Kent Kelly - Gray Rain Exodus

Get the fuel and get out of here.

For the first time, Sophie turned off the H4’s headlights. The enveloping cloud of isolate and claustrophobic blackness choked in and took her breath away. She thought for a moment of Patrice’s favorite movie, that horrifying movie she loved as a child because it scared her, of Dorothy in the farmhouse as it lifted up in the tornado, chaos and wreckage whirling by in a living nightmare out the window.

And here we are. This isn’t Kansas…

There were deep gouges of parallel scrape marks in the blacktop, where truck wrecks had been dragged, towed, reorganized. A tow truck with shattered windows loomed nearby, its secured chains rattling in the wind. Behind it was the ruin of a makeshift temporary building which had blown over, its dilapidated frontage still clearly reading: “CDL PHYSICALS, WALK-INS WELCOME.”

Welcome, indeed.

“Sophie, that truck. Did you see?”

“I saw.” She looked down at her gun instead of nodding. “I know.”

“There damn well might be people.”

“We don’t have a choice. Get both of your guns ready, Silas,” said Sophie. “We’re going to try this.”

They turned into a paved and devastated enclosure framed by shattered concrete walls, its entrance bracketed by guardrails that had been turned into vertical curlicues, as if they had been the rejected toys of some furious, monstrous child.

Sophie did not blink as the wind wove clearer and the darkness streamed into almost-light. She waited, then was forced to turn the headlights on again. She peered out into an inky stew of smog and cartwheeling fragments, looking for the restaurant, the showers, the stores, the fuel bays, Anything . But she could not see the buildings of Pearson’s Corner. There were too many bus and semi wrecks, pulled together to make walls and aisles of alternating trash and sand. Further on, trucks were parked in concentric rings, a maze of ways leading into a deeper, more tranquil darkness.

The winds howled overhead. There was no one to be seen.

“Silas,” asked Sophie, “here we go. Are you with me?”

“Course I am.” He popped out the pistol’s clip, checked his round and reloaded it. “Just be quick, all right? Get us gassed and out of here, quick as you can.”

“I plan to.”

Sophie put her foot on the brake, tied a water-moistened rag just below her face. The helmet would decrease her visibility too much outside, her awareness. She glanced down at the HK UMP40 Universale submachine gun, pocketed in her suit on its utility cord. She was suited, both she and Silas were well-armed. If anyone was still alive out there, she almost wished they would confront her.

Just try to get between me and Kersey, between me and my Lacie, she thought. She slowly lifted the gun from its pocket, hefted it. The clip was full. Just try.

Yes, a sibilant voice whispered inside her, the waking scrape of dead leaves rising upon a coil of the wind. Yes, try. Somewhere deep inside, the beast which had once been Sophie’s sister purred in the heart, trembling with shivers of expectation.

The wind slowed again, re-gathering. Sophie could hear the rhythm of something broken into disparate echoes, beats, a pulse beneath the gale that sounded almost mechanical. What is that? She dared to crack the window half an inch. The roiling stench of smoke, burnt grease and molten rubber swirled in as an almost tangible, blurring fume.

There was the echo again. Was that an engine she was hearing? How can there be —

“Generator,” Silas murmured. Sophie looked down at the gas gauge needle, afraid to look up into the whirling clouds enveloping the H4 and its light streams. What if she saw someone standing out there?

She closed the window and the sound melted away.

“You hear anything else?” Silas tried to sit up a little straighter. He peered out one of the view slits in the duct-taped lead curtains, his eyelids trembling as he narrowed his eyes. He let in a shaking breath. “Soph?”

“Yes, Silas?”

“Give me that other magazine.”

Not good. But the fuel, the need to keep moving, was paramount. Paradox, we can’t stop we have to keep moving, we have to stop so we can keep moving, we can’t —

Her hands twitched over the seven-round extended pistol magazine, testing the heft of the bullets inside. In the rearview, Silas shook his head at her.

“No,” he said. “The rifle one I cleaned. The long seven-sixty.”

She lifted the bulky assault rifle magazine with grim distaste, fishing it gingerly out from its paper nest in the open glove compartment. She palmed it and passed it back to him. He took it with shaky fingers. Sophie heard the ominous click-chuck as Silas changed the assault rifle’s ammo feed and readjusted the forward lip.

What did he think he saw? She pressed her foot down on the brake, harder than before. If there wasn’t anyone, do you think he would be readying both weapons?

“I’m scared, Silas,” she whispered.

“Me too.” He coughed softly against his shoulder, a wet and lingering sigh. “You listen, if you please. You my private, right? We get our fuel and gone, you hear me? And if the pump ain’t working no more? We get the Hell out of here. Then we… yeah. We figure something out. We soldier this.”

She nodded, trying not to dwell on the insinuations beneath his words. This was the most forceful, the most alert she had ever seen him.

“There we are. Ready as I’ll ever be,” he said. “Go in now. Coast as much as you can.”

She eased her foot off the brake again. The H4 crept forward.

Moving at a crawl, wishing she could silence the damaged engine, Soph guided the H4 between the lines of trucks and paint-blistered RVs. Gouts of shattered glass showed where an impact had occurred after some of the trucks had been parked in place. And what does that mean?

She gripped the wheel tighter, holding her breath, eyes wide, afraid to blink. The shadowy monoliths of wreckage crawled by to either side, dark metallic waves, the iron-sheeted walls of Hell’s in-spiral city.

And down. And down.

She tapped the brake to stay under five miles an hour.

Where are these fuel bays? She leaned in toward the windshield, her gaze struggling to look for human shapes in the twisting and tumbling garbage on the wind.

“Where?” asked Silas, and she jumped a little. She hadn’t realized that she had murmured the question aloud. “With this many trucks, these walls of flatbeds and tankers and all, I just don’t know. There’s a fork in the ways up there. God, it’s like tunnels made of wrecks. Go right, I think.”

She turned. A darker, more garish and somehow wider vista met the H4’s lights. The wind was quieter in the spiral deep. A few plastic bags with still-identifiable store names emblazoned on the sides were blowing and lilting endlessly like the ghosts of gulls.

Here, here solace we will find. In the eye of the storm.

She was certain then, as she looked around at the lighter wreckage. A good number of people had survived here for quite some time. Some might still be alive, irradiated, poisoned, broken, sheltered and still in the business of dying. There in the inner circle of all those parked trucks, the curve of the concrete valley’s far horizon made not of metal but of mist, more trucks had been backed up against each other to forge an iron fortress. Semis were fused together by haphazardly-welded metal plates, bumpers were wreathed with barbed wire. More than one truck had brown and foreboding stains spattered up across the grille. Pieces of a tattered flannel shirt fluttered from a tractor’s smokestack, a scarlet banner of grid and cross.