Go-Ready

by Ryan Husk

  Another honk from Edward. Marshall looked back, shook his head, “The motherfucker’s gonna keep on and get on my last goddam nerve.”

  Margery, like every woman, was able to shift gears between hating her man and appeasing him. “Settle down, baby. Let’s go.”

  Down two short roads, they came to a roundabout, circled around it, drove past a dozen other homes with people moving about in their yards, hollering at neighbors, packing their shit, and walking around like slow-moving zombies, holding up their cellphones and searching for signals.

  Margery patted Marshall on the back, and pointed to a sign that read RIVER RUN PARK THIS WAY, with an arrow. He nodded and turned down that way.

  Behind them, the caravan moved obediently along like an ever-growing centipede, growing one segment at a time, then following the segment ahead. Marshall held the lead all the way to the iron gates of River Run Park, then pulled to one side to let the old man hop out of his Chevy and dig around in his wallet for his card. He scanned it at the terminal, but nothing happened. He scanned it again, and again nothing happened. Three more tries to no avail. Marshall glanced behind him, and was just about to holler to Wade that they might need a Plan B when Margery slapped the back of Marshall’s head and pointed to the gate, which was finally opening.

  They trundled on in, the entire caravan moving right along until the gates closed on the old man in his Chevy—he’d had to run back to his truck, but in that time the gates had closed again. He had to get back out, go through the ritual again five or six times before finally the iron gates opened once more, and then he hustled on into the Chevy and followed after them.

  Marshall was still in the lead, signaling left and right turns with his hand, with Margery signaling right along with him as copilot. River Run Park was a nice-sized venue, with two, count ’em two, baseball fields, a tennis court, a basketball court, a vita course for joggers, numerous picnic tables dispersed randomly throughout the park, three swing sets, and a large concession stand area at the epicenter of it all. The park was very expansive for belonging to such a small town, and, except for Marshall, his caravan, and one vacant car, the entire park was completely empty.

  “Which way are you a-goin’, ya big dummy?” Margery shouted. “I don’t see no way out of—”

  Wordlessly, he pointed to the baseball fields, and that shut her up for a moment. The baseball fields were wide open, with small trails going between them that the golf cart-riding maintenance workers usually used. Harleys grumbled up between the concession stands, the Chevy and the jeep right behind them. As they drove past the baseball fields, Marshall glanced at the stands, the diamond, home plate, the mowed outfield. Empty, joyless, all of it. Don’t seem right, ’specially with a mushroom cloud behind it.

  At the other side of the baseball fields, they came to the far end of the jogging course and a forest thick with trees, briars, and brambles. Marshall checked his sideview mirrors, saw which side Jeb was on, and signaled to him to drive on up beside him. Jeb came up, Marshall slowed up and hollered over, “Tell the others this may get bumpy. It’s dense in there, but not as dense as it looks. Just saplings an’ pine branches. We’ll be through it in a few minutes.”

  Jeb gave a thumbs up, slowed his roll, and relayed the message first to Wade, and then slowed up even more to holler through the windows of the Wrangler and the Chevy.

  Then, Marshall became aware of a dull roar. It started just up ahead…

  * * *

  The jets roared overhead. Janet instinctively ducked, as did Gordon. The guys ahead on their motorcycles swiveled a little, like evasion tactics. The jets seemed to almost have burst right out of the forest. They had been so low to the ground that their wake split the trees. Three of them, in one of those classic formations she’d seen in movies: one jet out front, the other two flanking it and remaining just behind, forming a perfect triangle.

  “What the hell are they doing?!” Janet shrieked. Nobody answered her. Gordon rolled down his window and looked outside, up at the sky, all around, searching for something. She had started trembling again. That wasn’t good. She had checked her blood-sugar just thirty seconds ago and it was close to another spike.

  The big, blonde-bearded biker—Think his name’s Jeb?—had just slowed down and was about to holler something into their window when the jets went past. “Fuck me!” he cried. After a few seconds of the shock wearing off of everyone, Jeb hollered, “Marshall’s gonna guide us through the trees. Says the forest is dense, but ain’t as dense as she looks. We’ll drive slow an’ careful-like.”

