by Sweet, Dell
“There!” she shouted, pointing down the tracks.
Joel looked in the direction she had pointed, which happened to be down the tracks.
“Shit, that figures,” he said, “a rail road trestle.”
The trestle was a newer one, and the sides were enclosed steel with concrete reinforcements. Probably why I didn't realize it was a train trestle, he thought, and then said aloud. “Well that blows that, but there ought to be other bridges. This can't be the only one.”
“Actually,” Glenn said, from behind him, “it ain't necessarily bad news.”
“What do you mean?” Joel said, staring back down the tracks at the bridge.
“Well, just what I said. It's still a bridge ain't it? It's not a rickety old wooden one either, solid steel and concrete, it'll hold us, and it does cross the river right?”
Joel looked at the bridge doubtfully. “I suppose so, but... You think we could fit across it?”
“I've seen cars and trucks both on trains,” Haley exclaimed, “they would have to fit, or else how could they carry them on the trains without smashing the hell out of them?”
“Good point,” Glenn said, “how about you park this buggy, Joel, and we go take a look at the bridge.”
The other two Jeeps parked, and all of them walked off down the tracks to look the bridge over.
The wooden ties, and the tracks that lay upon them, were well supported. Heavy steel girders ran the length of the bridge, and were supported by massive concrete pilings sunk into the river bed far below. Joel peered down through the ties at the concrete. It was cracked in a few places, but all the pilings seemed still to be firmly anchored in the river bed. “Do you really think it would hold us?” he asked.
“If it will hold a train, Joel, it will hold us,” Glenn replied.
“I mean the cracks, wise ass,” Joel said. “The pilings are cracked. They seem to still be solid, but... I don't know,” he finished lamely.
“Tell you what. You drive one, and John and I will drive the other two. Everybody else can walk across. I'll go first even. If it looks the least bit shaky we call it off, and search for something else, okay?” Glenn argued.
Joel thought for a moment before he replied. It might be a good idea after all. Where else were they likely to find a bridge that wasn't blocked off with traffic? The bridge did seem solid, and it couldn't hurt to try he supposed.
“Okay, but I'll start out. You watch, and you damn well better let me know real quick if she starts to go. I'll be pretty pissed if you dump me and my new truck in the river,” Joel finished, smiling widely.
“Wouldn't think of it,” Glenn said, solemnly.
“See you on the other side,” Haley said, and before Joel could reply she quickly kissed him. “For luck,” she said, a bit breathless. She turned and along with the others started walking across the bridge.
Joel watched her go. The kiss had taken him by surprise.
“Ah, Joel,” Glenn said grinning, “better close your mouth before the bugs start flying in.” Joel closed his mouth with a snap, and looking a bit embarrassed, walked off towards the Jeep.
John threw Glenn a wink, and they both walked out onto the bridge to wait. Joel started the Jeep, backed around, and drove slowly over the ties towards the bridge, straddling the rails as he went, and he was still thinking of the kiss as he edged slowly out onto the bridge. He looked across and saw Haley waving from the other side. He waved back and then brought his attention back to the truck.
“How's she look, Glenn,” he asked out the open window, as he inched cautiously out onto the trestle.
“You might scratch the paint a little, but the deck didn't budge a bit when you eased on to her,” Glenn replied. “I don't think they brought too many auto-carriers across this deck though, more like freight cars. You only got a couple of inches on either side.”
“Well here goes nothing,” he muttered under his breath as he moved further out onto the bridge. “Still okay?” he asked.
“Good as gold,” Glenn replied. Joel was not entirely blocking the bridge, and Glenn and John squeezed by on one side of the truck. “We'll be behind you,” Glenn said, as he paused at Joel's window. “I'll wait until you're off, and John will wait until I'm off.” Glenn looked at both men as they nodded their heads.
“Let’s do it,” Joel said.
