Their life stories glided out of their mouths and lingered briefly like the sparks from the fire, rising on the sinuous updrafts of heat.
Gabriela’d traveled about 140 miles with her three children and she was almost home. “Home” being her mother’s house in the country, about fifteen miles from this freeway exit. Her husband had been stationed at Fort Chaffee and they’d lived off-base with the children. Two days ago, the President had declared a Nationwide State of Emergency, and the Army had shoved all active-duty personnel into trucks, with no word on their destination or when they might return. “They had underground tanks full of gasoline at the base, and he said about half of them were still good,” Gabriela said. “I don’t know how he knew, but he said he knew. I don’t know how far those trucks got, or what happened to the soldiers in them, but I figured me and the kids would be better off at my mama’s. The prison is right next to the military base, and I heard the convicts broke out yesterday.”
“We’re headed for a place in Central Indiana I know, a farm. A commune, sort of.” DD said.
“Central Indiana? In November?” Gabriela exclaimed. “It’s gonna get cold once you cross the Ozarks.”
“Yes, I’ve been thinking about that...” Don’t whine about how you hate the cold. In the face of what you’ve caused, it’s a petty concern.
“My mom’s place has a big cattle barn. I bet she’d let you sleep there, and feed you too, in exchange for chores. She’s all alone there with my little brother.”
“I’ve never worked on a farm before. I wouldn’t know the first thing to do,” began DD.
“I have. Spent time on my uncle’s cattle ranch when I was little,” said Jeremy.
“I can fix things and I’m a nurse?” offered Jessica tentatively.
“It’s settled then. We can be there by noon tomorrow.” Gabriela said.
DD started to object but stopped herself. She didn’t want to trek through the freezing cold. She told herself she was worried about her recently-healed feet, but they were actually looking pretty good. Be honest: even with heavy socks and mittens and respectable boots, I just flat-out hate cold weather!
At that instant, they heard footfalls lumbering up the shoulder towards them. Gabriela sprang across the campsite to crouch over her children, no sign of her phlegmatic reverie as she transformed instantly into a wild animal protecting her young. Jeremy shot erect to face the intruder. DD stood too, and took a step back, out of the firelight. What should I do?
Then she remembered she was armed. She drew her S&W, grasping it low at her side. The stranger moved closer to the fire, arms-length from Jeremy, and his bony build, red shirt, and grey hair left no doubt he was the man Gabriela described, the one who’d attacked Martha.
“The police can’t help you now, can they? It’s every man for himself! Police can’t help you now!” he hooted, shifting foot to foot and jerking his bloodshot gaze around the scene. DD noiselessly pulled back the hammer on the revolver. Can I do this? And, Am I doing this because he’s black?
“What you LOOKIN’ AT?” He finished the phrase in a screech and jerked back his hand, holding a rough wood walking stick, heavy and thick like a club. DD raised her firearm. He was sluggish enough, sloshed or insane, or both, that Jeremy had no difficulty seizing the wrist of the hand that held the stick high in the air, so he couldn’t bring it down. They grappled a second or two. Then, in a moment of sheer unscripted absurdity, Jessica abruptly stepped in and yanked the club out of his grasp, then stepped back; DD blinked in surprise over the sights of her gun, now centered on the man’s chest. The poor addled bastard looked at Jessica in dull confusion, then kicked Jeremy—hard—in the thigh, going for the nuts and missing, and yanked his arm free. Jeremy backed up a step, reaching for his gun, but DD was ready with her hammer cocked and her barrel level. Just like at the range...squeeze, don’t pull... She heard the bang, felt the recoil. I missed. Her first emotion was relief. She regained her sight picture, ready to fire again. But then the stranger put his hand to his side, and she realized her first shot had found its mark. She let the gun drop to her side and watched him drop, in turn, to his knees. She put her other hand up as though to say stop, just as Jeremy fired the first of two more shots into his body.
Then time speeded up again. The man was on his side. Her heart was thrashing, her ears buzzing from the sound of the gunshot, and her hands were quivering as she holstered the revolver. Jessica bent briefly over the recumbent madman. She looked at her mother, shook her head sorrowfully, then stood up and turned away.
