Black Autumn Travelers

by Jeff Kirkham

  “No. No, Mat, that doesn’t sound creepy. What’s up?”

  “This thing in California has turned ugly. The banks are closed and we’re having power outages along the eastern seaboard. I was about to get on the freeway,” Mat fudged the truth, “and I pulled over because I don’t want to just dump you so far away from your family. Is that crazy of me? Kind of creeper-guy, right?”

  “Really? You turned around because you’re worried about me? I’ll be honest; I thought we were just going to screw and move on. I mean, that’s the deal, right?”

  Mat laughed, but the words stung. “Yeah. Maybe that was the deal… But here I am outside your dorm. Knight in rusty armor, I guess. Why don’t you grab some clothes and hang out for a day or two at my place? Maybe we should play it safe and chill until we see what happens?”

  “Hmm,” Caroline seemed to be thinking through the implications. “They cancelled class. I’ll grab some clothes and stuff. Hanging out sounds like fun. I’ll be down in ten minutes. Maybe fifteen. Can you wait that long?”

  “Sure. No problem. I’ll be the stalker in the big, black truck.”

  They both chuckled and Mat ended the call.

  3

  “And it's time we saw a miracle

  Come on, it's time for something biblical”

  Apocalypse Please, Muse, Absolution, 2004

  Interstate 15, Hesperia, California

  It had taken the entire day to inch up the I-15 to the top of Cajon Pass.

  Logically, Cameron knew they should keep going, crawling along the I-15 all night. But he and Julie had exhausted their ability to keep it together. Stress and fear gnawed through any mental reserves they once had. Between that and sleep deprivation, he knew driving through the night would be a bad idea.

  He pulled off the interstate and turned onto a series of dirt roads running into the featureless California high desert. With nothing but rolling washes, mesquite bushes, and the occasional yucca plant, Cameron was betting they would be left alone to get some sleep.

  During the day, he had dug out his handgun and wedged it between his seat and the center console. He vaguely recalled it being illegal in California to carry a loaded firearm in the car, but he loaded the Beretta anyway, running the slide and racking a bullet into the chamber.

  As soon as they shut the car off in the pitch-black heart of the desert, Cameron and Julie fell asleep.

  Cameron awoke to a blinding light and a brutal headache. At first he couldn’t figure out where he was.

  As his sleep-addled mind assembled the nightmare—the nuclear strike on L.A. and their endless drive through the California desert—he lunged for his gun and twisted around in his seat. The light drilled him from his driver’s side mirror, coming from a vehicle behind the 4Runner.

  His first thought was that cops were shining their spotlight into his back window. He shoved the loaded gun under his thigh, hiding it.

  As minutes ticked by without an officer knocking on his window, Cameron began to doubt the spotlight came from the police. For one thing, the light was wrong. As he shielded his eyes, he could see a massive bank of lights on top of a truck about sixty feet back. Then it dawned on him; he was looking at an off-road pickup truck with a light bar.

  A chill went down Cameron’s spine. Someone in an off-road vehicle was sitting behind them, planning who knew what. He cranked his keys and stomped on the gas, making his 4Runner roar to life, but going nowhere. In his panic, he hadn’t taken it out of “park.” He threw the SUV into gear. Julie and the kids jolted awake. Gravel and dust blasted out the back as he tore off down the dirt road, escaping the off-road truck.

  The truck followed, keeping its distance.

  “What’s happening? Who’s behind us?” Julie trilled, keying off Cameron’s intensity.

  “I don’t know. It’s someone in a truck,” shouted as he raced deeper into the desert with no idea where they were headed.

  After twenty minutes of high-speed chase, the futility of running slowly dawned on him. The truck wasn’t backing off, nor was it closing the distance. Worse yet, he had no idea where they were or how to find a way out of the desert. He couldn’t see city lights anywhere.

  “What’re we going to do?” Julie sobbed. Cameron ignored her.

