The vehicle dramatically changed our situation. Most important, we would be at our destination by tomorrow or the next day. Secondly, we could carry more food, water, sheltering material, and weapons than if on foot. Third, we wouldn’t be expending as much energy in our travels. At the end of the day, we wouldn’t be as tired, and we would be in better shape to fight if it came to that.
It wasn’t all good, though. Driving the vehicle will make noise. Anyone within a mile or so will be able hear us. It will also leave tracks more easily followed and be harder to hide should our enemies be near. We’ll take the negatives for the positives, though. I am damn tired of walking. Who wouldn’t be?
We re-inventoried everything; spread it all right out there on the floor in the shop. We set aside three days of rations and a small alcohol stove to cook them, along with a box of matches and a small pot. We added a jug of water as well as three individual containers for each of us. A ten by twelve tarp was set aside with a length of rope. Finally, the weapons: the rifle, twelve gauge shotgun, three pistols, Anna’s assault rifle and ammunition for all consequenceswot of them. And the prize; Hank had two cans of gun powder for reloading. To these we taped nails and punched a small hole in the screw cap for a fuse. Now, we had crude hand grenades. A few other items were included in our pile: the machete, a couple of hand tools, a roll of tape, and four clean blankets. We were ready to go.
With Gabriel behind the wheel, we drove back to Road P, going maybe ten miles per hour. Hank’s machine was certainly capable of going faster than that. The terrain just wasn’t suitable for speed with all the ruts and obstacles and with two of us riding on the small cargo platform on the back. It was still twice as fast as we normally traveled so no complaints from me.
The first few hours were uneventful except for one little thing — smoke, only a whiff at first. But as we continued on our way south, the smell kept getting stronger and stronger, and we could also see a dense, steel gray haze to our southeast, back in the foothills.
By our mid day stop, it was like gray gauze draped our world. The odor of burning vegetation was unmistakable. This somewhat surprised me because even though this part of the state received less rainfall, it still seemed too early in the season for wildfires.
I bent down and grabbed a handful of weeds and squeezed them. Some of them easily crumbled, others didn’t. My guess was that the dead stuff was the material left over from all the previous dry seasons, ready fuel, six, seven, eight years worth, mixed in with new and greener growth.
Maybe it was a lightning strike that started it, or one accidently set by some poor soul trying to keep warm, that got out of control. Who knows? It doesn’t matter I guess. It was on us, and at the time that’s all that counted; that and the fact that our eyes were starting to feel raw, and our lungs were getting that deep dull ache when we breathed in.
We switched places at that point, Gabriel getting in the back with Petra, me moving to the driving position, and Anna sitting in the right front. I also cut four, six inch strips from the end of one of the blankets to fashion a scarf of sorts for each of us. We wrapped them around our faces, covering everything except for the slightest bit of our eyes. We started off again.
After another ten miles or so, the smoke was as thick as coastal fog, cutting visibility down to a hundred yards. We wet the fronts of our makeshift masks and kept going, though. We couldn’t turn back now. We were so close. At this point, there was very little conversation going on between us; no talk of Woburn or what we’d do when we got there. I doubt anyone was even thinking about it. I think instead we were all wondering if this time we were pushing our luck just a little too far.
I looked back a couple of times while driving and noticed that Petra had turned her face into Gabriel’s body, and he was rocking her. But maybe that was just the movement of the vehicle instead. I also caught Anna looking at me once, but I couldn’t read her expression because of the wrapping that covered her face. No doubt she was as worried as I was.
A hot wind kicked up about thishimself; kill or be killed. with t point, and I was suddenly occasioned by a very unsettling recollection. Many years ago, long before the troubles that have brought mankind so down low, I watched a wildfire survivor interviewed on camera. He was a scruffy old coot, crinkled and dry as high desert chaff, no doubt much more so in appearance because his ordeal just recently happened.
