by Ike Warren
Chapter 7: Into The Darkness
The illusion of water shimmered on the road surface in the distance. Allan’s tired mind drifted back to when he was a kid, sitting beside his father who drove the old family pickup on a hot summer afternoon. He remembered seeing the same shimmering pools of water on the road surface that he saw in front of them now and he remembered asking his father “Is that water on the road in front of us?”
His father grinned, “Yes it is son. Keep your eye on it and pretty soon we’ll splash right through it.”
As they drove forward in his daddy’s pickup the image of the water disappeared.
“What happened to the water daddy?” Allan asked.
“I was just teasing you about the water son. That was really just a mirage. It happens because the air temperature at the road surface is hotter than the air around it and something about it forms kind of a mirror effect.”
Of course Allan didn’t believe his father, and he was angry at that he lied to him about getting to watch the truck splash through the water on the road and so he gazed into the horizon for the duration of their trip, searching for more mirages and hoping that just one of them would turn out to actually be water so that the truck would drive through it and make a big splash and his father could be proven wrong. Allan looked at the mirage ahead of them now with the same wishful thoughts.
If only that was real water on the road ahead and we could get our feet wet and splash around in it for a minute or two amongst all the other people wandering around on the highway. He thought. Skipping around in the water with no care in the world. We might even bend down and take a drink as if we were a couple of gazelles frolicking beside an oasis in the middle of the African desert. It sure feels as hot as a desert in Africa out here. After filling our bellies full with the cold crisp water we might lie down and bath our bodies in the little roadway pool.
“What are you thinking about?” Jennifer asked.
“Huh?” Allan asked stunned as his train of thought came back to reality.
“You’re just staring off into space with a weird grin on your face.” Jennifer replied.
“Oh, nothing I guess.” But it wasn’t nothing. His mental lapse, although momentary, was a sign of dehydration and heat exposure. As quickly as he came to that realization, his thoughts drifted away again.
Two gazelles in Africa just bathing in the little pool on a hot summer day. Until a crocodile leaps up out of the water and eats us for supper. Mmm, supper. Oh to have a nice juicy steak right now. I can almost taste the meat on my lips. So juicy and tender. Maybe we could setup a makeshift grill on the side of the road and grill the meat for a few minutes. The steaks will be cooked medium rare, centers red and juicy, the outside crispy with a slight oily residue shimmering on the surface from all the juices inside the meat boiling to the top. Oh how I could go for some gazelle steaks right now. Allan licked his lips and smiled while Jennifer looked on at him with a worried look on her face. He felt her staring at him and he shook the fantasy away and forced his mind to focus on reality.
There is a lesson to be had in the mirages of water on the highway. He thought. Dad was right. Since the asphalt roadway is black it absorbs more of the sun’s heat and the air just above it becomes hotter than the rest of the air around it.
“We need to get off this black asphalt.” He told Jennifer.
“Why?” Jennifer looked down confused.
“The black asphalt absorbs heat which means we’re walking on top of the hottest surface around. If we walk along the side of the road on the lighter colored concrete it shouldn’t be quite as hot on us.”
“Yeah, but how far does this concrete go? What will we do when that ends and there’s nothing but more black pavement? Besides, when most of the cars stalled out yesterday what did they do? They pulled over to the side of the road and blocked the shoulder.” She moaned.
“Well then we can deal with that when we get to it. We can walk around the stalled cars.” His frustration was matching hers and he looked down at her and saw that her face was flushed red and her forehead was covered in sweat and amongst the heat and exhaustion and dehydration she was angry. “Don’t worry.” He tried to comfort her. She looked up at him and sighed and with that some of the tension in the air was lifted.
