Kent Kelly - Gray Rain Exodus

“Don’t you know, no. How many people can there be. Nor do I.” Silas was tapping something. The mirror. He was staring at himself in the mirror. “Pearson’s though. That place is huge, see? RV park, showers, sleepers, everything else. Big, with a Hell of a lot of fuel pumps. And full-on FEMA-funded fuel bays with high roofs and emergency backups, regular and diesel and more if I recall. All kinds of fail-safes, after the Federal Bombing. Was all over the news, I drove Jenny up once just to check it out, all that buildup. She didn’t care. Naw, she was just after truck stop shopping and cinnamon rolls. You see what I’m saying?”

Sophie frowned. “I don’t think so.”

“Advanced fuel bay pumps are fast as Hell. Gas might still be there,” he said all in a rush. His eyes were wide, excited. Alive. “Gas is always underground, it defies gravity, right? You got backups, especially at a big fortified truck stop like that. Even if there’s power overload, and that happens with too many trucks through and forest fire crews and army convoys and thunderstorms and all, see, pressure plates auto the backup generators and the fuel’s just always on . Transfer switches. You pull into a sheltered bay, you fill, you go. Costs a little more but it goes straight to the fireman fund. You pay on the way out.”

Always on. The images in Sophie’s mind began to whirl, struggling to sync with Silas’ understanding. Sheltered fuel bays. FEMA funding. You pay on the way out…

“So…” She chewed her lower lip, a scab there. “You think these special pumps might still be working.”

“Yeah, if they’re still there.” Silas groaned again. “All built up, protected. Got to try.”

Sophie’s mind was reeling, shifting into determined focus, calculating.

Pearson’s Corner, that’s just a few miles off if I remember. Might still have the gas. Might have survivors, too. The lake did, Fort Morgan did. But even if there’s dying people there, the fuel bays are away from the restaurant, and always on. We go in, we gas, get out… The truck stop might well be ruined, or wiped entirely off the map. But it was fortified, and what if it was still there?

The plan was not perfect. But oh, it was. It was the only chance, unless Sophie wanted to try to siphon gas from some other slagheap wreck that they might find.

In this storm? And when’s the last intact wreck that you could see?

How much gas did they really have? There was no way to know, the damage from the bullet, the worse damage to the chassis from going over rubble, and the instrument shake-up caused when the H4 collided with the cave wall were all conspiring against her in a merry game of “You could run out now, you know. Why wonder? Empty soon. Why, you could die at any time.”

She made a decision. She gripped the wheel.

“Silas,” she said, “it’s perfect. Damn the danger. Help me find it, we’re going to try. If we see anyone, cover me. If we hear anyone, we’ll make a getaway, try to get as much fuel as we can first. Which exit?”

“Two fifty-four, if I recall.”

Sophie had no idea where they were, not precisely. But she knew she was somewhere near to Highway 60, near to US Route 34 or what was left of it.

Even at a five to ten mile an hour crawl, Pearson’s was very close. And after all, there was very little choice.

With Silas’ guidance, a crossing of the median and the chance revelation of a downed and fire-bleached highway sign (“… TTRACTION — EXIT 255 — MARIANA GOLF COUR…”), Sophie slowly found her way toward the sheltered ruin of Pearson’s Corner Truck Stop, Café and Bakery.

They made their way off the interstate and four-wheeled onto the trash-strewn frontage road, where the wrecks were fewer and the land a little lower. In some places, there were even identifiable remnants of the dead: skulls with faces, shoes, briefcases, leather jackets which had only blackened instead of melted. Bone piles and tire chains littered the byway, festooning the drifts of wind-trapped gravel. Almost-identifiable cars emerged from the blinding smog and the dunes of asphalt, garish silhouettes at the edge of sight. Trash and pieces of debris, aluminum siding and shreds of tire, blew overhead in tumbling gouts, buffeted by black wind.

Once the interstate was left behind, the lower ground gave way to decipherable vestiges and slaughter, the playthings of a recently exhausted Armageddon. After the first impacts over Colorado Springs and NORAD and Denver, survivors had fled along the interstate, bogged down, and taken to the frontage roads and even the fields in a desperate and futile attempt to flee. And then the second-wave missile impact at Loveland, and the end of everything.

There were lines of blackened RVs and burned-out buses, semi trailers, multiple lines of a never-ending traffic jam. “Lanes” through the labyrinth were nothing more than sizable gaps where later fires had gorged their way through, where gas tanks or coal trailers or even entire tankers had exploded. But some of the bigger trucks were almost whole, even readable as effigies of yesterday’s mundanity.

Home Depot, read one truck’s side, Wal Mart said another. United Parcel, Con-Way Transportation, North American Van Lines, Thompson School District…

As Sophie drove, ash-stained trucks loomed up on either side, gray monoliths, pillars in the wasteland tumbled over end.

Silas was sitting up in the back seat, panting, scratching at an open sore over his left knee where the bandage joints had opened. “There,” he said. He scrabbled at the shoulder of Sophie’s suit. “That say?”

Sophie edged the H4 nearer to the half-toppled steel of the highway sign. One panel read “POSTILLON RV PARK,” the other “CAMPION, 60 WEST.” Further back in the gloom shone the pathetic remains of a splintered Sinclair gasoline sign, its green sauropod logo still discernible on the blistered slab of its crackled porcelain face.

“Yeah, down there,” said Silas. His voice was edged with hope, with fervency. “No. Back on. Turn back a little.”

“Back the way we came?”

“Some little, yeah.”

Sophie backed the H4 around in an awkward circle, rounding the collision of an upended Lexus and some kind of blown-out station wagon. And looming out of the darkness there rose a pile of split-open sandbags, tilted in a haphazard cascade like the remnants of a pyramid wreathed in sand. Still standing amidst the drifting ash, a huge tilted sign proclaimed in a jaunty hand-painted font:

The scoured face of the sign was streaked with black plastic tears. A huge plastic tarp had constricted around the pole, and was blowing up in tatters up across its throat like a necklace of shadowy tentacles.

And sandbags. Sophie’s tongue poked out at the corner of her mouth in concentration. How old were these haphazard piles of reinforcement? People had survived here, long enough to build a makeshift guard post looking out over the interstate. Or rather, survivors from elsewhere had gathered here, a truck stop being a logical place of pilgrimage for anyone hoping for food, gas or shelter. But how long could anyone have survived after the firestorm, so close to the Loveland impact crater? How many days?

Some might still be alive.

She didn’t know. She wanted to ask Silas, but when she looked back into the rearview, he had changed. A grizzled soldier was poised in her back seat. He was vigilant, alert, trembling and silent. A trickle of fluid was running down from an open sore in his neck, down to his shivering hand and he did not seem to notice. He was fingering the Luger pistol’s trigger, licking his parched lips.