by Ryan Schow
There was one steel beam still intact, the concrete all around it crushed down. It was a way over, but not even close to ideal.
How the hell was he supposed to get everything over that? The bare beam was at least thirty feet from edge to edge. He looked down to see if they could slide down one side of the concrete to the first level roadway. They couldn’t. The collapse was too complete.
Jagger stood there for what felt like ten minutes of contemplating before he picked up his bike and started across the beam. He wasn’t a very large man, but he’d lost weight on this trip and the winds were not friendly. He forced himself to go slow and steady. Every gust could have been his end though, so he watched his balance and kept his eyes straight ahead.
When he got to the other side, he saw the girl just staring at him. He walked back across the beam, his confidence growing. He carried the two wagons and their things across the beam, and then her bike. Then he went back for her. She was scared, he could see that.
“Don’t look down past your feet. It’s wider than you think.”
It wasn’t.
She started across the beam and he followed her, measuring her balance. She stopped halfway across, froze.
“You’re doing great,” he said.
She didn’t move.
“You can do it,” he said. “Just put one foot in front of the other.”
She started to move, but stopped, and this messed up her balance. She put her hands out, started to circle them as her body lost balance. He reached out, grabbed her—nearly lost his own balance—then held her in place.
She started crying, sobbing. He finally said, “Turn to me.”
She turned, her delicate hands gripping his arms, his shirt. When they were facing each other, he said, “Come here.”
She did.
He picked her up, slowly, carefully, and she clung to him for dear life, circling her arms around his neck, pressing her face into his chest.
He moved, slowly, carefully, beyond terrified across the rest of the beam. When they reached the other side, he plunked down hard and tried to still his rampant heart.
She sat beside him but didn’t say anything. She just snuffled and wiped her face. Her hair was dirty, tangled and in her face. She brushed it away, didn’t look at him. It was almost as if she was embarrassed for having failed to walk across herself.
When he stood, she stood. They went to the bikes and he hooked the wagons back up. After that, they rode across the rest of the bridge. The nightmare that was San Francisco slowly unfolded. The skies were smoky, but not terrible. Certainly breathable. But the damage was immeasurable.
The closer he got to the Fremont exit, which would take him downtown, the more he realized this city was gone. Fallen. The Transamerica Pyramid was a memory, skyscrapers shelled and toppled, entire roads buried beneath collapsed buildings. Fremont was still passable, but barely. Half the street was broken glass from the skyscraper next to the exit, so they were forced to tread slowly over it, sparing the tires of their bikes, but risking getting cut if they stepped wrong.
They circled around a swamp of debris, struggling to get the bikes past, almost abandoning the wagons because at some point he was having to carry them over huge mounds of unstable debris. Twice he slipped. Twice he lost his footing and sat down hard on lumps of dusty concrete. Somewhere along the way, he twisted his ankle in a pile of rubble.
The skin cut open, not in a gash, but enough that he began to worry about infection. Once they got to Fremont, he realized just how bad downtown was. He almost forgot to breathe, seeing what he was seeing.
Most of downtown was piles of wreckage. Completely impassable.
“We’re so screwed,” he muttered under his breath. He looked at the girl and she was looking at him, waiting.
It took them days to get through.
His ankle didn’t get infected, but they got plenty more scrapes, bruises and cuts trying to get through the crumbled buildings that once defined the skyline of this magical city by the bay.
They ran out of food around the fifth day into being in San Francisco. From there it got a bit hairy. He told the girl to wait for him in the corner of a building that wasn’t demolished. It didn’t look safe, but he couldn’t leave her unattended either. Jagger slipped inside where it was pitch black and dusty. Using one of the shotguns and an old battery operated flashlight he took from Bright’s place before they left, he went door to door, floor by floor looking through all the abandoned apartments.
All of the numbered doors had been kicked in. There wasn’t a body to be found.
He found spoiled food and some dead pets, but he wasn’t finding anything to eat. Finally, on the sixth floor, doing knock and drops—knocking on the door then kicking the door down—he found some canned food. A lot of it. Using plastic bags he grabbed from one of the previous homes, he packed up the food as well as an iron skillet and a hot mit, a can opener and two plastic bowls with silverware.
He returned to the girl. He found her cowering in the corner where he’d left her. She held her finger to her lips, giving him the universal shush! signal. He moved as quietly as he could into the corner of the building with her. Poking his head around the corner, he saw several guys in National Guard uniforms loading stacks of dead bodies onto a large platform trailer hooked onto a ragtag Humvee.
One of the bodies in the pile moved, then mewled. A withered hand tried to creep out of a heap of bodies while the exposed head turned, eyes slowly blinking, its mouth trying to work its way open, to maybe say he was still alive.
“Got another one,” the young kid announced.
An older man with a steely look in his eyes, a set jaw and the hardened disposition of a career soldier, walked over, withdrew his pistol then discharged the weapon. The dying man’s head flopped over, a single red hole in it.
“Problem solved,” he said to the kid with a disgusted look on his face.