They walked past a man struggling to push a Kawasaki motorcycle beside him. The man was sweating profusely and breathing heavily but onward he pushed the bike. Allan’s thoughts wandered to the efficiency of gasoline. If only we could find a motorcycle with an engine that worked and a single gallon of gas. He looked at the man, struggling to push the motorcycle down the highway at 2 or 3 miles per hour, becoming completely exhausted yet Allan thought how a single gallon of gas could send the motorcycle racing down the highway for 75 miles at 70 miles per hour. If it were my motorcycle and if it worked we would be home in less than an hour with plenty of gas to spare. But no doubt there is probably gasoline in the tank of the broken bike. Such an amazingly efficient liquid now just dead weight. Allan wondered why the man would expend so much energy pushing a machine that was now useless. He figured the only reasons why the man would do that was if he didn’t have far to go in which case why would he still be pushing the bike into the second day of the disaster? Perhaps the man just found the bike lying on the side of the road and decided to take it as his own little souvenir, like all the other scavengers of the disaster, without concern for the fact that the motorcycle didn’t even run. There was one other reason that Allan considered, and that was what if the man knew something that Allan didn’t? What if he was taking the motorcycle to a nearby shop where he would find the tools to make a simple repair to get the bike running again? But wouldn’t the parts be susceptible to the same energy pulses that took out all the cars, regardless if they were in unopened boxes or not? He wondered. Allan didn’t know much about mechanics, and that raised another thought that had been nagging at him since they left the mall parking lot the day before. What if we left our truck too soon? What if Walter was right? What if all the cars on the road just needed a few more minutes to auto-reboot their computers and everything would be fine. What if everyone had just assumed that all the cars were broken and nobody had since actually tried to crank one back up? If I could just find one car with the keys still in it then I could try cranking it then I would know.
The problem was, there were no keys in any of the cars because when all the cars stopped working everyone got out and put their keys in their pockets and purses out of pure habit. Allan wondered how many hundreds of thousands of people, maybe millions, were at that very moment walking around still carrying the dead weight of useless car keys in their pockets. He remembered the keys that Jennifer was still carrying for him in her backpack. The rational thing for him and everyone else to do would be to take all the car keys off their key chains and toss them on the side of the road like all the other trash that littered the median. The idea of that seemed silly though and Allan wondered how such a rational thought could seem so irrational. It was then that he realized that the man who was pushing the bike was probably not pushing it because he had stolen it or because he knew of a secret way to fix it. More than likely the man pushed the motorcycle for the same reason that everyone else was still walking around clinging to their car keys out of habit. Allan was not just an onlooker of a man struggling to push a useless motorcycle, they were one and the same, for if Allan had the strength to push his own truck down the road he would do it. Everyone had been clinging to the hope that the disaster was only temporary and that pretty soon everything would be back to normal and everyone’s car keys would work and the motorcycle would fire back up and everyone would carry on about their lives at the usual 70 miles per hour. Allan feared that soon all that hope would run out and he was afraid of what the consequences would be once that happened.
In the late afternoon Allan and Jennifer decided to continue walking on into the night. They had not made much progress due to the extreme heat of the day but now th
at it was getting dark and the temperatures were falling they both felt more energized to press on. What they had not anticipated though was the complete and all-encompassing darkness of the night once again. The night before had been completely dark, but it was raining and cloudy so they expected with the clearer skies from earlier in the day that it wouldn’t be quite so dark at night, yet as the afternoon temperatures dipped a cloudy overcast spread across the sky and by nightfall only a few stars poked through sporadic breaks in the clouds. In the darkness they clung to the concrete shoulder of the highway and used it to direct them in a straight line. Allan felt like a cave explorer walking so cautiously in the darkness, except a cave explorer would have thought ahead and carried a torch to light the way. He imagined himself holding a long stick with a piece of kerosene soaked cloth wrapped around the end of it, lit on fire and lighting their path as he had seen in so many movies. It was too dark now to gather such supplies and apparently no one else had thought of it either since there were no such flaming torches visible amongst the mass of people moving about the highway in the darkness.
