Pavement Ends: The Exodus

by Kurt Gepner

  The two men walked at a brisk pace. The bald man steadily nibbled his treat into extinction. Along the way, they passed three groups of people, who all looked a mixture of whipped, hopeful and terrified.

  They chatted as they walked. The bald man was named Bruce. Bruce seemed eager to brag and wasted very little time in doing so. He proudly described himself as being a "petty crook," until everything went to hell. Then, using a stash of assorted guns and a few friends, he took over the Glenn L. Jackson Memorial Bridge and Government Island, which was a five-mile long island running between Oregon and Washington in the middle of the Columbia River. After a gunfight that left a rival group dead, Bruce’s gang situated the cars and set up their toll operation.

  Hank let Bruce do most of the talking, but at one point he asked, "Did you happen to see a guy come through here, about this tall," Hank waved the flat of his hand around the level of his chin, "with a Seattle Seahawks tattoo on his neck?" When he didn’t get an immediate response, Hank added, "He would have had a little dark-haired girl with him." He doubted that his son would have taken Izzy to find her mother, but he wanted to eliminate all of the possibilities. This was the first time that Hank had approved of the tattoo that his son got on his eighteenth birthday, because it was his only extremely distinguishing feature.

  "Naw," Bruce said after a moment’s recollection. "I’d of noticed that, cuz I’m big into ink." When he saw the fallen expression on Hank’s face, he added, "But I’ll keep an eye out. Is he a relative?"

  "My son," Hank said with a nod. Then Hank asked for more details about the operation that Bruce was running and the bald man happily returned to extolling his own virtues.

  As they walked, the groups passing them veered wide of the two armed men and diverted their eyes to the road. On the Oregon side of the bridge, an older man stood, waiting for the pair to arrive. Bruce had explained that his friend, Jerry, could be touchy and that Hank should keep quiet until he was told to speak.

  When Hank was close enough to look Jerry in the eye, it was obvious why the older man could be "touchy." With a faded drab Marine cap crammed down on his coarse grey hair and his smallish stature, Jerry looked like he had survived Vietnam as a Tunnel Rat. His tongue was in constant motion, flicking snake-like across his toothless gums, sloppily parting his flaccid thin lips. He was an icon of paranoia, chain-smoking roll-your-own cigarettes and slurping from a steaming Styrofoam bowl that had ‘Cup-o-Noodles’ printed across it in red letters.

  Despite his edginess, Jerry listened attentively to Bruce and asked Hank a number of astute, business-savvy questions. After discussing the layout of the toll operation and how to price and present their services, the men arrived at an agreement for Hank’s return passage. For the fee of seven packs of cigarettes and three bags of trail-mix, Hank and anybody with him, would be allowed back across the bridge. They wrote out the contract on the back page of Hank’s moleskine notebook and shook on the deal.

  Cringing internally at the exorbitant price that he’d just paid, Hank smiled, waved and crossed to the other side of the car-wall. As his trek got back underway, his thoughts raced off ahead of him. It was likely, he thought, that his brother’s garage had survived. It was, after all, detached and had never been wired for power. If it did survive and Marissa had moved in, as he suspected, there might be neighbors and other refugees sheltering with them.

  Although he would rather not take on any more strangers, he wouldn’t condemn them to the Hell that he expected the city of Portland would soon become. For that reason, Hank had negotiated a deal to allow any number of people to accompany him back across the bridge. As costly as it had been, he hoped that it would be unnecessary. The future cost of such a thing, he suspected, would far outstrip today’s price.

  Hank’s thoughts were suddenly and appallingly ripped from his mind.

  CHAPTER TWO

  On the other side of the car-wall, Hank was horrified by the battlefield that spread out before him. The road was devoid of cars for two hundred yards or more. Beyond that point, several vehicles had been turned onto their sides, apparently as a fortification. Between the car-wall that marked the southern border of the toll bridge and the fortification he had just passed, there lay scores of bodies rotting under the dawning sun.

