In ten minutes we arrived at the farmhouse on fire. It wasn't far from the pavement.
The place was newer—not the traditional weather-beaten house and barn from the horse and buggy days you would imagine on the high plains. A large antenna was attached to one side of the house and a dozen green farm implements sat between the house and the large wooden barn. Both structures were on fire, though the barn was already nearly out after consuming everything inside.
A little warning light in my mind told me not to get involved here, as the whole thing didn't add up, but Jo was out of the car and screaming like a banshee. I parked well away from the heat and flames and ran to meet her.
“Mr. Evans! Mr. Evans!” she screamed.
Jo ran to a nearby SUV. It looked foreign to me because my life revolved around sportscars, but such vehicles were fine in the south as it was—I thought—pretty safe now. Whatever she hoped to find, it wasn't there. She ran around the back of the burning house, screaming his name the whole way.
I couldn't keep up with all the fires. There were pops and fizzles coming from inside the home; they drowned out Jo's calls from the backside while they continued. I could imagine any number of explosive liquids—oils, greases, gasoline—necessary for the operation of the cars and farm equipment. It wasn't unusual for citizens to keep those resources locked up in their living spaces to keep thieves from taking them. That's another reason people tended to live together out on the plains, at least in these modern times, so someone was always at the homestead to keep watch. I realized there was no one standing around watching but Jo and I. Whoever lived here must not have been home at all.
Or, maybe they were there; just not alive.
Jo came around the opposite side of the house from where she disappeared.
“Go! Get down!” She screamed wildly when she saw me, waving me back. I hesitated, as I saw no threats beyond the huge fire she'd circumnavigated without incident.
I took a step back, but still didn't understand. I formulated the response in my head: “Where's the fire?” It was going to be epic, and the timing exquisite.
I only got out the “Where” before something large exploded from behind the house. The ground shook and I lost my balance and fell from my feet. Jo, already running, looked like she'd been picked up a foot, then thrown to the right a couple feet by the force of the blast. She landed not far from me.
A huge plume rose from behind the house, even as debris started to rain down everywhere around us.
A large crash sounded behind me. Small bits of debris tinkled onto both our cars, but I knew something larger had struck mine. From the ground I turned and could see a large piece of metal had come out of the sky and crushed the middle of my car.
Jo was on her feet first, though I was ready when she pulled me up.
With smoldering debris everywhere, and fires in multiple directions, I stood there like an ass. After all, I'd brought nothing but a screwdriver to an inferno.
You got issues
The first thing I did when I reached my feet was run to my car.
“It's totaled. Leave it!” Jo yelled.
I was not going to leave my dad. Not for her; not for nobody. But when I reached the car I'd used for so many months, I could see no one was left in the front.
“He must have made it out.” I turned around as Jo paced nearby. “He made it out. It's all good.”
“No, I don't think Evans made it out at all. I think he's dead, inside. His car is over there under what's left of his barn.” The barn had collapsed in on itself. The crushed and burned shells of several cars poked out from the fallen rafters.
“I was talking about my dad, not Evans.”
Jo turned to me liked I'd stepped in dog crap. “Your dad? He was in your car?”
It seemed perfectly obvious. Of course he'd been there.
I looked back at my Camaro, and reformulated my answer. “My dad is sometimes in my car. He wasn't there when the debris fell.”
“Girl, I thought I was messed up. You got issues.”
I didn't know what that was supposed to mean, but she didn't want to go claw to claw at that moment.
“Grab what you can from your car. This isn't right. We have to tell someone.”
I didn't know what I'd grab. My cargo hold was mostly empty, just as I'd said, but I had a few things I could take. My music player was ruined, but I grabbed the one personal thing I always kept with me: a little bobblehead golden retriever. I reached in through the broken windshield, peeled it off the IROC's crushed dashboard, and put it in my pocket.
I also grabbed my CB Radio and antenna. I'd need those no matter what I was driving.
In the few minutes it took for me to ransack my own ride, Jo had pulled hers around so it faced the road. She revved the engine and puffs of dust rose from the dirty driveway from her dual exhaust wash.
I read her engine noise as if she were speaking.
“Hurry, girl. We gotta scoot,” it said.
I popped my lift gate one last time, thinking I may have left something back there. In fact there was one last paper bag fluttering in the corner. I grabbed it and carried it with me to her Mustang. When I hopped in I tossed the bag in the floorboard of her back seat, along with my radio.
“So, where we going? Hays?” It would be the most logical place, I thought. Find the authorities, tell them what happened and all.
“No, I have another stop to make.”
“What? You're running freight, still?”
Jo had moved the car to the edge of the pavement. I felt the call of the yellow line even as a passenger. My hands got sweaty in my driving gloves, as they always did. But Jo was a tease. She stopped so she could look over at me. “Listen...” She rubbed her face, clearing her own sweat. “I can't go back yet. I just can't. When you drive on the highways.” She looked both ways on the road. The remote farm had visibility for miles in every direction. “The stakes are higher. I was supposed to pick up something from Evans. It's either phenomenally bad timing, or something else is going on.”