Gabriela was telling the one child who’d sat up, the boy, “Nada pasó. Duermete, amor.” Nothing happened, go to sleep. The child glanced around, bewildered, but compliantly laid himself back down, sinking instantly into the profound sleep of the innocent.
They stood in a rough circle as the night wheeled around them, connected by some invisible rigidity to the pivotal hub of a moment. No one spoke for a time. “I guess I’ll check his pockets,” Jeremy said. DD walked back over to her seat by the fire and sat down heavily. She sucked down a long pull on her root beer and Everclear.
“Mom, are you okay?” Asked Jessica, settling next to her.
“Yes. Yes, I think so.” Numb. I go numb when bad things happen. “I’ve carried a gun for twenty years. I hoped carrying it would mean I’d never to have to use it.”
“I know, mom. You did what you needed to do. You protected us all.” She took her mother’s shaking hand, and the two of them stared into the fire. It was comforting to realize they were still alive, together, and safe.
Gabriela had soothed the children and was walking towards the fire, facing the two of them. A sharp intake of breath from Gabriela made mother and daughter look up, then quickly follow her gaze to Jeremy. Jeremy’d been bending over their attacker, searching him for anything of use they could scavenge. Now he was standing upright with his hands in the air. Three men wearing a motley of denim and leather stood, holding rifles trained on him.
XLI.
90% Of Life Is Showing Up
The next evening, the oblique sun of Autumn was nearing the horizon when Amit requested that Juni turn off US 41 in Indiana, onto an unexceptional two-lane road between two cornfields. They’d bypassed literally hundreds of inoperative vehicles on their way south.
In some places, they’d discerned the impediments far in advance, and diverted down side roads. Fortunately, due to his age, Amit was proficient in navigating by paper maps, so they didn’t get lost.
They’d seen only two police vehicles with their coruscating lights. The few police vehicles still running were obviously way outnumbered by the immobile vehicles. They probably had other things to worry about too, mused Amit, as he’d noticed a gigantic irrigation outlet spouting, turning the farm's utility yard into a lake, its PVC pipes spraying water, above-ground traps and connectors the thickness of a man's thigh sagging flaccidly and ready to fall. Probably a lot of the police had deserted, Amit thought, to save their own pelts, or their own families’.
They sped down the desolate country road. Clumps of trees broke the monotony, the only things which kept the scenery from being a featureless pancake from horizon to horizon. The wind swept unceasingly out of the west, and the trees had deformed themselves, bonsai-like, towards the bearing of the gusts. A dog, lolling in the brown grass before a brick ranch house, was the only sign of life. The anesthetizing Midwestern uniformity sped by them in a smudge. The sky was grey and overcast; a draft stirred the odd husk on the dry stubs of corn, chaff from a harvest weeks past, or rustled the dry, drab, leafy stalks of seed corn, reserved to dry in the field for a Spring planting that might, now, never take place.
The sun sank lower and began to turn the few most lofty clouds pearl-pink. Finally, as the leading edge of the ginger disc just melded to the smooth level plane of the horizon, Amit said, “Here.”
Juni decelerated and turned south onto an unmarked dirt road between two windbreaks. The road was just two bumpy ruts, which m
eant they proceeded at a sedate pace, a row of spruce trees like Christmas trees on their left, a row of scraggly arborvitae on their right.
“You could almost believe things were normal,” remarked Juni quietly.
“Yes, it’s very peaceful out here,” agreed Amit. “We might as well enjoy the illusion. I don’t think things will ever be normal again.”
Juni’s face fell, and her lips writhed as she tried to maintain possession of her weeping; her eyes at least remained dry. She concentrated on the track ahead, the potholes in its corrugated surface concealed by the shadow of the windbreak on their right.
“Were you ever married?” She asked abruptly.
Amit sighed, “Yes, I still am. But my wife is in India.”
“When do you see each other?”
“The last time was two years ago. I believe that was just before you hired on at the University.”
