by James Sperl
The radio message had garbled when the voice on the other end named Rosenstein's location. Though an important detail, it also turned out to be a problematic one. Collectively, Clarissa and the others could list six different states that had a city called Ashland in it, but they weren't able to discern a state name in the transmission. At the time, no one considered it a big deal. A simple reference check of the U.S.'s contiguous forty-eight states would yield a master list of Ashlands, which would help the group determine where they should go.
They were traveling north of Pastora toward Bend when Andrew suggested they seek out a library. To everyone's surprise, the first one they came across—the quaint Bend Southwest Library—was open for business. When asked how they were up and running when so much around the world was happening, the two-woman crew that ran it by candlelight declared with immeasurable stoicism how they would not let the “current state of affairs” deter them from providing literature and educational materials to the public. Their devotion moved Clarissa.
It was there she and the others procured a Rand McNally U.S. road atlas. It was the 2007 edition, but it was good enough—no one imagined a new Ashland had sprung up in the years since. Jon had combed through the book's index of places, which listed each state's cities by county along with their relative populations, and highlighted each Ashland entry.
The news wasn't good.
Twenty-two.
That was the number of cities, towns, or burgs named Ashland that existed in the Continental United States. Like that, the group's already daunting journey had transformed into an all out, cross-country odyssey.
They felt the frustration uniformly. How in the hell were they supposed to find Rosenstein Biotechnologies from a grocery list of twenty-two possible locations? As the voice on the radio assured, the shadow company called Rosenstein wouldn't be listed in the Yellow Pages, and with no power or Internet, it couldn't very well be Googled. The only solution was the one nobody wanted to admit: they would have to travel from Ashland to Ashland and systematically eliminate contenders until they located Rosenstein. For many, though, the “until” was highly dubious.
Evan hoisted the tent to throw it into the bed of Andrew's truck but faltered with the weight. Clarissa rushed over to help him.
“So where're we headed today?” he said, as Clarissa caught a section of tent that drooped over the rear quarter panel.
Andrew pulled open the door to the truck. “Pennsylvania.”
Number fifteen, Clarissa thought.
Ashland, Ohio—much like the thirteen Ashlands before it—bore no fruit, and as the list of unexplored Ashlands dwindled, she began to lose heart that they would ever find what they sought. It was ludicrous what they were doing. How could they expect to find a covert, government-run facility without any information to lead them to it? It was like trying to locate a pebble on a sandy beach at night. Sure, they hit up local yellow pages (as if) and wandered through each towns' industrial sectors in the hopes of happening upon something that fit the profile, but it was all speculation. Even conversations with non-aggressive locals yielded big steaming piles of caca. No one knew what they were looking for, and they sure as heck didn't know where to look for it. The place could be anywhere.
But Clarissa did learn a couple of things from Andrew, who she was convinced spent all of his time reading when he wasn't busy preparing for the end of the world.
The voice in the transmission had trotted out a pair of unfamiliar acronyms. Clarissa had heard of one of them before but didn't know what it meant. Andrew was quick to educate.
The message spoke of D.A.R.P.A., which stood for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. It was a legitimate branch of the U.S. Government tasked with research and development projects for future defense technologies and not, as the more conspiracy-swayed customers of Aunt Mae's would have Clarissa believe, a splinter agency that developed secret tech and ran by its own set of rules. Or maybe it did. What did she know? All she knew was that the B.T.O.—the other acronym mentioned in the broadcast, which operated under the D.A.R.P.A. umbrella and stood for Biological Technologies Office—factored into all of this somehow. Clarissa didn't care what any of it meant. She only wanted an end to this living nightmare. With any luck, they would find it in Pennsylvania.
“Did someone say Pennsylvania?” Valentina stepped out of a thin line of trees holding a plastic washbasin filled with rattling dishes. Rachel tromped behind her clutching a bottle of soap and a bag of damp towels. “I've always wanted to go to Hershey. I miss chocolate.”
