John Adams - Wastelands - Stories of the Apocalipse

"I think you’ll live," I said, trying not to let her hear the worry in my voice. Her injuries probably wouldn’t kill her, but a night outside in Colorado in the wintertime just might. I bent down so I could look out the windows. The Sun was still fairly high over the mountains. We had a couple of hours of daylight left, but I couldn’t see any houses and I didn’t know how far we could walk to find one. The wind wasn’t as strong here as it had been farther north, but it was still blowing hard enough to drop the chill factor by twenty degrees or so. It was already sucking the heat out of the car.

Jody had been thinking along the same lines. "All of a sudden I’m not so happy the world’s empty," she said.

"We’re not in trouble yet," I told her. "For one thing, the world’s not empty." I flicked on the car’s phone, dialled upside down, and waited, hoping the transmitter could make contact with its antenna underneath us.

"Who are you calling?" Jody asked. "Dave?"

"That’s right. He’s the only one anywhere close to us."

"What makes you think he’ll help us?"

"I don’t know if he will or not. But it can’t hurt to ask."

We waited for ten or fifteen seconds while the phone tried to make a connection. Finally we saw a flickering, snowy phantom on the windshield, and Dave’s voice, shot through with static, said, "What now?"

"This is Gregor," I said. "We’ve been in a wreck just north of Fort Collins. Jody’s been hurt. Can you come get us?"

His upside-down face looked us over suspiciously. "This is a trick to get me out of here."

"No it’s not," Jody said. "Here, have a look." She bent down toward the camera eye and took the blood-soaked rag from her forehead. Dave’s expression grew a little more sympathetic, but not enough.

"Sorry," he said. "You got yourselves into this, you can get yourselves out."

I said, "Dave, we’re not just asking a favour. We could die of exposure out here."

"Quit being melodramatic. You’re resourceful—" His image broke up for a second, then came back."—must have brought coats and hats and stuff."

"We’re in an upside-down car in the middle of nowhere and you’re telling us to put on our coats? Damn it, Jody’s injured! We need to get her to a hospital and see if she’s broken anything. She could have internal injuries."

It was hard to read his expression in the snowy, upside-down image. I thought he was scowling, then for a brief moment the scowl reversed itself. "All right," he said. "I’ll come. It’ll take me a while to get out of the mountain, and an hour or two more to get up there and find you. Just sit tight." Then before either of us could say anything more, he switched off.

I thought for a moment about his sudden capitulation. I didn’t like the feel of it, and pretty soon I realized why.

"The bastard isn’t going to come."

Jody looked around at me sharply. "What? He just said—"

"He wants us to think he’s coming, but he’s going to wait for us to die of exposure. Think about it. What better way to get God’s attention than to send a couple of free souls to go knock on Heaven’s gates for him?"

"But… he… would he do that?"

"Sure he would. He just said so. It’s going to take him a ’while’ to get out of the mountain, and a while’ to fly up here, and a ’while’ longer to find us. He’ll make sure it takes a long while, so when he gets here he can honestly say he tried to rescue us, but he was just too late."

She shook her head. "No, I don’t think he’d do that."

"I do. I’m not waiting around to find out the hard way."

"What are you going to do?"

I reached under the seats into the back for our coats. As I helped Jody into hers, I said, "I’m going to walk toward Fort Collins and see if I can find a house or another car that works. I won’t go any farther than I can walk back before dark."

She thought about it, then said, "All right. While you’re doing that I’ll call Gwen and see who else might be able to come get us."

"Good." I pulled on my coat and hat and gloves, then opened the window and slid out onto the frozen ground. A cold blast of air swirled snow inside. I leaned in to give Jody a kiss, then backed away and made sure she closed the window tight before I stood up.

The car was a dark oblong against white snow; I wouldn’t have much trouble finding it again if I got back before dark. I started off toward where I hoped town would be, turning back periodically to make sure I could spot the car again until the slope of the land hid it from view. The Colorado foothills didn’t have nearly as much snow as Yellowstone, but there was enough to leave a pretty good set of tracks. It would take a few hours for them to fill in, so I wasn’t that worried. I trudged along, hands in pockets and head tilted to the side to keep the wind from blowing down my neck, looking for any sign of civilization.

As I walked, 1 realized how much I was going to hate living a primitive life when all the machinery started falling apart. By the time I was an old man, I’d probably be walking everywhere I went. I might even be burning wood for heat, depending on how long the colony’s power plant lasted. No wonder Dave was so desperate to have God come back for him.

I thought about Jody waiting for me in the car, possibly dying of injuries or exposure before I got back. At the moment I didn’t mind the idea of a God watching over us, either, provided He’d actually do something to help if we needed it. Even if He wouldn’t-or couldn’t-keep her alive, the idea that I might somehow join her again after we both died was at least a little comfort. Not much, because I could never be sure it would happen until it did, but the possibility might keep me going for a while.

It came to me then that if Jody died, I could easily join Dave in his quest. But she wasn’t going to die. All I needed was to find some shelter and we’d both be fine.

I eventually spotted what I was looking for down in a gentle valley: a house and barn set in among a stand of tall, bare cottonwood trees. There were a couple of vehicles parked out front and a long, winding road leading down to them from a highway off to my left. I kept going cross-country straight for it.

It was farther away than it looked, but I made it just as the Sun touched the mountains. The house was unlocked, so I didn’t have to break in. It was also un-heated, but it felt wonderful compared to outside. I tried to call Jody on my cell phone, but when I opened it up the screen had a big crack in it and it failed to light. I had apparently landed on it in the crash. The house phone was dead, too; no surprise after four years of weather like this. But I found a hook by the back door with a set of keys dangling from it, so I took them outside and tried them in the vehicles.

There was a hover car and a four-wheeler pickup truck in the driveway. The hover car was as dead as the phone, but the pickup lurched forward when I turned the key. I pushed in the clutch and tried again, and was rewarded with the whine of a flywheel winding up to speed. The power gauge read low, but I didn’t think I’d need much just to reach Jody and come back.

While the flywheel spun up I checked in the glove box for a working phone, but all I found were a bunch of wrenches and fuses. That wasn’t reassuring. I let out the clutch slowly and the truck began to roll forward, though, so I steered it around the driveway and began to bounce and spin my way up toward the highway. I’d heard it was easy to get a wheeled vehicle stuck in snow, so I figured I should drive on roads as much as I could until I got close enough to try driving cross-country.

It was a good idea, and it would have worked if there hadn’t been a big drift about a kilometre down the road where it crossed the bottom of the valley and began to climb the other side. I realized too late that the road didn’t rise up with the terrain, and by the time the pickup nosed into the bank, shuddered as it dug itself in a few more meters and came to a stop, it was thoroughly stuck. I couldn’t back out or go forward, not even when 1 left it in gear and got out and pushed.