He eased off the gas and let the Jeep idle its way across the bridge. When he reached the other side he angled off the tracks, parked, and walked back to the bridge. He stood quietly beside Haley and watched until the other two Jeeps were across. As he stood next to her, he noticed how much more aware of her he was. Funny what a little kiss can do, he thought. In fact, he noticed, she seemed to be a little flushed, and with that thought, Joel began to wonder just exactly what the kiss had meant.
Oswego NY: Joel and Haley
Early Afternoon
Once they were back on the main road again, it was late afternoon, and by the time they finally reached the other side of Oswego, they had all agreed to stop for the day.
As they entered the small town of Martville, and pulled into a large field, Joel found himself wondering more and more what the kiss had meant.
They made a half-way decent meal out of the canned goods they carried with them, and once they tired of rehashing the day’s events, one by one they went off to find a place to sleep. They had sleeping bags, and rather than set up the tents they had also brought with them, they all agreed they would rather use the bags.
Joel watched as Terry walked off in one direction with Gina. Obviously something had sparked with those two, he thought. He sat talking quietly with Glenn and John, as well as Haley. When he finally said his goodnights, a few hours later, Haley got up, and saying goodnight, walked away by herself.
While Joel waited for sleep to come, he found that instead of thinking of all the bad things that had happened, he was thinking of Haley, and all the good things that could happen.
Route 104: Joel and Haley
Early Morning
The next morning they were on the road early. The going was still slow, but by noon they were on the outskirts of Alton, a small town about forty miles from Rochester. They were only thirty or so miles from Webster where they would turn off 104, and take route 250 into the small village of Fairport.
A run-down general store, with two old gas pumps sitting on a chipped concrete island, was all that marked the small town. The low speeds and constant use of the four wheel drive, had taken a toll on the fuel tanks of all three vehicles, so when Joel had spotted the small store as they passed a sign for the township limits; they had pulled off into the dirt parking area. The other two Jeeps followed him in and lined up by the pumps.
When Haley and Terry, along with Gina, had first picked up the jeeps, they had filled the tanks by siphoning gas from the dealership's underground tanks. It had been a fairly easy process as Terry had worked at a gas station before, and had been responsible for, among other things, checking the levels of the tanks and comparing them on a daily basis to the numbers on the pumps to make sure they matched up. He had known where to look for them. The tanks were fairly simple to access. A long piece of hose slipped down into the tank had been adequate to siphon the gas into cans and then fill the Jeeps.
Terry had found a hand operated pump, mainly used to pump kerosene from cans into small heaters, at the department store back in Oswego, and, along with Dave, had adapted the crank operated pump to use it to pump gasoline. The adaptation had been simple. A long section of heavy hose had been slipped over the pumps short tube, and held in place with a small hose clamp.
One by one the Jeeps were pulled over next to the underground tanks, and quickly filled. Haley had been impressed with the idea. It was a lot better than the mouthfuls of gas they had swallowed filling the Jeeps back in Watertown.
After the Jeeps were gassed up they decided to take a short break and eat lunch. They were all getting sick of the canned meat, so they foraged through the small g
eneral store to see what was available. Once each had found what they wanted, they had carried it out onto the wide front deck to eat.
Joel sipped at a cold beer while he sat in an old wooden chair eating a large bag of chips. Glenn and John were talking quietly beside him.
“Where do you think the best place to go is?” Glenn asked of John. They had been discussing several places where people may have gathered. They were all hoping to find other people once they arrived in Rochester, but until now they had not discussed where to go once they arrived.
John answered. “Well, the compass is open. I think it would be a good idea to stay away from the North side though. The whole area has been run down for years, and I'm not so sure we'd want to meet anyone who was still alive in there.”
“That bad, huh?” Joel asked.
“Actually, more than that bad,” he replied. “When I was still living there, and still on the City Council, I remember we had constant problems there. The city was always being accused of not caring much about the north side, and to be honest it was based in fact to a certain extent. The city and the council, me included I hate to admit, did let it run down pretty much. Trouble was, when we tried to retake the neighborhoods we couldn't.”