Juni considered that. “But…how does that work? The two of you being married, I mean?”
Amit sighed. “It isn’t unusual for Indians to marry someone their parents choose. It was even more common, in fact it was the rule, when I was a young man. Things have changed since then, in India as well as here. And the way the internet, at first, allowed people to communicate across borders and around the world, effortlessly, increased the pace of change. But you asked about my marriage. I suppose… Marriage has different meanings for different people, in different places, and at different times in our lives.”
Juni digested this. A few minutes later, “Do you have children?”
“None living.”
Juni was silent after that. The windbreaks curved in parallel to the right, then to the left, the trail arching with them, and then ended. The car track continued into the twilight. There was little change in the vista as they crept along; they passed a grain silo, a barn, an irrigation rig, they passed a crossing with another dirt road, empty in both directions as far as they could see. It grew darker, and a rabbit materialized from the grass at the roadside, zig-zagged frantically before them in the headlights for a hundred feet or so, then sprang madly to the side at the last possible moment, just before Juni would have been compelled to brake for it.
Finally, when there was nothing but dreary farmland from horizon to horizon, the last light in the West was fading, and Juni had a look on her face in the dim greenness of the dash lights like there’d never be anything but fields and dirt roads ever again no matter how far she drove, Amit again said, “Here,” pointing to a track which was scarcely discernible in the brown grass, running over a shallow culvert. They truly crawled from here on, jostling across a field of stubble and going between two spruce trees to cross another windbreak. The track curved around a gentle rise, and then plunged into a stand of bushy forest, like a secret oasis in the midst of the flat farmland. The track jumped onto evenly-spaced wood crosspieces, rounded one last curve, then fell to its finish in a clearing.
A small log cabin, its windows gleaming with warm light, perched on the rim of a shallow depression. As she approached the structure, her eyes got larger as she revised her appraisal of its size, from small, to large, to gigantic. The depression, round as a bowl, was large enough that you’d have to shout to be heard from the other side, and though it was shallow in contour, it was perhaps fifty feet deep, and the light from the house and her headlights showed it was lined at the bottom with cattails gone to puffy seed and reeds seething in gusts of wind. The house was three floors tall and had a massive stone flue with a thin tape of smoke winding from it. A man emerged deliberately in the door, carrying a shotgun low by his side, and approached the car unhurriedly as it trundled to a halt. He stopped about twenty feet away, standing outlined in the fading light, and Amit opened his door and swung out.
“Snowbear! Hank! How are you?” Asked Amit, and their host walked into the headlights. The stranger was lanky, a ruddy clean-shaven white man, with long salt-and-pepper hair, sparse on top and dragged back into a ponytail. He was wearing a denim shirt and jeans with heavy leather hiking boots. His belt buckle was in the shape of a silver bear.
He beamed. “Amit! Long time, no see! What brings you here, my friend?” He shook Amit's right hand and they circled each other's shoulders with their left hands in a secure masculine embrace.
“Trouble. Have you not heard?” Amit replied.
“Heard?” Snowbear asked.
“The trouble?”
Snowbear waved a hand vaguely at the house. “Internet went down last night, but no one’s been on it for a while anyway. Then we lost power, about four hours ago. What’s up?”
“May we…” He shifted his feet and nodded towards the house, acutely aware now of his exhaustion.
“Of course! Sorry! You look whipped! Come on in. We just finished dinner but there are leftovers. Pinto beans and cornbread.”
“Sounds wonderful.”
Juni trailed the two men into the ample and abundant home.
XLII.
Better than Nothing
Jacob huddled in his garret. He’d broken into the attic window of the condemned house the night he’d watched the Germans and the two women get shot down in the street like dogs. It’d been three days and he’d eaten nothing but some oyster crackers in packets he’d scavenged from the sidewalk outside a crawfish joint. It’d rained, and he’d caught some water in plastic bottle he’d found and cut the tops off of, but then the bottles melted, like everything plastic was melting. He was hungry and scared and alone. He slept on a crib mattress he’d pulled from a dumpster, his gun in his hand, startled awake by every scampering cat or distant voice.