  They were most densely concentrated near the toll barrier, but were scattered everywhere except down the middle walkway. Hank felt sick. He swallowed down a reflux of bile and began putting one foot before the other just to get past the ghastly scene. Trying not to look was an act of futility. Hank found his eyes pulled toward the dead that were strewn about him. They clearly had all been shot. Yellow sprinkles, fly eggs, decorated the moist areas - eyes, wounds, mouths - that were open to the sky. Why? Hank begged the question of a power beyond his comprehension.

  As he approached the second barrier of upturned cars, he heard weeping. Slowly he crept around the hood of a Chevy Impala and looked across several dozen groups of people huddled together for warmth and comfort. Many of the people had nothing more than the clothes on their back for protection against the elements, and many of those were torn and tattered. Some of them had a jacket, towel or blanket draped over their shoulders as they sat huddled together. A few, literally, wore nothing but the barest scrap of covering for the sake of modesty. They were scorched, cut, scraped, bruised and grimy and their eyes were hungry. When Hank came around the car, several of the people quickly found their feet.

  "Please, Mister," begged a solitary woman with unnaturally red hair. She was dressed in a gray skirt, dingy white blouse, black pumps and gold-framed glasses that were bent and missing a lens. A few days ago, Hank could tell, she would have been considered attractive. She was lean, but not gaunt, and her teeth were straight and white. The unnaturally red hair upon her head was pulled back into a ponytail and though frazzled it still had a healthy sheen. The woman obviously took care of herself. Now, however, she was just an unremarkable face among the other grime-smudged faces.

  "Give me some food, so I can get to my babies! They’re real," she said, as if desperate for Hank to believe her. "They’re names are Desiree and Douglas, but we call them Dizzy and Duggy. You know, like Buggy." Sounding deeply forlorn she added, "I’d show you their pictures, but I lost my purse." In the next instant, she was on him, clutching Hank’s drover’s coat. She looked up at him with wild hope and desperation in her eyes.

  Hank opened his mouth, but hesitated as several voices layered upon one another. They all begged for something they could use to barter for passage across the bridge. They said that they would be shot if they tried to cross without something to trade. The gray-skirted woman pressed closer and, whispering loudly, offered him sex for a can of food. Gently, Hank pushed her away saying, "I’m sorry. I really am, but I’ve got to get to my family too."

  The woman would not be dissuaded and began clawing at the straps of his backpack. "You’ve got enough to spare!" She screamed. Within a heartbeat, several more desperate people surrounded Hank, tugging on his gear and hitting him with sticks and fists. Completely unprepared, he blocked a few of the blows, but was quickly overwhelmed as more than a dozen pairs of hands grabbed and pummeled and pulled at him.

  Feeling a panic like that of drowning, Hank reached into his Drovers coat for his shotgun. He couldn’t pull it from his holster. Other hands tried to get it away from him, but he firmly gripped the handle. A round-bellied man lunged at him and Hank toppled over with feet flying skyward. Somebody fell across his chest and crushed the air from his lungs.

  The blast deafened him.

  The mob scattered. Whisper was unholstered and another shell chambered before the last person crawled off him. Hank rolled to his left and rose to one knee. His head was spinning, his glasses were askew and his hands trembled with barely controlled panic. Leveling Whisper and swinging it in a broad arc around him, Hank drove back the assaulting mob that threatened him.

  The gray-skirted woman gasped for breath, her cheek pressed to the ground. Blood
soaked quickly into her blouse and hair. Ensuring that he had a protective insulation of space, Hank put his hand on her back and bent down to look her in the eye. He could feel the rattle of liquid in her lungs. "Can you talk?" He asked with great compassion.

  "Kah…. Kgah…." was all she could manage. Looking into her eyes, Hank saw such deep sorrow that he had to look away. His eyes found her obliterated neck, instead.

  "I’m sorry," he whispered. The wound was so gory that he couldn’t begin to tell the extent of the damage. It was obvious, by her blood loss and complete immobility, that the wound was fatal. "I’m holding your hand," he said to the woman as he slid his fingers under her palm. "Can you feel me?"