This man described, in the most colorful of terms, his unfortunate experience and his fortunate survival. His spontaneous poetry, at least a single portion of it, has apparently lingered all this time in my brain and was called up by the similar circumstance we found ourselves in. Most particularly, he said that just before the flames found him, “it was as though the devil’s breath swept across his land and kindled the very earth upon which I stood.” He survived when “God’s hand tumbled me over and down into a dry ravine” where he lay for the next hour.
I slowed our machine with these thoughts fresh in-mind and eventually stopped altogether, suddenly convinced that a great calamity was about to fall upon us. As it happened, the place I halted was one that was more asphalt than vegetation. We dismounted at this point, all of us except Petra, and I directed them to clear the weeds on both edges of the road as best they could and work to the center. We set about kicking and scuffing and pulling free the weeds for twenty yards north and south, throwing what we had loosened to one side or the other. Once fairly well accomplished, we remounted our vehicle and positioned it near the western edge of the blacktop, so certain was I that the fire was coming from the east. There we waited, hoping that our little island would be avoided, and we would be saved.
As we waited for death or for deliverance, the wind picked up speed, blowing hot from west to east. This confused me to such an extent that I thought I had made a mistake. I questioned if the fire wasn’t approaching us from the west instead of the east, being driven by the air flow. But it dawned on me that I hadn’t been mistaken at all. The flames were consuming great quantities of oxygen and so sucking the air in its direction, feeding its voracious appetite.
I know this sounds crazy, but the fire seemed to be a living thing; an inexorable force, a juggernaut destroying everything in its path. I don’t ever remember feeling so small and helpless as I did at that moment. We seemed totally defenseless.
The space around us suddenly cleared of smoke, it all being pulled with the air toward the approaching fire. The weeds and brush at the side of the road bent to the east like bony fingers pointing toward the danger — it’s there, that way, coming for us. The heat increased by degrees to the point that I wondered if everything might not eventually explode into flame. At that point, an idea came to my mind; a way to perhaps ensure our survival.
I jumped from the vehicle and clawed through our gear until I found the matches, which I carried along with one of our spare cans of alcohol to the eastern edge of our little asphalt island. I next splashed small amounts of the flammable here and there along the whole forty yards and ignited it. At first the brush was slow to catch. Soon enough though, the oxygen that was being sucked up and toward the main fire, fed these flames, racing them uphill with the wind. consequenceswot
My hope was that if I could burn enough of the area immediately between us and the fire, it would deny the fire the fuel around us and we would be saved. For the most part this worked, except that embers ignited some of the remnants of our early effort to clear the road. These I attacked with my boots and soon both Anna and Gabriel joined in until they were extinguished. After that, we just waited by our little vehicle. What else could we do?
Somewhere, I guess the two fires joined and the bigger one continued to burn our way, only to the north and south of us, surrounding us with flames. But we were saved; hot, scared, awed by the power of the fire though we were. I have to add, in those moments when the storm rushed down upon us and since, even now, I’ve been unable to avoid the most unsettling thoughts of what our death would have been like had my scheme failed; a b
ullet, almost anything instead.
After a good long time had passed, we traveled through a landscape of gray and black, still smoldering in places, tendrils to the sky. Sometimes we passed a foundation with a house or barn crumbled down around it, fence posts turned charcoal stubs, vehicles hollowed and resting on their metal rims, stinking, the earth a holocaust, an ash desert, we the only things living. Our wheels ground down beneath them what was left, floating a frail gray dust that settled on everything. Our way, though, was cleared of all obstruction save few, allowing us to pick up speed and make up most the progress lost.
At dusk, the ravaged landscape was an hour behind us, and we were maybe yet a day’s travel from Woburn, if that. I thought about pushing on, just traveling through the night (our vehicle had lights), but the truth was we were drained, exhausted, at our limit of endurance. I don’t know why that is, it makes little sense considering we were riding not walking. Fear maybe, it can take it out of you for sure. Or perhaps it was just the accumulation of physical exertion and too few calories taken-in all these days. I don’t know, whatever, we just were, so we stopped to eat and sleep a little.