A sweaty arm brushed up against Allan in the darkness and a voice from an unseen face said, “Pardon me.”
A few steps later and he bumped into a large torso and out from it came a scruffy and angry sounding voice, “Excuse me!”
All around them now they could hear the sound of people walking and breathing. Some of the breathing was hard and passed them by quickly and others sounded like the relaxed breaths of people just roaming around. Wherever they were they seemed to be amongst a massive convergence of people, but where they were and why there were so many people in that place Allan did not know. The air was thick and rank from the breath and sweat of all the people passing by who had been walking in the heat but who hadn’t bathed or brushed their teeth in over 36 hours. It reminded Allan of the odorous men’s locker room back when he was in high school. That indescribable salty-musty odor that all locker rooms seem to have. Even the air outside, still humid from all the rain the night before, mimicked the thick moist air of a locker room. For some reason he thought of the victims of the holocaust, escorted down amongst the hundreds of other people into dark and filthy gas chambers to the horrible fate that awaited them. What horrible fate awaits us here in this dark and crowded place? Allan felt panic rush over him and he began to walk faster. Jennifer grabbed the back of his shirt and she held it tight to keep from becoming separated. They bumped in to more people and Allan must have said “Pardon me” at least a dozen times before he gave up and began bulldozing his way through the crowd. It all felt surreal. It was like a dream.
A nightmare.
The darkness, the unseen people, the tugging on his shirt by Jennifer, holding him back, preventing him from moving forward. Why are there so many god-damn people here? He pleaded with himself to find an answer. Someone’s bony elbow jabbed him in the side. Allan side-stepped in reaction and immediately a heavy foot landed on his and Allan winced in pain.
He thought back to when he was a young boy helping his grandfather vaccinate cows at his farm. All of the cows would be rounded up into a small pen and then his grandfather and uncle and the other men who had volunteered to help would separate the herd by flailing their arms and yelling “Yah!” and the cows would go one by one down the cattle shoot to receive their vaccination sots. As a boy Allan had never been allowed into the corral because his grandfather told him that it was dangerous and in the darkness of this night he could almost hear his grandfather’s voice. “It’s dangerous enough as it is, but if the cows get spooked they will stampede and there’s nothing stopping them.” The dark place on the highway was a cattle corral and on that night the humans were the cows.
He felt the tug on the back of his shirt let loose and Jennifer called out, “Allen!” as a dark figure passed between them. Allan stopped and turned towards Jennifer’s voice and something above him caught his eye. It was something massive in the darkness and only visible as a blackened contrast to the ever so faint glow in the sky offered by the few stars that poked through the clouds. Jennifer caught up to him with her hands held out in front of her to protect her stomach.
She touched him as he gazed upward to the sky. “What is it babe?” She whispered.
“We’re at the High Five Interchange. We’re at the bridges that we commented on yesterday when we were stuck in traffic.” They stood and stared up at the long black arching bridgeway and imagined the pale pastel colors that they had seen the morning before. The bridge made Allan feel both at peace and anxious. He felt at peace because he finally had a bearing in their sea of darkness but he felt anxiety because he realized that they had only walked about 20 miles in the past 36 hours. All the detours around the stalled cars and stopping to rest and searching for supplies was slowing them down. A car could do that in less than 20 minutes if traffic cooperated. One gallon of gas. He thought.
“We’re going to have to walk all night.” He told Jennifer. She grabbed the back of his shirt again and he led them out into the night.
They walked past the High Five Interchange and away from the roaming mass of people. The clouds began to grow denser and the little bits of starlight that had poked through earlier faded behind the abyss of clouds. There was someone with a torch of some kind inside a building near the service road. If they were the owner of the building or if they were an intruder Allan could not know, but he guessed that it was probably the latter. Suddenly his knee slammed into something hard that seemed to spring back and forth, causing him to lose his balance and he fell down. When he landed he paused for a moment to determine what had happened until he realized that he was actually sitting inside of a car. He was in the driver’s seat because he felt a steering wheel in front of him and apparently the driver’s side door had been left open which is what he had just stumbled into. The inside of the car had a similar musty smell to that of the bridge area that they had just walked out of and Allan prayed that it wasn’t the smell of a dead body inside the car. This seat does not feel right. He thought and he froze. What if I’m sitting on top of a dead body?
