Alive! Not Dead!

by R. M. Smith

  I drove her back to the house. Carrying her inside, I laid her down on a couch in the living room.

  The drive to the house had knocked her out.

  Late day sunlight came in through the windows. I ran to the bathroom. I grabbed as many towels as I could and went back to her. She was motionless on the couch. Blood had already saturated the pillow her head was on.

  “Mindy,” I whispered to her. “Mindy stay with me.”

  I wiped her face clean with the towels.

  Her breath was rough in her chest.

  What could I do? I tried as best as I could to keep her comfortable. Her breathing became labored. I knelt beside her on the floor and held her hand.

  What to do? I kept asking myself. What can I do to help her? There has to be something! No doctors. Rosita’s too far away. No emergency room personnel…emergency room. Where is there an emergency room around here?

  “Emergency room,” I said out loud. “There has to be something like that in the casino…I mean, what if someone had a heart attack when they won poker! There has to be something there!” I glanced down at Mindy. She was still knocked out. “Baby, I’m going to go look for something to make you feel better. I’ll be right back!”

  I drove back to the front of the casino. Surely there would be something right inside the front door letting people know what to do in case of an emergency. There would have to be!

  Of course, there wasn’t.

  This was a casino! People didn’t want to worry about getting hurt. This was a gaming haven – a retreat from real life.

  What to do? What to do!

  I thought about the Conoco gas station. It was just a quick place to get gas or a snack. There were no medical supplies there other than aspirin.

  That would have to be it. Aspirin. I could grab her a couple bottles, give her a few extra for the pain. Maybe they would have some with more power – something to take off the edge…

  I stopped in my tracks.

  “God dammit!” I yelled. I forgot about the extra bottles of pills Rosita had given us back in Concordia. The fucking bottles were in the house in our bedroom!

  I sped quickly back to the house, went in, took the stairs three at a time, got the bottles of pain medication, a bottle of water and ran back down to Mindy.

  When I got back down to her, she was sitting up on the couch.

  Her face was twisted in pain. “God, this hurts!”

  “Here, take these,” I said, handing her three pills.

  “Where’d you get these?” she whispered.

  “Rosita gave them to me, remember?”

  She nodded as she took them. I helped her lay back down on the couch.

  In minutes, she slept.

  She might have cracked her rib, I don’t know, but she was sore for a very long time. Her butt hurt too from landing on the concrete like she did. Her face healed quickly.

  We spent the healing time by simply taking it easy.

  I made steaks every night. We would watch thunderstorms roll across the horizon during the evenings. Some of the storms would drench the house and flood the lake. The days after would be warm and the water would go down. During the day I would cut our steaks and marinate them in different ways just so the taste wouldn’t get old. We spent so much time sitting outside on lawn chairs, drinking wine, talking about us and the world and wondering why we were still alive, not dead, like everyone else.

  Some mornings, when it was clear, I would notice a strange glow to the south. It didn’t look like the glow of a large fire or a large city. It didn’t seem menacing at all, it just seemed strange.

  At the time, we guessed it was the horizon, almost as if the south was actually west now – because the sunsets seemed to be further to the south.

  What it actually turned out to be was something that would have never crossed either one of our minds in a million years.

  When we both were healthy enough, we packed our things and headed south. We wanted to see what that weird light was.

  I drove. Mindy was content to be the passenger.

  THE SPLIT

  As we came into Denton, a suburb of Dallas, I started noticing more devastation. Devastation had sort of slipped my mind, I guess. I mean, seeing a stalled car, a row of broken trees, collapsed buildings or a downed overpass had become ‘normal’ to me.

  As we came into town, the roads started to look severely buckled. Large chunks of the road were tilted. It made swerving around them almost impossible. The sides of the roads were also buckled. It looked like five foot tall rib-like creases had formed in the soil. Even the trees all looked to be broken or snapped. It all reminded me of the way the world had looked outside Seattle. Man that seemed like so many years ago now.

  At the interchange of highways 35W and 35E I stopped the motorcycle to look around. I was amazed at the destruction. Huge overpasses that once carried thousands of cars a day were now completely destroyed. Some parts still stood like giant cracked pedestals. Some pieces of the highway hung by the steel rods inside the cement. On the horizon of the city, I could see tall columns of gray smoke where uncontrolled fires burned. The smell of ash hung thick in the air.

  It was as if all of the color had suddenly gone out of the world. This all looked bleak.

  “We should go back to the casino,” Mindy said, grabbing my arm.

  I agreed with her. This place didn’t look safe at all.

  I started to turn the bike around on the gritty street. Mindy grabbed my arm tighter. She said “There’s a man down there. I can see him on the side of the road.”

  “We should leave him,” I said.

  I kept turning the bike. Mindy kept turning in the seat to look at the man. “He sees us,” she said. “He’s running toward us.”

  “We should really go, Mindy,” I said. “We don’t know anything about the man.”

  Mindy patted me on the shoulder to look.

  I turned the bike back around.

