Against our better judgement, but also since we didn’t have any other choice, we each ate two apples for breakfast.
We had a few apples leftover after breakfast and we wrapped them in one of the blankets in the back of the truck for later.
I then unlocked the truck and told Emma and the kids that in case of an emergency that they should lock themselves in the truck until I returned.
I left them at the truck and began to walk down over the hill, following the overgrown path down the hillside.
I didn’t want to start driving the truck down the hill until I knew what laid ahead, hidden in the grass and high weeds.
The truck was a four-wheel drive, but there were limits to what a four-wheel drive could handle. It had been great staying at the shed last night, but I didn’t want to get stuck here. Our goal was to go to my father’s place in the mountains, a place we hoped where we would be able to build some kind of life, but we didn’t know what we would find when we got there. It was just a plan, an idea we hoped would work out.
It could end up being another mistake, we or should I say that I had made plenty of those lately, but we needed a plan, we needed to try. We had to do something and for now, it seemed like the right thing to do.
“How many times had I said that before?” I thought.
I walked down the hill, following the path, watching for rocks and holes, anything that I thought could damage the truck or keep us from getting the truck down the hill.
So far, I hadn’t seen anything that I felt would stop us.
I felt confident about our chances as I reached the bottom of the hill.
From the bottom of the hill, I was able to see the path as it went up over the hill on the other side of the trees.
The path was steeper on this side of the trees, but it led directly up to the interstate.
I had the impression that the maintenance road had been here before the interstate had been built. This part of the maintenance road was probably abandoned after the interstate and Ellsworth Air Force Base were built. It became easier to get to the waterline from the roads around Ellsworth at that point. Fortunately, it didn’t appear that the construction of the interstate had blocked this end of the old access road.
From here it looked like if the truck was able to climb the hill up to the interstate, I should be able to get on to the interstate through an opening in the guardrails.
In theory it all looked doable, Now I just had to drive the truck down over one hill and up the next.
The closest thing to a four-wheel drive I had driven was a Toyota Camry through the potholes on Eighth Street, which didn’t work out so well, but at least now I had a real four-wheel drive.
I walked back up to the truck.
“Well, can we make it?” Emma asked.
“I didn’t see any obstacles but the hill on the other side looks steep,” I replied. “I have to assume the water company traveled over that hill, so we should be able to make it up that side too.”
“OK,” Emma said warily. “If you think we can do it.”
“We won’t know until we try,” I replied. “Everyone in the truck.”
Once everyone was in the truck, in the same seating order as yesterday, I said, “I think we should all buckle our seatbelts.”
I put on my seatbelt, Logan pulled his seatbelt around himself and clicked it into place as Emma searched for hers.
“I don’t have a seatbelt,” Emma said.
“Well, if the truck starts to roll over, Logan, you reach around Katie and we’ll lock arms to keep them from falling out of their seat,” I replied.
“What?” Emma asked.
“Just in case,” I said. “Or you can wait at the bottom of the hill until I get the truck up on the interstate, that might be better.”
“Drive,” Emma said. “If things start to get too scary, you can let me and Katie out then.”
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“How do I know?” Emma replied. “I’ve never gone four-wheeling before.”
“Neither have I,” I smiled.
I turned the key and today the truck started right up.
“So far so good,” I said. “Now how do we get this thing into four-wheel drive?”
I looked down at the levers on the floor in front of Katie’s feet and saw I had two options, Four-wheel high and four-wheel low.
I shifted the lever into four-wheel high, remembering that my dad never used the low range unless he was climbing very slowly over rocks.
Then I got out of the truck to look at the wheels.
I turned the knobs on each of the front wheels to the locked position, something else I had seen my dad do many times.
I couldn’t think of anything else I needed to do, so I got back in the truck and put the gearshift into drive and touched the gas pedal with my foot and started driving slowly down the hill.
Other than the few whimpers let out by Katie, we arrived at the bottom of the hill without any problems.
The hill we now had to climb looked much more intimidating than it had looked when I was standing out in the grass.
I looked up at the interstate and instructed everyone to hold on, then I hit the gas.
The first part of the hill went smoothly, then the hill started to get steep. It became clear as we started up over the hill, something I hadn’t been able to see from down in the grass, that when they built the interstate that they had dumped tons of debris over this side of the hill. The last hundred feet was going to be a challenge.
When we hit the last part of the hill, the truck began to bounce and lurch from side to side as the wheels spun, then each of the tires took turns gaining traction only to break loose again seconds later.
I didn’t know if this was normal or not, never having done anything like this before, but since we still seemed to be moving slowly up the hill, I kept my foot on the gas and prayed.
The last twenty feet it felt like we were driving through sand on a beach, sometimes going uphill, other times we were sliding backwards, but somehow the truck found enough traction to go forward more than backwards.
