The Remnants of Yesterday

by Anthony M. Strong

“Nope.” It only took a second to connect the crocodile clips. I checked the charger to make sure everything was working right, then brushed my hands on my jeans. “All done.”

  “Good. Now can we go back inside?”

  “You read my mind.” I straightened up, my eyes wandering down the road as I did so, toward the highway. A dull red glow pulsed on the horizon. “Look.” I pointed.

  Clara nodded. “I saw it while you were tying Walter up,” she said. “What do you think it is?”

  “Fire.” I’d seen that same glow a few years before while hiking with friends in California. The forest fires had been particularly bad that year, and although we weren’t close, we could still see them. “Something’s burning on the Interstate.”

  Clara looked at me, a haunted look in her eyes. I knew what she was thinking. Then, as if deciding not to dwell on it, she spoke. “We’re not safe here. We should go back to the store.”

  7

  AS SOON AS WE STEPPED inside, I turned and locked the doors. “We’ll need to lock the back door too.”

  “Already took care of that when I got the extension cable.”

  “Good. Are there any other ways to get in? Any other doors or windows?”

  “Not as far as I know. There are windows in the restrooms, but I don’t think they open. They are probably too small and high for someone to get through easily anyway.” She thought for a moment. “That’s it I think.”

  “Then we’re safe here until the car battery charges,” I said. “Sure would be nice if we could get a message to the outside world though.”

  Clara picked up her phone and examined it. “Still no service.”

  “I didn’t expect there to be.” Even so, I was a little disappointed. “You should get some rest.”

  “I can’t…”

  “We’ll need to be alert tomorrow. I have no idea what we will find out there, but if Walter is anything to go by, it isn’t going to be good.” Once again I thought of Jeff. Was he safe? Was he even alive? What about his wife and the baby? If this happened in New York while she was in labor… it didn’t bear thinking about. God I hoped they were ok.

  “What about you?”

  “I’m going to stay up and watch our friend.” I nodded toward Walter. “We’ll switch later.”

  “Well alright.” She didn’t sound convinced. “I’m not sure I can sleep.”

  “Just do your best.” I slipped my jacket off and handed it to her. “Here. Use this as a pillow. It’s not much, but…”

  “Thanks.” She took it and sat down with her back against the service counter, then propped the coat behind her head before looking up. “Promise you won’t go out there.”

  “What, are you crazy? One wrestling match a day with your boss is enough for me.” I could tell she was still shaken up, so I added. “I’ll be right over there near the door. I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Okay.” She smiled and closed her eyes.

  I watched her for a moment, then made my way to the display rack nearest the door and settled on the floor facing the forecourt, and the newly minted madman, Walter.

  8

  “WAKE UP.” Someone was shaking me.

  I didn’t want to wake up. I knew I was dreaming, but the dream was too comfortable. I was in New York with Jeff and his wife. They were cradling a baby. We were laughing and joking, my brother ribbing me about my height – he was a whole inch taller than me – and sharing stories of my lack of athletic prowess back in high school. It was just like it always was when we were together, and everything was fine with the world.

  “Come on, wake up.” The shaking was getting insistent now. “He’s gone.”

  “What?” I snapped my eyes open, the dream fading until it was nothing more than a vague recollection. I must have dozed off. Not a good way to impress Clara with my protective man skills. “What’s going on?”

  “Walter.” She pointed out toward the gas pumps. “He’s not there anymore.”

  I blinked the sleep from my eyes and looked through the window. It was light out, the long rays of the early morning sun casting a golden hue over the forecourt. Walter was nowhere in sight. “Dammit.”

  “How long were you sleeping?” Clara asked.

  “Not sure.” I had no idea. It could have been thirty minutes or two hours. All I knew was that it was still dark, and Walter was still securely tied up, last I remembered.

  “So what do we do now?”

  “Exactly what we planned to do. We get in the car and drive the hell out of here.”

  “With that maniac on the loose?” She said, her eyes narrowing to angry slits. “Not a chance.”

  “We don’t have a choice,” I replied, doing my best to keep my voice level and calm. “We’ve been here for at least 8 hours, and in all that time not one person has stopped for gas. We haven’t seen a single car drive past, and there’s no sign of any type of emergency services, not the cops, not the National Guard, or the Army. We can’t even make a phone call.”

  “We should have gone last night when we had the chance. While Walter was tied up.”

  “What with? The car battery was dead.” I threw my arms in the air. “Did you try your car when you went to get the charger?”

  “It didn’t start.” She seemed to be calming down a little.

  “Besides, even if I had seen Walter escaping, what was I going to do, go out there and subdue him all over again?” I felt a little vindicated by this logic. “It took a propane tank across the head to bring him down last time, remember?”

  “An empty propane tank.” She tried to suppress a smile. It didn’t work.

  “Still counts.” The situation seemed to have diffused itself. “He’s probably long gone by now anyway. I vote that we gather up our stuff, grab some snacks for the road, and get out of here.”

  “Fine. But I’m not leaving without this.” She picked up the tire iron. “Now I’m ready to go.”

