Pavement Ends: The Exodus

by Kurt Gepner

  Some of the refugees looked up and pointed at them, but mostly they were ignored by the wretched wayfarers. A mounted police officer, dressed in blue, rode below them on a tall chestnut gelding. People parted around him as he meandered up the river of pedestrians.

  Pulling back from the railing, Marissa and Hank regarded one another, each a reflection of amazement and dread. Then Hank looked past her at the Coke machine. His face lit up as his eyes lost focus and his expression became vague. "We have a crowbar," he said dreamily.

  "Yes," Marissa said a bit tersely. "You’ve made a point of moaning over the one you forgot in Walgreen’s."

  Hank smiled and pointed. "Nobody has touched that machine and we have a crowbar."

  Marissa looked over her shoulder at the red sentinel. She joined in his illuminated expression. "Oh!"

  It took them fifteen minutes to convince the vending machine to relinquish its trove of goodies. The children and adults formed a human chain and emptied the icon in another ten.

  They didn’t count, but Hank estimated that they collected eight cases of soda and four cases of water. He gave each of them a bottle of Coke. After they celebrated their harvest, benefiting greatly from the caffeine and sugar, Hank pressed them back to service. They re-mounted their bicycle-contraption and started down the other side of the overpass.

  As they turned in the direction of the I-84 onramp, they had troubles controlling their momentum. Even with Matt levering all of his weight against the makeshift brake, it took Hank and Marissa dragging their feet to stop just inches from a barricade. Access to the freeway was between two walls of concrete that served as sound barriers for the adjacent homes. A car had been pushed up on its side to entirely block the onramp, except for a gap so narrow that only one person could squeeze through at a time.

  They had barely come to a stop when three colorfully dressed men piled out of an old Dodge van and rushed toward the family. The men were young, no more than eighteen years old, and each carried some sort of weapon.

  "Great…" Hank muttered as he dismounted. Then he painted on his best smile and showed his palms. "Hey there," Hank said loudly. "You guys wouldn’t mind helping us through, would you?"

  The lead member, of what was clearly an organize gang, grinned crookedly at Hank. Like the other three, the left side of his head was shaved and he wore a red bandana over his brow, but he differed from them in the color of bandana that was tied around his upper arm. It was green, while the other two wore black.

  By Hank’s estimate, the leader was the youngest, perhaps fifteen or sixteen years old. He held an aluminum baseball bat and wore a sheathed bayonet at the side of his left combat boot. The grin he offered was not a kind one and Hank saw malice in his steel blue eyes. Wetting his lips, he nodded once toward Hank. "Dah," he said with a Slavic accent. "We help you." His two flunkies chuckled. "Go walk," he thrust his thumb toward the interstate, "and you have no problems." He looked at his friends. "Dat was helpful, dah?" His flunkies laughed in agreement.

  Hank could tell that he wasn’t going to be able to reason with the gang leader, so he reached into his drover’s coat for Whisper. Before he touched the handle, however, the gang leader had pulled a pistol, seemingly from thin air. It was cocked and pointed at Hank. "Don’t fuck with me," the gang leader said. "I shoot you dead."

  Slowly, Hank extracted his hand from his coat and held it high, along with his other hand. Suddenly, the leader collapsed and fired a round at the sky. An angry shriek came from on low. "You can’t do that!" Steven hacked at the gang leader, screaming and crying. "You can’t do that!" The first slash from the boy’s Kilij landed perfectly behind the knee, severing tendons. The following multitude of hacks landed with random passion. The gang member nearest Marissa lifted a three-foot iron pipe over his head, obviously intent on smashing the little boy.

  Hank grabbed for his shotgun, but again he was too slow. Before his hand touched the handle, the pipe-wielding gang member dropped to his knees. His weapon fell from his fingers and clanged brassily on the road. He looked down, disbelieving the two lengths of steel that had sprouted from his chest. Marissa’s narrow blade was through his heart, while ten inches of Matt’s wider blade had slid neatly between the ribs just below his left armpit. Marissa yanked her rapier free and the gang member fell over backward.