“Well, you should prepare yourself for disappointment,” Jon said. “Because we won't be passing through it. Not even close.”
Valentina stuck out her tongue playfully, as Jon popped the hatch on the SUV. She stuffed the basin in the back.
Rachel plopped down the soap and towels beside it. “Pennsylvania, huh?” she said.
“Yep,” Jon said.
“Awesome,” she replied with no amount of awesomeness.
“Oh, come on, Rach,” Cesare said through a wide grin, as he escorted Elenora to the backseat of the SUV. “What else do you have to do?” He opened the door for his grandmother and helped her inside.
Rachel lifted her brows in defeated assent. “I know, right? I'd planned on going out to dinner and a movie later, but, you know, apocalypse and all.”
Cesare chuckled. Clarissa caught him exchange barely suppressed goo-goo eyes with Rachel. The flirtatiousness between them had grown more overt in recent weeks. They had shared a spark from the get-go that only intensified with each day they spent in close quarters with one another. Clarissa thought they made a good couple, and though it took a bruising to her ego, she thought Valentina had come to accept that, for once, she wasn't the object of desire.
Elenora leaned out the door. “You could always do what I'm doing,” she began, “and consider this a chance to see parts of the country you've never seen before.”
Rachel put up a smile that bordered on artificial. “It's a thought, though I can't say that...” She turned to Andrew. “Where are we again?”
“Dosen,” Andrew answered without looking.
Rachel turned back to Elenora. “...Dosen, Ohio, is real high on my bucket list.”
Elenora shrugged. “I guess it's all in how you look at it.”
“I guess so.”
Rachel and Cesare looked at one another again. This time, Clarissa swore she saw Rachel's face flush with panic as if she worried that she had just insulted Elenora and tarnished the woman's approval of her. Cesare subtly shook it off.
Andrew stepped to the rear of the truck and passed his eyes over the group. “We ready?”
Everyone nodded affirmatively.
“Then let's get rolling.”
The group mumbled agreement, as each person peeled off to his or her travel vehicle—Andrew, Cesare, Elenora, and Rachel in the truck, Jon, Evan, Valentina, and Clarissa in the SUV.
Engines rumbled to life. Not seconds later, both vehicles accelerated onto the state road that led away from the campground.
Next, Clarissa thought from the rear passenger seat of the SUV. According to the road atlas, the travel time to Ashland, Pennsylvania should take five hours, but these days such estimates were pie-in-the-sky dreaming. With so many roads either dangerous (bands of violent looters prowled the highways) or impassable (abandoned cars made for terrible congestion), the time it took to get between two points was often more than twice what Rand McNally claimed, and that was on days when fuel wasn't an issue.
Unlike today.
CHAPTER 31
The highways didn't look like they did in apocalyptic movies. Hollywood would have one believe that a mass exodus from cities resulted in copious abandoned vehicles strewn scattershot along freeways. While Clarissa and the others had encountered no shortage of ownerless cars and trucks, their placement in the road was far from random. In fact, it was downright orderly.
And it unnerved Clarissa to her core.
&
nbsp; “God, this is so weird,” she said, as she gazed through the window of the truck at a line of vehicles parked nose to tail across two lanes. “I still can't get over how so many of these cars never even budged from the road.”
Evan twisted around to look at her from the front seat. “I know, right?” he said before facing forward again. “Based on how people were freaking out back home, I thought the highways would've looked like a one-sheet from The Walking Dead, not just your average traffic jam.”
Clarissa nodded. “Tell me about it.”
“Maybe that's what's been happening,” Valentina said, sitting forward enthusiastically. “Maybe we're in the initial stages of a zombie apocalypse.”
Jon glanced at Evan from behind the wheel then found Clarissa and Valentina in the rearview. “You guys have seen one too many movies.”
Clarissa snapped her eyes to him. “What, you don't think this is strange? We've been traveling the highways for months, and whenever we come across a traffic block it looks like folks just up and left their cars in the road? I think it's strange.”
