Jacqueline Druga - Under the Gray Skies

I spun from the sight, flung off my face covering and every bit of water I drank splashed out of my mouth.

The retching and gagging didn’t stop, even after nothing came out. Using the back of my hand, I focused on controlling my saliva glands, calming my gag reflexes and catching my breath.

I lifted the cloth, turned and looked at another car.

With a swipe of my hand, I cleared the back window and screamed.

Children.

No, young children, possibly toddlers strapped in car seats. Their little bodies black and bloated as their open mouths appeared to be gasping for air.

I don’t know what possessed me. In a frantic state, I walked by every car, wiping a window, looking in.

Every car had bodies.

I wanted to scream. In fact, I did scream, a gurgling scream that didn’t echo in the dead town but was absorbed into the thick air.

Grabbing my suitcase, backpack over my shoulder I ran for the Hilton. There were cars in the driveway. Even though I didn’t want to look, even though I tried not to, I still saw the bodies in the cars.

Running as fast as I could, I made it up the driveway and to the front doors. The glass was shattered and there was a car smashed through one of the huge lobby windows.

One step, that was all I took and I knew the Hilton wasn’t any different.

Inside the lobby the dead were everywhere. Men, women and children, overlapped, they looked as if they just died where they stood. The front desk agents were dead on the registration counter.

I couldn’t breathe. Hyperventilating, I fought to catch my breath. Before I had even stopped wheezing, I ran back out of there, down the driveway and back to the street.

There was no sound, not even the buzzing of flies.

Where were the insects with all the decaying bodies?

Once I hit the road, I lost it. I dropped my suitcase and backpack then I fell to my knees.

What had happened?

I felt abandoned, lost and helpless. I didn’t know what to do. At that moment, all I could do was fall in the street and cry.

I tried to reach my mother again but was unsuccessful. It didn’t even ring, just that same weird tone I got when I called my own home. I started to doubt my own sanity. Had I even talked to her? Did I imagine it? Every phone I lifted, the same thing happened, so I went into a couple of businesses and tried again.

The mountains were my focus now and I wanted to get there. I believed it was a good destination and maybe authorities and workers were set up outside of town.

I grabbed a map from a Quik Stop gas station just a few blocks into my walk and planned my journey. One road would take me straight toward the mountain. It wasn’t a highway. Those were impassible and the ones with any overpasses had fallen. From what I gauged, the mountains were about six miles away. Not far at all. There also looked like there was a small community just at the base of the mountain and another on the other side. That road though would be a bitch to walk.

What was I thinking? Not an hour into my walk, my legs started to hurt and so did my back. I felt weak and the mugginess of the air made it hard to breathe. That was the physical side of it, emotionally, I felt worse.

With the gray overcast look to everything, it felt like gloom and doom with every step.

The quakes apparently didn’t spare the area. If a building wasn’t made of a solid frame that had some give and shook with the quake, the structure was reduced to fragments of stone and brick. The traffic still lined the road, cars full of families trying to get out.

When did this happen? How long were they in their cars, or in towns before they decided they had to go?

I saw an old man laying in the middle of the road, dead, his hand still holding a plastic grocery store bag. Canned goods spilled around him.

The city wasn’t brought down by the earthquake or that destruction cloud, something else happened.

With each step I thought back to that day.

The tremors, the hard shakes, flickering of power.

It had to take about fifteen minutes, maybe more, to get from the gate to inside that moving tram.

Surely, whatever knocked the tram from the tracks and tossed me into a mound of rubble wasn’t the same thing that hit the east side of the city.

They had time to get in their cars and try to flee. They had time to gather in hotel lobbies and loot stores for supplies.

Was there an evacuation order? I didn’t see one military truck, only police cars.

It was a mystery to me that I wish I could solve by picking up my phone and looking online.

But those types of instant answers were gone.

Another two hours into my walking, which I determined was only two miles, I hit more of a residential area. There was less traffic on the street and I figured if I could find a car, I could get out of the area faster.

I had left that plane just before noon and as it pushed four PM, the skies darkened as if nightfall was only minutes away.

It was getting harder to see and I didn’t want to waste my flashlight. I could have been smart and found another flashlight somewhere, but in my mind help wasn’t that far away. I just had to get there.

I passed a house with a white car in the driveway, the trunk was open and a man lay outside the driver’s door. Apprehensively, I approached, afraid to look inside, hating to see even more bodies. There was no getting used to it, each body struck an emotional chord within me.

No one was in the car, I sighed out in relief and saw the keys were clutched in the man’s rotting hand.

Again, I wasn’t a survival guru. I wasn’t. I knew enough however that if some sort of power surge hit, like an EMP, then things wouldn’t work. My phone went dead and I was unable to power it up again.

Whatever hit my phone, had to have hit before those in the east side of town decided to pull an exodus. The lights went before that. So how were the cars running… unless they weren’t running when it hit? For the most part, I was just guessing what happened.

For all I knew a nuclear weapon, or two, exploded and I was a walking corpse by absorbing radiation into my body. Perhaps I was facing nothing but a slow and painful death.

I had to try. At least drive to where I could stop somewhere safe until daylight.

The man in the driveway was getting ready to leave, that was evident. Placing down my bags, I bent down to his body and holding my breath, I reached for his hand. The second I uncurled his fingers, they pulled from his hand connected only by a thin strand of glue like fluid.

My gut filled with nerves along with hope that the car would start. As soon as I placed the key in the ignition and heard the ‘ding’ of the bell, I knew it would work.

I started the car and checked the gas gauge. Half a tank, it would get me at least over that mountain should there not be any help at the edge of town. Either way, the end of town, the bottom of the mountain was my stopping point for the day. Taking that mountain road wouldn’t work, without electricity it would be far too dark and dangerous. It was already getting too dark to see clearly.

Car running, I loaded my suitcase and backpack into the car, walked to the back and reached for the trunk. He had loaded that up with items. I didn’t have time to check them, but I did see a sleeping bag and I grabbed that. After closing the trunk, I walked to the man, undid the sleeping bag and covered him.

It was crazy and under normal circumstances people would have thought me insane. I got in the car and opened up the glove compartment. It was hard to see, so I grabbed the bunch of papers from in there and rummaged through them. There were receipts from fast food, gas stations, one was a furniture rental receipt, another a phone plan agreement for a phone he just bought two weeks earlier and finally, his registration. James Herron.