Kent Kelly - Gray Rain Exodus

She stared right through me.

She had a briefcase strapped to her back with bungee cords, and she was pushing a rusty shopping cart. I looked into her bloodshot eyes, hidden away behind a slit, mole-eyes framed between two yellow bandages. She had cut herself a “mouth” in the lower bandage, for breathing.

She stared and then looked away from me. Silas was urging me to drive on, to go — “She’s already dead,” he promised me — but I could not leave her there. I could not.

I slowed, I rolled down the window, I called a common name (did I choose Mary? Marie?) and the woman left her cart behind and hobbled away from us across the fire-ravaged fields, limping into darkness.

Shameful. I so wanted to go back for her. She left her cart and supplies behind, by calling out and terrifying her, I could have killed her.

Silas said she had a butcher’s cleaver strapped to the back of her belt, I do seem to remember this. But did she? Truly?

I cannot remember.

He talked me out of searching for her again. What could we have done? Would she have been pleasant, grateful, eloquent, profound? What stories of survival could she share? Would she love? Grieve? Would she have come with us all the way?

Would she have murdered us in our sleep?

Silas is the stronger one, Lacie. If you ever are sitting reading this, my daughter, honor him . He got me through this, despite his delirium, his agony.

He was always the stronger.

Evening, I believe. A little exhausted rest once I had hidden the Hummer off the road. Hours mean nothing now, we measure everything by the burning of gas. Having siphoned once again, the “time” is three-quarters full.

Changed Silas, much worse. Diarrhea, caked with blood, and not nearly enough urine. I hydrated him despite his delirium. Nearly choked him, I fear. He woke halfway through and called me Jenny, and asked me, Why, my love? Why?

I shushed him back to sleep.

Still some morphine vials, but not much more that I dare to spare. I fear I am losing him. He cannot eat. His scrotum is swollen and something is wrong with the burn-flesh curdle over his left thigh. He smells… sweet . Bittersweet, of yeast. He is hiding the left side of his abdomen. He would not let me see.

I cannot care for him much longer.

I’m going faster, love.

Oh, my Lacie. I swear to you I’m coming.

And Nederland. I… don’t understand exactly what happened here.

It appears an airliner, a United flight (from the surviving tail jutting up out of the ashen waves), tried to do a water landing on Barker Reservoir just to the east of town. Wreckage all over everything, and the great white frontage of the plane smeared over the highway, into the sundered ruin of some kind of store. And the wind, rolling pieces of airplane in the gutters. Torsos and half-cloven bodies everywhere, dried intestines wavering in the trees.

I did see one blackened crow, blind and gaunt yet still alive. Pecking. It was feeding.

Into and through what was left of Nederland. I could not dare to sleep there.

So much death there, so many bodies. I couldn’t make myself search the cars. It was all I could do to stop and pour some of our own gas into the tank. When I stepped outside, I did not close my door all the way.

I heard. Silas began sobbing.

But he stopped himself, choking. Pretending to cough into his hands. He wanted to talk about his daughter, his granddaughter, and Lacie.

(Later)

Hard to sleep, had to open up the suit despite the risk. My helmet seal is faulty in some way.

(Later)

Through town past Navajo Trail. North, ever on. Did not take East 119 to Boulder, I understand now that any city will be a Hellhole, a deathtrap entire.

Someone is watching out for us, some dark angel. Someone (it appears) has driven through here, and even returned. Because there was a spray-painted scrawl on a black stop sign ahead: “DEATH,” with an arrow pointing ahead, toward Boulder and beyond.

Whoever you are, whoever has gone and returned and written this in paint, I saw. And I believe you.

(Day 4?)

Woke trembling.

Peak to Peak Highway still onward, sometimes even driving through the trees (many of them are browned and dying, perhaps from radiation), west and then north. Diverted off a little around a terrible wreck, two school buses, one collapsed inside the other.

And then past Mud Lake, a split-rail fence was still standing there. As it has been for decades.

Somehow this gave me strength. Something, at least, has survived untouched. A legacy of things once made. It is as if humanity is finishing its poem.

And who will read of us when we are gone?

Two dead horses in the middle of the highway, the corpse of an obese woman still holding her suicide rifle, slumped over one’s belly. Silas asked me to stop and search the packs piled atop the other horse, a palomino with its side torn open.

I could not bring myself to do this.

A little greenery past Sugarloaf (?), even a hint again of sunlight .

Tom, I am always thinking of you and our time together.

But what is seeing now? Is it worse to behold? Blackest night in the midst of day, the wind and the burning of the Archangel high above.

The warmongers, they scorched the sky.

Oblivion and yet, a little sagebrush, a few surviving trees. Waving grasses in crimson mist.

I’m so tired. I don’t know if I’m making sense.

(Later)

Silas awake again, thank God. He even tried to eat some of the spinach.

(Later)

Passed the turnoff east, Silas did not feel we were yet far north enough from Boulder. Hard to believe we’ve come as far as we have, over these endless days.

It’s as if I never lived. He knows these roads so much better than I do.

Without him, would I already be dead?

I know this.

Seven telephone poles, still unblackened and perfectly strung, winding their way up through a somber clutch of aspens. Even a little almost-pure rain, gray and soft to swathe our Exodus.

Beautiful things out here, in the nowhere. Haunting and terrible. And I did see another living thing, the silhouette of a lone horse limping off in the distant fields, I am certain of it.

I could not believe it.

Opening a window, stifling, the stench. Hard to breathe.

But fewer ashes in the air up here, visibility perhaps even 200 feet. Horrible burned-out wrecks and roadside suicides, almost worse to be able to see so much more.

But it is clearer up here. If there are more survivors, they are near. I can feel it.

Away from Calvary Chapel, beneath the mountain. A glimpse of hope outside ourselves. Survivors!

I will not say precisely where. They want to be left alone.

They were well-stocked, they may even last a year. Kind hearts, and brave enough to speak to us despite our weapons. Four people, a young girl who would not speak, a younger man, an elderly man and a blinded woman with lovely hands.

The younger man came to me when I stopped, and he said to us, Go. Let us die in peace and be with our beloved .

I hope to honor him, this memory. I leave these words of his here forever, as an epitaph to faith.

And we gave them some little supplies, some food, and they gave us gasoline they no longer had a use for.

It is possible for love to be again. It is.

(Later)

Beautiful here, in the mist after darkness falls. I so miss my Tom.