by Chris Pike
Come on, Mom, pick up the phone!
Rivulets of tears streamed down my cheeks. I had to get away from there. Venturing out into the streets and onto the freeway, I found I-10 was the most surreal scene I had ever witnessed. It was a maelstrom of idling vehicles with drivers either slumped over, or hanging halfway outside their cars. I desperately searched for some sign of life or of movement. A lone survivor ambled aimlessly among the cars.
“Hello!” I yelled. “Can you help me?” The man took one glance at me and took off running.
I didn’t know what to do, and that smell was still lingering.
What in God’s name is that smell?
Then it hit me; I had to find May. The fight we had earlier didn’t matter, and whatever we had quarreled about seemed so trivial and insignificant. Surely those wouldn’t be the last words I’d ever speak to her. She was my baby sister and I had always protected her. I couldn’t fail her now.
I was momentarily overcome with panic so paralyzing I thought I’d pass out. I kept giving myself a pep talk. One more minute, one more minute, was all I needed. Keep going. I concentrated on lowering my heart rate and breathing deep, long breaths. Tunnel vision took over and I blocked out the people lying in the street, some already dead, some raising their hands as I passed by, calling out to me to stop.
I realized now why the man had run away from me. He was in survival mode, like I was when I ignored the people calling for help.
A few other cars were still on the road, and some drove the wrong way, weaving dangerously in and around stalled cars until they could go no further. The drivers were as confused as I was.
I drove until I could drive no more, until I was hopelessly deadlocked in the massive traffic jam. I got out of my car, flung my backpack over my shoulder, and sprinted along the side of the freeway. By now, the cloud had blanketed the land in a dark haze. I took a shirt out of my backpack and held it over my nose and mouth. My eyes burned, my lungs hurt, yet I was still alive.
And if I was alive, it meant May could still be alive. I rationalized it might be a genetic reason I was alive, because I couldn’t think of anything else. We carried the same genetic makeup, formed by a thousand chance happenings.
I stumbled along the road, blindly at times, feeling my way in a few feet of visibility. I tried my cell phone again, only to find the lines were busy.
Gradually, the dark gave way to a feeble light, enough for me to try to identify a pattern among the dead. I quickly theorized the cloud was like cancer that didn't discriminate in who it chose for a victim. I ran past cars containing the great melting pot of people who made up the city. Every ethnicity, age group, educational level, or socioeconomic status had been hit.
I must have blacked out, because the next thing I knew I was standing in front of May’s school. I swung open the front door and walked in. A wave of seasickness struck me and the room wobbled as if it was on a rolling ocean. I kittered off balance and I held onto a doorframe to steady myself.
I stepped around the dead bodies on the floor, pushed open the door, and dashed down the steps onto stable ground.
“Ella.” A faint voice called. “Help me.”
“May, is that you?”
“Yes.”
“Where are you?”
“Over here. Hurry.”
I put my hands to my mouth and yelled, “Keep yelling! I’m coming!” I ran in the direction of the pleas, which were becoming fainter and weaker. I stopped and whipped my head, looking in all directions. Leaves blew all around in the cold wind. A plethora of students and musical instruments lay askew on the football field. The strip shopping center across the street sat empty.
Among all the chaos I spotted a tiny figure huddled against a wall. It was May, rocking back and forth, arms wrapped around her knees.
I ran to her, knelt, and cradled her head on my lap. She was so frail. “Are you okay?”
“You came for me,” she squeaked. Her voice was raspy, weak.
“Of course, I did. I had to find you.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“What for? There’s nothing to be sorry about.”
“Don’t be mad at me.”
“I’m not.” May’s eyes, which had been sparkling and full of fire earlier in the morning, had become dull and glassy. Her eyelids fluttered, she took a deep breath, and went limp in my hands.
“May? Maybelline!” My words choked in my throat. “You’re my little Beanie. Remember?”
“I do.” Her voice was as weak as a soggy kitten’s.