  9

  “KEEP YOUR EYES PEELED for Walter,” I said as we stepped from the safety of the convenience store out onto the gas station forecourt.

  “No shit.” Clara brandished the tire iron like she was carrying a machine gun. Her eyes darted from side to side.

  We moved forward slowly, making our way past the abandoned BMW, toward my own car. As we passed the pump where Walter had been tied up just hours before, my eyes fell to the nylon rope.

  Clara saw it too. She reached down and plucked it from the concrete. “Look at this.” Despite still being tied, the rope was separated, the ends frayed and ragged. In a couple of places there were small linear indentations in the weave. She examined them closely. “These look like-”

  “Teeth marks.” I finished her thought.

  “Oh my God. He chewed his way free.” Clara’s eyes were wide with shock. “How is that possible?”

  “He obviously didn’t like being tied up.” It made my teeth hurt just thinking about biting through nylon rope.

  “It must have taken a while to do this.”

  “I don’t want to think about it.” Clara dropped the rope and focused her attention on the car. “We should get out of here before anything else happens.”

  “Sure.” We covered the last few steps to the car in a hurry, aware that at any time we might find ourselves dealing with Walter once again. “Hop in while I disconnect us.”

  “Keys?”

  I threw them to her and sprinted to the front of the car, leaned into the engine compartment, and unclipped the charger cables. The positive sparked with a gratifying pop of electricity when I pulled the clip off. “Okay, start her up.”

  There was a moment of silence, then the engine turned over. It caught for a moment, almost starting, but then fell off to nothing more than a grinding cough.

  “Try again.” I poked my head around the hood.

  “Okay.” Clara turned the key a second time, and again it resulted in nothing but a rasping, choked rattle.

  “Dammit.”

  “The check engine
light just came on,” Clara said. “Plus a bunch of other lights. It looks like Christmas on the dash.”

  “Try it one more time.” The knot of frustration in my stomach told me it was no good, but I didn’t want to give up just yet.

  “Here goes.”

  Same again. The engine shuddered and sputtered, but we were still stranded.

  I waved her off. “That’s enough. It’s pointless.” I grabbed the charger, my anger flaring, and threw it with all my might. It bounced off a pump and landed several feet away, surprisingly unharmed. I leaned my elbows on the front of the car and stared, forlorn, at the engine, as if somehow I might have an epiphany and figure out what was wrong. Needless to say, no such bolt of mechanical inspiration struck me.

  After about a minute of silence Clara spoke up. “Now what?”

  I slammed the hood down. “Now we walk.”

  10

  WE DIDN’T PASS A SINGLE vehicle on the way to the Interstate. The two-lane road was empty and desolate. We walked in silence, both of us consumed by our own worries. We sported backpacks liberated from the convenience store on our shoulders. These were filled with as much water and food as we could stuff in them. I’d also transferred most of the clothing from my overnight bag. I would have taken the bag, but it was cumbersome, and I didn’t want to be weighed down. We decided to hike along the Interstate to Clara’s college first, since it was only one exit down, and then make further plans depending upon what we discovered there. She could use a change of clothes anyway, and I could tell she was worried about her roommate.

  It wasn’t until the highway was in sight that we got our first glimpse of the devastation the previous evening’s event had caused.

  “Look.” Clara spotted the car first. It was blocking half the blacktop, nose down in a ditch, with its rear wheels a foot in the air.

  “They must have been coming off the ramp and lost control.”

  “Do you think they blacked out like us?”

  “Don’t know.” We drew close to the car. I scanned the ground. “There are no skid marks, no rubber on the road.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means they didn’t try to stop.” I peered in the window. The airbags were deployed, but there was no sign of anyone inside. “It’s empty.”

  “Then that means they got out okay. Right?” Clara was eyeing the front of the car, which had crumpled upward when it hit the ditch. One wheel was bent out at a crazy angle, the tire flat.

  I reached down and pulled on the door handle, then went around to the other side and did the same. “They’re locked.”

  “What?” Clara tried a handle too. “That’s impossible. How did the driver get out?”

  “This just keeps getting weirder doesn’t it?” I turned from the car. “Come on.”

  “Where?”

  “Up there.” I pointed to the off ramp.

  “I’m not sure I want to know what’s up there.” Clara looked nervous.

  “I don’t think we have much choice.” I wished I could tell her everything would be just fine, but I had a feeling we weren’t going to like what we saw on the Interstate. “Besides, there might be people up there.”

  “I suppose.” Clara did not look convinced, but followed me anyway as I made my way to the ramp and started up, looking back every once in a while to make sure she was still with me. As the ramp leveled out and joined the Interstate, we saw for the first time the cause of the glow we’d observed on the horizon the previous evening.

  I stopped, shocked.

  Clara, who was only a few feet behind me, almost walked into me, her attention fixed on the scene of carnage that now presented itself.

  “What the hell…” She spoke in a whisper, her eyes wide.