Her demeanor turned serious. “What was that back there. Are you all right? You said your dad was in your car. I was watching you as we drove. You were talking to someone, weren't you?”
I felt the accusation, but I couldn't very well go on blathering about how I sometimes talked to my dad, and sometimes when I went dangerously fast he showed up to slow me down. Whether she saw him or not, I knew he was there for me. I desperately wanted to explain all of it to Jo, but I could sense that wasn't going to fly. Not here, with a burning homestead off our rear quarter panel. She was looking for a co-pilot, someone she could trust to help her get her freight delivered, no matter what else was going on.
“I know it looked like I was talking to someone, and yes I did mention my dad. But that's just my way of keeping it together out here by myself. I don't have a co-pilot, and I hardly see people. I just like to stay social, that's all.”
It sounded good, and mostly it was true.
I could tell she bought it. Maybe she had no choice, given the circumstances. However, it was much easier to believe my story than to think I was really seeing my dead dad in my passenger seat.
She turned left with caution, then worked through the gears with great skill until we were tilting the speedometer past the 100. Buckled in to the surging animal as I was, I could almost forget the sadness I'd felt when I thought my dad was struck by the debris after the explosion.
Searching my feelings, I knew deep down he was dead. But he was also with me, out here in the wastelands of Kansas. He'd steered me right, many times. Of course, an equal number of times I ignored him and did what I wanted. Maybe it made him mad when I didn't listen, but sometimes I thought I saw a smile on his face, like he was proud he had a daughter who didn't always follow his rules.
Jo downshifted and the car lurched forward as we decelerated at the edge of a town. Beyond, another thin rope of smoke rose into the air, then bent over like a whip antenna on the wind
.
Something serious was going on, and it wasn't just at the Evans' farm.
In the rearview mirror I caught motion behind me, inside the car. Jo had ripped her backseats out as most couriers did, but I know I saw someone sitting back where the seats should have been.
I pretended to look back at the fire. But when I searched the rear of her car, my dad was gone.
Save the car
“What town is this? It looks like Greensburg. I can't remember. Been too long.”
One of the fortified towns. A string of them run down the middle of the pony pastures, sort of like lifeboats for the surrounding homesteads and farming villages. Greensburg is typical for the towns out here—flat, grid street system, and surly residents.
By the time she asked the question we passed the “Welcome to Greensburg” road sign, though the population figure had been painted over in an angry black streak.
“If you want to drop me off, I can make my way back to Hays on my own.”
“No,” she said quickly, and to my relief. It was exciting riding with a professional. “I, uh, need a co-pilot. You can learn on the job.”
“Excellent! Where do we pick up the goods?” I'm sure I sounded like a giddy schoolgirl, but I admit I was feeling pretty happy. I didn't relish begging a ride home from someone else. That would involve talking to them. Going to get my first piece of important cargo was a much more exciting path.
Still, Jo looked at me sideways. “Hold your horses. We've got to report this to the Sheriff. Since we're right here we can go into the fort.”
I wanted to ask her why. Why not just radio it in? But I didn't want to look like a total rookie, even though I was.
Inside Greensburg, things looked pretty much like the other towns in these parts. Cars of all types were parked three deep in every yard, open lot, and in front of every building. Every refugee between Kansas City and Denver fled to points between to escape the conflagrations. They brought everything in their cars and drove them until they ran out of gas. In the early days it was a cottage industry to go out and recover them. Now, they provided miles and miles of spare parts for the survivors.
We drove through block after block of vehicles, until we came to the squat brick building housing the sheriff and his deputies. Unlike the highway patrol and their penchant for dramatic and menacing interceptors, the local sheriffs usually stuck with the cars they had before the bombs. The gold 4-door sedan cruisers were a few years old, but still ran better than most civilian cars. And they were perfectly clean.
Jo ran her Mustang right up the service garage door of the department—a bay that was probably always hopping, no matter the hour. Again, pretty typical out here. She pulled her leather jacket from the mess in the back, put it on, then buttoned a few of the lower buttons to cover herself up.
“Come on, rook. We'll report your car while we're here, too.”
We walked by the big hand-lettered sign at the door. The three rules for drivers everywhere. Losing a car in a wreck was usually the first and last step in being reassigned to push a shovel at a farm somewhere. Maybe it was true for the sheriff's office too.
Rule 1. Save the car.
Rule 2. Save the parts.
Rule 3. Save the driver.
I'd never noticed the driver was last, until just now. Of course, I'd never lost a car before nor had I ever been so close to getting myself offed in an explosion. If the car and the driver failed to return...
“I guess I wouldn't have a worry,” I mused to myself.
We crossed the grungy floor of the work bay, and approached a gaggle of farmers and a couple deputies. I could tell they were already aware of what we were there to report.
“Smoke to the south and east, Marv. You've got to do something.”
The young deputies seemed overwhelmed. The other men had them surrounded, though there was no hostility in the room. They just wanted the attention of the law.
“Please. Listen. We know of the fires. We see them, too. But we don't have the manpower to track down each one. There are too many.”
