Davis Aurini - As I Walk These Broken Roads

“Gas tanks are gone.”

“Say again Romeo?”

“I just noticed, Whiskey. All of these vehicles had their gas tanks explode. You can see the marks on the road under them.”

It was the fireball, he realized. All of these cars had been hit by the fireball when the bomb went off. That’s when he noticed the bodies — he’d been passing them for a while without realizing it because they were nothing but dark, charred husks. The fire and the elements had left little behind.

They’d slowed to little more than a jogging pace. They were almost all the way into downtown, buildings looming on either side, but the traffic of the dead was getting worse. The cars were skewed out perpendicularly or rolled over. On his motorcycle Wentworth was still able to make it through, but Raxx was running into problems. The broken tower with its fallen disk, the one which pointed up at the sky like an accusing finger, passed by on their left. Spotting an off ramp in the distance Wentworth radioed Raxx and suggested they take it.

They managed to make it there and thankfully the ramp itself was free of cars. They realized why as they exited onto a street level intersection of wide avenues — a smattering of vehicles had coasted off the ramp at the very end, engines dead but wheels rolling, spreading out through the intersection and pushing the vehicles already there onto the sidewalks.

The streets were clogged with dead vehicles. Raxx pulled over next to Wentworth, and they agreed it was time to proceed on foot. The trick was figuring out where — their vehicles would stand out and draw attention in this automotive graveyard if any scavengers happen to stop by.

On the far corner of the intersection was the answer they needed; a multi-storey parking garage. It was built ruggedly, with no windows, just wide gaps between support columns, designed with functionality, not aesthetics in mind. It seemed to have survived the blast relatively unharmed.

Raxx nosed his way over a curb and into a parking lot, and eventually found a route to its main entrance. A black-and-yellow wooden barrier, its paint chipping, had survived the nuclear fire, but under the truck’s grill it snapped off easily. Inside the vehicles were parked in orderly rows and dead halogen lights hung from the ceiling. Their way was clear until they reached the fourth level; there they found a minivan which had been about to enter the ramp to the fifth and final level blocking both lanes. The rubber from its tires was melted into the floor and its axles were rusted. There was no way they were going to move it.

They settled for parking on the fourth level in the darkest corner they could find. The chance of anybody walking up there by accident was low; aside from their own vehicles there was nothing of value in the garage.

When they shut them down the engines echoed for a split second, almost wistfully, then they faded and the garage was full of concrete silence.

For half an hour they stood in the shadows, watching and listening, waiting to see if anybody had heard them arrive. Thankfully, the vehicles in the garage had been unoccupied when the bomb hit and there were no charred remains for them to ignore. They stayed sharp and the time passed slowly.

Checking his Datapad for the third time Wentworth saw that thirty-three minutes had passed since their arrival. Neither of them had seen or heard anything during that time other than a flock of pigeons and a large rat. “I think we’re good,” he said to Raxx, slinging his rifle, “not that I expected anything. We’ve still got about four hours of daylight left, let’s pack up and get going.”

“So you wanna sleep outdoors tonight? I was thinking we might as well, we’ll get more accomplished that way.”

“Yeah, agreed. We should pack light though — I want to leave space for anything interesting we might find.”

Raxx took his rucksack while Wentworth took his duffle. Within a few minutes they’d made it down to ground level and were heading north, passing under the highway. The downtown core loomed ahead.

The buildings were immense, blocking out most of the sky and casting long shadows. When they spoke they whispered, but they didn’t speak much. As they passed under the highway, its chalk-white supports on either side of them, their footsteps echoed hollowly. Somehow an ancient poster was still up, taped to one of the columns and fluttering in the wind.

A brief open space followed after they passed under the highway; a park in front of a stadium, off to their right. Then the avenue they were on turned into a tunnel. They walked in silence now. For some reason the wind died down in this brief underground passage. A red cigarette pack lay in the gutter, standing out even in the gloom. It seemed to go on forever even though they could see the end of it, not more than a hundred meters from the entrance. When they finally got to the other side they stopped and stared.

“Holy Hell…” said Raxx.

The buildings they’d seen before were nothing compared to the ones confronting them now. They kept stretching up and up until they had to crane their heads back to see the top. Before it had been the proximity of the buildings which blocked out the sky; now it was their magnitude. All of the glass was gone from their windows, and their exteriors were a uniform grey from the dust, with dirty streaks where water had run down. Few were fully intact, and the debris of the fallen littered the streets ahead, sometimes the piles were several stories high. Behind them they could now see that the cause for the tunnel; dozens of train tracks running above it. This must have been the major transit hub for the great city.

The debris started at the first intersection after the tunnel and stretched on as far as they could see. Slowly they walked up to it trying to understand its magnitude. They stood there; Wentworth lit a cigarette, Raxx put down his rucksack and started making trial attempts at climbing the pile, seeing if it was possible. The dust spiralled up with the wind while dead leaves and garbage blew about in corners.

Finally Raxx gave up. “I don’t know how we’re going to get past this. We could climb it, but it’d be slow going all the way. Dangerous, too.”

Wentworth had been looking about him while Raxx spoke. “I’ve got an idea. Let’s go see if the subway system hasn’t collapsed.” He indicated a stairwell going down into the earth.

They walked down the stairs. The bottom was filled with debris and a set of glass doors, spider-webbed into small granules but still in the frames. Wentworth used his rifle to beat on one of them; the safety glass resisted with a rubbery consistency, but after his third strike it broke and sprayed pellets into the interior. For a second he felt like a vandal before shaking it off.

A cool wind was blowing out through the empty frame; it carried the hint of mildew. Somewhere in the distance water was dripping. They foyer they’d stepped into opened up into a labyrinth of turnstiles, stairwells, and confectionary stands. There were newspaper kiosks but their contents were long decayed. There’d been people in here when the bomb went off, but the blast hadn’t hit them directly; they’d been allowed to decay. Their fragmented skeletons and tattered clothing didn’t look real.

The two men turned on his flashlights and started exploring.

The subway was convoluted, three dimensional, and counter instinctive. For half an hour they wandered its upper level, investigating the stands, maintenance hallways, all of its nooks and crannies. They discovered things which were technically useful, but generally worthless: brushes, mops, old currency, and magazines; they picked them up, looked them over, then left them. The only exception was some news magazines, brittle but still readable, that Wentworth pocketed. Occasionally they’d see something — a missing fire extinguisher, a knocked over garbage can — that suggested that others had been through here before, but if so it had been a long time ago. The dust was heavy on the floor, and Wentworth was uncomfortable with the prints they were leaving.