  “What the hell are they doing?” he raged. He went down the list of possibilities as he plunged farther into the desert. It could be gangsters looking to rob them, though that seemed unlikely out here in Hicksville. It could be local kids dicking around. It could be some outlandish threat from a world where people detonated nuclear bombs over Los Angeles. He had no idea.

  The unknowable motives of his pursuers teased at his self-control, picking at the fine threads of reason, leaving them frayed. An impulse grew to slam on his brakes, jump out of the car, and empty his gun into the truck.

  If he stopped to shoot, lots could go wrong. He could kill some high school kid for doing nothing more than following him on a dirt road. What were the odds he would go to jail for shooting at some local yokel teenager? Probably pretty good, Cameron thought, even if he only put a couple of bullets in the fender.

  Or, he could get shot by his pursuers. If he were killed, what would happen to his family? He shuddered to imagine the many paths things could take out here in the desert, his family defenseless.

  A war waged inside him. Was it time to think or time to rage? Therein lay the rub. The gun, still tucked under his thigh, called to him, begging to be fired, aching to propel the anger from Cameron into whomever threatened his family.

  But, if the civilized world persisted, maddeningly relentless in punishing Cameron’s past lawlessness, he would pay a dear price. Could he release the hounds snarling in his head and not suffer at the hands of plodding members of polite society?

  When he was younger, he had dabbled in the underworld, roaming the streets of Orange County, partying hard, brawling in bars, and smoking more than his fair share of weed. But he had never crossed that line, that line where a man became a bad man.

  Many of his friends had crossed that line and Cameron knew, at this moment, thousands of bad men were cutting loose and burning it all down. One little snag in the safety net surrounding the weak and neighborly was all it would take for predators to enter among them, shooting first and laughing later. Cameron understood what drove them.

  With his cell phone dead, he worried that the greatest risk to his family might be running out of gas in the endless desert. Every mile they ran from their pursuers, they pressed farther from the interstate and deeper into the unknown.

  “Fuck it.” Cameron stood on the brakes, launching Julie and the kids into their seat belts. A Tupperware tub of Cheerios from the back seat flew onto the dashboard, impacted, and blew cereal across the dash.

  Cameron unbuckled, grabbing the door handle in one hand and his Beretta in the other. The vehicle shuddered to a stop and he jumped out of his seat, bringing the gun up, turning and opening fire on the pickup truck.

  BLAM, BLAM, BLAM, BLAM…

  The pursuing truck slammed on its brakes, swerving from side to side. It lurched to a stop still eighty feet from Cameron. With a tell-tale grind of the transmission and a whining reverse, it fled backward a hundred yards and bounced into a ditch beside the road. The driver slammed the truck into drive, lurched out of the ditch, and skittered away from the gunfire, heading back the way he had come.

  Cameron shot the handgun dry into the fleeing truck while Julie and the kids screamed in terror. Standing in the middle of the desert night, empty gun hanging from his hand, Cameron felt a wave of release. Something as old as mankind had broken free.

  He could breathe. The tension melted away and calm settled over him.

  He wasn’t a bad man. But he wasn’t a good man, either. Standing on that dark road in the desert, he was something else.

  It took three hours for Cameron to find his way back to the interstate. The coming dawn eventually revealed the highway. When they reached pavement, he looked down a
t the gas gauge for the hundredth time. It was at a quarter of a tank. The fool’s errand into the desert might well have cost them the ability to reach Las Vegas.

  Before returning to the barely-moving exodus along I-15, Cameron stopped the SUV and popped the rear hatch. He had grabbed everything his brother-in-law suggested back in Orange County. The 4Runner was packed to the gills with dried food, canned food, milk jugs with water, gas cans, and camping gear.

  Cameron thought about it for a minute and decided to reorganize.

  “What’re you doing?” Julie asked. Cameron hadn’t said much since the shooting. She shifted anxiously in her seat, apparently freaked out by the night before. “Should we call the cops?”

  Truth was, Cameron felt totally on top of things. “No cops,” he answered, busy with his thoughts. “We’re fine.”

