Black Autumn Travelers

by Jeff Kirkham

  “Yes, you have my word.”

  “Get going. Leave now. I love you. Goodbye.”

  “Goodbye, Dad.”

  12 New Windsor Pike St., Westminster, Maryland

  Mat Best watched the naked girl snoring on his couch. The fist pump in his head never quite materialized. It had been like this for a couple of months now—all conquest and no spoils of war.

  The light from the fireplace danced over her perfect breasts and her gaping mouth as she breathed loudly, adrift in post-coital slumber. He felt fairly certain she wasn’t ten years younger than him. Definitely over eighteen, he assured himself.

  He had been stuck in Westminster, Maryland for over a year, caretaking his grandmother’s home. She passed away the year before and Mat and his brother decided to wait until the housing market improved before selling the house she left them as an inheritance. With nowhere else to be after almost a decade of service with the Army Rangers and contracting for the State Department, Mat had run aground here, in the house he had once visited every summer as a child, sleeping under the loud tick-tock of his Grandma’s clock. It had been the same clock that had kept a metronome beat while he serviced his latest love conquest on his grandma’s couch less than an hour before.

  He wasn’t going to lie. It had been a little weird.

  Not ready for sleep, Mat picked up his phone and began scrolling through Facebook. He’d spent most of the day convincing this young co-ed—Caroline—that he was the kind of suave war hero who would fulfill all her Special Forces fantasies. It didn’t usually take this much work for Mat, but apparently she was a southern girl who liked to play hard to get. Mat had been up for the challenge and it had blotted out his entire day, preventing him from checking his Facebook feed.

  He was startled when he saw there was only one thing anyone was talking about on Facebook: a nuclear bomb had been detonated off the coast of Los Angeles. Turning immediately to his phone app, he panicked at the half dozen calls from his family in Santa Barbara, a mere two-and-a-half hours from where the bomb had killed some boaters and blew out thousands of windows. He called his brother Tye. It was three hours earlier on the west coast.

  Tye answered on the first ring. “Mat, are you okay? You weren’t answering your phone.”

  “Sorry.” Mat headed into the kitchen so he wouldn’t wake the girl. He was going to have to wake her soon anyway, he realized. They’d been driving in the countryside all day enjoying the fall leaves, making out and having sex in his truck. They hadn’t spoken to anyone, and both of them had been too occupied to check their phones. “Is everyone okay?” he asked.

  “Yeah. Mom and dad are fine and so are Alisa and Ben. The fallout’s blowing out to sea, we think. Are you at Grandma’s?”

  “Yes, I’m in Westminster. Are you going to be able to stay there? Is it safe in Santa Barbara? What if the wind changes?”

  “We don’t know for sure,” Tye replied. “We’re north and west of the explosion and watching the winds. The fallout pattern isn’t far offshore from us. But the 101 Highway is jammed with cars as far as the eye can see. There are thousands of people from L.A. pouring into town, even into our neighborhood. Dude, it’s getting creepy around here. I don’t think we should stay.”

  Worry got the better of Mat, and he forgot to keep his voice down. “Where are you thinking of going? You’re taking Mom and Dad with you, right?”

  “We’ve been talking about loading up and heading toward Uncle Tony’s place in Porterville,” Tye told him. We’ll take everyone, but that means we have to get on the highway. Maybe we’ll head back toward Ventura and then cut north from there. Nobody’s driving south on the 101, so it should be doable.”

  “Mat… what’s going on?” the naked girl interrupted, standing in the doorway of the kitchen.

  “Hold on, Tye.” Mat turned to her. “Babe, there’s been a bomb in California and things are going crazy on the west coast. I’m talking to my brother in Santa Barbara. Let me talk to my family for a bit and I’ll take you back to your dorm, or you can spend the night here, okay?” With a worried look, she headed back to the living room, probably to find her own phone.

  “Sorry, Tye. When are you thinking about leaving the house?”

  “Uncle Tony says we can come any time, but he doesn’t have enough food for all of us for more than a couple days. Since Aunt Marilyn died, he doesn’t do a lot of cooking at home. So we’re trying to gather as much food as we can here before we hit the road.”

