300 Miles to Galveston

by Rick Wiedeman

  They were about an hour into their ride, and settling into a rhythm. Kurt had found his karate training had kept him limber and his light weight training had kept him reasonably strong, but his endurance wasn’t great. He’d always thought of Dallas as flat, but realized that was from the perspective of a car. On a bike, he was becoming intimate with long, gentle slopes that burned his upper legs and squeezed sweat from every part of his body. Fortunately Bane, with his hand crank and electric assist, and Sophie, as a kid, needed frequent breaks. They were equally unathletic.

  In the morning sun things didn’t look bad. Weeds pushed through the street like varicose veins, and though the glass fronts of strip malls had been smashed by looters, the air was peaceful. Blackbirds and grackles argued, squirrels ran along rooftops, and lanky, white egrets plucked frogs out of drainage ditches. It was like a Disney tour of unthreatening suburban wildlife, until they got to LBJ.

  Highway 635, the Lyndon Baines Johnson freeway, was once the northern limit of civilization. Anyone who lived north of LBJ was a hick. In earlier times, anyone who lived north of Northwest Highway was a hick. Every generation of moneyed Dallasites moved north. At first it was whites fleeing blacks and Mexicans, then it was all three fleeing overpriced houses and crumbling public schools. As they took over the next small town to the north, old farms were turned into cookie-cutter developments with brick mailboxes that looked like retarded Daleks.

  The only people interested in old houses with big trees and skinny mailboxes were loners, fashionable homosexuals, and DINKs – Dual Income, No Kid couples. Everyone else wanted new, new, new.

  The concentric east-west rings of proper folks went like this: Northwest Highway, LBJ, Beltline, George Bush, and 121 – the last two of which were toll roads. Kurt, Sophie, and Bane all lived north of 121, which made them at best new money, at worst working class hicks, or as a compromise, city folks who couldn’t afford their own neighborhoods anymore. It made them anything but cool, back in the days when people had a media-driven consensus as to what cool was. Now, few people left their hoods, not due to coolness, but just because it wasn’t worth the risk. Once you had fresh water, game, and a group of friends, there was little else to look for. Go nowhere, young man. There be monsters beyond that horizon.

  The three riders paused before the long, slow climb toward Spring Valley, Alpha, and finally LBJ.

  “Not bad for a cripple, a kid, and a desk jockey,” said Kurt.

  They all raised their water bottles and drank. Bane shifted his weight forward, pulled his artificial leg on, and used his cane to right himself. “I need to get up and stretch every so often.”

  “No problem. I’m in such bad shape I just need to stop to breathe.”

  Bane staggered to the opposite side of the street – something had caught his eye. Sophie lay in a nearby patch of grass and closed her eyes. Kurt looked down at her hair, spread out on the ground like a supermodel in a shampoo commercial. She was becoming a beautiful woman.

  “I thought we’d gotten you a helmet.”

  “Yep,” said Sophie. “We each had one. Guess we both forgot them.”

  Several years as a single dad had taught Kurt to choose his fights. This wouldn’t be one of them.

  “Dad?”

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  “Do you think they’ll eat Biscuit?”

  “Not enough meat on that little thing to worry about.”

  “I’ve seen the old people make soup out of squirrels.”

  “They won’t eat the dog. They’re friends, not zombies.”

  “I know. It’s just that, you know, things aren’t normal anymore.”

  “True, but I can’t imagine them doing that until there wasn’t a squirrel, bird, rabbit, rat, or stray dog left in the entire neighborhood.”

  “Yeah.”

  Kurt lay down beside her and they watched the clouds for a while. Bane was fishing something out of the drain with his cane.

  “Do you think God hates us?”

  Kurt chuckled. “God. I dunno.”

  “I mean, you told me once that the opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s not giving a crap. Seems like God doesn’t give a crap.”

  “I care about what happens to you. If God is a parent, he cares too.”

  “What if he’s not? What if all this horrible stuff... just happened?”

  “Then we still need to care about each other, or we won’t make it.”

  She nodded.

  Bane came back from his walk with a yellow-handled hatchet. “Found this by the drain.”

  “Cool,” said Sophie.

