“Agreed.”
They drank water and relaxed. Bane scribbled in a spiral notebook.
“Diary?”
“Something like that. I don’t record everything. Just the interesting stuff. Today has been interesting.”
“I heard Elmore Leonard said he tried not to write the parts that people skipped.”
Bane chuckled. “You a writer?”
“Something like that. I taught high school English for a while, did some tech writing. Got a couple of short stories published, but nothing fancy.”
“Cool. What did you write about?”
“The angst of the educated white man.”
Bane guffawed. “How’d that sell?”
“Surprisingly there wasn’t much of a market. Hell, I was just imitating what I’d seen. Fitzgerald, Joyce, Faulkner, TC Boyle... I was trying to be them.”
“I always thought that little whiney fella was funny... Sedaris. David Sedaris.”
“Oh yeah, loved his stuff.”
“Whatever happened to him?”
“His French lover covered his bed in rancid duck fat and set him on fire.”
“No kidding?”
“He was drunk, didn’t wake up in time. Got all wrapped up in it. When they found him, he was a blackened mummy, sealed in a twist of Alexandre Turpault scorched linen, like Satan’s cigar.”
Bane stared at him, then gestured him to come closer. When Kurt came over, Bane gave him his pencil. “I have another spiral pad in that grey canvas bag over there. You need to write that down.”
“Nah,” Kurt said, handing him back the pencil. “Thanks, but that time is past.”
Bane took the pencil, and scribbled quickly. “...like …Satan’s …cigar. How do you spell that French name?”
“Does it matter?”
Bane shrugged, and put the pencil behind his ear.
* * *
At nightfall, Sophie was moaning.
“Crap,” Kurt whispered. “She’s got a fever.”
“I’ve got some aspirin,” Bane said.
Kurt shook his head. “No aspirin. Ever.”
“OK.”
Kurt wet a rag and laid it across her forehead. “Stay with her. I’m going to see if that gas station near the bridge has anything left in it. Maybe there’ll be some Tylenol or something.”
Kurt pumped his flashlight and thumbed it on, then checked that he had his knife, the extendable baton, and a plastic bag folded into his back pocket.
When he got to the bridge he saw one of the mountain lion kittens, scrawny and big-eared, sniffing the asphalt where they had crossed. Sophie had been dripping blood, leaving brown splotches every five feet.
Kurt waved his arms and drove it off, and then it lurched into the sky with a sharp kitten growl. He couldn’t tell the color, but from the silhouette it appeared to be an eagle that had snatched it, the six foot wingspan making the dead lion kitten look like a doll with a floppy neck.
He walked across the parking lot, avoiding the humps with steel plates where the old underground gasoline tanks were refilled. The LNG tanks that had replaced them were tall, white cylinders, shaped like toilet paper spring tubes standing on their ends. Kurt circled the store. No broken glass. No recent signs of entry in the dust.
Popping the door open, he saw two empty wire racks that had once held chips and crackers. The fridges were likewise empty. Walking behind the counter, he found a yellow pack of American Spirit cigarettes from the Res in Oklahoma. He didn’t smoke much, but when he did, these were his favorites. They were still in the plastic.
There were small plastic packs of energy pills, hangover powders, key chains with rebel flags and playboy bunny heads and empty photo frames. No real medicine.
He went to the storage room, which was locked, but after a few minutes of looking, found the key on a hook beneath the counter.
Inside were a mop and bucket, and two shelves with light bulbs, toilet paper, a small metal marijuana pipe, and a huge bottle of Advil. He tapped it, and the gel pills inside broke free from each other and rattled. Unscrewing the lid, he could see it was half full of blue gel caps – about 100 of them. He closed his eyes and said, “Thank you.”
Something cold flailed down onto his head, splitting his ears and turning his vision a sparkled red and blue. He collapsed.
* * *
As he came to, the first thing he noticed was the smell, a combination of weed and unwashed blue jeans. Then he noticed the sounds. Two young men, probably white, not educated. He blinked, but saw nothing.