Jo yelled over the backs of the men. “The Evans' place blew up. We were just there. She lost her daily driver in the blast.” The farmers turned to Jo, then to me. They sized us up, as men often did, but resumed talking to the two uniformed deputies in their scrum.
“You see? This is getting out of hand!”
“You have to go out there.”
“Who will protect my farm?”
I thought they all had good points, but even I could see there were only two deputies. Not only could they not put out the fires that had been reported, but they had no chance of doing anything to protect the remaining farms. That was the purview of the respective families living there.
Jo and I watched as best we could, though the chatter became confusing and contradictory the longer we stood around.
She touched my arm to get my attention. “I'm going to go around to the front offices. See if anyone else can take down your information.”
We'd made it outside the garage door when another gold car marked “Sheriff” came to a hard stop just next to Jo's 'Stang. It was close enough I could feel the heat of the engine on my face.
A stocky older man got out, quick to throw his Stetson over his thinning gray hair. I raised my hand in a wave, ready to greet the long-time sheriff, but he ran right by so he could address the men in the garage.
“We're at war!”
You seem competent
Jo and I shared a look. Suddenly reporting a missing car was low on the to-do list of our day. My mind spun like the cylinder of a revolver. If this was a war, I knew what I wanted.
Find a new car.
Get to Hays.
See Penn.
I didn't know how Penn got in there. Could I see him? Should I? Why would I?
The cylinder spun wildly until Jo spoke.
“They'll radio this in. I can't...I have to—” She turned back toward the station. “You wait for me in the car. We're leaving. I'll be right back.” Then, contrary to her statement, she ran down the sidewalk and around the corner of the building. Beyond her I could see a lot full of sad-looking impounds.
I sat in the car as instructed. Once in my spot, I slowly turned around to look in the back. I really thought I'd see my dad, but I only saw her cargo area. Unlike mine, hers was stuffed with junk. I could see clothes of every sort, shoes, a plastic child's bucket, a basketball. What did she do if she had to transport something with some bulk?
It was a confused jumble of seemingly unrelated gear. Not what I imagined for someone running in the pro leagues up on the interstate. It was more like the stylings of a vagabond.
Some drivers lived in their cars.
I examined the area with an eye toward living in the Mustang. I saw a tightly wrapped sleeping bag stuffed behind my seat. A mushed pillow lay toward the back, under a net of some kind. A few cans of food had been lined up in the floorboard behind Jo's seat.
My inspection was interrupted when Jo opened her door and hopped in. I had “a look” on my face.
“What? You filchin' my stuff?”
“Filchin'? No, I'm not doing anything.”
“Good, hold this.” She said it as the paper came out of her hand.
She started the car and slowly pulled back into the street. In moments we were lost among the rows of abandoned cars and the hunkering houses behind them. If war was coming, we were already in a town lumbered down by the fortress mentality.
I was holding a highway map of Kansas. Not the typical hand-drawn map of the major supply roads down in the pastures I was used to, but the full-blown, 100% complete map of every road in the entire state. I couldn't say why, but it felt dirty in my hands.
“Where did you get this? They give you guy the good stuff up on the interstate, huh?” I laughed, but I was more impressed than I wanted to let on. To know where every road went...
She was busy turning the wheel back and forth as she weaved across the grid of street
s until we returned to the road where we entered. I could see men and women running here and there between their homes. Word must spread fast.
A tornado siren whined as we left for the open road.
“I'm not supposed to have it.” Jo said it, though I couldn't tell if she was talking to me. When I didn't respond, she turned to me. “The map. I'm not supposed to have it. None of us are.”
My eyes read the cover again. Kansas Official State Transportation Map. The years had been crossed out, and someone wrote in “forever.” Also, in red marker, someone wrote over the buffalo photo. “For police use only.”
It all came together.
“You stole this?” I'd said it with some awe in my voice. And a little fear.
“I need it.” She did not elaborate until we had turned right onto the trunk line and were heading north for Hays. “We need it, actually. If there's something going on down here we may need to use roads we don't normally use. I can't remember them all, and I don't trust you to know them.”
I felt a little hurt that she wouldn't trust me, but we'd only known each other for a couple hours. Of course she wouldn't trust a pony like me.
I absently rubbed my arm as the dry landscape screamed by. The Mustang's tuned motor was obnoxiously loud but we could still talk at almost-normal levels. It was many minutes before she spoke again.
“I didn't mean it like I said it. I like you. You seem competent. That's all that matters out here. But I've got a lot on my mind right now. Just ignore me.”
I could hardly do that since she was behind the wheel, but it did make me feel a little better.
Hays was still sixty miles away when she suddenly let off the gas and allowed the car to decelerate. Whenever possible we tried to save the brakes, as every resource was valuable. She eased left onto a gravel side road.
“I've got one more stop to make. There's no smoke, so I hope she's there.”
Unlike the highway, she took the gravel at a jogging pace. As in foot jogging. I assumed it was because she didn't want to damage her paint or undercarriage. I knew something was up when her hands gripped the wheel like she was at speed. She gave me a sideways glance, confirming I was looking at her.
Post Apocalyptic Ponies: Revolutions Per Mile, Book 1 Page 3
