Nick Cole - The Road is a River

The Old Man watched his granddaughter run from one shack to another, flinging open doors in the morning light, dust motes swirling about her.

“I won’t lie to you,” said General Watt. “What you’re heading into is very dangerous. If you turned off this radio and went home and never answered it again … I would understand. I have children and grandchildren too. But please don’t.”

“I’m sorry,” said the Old Man.

“Don’t be. If you knew my story, you would know that when I was … let’s just say it was never considered possible for me to have children. But I have them and they are mine now. I will do everything I can to save them. Sadly, I have done everything and it isn’t enough to overcome the one problem we’ve faced since the mountain above us collapsed down onto our emergency exit. You sound like a good man. Maybe if there had been more like you back before the war, we wouldn’t be stuck here now.”

“I was only twenty-seven then,” said the Old Man. Static rose like a sudden ocean wave cresting and then falling violently onto the shore.

“I know what I’m asking you to do is beyond … reason. But I have to. You are our last hope. My grandchildren’s last hope.”

The Old Man wiped a sudden hot tear of shame from his eye.

“Don’t worry, we’ll get you out of there,” he said.

Static.

“Thank you,” said General Watt just before a storm of white noise consumed her voice.

The Old Man turned to look at the village one last time as it disappeared on the far horizon behind them. The desert, a sandy plain dotted by dry mesquite growing low and close to the ground, swallowed the village and replaced it with more, an endless-seeming supply of itself.

I will never see my village again.

He let the whispering roar of the turbine overwhelm his thoughts, disintegrate them, and turn them into fuel to be spat out the back of the lumbering tank.

You don’t know that. Good things and adventures might be just ahead.

Like what?

The noise of the tank filled the Old Man’s thoughts as he waited, trying to imagine what good could possibly come of this journey. He could think of nothing.

Rivers, my friend. Rivers that must lead to an ocean.

I cannot remember when I last saw a river. A river—to be on a raft and to float and to fish … that would be heaven. There are no rivers in the desert. Only riverbeds.

Maybe we will find a river and we can make a raft, my friend. She would like that.

“Grandpa,” came her high voice over the intercom as they jounced off-road. The interstate was damaged and the outermost remains of the Great Wreck were beginning to clog the highway.

I wonder if my car is still here.

Of course it is, where would it have gone?

True.

Before him the Great Wreck, as they’d called it all those years, lay spreading in every direction. In the distance he could see where the two broken semis that had collided and overturned formed the epicenter. From there rusting cargo vans and sinking station wagons had tumbled away down the road or off into the nearby desert, torn to pieces by the remorseless forces of fearful momentum meeting sudden obstacles. Other cars, hundreds of others, had driven off into the thick sand, becoming stuck as still more and more vehicles, unseen from the Old Man’s vantage point, had continued to hurtle themselves into the wall of destruction as they fled the nuclear fireball over Yuma. On that last long-ago day everything had been smoke and screams and rending metal and people rushing away to the east and the fireball in the west where Yuma had once been. Now it was quiet and rusty and sinking year by year into the soft piles of sand that were dunes marching east.

“Yes?”

“Why did you change your mind about going back?”

The Old Man maneuvered the left stick to avoid a rusting station wagon that had fallen backward off the road. The tank clipped the front end and crushed it before the Old Man could adjust their direction.

“Because they need our help and because we must always help one another.”

“Even strangers, Grandpa?”

But the Old Man did not answer as he edged the tank closer to the massive destruction of the Great Wreck.

“Let’s stretch our legs for a moment and see how we might get around all these old cars and trucks.”

They walked a ways from the rumbling tank, heading toward the massive wall of rusting and smashed vehicles that had piled up just beyond the last valley.

It’s like coming home … but that doesn’t seem right does it?

No, it doesn’t. But it all began here. Here was the day after. After what I had once been or was becoming. I can’t even remember now. But it was here on that last day when my car died.

“What happened here, Grandpa?”

“Most of the people you know in the village, we all met here on the day of the bombs.”

“Did you plan to meet? Like did you know one another before the world ended?”

Before the world ended. That must seem like a strange phrase to her. Strange because the world has gone on.

“No. We were just all here on that day. Or we met on the one that followed as we walked east away from the bombs.”

“What was it like?”

The Old Man looked at the two semis around which most of the wreckage centered.

I remember all of us getting out of our cars, trapped by the wreck, turning to see the mushroom cloud rising in the distance over Yuma behind us. I remember a woman screaming and then crying. Men were shouting.

“There was ash and dust. Fires on the horizons. Everyone was afraid.”

Like we’d done something wrong. Broken something that could never be replaced. Committed an unpardonable crime.

“Were you afraid, Grandpa?”

“I can’t remember.”

She laughed.

He took out the map he’d found in the library.

“We can’t go into Yuma. It’s too hot from the bomb I saw go off there. But if we cut through those plains off to the north, we should pick up the old road heading to the Fort. I found that radio along the road leading there.”

“Can I drive?”

“Not yet, you’re still too small.”

“There’s another compartment in front of the tank with a couch where you lie down with a handlebar like a motorcycle. I sat in it, Grandpa.”

“Could you reach the pedals?”

“Sort of, yes.”

“Soon, though. Soon.”

“Yes, soon.”

Rusting cars, bashed and torn, crushed by careening fear-driven freight-laden semis with drivers who had watched the world end in their rearview mirrors, remained, spreading across the blistered road.

Into the desert.

Underneath the sand.

Rusting destruction piled long ago during the end of the world.

“This is General Watt calling.”

“We’re here,” said the Old Man into his mic after a moment of fumbling with the communications system.

“I have some good news,” she said as a static squall crested and then was gone.

The Old Man stopped the tank.

They were on a small rise far out in the bowl of the desert. Somewhere within all the brown dust ahead lay the Proving Ground, the military base north of Yuma the villagers had avoided simply because it shared the same name of another place they had all seen destroyed.

I feel I don’t know everything I need to know about what we’re doing. But what am I supposed to ask her? This person, this General, she could be keeping the truth from me. And the others, Pancho, they could have been right all along.

For now, you must play the game according to its rules, my friend.

Maybe I should turn back.

“Our installation keeps a record of all the communications we tracked before the nets went completely offline. I’ve conducted a data search and found that a convoy carrying JP-9 arrived in the Yuma Proving Ground a week before the city of Yuma was destroyed. There is a chance that you may find the remains of that convoy somewhere within the facility.”