“Hey! He’s movin.”
“Hit him again!”
“No, please don’t,” he said, and held his hands up. “I can’t see.”
“How’d you get in that closet if you can’t see?”
“I think he means he can’t see now. Hey, he’s bleedin pretty bad.”
“So?”
“Hey, we don’t need to do nothin else.”
“Shut up. So, where are your friends? We saw you a while back. Where are you camping?”
Kurt blanched. He said nothing.
There was a white flash in his mind as he was struck on the left cheek with the same object, something metal, maybe a pipe. His ears chimed and fresh blood streamed down his face.
“Hey, let’s just go.”
“Shut. Up. I like this flashlight. I bet he’s got other cool stuff.”
“Hey, you said there were others.”
“A cripple and a chick. Jesus, man, grow a pair or go home.”
They all heard the dripping sound.
“Hey, he’s bleedin bad from the back of his head, too.”
“Yeah. And look at his eyes. They ain’t movin right when I shine the light. See?”
“Whoa. Hey, yeah.”
The angry one stood up and unzipped his jeans. Warm urine splashed down Kurt’s shirt, then his face. He turned away and waved his hands, but it made him dizzy, and he fell back to the floor.
Both boys laughed, feeding off each other’s amusement.
“Leave him. We’ll come back after we’ve taken care of the other two. I could have some fun with a blind slave. Ain’t that right?”
Kurt struggled to his feet, but slipped on his own blood. He wanted to charge them, but he had no traction, so he grabbed at air. They laughed. There was another flash of white as he was struck above his left eye.
He passed out. The boys left.
* * *
When Kurt woke, it was morning. He didn’t remember anything from the night before, or even why he was in a gas station. He stood up, stretched, and saw just a few streaks of dried blood forming a wide ring on the floor.
“Holy crap. That can’t be from me.” He touched himself, looking in a glass door of the empty fridge case. His face and shirt were covered in a rusty outline of blood. It looked like he’d been in a horror movie, but the makeup artist had wiped most of it off. As he touched the outline of dried blood on his cheek, it flaked off, like tea leaves.
Walking outside, he found a puddle without an oily rainbow and washed his face, neck, and hands, then went back to look at himself in a gas station window. He looked fine. There was a small line, like a decade-old scar, on his left cheek. He examined it carefully.
“Where did that come from?” he said.
The baton, flashlight, and other things were gone, and he realized now that he smelled like urine. He winced, then took off his shirt and tied it around his waist.
Checking the gas station again, he found the half bottle of Advil, but realized he didn’t need it. He felt fine. It was too big to fit comfortably in his pocket, so he just held it as he exited the station, looking around to get his bearings.
“Preston at LBJ. We stopped here? Kinda short,” he mumbled. “Sophie!”
It came back to him – the mountain lion, the camp site, the reason he had come to the gas station.
He ran.
When he got to the camp site, his throat went cold with fear. The tent was gone. The bikes
were gone. There was a pool of blood across the pale yellow grass where Sophie’s open-floor tent had been. Too much blood for a stitched up knee. He walked closer, and found a finger.
He looked away and threw up.
When he felt better, he looked again. The finger was young, but hairy. Not Sophie’s. Not Bane’s. A young white man, maybe 20. It looked like it had been torn off.
“Sophie!” he yelled. “Bane!”
“Down here!” The echo disoriented him.
“Here!”
He saw Bane waving, about 500 feet to the south, near a creek. Sophie waved, and ran to her father. As she got close, he said, “Wait. You’re running?” They hugged. “I was so freaking worried about you! What happened?” She hugged harder. “Wait wait wait. How are you running like that?”
“Oh! It’s the weirdest thing. It just healed.” She showed him her knee. There was a light scar, no stitches.
“The stitches fell out?”
“I guess. I didn’t see them when... those guys came.”
She told her father the story.