  Mat didn’t like the sound of it, but there wasn’t anything he could do from three thousand miles away.

  “Will you call me when you guys leave?” Mat asked.

  “Sure. Answer your phone, okay? Mom was worried about you.”

  “Will do. Stay safe. Give Mom and Dad my love.”

  Mat ended the call and walked back to the living room where the girl had put her panties on and was scrolling through her phone with mounting concern, her perfect tits looking even more perfect as she sat on the couch.

  “This is really bad, Mat. I need to call my family in Louisville.” She began dressing as though she needed to be clothed to speak to her parents.

  “Hi, Mom. Are you okay?” she said.

  Mat headed to his room, following an unconscious urge to check his gear. He pulled his duffle bag from beneath a pair of skis in his closet and threw it on the bed. Only then did he realize what he was doing: kitting up for war.

  Somewhere in the dark, warrior corner of his mind, Mat knew they faced something more than a “west coast problem.”

  “Yeah, Mom,” Mat heard the girl say. “I’ll come home right away. I’ll book a flight tonight.” Mat slowed down packing his bag. Something about the conversation wormed its way into his head, casting shadows on his action plan.

  “I will, Mom. Don’t worry, and please don’t let Dad worry. I promise I will be home tomorrow at the latest.”

  Mat knew it was a promise she would break. He had been in Santa Barbara, California, United States of America, when those camel-fuckers hit the twin towers in 2001. All flights had been cancelled almost immediately, protecting the airspace over the U.S. from follow-on attacks. With a true nuke strike on the continental U.S., the president would be in the air right now on Air Force One, and there wouldn’t be many, if any, flights pinging around the United States to clutter up the airspace. Not for a good bit, at least.

  Nine-eleven reminded him of the day he enlisted, which reminded him of Ranger School, which reminded him of the Ranger Creed.

  I will shoulder more than my fair share of the task, whatever it should be…

  Like a flash flood rushing into the sea, two versions of Mat collided in his head. In one version, Mat chased tail and drank way too much. In the other, he lived the highest ideals of honor and shouldered more than his fair share of any task.

  Like when the World Trade Center had been hit by two giant missiles filled with mothers and daughters, sons and fathers, Mat’s world flipped. Fifteen minutes before, he had been content to get laid and get going. Now, with nuclear fallout sprinkling down from the sky in Los Angeles, the co-ed sitting on his grandmother’s couch, naked from the waist up, represented an issue of honor to him.

  He had spent his short adult life taking personal responsibility for the safety of Americans. But that mission had been thousands of miles away, in an alien land smelling of death and raw sewage. What did that mission have to do with right here, right now, in the heart of America?

  Maybe everything.

  2

  “Fret for your figure and fret for your latte and

  Fret for your lawsuit and fret for your hairpiece and

  Fret for your Prozac and fret for your pilot and

  Fret for your contract and fret for your car

  It’s a bullshit three ring circus sideshow.

  Of freaks here in this fucking hole we call L.A.

  The only way to fix it is to flush it all away…”

  “Ænema”, Tool, Ænema, 1996 Zoo
Entertainment

  Highway 12, State of Washington

  Sage drove through the night on the mountain highway skirting Mount Rainier. The traffic inched up and over the Cascade Mountains like a line of sparkling ants. When he finally reached the city of Yakima, he merged onto the freeway. He had never driven a car on a cross-country trip like this before. At fifteen miles an hour, there was nothing exciting about road tripping.

  At six in the morning, he was contemplating pulling over for some sleep near the town of Wallula when his car started coughing. He checked the gas gauge and saw he had a quarter tank, but an indicator lit up on the dashboard saying, “Check Engine.” He didn’t know what that meant. He had never had a car do that before.

  His stomach lurched as he looked in the rearview mirror. With dawn’s light, he could see a plume of smoke billowing behind the Taurus, enfolding the other cars in a blue haze.

  He pulled onto the shoulder and shut the car off. Half-dazed by fatigue, he forced himself to think. He grabbed his cell phone from the console and spoke into the phone.