  “Lemme I see it,” said Kurt. Bane hesitated. “I’ll give it back.” Bane turned it over and gave it to him, handle first.

  Kurt ran his thumb along the edge, felt its heft. “This is nice. Good hammer side, too.”

  “Yes,” said Bane. Kurt handed it back to him, and Bane rubbed his fingers along the rubber grip. They stood there a moment, then Bane turned and stumbled back to his recumbent bicycle, where he unzipped a grey canvas bag and laid the hatchet inside.

  They started the long climb towards the LBJ bridge.

  Like most Dallas highways, LBJ had been under perpetual construction for Kurt’s entire life. Back when there was still a city, state, and federal government to plan and fund such things, LBJ had been expanded to 14 lanes, all dedicated to DriveFree, or network-controlled vehicles. The DriveFree tech had received federal funding back in President Obama’s second term, and after tests in Dallas, Phoenix, and Denver, was rolled out nationally. Incentives were given to trade in old, manual cars for the newer DriveFree models. A couple of start-ups tried to develop kits for adding DriveFree tech to older cars, but it was too expensive, and no federal money was spent in that direction.

  In the first 20 years, DriveFree vehicles ran on gasoline and ethanol, liquid natural gas (LNG), pure battery, or hybrid. Eventually LNG won the market. America, Norway, and Trinidad and Tobago became the leading LNG exporters, leaving Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Middle East to sell oil to poorer countries who couldn’t convert easily, mostly in South America and Asia.

  They paused at Alpha, and let the breeze at the top of the hill cool them down.

  “I had no idea it was this steep,” said Kurt.

  No one else spoke.

  They pressed on.

  As they approached Dilbeck, a small side street that connected the neighborhood to the east and the ruins of Valley View Mall to the west with Preston Road, they noticed the silence. There were birds, but they didn’t sing. As Kurt turned his attention to it, he could find not a single squirrel or rabbit, though they had been plentiful for the first 10 miles of the ride.

  Kurt slowed, reached to the side of the bike, and with a flick of his wrist, extended a metal baton. Sophie and Bane looked at him, and without speaking, reached for their preferred one-handed weapons. For Sophie, it was a thin rod that poked up from her bike’s rear wheel, like a safety flag; its bottom tip was sharp, and she held it like a lance. For Bane, it was an aluminum pistol-hand crossbow under a flap next to his seat. Kurt nodded with approval.

  They continued peddling, aware of every breath and metallic click.

  Kurt glanced to the right, when Sophie saw a yellow blur to their left. She couldn’t stab it before it got to her dad, who was 15 feet ahead, riding point; Bane was to the right, moving his crossbow over to aim at the blur, but Sophie was in the line of sight, and he pulled the gun up.

  Without thinking, Sophie screamed. Not a high-pitched girl’s scream. Not a coherent warning. It was a kiai, a deep, guttural, sharp yell she had practiced in karate for years, but never felt comfortable doing. Even doing it as a group, during drills, made her self-conscious, and doing it solo during a kata performance was impossible.

  The mountain lion stopped, dropped its ears, and stared at her.

  She moved her bike to face it and opened her arms wide, spear held high, hoping to drive it off. Though still an impressive animal, it had become thin and des
perate.

  It focused on her, the smallest of the three. Overcoming its own fear, it raised its head, pressing its rear legs into the asphalt to leap. The last two inches of an orange crossbow bolt appeared in its shoulder, and without making a sound, it turned and fled, low to the ground like a muscular liquid.

  Bane cranked the crossbow back and loaded another bolt. “It’ll probably run back to its lair, though if it’s starving, it might come at us again. Do we want to give it an hour to bleed and calm down, then try to finish it, or just move on and hope it doesn’t follow?”

  Kurt was listening, but he was looking at Sophie. “You stood up to it. What do you want to do?”

  “I don’t want it to suffer and die slowly. Finish it.”

  * * *

  It was mid-day. They had pulled their bikes to the shade of a tree, in the direction the mountain lion had fled.

  “Do you hunt?” said Bane.

  “Not in a decade. Used to hunt dove and quail. Hunted deer as a kid, but didn’t enjoy it.”