  “How’re we fine?” Julie almost shrieked. “You just shot at people!”

  “Sweetheart, please be still. We’re fine. I need to think for a minute. I’m sorry. I just need to think.”

  Julie broke into tears, and the boys started crying. Cameron tuned them out. He considered the supplies and the 4Runner. He looked around. Like most of Hesperia, trash spread alongside the road, resembling a flotilla of garbage on an endless sea of sand. He spotted some old telephone books next to an abandoned trailer several hundred paces away.

  “Julie, I’ll be right back.” He broke into a run.

  “Wait!” she shouted.

  “Just hang tight,” he yelled. “You’ll be fine.”

  Cameron ran over to the trailer and stacked up the old, weathered telephone books, as many as he could carry. He struggled back to the SUV and then made another trip, bringing more phone books.

  “What’re you doing?” Julie asked.

  “I’m putting together some protection. The 4Runner won’t stop a bullet and I’m afraid we’ll have more shooting before we make it to Utah.”

  “More shooting?” she said, fear rising in her voice.

  “We’ll be okay. Give me ten minutes. Get the boys ready to travel. Take a walk and stretch your legs. Thanks, babe.” Truth was, he hadn’t felt this clear in a long time. Back in the real world, anger clouded everything, circling his thoughts like a vulture ready to pounce. This morning, he could think straight.

  He pulled everything from the backseat and the rear cargo area and stacked his supplies into neat piles. He finished with five rough stacks: the telephone books, the canned food, the water, the gas, and everything else.

  Cameron never missed the MythBusters television show. Those dudes had shot a gun at everything imaginable on that show, making it a poor man’s encyclopedia of ballistics. He knew books served as excellent bullet-stopper. He also knew from MythBusters that water made bullets do crazy things—causing them to twist, bleeding off energy like an Olympic runner in molasses. What he saw on the ground, in five piles, was plenty of both: water and books.

  He pictured the slow-motion videos he had seen of bullets going through books and bullets going through water. If a bullet hit a book first, it would slow it down a lot, but it would still be going straight, pointy end first. Cameron didn’t know much about physics, but he was pretty sure that a bullet, with all its force concentrated in a pointy tip, was pretty powerful. But, going through water, a bullet turned sideways, even if it was a big rifle bullet.

  What would a bullet do if it hit water first and went crossways or sideways into a book?

  Horse sense told him that a thick book would stop a sideways bullet.

  Cameron began stacking “miscellaneous” gear in the center of the cargo area: the freeze-dried food Jason had given them for Christmas, the camping gear and their luggage.

  He unbuckled the boys’ car seats.

  “What’re you doing now?” Julie was perplexed.

  “I’m going to wedge both the car seats into the center of the backseat.”

  Julie was beginning to calm down. “Won’t that be unsafe? They won’t be belted.”

  “Yeah, but we’re only going five miles an hour and, honestly, I’m more worried about gunfire than a car accident.”

  “Really? Why?” Julie clearly hated the thought they would face gunfire again.

  “Because shit got real, babe. We’re going to be okay, though. I just need a few minutes. Put the boys back in their car seats.”

  Cameron grabbed some luggage and pushed two suitcases up against the kids, one on each side of the mashed-together car seats.

  He stacked the phone books outside of the luggage, standing them on end. He still had a bunch more phone books, so he stacked those in the cargo area, facing the back of the car. He dumped the last six phone books on the driver’s seat.

  Last, Cameron stacked the canned food, two cans deep, up against the phone books, the last layer of gear on the outside by the car doors.

  When he jammed the passenger doors closed, the cans slouched against the door and window, barely fitting. The water jugs and gas cans were the last things left, and he stacked them around the outside of the rear cargo area, the first line of defense.

  When Cameron was done, he could see that it was far from perfect armor. But, with any luck, a bullet would hit the canned food, gas or water first, yaw like he had seen on MythBusters, then slam sideways into the phone books. If a bullet fragment made it through the books, it might hit the clothes or the camping gear. From the right angle, he figured the junk he had stacked up might stop a rifle round.