Jon tossed his head from side-to-side. “I mean, yeah, it is a little, I guess, but not so much when you think about how things likely played out.”
Clarissa tipped her head. “What do you mean?”
“Well, here you've got a bunch of people traveling along the same road, everyone freaked out with fear, when they come across a bottleneck. Could've been an accident. Could be some folks ran out of fuel, or worse, it could've been that something bad went down. Either way, the result is the same—you're trapped. Unless you're in something capable of driving off-road, once traffic stops moving, all a person can do is wait until things get going again. As we've seen all over the country, things never start going again.”
Clarissa looked at the median that divided the highway, as Jon slalomed among cars parked on the shoulder of the road. He had a point. The median was wide and grassy with a deep divot that cut right down the middle. Only a high-clearance vehicle would be able to traverse the ditch without becoming hung up. Quite a few stranded cars found that out the hard way.
On the opposite side of the road, a guardrail lined the shoulder and provided a barrier against the drop-off beyond it. Clarissa saw Jon's reasoning. No one had any place to go. Anyone driving a lesser vehicle would be forced to commit to having to go forward. Some had tried to turn around, as was evident by the occasional backward-facing car, but as the queue grew and the road became clogged, people got stuck. And that said nothing of what happened when car after car ran out of gas.
Fuel.
It was the bane of their existence. Gas stations had stopped selling it almost two months ago. Not only had production dwindled to nearly non-existent, but the little that remained had been commandeered by executive order. Clarissa once saw an Exxon tanker truck in Montana get escorted down a road under Humvee supervision, all four of which had soldiers hunched over machine guns in the turrets.
So they scavenged.
In jams like this, fuel was more plentiful than one might expect—if one knew how to get it. Some newer model vehicles employed difficult to siphon capless fuel ports, but most cars and trucks still used locking gas caps. It was behind these where reservoirs of liquid gold sat, but the removal of the caps required some effort and a little skill. It was common to come across a pried-open fuel door and find a damaged gas cap still in place. In rare instances, when would-be pilferers had given up trying to access the fuel through conventional means, entire fuel tanks had been removed. The result was still the same, but the method used to achieve it was a labor-intensive endeavor too time-consuming to be practical. Fortunately, for Clarissa and the others, Jon knew a trick.
Using only a hammer and a screwdriver, he showed the gas-strapped group how to make quick work of a locking cap. Punching the screwdriver tip through the cap in just the right place and at a slight angle damaged the locking mechanism enough to allow the cap to unscrew. After that, it was simply a matter of siphoning the fuel.
Again, Jon was there with the plan. Using liter-sized water bottles, tape, and lengths of garden hose, he produced a deceptively straightforward self-siphoning apparatus that didn't require a person's mouth ever to come into contact with the toxic liquid. Andrew was more than impressed.
Pulling on to a level stretch of the median, Jon came to a stop and cut the engine. Andrew pulled up alongside him. Everyone got of his or her respective vehicle.
“Okay,” Andrew said, as he reached into the truck for his rifle. He performed a three-hundred-sixty-degree survey of their surroundings. “You all know the drill. Speed and safety.”
No one spoke, as they descended upon the empty gas cans stored in the truck bed and on the roofs of both vehicles. No one had to. Everyone knew what to do and with whom to do it. Just like they knew they shouldn't spend one minute more than they had to parked along a major interstate.
Clarissa plucked a five-gallon can and one of several prepared siphon kits from the back of the truck. Valentina shuffled up beside her and grabbed two cans of her own. She gave Clarissa a raised-eyebrow look of forced tolerance.
“See you soon,” she said.
Clarissa managed a smile. “See you soon.”
“Ready?” Jon said to Valentina, as he sidled up beside her.
Valentina sighed. “Ready.”
“Okay. Let's hit it.” He looked at Andrew. “We'll head west.”