“Listen to me. You’ll be okay, but you need to fight. You have to stay awake.”
“I can’t.”
I scooped her up in my arms and I was surprised at how heavy she was. I had to get help. The hospital was too far, the school clinic would be of no use, so I decided to go home.
I struggled to hold her and several times I stumbled, yet I never let go of her. If there were any survivors, I couldn’t locate any. The sounds of the city had gone silent. It was eerie walking alone on the street where usually children rode bikes, mothers pushed strollers, and joggers made their daily running quota. Cars should be whizzing by, a soccer mom with a cell phone to her ear, a harried father rushing to work, delivery trucks, the thrumming of lawnmowers and leaf blowers, neighbors walking their dogs.
All gone in an instant.
I pushed the fear out of my mind to concentrate on my goal.
I had to get home, to get help for May, and I was determined to do it if it was the last thing I did because we were sisters.
Each breath I took was labored, my lungs clogged with the particles from the cloud. My legs were as heavy as if I was slogging through quicksand. My arm muscles quivered from holding May. The air was heavy and hot like I was in a steamy sauna. Yet I clung to the hope my home was within reach.
One more step, one foot in front of the other was all I needed to do.
My mind wandered and the tall trees swayed, the whispering leaves calling me to follow them back to a time when May and I were little, sitting on a blanket in the yard, playing make-believe. We laughed and sipped imaginary tea while nibbling our sandwiches under the dappled shade of a magnolia tree. The fruity aroma of the white blossoms filled my mind with the hope and promise we had survived, and we would continue to survive. A strange feeling overwhelmed me in the deafening silence of a city gone mute, and the more I fought it, the more I became aware of it.
Fear.
I was scared out of my mind.
Finally, I stumbled to the front door and placed May on the concrete porch. Fumbling around in my purse, I found my keys and opened the door. I fell forward into the foyer and collapsed from exhaustion.
“Mom?” I croaked. Taking a difficult breath, I said, “Help us.” Too weary to keep my head up, I laid down, resting my cheek on the cold floor. “We need help, Mom...”
There was no response.
Several minutes passed, and once my energy returned, I willed myself to a sitting position. Although May was still breathing, she was fragile and vulnerable. I gazed upon her with the knowledge her life depended on me. I crawled on my hands and knees to where she lay, hooked my arms under her, and dragged her into the house, inch by agonizing inch. She groaned when her back bounced over on the threshold. I breathed hard from the exertion, not realizing how exhausted I was.
Pushing myself up, I stood against the wall, and, like a drunk, stumbled down the hallway to my parents’ bedroom. I needed Mom’s advice. I threw open the door.
“Mom?” She was in bed with the covers up to her chin, her arms crisscrossed over her midsection.
I tiptoed around the bed and sat down next to her. She looked so peaceful and quiet, her porcelain complexion smooth and untarnished from the ravages of her illness. I placed my hand on her arm to wake her. I gasped and immediately withdrew my hand.
She was cold, and I knew then she was gone. I was too stunned to cry, and even if I had tried, I had no more tears to shed. With g
reat sadness, I pulled the covers over her face. I silently closed the door and stumbled down the hallway to the foyer. I slid down next to May, and with exhaustion overcoming me, I closed my eyes and drifted into a fitful sleep. Hazy images of friends and snippets of conversations weaved through my semi-consciousness. I tried to hold onto them, remembering their faces and voices, yet it was like trying to hold water in my hands. It slipped away, never to be reclaimed again.
I wasn’t sure how much time had passed. Perhaps a few minutes, perhaps an hour. My eyes popped open and I rubbed them.
The shadows outside were long and dark, and the street was uncommonly silent except for the chattering of blue jays flitting in the treetops, searching for a place to roost. Mesmerized by the jays, my eyes followed their fluttering movements until a strange noise echoed in the stillness. It was a mournful, guttural sound akin to a large carnivore claiming a prized kill. It sounded like a lion.