  “Call Dad.”

  The automated voice replied. “I’m sorry. You have no service.”

  Sage looked around and saw a field of trees in a neat line stretching off into the misty dawn. The slow march of traffic continued past his window. The car filled with an acrid smell.

  He pushed sleep aside and forced himself to think. Something major was wrong with the car. He couldn’t reach anyone by cell phone. He was somewhere in the middle of Washington.

  Year before last, when he was fifteen, his dad offered to rebuild a 1967 Ford Bronco with him. They even found a Bronco, paid the owner seven thousand dollars, and drove it home. He and his dad called a Bronco restoration shop in Colorado and spent an hour on the phone with an expert detailing everything the car needed for a frame-up rebuild. His dad agreed to pay for the parts if Sage did the work.

  After that, Sage did nothing. Every day, when confronted with the opportunity to work on the Bronco or lie in bed messing with social media on his phone, he had always chosen Instagram or Snapchat. He never ordered any of the parts nor did he lift a finger to start the bodywork.

  When Sage turned sixteen, his dad sold the Bronco and his mom bought him a much newer Audi instead. Beyond changing the oil and the brakes, there wasn’t anything an owner could do mechanically with a 2012 Audi besides change out the rims. It was a black box that only a trained technician with a special computer could access.

  While Sage’s Grandpa Burke had passed down knowledge about cars to his own sons, that knowledge had died with Sage and that Ford Bronco. He knew nothing about cars and it was his own fault.

  Sage couldn’t think of one good thing to come out of all those hours on his phone. A good-looking boy, with a topknot of brown hair, slim build and budding muscles, he had no problem getting the hottest girls in school to burn up the SnapChat lines with him all afternoon, every day of the week.

  As he sat beside the road in a car that smelled like burning tires, he had no clue what was wrong or what to do. Like an ignorant child, he’d have to go find help—find someone competent enough to tell him what to do next.

  Tired and angry with himself, Sage stepped out of the car and began the process of gathering his gear. He didn’t want to make another mistake—leaving things in the car to be stolen. But a problem arose: there was no way to carry so much stuff. Grandpa Bob had loaded him down with enough camping supplies to fill five backpacks. The trunk and backseat of the Taurus were filled to the brim with food, water, tent, rifle, water purifier, sleeping bag, shovel, knives, cookware, Coleman stove and fuel… The list went on and on.

  Sage hoped to walk until he found a farmhouse where he could call his dad on a landline. But he couldn’t do that without leaving his supplies unprotected. He knew enough about road trips to know that an endless line of cars was not normal. People had to be fleeing Seattle, given the gridlock. It meant people were desperate. Even with a thousand prying eyes along the interstate, someone might still rob his car. Grandpa Bob and Grandma Glenda had sacrificed a lot to supply him. He couldn’t risk losing what they had given him.

  Sage slumped against the Taurus on the side opposite the interstate. He didn’t want people to see how helpless he felt. Without his parents or a phone, he felt utterly lost. His eyes welled with tears, and he fought the urge to let frustration carry him away.

  He sat up against the rear wheel of the Taurus for ten minutes before an ancient Chevy Suburban broke out of the line of cars and rolled up behind the Taurus. Sage looked up and rubbed his face vigorously, hoping to erase the telltale signs of his despair.

  A grizzled old man in an army jacket and a long, gray beard opened the driver’s door of the Suburban, hinges shrieking, and climbed down. Working out the kinks from a long drive, the old man limbered up as he trundled over to Sage. He must have noticed Sage’s swollen eyes and flushed cheeks. He turned his gaze away before talking.

  “You got car troubles, son?”

  Sage was on guard. “Yeah, but I got it handled.”

  “You do, huh?” the old guy said, doubt in his voice.

  “I got someone coming,” Sage lied.

  “Well, that’s good,” the old guy said, obviously not believing him. “How’d you manage that with all the cell towers busted?”

  The question stumped Sage, so he said nothing.

  “Anyway,” the old guy continued, “by the smell of things, I’d say you’ve got either a blown head gasket or you’ve fried a cylinder. In either case, your car’s dying.”