Andrew threw a bag containing a siphon kit and tools over his shoulder. “Sounds good. Clarissa and I will move east. Cesare, you and Rachel hit the vehicles in between.”
Cesare slung a similar bag over his shoulder then untied two beat-up gas cans from the roof of the SUV. “You got it.” He smiled at Rachel then locked on Evan, who sat with Elenora in the backseat of the truck. “You good?”
“We're fine,” Elenora said ahead of Evan. “Now get going, be safe, and hurry back.”
“Roger that,” Jon affirmed.
Andrew clutched two cans and passed his eyes over the group. “Everyone ready?”
Again, no words. Just nods.
“All right,” he said, already moving away. “Let's get this done.”
* * *
The deserted vehicles that clogged I-80 Eastbound looked promising. Few of the fuel doors had been tampered with, which meant the likelihood of finding gas was high. This was good news.
Clarissa hated scrounging for gas, almost as much as she hated being dependent upon the vehicles that used it. But cars and trucks were more necessary now than they had ever been. For the average person, moving from place to place was not only advisable, it was part of the daily ritual. Remaining immobile too long gave predators the opportunity to wreak havoc on those who were predisposed to peaceful living. For folks that preferred the danger of settling to transiency, high group numbers seemed to work as a deterrent against wanton attacks, but they were never a guarantee.
Clarissa longed for things to return to normal. She often daydreamed of plopping onto her sofa at home and kicking up her feet with a glass of red after taking the world's longest, hottest bath. She fantasized about binge-watching TV shows until her eyes bugged out of her head from exhaustion. She visualized a refrigerator and cupboards so full of food she had to eat until the doors were able to close. Most of all, she dreamed of someone to share it all with, even though that fantasy hadn't existed for her even before the world started to end.
Was it so much to ask? How hard was it to find a decent, caring man? The answer, apparently: very hard. All she wanted was someone who would love her and stand with her, someone with whom she could share her bed and feel his warm skin on hers, to inhale him, to absorb him until they were one. Someone who would provide comfort and reassurance and tell her that despite all the terrible shit that went on outside her window, being with her was what home felt like.
They were only wistful dreams when she said them out loud, but that didn't stop her from making them real in her mind. Pessimism was never her thing, though
it was getting harder and harder to maintain the fluid level in her optimist's glass. Her imaginary life could be a reality one day. She believed this. She had to. Until then, Rosenstein.
She and Andrew trotted alongside the glut of cars, passing would-be contenders with a scrupulous eye. Clarissa made mental notes as to which vehicles they should try first. Their tactic was well-practiced: proceed first to a point far from home base and work your way back. One too many times they had misjudged how much fuel they would find within a certain distance and came up short. When that happened, it was back to square one, wherein they lugged weighty, half-full cans of sloshing gas past an initial starting point to top them off. Rule number one of roadside fuel acquisition: if possible, never leave a scene empty-handed.
They ran past a mile marker/exit sign. The beginning of the word DuBois (a city name Clarissa recognized from the atlas) poked out from underneath a panel of weathered cardboard, which had been duct-taped over the green sign. On it was written the words: “Trading Post – 11 miles.”
Clarissa said nothing in acknowledgment. Neither did Andrew. They had seen signs like this before. Sometimes they were legitimate; sometimes they were traps. Only a visual assessment could determine which. It did no good to talk about it until then.
Andrew looked back at his truck and gauged their distance. He stopped on the gravelly shoulder.
“Okay,” he said through a light pant. “I think we're good. Let's go.”
Clarissa nodded and followed him over to a Honda Civic. It wasn't special. It was just first.
Andrew got to work on the fuel door while Clarissa tried the driver's side door. Locked. She rooted in Andrew's backpack and pulled out a punch, which she pushed against the window with her entire body until the window shattered. People were such funny creatures sometimes, she thought. Here they were in the midst of an inexplicable, all-out world event, and still, people locked the doors to their cars.
