by T M Edwards
“That wasn’t very convincing.”
I shrugged. “It was my choice to leave the safety of the truck.”
At least that managed to get a small chuckle out of him. While I appreciated that he was being more true to himself, I hated the fact that I had probably deeply embarrassed him by forcing him to reveal his secret long before he was ready to do so.
***
“Hey, what do you think that is?”
I looked up. “Where?”
Sam pointed out the window, where I could make out a shape on the shoulder of the road. It was too far away to tell what it was.
I kept my eyes on it as we drove closer. Eventually it resolved into a human form, bent over what looked like a shopping cart.
“Sam! It’s a person!” The rumble of the truck increased as it sped up. It was a man in a gray-green coat that went to his knees. He was walking slowly, leaning on a cart that was piled high with items I couldn’t identify. Beneath the coat, and behind the beard that had grown down to his chest, he looked emaciated. There were deep hollows in his cheeks, and his hands on the cart handle were skeletal.
“Should we help him?” Sam braked the truck and slowed to a stop a few feet in front of the man. He didn’t even look up or acknowledge us. “Stay here. I’ll see where he’s headed.” I watched as Sam opened his door and jumped down, then walked around the front of the truck.
“Sir?” the sound of Sam’s voice came, muffled, through the window. “Sir, where are you headed?”
The man ignored him and continued walking at a pace that was barely more than a shuffle. His eyes were rimmed with red, and his lips moved as if he was muttering to himself.
I saw Sam reach out and put a hand on the cart. With a suddenness that made my heart skip a beat, the old man bared his teeth and growled. He reached out a hand toward Sam with his fingers curved like claws. Sam raised both hands and backed away.
As soon as Sam’s hands left the cart, the old man resumed his slow pace down the side of the highway. I watched as Sam stood aside, his shoulders tense, while the man shuffled past him and continued down the road. Sam shook his head and walked back around the truck, then climbed into his seat.
“Can’t we give him some food or something?”
Sam shook his head, and pulled the gear-shift down. “I don’t think he would accept or recognize it.”
The truck rolled into motion again, and within a few seconds we passed the old man. I turned to watch him as he disappeared behind us. “Couldn’t we at least try?” My heart felt as if it was being pulled by a string. A string with the other end tied to that man and his cart. He was alive, and he was not huddled in a corner somewhere, waiting to die. That had to be worth something.
“I’m sorry, Deidre. There are some people that just can’t be helped.” Sam sighed. “If he is like us, and he is resistant to the radiation because of something wrong with his mind, he seems to be trapped too far inside it for us to reach.”
“But...he’ll die.”
“I know. I know, but all we will do if we give him food is to prolong his suffering by a day or two, and reduce our changes of reaching Vegas to help those who still have the will to survive.”
Even though I couldn’t argue with Sam’s logic, the weight of that guilt on my heart was exhausting. I curled up on my seat and stared out my window, trying to rid my mind of the image of that old man, whose mental illness was going to kill him in this new world, just as surely as his fear would have if the radiation had affected him.
***
By noon, we were at the Arizona border. Like usual, we stopped at a gas station just inside the border and found a map of the state to complement my bigger atlas. Even though our route was fairly straightforward, it never hurt to have a more detailed picture of where we were.
I went inside to find the map, while Sam stayed outside to refill the truck. Except, for the first time, I found a store that was entirely stripped. Not even any maps. Other than a single banana rotting in a basket, and a few bottles of beer in the fridges, there was nothing.
I returned empty-handed to the truck, and we set off again. Sam’s face was drawn, and I couldn’t decide whether I should ask him what was wrong.
“How are we doing on gas?”
Sam just shook his head. “I’ve got about fifteen gallons left. In this truck, that’s no more than three hundred miles.”
“Will that get us there?”
“Unless we find more fuel, we’re going to run out with about a hundred miles to go.”
My heart sank, and I didn’t know what else to say, so we drove in silence for a while. Even the striking countryside couldn’t rouse me from the whirlpool of “what-if” that was swirling in my head. A hundred miles...that was at least five days. Probably more. Even though I tried really hard to hide it, my ankle was excruciating to walk on. I wouldn’t have been surprised if it was fractured. I just hid it because I didn’t want to embarrass Sam further about last night.
In the distance, I saw a car. I saw Sam look over at me out of the corner of my eye, and met his gaze. Maybe we were saved.
As the truck rumbled closer, I saw that there were more cars behind the first. A lot more cars.
Sam braked the truck to a stop as we came up to the scene. The road, which at that point was a bridge, was completely blocked by cars in what looked like a massive wreck. There had to be at least 20 of them. I could see two that had smashed through the railing and were hanging halfway out over the street that ran beneath the bridge. There were dented doors, hoods and trunks crumpled like so much aluminum foil. Glass was scattered everywhere.