Bane had heard them coming and hidden behind the bench with his pistol crossbow. When the boys approached Sophie, who was still asleep, Bane stood and told them to leave. One boy put his hands up and started walking off, but the other grabbed Sophie and laughed. “Whatchu gonna do, gimpy? Shoot her?” Before she was fully conscious, Sophie dug her nails into his ribcage, and bit two of his fingers off as he tried to slap her away.
“I think I swallowed one,” she said.
He looked at her eyes. They were still green, but there was a hazel patch at 10 o’clock on her left eye, and at 2 o’clock on her right eye.
“You feel OK?”
“Yeah. Actually, I feel great.”
“Yeah,” Kurt said. “Me too. And I shouldn’t.”
“Sorry to scare you like that,” Bane said as he approached. “But where the hell did you go?”
Kurt tossed him the Advil bottle. “Gas station. Like I said.”
“There’s blood in your hair.”
“Yeah, but it’s OK. I dunno how to explain it. Those boys beat me badly. Hit me back here... and then I couldn’t see. But when I woke up this morning, I was fine. Took me a minute to remember everything, but it’s come back to me, now. Where are those thugs, anyway?”
Bane kept his eyes level. “One ran off. The other we…” he drew his finger across his neck, “and threw in the creek.”
“You get your crossbow bolt back?”
“Never fired it.”
Sophie was still hugging Kurt. He placed his hand on her head, and looked to Bane, who nodded.
“Dad, you stink.”
They walked down to the creek and rinsed out their things. As they washed, Bane tuned the radio.
“This is the USS Fort Worth at Coast Guard Station Galveston. We have room for 35 survivors. We will update the count as we accept new passengers. Message repeats.”
Chapter 8: Fearfully and Wonderfully
They followed the access road to Central Expressway, Highway 75, one of the three north-south arteries of Dallas. Where they connected were a series of bridged spirals, but they stayed on the ground, peddling smoothly. There was a gentle uphill climb, then down for the next couple of miles. A few cars were abandoned on the highway, and once they saw a confused deer, but that was all. No people. No trash. It looked like people had just given up and walked away.
When they saw the exit for Knox-Henderson, Bane spoke up.
“Used to be some great stores down there. You ever go to the store at the back of Weir’s? Neat stuff. Candy, quirky toys. Hard to explain what they had – it was just cool.”
Kurt nodded. “If I really liked a lady, I’d get her something from Urban Flower.”
They didn’t pause as they passed the exits, but they talked about the times they’d had at Mockingbird Station and Lower Greenville. Finally, they climbed the slope up to the end of 75, where in another turn it would become 45 South to Houston. To the right stood downtown Dallas, silent. Fountain Place, a late-modernist skyscraper shaped like a stretching crystal, reflected the sky and clouds, while the Chase Building, with its bifurcated, convex roof, looked like a giant penis made out of Legos.
The highway curved left, and then right, and then became 45 South to Houston. They all raised their hands together in a silent woo!.
The day was beautiful. There was about a 5 mile per hour wind from the west, not enough to require constant steering adjustment, and as they passed through South Dallas into Dallas County, the land began to look like Texas again: old trees, broad fields, and wide skies. Crows cawed, and wild horses watched them pass.
Horses.
Kurt looked to Bane. “You ever ride horses?”
“No. We had goats. You?”
“Other than trail rides at summer camp, no.”
They chuckled for a long while. Two native-born Texans who couldn’t ride. Still, their expressions confessed that the thought of catching and riding three of those 1,000 pound animals was hilarious. “We would so get killed,” Kurt laughed.
“How far are we going today?” said Sophie.
“Let’s get to Ennis,” said Kurt. “About another 30 miles, no more hills.”
“I can go farther than that.”
“I’m sure you can, but the rest of us might need a break.” The truth was that he didn’t feel like he’d need a break. He felt great. It would be disturbing if it weren’t wonderful.
Bane looked at them. “I’m glad y’all are better, but I wish I understood it. I’ve got a bruise on my forearm from something I did a week ago, and it still hasn’t healed. You two... I’ve never seen that before.
Kurt said, “I really don’t understand it, either.”
