by Ike Hamill
Ashley’s heartbeat settled down again.
They walked through the dim living room and found Lisa and Corinna hunched over a much better map in the kitchen. This one had been printed back when the world still had technology. There were some scrawled notes on the side, but even those looked much more sane than the map in Ashley’s pocket.
“This is where they went,” Lisa said, putting her finger down on the map. “They left some marks on signs and she hunted around until she found the trucks.”
“They had been abandoned a long time when I found them,” Corinna said. “Flat tires and dead batteries. But there were enough of them that they could all be there.”
“And no sign of the people?” Ashley asked.
Corinna shook her head slowly. “They were supposed to be going down in a bunker and I couldn’t find the entrance anywhere. But, like I said, the trucks had been abandoned a long time before I found them.”
“It looks like a perfectly normal town,” Lisa said, looking at the map.
“It’s small,” Corinna said. “Just some houses and a couple of buildings. The trucks were at the outskirts, right near this overpass. Merle had a nose for finding underground stuff. I could have been right over it and not seen a thing.”
“Penny might be of help,” Tim said. “We’ll divide up the area and do a thorough search.”
Lisa looked at Corinna.
“That’s deep into the sun’s territory,” Corinna said. “It would be stupid to go up there.”
Lisa reached out to touch her hand and Corinna didn’t seem to notice.
“What’s the harm, Corinna?” Lisa asked. “I’m not saying it will, but even if the sun stops in the sky, what’s the difference?”
“You don’t know how difficult it is,” Corinna said. “The plants lose their minds. You have to keep covering them and uncovering them or they grow all crazy and don’t produce any fruit. The animals go crazy too. I haven’t seen a Death Line in years, but if they come back… You don’t want to try to cross one of them if there are any scavengers around…”
Ashley had no idea what she was talking about, but the tone alone made her want to plug her ears and not listen.
“It would be suicide,” Corinna said after a moment of silence.
Lisa patted her hand.
“We have the map. Maybe it’s best if you stay here, in your territory,” Lisa said. “We were out there before, so clearly the sun doesn’t care about us, right?”
“We would leave her here?” Ashley asked. The idea was crazy—it was at least as crazy as the stuff that had come out of Corinna’s mouth. Stranded alone for years and years, it would be horribly cruel to leave her alone once more.
“Think about the trip,” Lisa said. “We’re used to riding bikes mile after mile. We can’t ask Corinna to climb on a bicycle after all this time.”
Ashley finally realized what Lisa was really saying—Corinna was too old to go along with them. The years had been cruel to Corinna’s body. It was obvious from the effort that it took for her to get around. The idea of abandoning her made sense but still seemed unbelievably cruel. Penny wasn’t fit enough to run the whole way, but they certainly wouldn’t leave her behind.
“Maybe a tandem bike?” Ashley asked. “We could find one, right?”
“Why don’t you guys drive?” Corinna asked.
“Even if we found a car with tires that could still hold air, we don’t have any fuel,” Tim said. “It all went bad decades ago.”
“Use Mike’s stuff,” Corinna said. “I still use it when I need power. It works.”
They all looked at Corinna for a minute, not understanding.
Finally, Corinna sighed and started to push her way to her feet.
“I’ll show you.”
The maze of paths was impossible to keep track of. Ashley followed behind as Corinna took turns, ducked through old doorways, and moved below curtains of foliage. Everything was overgrown and decaying. It reminded Ashley of being back in the jungle, where she couldn’t see more than a few paces in any direction. Eventually, Corinna climbed an improvised step and moved through the broken out window of a big garage. Along one wall, they saw a stack of blue drums. Corinna rapped on them with her knuckles, stopping at one that didn’t sound hollow.
“Hand me that,” she said, pointing at a five gallon can.
When Ashley passed it to her, Corinna screwed off the lid and positioned it under the spout of the drum. Soon, green fluid was flowing into the can.
Ashley turned and looked back to Tim.
“Doesn’t that look like…” Ashley began.
Tim finished the thought. “The fuel from the boat.”
“And the cart,” Lisa said.
“It’s thicker than gasoline, but it works the same way somehow,” Corinna told them. “I think when it gets sucked into the engine it thins out. Way back when, Merle found an additive in one of the bunkers he was exploring. Mike put it in the old gasoline, and it made it work again.”
“We still need to find a car,” Lisa said.
Still holding the can under the spout, Corinna gestured with her head.
Lisa walked to the opposite end of the garage and Ashley followed her. Together, they pulled back a drop cloth and found the old car underneath.
“I ran it a couple of years ago, just to see if I could. There’s a pump somewhere over there. You can see if the tires still hold air,” Corinna said.
They found the pump and Tim took the first shift at working it. He was panting and sweating by the time he passed it off to Ashley. It didn’t take all that much effort to push down the plunger, but after a few minutes her arms were burning. Lisa took a brief shift and then Tim took over once more. While they worked, Corinna came over and tipped the fuel can up to put the contents into the fill pipe of the car. It took forever for the thick liquid to flow into the pipe.