I had noticed when a bird of prey alighted high in a pine tree near our house, the blue jays squawked loud, pestering the hawk by darting close to it, snapping their bills, jeering and mimicking another hawk, trying to force it away by alerting other birds of its presence.
Now the birds went silent, and the stillness of the house worried me, closing in on me like a coffin lid being slammed shut. The hair on my arms prickled and my sixth sense alerted me to predatory eyes. I sprang up, shut the door, and turned the lock.
Trembling, I put my back against the wall and slid away from the front door, keeping my eyes on the beveled glass decorating the door. I had no idea what had happened or why, but for now May and I were safe, we were together, and, as of now, it was all that mattered.
All the hurt I had experienced earlier when May and I traded barbs vanished as easily as a dewy raindrop in the blistering heat of the desert. May and I were sisters, and we would survive, no matter what we would face in the future, or what we had to do. The world was crumbling around us, people had died, and I lost the innocence of my youth that day.
Chapter 4
Central Texas
Fifty Years in the Future
I couldn’t believe I had agreed to the interview. I had repressed those memories, and now I had to live them all over again.
I must have been a sight with my long silver hair blowing in the wind, sitting high on a horse. My hair went gray in my late teens, but considering what I had seen and done, it wasn’t a surprise. I joke about my gray hair being the same as a gunslinger putting notches on a gun, signifying the number of kills. I did plenty of killing, accumulating more notches than would fit on a gun.
I sat straight in the saddle with my shoulders back, keeping rhythm with the horse’s long-legged gait easily gobbling up distance. The zebra dun was making good time on our journey into the rural Texas community. My ranch was tucked away in the foothills of the Texas Hill Country, once covered by an ancient inland sea. Limestone fossils dotted the hills, and in my spare time I collected various fossilized sea creatures once inhabiting the great ocean.
“The Age of Dinosaurs” I believe it was called. Creatures with unimaginable strength and cunning who dominated the Earth for millions of years. A shiver ran down my spine and a feeling I was being watched washed over me. I pulled in the dun’s reins, her hooves quieting, allowing me the opportunity to listen to the sounds of the country.
The wind whistled around me, and I took in the feeling of the land and of the animals and for anything that might disturb its relaxed rhythm. I had learned to read the land as if I was reading an instruction manual. I had learned to rely on my sixth sense to survive and to notice anything out of the ordinary. It had saved my life several times.
A field sparrow flitted by and landed on a fence post, oblivious to my concern. Clouds floated in the sky, strung together like cotton candy, and I glanced skyward, searching the wide open blue for any hint of my real-life nightmares.
My hand gravitated to my bolt-action rifle tucked securely in the scabbard. I never went anywhere without it. I needed to be prepared if somebody or something tried to attack me.
It had been a long time since I had to kill a man, or a tearawolf, the mutant creatures created by man-made germ warfare. We called them tearawolves because I witnessed one tearing apart a man in a matter of seconds. I thought we killed them all, but couldn’t be quite sure, and it was the reason I carried a rifle wherever I went. I also had a six-shooter and a knife for backup.
Because the winter rains could make an appearance soon, I was wearing a tan colored, weatherproofed poncho, and I’d learned never to be caught unprepared, to check my rifle and ammunition, to carry extra food and water, and to make sure my horse wasn’t lame.
A rush of autumn hugged me with a teasing of rain, the life-force of the land, renewing the parched grass and the crops hungry for its rejuvenating qualities.
A wide sombrero shaded my skin, wrinkled from the sun. I don’t mind my wrinkles, and wear them like battle scars. I had real scars. The longest one snaked down my thigh to my calf, yet I kept it hidden it because it brought stares and questions.
The sombrero was given to me a long time ago by a Mexican woman who had crossed the border into Texas looking for someone, anyone she could take care of; to latch onto, to give her life meaning after her entire family had died. She said she had always taken care of other people, and since she had nobody left, wanderlust called her away. I fed her and let her take shelter in my home, and I asked her to stay, but she said God told her it was not to be.
