by Schow, Ryan
“So does he know where he’s headed?” she asks about Marcus.
Looking over at her for a moment, I’m really starting to find myself letting go of my past around her.
“You look so beautiful right now,” I say, my tone different than usual.
She smiles, reaches out for my hand and takes it. “You know, I don’t think I’ve heard you tell me that with so much emotion before.”
“I’m teetering on the edge of…something. The point of no return, I think.”
“What do you mean?”
“With you, and how I am, or could be. That’s what I’m talking about.”
“I know, but what do you mean?”
“He’s got a map,” I look over and tell her. We slow down so Marcus can clear a pathway with the truck. Glancing her way, I say, “Do you think we have Stockholm Syndrome? That we’re just…what we are…out of necessity?”
“I like how you say ‘we.’ It’s nice to finally be included in a relationship again. Even if the relationship we have might just be a start. The first fifteen feet in the journey of a thousand…whatever.”
Marcus pushes through the cars, having to back up several times and nudge them out of the way so they don’t get dragged under the back wheels. When we finally get through the obstruction, we move forward again. The going is slow.
It’s like this all day.
The subjugated masses are mulling about the street corners and roadways, and through the freeway graveyard. They all look homeless. No one is dressed for anything but Armageddon. In fact, if you let your gaze linger too long, one look will tell you these battered souls are emerging from a deep stasis, or some kind of a short but ferocious hibernation.
To a number, each of these people I see on the streets bears the mortified, barely-alive look of a pack of zombies in search of brains to eat. Fortunately we don’t see much violence, and we aren’t attacked as much as we’re just stared at. No one has cars but us.
The slack-jaw stares of the masses rile me at first. It’s official. I no longer like being the center of attention, as I was in my skateboarding days, and I certainly don’t like the way some of these people are looking at us.
The morning passes at a rather lackluster pace, giving me time to think about the smells of this car and the pungent smell of the asphalt highway. I also catch myself thinking about the way Bailey looks right now and how we’re now starting to feel the permanence of each other. Of course, I’m also sitting on this stiff leather seat smelling the excrement of critters and the age of this heap thinking about every bruise, every cut, and all the ways we could’ve died but didn’t.
Bailey and I talk about meaningless things because we’re still too early in our relationship, as Bailey says, to talk about more serious things. Things like how she’s going to tell her fiancée she’s moving up in the world and it doesn’t include him.
“You still skate?” she asks, dragging me out of my reprieve.
“I thought about going back to it now that I don’t need a real job.”
“Not now, before this.”
“Oh, yeah. I guess I always wanted to skate with Indigo, but she always wanted to do archery with her grandpa. He was good to her. Taught her to shoot a bow and arrow. Taught us both how to shoot guns. The guy was the consummate Boy Scout leader, but that was before the Boy Scouts became the Scouts and he got fed up with putting politics before people. I enjoyed my time with him. Indigo felt the same.”
“Well maybe you guys can change that when you get home.”
I think about this, even as we settle into a drawn out silence.
“Maybe,” I end up saying. “Hopefully.”
We head up Hwy 1 moving at a snail’s pace. The burnt out cars are easier to move than those that are merely abandoned. Some wrecks are easy to get through, but others take longer and it looks like they’re wearing on the Mack truck. But they aren’t. Not when me and Marcus check the welds and see everything is Kosher.
By the time we hit Huntington Beach, which is only six miles outside of Newport Beach, we realize this trip is going to take a lot longer than expected. Marcus asks me if we want to divert routes and hit San Francisco first. I don’t want that because it doesn’t give Bailey resolution with her future ex-fiancée. The truth that I know in my heart (but won’t tell Marcus) is that I’m already planning on having Bailey with me in San Francisco. It seems she wants that, too, so that’s where my intentions lie.
“Let’s stay the course,” I say and he nods. Looking at him, I ask, “What are you going to do with the girls?”
He looks like he doesn’t want to talk about it, but I know what he’s thinking. Now that he let me in on his fears as a man, as a potential father or father-figure, I have a better understanding of what makes him tick. In situations of survival, he shines, but pull the chaos away, give him a normal life and he’ll self destruct.
“Marcus,” I say, “you’re not him.”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” he says, giving me a dismissive wave.
“Of course you don’t want to talk about it, butthole, but you can’t live this life in complete isolation. I mean, do you even see how everyone looks at you? You’re these girls’ world. Corrine especially.”
“I know.”
“And that scares you,” I say.
Stepping forward fast, startling me, he all but growls, “Of course it does.”
“Jeez man, chill.”
“This is going to take forever to get there,” he says, running his hand through his hair and pacing alongside the truck where the girls can’t see him.
“If you want, I can put them in the back of the El Camino with the rest of the crap there. That way you can brood all by yourself if you want.”
He stops pacing, fires me a look. “I’m not going to end up being the person you want me to be.”
Now I step toward him.