The last ten feet took what seemed like forever, but when one of the front wheels touched the berm of the road, the truck shot up over the last of the hillside, between the guardrails and onto the interstate.
I barely was able to hit the brakes before the truck started down over the embankment on the other side of the road.
We all just sat quietly and looked at each other.
By how pale everyone’s faces were, I think our hearts had stopped beating somewhere about the time we when we hit the debris and the truck began bucking like a wild steer at a rodeo.
“That was fun,” Katie finally said, “But if we have to do that again, I think I’ll walk next time.”
We all started to laugh nervously.
Chapter 7
I took the truck out of four-wheel drive, since we were on solid pavement now and more importantly to save gas.
Our half tank of gas was now down below the quarter tank mark.
We all got back in the truck and smiled, it should be smooth sailing from here, so we thought.
The first mile went smoothly, we had to avoid a few abandoned cars, which at first we thought had been abandoned because they had run out of gas, but the next mile told us what had really happened.
Within the next mile, where interstate 90 turned north to go north of Rapid City, we were startled to see thousands of cars lined up bumper to bumper in all four lanes.
When we pulled up behind the last car, we discovered that it was even worse than we had thought.
I got out of the truck to walk up to the car we had stopped behind, it was when I got out of the truck I was struck with the unearthly sound of dead silence.
It was dead quiet, a thousand cars lined up on the freeway, but there wasn’t a single sound from any of those cars.
I waved at Emma to come out of the truck.
Emma and the kids looked at me
strangely like they didn’t understand why I was waving for them to come out of the truck, but they slowly crawled out and walked up to where I was standing.
“What is it?” Emma asked.
“Listen,” I said. “What do you hear?”
Emma looked confused, but then she slowly began to turn her head and look around.
“I don’t hear anything,” she replied.
“Thousands of cars that go on for as far as I can see, and not a sound,” I said.
“Where is everyone?” Emma asked.
I started to walk up between the rows of cars in front of us and looked in each of the cars as I walked. The windows were smashed with dried bloody pieces of flesh hanging from the jagged edges of glass.
Many of the cars without their windows smashed, had their doors hanging open, but they hadn’t been spared the mayhem that I had seen in the other cars. Even though their windows hadn’t been smashed out, the interior of the cars were discolored by dried blood, that had at one time drenched the interiors. All of this quietly told the story of what had happened here, perhaps weeks ago.
“Emma,” I replied. “I think they are all dead. Look at all of these cars, don’t they remind you of the mini van that the dead broke into out in front of our house?”
Emma just nodded.
We all just stood in silence and stared at the cars around us, each of us seeing our own visions of the slaughter that had taken place here.
I turned when I heard Katie scream and saw her running towards me.
“There is someone in that car over there!” Katie gasped.
I guided Katie over next to her mother and went to investigate.
“The red car,” Katie shouted as she pointed towards the cars in the center lane.
I cautiously walked up the center lane, staying back a few feet from the cars. I walked up the line a few more cars before I was scared out of my wits by two skulls that started ramming their scary rotted faces into the side windows of a red car. It was as if they were trying to get at me but had no understanding of why they were unable to reach me. They just kept slamming their mangled faces into the window, over and over again, teeth and rotted flesh broke away from the faces and dropped to the floor of the cars, but the dead bodies didn’t seem to notice or to care.
As I watched in amazement, I started to hear the sound of something pounding against the windows in some of the other cars around me.
As I glanced up and down the lanes of traffic, I could now see faces bouncing off the inside of the windows of the cars where the doors were still closed.
“My God,” Emma said, but stopped and just looked at me.
“It looks like the people in these cars were trying to get away from the city and the dead,” I said. “But ended up getting trapped here in their cars when they got stuck in traffic.”
“Then the dead attacked them and dragged them out of their cars and killed them,” Emma said.
“But I’m not sure if the dead came out here and attacked the people in their cars, or if many of the people in the cars were already infected before they tried to make their escape,” I replied. “Probably a little of both. The cars with the dead pounding their faces into the windows I think are some of the people who were already infected when they got out here but weren’t able to break out of their cars. There could still be hundreds of them in these cars.”
“How are we going to get through this?” Emma asked.
“We aren’t,” I replied. “I was looking up the highway to see if we could ride the berm, but there are too many cars sitting sideways, we could never get through.”
“We could push the cars out of our way with the truck,” Logan suggested.
“This looks like it goes on for miles, it would take forever to do that,” I replied. “We don’t have enough time or gas to do that the entire way to Montana.”
“Couldn’t we siphon gas out of some of these cars?” Logan asked.
“I think most all of these cars sat here and idled until their tanks went dry,” I replied. “Besides, if any of the dead started to find a way out of the cars they are trapped in, we could find ourselves in trouble.”
“Then what do we do?” Emma asked.