  Janet watched Edward think for a moment. Then, he nodded. “All right, lead the way. And hey! Tell Wade we need to pull over once we’re through. We need to regroup and make sure we know where we’re going.”

  “I’ll tell ’im,” said Jeb, and sped up to catch up to his hog-driving brothers.

  “What the hell were those jets?” Janet said. “Somebody explain that to me.”

  “I don’t know,” said Edward. But something in his voice told her otherwise. It was the same edge her father had when that tornado hit two years ago. Janet had been crying and asking, “Why did the lights go out?” Her father had only shrugged and said, with just a touch of edge in his voice, that it was probably only a random blackout. Nothing to worry about. When it got darker outside and the wind was pressing against the windows and causing them to pop, she had asked again, and heard even more edge in his voice as he said that it was only a strong thunderstorm, nothing to worry about.

  She looked at Edward. He has a suspicion, but doesn’t want to say.

  Janet knew something else. It was for her benefit, because the adults didn’t think she could handle it, either because she was as girl or because she was seen as a child, or both. And she had never liked being treated like a child.

  With trembling hands, she tried her phone again. Nothing, only that constant squeal that hurt her ears.

  They moved off the road and onto the jogging course, which was a little bumpy, and then followed the Bearded Biker Boys into the forest. The ground was level enough for all of them to pass. The Chevy went first, though slowly and as tentatively as a person testing the temperature of water with their toes before jumping in. “C’mon, c’mon,” Edward said. Janet watched him tap the steering wheel impatiently. Edward looked fit to jump right out of his own skin.

  Then, she started crying. Janet didn’t know where the tears came from, only that they came. She wasn’t sobbing or even sniffling. The tears just fell. And they kept falling. She reached up to wipe them away, just as they hit the first major bump in the forest floor. They entered the dark, pathless forest, following the Bearded Biker Boys and the old man and his wife in the Chevy, and all Janet could think was, We’re all lost. Strangers following strangers in a fucking forest.

  Janet hugged Atlas close. The dog was looking eagerly through the front windshield, eyes unblinking, searching for something.

  The tears kept coming as the tree limbs scraped on the windows and the roof of the Wrangler. Neither Edward nor Gordon were looking back at her. That was good. If they looked back and saw her crying, who knows what their reaction might be then?

  They’re already freaking out because I’m a diabetic. I can tell. They just don’t want to say. Like Dad when the tornado came. Like Mom when she first heard I wouldn’t ever be able to live without insulin and medication. But no matter how much her father and mother had tried to protect her from the truth of what was coming, the tornado still came, and diabetes still took over her life.

  They pushed through the forest for another three minutes in silence—well, except for the jumps, the bumps, the tree limbs scraping, and the Wrangler’s chassis and axle squeaking whenever they hit another hole. When they finally emerged from the forest, they were on a dirt road. The guy out front—the one named Marshall, the biggest one—turned down another dirt road, then led them down another, and another, until finally they emerged onto a completely vacant concrete road, though the paving
job looked ancient. There was no yellow paint separating lanes, and weeds and grass grew between the cracks splitting the pavement.

  Here, Edward honked his horn twice, and waved a hand out his window and then showed a fist. Like those military and SWAT team guys you see in the movies, she thought. They make a fist whenever they want someone to “hold up.” She had seen enough of her father’s war movies and action flicks to recall this.

  When they pulled over, the Chevy pickup did the same, and the Bearded Biker Boys circled back around, and grumbled to a stop in front of them. Janet hopped out with the rest of them. Atlas followed her, limping alongside her. They were in a perfectly wooded area, on a naked strip of road with absolutely no one and nothing in sight. It was also getting strangely dimmer; someone was draining the light out of the sky. The yellowness was fading. Now, only dark clouds coated the sky, some of them stationary, others mobile and swirling like mad.

  It looks like ink swirling in gray water.