Ashley couldn’t imagine how it would work. She had helped Brad work on engines before. From what she understood, gasoline had to be sucked into the system by a fairly weak pump. It didn’t make sense that the syrup-like fuel would work without modifying the engine. For all they knew, this was one of Corinna’s delusions. She glanced down at Tim, slaving over the pump, and wondered if all that effort would be a waste of time.
“The battery,” Ashley said. “None of this will do any good if the battery won’t start the engine.”
Corinna laughed at her.
“What?”
“I have a generator. You can charge the battery with that.”
“Wait,” Lisa said. “If you have a generator, then why can’t we use that electric pump for these tires.”
“Yeah,” Corinna said, looking at Lisa like she was crazy. “That’s what I thought you intended to do before you guys got so excited about the hand pump.”
Ashley shook her head as hope drained out of her. Corinna was clearly insane and this was a fool’s errand.
“I’ll do that,” Ashley said, pointing to the can that Corinna was slowly pouring from. “You start up the generator, okay?”
Corinna shrugged. “Fine.”
Ashley watched, still believing that Corinna was crazy as the woman shuffled around to another part of the garage and began to move things around. Then, a few minutes later, with two tugs of a cord, the generator coughed and then roared into life. A hose was directing the exhaust through a window with most of the panes broke out. Plenty of the blue smoke came right back into the garage.
Corinna came back with the end of an extension cord and Tim and Lisa backed away while she hooked up an air pump. In less than a minute, she had the tire completely pumped up.
Ashley’s hope surged back. This wasn’t just good news for the trip—this meant that maybe they would have the tools to start putting their world back together. Maybe they could start to resurrect some of the dead machines around them and put them back to work.
While Corinna inflated the tires and Ashley filled the tank, Tim went to the garage door and tr
ied to work it loose on its rollers. Finally jerking it free from the rust, he and Lisa lifted it up and let in a blast of sunlight and fresh air. The garage opened up onto a relatively intact patch of asphalt that seemed incredibly foreign after all the twisting backyard paths they had taken to get to the garage. That road would connect to another and another until they could find the highway north. It wouldn’t all be clear, but they would find a way around the blockages. Ashley was sure of that.
Finished with the tires, Corinna yelled to Tim over the sound of the generator. He popped the hood and they hooked up a charger to the battery. It didn’t take long before it had enough juice to turn over the engine. Ashley was still sure that she had just dumped gallons and gallons of poison into the vehicle’s tank. Somehow, churning for just a few seconds, the engine caught. It ran rough for a moment and then smoothed out.
Corinna turned off the generator.
Ashley joined Tim and Lisa as they stared at the car.
“I thought the gas from the cave was going to be the last fuel in the world,” Lisa said. “How much of that additive did Merle find?”
Corinna shrugged. “I don’t know. I only know that Mike mixed enough gas for the these drums. About half of them still have fuel in them.”
Ashley counted, moving her finger in the air as her eyes moved over the blue drums. There were sixteen total, so perhaps eight still had fuel. It was a start—certainly way more than the people of the Outpost had stashed in their cave.
“Ashley, fill up one of those red cans and put it in the trunk,” Lisa said. “See if you can fit the packs in there as well. One of them can ride in the backseat.”
Ashley moved to follow orders. Tim shut off the vehicle as they packed it up and got it ready to go. When all the packs didn’t fit in the trunk, they opted for strapping Lisa’s to the rack on the roof so there would be plenty of room for Penny in the back.
“Where’s Corinna?” Lisa asked.
Ashley looked up and realized that she hadn’t seen Corinna in several minutes. They had been so busy checking on the vehicle and making sure that it was ready to go, they hadn’t kept track of her.
“Do you have any idea of how to get back to her house?” Lisa asked.
“I’m not sure,” Ashley said. She was good at backtracking, but in all honesty, she wasn’t sure if she could find her way back. They might be better off driving to the other side of the park and coming in the way that they had in the first place.
Before they could debate the best course of action, Corinna ducked back through the window. She had her own bag slung over her shoulder.
“I better go with you,” Corinna said. “You’re never going to find your way.”
Lisa smiled.
Tim took the first shift driving with Corinna in the passenger’s seat, barking directions at the last second. Her instructions came so haphazardly, it was easy to believe that she was making them up. She was never wrong about the roads she chose though. There were a couple of places where the road was bad or nearly blocked, but they always ended up being passable.
The bridge made Ashley catch her breath. One guardrail had been taken out by something. Corinna claimed that a flood had jammed a tree underneath and peeled back part of the structure. It seemed odd that she would have such detailed information about the bridge, but there was no reason to dispute her account either. The car idled at the edge of the asphalt for a few seconds and then Tim took it out of gear.
“We should go look,” he said. “Just to be sure, right?”
“If you think it will make a difference,” Lisa said.
They all got out.
Underneath, the bridge was even more frightening. Some of the concrete supports in the middle had crumbled. The other side looked fine, but there was no telling if the thing would support the weight of the vehicle. Corinna walked out to the center of the bridge and jumped up and down, like that would prove anything.
“I made it across a ton of times,” she said.
