Black Autumn Travelers

by Jeff Kirkham

  For Cameron and Julie, the thousands of dead cars meant traffic had thinned, even though the exodus out of California had probably multiplied a hundred times since the nuke. Cameron figured that fleeing Californians were reaching a simple, physical limit: they were running out of gas, blocking the road westward from Cajon Pass back to Los Angeles. Even using the southbound lanes, dirt margins and side roads, an all-out migration from Los Angeles had undoubtedly choked every inch of blacktop. Leaving southern California had probably become impossible.

  Before the nukes, very few people could have accurately guessed the range of the gas tanks in their cars. In the desert exodus out of California, that minor statistic—an asterisk in the vehicle’s owner’s manual—had meant life or death. People who had recently filled their tanks, or who had braved the massive lines at gas stations, had achieved a greater distance from the violent caldron of southern California. But no vehicle had enough capacity in one tank to clear the chaos bubbling out of the Los Angeles basin.

  In perfect road conditions, with a full tank of gas, light sedans with top-of-the-line fuel economy could reach six hundred miles. Stop-and-go traffic traded fuel for forward progress, burning at least a quarter gallon per hour. The simple physics of internal combustion would leave hundreds of thousands stranded.

  With cars dropping like flies and northbound cars overtaking the southbound lanes, the stop-and-go rhythm increased, and the 4Runner started making fifty feet at a time. Cameron and Julie had logged more miles that day than the previous three days combined.

  Survival of the fullest tank, Cameron thought to himself.

  At last they neared the final stretch of highway into Las Vegas. Dead cars littered the roadside like a desiccated army, riven with people stumbling slowly northward.

  As they crested the final rise, Cameron’s heart sank. Vegas looked like a dying fire pit, with hundreds of buildings smoldering across the valley, sending up tendrils of smoke, all conjoining to form a disc of muddy gray haze over the desert metropolis.

  “Oh, my God,” Julie whispered.

  Cars poured out of Vegas in every direction except back toward southern California. The southbound lanes were filled with the California exodus. Even as Vegas died, people knew better than to head toward L.A.

  “Are we going straight to Jason and Jenna’s place?” Julie asked. They both understood she meant Jason and Jenna’s second home in Henderson, a few miles south of the Las Vegas strip. The golf resort home had acquired mythical dimensions in Cameron’s mind, a respite in this struggle to survive. Knowing Jason’s penchant for “prepping,” the Henderson home would offer them resupply—food, water, and gasoline, assuming nobody had looted it out. Once again, Cameron bet his family’s life on the whim of fate.

  —Spin the wheel and, praise the Lord, Jenna’s house still has gas. Spin it again, and, ah shucks, your family dies from thirst in a burned-out version of Sin City.—

  Cameron felt compelled to run directly to Jenna’s vacation house to see if they lived or died; he wanted to see if the gas had been discovered by looters or not.

  This Cameron, the one who had emptied his Beretta into those assholes in the desert—weighed his options. Strangely, the killer in him could stop and think, less afraid and more cagey.

  “We need to make a decision about which road to take tomorrow to reach Utah. Assuming we find gas tonight, tomorrow we can either go the normal way up I-15 through Saint George, or we can go around the Grand Canyon. With this traffic, it might be quicker to go east around the Grand Canyon and cross into Utah on back roads. Let’s drive through Vegas a little and see how bad traffic gets on the other side of the Strip. We can always double back.”

  Julie’s face slid into a frown, eager to escape the highway nightmare they had endured for three days. “Cam, the boys need to get out of the car.”

  Cameron knew that wasn’t her real concern. She wanted to get under cover, exhausted from the constant stress of driving through The Death Valley Death March. He didn’t blame her for being tapped out, but he also knew that they would have to answer the question about the I-15 sooner or later.

  An hour later, they inched into the Las Vegas Strip, shadowed in the deep channel cut by Interstate 15 between high rises and luxury hotels. As soon as the Aria Hotel loomed over the freeway, it became clear he had made a terrible mistake.

  Hotels burned unchecked, whole floors gushing soot like black demon tongues licking the sky. As the family drove by the Bellagio Hotel, Cameron saw something fall from a burning floor, ominously sculling in mid-air, almost certainly a human form.