Jagger opened a bottle of water. He handed it to the girl, who went after it like she hadn’t seen water in a decade. She drank deeply, her little lips cracked. Studying the rest of her, he found her skin to be a bit too sallow, and her eyes a bit sunken. She handed him the bottle and he finished most of it off. She was looking at it, the last inch in the bottom. The last inch he left for her.
He handed it over; she downed it in a single shot.
Outside the building, the soldiers went about their business collecting the bodies, dragging them to the trailer, pitching them onto the heap. When they were done with that building, they moved up the street to the next, loaded the trailer until they couldn’t toss another body on top, then they left the scene altogether, presumably to dump their load.
Jagger wasted no time popping open a can of beets. He and the girl ate greedily from them, chewing loudly, drizzling maroon-colored juice down their lips and chins. Every so often, she would look up at him and he would look up at her, but they wouldn’t say anything. They didn’t need to. When they finished the beets, they opened a can of green beans, ate at a more reasonable pace, then dried their chins and mouths with their shirts.
She let out a little burp, then followed it with a smile.
“Good one,” he said, opening the last bottle of water. He handed it to her and she shook her head. He took a sip then stored it with their things inside the wagon.
“We should check out the rest of this building,” he said. He watched her body sag. “You want to come with me?”
Now she perked up.
They found a place to stash their stuff where it wouldn’t be seen by the casual observer, then walked up to the sixth floor where he resumed their apartment to apartment search. They hunted for whatever they could use. Things like medications and water. Maybe a butcher knife or a meat cleaver. There was more stuff than food, and more food than fresh water, but they managed to gather a few jugs, some anti-biotic ointment for their cuts, a handful of vitamins and a couple bottles of Vicodin from an undisturbed bedside table.
When they got b
ack to the wagons and bikes, they loaded up what they could before setting out into city. Jagger was trying to make it home before nightfall, but home was across town, closer to The Presidio.
The moving was really slow, the destruction beyond measure. So much of the city was treacherous and impassable. Nightfall came quickly, too quickly. They found an old apartment building that was locked from the outside, but undisturbed. With a chunked block of concrete, he broke the glass to the front door. After clearing it out, he entered the building with the girl in tow. Shotgun at the ready, they proceeded in.
The lobby was dark, a staircase nearby. They made it up two floors without incident, but the walk was creepy. It was pitch black. He was so moved by the dark he felt alone, even though the girl was with him. His brain began to unravel.
He thought of all the horror movies he watched as a kid, the haunted homes and roaming ghosts and paranormal activity and it started to get to him so he tried to clear his mind and just move forward.
The silence was eerie though.
They got into a hallway where he flicked on his old flashlight enough to see the path ahead. When he clicked it out again, he started moving from door to door, knocking lightly. Somewhere down the hall, they heard rustling, but it was just a pack of rats scurrying into a hole in the wall.
When they entered the first apartment, the natural light coming in from the windows brightened the place enough to see around, but he didn’t need the light to know someone had died in there.
Behind him, the girl gagged.
He moved into the kitchen, telling her to shut the door behind her. She did. He went through the pantry, the fridge, the drawers. There were useful things in the drawers: a book of matches, a pack of batteries, chewing gum. But no food. Not even a can of beans or an unopened jar of pickles.
They went through three more places before they found a 24 pack of waters stashed between a bed and the wall it sat upon. There was a dried, meaty spray of what Jagger could only imagine on the pillow. He ignored it while trying to tell himself he needed to be grateful for what he’d found. The girl turned and threw up. It looked like a bloody mess, but that’s only because they’d eaten beets a few hours ago.
“You okay?” he asked, pulling her hair back.
She shook her head.
“Good, let’s go. We’ve got water now.”
She looked back up at the bed, her eyes on the carnage, then doubled over and dry heaved twice more. When she was ready, they left the apartment tower, got their things and headed deeper into downtown.
Night fell on them fast; they found a place to crash for the night. It was on a couch in a gas station lounge, not ideal. That’s all they could safely find as the sun dipped below the cityscape, taking both the light and the heat with it.
Bundled in the blankets from the big rig, the girl slept, snoring lightly, her nose not as plugged as the day before. He wrapped a blanket around himself, sat close to the girl, let himself drift off. The next day was slow moving. Really slow moving where they had to take the long way around everything. They finally made it to the outskirts of downtown, but were stopped by a thirty-foot pile of bodies and the sinking sun.
“We can’t walk over them,” he said, still taken aback. “Not with cuts on our legs and arms.”
He could only imagine the kinds of diseases festering in that gigantic mound of rot. Besides the almost steady buzzing of blow flies, and the rustling of bodies that made him think of huge, ravenous rats. When they were ready to go, he had to pull the girl away from the heap of bodies.
She couldn’t stop staring.
Together Jagger and the girl meandered into a nearby building looking for a place to crash. The bottom few stories suffered some sort of ground level blast which left them uninhabitable, even for a night, but they did get upstairs about seven floors where he felt they were safe. The only bed was a queen sized bed. She took one side; he took the other. Both of them stretched out and called it a day.
“Good night,” he said.
