by Paul Jones
It was all so ... pristine, so untouched - it was Lark's.
He slammed the door shut unable to face this particular ghost from his past. Now was not the time, he told himself. The voice in the back of his mind whispered back, when will it ever be time, Jim-boy?
He pushed that thought aside. What he had to concentrate on now - what was important - was finding Simone. She wasn't at the house, so, where would she most likely be? She would try to get to some place safe.
If she had been anywhere near their home then she would have seen the devastation and gone elsewhere, unless of course she was so close that she had become a victim of the crash herself, engulfed by the fireball that had surely accompanied the unscheduled landing of the massive airliner in the middle of their housing development.
He could not allow himself to think that. She had to be alive and he had to find her.
Simone’s parents! Of course.
They lived in Thousand Oaks. Maybe she was visiting them? She used to hop over there most weekends when they were still married. Perhaps she had made it there. It made sense. It would be the logical place for her to go, he supposed. After all, he and Simone were divorced, would be divorced, or whatever. This flip-flop of time was confusing enough without having to think about present and future tense.
On the off chance that the phone might be working again, he flipped open his cell and hit the send button but he got the same NO SERVICE message as before. In the master bedroom, he tried the receiver to the phone next to their bed – nothing. It was dead, too.
Thousand Oaks was over eighteen miles away. It would probably take him a day or more to walk it and with the current state of madness, there was no guarantee that he would make it alive. He needed transportation and he knew exactly where to find it.
* * *
They bought the bikes the previous year and had planned to take rides on the weekend up into the nearby San Fernando Mountains. There were so many great trails lacing through the San Fernando's and surrounding hills, but for some reason the weekend excursions never materialized. Jim knew why, he was just too busy at the lab and the bikes had stayed in their racks. Simone had talked about selling them but he had promised her that they would use them - someday they would.
The bikes were stored in metal overhead racks attached to the ceiling of the garage. When the tree had fallen into the den above, part of the upper floor had collapsed down into the garage below, burying the three bikes under a six-foot high mound of splintered wood, stucco and furniture.
Grabbing a pair of leather gloves from the shelf Simone kept her gardening tools and rose food, Jim started pulling and shifting the debris.
The heat was beginning to take its toll. His muscles ached with each piece of debris he moved from the pile to the clear side of the garage. Covered in grime and dirt, dust had crusted inside his nostrils and scoured his eyes. He was exhausted, but within minutes a glint of dust-covered chrome rewarded his toil. Kneeling down on the pile of rubble Jim hurriedly threw the remaining covering of debris aside, uncovering Simone's bike still attached to its rack, its four fastening pins locked to the remnants of the plasterboard that had been the ceiling.
With a final tug, he pulled the bike free of the mangled storage rack and hefted the scratched and bent bicycle over to the opposite side of the garage.
A broken floorboard had punched through the spokes of the bike's badly buckled rear wheel ripping them from the exterior rim. Now they protruded outwards like the staked ribs of a vampire. The front tire was flat and with the back wheel so badly damaged, the bike was unridable. He would just have to hope for better luck with his own bicycle. Leaning the useless machine against his workbench, Jim headed back over to the pile of debris.
His bike was in little better condition and by the time he pulled it free of the remaining debris he could see that the front tire had ragged gashes in several places and the front fork, instead of jutting forward as it should, now slanted back towards the pedals. Other than that, the bike looked to be in working condition. Between the two damaged bikes, Jim realized he had one working one; it would just take a little cannibalization. Rummaging through his toolbox he pulled out a couple of spanners that would fit the locking nuts keeping the wheels fixed in place. He released the front wheel from Simone's bike and used it to replace his bike’s wheel. Next, he grabbed the hand pump and started inflating the flat tire.
Ten minutes later, and much to his relief, the tire remained inflated.
* * *
The fastest route to Thousand Oaks from the Valley would be via the 101 freeway west, and as Jim Baston headed onto the slip road that fed off Valley Circle Drive and led onto the 101, he could see that it wasn't going to be an easy ride. Jim guessed he had probably about an hour of light left. The first hint of dusk was already discoloring the sky, turning the blue to a deep purple.
Completely blocked by abandoned cars that snaked around the curling on-ramp and down to the freeway below, Jim left the road and pedaled his bike up onto the grass verge running alongside the road, skirting around the crush of vehicles.
Things were worse on the freeway.
Cresting the gentle rise of the slip road, he brought the bike to a hasty stop, gazing out over a sea of glittering quicksilver.
The ghostly light of the setting sun glinted off the roofs of thousands of crushed, burnt-out and abandoned cars, trucks and big-rigs, lending an eerie orange cast to the terrible panorama that shimmered and stirred in the heat haze floating above the river of destruction. The smell of burnt plastic - like toy soldiers left too long under the mid-day sun - wafted to him on the early evening breeze.
"Jesus wept."
