’d feel different afterward, after the visible neon sign proclaiming 'virgin' had blinked out on my forehead. I’d spent years obessessing about it, so it seemed like somthing should have changed. Maybe it would have if I’d still been at Ceder Falls High School surrounded by the gossip and the braggadocio of teenage boys. But on my uncle's farm, nobody noticed, or at least nobody said anything. The next day, like every day, we dug corn, chopped wood, and carried water. And it didn’t really change much between Darla and me, either. Yes, making love was fun, but it wasn’t really any more fun than anything we’d already been doing together. Just different.”

“the pre-friday world of school, cell phones, and refrigerators dissolved into this post-friday world of ash, darkness, and hunger.”

“The few trees still upright were stripped of their branches, lonely flagpoles without a nation to claim them.”