The place we stopped to rest and hide was near a nameless cross street. It used to be one of those charging station-convenience store combinations that had once been so common, this one wood framed and white washed. A wooden sign over the door advertised “Bait Sold Here.” Another, posted on an interior wall said, “Lottery Tickets.” It of course had long ago been looted of everything useful and much abused in the process. The windows were broken out of the place, every one of them, the shelves turned over, and it looked like an owl or two had roosted inside because of the excrement all over the floor.
Outside in the charging area, one of the four, bright red charging poles lay on its side. The cables at the bottom were pulled out, cut, and the copper wire bared as if someone had thought the trouble was at the meter and not at the source. Nearby and around, I counted eight cars and trucks left standing in no particular fashion, probably where their owners had left them when it finally dawned they were useless. It was there that we positioned our own vehicle, among all the others, where it wouldn’t be easily noticed. It wasn’t the best place, though. We knew that.
There isn’t much more east or west with t of interest to the day. We built our fire in the hollow of an upside-down truck tire rim, using wood siding pulled from the store for fuel. Once the flames had burned down to a good set of coals, we placed a metal wire shelf, taken from inside the store, over the rim and roasted some of our potatoes on top. We also put the alcohol stove we got from Hank to use, heating a can of beans and after, making tea. It was a good meal as our meals went, but it did little to improve my energy level. I wasn’t just tired, I was completely tired. I could feel the fatigue right on down to my bones.
I took the first watch so I could finish up the day’s words while events were still fresh in my brain. I found that the writing of them, though, was difficult. I kept nodding off, so I had to stand and use the hood of a Honda SUV as a desk. That’s how tired I was. But, as you can see, I managed.
As for the rest of them, Gabriel, Anna, Petra, they crawled into the cars parked scattered around and went to sleep. I can hear them now, occasionally turning to find a better place and even mumbling out a few words of the dramas playing out in their unconscious minds. There are few sweet dreams among us, but I hope theirs are pleasant this time. I don’t want them to suffer anymore.
These dark, silent hours standing watch, when my only company is my thoughts, are often the ones of either most doubt or final resolution. Tonight, the latter is king because it’s settled in me that I love the three of them beyond all measure, and I no longer question the genuineness of that feeling. They are in my care. I’m empowered. Purpose is granted me and served in being. So much has changed. So much has changed. Alan Trent (April 16, 2054).
April 17, 2054-
Anna and I are in a bad fix. Both of us are hurt, she more than me. We’re hiding. Gabriel has reluctantly gone on. I pray he is all right. No time to write more. I must attend to Anna’s wounds and our defenses. Maybe later — I hope. They are hunting us with will.
May 5, 2054-
My name is Gabriel Sanchez. Today is my birthday. I’m seventeen years old — happy birthday to me, ha, ha, ha. I treated myself to an egg and toasty-bread this morning. Been saving that egg for a whole week. Big celebration, huh? Well, it was good enough.
You probably already know a little about me if you’ve read any of this journal at all, so I won’t say anymore about that. I’m not that interesting anyway. But what you don’t know is why it’s me who is now writing and not Alan. I’ll get to that. I promise. It’s part of a longer story, though, and I’m going to tell it to you from start to now. I owe it the time.
Also, I want to say I’ll do my best to write it out so it makes sense. I haven’t had a lot of practice writing, but mom says I’m good at it. She’s the one who taught me the most because after the seventh grade I stopped going to school. All the teacherhimself; kill or be killed. s , but ts died. Most the kids, too. So the thing is, I don’t know how it will turn out.
___________
Starting up where Alan left off, we drove away from that wrecked up station on April 17th, in the dark and in the cold …cold, cold, cold, always the cold. We were in a rush to get to Woburn and warn them of the attack. That’s where our minds were mostly at. So I don’t think one more day of shivers and goose bumps much mattered to any of us.