“Yeah? When?” Tim asked.
“I don’t know,” Corinna said, rubbing her chin. “Maybe ten years ago. Doesn’t matter, though—it looked the same then as it does now. Clearly, it’s not getting any worse.”
“I don’t know if that’s clear or not,” Lisa said.
The three of them huddled near the hood of the car while Corinna came back.
“You want to try to find a way around?” Tim asked.
“She said there isn’t one,” Lisa said. “And she has been right about everything else.”
Tim took a deep breath and let it out slowly.
“You guys stay here and I’ll drive across. If I make it, you walk over and join me.”
“No,” Lisa said. “We all go together.”
“I think that’s a mistake,” Tim said.
Ashley was the tie-breaker. When they both looked to her, she said, “You’re both right. We’ll go to the other side first and then Tim will drive across. That way we’ll all be together on the other side.”
Lisa still looked skeptical.
“If anything, less weight will help,” Tim said.
“And if the three of us feel anything wrong when we’re crossing, we’ll come back,” Ashley said. “We’ll be testing it to make sure it’s okay.”
After another moment, Lisa finally relented.
Corinna joined them at the moment of decision.
“You guys coming?” Corinna asked.
“Yeah. Let’s carry the packs,” Lisa said.
They unloaded the packs from the car and had to put a leash on Penny to take her across. Ashley had her head up and walked confidently along the railing. Below, the water was deep and calm. Even if they fell, she figured they had a good chance of swimming to shore. Lisa was moving inch by inch, holding onto the railing while she kept an eye on the part of the bridge that had already crumbled.
“I’m sure it has been this way for years, Aunt Lisa,” Ashley said. “It’s stable.”
“I’ve been burned by bridges before,” Lisa said. “One of them saved your father.”
“Saved him?” Ashley asked. She thought she knew the story, but asked anyway in hopes that it would take Lisa’s mind off of the danger.
“We were on our way from Maine to New York, chasing after the group that went with Luke. Your father was in a coma of sorts.”
“Deep Cycles,” Ashley said.
“Yes. What we didn’t know is that the bridge had been sabotaged.”
“Why would someone do that?”
“We’ve debated that over the years. The explanation that most agree on is that some people react to tragedy by trying to become part of it. The only way that they can feel like they have some control over their lives is to take ownership of the horrific things that happened. The person who turned that bridge into a trap may have been doing that. He was so devastated by what happened that he wanted to devastate others as well.”
“You think that’s true?” Ashley asked.
“I think some people were mentally ill before the end of everything and they didn’t get any better along the way. Maybe the guy would have been a psycho before but never had a good opportunity.”
They were almost across. Ashley felt like she could jump to the far base of the structure if required. Lisa was still moving slowly and carefully, like any firm step might make it all collapse. Corinna and Penny had gone ahead and waited for them near a rusty old sign.
“Wave him across,” Lisa said. “Let’s get this over with.”
Ashley waved her arms and they heard the engine rev in the distance. When Lisa and Ashley were out of the way, Tim came fast. Even though she knew it was safe, Ashley held her breath and leaned to the side to watch the structure of the bridge. When he was halfway across she thought she saw the pillars flex under the weight. She thought about that story of her father waking up when the bridge below him collapsed. He said that it was all the clues that had really snapped him from his Deep Cycles. His brain had been trying to process
everything about the end of the world, but the clues from real life had snapped him out of it.
Tim pulled up and jumped out of the vehicle with a giant smile on his face.
“That was intense,” Tim shouted. “Did it shift? I thought I felt it shift under me.”
Penny pulled away from Corinna and went to him to press against his leg.
“I don’t think so,” Lisa said. “Probably just your imagination.”
She took her bag and was lifting it up on top of the vehicle.
“Give me a hand here, Ashley, would you?” Lisa asked.
Ashley tore her eyes from the bridge and looked to Lisa.
“He always said that it was a shame,” Ashley said.
“Huh?” Lisa asked.
Ashley realized that they were all looking at her.
“Dad,” Ashley said. “He told me about the bridge and how it woke him up from his trance—his Deep Cycles. He said that he had been trying to put together all the clues about why ending the light hadn’t taken away all of the other monsters. He said that if he hadn’t been woken up by the bridge that he would have pieced it together much sooner.”
“That’s speculation,” Lisa said. “We didn’t have all the information. Your father never really had the full picture until he went down in the bunker and saw the whole mural of collected graffiti.”
Ashley shook her head. “That’s not what he said. He said that the mural made it clear, but all the clues were there before.”
“What’s the point?” Lisa asked. “He figured it out. We’re all here because of it. Why fixate on it now?”
“I’m not sure,” Ashley said. “Not yet.”
Chapter 110: Robby
“Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” Romie asked.
Robby glanced up at her.
“Of course not,” he said.
“Good,” Romie said. “I just wanted to be sure that we were all on the same page. Come on, kids, let’s leave your father to his work.”
Romie had only joined them a few minutes earlier, but she had already taken charge. Robby thought about asking her to leave the kids—he might get a different response from the system if Jim was around—then he decided that it could be a good test to not have them near.