  There was the odor of industrial smoke rolling in from someplace, but otherwise there was no sign of civilization. It was also quiet, not even the birds were chirping, and one could be forgiven for thinking that nothing unusual had happened at all. No nuclear blasts, no terrorist attacks, no panic-stricken populace, and no military fools shooting at them.

  Then, Janet listened harder, and realized that the birds really weren’t chirping. At all. In fact, except for a fugitive wind that blew through the tall grass on either side of the road, causing it to whicker to itself, there were no sounds at all. Not even a cricket. “S’weird,” she said.

  “Wazzat?” said the woman. Janet thought Wade had called her Margery.

  “It’s just…really quiet.”

  “I know. Oh, darlin’, yer eyes are so red.” Margery knelt down to touch at her face, felt for fever, and then ran her fingers through Janet’s hair in a series of soft, swift motions that were more motherly than she might’ve given the woman credit for being. She was a big woman with hair the color of honey and cut in an almost-mullet. She wore blue jeans that were too tight and showed her muffin top, and she had on a shirt that had two words in big, bold, black letters: TEAM JACOB.

  Oh, god, a Twilight mom. “I’m all right,” she said.

  “No you’re not, you’re shaking.” Margery’s voice came with the occasional click: her tongue was pierced with a stud. Margery reached her arms out to touch Janet’s face, as though it was made of such precious porcelain, and when she did, Janet spotted the black, bleeding Superman symbol on her forearm. She didn’t return the big woman’s embrace, nor did she recoil, either. Not too far away, Gordon was looking at the two of them hugging with something between concern and acceptance.

  Margery gave her a light kiss on the head, gently petted her head. Suddenly, Janet recalled her cousin Connie’s last words to her: We r hurt fire is everywhere cant see I ned help. Im burnt & mom’s skin is peeling off and i think dad’s dead. She started to cry, but held back the faucet.

  “A’right, what’s this palaver about?” said Wade, stepping over to where Edward and Gordon stood in front of the jeep. The old couple was getting out, too, and came walking over. They were a small, shriveled pair, who looked so fretful as to be pitiable.

  Janet looked up at the elderly couple. “My name’s Janet,” she said.

  The two of them glanced down at her, gave the briefest of smiles. “Name’s Colt,” said the man. “This is my wife, Greta.”

  “How do you do?” said Greta. The woman was sixty around the eyes, but her face and body looked a deal younger. The hair was blonde, but obviously dyed from gray. She wore a pair of tight blue jeans which looked permanently fastened to her wide hips.

  “How you folks doing?” asked Jeb, stepping over to the old couple. “My name’s Jeb. That’s Marshall there. Wade, Edward, Margery. And…Gordon, is it?”

  “Yeah,” said he, stepping forward to shake hands with Colt, and nodding to the woman. “Colt, you said?”

  “Colt O’Hare. Like the airport in Chicago.”

  “Gordon Devereux. Pleasure.”

  Janet had been told she was a perceptive young lady. She was the type to make observations about people in a flash, guess entire aspects of a person’s character by observing only a few characteristics. If she had to guess, she was witnessing a bit of camaraderie already between Gordon and Colt, in just the few seconds since they had met. Two older guys, she noted. Not bikers, not very big like these others.

  Janet turned to look at the others by the jeep. Edward, not having answered Wade’s last question, had stepped over to the passenger side of his jeep and opened the glove compartment, took out a few road maps, and started sorting through them. When he found the one he wanted, he rolled it open on the hood of his Wrangler. It wouldn’t stay open, so each of the men held down a corner of the map as they wordlessly surveyed their options.

  “You keep maps like this in your glove compartment all the time?” asked Margery, walking over to join the men, an arm wrapped around Janet. Guess us girls gotta stick together. Like the old guys.

  “Figured when the shit hit the fan, GPS wouldn’t last too long,” Edward said.

  “A man after m’own heart,” she said.

  Marshall gave her a look. “Watch it now. I’m standin’ right here.”

  Edward looked up at the sky. “Anybody seen the Face recently?”