  —Spin the wheel of fate and, whoops. You win a visit to Purgatory—

  Even amidst the destruction, people flooded the streets and rooftops—partying, looting, rioting. They saw a couple having flagrant sex on a freeway overpass, flaunting their naked pubis precariously over the edge of the guard rail, oblivious to the hundreds of cars passing below.

  As they passed by the towering glass City Center Hotel, locked into slow-moving traffic, someone opened fire with a rifle from one of the top floors. There was nothing Cameron could do to escape the gunfire. They were completely blocked in on all sides by plodding vehicles. A person’s head exploded in the car next to them, splattering the passenger side window with blood and brain matter. A half-second later, a bullet thunked into the 4Runner, somewhere near the rear quarter panel.

  “Check the kids!” Cameron screamed at Julie, afraid to let go of the steering wheel, as though clutching it could somehow protect them. Julie ripped both crying children from their car seats and shielded them with her body while searching them for blood. Unhurt, the kids shrieked, echoing the feral terror of their parents. Another bullet slammed into the front half of the 4Runner, and Cameron prayed it hadn’t hit the engine. Stalling right then, under rifle fire, could prove fatal.

  —Spin the wheel once more and you get an all-expense paid trip to Sniper Alley. Remember, medical attention will cost you extra—

  The traffic gave a little and Cameron inched under an overpass, shielded from the sniper by asphalt and concrete. “Shit, hell,” he yelled into his vinyl-wrapped steering wheel, projecting his rage onto the embossed Toyota symbol. Never before had he felt so much like a rag doll caught in a hurricane. He hungered to stop the car right here, climb every step in the City Center Hotel, find that gunman and wrench his neck until he could feel nothing but vertebrae.

  Other than abandoning their car and their supplies, Cameron could think of no alternative but to drive straight ahead. A three-foot concrete barrier separated the north and southbound lanes, and there was nowhere else for him to go. They were caught in a concrete slalom. They drove on, everyone panting from the come-down of absolute terror. The car beside them nudged past with its slain passenger smeared across the window, howls of grief and terror resonating like a pack of dogs, wild and unchecked.

  As they nudged out the far side of the overpass, they saw a body hanging from a lamp post on the Flamingo Road Bridge, a smudged sign around her neck branding her Bitch for some inconceivable offense.

  Thankfully, the shooting seemed to focus on the side of the overpass they had already cleared. The spinning gameshow of death had moved on to other lucky contestants.

  Music pulsed from atop one of the hotels. Cameron couldn’t tell which, but the falling bodies seemed most frequent from the top of Trump Tower as a contingent of Vegas visitors partied their way into the Apocalypse.

  Fatigued through and through by horror, Cameron’s mind drifted back to the Prince song.

  “The sky was all purple, there were people runnin’ everywhere.

  Tryin’ to run from the destruction, you know I didn’t even care.”

  Cameron felt the tidal shift of emotion pulling him toward nihilism and apathy. Then he looked in the rearview mirror, caught sight of Benny and Barkley’s terrified children’s eyes, and snapped back to reality.

  Gotta hang on, Cameron reminded himself. First guy to lose his shit loses his f
amily. Last guy to lose his shit, maybe his people make it.

  Thinking about this like a Discovery Channel show helped calm him, tricking his mind into a peace that it had no business finding.

  Cameron wondered what had pushed the Strip into debauchery and murder in a mere matter of days. The criminal underbelly of Vegas had likely descended on the Strip—preying upon unprotected visitors. Overwhelmed and opting to protect their own families, Vegas police must have abandoned the stranded visitors to their terrible fate.

  Before the first commercial on the Discovery Show about the cataclysmic destruction of Vegas, they would showcase the gap left by civilization retreating. As they rolled wordlessly forward through the chaos, Cameron heard the Discovery Channel voiceover in his head.

  —Some sleeping evil awakened, sweeping before it the drunk, drugged and vicious. Human predators mingled with the thousands of vacationers, and the weak and elderly hid themselves like doomed rabbits in their hotel room warrens. The Hell of Dante had come to America.—

  That would be the last line of voiceover before they transitioned to the commercial break.