Yesterday, he’d heard three women walking down the alley under his window talking about the camps. FEMA had emergency camps just north of town and they still had buses that ran, apparently. He’d heard them say that a bus left every day at sunset from LaFreniere Park. He could just make it there on foot if he left now. He scrambled down the drainpipe and set out through the streets, still plumed with the smoke of hundreds of smoldering fires. He picked his way through broken glass from shattered store windows and around the cars with their deflated tires, the puddles of caustic battery acid freed from its plastic casing, and the shattered blobs of plastic signage. Anytime he saw someone, he ducked out of sight and waited for them to pass, unless they ducked into an alley or a stalled car first, in which case he warily stalked past their concealment.
When he finally reached the old graveyard adjoining the park, he joined a bedraggled mob by the gates. Yats and blacks, a small gaggle of devastated college kids, moms with filthy starving children, and bunches of solo men and women of varying ages just like himself, leaned against the wall, sat on the curb, or squatted in the shade of scrubby bushes.
“They got food and hot water in the camps. Diapers and clothes for the young ones.”
“I getting up under that!”
“They make everyone sleep in bunk beds.”
“I hear they make you work.”
“Farming is what I heard. Doing laundry. Like prison.”
“Better than what we got here.”
“Sure enough.”
Around 4:30, a semi-truck pulled up, its diesel motor still growling away, its huge tires replaced by wire-lashed bundles of rags. Three men and a woman in green fatigues got out. Jacob had no idea what kind of military they were, he’d never served, and none of his family had, but they had American flag patches above the insignia. The soldiers took it in turns: two would stand with firearms ready, one would search those wishing to board, and one would help them climb up into the wooden-floored trailer of the semi.
Jacob had a sick feeling when he saw that people weren’t being allowed to board with firearms. He watched an old, arthritic woman crook her finger at the soldier who’d pulled a Ruger semiauto pistol out of her cleavage, but even when she stamped her foot, the soldier remained impassive, and finally the lady acquiesced; he dropped the magazine, cleared the chamber, and dropped firearm and clip into the slot atop a corrugated s
teel box. The woman allowed herself to be helped into the truck bed.
When Jacob approached, hands up, it was the woman’s turn to search, and he told her straight up, “I have a firearm in the back of my pants.”
“Okay, sir, keep your hands up and turn around.” The weight of his weapon eased from his hips and he heard a click as the trusty Sig he’d inherited from his dad was unloaded, then a clang as it dropped in the box. He hardly noticed the woman’s hands ranging over his body as he thought of his dad teaching him to plink with that gun, hitting cans atop fences at grampa’s house. He hadn’t thought of his dad in months, and he misted up a little, shook off the helpful hands of the soldiers at the rear of the trailer, and vaulted up himself.
Inside, the truck was completely empty except for thick hemp ropes laced back and forth across the floor, tied onto steel cargo loops. “Grab hold and hang on!” one of the soldiers shouted at his back. Jacob moved as far forward as he could to leave room for later arrivals, found a spot where he could wedge his legs under a rope, and settled down to fantasize a hot meal, a shower, and a real bed. Today’s load was only a half-full truck, and once the doors shut it was dark within. They bumped and lurched for what Jacob thought was an hour and a half or so, during which he thought about his plants dying on the windowsill of his apartment, and when they stopped in the twilight and the engine stopped and doors rolled up, he got his first look at his new, temporary home.
Ten-foot chain-link fences topped with coils of concertina wire surrounded the grounds. It looked to Jacob like what he’d seen of his dad’s old photo albums of his service in the Army: flat, treeless grounds with half-cylinder aluminum buildings. He remembered his dad called them “Quonsets” to Jacob’s great amusement. He used to jump around chanting, “Quonset, Quonset, Quonset,” until his father tossed a blanket over him and threw him shrieking on the couch for a good tickle session. Jacob shook his head. This sentimentality wasn’t like him.
Eupocalypse Box Set Page 16