“You can be whoever you want in this world, man! Don’t you get it? This is your chance to start over. Amber’s marriage to some douchebag doesn’t mean squat. It’s a piece of paper and a state run prison for a lot of men and women. Besides, these girls are looking to you to help them, to protect them. They want you to do what you’re good at. What you want to do anyway. So just do that and stop worrying about all their feelings. They’re tough women. They see you. They know you’re this uptight, closed-down rock of a man. It’s no surprise to any of us that your social skills suck and you’re worried all the time.”
“The thing I hated most about my old man was the brooding.”
“Well, you’re definitely a brooder.”
“It makes people uncomfortable. It makes them uneasy because it’s not the outside world that has me stewing, it’s the problems are up here,” he says, aggressively tapping his forehead with two fingers.
“No kidding.”
“So, I can’t help it!” he hisses.
“You ever think about seeing a shrink?”
He starts to laugh because we’ve already been over this before.
“I know, we can’t find one and book a session,” I admit. “But a shrink is just someone with a different skillset for helping you solve your problems.”
“My problems are different!” he barks.
“Breaking news, pal. All our problems are different. But they’re all kind of the same, too. I mean, look around! This is Armageddon!”
“Which means what exactly?” he challenges.
“Which means you’re not special in this world anymore for your damaged psyche as much as you’re special because you have your own skillset of solving problems. For starters, you’re money with a rifle.”
“My old man taught me,” he grumbles, like the thought of it is just another tragic piece of the broken puzzle of his life.
“See? There’s something good you can take from him.”
“He taught me to shoot when I was six. When I was older, when I’d miss my target, he’d take out his .45, put it against the back of my skull and tell me
if I missed again he’d pull the trigger.”
“And did you ever miss?”
“Once.”
“Obviously he didn’t pull the trigger.”
“No, he did. We were in the woods, so he could have killed me if he wanted to. I was convinced that was his intention. So when I missed and he pulled the trigger…well, I didn’t expect the chamber to be empty. I pissed myself anyway.”
“How old were you?”
“Eleven.”
“Eleven?” I ask, aghast.
“He pulled the trigger, I pissed myself, and then he beat me so bad he had to carry me to the car and into the house where I couldn’t go to school for a week. After that, I didn’t miss. Not ever around him anyway.”
I’m speechless. I’m speechless and humbled. For me to be going around, poking him, telling him he needs to get over it is like some stranger telling me forget the pain Margot caused me and Indigo and just move on.
“I’m sorry, Marcus.”
“It’s alright,” he says, shrugging it off. “That was a long time ago.”
“Yeah.”
“We should head out,” he says, and he’s right.
After enough obstructions, we cut a clean path up Hwy 1 making surprisingly good time. The coastline homes and businesses are devastating, as is the hazy gray shoreline beyond. It’s sobering to say the least. Before the drones were taken out by what Marcus says was an HEMP, a high altitude nuclear EMP, they did catastrophic damage.
“It would’ve been so much better to have traveled this distance by boat,” I tell Bailey.
Looking over at her, her head is against the window and her eyes are closed. She looks so still. So incredibly beautiful. Eyes back on the road, we’re making good time. The speedometer hovers around twenty-five, maybe thirty miles an hour. But we never really get over forty and never for more than a minute or two.
Still, people are out. They have been all day. Some of them have taken to throwing things at the El Camino and the Mack truck, some just yell or watch us the way you think a zombie would watch a caravan of cars moving through town.
Twice we’ve gone through populated areas where the defeated masses rose up enough to storm our slow moving caravan of two. In those times I had to jump out of the car with the shotgun. I even fired off a load earlier to let them know I meant business.
Honestly, I don’t want to kill anyone, but I’m not offering up my life either because I decided to take the journey of a pacifist. Hell no. This is the end of civilization and I’m acting accordingly. For me, acting accordingly is riding in the back of the El Camino’s bed through the more densely populated areas, like Long Beach. It was riding with my shotgun out for people to see. It’s holding that look in my eyes, the same steely gaze that Marcus seems to wear all the time. He calls this the thousand yard stare. I’m not an alpha yet, but I’m well on my way and planning on making it me.
Several times we divert off E. Ocean Blvd. First because a giant tower of buildings had collapsed on Orizaba Avenue. The rubble of these buildings spilled all across E. Ocean and halfway down the beach. Locals digging through the debris in a weak rescue attempt said they’d been the Galaxy Towers. They said it was a nineteen- or twenty-story apartment complex with four buildings shooting off a centralized parking garage, one floor of parking for every level. There’d been cars and bodies everywhere. It was impassable. Another apartment complex had come down as well, 1900 Ocean, the kind of luxury apartment tower one man said was so beautiful inside it hurt to see it like this. He said he just sold his home in Freemont so he could pay thirty-five hundred dollars a month rent to look at the ocean. The point is, we’ve had to leave E. Ocean more than once. Our final detour took us a few blocks up to E. 2nd Street where the high life with the beachfront property became one way roads full of forgettable architecture and overpriced multiplex living. Marcus pulls to a stop. Great. We do the same.
Bailey’s still asleep. She doesn’t even stir.
My smooth exit from the El Camino is hampered by screeching hinges and springs that rock and squeal as I get out. Now Bailey’s awake.
“What are we—”
“I don’t know,” I say. “Just try to wake up for a second.”