  A man in a long coat was running toward us. He was completely covered in dirt and mud. His hair, including his moustache, was matted with mud. For a second I thought he had climbed out of one of the sewers along the road. He wore glasses. The lenses were covered with dirt. I could see where he had wiped the lenses with his fingers so he’d be able to see.

  He was out of breath when he got to us. “Hey. You’re alive! You’re real people!”

  “Yes…” I started.

  “You need to follow me. We need to get off this side.”

  I didn’t say anything. Neither did Mindy.

  “It’s going to fall,” he said. “It’s teetering. Can’t you feel it?”

  I felt like gunning the engine and leaving this man in the dust. Something told me to wait. I said “What are you talking about?”

  “This whole side is going to drop soon. It could be hours, might be days. You need to come with me to the other side! There’s people there…and some zombies, but we got it under control. This side isn’t safe though.”

  I played along with him. “Well, if this side is falling, then why are you here?”

  “I used to live over there,” he said pointing to the northeast. “On Highland Street. I was going through what’s left of my house – was looking for pictures of my wife. I forgot what she looked like. It’s been so long since she died. I was at work when all of this happened.

  “But we gotta go! You guys are alive and need to stay that way. The other side is safer. It’s cleaner! We have running water and everything. It’s on the other side of Fort Worth.”

  “We’re ok,” I said. “We’ll be fine here. We’re going to head north.”

  “No, no,” he said. He grabbed my arm, not hard, just trying to make a point. “You don’t understand. I’m a geologist. The earth has cracked in two – well maybe fourths, we’re not sure. We got some old weather satellite working again. One of the guys who is with us is a genius with that kind of stuff. He got it all running again. You should see the earth. It’s breaking up. We’ve
seen other things on the satellite, too. It was disabled for a reason. Please, come with us. There are other people there, people like you. There are families. Good people. We all get along great. It’s safe.”

  “We’ve heard things like this before,” I said. “It wasn’t safe when we got there.”

  He stomped his foot. “This isn’t safe. It’s going to fall.”

  I didn’t believe him. I thought he was some kind of psycho. He probably found a stash and was smoking it when we saw him. He was probably trying to hide it from us.

  Or, he was one of Washburn’s men. Maybe he was a soldier. I was waiting for him to call us FEEFEEs.

  We sat there for a minute just looking at him. Questioning. Doubting. Finally I asked “So this side is falling?”

  “Yes. It’s been slowly dropping for a few months. It’s really hard to tell unless you can actually see it. On the other side, we can see this side going down slowly. But we think it’s going to start falling faster.”

  “How far away is the other side?”

  “On the other side of Fort Worth.”

  “And how far is that from here,” I asked.

  “Not exactly sure how far it is, but we’re in a town called Alvarado.”

  Mindy sat behind me still, her arms around my belly. I said “Do you mind giving us a minute to talk this over?”

  “Sure,” he said. “No problem. I’ll wait over by that truck.”

  There was a jack-knifed semi-trailer crashed on the road next to us. He walked over to it. He leaned against the crumpled side and started to try to clean his glasses.

  I whispered to Mindy, “Ready?”

  She said yes.

  “Ok hold on.”

  Quickly, I started the bike, spun it around, and sped off to the north. The man yelled something after us, but I couldn’t hear it over the engine.

  Later, back at our house by the casino, Mindy told me what he had shouted at us. She said “It sounded like he said ‘he’ll find you’ or ‘they’ll find you’.”

  So, I thought, Washburn and his cronies were still after us. They were trying to make up any bullshit story to get us to come back to their “safe” area. I had to laugh. This side of the earth was falling down. Come on, Washburn, you got to think of something more original than that.

  Moose Lake was gone. Omaha was his new base, and now there was something near Fort Worth, Texas, too?

  How many innocent people were being taken to these bases? How many were being humiliated? How many were told they were carrying a virus? How many were being gassed to death?

  It disgusted me.

  Why did he want Mindy and I so bad? Was he really pissed because we had escaped? What was the big deal of our escape? We hadn’t escaped from a prison. Why didn’t he just keep us there and kill us? What was this whole charade about?

  Was it something about the plane crash? Why did he want us so bad?

  We needed a new plan. Going to the coast wasn’t out, but we needed to find another way down to it. We drove back to the casino. Over at the Conoco gas station we found a rack of travel maps. I grabbed a map of Texas. We took it back to the house, looked it over, and decided on a different route.

  After stocking up on provisions, we left our home. We headed south across the border of Oklahoma into Texas. We took highway 82 east instead of heading south. In Sherman, Texas we stayed at a La Quinta Inn and fueled the bike at an Exxon gas station.

  We were traveling again.

  Shortly before sunrise in a mobile field office 12 miles east of Texarkana, Texas, Master Sergeant Dean Sharon - a 17 year army veteran stood watching helicopters take off from the damaged earth. They would rise up out of the dirt then slowly head to the east. After a few minutes, the choppers would drop down out of sight in front of what looked like a towering cliff that spanned the horizon. The rotor wash from the helicopter would send water from a nearby waterfall flying up into the air as the helicopter went down. Even from this distance, he could see rainbows in the water vapor; rainbows formed from the sunlight below.