  “I hunted deer and rabbit when Mom was broke. Never knew what the right season was.”

  “This is a predator,” said Sophie.

  “Doesn’t matter,” said Bane. “All animals act the same when hurt. First scared. Then angry.”

  Sophie had a knife in one hand and her slender spear in the other. Kurt had his baton and a baseball-sized chunk of concrete. Bane readied his pistol crossbow and got back on his bike.

  “I will ride towards LBJ, shoot it if it comes back this way. You two head the same direction.”

  “We might not even find it,” said Kurt.

  “True. It might find you, though. Good luck.”

  Kurt and Sophie crept across front lawns choked with weeds. Shrubs climbed patio columns, and the oscillations of water and heat over the past few years had pulled the clay out from the foundations, giving the homes sagging rooflines and deformed faces.

  After treading weeds for ten minutes, they found a narrow flattened path with a splotch of blood every 20 feet. Fresh white wood was exposed to the air where the lion had planted its legs and jumped over a weathered fence. They walked around it, Sophie to the left, Kurt to the right.

  Now about 20 yards apart, they moved forward together, using hand gestures to communicate.

  Kurt pointed to his eyes, then to a broken shrub. Just past it, they saw the lion’s stomach, panting.

  Sophie froze. She and the lion locked eyes. Kurt gestured, trying to get her to come towards him, but she did not see him.

  The lion held its head up, flattened its ears and opened its mouth, but made no sound. Its head was a round mass of muscle and bone, but beneath that, dark red blood streamed down the orange crossbow bolt and fell to the ground in an arc as it strained its muscles.

  Sophie raised her spear and took a step forward. Kurt whispered, “Are you crazy? Get over here!” She took another step, then ran straight toward it, dropping the knife, grabbing the bottom of the spear with her free hand, and driving it down into the lion’s shoulder, overhead, as if she were driving a flag into the earth. It swatted at her, catching her knee, and she fell back, bleeding. Kurt dropped the ball of concrete and ran to the cat, yelling, but it didn’t move. Its eyes were blank, its pink tongue out, blood dripping from its mouth and wounds.

  Sophie sucked in air and clutched her knee.

  “What the hell were you thinking?”

  “She wanted me to kill her. To finish it. I saw it in her eyes.” She winced and rocked back and forth. “Man, that really freaking hurts.”

  “Let me see.” He pulled her fingers apart. There were two gashes, three inches long and about an inch apart, that went to the bone.

  “Hold your knee above your heart. Yeah. Like that.” She lay down and held her leg up without bending it. Kurt looked around, found a half-inflated basketball in a nearby driveway, and used it as a prop.

  “That’s actually pretty comfortable.”

  “Good. You lunatic.” Kurt shook his head, then looked around. “I don’t think this is mating season. It’s fall, right? So this thing’s – how’d you know it was a she?”

  “I dunno. I just did.”

  “Well, you were right.” He looked at it closely, then pushed its paw away with his baton. “Sorry, girl.” He put his shoe on her jaw, set down his baton, and pulled out his knife. With one sure cut, he severed her jugular and half her neck. No blood spurted. He wiped the blade on his shirt, and pulled Sophie’s spear out of the lion’s shoulder. She was about five feet long, maybe 100 pounds, ribs visible, starved.

  “I’m going to get a medical kit. Don’t move around till I get back.” He handed her the spear.

  “Can you prop my head up a bit?”

  “No. I want your heart at ground level. It’ll reduce the bleeding.”

  “OK.” She sighed, and held her spear across her chest. He took off his bloody t-shirt and wrapped it around her knee, tugging the half-knot down tight, then making a bow. As he left, her blood seeped into the shirt, and she felt sleepy.

  Bane’s bike was there, but he wasn’t. Kurt unzipped the bag with the medical supplies, and noticed a gym coach’s whistle. He blew it twice.

  Bane staggered out of an abandoned booth, one of those tiny, stand-alone buildings that, over the years, had been a photo processor, a hot dog stand, and most recently, a tobacco store.

  Kurt walked towards him. “What were you doing in there?”

  “Found her kittens. Eyes are open, but they’re pretty weak. Two alive, one dead.”