For me, I was also thinking about seeing my friends. I even had this picture in my head of what it would be like when I got there. I saw them all around me, slapping me on the back, saying they thought I was dead, laughing until our faces cramped and we had to squeeze them to stop the ache. And later, when I told them all that had happened to us — captured, beat-up, our getting away, how Eric (Ponytail) hunted us, and well, you know, just everything that happened — they were real quiet like, just listening. Later, after they went off to spread the word that we were back and not dead, I got to crawl into my own bed and sleep for three days straight — warm, too. It was all just one big made up dream, though. The way it really happened wasn’t even close to that.
Getting back to that morning, we were all kind of quiet at first. You know how it is when you first wake-up; your body and your brain are kind of still asleep for a while. However, when Petra asked if the “safe place” was much farther, that’s when things got going between us pretty good. We were all real excited about finally getting home. I don’t think anyone had a thought that we wouldn’t just drive right into town without any more trouble and that would be that. I know that’s what I was thinking anyway, as well as the other stuff I already wrote. The only thing I figured that might happen different was that we’d run into one of our militia patrols or maybe even one of our roadblocks, but it would end the same anyway. We’d be home.
Oh, one more thing; I started off driving. I liked driving even though turning the wheel sometimes hurt my shoulder. You know, the shoulder that I dislocated. I didn’t say anything about that to Alan or mom, though, or even make a face, because I was afraid mom would make me give up my turn. I guess you don’t really need me to tell you stuff like that. I don’t even know why I said it. Wrote it.
Eventually the road we were driving on, the one Alan called Road P, came to an end at an intersection that went left and right (east and west). We took a stop at that point to look at the map one more time and to switch places.
I’m not even going to try to explain the turns and roads we had to take, according to the map, to get to back home. It’d be just too hard to put down for anyone reading this to make sense of. But basically, it was like we were on one side of this huge old block that was maybe fifteen or twenty miles square and we had to get to the other side of it and a little beyond, where our destination was at. To do that, we had to go all the way around this block. In truth, the block wasn’t square and the roads weren’t all straight, but I’
m sure you get the picture. We hoped that because the map only showed highways and main roads, we’d come across a minor one as we agreementwotdrove along that would be a shortcut to the other side.
There’s another thing. The area we traveled was hilly and covered mostly with grass, except for a few trees here and there. There were parts of it that had been farm land at one time, but there was also a large, large chunk of land that looked more like it was a wild area or something. The map didn’t say, but I’m thinking at one time this was maybe a wildlife refuge or a park even. None of that really matters other than to get you to see that it was some pretty rough country in places. You couldn’t just go skipping along.
While we were going over the map, I was also keeping my eye on Petra who, like us, had gotten out of the vehicle, except she was wandering around a little. She didn’t have, you know, too much interest in what we were doing. At one point, I saw her walk over to these wildflowers growing nearby where she kind of squatted down and picked a few. She liked flowers I guess and had done this before. Usually, after she picked them, she would carry them around with her until the petals fell off and then go and pick some new ones. For some stupid reason, I remember these particular flowers were purple or maybe blue and shaped into kind of a cone with these little yellow things sticking out of the middle. I can understand why she was attracted to them. The stuff you remember, huh?
Anyway, I looked away from her for a second or two, and when I looked back I saw her stand-up real quick and throw her flowers on the ground. Next I saw her look at her hand or wrist and slap at it three or four times. After that, she let out this high pitched squeal and kind of did a little tap dance in a half circle, at the same time shaking her hand real fast. A couple of seconds after that, she ran our way holding her hand to her body and her face showing hurt. I right off started toward her, and I guess mom and Alan saw something was wrong and started as well. The three of us weren’t in a real rush, though. Everybody was calm like — except Petra of course. She was worked up pretty good.
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