  A pall of acrid black smoke hung over the highway, under which sat the remains of several cars, some burned out, others shunted into each other, a couple upturned, their wheels pointing skyward as if they were accusing some angry god of smiting them. Here and there flames still licked at a few smoldering wrecks. Further down the highway a thick column of smoke weaved into the sky, rising for hundreds of feet before being carried eastward on the wind. One vehicle, closer than the others, was mashed into the safety barrier, its right side torn away, the interior scorched almost beyond recognition. The remains of the driver looked at us through empty eye sockets surrounded by black charred flesh. His hands, if indeed it was a he, still gripped what remained of the steering wheel even though his arms were nothing more than bone and gristle. The rancid stench of death permeated the air like a sickly perfume.

  I heard Clara gag. She turned away and bent over.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Give me a minute.” Her voice sounded thin, hollow.

  “We can go back down,” I said. There were other wrecks dotting the highway for as far as the eye could see. I was pretty sure this wasn’t the worst of what we’d find.

  “No.” She straightened up and wiped her mouth. “We need to get to the college. This is the quickest way.”

  “Okay.” I reached down and took her hand.

  She closed her fingers over mine, and then we walked.

  11

  WE HAD BEEN WALKING for about half an hour when we came upon the cause of a rising smoke column. At first I couldn’t make out what I was looking at, but as we drew closer I recognized the familiar shape of a commercial jetliner, or at least what was left of it, blocking our path ahead. The terrain was uneven, the highway cutting across a steep slope bounded on one side by a steadily ascending wall of rock, and on the other by a steep drop off that reached flatter ground about eighty feet down. The airplane had punched into the side of the hill, leaving the slope strewn with wreckage. The front section, the cockpit and about a quarter of the fuselage, had smashed into the highway and buckled against the cliff, demolishing a large portion of asphalt in the process.

  I spotted the remains of a wing, its aluminum skin burned and black, then part of the passenger section, open to the sky as if it had been peeled apart by a huge can opener. Next to this, a wheel and landing strut stuck straight up out of the soft ground almost like it were still doing its job, only there was nothing above it except a mangled mess of wiring and torn metal.

  “Oh my God.” Clara looked frightened. “It looks like it just fell out of the sky.”

  “I think that is exactly what happened.” A smell of burned jet fuel lingered in the air. If we were unsure that this was an event of greater proportion than just our immediate area, the sight of the downed aircraft, and lack of any emergency response, seemed to confirm it.

  “Is it safe?” Clara asked. “It’s not going to explode or anything?”

  “I don’t think so.” I could see a jet engine laying in a depression near the road, the turbines shattered and burned. “I think it did all of its exploding already.”

  “This is horrible.” She looked like she was about to burst into tears. “Do you think there were a lot of people onboard?”

  “It’s a big plane.” I couldn’t tell what type of plane it was, but from the amount of wreckage, and the recognizable logo painted on the vertical stabilizer, it was almost certainly a passenger aircraft.

  “What do you think happened to it?” Clara asked.

  “Same thing that happened to us. Only we weren’t in the air when we blacked out and all the batteries stopped working.” The aircraft had not completely disintegrated upon impact, which meant it must have been fairly low when it went down, probably taking off from Burlington Airport. Here and there on the hillside I could see rows of chairs, some with what looked like blackened bodies still strapped in. Other seats were empty. “They never stood a chance.”

  “How are we going to get around it?”

  “We’re not.” There was no way around on the right. The rock face was almost vertical. I picked out the remains of old dynamite bore holes, vertical shafts drilled into the rock from the construction workers when they blasted the roadway out of the hillside. The downw
ard slope on the left might have been an option if not for the amount of debris. As it was, we would never be able to negotiate such a steep drop and also climb over the shattered remains of the plane. That left the road, and the wrecked cockpit. “We will have to go through it.”

  “I’m not climbing through that.” There was a look of horror on her face.

  “We don’t have a choice,” I told her. “It’s either that or we turn back.”

  “We can’t,” Clara said. “I need to get to the school.”

  “Then we go forward.” We were almost upon the wreckage now. I could see the deep gouge the impact had made on the roadway. I pushed a piece of twisted metal to the side and picked my way forward, then looked back at Clara. “Be careful. There are a lot of sharp edges.”

  “We’re really going to do this?”

  “Yep.” The ruined cockpit loomed large over us. I chose my footfalls with care, aware that the ground under my feet was unstable, and approached the wreck. Ahead of me a service hatch hung open below a large hole in the floor of the main cabin. Beyond that was a jumble of debris. I motioned to Clara. “I think we can get through here if we’re careful.”

  “There?” She didn’t look convinced. “We’re going to climb into the plane?”

  “It’s the only way.” I reached out and gripped the edge of the hatch, testing to make sure it was not going to give way, then pulled myself into the aircraft.

  “What about me?” Clara looked up at me.

  I leaned down. “I’ve got you, hold on to my wrists and climb up.”

  “Okay.” She paused a moment, took a deep breath, and then gripped my hands before finding a foothold on the side of the fuselage and scrambling up. She stumbled forward into the aircraft, swaying for a moment before regaining her balance.

  “You good?” I asked her.

  “Sure.” She brushed a smudge of soot from her arm. “Can we move on? I don’t want to linger any longer than necessary.”