  “Oh, crap. Don’t tell Sophie. She’s gone all Sheena Queen of the Jungle on me. She’ll want to adopt them.”

  “Where is she?”

  “We found the mountain lion hiding in the bushes next to a house, bleeding out. She and Sophie locked eyes, and then Sophie just hauled off and ran her through with her spear. Got swiped on the leg pretty bad. Gonna need stitches.”

  “She killed it?”

  “Yeah. You hit it good, but she finished it.”

  “Damn. We need to give her an Indian name or something.”

  “Won’t Listen to Father,” said Kurt.

  Bane chuckled. “Or Sophie Long Spear.”

  “That’s not bad.”

  Bane nodded.

  “But let’s not tell her about the kittens.”

  Bane kept nodding. “They’ll die, though.”

  “Everything dies,” said Kurt. “I’m stopping this Rudyard Kipling moment right now.”

  Bane chuckled, and they walked back to his bike for a needle, thread, and a flask of whiskey.

  Kurt noticed a black vulture circling, back where Sophie lay, about a thousand feet up. Then, two. As his eyes drifted downward, he noticed two turkey vultures doing the same, but only one hundred feet up. They wouldn’t be able to do anything to Sophie unless she had passed out. Still, the scene tugged at his protective instincts, and he double-timed it back to her, leaving Bane to struggle through the weeded yards.

  “I want you to take a sip of this,” said Bane.

  “What is it?” said Sophie.

  “Whiskey. It’s gonna taste like crap, but think of it as medicine. It’ll numb you a little bit, which will help when we sew up your knee.”

  She took the flask, sipped, winced.

  “More than that.”

  She nodded, took a swallow, then shuddered.

  He poured a little more across the wound, and she showed her teeth, but said nothing. She felt the needle each time it went through her skin, and felt the whiskey burn through her chest, and down into her arms; the sweat drop off her neck; the weight of the men on the grass beside her. She felt everything, and for that moment, the world became her temple.

  Kurt and Bane helped her up, and braced her as she limped.

  “You can’t bike with that knee. We’re going to put you on Bane’s trailer, and I’ll walk the bikes. We’ll camp early, and we’ll see if we can figure out a one-legged way for you to do this.”

  “I’m
sorry, Daddy.” She felt selfish and small as the consequences appeared clearly to her. She couldn’t travel. Now, she was a burden.

  “Hey. Look at me. You were very brave. Crazy, but brave. Here.” He handed her the slender spear, which he’d taken when helping her walk, and Bane likewise pulled away from her, leaving her to stand on her own, leaning on her spear.

  “We hereby recognize your courage in life, and dignity with death, by bestowing your woman-name.” He looked to Bane, and they said, together: “Sophie Long-Spear.”

  She beamed.

  Chapter 7: Half a Bottle of Advil

  They crossed the Preston Bridge over LBJ like refugees from a strange war. Sophie was propped up on Bane’s trailer. Bane was pumping his recumbent bike with the hand crank, and Kurt was walking both his bike and Sophie’s like tired horses. They looked like they were headed for the island of misfit suburbanites.

  Pausing mid-way across the bridge, Kurt looked down to the overgrown highway.

  “Plenty of foliage and trapped water. I bet the mountain lion hunted here.”

  Bane nodded. “Makes sense. Animals would get funneled down there, and the lion could watch, then sneak down for a kill.”

  They continued, turning left onto the LBJ access road.

  “Let’s set up camp over there, in the shade of those office buildings. The walls will cut the wind, and give us a bit of hiding space.”

  Sophie was asleep, and Bane let the bike and trailer coast as the access road sloped downhill.

  * * *

  “I guess this is going to be a short trip,” said Kurt, once he was sure Sophie was asleep in the open tent. She was snoring, the tent flap open to a median overgrown with soft grasses and wildflowers.

  Bane, sitting on a nearby bench, nodded.

  “You could go on ahead,” said Kurt as he paced. “I’d be happy to give you whatever gear you wanted.”

  “Nah,” Bane said. “I wouldn’t survive this alone. Besides, I’ve enjoyed the company. When she heals up, we’ll have to do this again, if only nearby, and for fun.”