“Wow.” emerged from Sam as we both stared in shock at the tragedy before us.
Silently, we both opened our doors and stepped from the truck. I let Sam walk in front of me so he couldn’t see me limp. I didn’t want to approach the mass of cars at all. There was no way that many of those drivers and passengers had survived. There was bound to be dead bodies in those cars, and I wasn’t sure I could handle it. I’d never actually seen a dead person, except one aunt who had been skillfully dressed and applied with makeup before her open-casket funeral. I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t mentally prepared to see rotting corpses, even this far into the apocalypse. I’d rather preserve what remained of my innocence.
Sam stopped, and turned to look at me. “You don’t have to come,” he said gently. “I can do this alone.”
Contrary to what I’m sure we both expected, his words strengthened my resolve. This was life now. If he with his PTSD was brave enough to go look, then me with my normal background could be, too. Anxiety be damned.
As if he saw the change in my eyes, Sam reached out his hand to me. I limped forward and took it, and together we walked toward the mangled cars. His hand was warm and reassuring as it engulfed mine, and he took the lead toward what was sure to be a scene of carnage.
The familiar feeling of numbness settled over me as we reached the first cars. The smell hit me first, and took away all doubt about what we were going to find. The smell of decay: bitter and thick and slightly sweet.
We passed single-file between the cars with Sam in the lead. As we looked into each one, I saw what I knew I was going to see. They looked just like what I’d seen on cop shows. But no show could capture the incredible loneliness and sadness that each of these people had died together in this mass of vehicles, and yet utterly alone, trapped within the confines of their own metal coffins.
Even though I knew that there was no way anyone was left alive, I found myself almost eagerly peering into each new vehicle, searching for a face that was whole and alive, rather than inert and gruesome.
As we neared the far end of the wreck, Sam let go of my hand. I ran my hands through the unruly mess of my hair, then left him to whatever he was doing as I turned on my heel and began to walk back toward our truck.
I passed back through the wreck, sometimes having to turn sideways when two cars had ended up very close together. I walked too close to
one of the crumpled bumpers, and a sharp edge tore through the leg of what had been my last pair of intact pants, and left a gash in the same leg as my bruised ankle. I gasped, and stood still for a moment, trying to push past the numbness in my head that was preventing me from reacting to the pain.
That turned out to be a mistake. All of the emotions I had suppressed came flooding back all at once, and it was all I could do to calmly limp to the edge of the gathered cars before I broke completely and stumbled off to the side of the road to vomit violently over the bridge railing.
Sobs began to mix in with the painful retching, until I was no longer sure if I was throwing up or crying. I vaguely heard footsteps behind me, and Sam’s hands gently gathered my hair away from my face and held it at the back of my neck, while he silently waited for me to manage to catch my breath.
Day 37. October 23rd
It was just past midnight, and here I was again, awake and listening to Sam cry out in his sleep. I lay across the seats in the truck cab, shivering even while wearing every bit of clothes that I had. Sam had tried to insist that I take the sleeping bag, but I had refused. It was colder where he lay in the bed of the truck, than it was inside. I would survive. I had a heavy military-style jacket of Sam’s on top of me. I was cold, but not deathly so. My breath fogged out in front of me with each exhale.
My stomach ached so badly that I probably wouldn’t have been sleeping even if Sam wasn’t having another nightmare. I hadn’t been able to eat ever since we found that group of wrecked cars. When I’d finally managed to convince my stomach to stay where it was supposed to be, I was so weak that Sam had needed to sling my arm around his shoulders and grasp me around the waist to help me walk. It was my turn to be embarrassed, because neither of us smelled good after many days without showers, and I was somehow still hung up on the idea that a guy shouldn’t know that girls could smell like anything other than perfume or deodorant.
I’d been slumped against my window as Sam had turned the truck around and driven us back to the last exit so that we could bypass the wreck, which completely blocked the highway. At least our gas tank was a little fuller, maybe even adding enough to our fuel stores that we could make it to Vegas.
We hadn’t made it much farther that day. Even though I was too weak and shaken to notice much, I think the experience had affected Sam, too. We’d only driven for another few miles before he pulled off to the side of the road, in a sort of little canyon where the road was bordered by two cliffs with scraggly evergreens clinging to the sides. I was feeling too depressed to ask why, and I certainly hadn’t had the energy to argue.
Sam had pulled the little emergency radio out of my backpack, and set it up on the dashboard facing me, with the endless looping broadcast from Vegas playing softly. I didn’t know why he’d done it. Maybe he thought I needed to hear the voices of some living people. Maybe he thought I wanted to give up, and he was reminding me that we were almost there.
Only three and a half more hours of driving time,assuming everything went like it should.
Sam cried out again, and I turned to watch him through the back window. His face was contorted in distress, so different from the calmness that infused his features when he was awake.