  "Nguh…" she gurgled. "Kagh…"

  Hank looked her in the eye again and she looked back, clearly, cogently. Blood frothed from her mouth as she looked at him. Her eyes were as gray as her skirt. She looked at Hank, through her pain, as if willing him to know something that she was unable to speak. With regret-filled eyes, Hank tried with all his heart to hear her last, grief stricken thought. Their eyes remained locked, each with the fearsome need to communicate, until she was overcome by the great, unspoken sorrow. Tears welled in her eyes and spilled to the pavement, mingling with dirt and gore.

  The gray-skirted woman, once more, tried to speak and then expelled her last breath, noisily through her bloodied nostrils. Hank was so overcome with grief that he knelt there, under hunched and shaking shoulders, for a long time. Finally, not knowing what else to do, he let go of her hand and genuflected with a silent prayer that her soul find peace. He was suddenly lost in a terrifyingly altered world. With all of his emotion, because words wouldn’t form in his mind, he implored God to make everything right again.

  As an antithetical answer, he became aware that the mob was once again gathering its bravery and closing in on him. Hank snatched his hat from the pavement as he stood. His backpack hung to the side, the left strap had torn off the bottom. People still kept their distance, somberly, hungrily watching him. They seemed individually aware of what their actions had caused, each flirting glances at the woman’s body, but were too consumed with the spirit of a mob to show remorse. Nobody spoke. Hank gazed around at them, feeling wrathful and pitying them at the same time.

  "Does anybody…" he started to ask, but his voice was congested with grief. It was a feeling that was becoming a bosom companion to him. He cleared his throat and spoke out again, loud enough to be heard. "Does anybody know her name?"

  The people were quiet. They looked away, avoiding his stare. Hank checked her garments and found no identification. Nearby he saw her glasses, her only personal possession, now mangled beyond any repair. Picking them up, Hank tucked them into his breast pocket. Then he began walking, not looking back.

  Along the Oregon shoreline, concentrated below the bridge, a village of people had sprung up. Many people were at the water line, beginning their day by dipping buckets, rinsing their faces, fishing and other activities that would be expected from an established community. Some watched his progress, but they were mostly engrossed in their own doings.

  Hank trudged grimly, but before he cleared the bridge entirely, he had to stop. A burning sensation had begun along his left knee. It rivaled a twin pain on the back of his head. Leaning against the guardrail, Hank examined himself. The blast from his shotgun had left a slick, black burn along the left of his knee and top of his calf, ending about an inch above his logger boot. His blood soaked into his pant leg, around a fresh hole that was six inches long and more than an inch wide. He touched the back of his head. It stung. His fingers came away wet and red.

  He set down his backpack and stripped to his bare chest. He ripped a few strips from the bottom of his T-shirt and soaked one with water from his canteen. Gritting his teeth, he scrubbed furiously at the back of his head until he was satisfied that he’d cleaned it as well as possible. The physical pain of it was somewhat cathartic against the guilt torturing his soul. Saturating another piece of bandage, he pressed it against his wound and used a length of fabric to hold it in place with a knot across forehead.

  Then he unstrapped Whisper’s holster and pulled out his multi-tool. At a point about mid-thigh, he cut off his left pant leg. A fresh wad of T-shirt was bloodied while cleaning up the groove blown into his leg. It looked nasty, but Hank was certain it was superficial. He salvaged some strips from the pant leg and used them to tie a white, cotton bandage over the breach in his flesh.

  With a few more strips of jeans material, he made repairs to his backpack. As he tended to his injuries, several groups of people, mostly small, some large, passed him by. They were all encouraged to maintain a healthy distance when he brandished Whisper and glared at them. When Hank was satisfied that all diligence had been given to his wounds and his equipment, he pulled on his shirt and Drover’s coat. After a quick inventory, he found his feet and planted them on his course again.

  By mid-morning the foot traffic had picked up to a steady flood. He couldn’t enumerate the blanket of people in either direction. Business is good, he thought morbidly of the toll bridge. Now and again a passer-by would shout out some tidbit of news. When they did, Hank told them about the toll or other specks of information they might use. Some had already heard about it, others had not.