  Cameron leaned in, grabbed the telephone books on his seat and put them on the floor beneath the kids’ legs.

  “If we get into anything scary, I want you to grab these books and put them between you and the door,” Cameron instructed Julie.

  Julie made a worried face. “What about you?”

  “I’ll be driving like a bat out of hell, so I probably won’t have free hands. Besides, this is all just a precaution.”

  Five hours later, they had progressed almost fifteen miles. The gas gauge bobbed near empty. Up ahead, a gas station appeared in the distance with a giant, hand-made sign painted on a four-by-eight sheet of plywood. “Cash Only,” it said. “$10 a gallon.”

  “Sons of bitches,” Cameron swore, but he was happy he had grabbed all the cash from their bank in Anaheim three days back. He’d cleaned out their checking account, even taking their rent money. He had almost four grand.

  An hour later, he made it to the front of the line and refueled. His mistake turning onto the desert road and burning up half their gas hadn’t cost them their lives after all.

  Wallula, Washington

  Sage Ross abandoned the plan to try for Utah.

  With his current resources, it seemed impossible; he would have to walk all the way from Washington to Utah. After consulting his map, he realized that meant traversing a fortress of pines eighty miles wide and six thousand feet high, plus another five hundred miles of flatland.

  Some people might survive the winter trapped in alpine mountains, but Sage’s thin Boy Scout training didn’t even come close. According to the map, he would cross either the Nez Perce or the Umatilla Mountains and, no matter how many times he repacked his backpack, he couldn’t find a way to carry more than five or six days’ worth of dried food.

  He supposed a superior mountain man might be able to forage enough food in the winter pines, but Sage wracked his brain, remembering the limited time he had spent in alpine forests. He couldn’t remember seeing much in the way of edible plants or edible animals. At least here, among the fields, he knew where to find water. He might even be able to scavenge crops.

  Raised in the period of western child psychology that demanded parents protect their children from every form of failure, Sage used to view life as his oyster, and he was the beautiful little pearl cradled inside. Everything had pretty much always gone his way.

  With his car dead and his phone not working, a new realization descended upon him: stuff in this world might actually be out to kill him. For the first time, some long-dormant p
art of his psyche that worried and fretted about the future began to wake up and stretch its arms.

  For years, Sage helped his dad work their hobby farm. He complained the entire time, but he had begrudgingly learned a few things about the production of food. He and his dad had spent time in the forests of Utah and Wyoming, backpacking, fly fishing, and tinkering with wilderness survival. In that time, Sage gained a passing familiarity with the edible plants of the West and could probably identify a quarter of the edible mushrooms, roots, and berries common to the Rockies.

  With even that tidbit of knowledge, he admitted how difficult it would be to cover even the most stripped-down caloric requirements while living off the land. In round numbers, he ate between twenty-five hundred and thirty-five hundred calories a day. It would be painful, but he could trim that down to two thousand calories a day if he was careful about how much energy he expended.

  He guessed that gathering food consumed huge amounts of energy. The easiest calories he and his dad found in the wilderness had been roots. But a lot of the best roots, like sego lily and dandelion, were a bitch to get out of the ground. With each root delivering around five or ten calories, and the process of digging them up costing nearly that much energy, it penciled out to a losing proposition. He might fill his belly, but he would never gain net energy.

  Roots growing in wet, loose soil, like cattails, were somewhat easier. Sage had seen some cattails down by the canal that ran along the fields. He could harvest the cattails for carbohydrates, but he knew he would burn through the local supply within a matter of days, and pulling cattails from wetlands was cold and dirty work.

  One of his most despised farm jobs back home had been butchering rabbits. His dad built a rabbit-breeding system, and Sage became the designated rabbit slaughterer. When his dad forced him to do it, he could kill, skin, and clean one rabbit every ten minutes.