Suddenly a man’s voice spoke from underneath him, “Well, are you going to get up?” Allan, who was convinced that he was sitting on a dead body moments before leapt up fearing that the corpse had come back to life and was now talking to him. It took a moment for him to calm down and realize that it was not a dead body.
“What are you doing in the car?” Allan demanded and he knew the absurdity of his question but it was the only thing that he could come up with as his anger at his own clumsiness swelled.
“Just resting sir.”
“Why do you have the fucking door open?”
Jennifer leaned close and whispered, “Allan, calm down.” He immediately felt embarrassed for having lost his composure and for cursing like he did.
“It’s hot in here and I stink. It’s pretty bad when you can smell yourself. I opened the door to let air circulate.” Said the voice inside the car.
Allan rubbed his knee. “Look, I’m sorry for yelling at you.”
“Oh, that’s alright. You hit the door pretty hard there. The bang kinda echoed inside the cab of the car a little.”
Allan continued rubbing his knee and he grabbed Jennifer’s hand and they walked on, careful of every step now. Here and there they began to pass people carrying candles that helped light their way. Allan was amazed at how much a single flickering candle flame lit up the area around it. In addition to the candles there were those who smoked cigarettes. The little red embers lit up small areas in front of the smoker’s face and it looked like little red torches floating around in the night. Whenever one of the smokers would raise their cigarette to take a drag it would reveal the lips and noses of their faces. Allan snickered because it kind of looked like there were no bodies attached to them, only lips and noses behind the ember of a cigarette hovering above the ground in the darkness.
Allan remembered when he was a rebellious teenager experimenting with cigar
ettes and a ridiculous conversation that he had once had with his best friend about the benefits of smoking. “The smoke prevents bacteria from growing in your mouth.” His friend had told him.
“They help warm you up if it is cold outside.” Allan suggested.
With that, Allan and his friend nodded their heads and exclaimed, “Hell yeah!” as they each fired up another cigarette. But Allan, even in his youth, knew that neither of those reasons were really legitimate but if he could talk to his friend now he would offer up one more reason why cigarettes were beneficial. When society collapses, the embers of a cigarette will help light up the darkness around you, at the very least so that others can identify you by your lips and nose. He chuckled at the absurd thought and for some reason he found himself craving a cigarette. He hadn’t smoked in years but the reminiscing thoughts of his teenage years brought back memories of playing video games and cruising around town in his pickup truck all without a care or responsibility in the world. A big juicy steak with a cigarette for dessert sounds pretty damn good right about now. He thought and he smiled and he could almost feel Jennifer staring at him again even though it was impossible to know for sure if she was looking at him in the darkness.
Suddenly they heard gun shots close behind them.
Too close.
Both of their ears began ringing and they turned and looked into the direction of the gunfire but there was only the void of darkness out there in the night. They could hear the sound of people screaming and panicked footsteps were suddenly all around. Allan imagined a herd of cattle stampeding right towards them. He grabbed Jennifer’s hand and in the panic he found himself running too, tugging at Jennifer’s arm, forcing her to keep up. His instincts told him to run but he knew that it wasn’t safe to run in the night. With every step he anticipated running into someone or falling over another opened car door. He tried to slow down but his feet would not allow it. He tugged harder at Jennifer’s hand, desperate to get away from that awful place. She screamed out between exhausted breaths, “Allan! Slow down!” but his own stampede could not be stopped. Time seemed to slow down and as he ran he thought how they were finally making good progress towards home. If only we could run like this the rest of the way home. We’d be …