  The last teenager ran away. He quickly put distance between himself and the sword swinging family. All the way he yelled, "Tommy! Tommy! Help!"

  "He’s getting away, Hank! Shoot him!" Marissa snapped.

  "He’s gone," Hank said.

  "Shoot him!" Marissa commanded.

  "No!" Hank rejected her order. "We need to get out of here, before he comes back with more. Now help me to move this car."

  "Shoot him!" Marissa said with a deadly growl as she set the bloody tip of her rapier against his throat.

  Hank looked down at the blade, without moving his head. He met her eyes again and saw something feral stare back at him. The threat to her child and to their survival had filled her with a cold, glazed, murderous rage. Her pupils were dilated and her green irises were wreathed with a barely contained, white-hot frenzy.

  Deliberately, he freed Whisper from its holster and grimly took aim. The boom was incredibly loud. Perhaps eighty yards distant, a bouquet of crimson blossoms sprouted from the gang member’s back. He fell hard on his face with feet rolling up over his arched torso. Then he lay still.

  Wasting no time, Hank pumped and holstered his weapon. He knocked aside her blade with an angry swipe of his arm and retrieved the spent shell. Then he went around to the other side and pried the pistol from the gang leader’s shaking fist. Blood pulsed weakly from his enumerable wounds. Hank unstrapped the bayonet, patted him down and found nothing else on his person. The Smith and Wesson was a grimy black 38 Special. Only three of the revolver’s six chambers were loaded. Marissa took the weapon when Hank held it out to her. "Next time," he growled angrily, "you shoot the terrified kid in the back!"

  Hank picked up Steven, who was standing limply and bawling, and set the blood soaked boy into the trailer next to his father. Matt held his son tightly and consoled him while tears of gratitude and sadness and fear, and a thousand other unnamable feelings, coursed down his own cheeks.

  After tossing Steven’s bicycle into the trailer, Hank knelt beside Ella and asked the girl, "Are you all right?"

  She looked at him with round watering eyes. "Yes," she whimpered, trying to keep her tears inside.

  "Do you want to ride in the trailer?" he asked.

  "Yes," she sobbed. Hank picked her up and sat her next to her brother and then tossed her bike in as well.

  "Marissa," Hank said sternly. "Help me with this car."

  Marissa was in an obvious state of shock. Hank could see that his sister-in-law was consumed with horror. Whether it was for what she’d just seen or what she had just done, Hank didn’t know, but her whole body trembled. She stumbled to the concrete wall and leaned against it with buckling knees. Unable to hold herself upright, she sank to the pavement and retched.

  A small flicker of pity flashed in his heart, but Hank had exhausted his compassion for the moment. He left the woman to heave up her guts. In the trailer, Ella and Steven were clinging to their father for comfort. Hank saw a soul-deep agony etched in his brother’s face.

  With an energizing breath, Hank commanded himself to the task at hand. He dragged the corpse from beside the trailer over to the road side. Then, sparing no sympathy, he dragged the moaning gang-leader out of the street and left him to his final suffering along the curb.

  The upturned car was a long, brown, soft-top Pontiac. In order to right the old beast, their own make-shift vehicle had to be pushed out of the way. Hank did that.

  While Marissa continued her loud vomiting, he went to the opposite side of the car and rested his hands on the hood. It was warm from the mid-morning sun. Grunting with the effort, he pressed his shoulder against the old beast. It hardly budged. Fueled by the res
idual adrenaline of their encounter and a dark nebulous cloud of anger, Hank roared and shoved against the clunker with all of his might. The old rust-bucket groaned slightly as it fell to rest on its four flat tires.

  Hank moved the shifter into neutral and popped the parking brake. He still had more fury to spend and cashed it in with one intense surge against the dented rusting jalopy. The car yielded to the raging bear of a man.

  "Be sick later," he said to Marissa. "We need to go."

  "I’m so sorry," she said and heaved again.

  He was dizzy from his exertion and it felt like an ice-pick was perforating his lower back. "I don’t care right now!" Hank snarled his words at her. "Get up! Get on! Get going!"