  The news that he was able to gather seemed mixed. A movie theater behind the Wal-Mart just south of Powell Boulevard had been turned into a shelter, but they had run out of supplies. Most of the stores had been drained of anything useful. A few gangs were warring with the police and each other for domination of territory within the city. They were armed with guns and hand weapons. So long as you kept to the major roads, you were fairly safe, but even then some people were being harassed.

  The police were commandeering operational vehicles, even motorized scooters. They were trying to keep the camps and roads safe, but had no organization. There was almost no military presence. According to one resentful woman, the authorities had evicted the criminals from a downtown jail and moved their families into its protective walls.

  Hank absorbed all the news and kept plodding on. The local railway transit system was called MAX. Just a few blocks from the Glisan street MAX station was where Matthew, Marissa and their children called home. With this in mind, Hank made his way to the tracks and followed them toward his destination. If not for the overarching love and dedication that drove him toward his family, the deadly struggle on the bridge would have left Hank incapacitated by despair. As he stepped between the twin iron rails, he couldn’t stop his mind from lingering on what had transpired.

  Only three days ago, those people who had attacked him were clerks, accountants, teachers and cooks. They would have rushed to dial 911 if they had seen him in trouble. They would have helped him. They would have been decent people just three days ago. Whatever the specific circumstance that had brought each of them there, it was obvious that they now possessed nothing of value. They had no food, or anything worth trading. They were waiting for a chance to cross. They were on the beachhead of desperation. Without resources or wits, they had every ambition to risk life or limb and only imminent death could discourage them.

  The gray-skirted woman had had two children. They were babies, she had said. Were they twins? Hank wondered. Did she mean babies figuratively? He guessed that she had been in her early to mid-twenties with a professional career. Probably, they were young children. Who knows? He thought with a mental shrug of irony. How old were they? If I had spared a can of food, she wouldn’t be dead. Now her babies might be orphans, for all I know. And what did I do? Hank demanded of himself. I left her lying in the middle of the road. I left Jeremy buried in a stranger’s front yard and that woman lying in the middle of the road. Now she’s just maggot food, he railed inwardly.

  Walking along the tracks had a singular advantage. There was nobody near him. The path of least resistance, as well as the one most protected, was the road. As his course turned parallel to Interstate 84, Hank saw that drov
es of people filled the broad thoroughfare. Most were headed in the direction from which he had come. But hundreds of people were westbound as well. As the sun gained altitude, more and more feet crowded onto the black top.

  By the time Hank reached the Glisan Street MAX station, the sun had nearly reached its zenith. He had drunk the last of his water more than an hour before and now his mouth was sticky with thirst. The day was uncommonly hot for being the twenty-fifth of May. By his reckoning, the temperature was well into the eighties. But the humidity was so low that he couldn’t be sure.

  With slow, plodding steps, he climbed the station stairs. Although he was only a few blocks from his destination, Hank found a shaded bench and sat himself down. Next to him a Coke machine sat quietly and, as of yet, untouched. He felt mocked, knowing that gallons of clean water was within an arm's length, but unattainable. Briefly, Hank thought longingly of his missing crowbar.

  Resting his forearms on his knees, Hank leaned forward and cradled his head in his hands. A droplet of sweat fell from the tip of his nose and splattered on the cement. It formed a small, dark circle that faded into the pale, fabricated stone and vanished before the next bead of sweat followed. The air was still and silent, except for the muted sounds of refugees migrating along the interstate below. Taking a deep breath, Hank pressed his hands into his knees and groaned up to his feet.

  The brief hiatus had little effect on Hank's energy. He didn't seem to have enough for more than a trudging sort of amble down the vacant, litter-strewn street. Although no stranger to hard work, three days of raw physical exertion, sleep deprivation, emotional trauma, plus the unseasonable heat and onset of dehydration had pushed Hank to the absolute edge of his endurance. Only hope and love drove him forward.

  Just as expected, the houses and apartments were gutted by fire. He knew what would be left of the house Matt and Marissa had called home for twelve years. But when he rounded the corner and saw the burned down heap a deep sorrow for his brother and sister-in-law overcame him. The destruction of their house was even greater than most, because it had had a metal roof.