“The interstate looks passable going back the other way,” I started to say.
“You mean we aren’t going to Montana?” Katie asked.
“No, we’re still going to Montana, but we’ll have to go some other way. I think Route 212 is back that way a few miles, if we follow it north, it should take us where we want to go.”
Katei jumped when we heard the sound of glass breaking somewhere in the mass of cars in front of us, we all hurried back to the truck and got inside.
Katie stared wide eyed out the back window as I turned the truck around and we sped southbound in the northbound lane.
We found the exit for Route 212 two miles down the road, got off Route 90 and continued on our way.
I nervously watched the gas gauge as we drove, even if we found a few cars that still had gas in their tanks, I didn’t have any way to siphon out the gas. With the gas we had remaining in the truck’s tank, I knew we would need a little luck to complete our trip.
We found more areas where the road was clogged by abandoned cars, but they were small backups of only a few hundred cars, nothing that our four-wheel drive truck couldn’t get around.
However, what should have been a two-hour drive ended up taking us all day.
It was only an hour before dusk when we reached Devil’s Tower.
Katie and Logan were excited when they saw the Devil’s Tower off in the distance against the red glow of the evening sun. We had stopped there many times when making the drive to my dad’s house. They always got a kick out of watching the barefoot climbers scale the side of the Devil’s tower through my binoculars. I had promised them that one day in the future that we would all climb the tower, but I knew that was something that was fun to think about, but that we weren’t crazy enough to actually attempt. Hopefully they had forgotten about that a long time ago, or at least decided that the idea was so scary that they didn’t want to remind me about it, just in case I was crazy enough to want to try it.
We had just found Route 14, the road that would take us past my dad’s house when the engine began to sputter.
I pushed on, but I knew the truck would run out of gas before we would reach our destination.
In fact, we only made it another three hundred feet before the truck died.
The engine chugged one last time and then the truck slowly coasted to a stop.
We just sat and stared at the road ahead.
Chapter 8
“I was thinking maybe I should go out to look for some gas,” I said, finally breaking the silence.
“If we got out and walked could we make it to Grandpa’s place before dark?” Katie asked.
“No, I think we have ten more miles to go,” I replied. “We wouldn’t make it very far before it got dark.”
“We’re so close,” Emma sighed.
“I haven’t seen any cars or houses since about five miles before we drove past Devil’s Tower,” I said. “From what I remember, there isn’t much between us and Dad’s place.”
“So where does that leave us?” Emma asked.
“I think we are stuck here for the night,” I replied. “We can start walking in the morning when it gets light out, unless we find some gas shortly after we start out, we’ll be finishing our trip on foot.”
“Do you think it will be safe?” Emma asked.
“We’ve seen a lot of evidence that the dead have been here,” I replied. “But hopefully what we’ve seen has been out there since the beginning. We’re out in the country a good piece and we’ve been climbing hills the last ten miles, so I think we should be OK.”
“So we’ll be walking up hill the whole way?” Katie asked.
“Yeah, it starts to get steep from here,” I replied.
“You shouldn’t have any problem,” Katie
smiled. “In the Stone Age when you grew up you walked ten miles up hill both ways to school, but it is going to take me all day unless you want to give me a piggyback ride.”
“Not a chance,” I laughed. “According to your mother you weigh a ton.”
“Mom!” Katie laughed, “that’s not nice, how would you like it if I called you fat?”
“I didn’t call you fat, I just said you weighed a ton,” Emma protested. “There’s a difference.”
“Now girls, fight nice,” I laughed. “If a strong breeze came up, it would blow you both over. I weigh more than the two of you put together, but it doesn’t mean I am going to carry either one of you.”
“We’ll see,” Emma smiled.
Katie giggled, “Yeah Dad, we’ll see.”
I just sighed, two against one wasn’t fair and I should know, I was used to those odds.
“Well, I guess I better get a good night’s sleep then since I am going to have a tough day tomorrow,” I said. “I recommend that we all get out and take a bathroom break before we turn in because no one is getting out of the truck again until morning and we can see what’s outside.”
We all got out for our final break, and then we each had another apple before we got back inside the truck.
We did the best we could to make everyone comfortable, but it was impossible to make everyone happy on the single bench seat inside the old truck.
I sat in the driver’s seat, Emma sat next to me and Logan sat in the passenger’s seat next to the door.
Katie laid on top of us, with the end that talked on my lap.
I had to tell Logan three times to stop tickling Katie’s feet, he finally stopped when I threatened to turn Katie around, so he had to deal with the end that bit.
Finally, peace and quiet filled the truck.
Logan fell asleep first, aside form his snoring, all was quiet.
That was until Katie had to ask me a question.
“Dad?” Katie asked.
Just Trying To Stay Alive: A Prepper's Tale Page 34