“Why?” Glenn asked. “Didn't you have support from the neighborhoods?”
“Not really,” John said. “Don't get me wrong. There were still a lot of good people trying to live there, but by the time the city stepped in, drugs had pretty much taken over. It got so the police couldn't even go in there after dark. The drug dealers knew it and used it to their advantage. After a while... well, the good people who had tried to change things just left. The last time I was there, on Clifford Avenue, it was pretty bad. We, myself, and two other board members, decided to take a tour through some neighborhoods ourselves, to see just how bad it had gotten. We had to have a police escort, and even then we ended up seeing only a small part. Most of the neighborhoods were full of drug houses, prostitution, burned out buildings. I'll tell you, truthfully, it scared me. That was one of the reasons I didn't run again and ended up moving to Watertown.”
“A lot of parts of Watertown were like that too,” Joel said. “I got to the point where I really had begun to hate the place.”
“I know exactly what you mean,” John said. “Don't get me wrong. I'm not glad that this happened, but... who knows how much worse things would have gotten? At least now there's a chance to start over again, maybe.”
“You know what really got to me?” Glenn asked. Both men looked at him waiting for him to speak.
“You know where Mobile Alabama is?” they both nodded. “Well, I was down there a few years back to see a buddy of mine I was in the Navy with. We were always telling each other we were going to get together and finally we did. So we were driving down Airport Boulevard, kind'a the main street so to speak, and I was, you know, sort of looking around out the window. Sightseeing, I guess you could say. Anyway, I see this young girl standing in the middle of the island that splits the lanes holding a sign. I figured it was one of those 'Will work for food' signs, but as we got closer I saw it wasn't. I could also see she was pregnant, couldn't have been more than sixteen or so. I asked my friend to slow down so I could read the sign. I couldn't believe it.”
“Well, what did it say?” John asked.
“Well, it was misspelled, you know, but it said, 'I'm pregnant and abandoned, please help me.' I couldn't believe it, so I asked my buddy to turn around and go back, but by the time he did she was gone. I couldn't believe that things had come to that.”
“That's bad all right,” Joel said. “I've seen the other signs, the food signs, but I've never seen one like that.”
“I haven't either,” John said, “but I can't say it surprises me a lot.”
“Well,” Glenn continued, “that wasn't the end of it, two days later I picked up the paper and there was an article about her in it. I guess I wasn't the only one who had seen her. The police had picked her up earlier, and told her not to stand there with that sign. That was in the morning, and it was afternoon when I went by, so she must have come back. Quite a few people had seen her back there in the afternoon, according to the paper. Well, the thing is that somebody did stop and pick her up, but not to help her. They found her body in the bay the next morning. If they hadn't picked her up the day before, they probably wouldn't have known who she was, but they did, I guess. The story said they had fingerprinted her, and taken pictures too. I guess they arrested her, ain't that a slap in the face? Anyhow, that's how they identified the body... I've always wondered about it. Who would just abandon her in the first place? I mean, being pregnant and homeless? I've always felt that I should have convinced my buddy to stop right there. Fuck the traffic, just stop and pick her up...”
“...So, I've gotten pretty sick of the world myself. It never seemed to stop, and it seemed that people kept coming up with more ways to be cruel. To tell the truth, I'm glad it's mostly gone, I hated it that much.”
When Glenn finished they were all silent for a few minutes.
Joel thought about the food signs. How many times had he seen them? Countless, he guessed, but he had never stopped. He had been, well, sort of afraid to.
“I think we all made our share of mistakes,” Joel said. “I know I did. I wish I hadn't, but I did. I guess maybe things are better, in a way,” Joel finished his beer, got up, and retrieved three cold ones from the cooler in the Jeep. He handed one to each of the men before he sat back down in the chair.