  Cameron and Julie’s eyes glazed. The couple grew silent, except for the occasional sob from Julie, shell-shocked after witnessing five miles of human destruction and evil.

  A few miles later, the towering hotels gave way and the freeway merged onto the 515-belt route, climbing out of Purgatory, and ramping toward a subtler hell. The 515 looped east of the Strip, back toward Jenna’s golf resort home. While the horror lessened considerably, hundreds of businesses and homes still burned, drifting waves of smoke across the freeway.

  His mind addled and adrenaline subsiding, leaving numbness and confusion, Cameron flipped to the television documentary he had been playing in his head.

  Commercial ends, fade from black.

  —Most visitors to Las Vegas failed to realize the racial tension and poverty just a couple miles from the decadence of the Strip. Glamor turned gristmill, the outlying areas had likewise devoured themselves like a snake eating itself tail-first. Even on the freeway, burning cars evidenced the roving attacks reaching out from low-income neighborhoods.—

  On every street, from their raised vantage on the belt route causeway, Cameron and Julie could see barely moving cars and walkers from Las Vegas, stumbling eastward. Where were they going?

  It dawned on Cameron: the people walked toward water. That would definitely make it onto the documentary. He tapped some long-forgotten show he had seen about Hoover Dam and the Las Vegas Valley:

  —In Vegas, millions of desert animals came from the surrounding desert every summer to indulge in the water provided by the humans of the city. Lawns, lakes, golf course ponds, even zero-scaped yuccas and creosote brush along the sculpted parkways in the wealthy areas—all drew a share of the water flowing into Las Vegas by the grace of county engineers.

  Now, with the grid broken, the flow of water and creatures reversed. People poured into the desert, seeking the one thing they couldn’t live without for more than a couple of days: water.

  Without power to pump, Vegas withered in the desert basin, except for those people ending lives neck deep in the alcohol stored on the Strip.

  For sixty years, Vegas had flourished at the sole mercy of Lake Mead, piled behind Hoover Dam, back-filling dozens of miles of what had once been the Colorado River. But Lake Mead couldn’t be counted upon to give up its water with ease. The River Mountains stood between the lake and Las Vegas. Pulling the water up and over the mountains required massive piping, pumps and electrical power—power that had died on the pyre of the stock market.

  To get water, the sun-dappled, silicone-breasted people of Las Vegas would literally be forced to walk twenty miles to put their hands in the water of Lake Mead. When the taps guttered to a stop, the blackjack dealers, car salesmen, telemarketers and transmission repairmen of Sin City turned desperately toward the only place they knew held water: the lake.—

  Tens of thousands of human souls moved sullenly down both sides of Warm Springs Road toward Lake Mead, dying of thirst. Watching the mass exodus from a freeway overpass, every east-bound street filled with humanity, Cameron’s mind stutter-stepped.

  Cameron couldn’t afford to care. It was as though he had awakened to find a world where mothers ate their young and God gutted puppies alive. Stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic, heading toward his sister’s vacation home, a sign hung over his limbic brain reading: Out to Lunch.

  For a moment, Cameron forgot how to drive. He looked over at Julie and could see the same schism in her slack jaw and glossed-over eyes, as though all the muscles in her face had suddenly ceased to function. Time stopped and his ears rang.

  After several miles, the auto pilot in Cameron’s brain must have failed because he slammed slowly into the back of a Nissan Altima in front of him. Neither Cameron nor the Altima bothered to pull over to the shoulder—settling instead on giving the middle finger out the window.

  Cameron’s rage at the gesture pulled him back from his stupor.

  “Mother FUCKER!”

  “What’s wrong, Cameron?” Julie asked reflexively, a profoundly stupid question given that everything was wrong.

  “We need to get out of here.” Cameron slammed back into reality. “We need to get the fuck out of here pronto. This place is dying and pulling everyone with it.”

  Julie looked at her hands. “How could this happen? Why didn’t the government fix this?”

  “Babe, you’re talking about the same people who work the counter at the DMV. You expect them to give a shit—to stay up nights staring at the ceiling, imagining all the ways the world could come undone? Hell, the authorities do their jobs, then go home and watch a shit-load of TV just like the rest of us.”

