Kent Kelly - Gray Rain Exodus

She ignored this. If she did not, she would go mad. Fuel, once a modern annoyance so trivial as to be unthinkable beyond the act of gassing up at some mall-adjacent station, was now becoming a matter of life and death.

“Halfway home indeed,” she whispered, swallowing past the bitter chalk-taste which had over-coated her tongue.

She looked out to the utmost edge of the roadway’s distance, perhaps thirty feet ahead where melted car wrecks rose out of the blackness like spectral shipwrecks locked inside the swells of a petrified sea. The entire interstate was a melted and re-cooled plane of rolling concrete, a rippling thread of hardened quicksand with slagged buses and RVs and semis sunken into its resettled surface. Pressure waves from the blasts had turned the highway into a series of small hills with re-hardened piles of metal and obsidian glass mounded everywhere, things which she had at first not even realized had been cars. There were no tires, very few human remains except for what was blowing out of Loveland to the west. But somehow, the highway was mostly intact. It had turned to liquid, reshaped itself and cooled into this undulating shape, a narrow and natal land filled on and on with popped asphalt blisters and foul-smelling hills.

She closed her eyes, just for a moment. Exhausted. There, she caught a foreign glimpse of childhood in remembrance, a young skirted Sophie in catholic school, learning the lore of the Gentiles. There had been a tale of Gehinnom, cinder-forge of the fallen, glowing valley of the burning sands.

You serpents, she could almost hear the nun’s haunted echo even then, you brood of vipers, how shall you to escape the sentence of Gehenna?

No answer. Two mute souls.

But Silas, before he had fallen asleep ( He’s dehydrated and unconscious, storm be damned, you need to check on him right now or he’s going to die, damn it Sophie, you —), had revealed to her that there was still a reason to hope:

“Naw, all this ruin, it’s a lot like Littleton, you know. Like I told, when I was leaving my own home? When I had to find a car to get to Black Hawk. You need to find cars that were in underground garages, Mrs. S.-G., or behind walls, or that were deep in shelter…”

And now, a broken whisper from the back seat was saying, “Pearson.”

Silas? Sophie slowed the H4 to almost zero, looked over her shoulder. Silas’ eyes were closed but his lips were moving. He tried to touch her elbow but only succeeded in scrabbling at the greasy sleeve of her radiation suit.

She put the H4 into park. She took his hand. “Silas, can you hear me?”

“Water.”

She unbuckled herself, half-crawled out of her seat and repositioned his untouched bottle of water beneath his lips. His tongue’s tip emerged and touched in through the bottle’s transparent neck, bloated and gray and searching.

She helped him to drink. The eyes opened, hunting, hunting for Sophie or for Jenny or someone else who could not be imagined.

“Pearson,” he said again.

“Who is Pearson, Silas?”

“No.” He cringed, lifted his neck a little and took another drink. Most of it streaked down around the yellow scabs of his chin. “Place. Pear… Corner.”

“Pearson’s Corner?”

“Yeah,” he whispered.

More water. She waited until he could speak.

“That big old truck stop,” he was able to say at last. “Way to Wyoming. Fortified, 2013, after the Federal Bombing? Yeah. It’s like a fortress now. Need to talk to you about that.” He looked into the toy mirror glued to the back of the driver’s seat, a Big Bird and Elmo mirror that Tom had bought some years ago. Lacie’s mirror. “Oh my,” he said then. He scratched at the stunted white stubble growing over his neck. “Damn, I’m all halfway to handsome, now.”

“I’m sorry.” Sophie smiled for him, but the tears were coming. “I forgot that was there. I’ll take that down.”

“Don’t you do that, please. However I look, it’s proof. I’m still here.”

“Yes you are.” She lifted and kissed the fingertips of his trembling hand. She could not look into his eyes any longer. The death decay, the graying and hollowed cast of his forlorn face, were not easy sights to bear. Worst of all, he was smiling back at her as if it were some sunny Sunday in Cherry Creek. So brave. “Of course you are here with me.”

She held his hand until he pulled it away.

He was trying to sit up all the way, trying to peer out the slits in the lead lining of the passenger window. “Soph,” he whispered, “how long was I down? Land looks like Hell itself. Where are we?”

“The last mile marker I could read was 248,” she said. “Just before you woke.”

He mumbled as he considered this, remembering. Then: “So Little Thompson River? Berthoud?”

“Almost.”

“Well, I’ll be damn. We’re close to Pearson already then. We need to double back to there? Think this through now. Desperately we need gas,” he said.

“We do.”

“Too close to Loveland. Poison, death rays, whatever you like to call. We can’t dare stop.”

“No.”

He considered this. “Well, you got to stop, you know. You just say the word, Mrs. S.-G. Me and my guns? I got you covered always. Ain’t no one ever going to hurt you while I’m here.” He coughed, that guttural rattling inside that started like dead leaves shaking together over the earth, ending in a wet slosh somewhere deeper inside. “Always.”

Oh, Silas. She tried to manage a braver smile, something to offer the rearview mirror, but she was crying. He could not see that. What am I going to do without you? She only nodded, turned and settled the H4 back into four-wheel. And still she drove on.

She four-wheeled over the median in a place where the divider fence had been knocked down into the ditch. The black dunes of ash were sifting away, revealing too much. The slag-wrecks she could see in the northbound lane were getting much worse.

Those were cars. Tombs for people.

She navigated over into the southbound lanes, driving around the back-axle heap left behind by a tanker whose warped and tinctured wreckage was sprawled off into the breakdown lane. The huge wreck had created a shelter-shadow, a halo of relative unburned ruin. There were clotted mounds there in the road, where the windborne dust had choked on something wet and kept on sticking, creating sloppy clumps of oily residue. Part of a woman’s torso was lodged between two surviving tires, still flapping a scrap of crimson skirt. One connected leg had a pink pump still upon its foot. Blackened toenails peeked out.

Sophie, swallowing bile, stared at her dashboard as she drove by.

The gas needle bobbed erratically as she hit a deep pothole. The mis-calibrated needle bobbed, adrift between one quarter and empty.

How much gas do we really have? How much is leaking? How can we even know?

She gritted her teeth.

“—fuel pumps,” groaned a voice. Swallowing. Coughing. Silas was trying to talk to her again.

“Sorry?”

“I say, Pearson’s Corner. We got to stop there. Special emergency, emerg… fuel pumps…” He trailed off.

“There’s an emergency pumping station there? But wouldn’t that be a likely place? For survivors, I mean.”

“You think there any more?”

Sophie shook her head. They both knew that away from Denver, further north and east, there were many more survivors than they had before imagined. But were they people? She could not get the image of the black toes, the flapping skirt out of her mind. Run over or did she crawl under at the last, there was some of her leg and some of her belly, it was pulling apart, in the wind, she was…