  The waterfall was new. It was on the Red River. There never was a waterfall there; and now it was the highest waterfall in the world – at least as far as he knew. There were more waterfalls along this river, he was sure of that. Anywhere the split cut where a river once crossed, there was now a waterfall.

  Water falling forever, he thought. There was no bottom to the split.

  A portable military telephone on his desk rang. He picked it up. “Sharon.”

  “They’re coming your way,” a voice on the other end of the line told him. “You are to allow them to cross.”

  “Yes sir,” Sharon said.

  “Help them. Treat them as if they never did anything wrong. We don’t want them to get any ideas that we’re onto them.”

  “Yes sir,” Sergeant Sharon said to his superior.

  “Hold them until I get there. Is the brig set up in Garland?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “We’ll get them this time.”

  “Yes sir, we will.”

  The line was disconnected.

  Sergeant Dean Sharon sighed deeply. This was it. They had been after these two long enough.

  He took his cover which was hanging on a hook on the back wall of the tent, put it on, and headed out to the turning helicopters. They waited there for any travelers or soldiers. This was the only way to get across the split.

  As the helicopter lifted with Sharon onboard, he watched under them as they crossed the split. Once again, sunlight caused him to shield his eyes.

  As we headed east, before sunrise the strange lighting along the horizon grew brighter and more detailed. To me, it looked like sun rays were coming out of the earth.

  I remembered seeing sunrises where clouds would be on the horizon and sunbeams would look like they were coming from the earth – but this was different. This was from horizon to horizon. It followed the entire curvature of the earth.

  The light wouldn’t last that long, though. It wasn’t like it lasted all day long. It happened right before the sun came up for a few minutes, it would fade out, then the sun would rise like usual.

  It was like the earth was cracked in half.

  We were on the third floor of a Super 8 on the west side of Paris, Texas watching the second sunrise. I asked Mindy “Do you think that guy was lying to us?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “He seemed pretty genuine.” Obviously she had been wondering the same thing.

  “His dirty clothes threw me off,” I said. “He said he was a scientist. Why would he be digging around looking for lost pictures of his wife? I wonder if there was something else he was actually looking for.”

  “He said he was with a group that had fired up an old satellite. He said they saw the earth breaking into pieces…” Mindy said. She was looking out the window, staring. “Dan…there are two people out there – by that car…”

  She pointed. Out in the parking lot of the hotel, two guys were siphoning fuel from an abandoned car.

  “What do we do?” Mindy asked her voice quickening. “I think one of them saw me.”

  “Nothing,” I said. “I don’t think they saw you. I’ll keep my eye on them.”

  We watched them siphon fuel into a large gas can from several cars. They looted through them as well, looking for supplies, obviously.

  They didn’t look up at the window. I was watching for them to act like they knew we were there, but they really didn’t seem to know anything about us being there. They were talking about something but their voices were blurred due to the distance between us.

  They set the gas can by one of the cars in the parking lot. They crossed the street and entered a Laundromat with shattered windows. We watched them in the brightening sunlight. They went from store to store on each side of the street. Soon we lost them when they headed down a side street.

  “Where are they going?” Mindy asked. “They’re just gonna leave the gas there?”

  “Maybe they
don’t want to carry it around with them,” I said. “We should leave though, now, while we have a chance.”

  “Do you think we should wait a while before we leave?” Mindy asked. “I don’t want them to see us leaving.”

  “Yeah we can wait a while.”

  We did. We kept looking out the window to see if we could see them, but they were nowhere in sight. In the meantime, we rolled up our blankets and checked the cooler. We were doing fine on meat and water.

  “I wonder where they were heading,” Mindy asked me as we went down the stairs to a fire exit.

  “Probably survivors like us,” I said. “We used to do the same thing, remember, when we were looking for food?”

  “Yes.”

  We pushed through the exit.

  Right outside, one of them leaning on our motorcycle, were the two men. They both had military rifles. One of them said “Damn, we were wondering how long you were gonna stay up there.”

  The other one laughed and asked “Now, what do you have in that cooler?”

  They both looked to be in their early twenties, maybe still in their late teens.

  One was named Doug. He did most of the talking.

  “We’re going to Texarkana – to the Army depot,” he told us as he raked through our cooler. He unrolled some of the steak from the plastic, gave a piece to his buddy, and then took a large bite of it himself. He talked as he chewed. “We’re going over the split, but I don’t think they’ll be too happy to see us come back there.” He uncapped one of the bottles of water and took a large swig. Most of the water went down his stubbly chin. He nodded to us. “We’re going to need you two to help us cross.”

  I didn’t say anything. Neither did Mindy. It was best to stay silent in situations like these we had learned.

  “We don’t want to hurt you, but we will if we have to. You’re going to be our hostages.”

  As he talked, again my mind raced back to Mits – as well as Johnny when he had talked to us at his roadblock. We were again in a similar situation. Trying to win some of their sympathy, I said, “Please, my wife is pregnant.”