  “Nawp,” said Wade. “Been gone fer a while now.”

  “Haven’t seen it in a while, neether,” said Colt. He hugged Greta, and both of them looked up at the sky fretfully.

  Edward nodded. Atlas licked his fingers, and he looked down, gave the dog a quick pat on the head, then looked into the forest. He looked up and down the road with a cold assessment, up at the sky again, then back at the forest. He had a troubled look about him. Does he sense it, too? Does he hear the silence? The absence of birds and crickets?

  After a moment, Edward looked down at the map again, examined it at length, and ran a finger along different roads, shaking his head. “Marshall, can you show me exactly where we are on this?” he said, a little frustrated.

  Marshall sniffed, leaned over it. The other men parted to let his eyes absorb it all, and they all waited in silence while he figured on it. Seconds lumped into minutes.

  Meanwhile, Janet watched as Edward went into his jeep’s back seat, lifted the ham radio, and set it up on the hood beside the map. Gordon started chatting about something with Colt, and Greta shared something with Margery, asking about her family and what all they had heard about the devastation. Janet petted Atlas, and watched Edward carefully as he made his first few calls.

  “This is call sign WK-GA-one, does anybody out there read? Over.” Static. “This is call sign WK-GA-one, broadcasting outta Bartow County, does anybody out there read me? Over.” More static. Edward made an adjustment to a dial. “WK-GA-one to anyone listening…”

  Janet looked at her phone. She thought about texting or calling someone, but when she tried to activate the touch-screen, it didn’t work. She wondered about her dad, her mom, Jesse…

  She looked up at Marshall. She had walked over to the big hulking man to look at the map, and now caught a whiff of him—he smelled like Aqua Velva, which seemed paradoxical considering his gruff look and tattered-looking jeans. Then, Janet realized they had been made to look torn, and his biker boots were actually new.

  Now that she looked at Wade and Jeb, she was forced to reassess them all. Long beards and tattooed as they were, they all stood square-shouldered, never slouched, and their eyes, now revealed since their transitional-lens motorcycle sunglasses had been pulled back, showed sharp, eagle-like intelligence. Especially the leader. Or, at least, Janet thought of Wade as the leader, since he’d been riding out front when they first met, and had done most of the talking. Isn’t that how men and boys do? The leader out front, talking the most? If she was being honest, it was the same with girls, too.

  “Well,” said Marshall, “if I had to say, I’d guess this
is us right here. Road ain’t got a name, though. I’m trying to find a number…” He trailed off, his bird finger scanning the paper along a thin blue line crisscrossing other similar lines. While Marshall did this, the others just glanced around intermittently, sometimes exchanging glances with one another.

  Finally, Janet addressed the elephant in the room. “What happened back there? Why did those men shoot at us?”

  Everyone looked at her. Then, everyone looked at Edward. Even Wade looked at him. Everyone seemed to think he would have the answer. Janet supposed that Edward was just that kind of guy, the one who cogitated a lot, and whenever he spoke it was with certainty. At least, that’s what she had gathered in the short time she had been with him. Others seemed to sense that he knew things. He certainly acted like it.

  Edward picked up his ham radio and returned it to his back seat, then came back to the front of the Wrangler to face them. When Edward finally did speak, he sighed and said, “I think…I think we’re in more trouble than we realize.”

  * * *

  Edward sniffed, scratched the back of his neck, and looked up and down the road. There was something he couldn’t quite put his finger on here. The silence bugged him, especially after such a loud and busy morning. He checked his watch: 12:07 PM.

  The others were staring at him. Finally, Wade said, “What do you mean, Eduardo?”

  “Yeah,” Jeb said, taking a puff of his cig. “Kindly define ‘trouble,’ if ya would.”

  Marshall looked up from his map. Margery held Janet in a one-armed hug. Colt and Greta stood side by side, an ironclad team that stuck together, but waited to be told the next move. Gordon stood off to himself, hands on his hips, squinting through his swollen eye. They were all waiting for it, but he wondered if they could take it.