The late afternoon sun hits my skin, sucks the moisture out of it. I feel parched. Irritated. Marcus and I walk toward each other, a stiffness in our bones from driving too long without stretching our legs.
“Getting pretty populated up there,” he says. “We need to get back to Ocean Blvd and look for signs to the 710. From there it’s a straight shot to the 405, and from there we’ll take the 5.”
“You expect we’ll make it there tonight?”
“To the 5?”
“Yeah.”
“Not a chance,” he says. “Looks like a couple of planes went down up ahead. The smoke’s pretty bad. And who knows what we’ll run into up there?”
“So why are we stopping then?”
“Maybe some trouble up ahead. Bunch of guys, five or six of them, just hanging out.”
“Can we get around them?” I ask.
“They’ve got their eyes on us now, so it’s best to head straight through. Measure the toll.”
“The toll?”
“Yeah, the charge to get through. Get Bailey on the wheel. You get in back with the shotgun.”
“You want me out there? Like some sitting duck?”
“They’re not going to want your piece of crap. Maybe Bailey, and maybe one of the girls. But not that.”
“I could have figured that out,” I say.
“They’re going to want to know what’s in the what’s in the truck.”
“Let’s just turn around, take a different path.”
“Sack up, Sally. We’re doing this,” he says. Then calling out over his shoulder as he walks back to the truck, he says, “You take the lead, I’ll watch your six.”
“Are you crazy?” I hiss, my blood starting to boil. He doesn’t reply. He just walks to the big rig, climbs in and waits. Opening the car door, seeing Bailey still drowsy, I say, “You’re going to have to be alert. And you’ll have to drive.”
“Why, what’s up?”
“Maybe trouble ahead. I’ll be in the back.” She hands me the pistol, which I take, but then I say, “Shotgun, too.”
“Is it that bad?” she asks, working to shake off the sleep.
“We’ll know in a minute or two seeing as how we’re taking the lead.”
Her face fell to a frown. “You have to be kidding.”
“Sadly, I’m not. Keep the window rolled down. You can do this.”
Taking the weapons, I climb in the open bed of the El Camino, sit down and tap the roof. Bailey pulls the Chevy around the truck and we see half a dozen black guys in the street with a smoking barbecue and pistols at their sides. I’m not sure if our truck will fit around the barbecue, but that might not matter. In fact, judging by the looks on their faces, it’s probably not going to matter at all.
They check their guns as we approach. These guys are big arms and bellies. They’re shaved heads, wife beaters and shorts. They don’t have their gold on, and they aren’t playing any loud music, but when we pull up, everyone’s making it very clear they’re heavily armed and we chose the wrong road to cruise down.
“Whatchu want?” one of the guys says, sauntering up to the vehicle. He’s glancing down at Bailey, but then his eyes are on me and my shotgun.
“Passing through,” I say, standing up.
“We got barbecue, though. So you’re gonna have to come back when we done.”
“We can squeeze by,” Bailey says.
“Wasn’t talking to you Nordstrom Rack,” he chides, barely even giving Bailey a glance. “I was talking to your boy here, and referring to that big ass truck behind you.”
“I think the truck can fit,” I say. “Maybe you could move your barbecue over a foot or so then we’ll be on our way.”
“You can’t move a hot barbecue. So you’re gonna have to wait. W
ell at least he is,” he says, referring to Marcus and the big rig. The guy waves for his boys to come forward and all the sudden the guns are cocked and ready. Behind me, the truck door opens and Marcus is officially got our six. I wish I felt better about the odds.
“Hold on there Paul Bunyan,” one of the guys says, using his gun like a pointer. “You need to slow your roll.”
“I just figured out two things I think we should talk about before me and the pretty boy risk our lives taking yours.”
Our intimidator seems to think about this for a second, then he says, “We got ourselves a scholar, a real wizard with words.”
“First thing,” Marcus says, a pistol in each hand, “one of us shoots first, then we all start shooting and no one gets to eat that barbecue.”
“And the second?” the head guy says.
“Diplomacy through beans.”
“What’s he mean diplomacy through beans?” a lanky looking kid in his late teens, early twenties asks.
“He should explain himself,” the guy beside me says.
“See nothing goes better with barbecue than baked beans and I happen to have two big ass cans of Bush’s baked beans. Not sure of the flavor, but at this point, who cares, right? They’re good.”
“If they’s so good, why don’t you keep ‘em for yourself?”
“Because he stinks at night,” Bailey says, improvising. “And I’m tired of watching these two get half drunk and try to light their farts on fire.”
“Oh now you got something important to say,” he says with a snicker.
“It’s a modern world. Women matter.”
“My woman matters. My child matters. My boys here, they matter to. But some cracker bitch like you? You don’t matter to me.”
“But she does to me,” I say.
“And me,” Marcus says.
This is where I pull out the shotgun, aim it at him and say, “Take the beans, move the barbecue, let us pass, or I’ll start this party with a bang.”
All the guns swing on me and if I tried to deny my bowels loosened a little bit, honestly, I’d be lying. They did. I didn’t let it show though.