  Sage gave the old man a sideways glance, unsure what to do next.

  The man pulled his hand from his jacket pocket and thrust it toward Sage. “I’m Leroy Rockwood.”

  Sage returned the handshake. “My name’s Sage.”

  “Well, Sage, I have a grandson about your age. I’m going to guess you’re seventeen. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “Come ’round over here.” Leroy turned toward his Suburban. “I want to show you something.”

  Sage followed cautiously. Leroy struggled with the rear handle of the Suburban for a second, and finally the back gate flew open. Sage peered inside. The cargo space was cram-packed with survival equipment—boxes of military meals-ready-to-eat, ammunition, gas masks and big water jugs. The Suburban smelled like moldy canvas.

  “As you can see,” Leroy strutted, “I’m a survivalist, and proud of it, especially now with the world going straight down the shitter. I was right all along, and to hell with all those commie bastards who made fun of me. I hope they choke on their Armani leather belts when they’re finally forced to eat ’em.”

  Sage smiled despite himself.

  “Young man, you can rest assured that I’m all stocked up, and I won’t be stealing from you this morning,” Leroy said, intuiting Sage’s distrust of strangers.

  Happy to be convinced the man could be trusted, Sage off-loaded his list of troubles. “Mister Rockwood… here’s the thing. My grandpa gave me this car to drive home to Utah. Now the car’s having trouble. What should I do?”

  “Son, you’ll be answering all your own questions from here on out. I hope your daddy taught you well.”

  “How about I go with you and we travel together?” Sage asked, suddenly hopeful.

  Leroy laughed out loud. “That wouldn’t be any fun for you would it? Besides, I’m off to my bug-out location and I got OPSEC to think of.”

  “What’s OPSEC?”

  “Operational Security. You know, keeping my secrets so I don’t get overrun by city folk.”

  “I wouldn’t tell anyone about your bug-out place, Mister Rockwood.”

  Leroy laughed again. “Sure you wouldn’t, especially if some beautiful female asked you real nice. I bet you’d keep your mouth shut tight as a tick. No, sir, I may have been born at night, but I wasn’t born last night.”

  “Please?” Sage implored.

  “Begging might have worked with your momma, but that ain’
t going to work with Uncle Leroy. Here’s what I’ll tell you, then I’ll get outta your hair. Get back in that piece of shit you’re driving, and get off at the next exit. Keep driving down dirt roads until the engine dies. You need to get away from the interstate. That car will probably still go a bit, and then it’ll be dead forever. Alongside the freeway is not where you wanna end up. In a few days, people will tear you to pieces for the stuff you got in that trunk. Now get going. Oh, and get your ass ready for winter, son. It’s coming.” With that, Leroy Rockwood turned around and strode back to his Suburban. Before climbing in, he shouted back at Sage. “Maintain OPSEC. Your daddy shoulda taught you that.”

  He climbed back into his Suburban and joined the slow exodus out of Washington State.

  I doubt my daddy even knows what OPSEC means, Sage thought.

  He considered the old guy’s advice about getting off the interstate. Driving away from the interstate or preparing for the winter wouldn’t put him any closer to Utah, but he was fresh out of ideas. He could wait here until another person stopped, and they might give him a ride, but odds were fair he would get robbed instead.

  Sage got back into the acrid Taurus and cranked the key. The engine fired, but made a sickly rattle. Billowing smoke, he pulled back into traffic. Within half a mile, he exited onto a country road. The car kept going, skipping and coughing, but moving forward nonetheless. He passed by a farmhouse and, after a few miles, the fields along the dirt road changed to recently tilled soil. Sage drove past a small trailer park full of what looked like families of migrant workers. A mile later, the fields gave way to barren hillsides with nothing but rock and sagebrush.

  The Taurus rattled and died.

  Sage had exhausted everything in his list of possible actions and, with the death of the Taurus, he had reached the end of the line. He stepped out of the car and looked around. He had driven onto a road that crossed a hillside perched above a freshly-tilled field. A mile or two below, a wide and sluggish river cut the landscape in two. He had no idea what the river was called.