“So,” John said, easing back into the conversation of where to go once they arrived in Rochester. “North side is out I think, there's no way I'd want to go back in there, especially now. East side is mostly old mansions; East Avenue, Park Avenue. West is made up of mostly poor neighborhoods and shopping centers, and farther out small business. South side is a mix, some places are as bad as the North side, and others are as nice as the east side. Farther out though, it's all malls and big discount stores. I'd say downtown would be a good place to start looking.”
“Why?” Glenn asked.
“Just a hunch, I guess,” he replied. “But where did you go after it happened?”
“I see your point,” Glenn said. Downtown, Glenn thought, was the first place he had thought of going. It made sense to him that it should be the first place to at least check.
“We'll have to walk, at least I'm pretty sure we will,” John said.
“I believe you,” Joel agreed. “A city that size has a lot of traffic I suppose.”
“Unbelievable,” John said. “An awful lot of it ends up on the Can-of-Worms, but its heavy downtown too. There are still a lot of small companies down there, so I'm fairly certain we'll have to walk down. We should be able to get within a block or two of the War Memorial though, and that's dead downtown. City Hall is across from that, and if there are people, that's where they should be. Of course the only real way to find out is to get there and see.”
The small caravan pulled back out onto the highway and continued on a few minutes later. Long before they reached Webster the stalled traffic began to back up, and they lost a great deal of time winding their way through it, or where that was not possible, pulling into the center traffic divider to get around it.
Even the center divider, a narrow, sloped grassy area double the width of the two lane highway, began to fill up with stalled vehicles, and several times they were forced to get around some other way. Fortunately the areas along the highway were crowded with small restaurants, shopping malls, and gas stations; the closer they got to Rochester. And they all had feeder roads. Roads that were mostly empty now.
The parking lots were fairly empty, and they managed to get around the stalled traffic that way.
When they reached Webster it was nearly 6:00 PM, and a light rain had begun to fall. The exit and entrance ramps were packed solid with cars, and impassable: As a consequence they were forced to drive the Jeeps down the side of the steep escarpment to the road below. Some cars
appeared to have either been trying to enter or exit using the wrong ramps, and the results had been catastrophic.
Most of the cars were crushed and blackened shells. A large gasoline tanker sat amid the wreckage. The tanker had apparently tried to exit the entrance ramp and had crashed and burned.
It looked as though gas, from the ruptured tanker, had spread the flames under the entire bridge, and everything had caught. Joel supposed that several of the cars gas tanks had probably exploded too, helping to fuel the inferno.
Once they had negotiated the steep and muddy embankment and driven out of Webster the stalled traffic eased up.
“Most likely everyone stuck to the main routes,” John said. “I'd hate to see what the Thruway looks like though, it's probably packed tighter than a drum.” The others nodded agreement.
Even though the stalled traffic had lessened, they were still forced to detour off the road several times to avoid accidents or vehicles that seemed to have been abandoned in the middle of the road. It was well after 8:00 PM when they reached the four corners in the small village of Fairport, and the sky was beginning to darken. The rain was coming down harder.
Joel angled the Jeep into a deserted gas station and they all ran toward the door which had been left propped open, thankful they were out of the rain.
They were no sooner inside, when the rain began to pelt the tarmac outside in great sheets. The sky darkened rapidly, and a stiff wind kicked up, blowing the trash that littered the streets through the air.
Joel was staring out the wide glass window when suddenly the street lights began to glow. Within a few minutes they were all glowing brightly, illuminating the wind driven sheets of rain. Haley walked over and flicked on a switch next to the door, and bright fluorescent lights buzzed to life overhead. She clicked on several of the other switches next to the first one, and the outside sign, along with the pump islands lit up.
“Looks like you were right, Glenn,” Joel said. Glenn, grinning, blew lightly on his finger tips and rubbed them on his shirt. “Elementary, my dear Watson,” he said, still grinning.