She didn’t say anything, but she reached out and put a little hand on his arm and it touched his heart. This little girl he’d saved, maybe she would save him too one day. Not from harm, but from the cruel weight of this war and the destruction it left in its wake. This also made him think of his boys, and Lenna, and how much he missed all of them.
As he was drifting off, he wondered if the boys would take to her. He knew they would. They had always wanted a little sister, same as Lenna always wanted a little girl. Already Jagger was beginning to think of her as his child. Was this because she had no one? Or was it because he was developing a fondness for the child? Perhaps it was measures of both.
He drifted off, then woke the next morning to sounds from the street below. Someone was setting the pile of bodies they’d encountered on fire, some Hitler youth looking guy. The men were all fanning out, some of them heading into the same building he and the girl were in.
Jagger hopped out of bed, careful not to wake the girl because she needed sleep. He grabbed the gun, stood sentry at the door expecting trouble.
He started to smell the smoke, the cooking of spoiled meat, the rotting smell just beneath it. It was seeping into the windows. He went to the window, looked down below. Through the haze of black smoke, and saw a Humvee arriving.
Next thing he knew, gunfire opened up below. The girl stirred, opened her eyes. She saw him looking at her and stilled. Her eyes found his gun and then the window.
The crackle of gunfire stopped.
A few minutes later, Jagger watched the men pile out of the building. They stripped the National Guardsmen of their weapons and uniforms, then confiscated the truck and left the nearly naked men in the street like tossed trash.
He couldn’t take his eyes off the bodies below. Not the ones immersed in flames, but the bodies of the men who had just died.
He glanced back at the girl. She said nothing. I don’t even know your name, he thought as he looked her over.
Finally he said, “I have two boys. They’re a little older than you. You’ll like them.”
She looked away, then smiled and looked back. For the first time since he found her, he thought he saw some light in those eyes of hers.
They left the room they were staying in because the stink of smoked flesh was seeping into the room they occupied.
“We can’t stay here,” Jagger had said. She nodded. “It stinks, right?”
She just looked at him, said nothing, then she looked down.
They switched floors and sides, found a bedroom that seemed inhabitable, if only for a night. They looked around the small apartment. There was a full sized mattress and a couch. Both smelled clean. Like maybe someone had either just moved in when the war started or was getting ready to move out. Probably the former. He dragged the mattress into the living room, which wasn’t large but had a large glass window with a view.
“I’ll take the couch?” he said.
She looked away, out the window. They slept through the day, woke near sunset and ate a can of chili, a small baggie of chip crumbs and drank two warm sodas. The girl took a blanket off the bed and crawled up on the couch to settle in for the night.
“So that’s how it’s going to be?” Jagger asked with a grin.
She didn’t move. Didn’t even act like she heard him. Looking at the back of her head and body, she was curled on the couch facing away from him, not saying a word. There was something so small and sweet about her, something so pure yet so broken. He couldn’t even begin to imagine what was going on in that little sandy blonde head of hers. She did, however, have the capacity to understand he needed the bed more than her, and somehow this left him feeling content.
“Thank you,” he said, not expecting a response as he crawled into bed.
The next day they got an early start. It was frighteningly cold, as usual, but they’d picked up warmer clothes along the way, clothes they could shed in layers throughout the day as the chill burned off. In the mornings, ove
r their clothes, they wore their blankets like ponchos. The girl draped hers over her head. Jagger did not. He couldn’t limit his hearing for the sake of keeping his ears warm.
They burned the better part of the morning and half the afternoon getting down one side of California Street and up the other side. Devastation was spread out everywhere. At times the street was blocked, but sometimes they could inch through here and there, and maybe navigate their way over small landslides of rubble.
By and large, there were no apartment towers, only rows of two and three story buildings. And California was a wide street. The problem with that was at the time of the first attack, it looked like traffic was heavy. That meant a congestion of cars. Because of this, most of the time they had to walk their bikes and wagons. When they could ride, however, they usually didn’t because they’d just have to get off again it was that bad.
By the time they reached California and Presidio, they felt like they’d been walking uphill for like ten hours.
Turning on Presidio, seeing more hills directly ahead, he said, “You ready for lunch?”
She let her bike drop in a clatter on the sidewalk, plopped down on her little butt then laid all the way down on her back and said nothing.
He laughed then did the same.
They laid like that until some guys came walking by. They looked at the two of them, their wagons with food and a few bottles of water and started toward them. Jagger sat up and showed them his gun. They changed direction immediately. He laid back down, enjoying the silence and the cool breeze washing over their overheated bodies.
“Water?” he asked.
She didn’t even move but to shoot out her hand. He laughed again. When he handed her the bottle, she sat up smiling, then drank deeply.
Jagger studied her dirty face and her unkempt hair, hair that was in dire need of a washing. He thought of using the water to wash her face, but he imagined he wasn’t much of a sight right now either.
Jagger was always a good looking man, and being military, he’d taken care of his appearance. But now he was wearing clothes with blood and dirt on them. His hair had grown out, his beard—which was non-existent for years—was now full and no longer itching. He was lean, though. Too lean. Where before he worked out regularly, now he was constantly walking, riding, scavenging, and he wasn’t eating much so he’d grown skinny. Far too skinny for his own liking.