The center panel in the window could open, so I pushed it to the side and carefully reached my hand through it. Nervous that he might react violently, I moved my arm through the window just until my fingertips could touch Sam’s forehead. He started, and I was afraid he was going to wake up, but his eyes stayed closed. The expression of pain on his face eased slightly, and while he was still obviously not at peace, his sleep became quieter. I leaned my head against the window next to my arm, and closed my eyes.
***
I woke to a gray sky, and an arm that was numb. I pulled it back inside, and shook it vigorously to try and restore the circulation. As I shifted to sit fully upright, I looked out of the windshield and noticed with surprise that we had received a dusting of snow overnight. It was just enough to whiten the tops of rocks and frost the tips on the trees that clung to the cliff. Sam was still asleep, with snowflakes dotting the sleeping bag and his tousled hair.
As if he’d heard me stirring, Sam’s eyes opened and he sat up. Was I just imagining it, or did the circles under his eyes look a little less dark? Sleep deprivation was a real thing in even this apocalypse, especially if you were like me and unable to sleep on a hard surface, or like Sam and unable to achieve normal sleep, period. I hoped that I’d been able to somehow help him sleep a little better by letting him know that he wasn’t alone.
Not being alone...who would have thought that it would take the apocalypse to teach me that I didn't actually have to live my life in isolation?
I think we were both eager to reach our destination. We ate breakfast as we drove, though my stomach cramped so badly that I was forced to stop eating halfway through the energy bar. It hit me that we were almost there, we were about to find out if we could help end all of this, or if those who were trying were even still alive.
Right as we took the exit that would switch us from the big highway we’d done most of our travel on, to the one that would lead us north to Vegas, the truck made an odd popping noise, and I was shaken out of my stupor when I saw Sam jump like he’d been shot, and fear contorted his face as he quickly braked the truck to a stop. The change in momentum launched me forward, since I hadn’t bothered to fasten my seatbelt, and I collided painfully with the dashboard.
Once I’d gotten my breath back, I turned to look at Sam. The truck was still making an awful racket, and after taking one glance at him, I reached over and turned the keys to the “off” position. Sam was ghostly pale, and shaking. His eyes were glassy, and he stared off into nowhere.
“Sam?” I asked gently as I reached out to touch his shoulder. He jumped violently when my fingers brushed his sleeve, and I pulled my arm back. “Sam? What’s wrong?”
Sam was muttering something that I could barely here. “The guns...coming for us...heard shots…”
He thinks the truck noises were gunshots. He doesn’t even know where he is.
I recognized a full-blown panic attack when I saw one. I’d had enough of them to know. But this extra complication of him suddenly forgetting where he was...I didn’t know how to deal with that. Did I try to break him out of it? Wait until it passed?
“Sam. Sam, hey. You’re okay.”
“No! They’re coming!” Sam yelled, and frantically unbuckled himself and threw open the cab door, then stumbled and fell because he missed the step. I quickly scooted across the seats to follow him out to where he sat, sobbing, tears running down his face. He was rocking back and forth, whimpering like a small child.
For several moments I couldn’t do anything but stand there, watching, as Sam cried in the throes of his fear. When he finally seemed to be calming down a little, I knelt next to him. “Sam. do you know who I am?”
He glanced at me, then nodded jerkily.
“Okay, good. Do you know where you are?”
“I...I…” He cast his eyes around us, taking in the arid landscape and the deserted buildings of the small town. “I...we were driving…”
I nodded. “Yes. We’re going to Vegas. The truck broke down. It wasn’t a gun, Sam, it was just the truck.”
Sam had shuddered at the mention of the word “gun,” but then he closed his eyes and took a deep breath, visibly trying to calm himself.
“You’re safe, Sam. There’s no guns. It was just the truck.”
He swallowed, and met my eyes. “It sounded like a gun.” His voice was almost pleading. His eyes shone with tears, and his cheeks were streaked with glistening tracks that ran down into his stubble of a beard. “I thought it was…” he closed his eyes and shuddered again.
I reached out and put my hand on his shoulder. “It’s okay. You’re safe.” On an impulse, I lifted my hand to wipe the tears from his cheek with my thumb. He grabbed my hand and pressed it against his face.
“I’m so
rry.”
“Why are you sorry? It’s not your fault.”
He let my hand drop. “I should control it better.” He stood up abruptly, and turned away from me. “I was a soldier. I should be stronger than this. I can’t...I can’t just fall to pieces…”
I stood up and tried to grab his arm, but he pulled away. “Sam, your brain is broken.” Even though he wasn’t looking at me, I gestured at the red truck behind us. “Do you expect that truck to keep on running like normal, even with whatever’s gone wrong in it?”
“Of course not.”
“Then why do you expect more of your own mind?”
He spun to face me, his fists clenched and anger on his face. “It isn’t the same and you know it. You said your brain is broken too, but I don’t see you freaking out over a noise.”