  Marissa crawled to her feet and sheathed her blade. She did not look at Hank. She did not look at her husband. She did not look at her children. She looked only at the dead and dying. Then she mounted her bicycle and began to pedal. Hank said nothing as they slowly rolled between the walls and onto Interstate 84.

  They merged seamlessly into the traffic. A mounted police officer rode up beside them. Hank acknowledged the man, but kept his lips pressed together tightly. The officer stood a little on his stirrups and twisted to look back upon the path that the family had traveled. "That was blocked a while ago. What happened?" The officer asked as he sat down again.

  Hank glanced at the officer. He gnawed on his bottom lip for a moment and then answered. "We were attacked by a gang."

  The officer nodded grimly and asked, "There’s a lot of blood. Who got hurt?"

  "Just the gang," Hank replied.

  The officer nodded again. "How many?"

  "Three," Hank said.

  "Good," The officer said. Then he clucked at his horse and trotted ahead of the family, slowly weaving into the distance. Hank and Marissa pedaled in silence.

  A few people they passed were all but naked, with only towels or plastic bags to provide them a sense of propriety. Most people were clothed and shoed, however, and carried a few possessions. Some carried gym bags, pushed wheelbarrows, pulled travois or otherwise hauled their belongings, however plentiful or meager. Shopping carts were the predominant form of transport.

  Everybody was filthy. The men were scruffy with three full days of growth on their smudged and oft bruised faces. People lay dying from various injuries and ailments. Bodies lined the sides of the road. Some had died of exhaustion, others of exposure or a lack of medicine, but many because of each other. The stench of unwashed bodies, feces, urine and death was vigorously recovering from the cleansing rain of the previous night’s storm.

  A certain resignation and rhythm had come over the people. For the most part, nobody asked for anything and nobody offered. Occasionally a person still had a touch of humor left and they would make a witty comment about the vehicle that Hank and Marissa were pedaling. The majority of those who had enough energy to show emotion, however, did so in the form of crying and whimpering.

  Very few children were on the road, but here and there a good Samaritan shepherded a cluster of orphans. Despondent parents with wailing infants and toddlers sat along the road-side, too exhausted to go on.

  One girl, of perhaps ten years in age, sat holding the hand of a corpse. If approached, she would lift a chromed pistol and competently point it at the interloper until she was left alone. She did not answer their questions. She did not invite their sympathy, nor would she accept it. She ate and drank anything tossed her way, but she did not move.

  Hank and Marissa pedaled on in monotonous silence. From time to time they were forced to stop, because somebody had fallen or had dropped something or just wouldn’t clear their path. Multitudes of steadily padding feet, the staccato rattling of carts and the rhythmic cranking of pedals were their constant companions. The few breaks in their heavy respiration involved Hank shouting at pedestrians, or urging Marissa to drink water.

  For her part, Marissa was holding herself together, but just barely. Before, when she was uncertain if she had killed someone, she had suppressed her feelings of guilt. She had rationalized her actions and finally she had consoled herself with the thought that there was, in fact, no evidence that she had killed a person. Now, however, she was a murderer thrice over.

  She had instructed her children to attack when threatened. Poor Steven had done only what he was told to do and there was no doubt that the boy he had attacked would die. Steven was not to blame. She had given him a deadly weapon, taught him how to use it and pointed him at a person. What did she expect to happen? It was her fault.

  Then she had stabbed a boy through the heart. She knew that her actions were justifiable and given the same circumstances, she would do it again. She was also aware that her husband’s sword would have also killed the boy. That was irrelevant to the fact that she had proved, without a shadow of doubt, that she was capable of killing another human.

  Finally, she had forced Hank, a man she knew to be gentle and caring, to shoot a boy in the back. The boy had certainly been affiliated with the gang, but he had held off right from the start. The boy was clearly misguided and perhaps he was guilty by association, but he was not a direct threat. Yet, Marissa thought, I physically coerced an unwilling person to shoot that boy in the back. I am a monster!

  On and on Marissa mentally flogged herself. Her self-conflagration purged her awareness from all that her body suffered. When Hank pedaled, she pedaled. In all other ways, she may as well have been catatonic.