“Have y’all always been like that?”
“No. I thought when Sophie’s knee was slashed, that’d be it. End of our journey.”
“Did you guys take some medicine, or eat something unusual?”
Kurt and Sophie looked at each other. “No,” said Sophie. “Water, pecans, dog meat... nothing special.”
“Well, if there are cosmic rays hitting us, I hope they give me super powers too, and not cancer,” said Bane.
They all laughed, but Bane kept chewing it over in his mind.
* * *
Everyone had been quiet for a long time. Sophie broke the silence.
“What’s in Ennis?”
“A Dairy Queen,” said Kurt.
“Drag strip,” said Bane.
“What’s a drag strip?”
“A place they used to race cars. Quarter-mile straight run, two cars race, fastest wins.”
“Oh. I thought it had something to do with men who dressed as women.”
“Where did you go to school?”
“Until the teachers quit showing up, Staley Middle School.”
“Did they quit before the power grid went dark?”
“Yeah. One told me she was going back to her dad’s farm in Colorado.”
“Why are we stopping in Ennis, Dad?”
There it was again. Dad. Not daddy, thought Kurt.
“It’s just a goal. There’s nothing special there that I know of. By now, I’m sure all the gas stations have been picked dry, but there might be a store or two with some kind of supplies left, if we wanted to look around.”
Sophie thought back to what had happened the last time one of them went to look for supplies.
“I’m good. Let’s not stop in Ennis. Let’s stop on the other side of it.”
“OK,” said Kurt. “That won’t add more than five minutes.”
Whether Bane had needed more breaks than usual, or he and Sophie felt better than usual, Kurt could not be sure, but it took the remainder of their daylight to get to Ennis. As night came, they saw a big, yellow glow from the west side of the highway.
“What is that?” said Sophie.
“The old drive through,” said Bane.
Drive-throughs had been big in the 1950s
and 60s, then died out, but made a resurgence in Ennis in the 1990s which lasted until the 2020s. People liked to drive out, especially in pickup trucks, back them into their spots and lay out with mattresses, couches, hibachis, and Igloo coolers full of Coke and Dr Pepper. Kids would run around and play, teenagers would make out, and older folks would watch the kids and the movie.
On a nice night like tonight, there’d be several hundred folks gathered to watch whatever was showing. Sometimes it was the latest blockbuster, but more often the movies were old B horror movies with little cursing and only hints of nudity. Something about the open sky and the social gathering made anything put up there special, while at the same time making anything too cerebral seem out of place. Most folks around Ennis would rather watch a mutated lobster chase a girl until her white t-shirt got wet than listen to some guy with no real problems lament his ennui.
As they got closer, they could see a giant shadow waver across the screen. It was a cross. A man was talking, though they couldn’t make out the words this far away. As they got closer they found dozens of people were walking towards the drive in, looking tired but friendly. Some asked where they were from, and they said Dallas, and the usual response was, “Welcome.”
Finally, one person said, “Are you here to hear Pastor Wilks?”
“Tom Wilkes?” said Kurt.
“That’s right. I’m not usually much for religion, but he’s good. I come and hear him twice a week.”
“Tom Wilkes was Travis’ mentor,” Kurt said to Sophie.
“Y’all ought to come. People share food and water. It’s nice.”
Bane and Kurt looked at each other and shrugged.
They realized as they got off the highway and followed the people that it wasn’t the minister’s voice they were hearing from the highway – it was the crowd reading in response. Each had a hand-written copy, shared among two or three.
Just like a century before, here was a service being led within the glow of kerosene and the crunch of sawdust.
The responsive reading ended as they settled into the congregation, and Tom Wilkes took the podium, flanked in hurricane lamps. Behind him, a small cross before a lamp cast a large shadow across the screen. Tom was in his 70s, bald with short grey hair on the sides, clean-shaven. He spoke slowly, giving the crowd time to absorb his intention, rushing nothing, holding everything. The crowd of 400 didn’t so much as cough.
300 Miles to Galveston Page 6