She called me Aya because she could never say my name, Ella. Some people still called me Aya. The woman stayed only for a while then left one day as mysteriously as she appeared. I had no idea what happened to her, or if she headed south to cross back over the border into her homeland. There were no more borders, only the ones in our minds, keeping us from realizing what we could do.
Those fluffy clouds had given way to wispy cirrus clouds high in the sky. A flock of Canada Geese honked in the wide expanse, wings flapping silently as they migrated south for the winter.
It was a gorgeous day to be alive, and a day like today made surviving all the hunger and pain and fear worthwhile. Life would find a way. It always did. There was a time when I had wanted to die, to give up, to lay down when I was wounded and bleeding, with not a soul around.
It would have been so easy to die, safe in my treehouse with memories of my childhood all around. I could have surrendered to the pain and the agony, yet I didn’t, because someone dear to my heart saved me.
My horse slowed to a trot along what was once a highway. I discerned a pale yellow line in the dry grass, remnants of asphalt long since crumbled away in the blistering heat of decades of summers, but if you dug in the dirt, clumps of it still existed. Younger folks took it home to display over fireplace mantels, like a trophy or something precious.
I came to the edge of town, where a car rolled along the road, and children were running alongside it. I kicked my horse in the side to make her gallop so I could see the car firsthand.
It was a fine-looking car with sleek lines and a light colored leather interior, and at one time had all the latest bells and whistles—satellite radio, GPS, Bluetooth—all useless now. I recalled the same car on the road over fifty years ago when I was eighteen.
For a moment, I pondered how fifty years slipped by so fast. We think we have all the time in the world, until our time is up. I liked to think I’d spent mine well, and perhaps I’d left a mark on the world.
I had no regrets.
The driver slowed the car and waved as he approached me. He honked twice, the noise startling my horse, and I took up the slack in the reins to steady her.
“Hello, Ella! What brings you into town? I haven’t seen you in a long time,” Hank Witherspoon said. He was a generation younger than me and owned a junkyard. He collected all sorts of old rusty appliances, tools, car parts, anything he could find. He repaired a tractor for me once. Come to think of it, he could repair most anything, tinkering with
it until he got it to work.
“I’m going to be interviewed,” I replied.
“What for?” His right hand was resting on the steering wheel, his left arm, bent at the elbow, was on the door.
“My life story.”
“Well, Lordy be! That surely will be interesting. You’ve had one heck of a ride, Ella.”
“That’s a fine lookin’ car you have there. Where’d you find it?” I rested my hands on the saddle horn. My horse moved in closer to inspect the car. Her nostrils flared at the new smells of leather, gasoline, and oil.
“I found it in a barn at an abandoned ranch about sixty miles west of here.” Hank put the car in park, turned off the engine, and stepped outside. He steepled his fingers together, stretching his arms out straight. He bobbed his neck side to side, and it audibly popped. “That feels right good. Been bent over too long, staying up all night fiddling with the engine trying to get this beauty to work. She finally purred to life. Ain’t she a work of art?”
“Sure is.”
“German-made, don’t you think?” Hank asked.
“I think so.” Flashes of my teen years came to me. My mind receded to a TV commercial where a sleek car maneuvered effortlessly along a two-lane highway cut into a cliff, high above the sea where the waves crashed into the rocks below. I would have been sitting on the sofa in our family den, my dad reading a book in his favorite chair. My mom would have been in the kitchen, and May would have been in her room, no doubt texting a boy. A memory I hadn’t thought about in years, and now it was as clear as if it was yesterday.
“Ella? Ella?”
“Hmm?”
“You’ve been a good friend to me. It’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you.”
I nodded to acknowledge him.
“I was a teenager when my dad died, and you took me in when nobody else would. You barely had enough food to feed yourself, yet you went hungry to feed me. Why?”