  CHAPTER TEN

  After their first hour of labored pedaling, Hank had drunk three bottles of water while Marissa had drunk none. Each time he drank a bottle, he urged his sister-in-law to drink one as well, but she ignored him. Finally, after a grueling merger onto I-205 North, Hank’s aggravation exceeded his already over-taxed self-control. "God damn it, Marissa! Drink the fucking water! If you get dehydrated, you’ll be even more useless than you already are! And then what!?! Am I going to have to toss your stupid ass in the back and do ALL the fucking work?"

  Hank thrust an open bottle at her and water sloshed from it, splattering across her face. Marissa looked at him as if in a daze. "What?" She asked.

  "Drink the God damned water!" Hank shouted at her. She took it from him and drank it down mechanically. Hank reached back and said, "Give me another one."

  Ella handed him a bottle and he snatched it from her grasp. The young girl began to cry and leaned into her father for comfort. Over his shoulder Hank shouted, "Suck it up, Ella!"

  That’s enough! Marissa thought, suddenly cogent once more. "Don’t talk to her like that," she said in a low growl.

  "Drink your fucking water!" Hank spat his words at her without concern for any hurt feelings. "I’m saving your asses." He jabbed his finger at her and spoke lower, slower and more dangerously. "If I say suck it up, then that… is what… WILL happen."

  A small hint of compassion shaded Hank’s voice as he went on. "And if we survive, you can tell me how much of a bastard I am." Then, realizing that he was acting like a bastard, he calmed himself and went on with a more civil tone. "But we won’t survive, if you won’t do what I say. Now please, Marissa, drink that bottle and this one too." Marissa did as he asked, resentfully, but dutifully. They rested for ten minutes then pedaled on.

  The day grew hotter and, worse still, very humid. The air stuck to the skin like rancid paste. Flies clogged their vision. They made a feast of dripping sweat and no amount of swatting or waving could keep them away.

  As the family approached the Prescott Overpass the steady traffic slowed to a quagmire of putrid fear. Hank yelled repeatedly for people to move, but eventually even threats with his shotgun were unable to part the crowd. He asked people what was happening, why they were held up, but got no sensible answers. Nobody knew. Finally he lost his patience and fired a shot into the air. The mob parted and a path opened for them. Once they emerged through the invisible wall, they assessed their environment.

  There were five police officers keeping the peace and preventing pil
grims from passing. Like most people, the officers expressed curiosity over the pedal cart that Hank and Marissa were powering, but studiously ignored their possessions. One younger officer, however, approached them with a gangly purposeful stride. Stretching his palm in their direction, he brought them to a halt. "Hold up folks. I know you’ve had a hard time getting through, but I can’t let you go on."

  "Why’s that?" Hank asked, craving information.

  "Because," the officer said and jerked his thumb toward the overpass, "Those God damned punks are raining bricks down on people who try to get through."

  "The what? Why?" Hank was baffled.

  "Food," the officer answered. "And they want a lot of it."

  "Who? A gang?" Hank was impatient and anxious to reach their rendezvous with the Caravan. "Why don’t you just take care of it?"

  With darkening face the officer said, "You know, we’re doing what we can to keep people safe. And, uh, we have only so much ammunition, almost no transportation and no communication. And besides, we, uh, can’t get a good shot at them from down here anyway."

  "Why don’t you just send a SWAT team up there and clear them out?" Hank asked accusingly.

  Darkening further, the officer crossed his arms. "The streets up there are, uh, in total anarchy. So, how are we supposed to take care of it? And, uh, why am I justifying to you?" The officer averted his gaze to look at the overpass. "Nobody gets through and that’s the final word!"

  Hank scowled. A quick scan revealed that the other side of the overpass was also being blocked by uniformed officers. A few knots of stragglers were sheltered under the bridge and a few bodies lay in the road with bricks next to them. Hank looked at the officer and then at the man’s badge and name patch on his uniform.

  "Officer Leonard," he said in a matter-of-fact tone, "you have thousands of people backed up on both sides of that bridge and dozens stuck underneath. I can’t see where you’re doing any good.