  “They were supposed to keep us safe. That was their job,” Julie argued, still staring at the floorboards.

  Cameron’s stutter from childhood returned briefly. “I g-g-guess they never imagined it would come to this.”

  Finally, the 515 belt route banked to the west and the traffic disappeared, apparently not foolish enough to re-enter the hell of the Las Vegas Strip. From there, Cameron and Julie would have an open shot at reaching Jenna’s house, assuming they could survive the surface streets.

  Assuming Cameron’s mind didn’t slip sideways off the ledge.

  Wallula, Washington, “Starbucks Camp”

  That night Sage slipped out of the camp by the pond and made his way quietly back to his hide on the rocky ridge. He had opted to sleep outside under the starlight instead of packing into the six-man tent with the Starbucks people. He wouldn’t mind being packed in there with the girls, but not with the hipster guys. He knew from personal experience that a six-man tent was really a six-midget tent. For six people to fit, they would be belly to butt.

  Under the moonlight and without a flashlight, he carefully cleaned up the supplies he had tossed around in his tantrum the night before and tucked them against the rocky nook. He pulled a trash bag from his backpack and wrapped his rifle and ammunition, protecting them from moisture. With his gear stacked tightly, Sage re-secured the camouflage tarp so that everything was hidden from view, piling up dried sagebrush to improve concealment.

  Once he was done caching his supplies, he sat down to think. On the one hand, the Starbucks Clan, as he had begun to think of them, had little to offer him. They were going to run out of food soon and their camping equipment was a joke. At this point, there was no way he was going to tell them about his own food cache and his gun. They were too near a cliff of desperation, and they didn’t even know it.

  On the other hand, he liked the idea of being around the girls, especially Penny. She was probably too old for him, but he had a rising sense that, in a failing world, age wouldn’t be the deciding factor. Justin certainly wasn’t going to save them from starvation.

  Sage worried they were headed for a confrontation with the farmer. He had already asked them to leave. The Starbucks Clan would increase the chances o
f Sage being kicked off the land, too. But there was nothing he could do to get rid of the Starbucks Clan, so he might as well hang out and see what happened next. He could always sneak back to his hidden camp at night, even if the farmer ran them off.

  For now, Sage decided upon a mission. He would show the Starbucks Clan how to live in the wilds. If nothing else, being around young people helped blunt the edge of his dread of being alone. Living by himself was a rising factor, he had been forced to admit.

  A thought dawned on him, and he went back to his stack of supplies and dug around. His grandpa had added a seventies-era Boy Scout Handbook to his backpack. Sage leafed through it and noticed that the old BSA book, with a picture of a gleaming Boy Scout hiker on the cover, kicked butt on his own modern Boy Scout Handbook.

  Back in the sixties, the Boy Scouts of America were more concerned with becoming competent in the wilderness than becoming politically correct citizens of the eco-obsessed world of the 2000s. The old book had no-nonsense instruction on how to live in the woods. Of course, the old handbook allowed for cutting down saplings and maybe even killing animals in the process of survival. The modern BSA lawyers would have a stroke if they thought a Boy Scout might kill a plant to survive.

  Right beside the vintage Boy Scout Handbook in his pack, Sage found an old wilderness survival book called Outdoor Survival Skills. It looked promising. He dug out a tiny LED flashlight and did some light reading before sneaking back to the Starbucks Camp for the night.

  Probably for the first time ever in the history of a survival skills book, that knowledge might just get a guy laid.

  Interstate 70, Near Warfordsburg, Maryland/Pennsylvania Border

  At this rate, it would take Mat and the girl at least six days to reach Louisville. They were averaging little more than five miles per hour in the stop-and-go exodus from the big cities of the east. Forests, rivers and parks kept forcing Mat back onto the interstate. For the last dozen miles, he had been rolling alongside a big river that he guessed was the Potomac. A West Coast boy would think the Potomac River flowed through the nation’s capital, not deep inland. It made Mat feel like he was making no progress, that they were still trapped in the human web of Baltimore, D.C. and the over-populated eastern seaboard. Being close to the nation’s capital made his skin crawl.