It was the most terrifying thing Jim had ever laid eyes on; this total annihilation of thousands of vehicles spoke more poignantly to him of the frailty of human life than all the bodies and devastation he had seen that day. It reminded him of newsreels he'd seen when he was a kid during the first Persian Gulf War, of the road to Basra after the Iraqi army, routed from Kuwait city, had tried to make their way back to their homeland. Miles of crushed, burned and broken vehicles, the charred blackened bodies barely distinguishable as having once been a walking, talking human, capable of laughter and love.
The 101 freeway had become a road straight to Hell.
Drivers had found themselves suddenly and inexplicably behind the wheel of a vehicle speeding along some long forgotten highway on a trip that was almost a quarter century distant, for reasons that had become ancient history. Only an instant earlier they had been busy getting on with their everyday lives twenty-four years into the future. Caught utterly by surprise - and with the advances in vehicle AI safety protocols that would virtually eliminate highway accidents, still a distant invention - those unfortunate enough to find themselves in their vehicle on this fateful day had attempted to avoid other cars and trucks. Most had probably instinctively hit the brakes or simply waited for the vehicle's nonexistent AI to kick-in and bring them to a safe stop. Instead, they had careened across each other's lanes and this ... this carnage was the result. Fires had erupted and swept rapidly over the vehicles, with many of their occupants trapped inside and unable to escape from the oncoming firestorm.
Maybe Simone is in one of these tin can coffins?
No! He could not contemplate that. If she were, he would never know.
It had taken years of pain and denial, of the mental equivalent of self-flagellation throughout those years, but finally he realized that Simone had been right. Consumed by his own anguish and self-pity he had used that as a wedge to drive them apart. Youth is wasted on the young. That was correct, but now he had a second chance to prove that he was wrong and he knew that she was not one of the dead who lay in this vast, metal, tomb.
If she was alive, then he was going to find her.
* * *
Whispers!
The mass of twisted metal had found a voice, and now it murmured constantly to Jim as he rode his bike between overturned campers and
the shells of burned-out cars.
Beneath the lavender California sky, the cars had begun to finally cool. As they surrendered their heat to the cooling air, their metal bodies began to creak, squeak and crack. Each expansion and contraction of the day-long heated metal sent a million vowels and consonants soughing and sighing into the air like dying butterflies.
It was an uncanny sound. To Jim Baston's exhausted mind, it sounded as though the occupants of the cars were chattering in their metal coffins, an eerie susurration of which he was certain he was the subject.
Who are you? - Help us! - Why did you live?
The questions skittered through the air to him; a mirror of his own exhausted mind’s thoughts of why he had survived when so many had not.
He avoided looking into the brutalized wrecks after the first few, the seared bodies of the occupants were mostly unrecognizable, the fire having thoroughly removed any trace of humanity from its victims. The remains were cloth less, sexless lumps of charcoal resting on beds of springs or melted into dashboards ... for the most part. But here and there a glimpse of an unburned arm jutting through a window space or the half burned torso of a victim clawing their way across the freeway illustrated the fact that not all of the day's victims had died quickly or quietly in their vehicles.
The stench was truly awful, detectable even through his muck-caked nostrils, his olfactory receptors seared by the chemical pollution he had inhaled throughout most of the day. The pungent, reeking miasma of dead humans and dead machines hung in the noxious air, overwhelming his senses. It seemed that in death the fusion of burnt human flesh and boiled bodily fluids had comingled with the oil and gasoline, melted plastic and seared metal to form a smell that had never before existed on this planet; it was the stench of defeat, of the destruction of mankind and its servile machine culture.
* * *
The sun had dipped finally below the horizon. A pair of sundogs stretched skywards on either side of it like lopsided rainbow guardians of that diming orb. Jim watched as it sank without a trace, replaced now by the crescent of a skull-white new moon and the setting sun's distant orange glow replaced by the cadmium lambency of the freeway gantry lights.
Littering the freeway were vehicles of every size and description, scattered haphazardly across the lanes at every conceivable angle. Sedans, tankers, coupes, pickups, vans, SUV's, car carriers, motor homes; packed so tightly together in places it was impossible to tell what the original vehicles had been.
It was also impossible to pedal in a straight line because of the sheer number of vehicles that blanketed the road. The machines had spilled over into the central reservation, crashing through the separating barriers. They had overturned in the breakdown lane that skirted the edge of the freeway, many even lurching over onto the grass verges and through the fences designed to block the daily noise of traffic from the businesses that lined the freeway shoulder.
Jim found himself zigzagging through the maze of metal as though it were an obstacle course. The road was littered with small pieces of detritus, sharp pieces of metal that ranged in size from tiny slivers to parts of engines and other things he tried to avoid looking to closely at. In the past few hours, since leaving the house in the valley, he had dismounted several times and carried the bike rather than risk a puncture.
All its going to take is one of those pieces in a tire, and I'm walking the rest of the way, he thought, as he applied his brakes, slowing the bike to a crawl to negotiate a particularly hazardous stretch of road. Once clear, Jim remounted the bike and began pedaling.
The road ahead became suddenly and completely blocked by a burned-out jack-knifed big-rig, its trailer lay on its back, wheels pointing into the air. Littering the road around the truck was a wall of decimated cars concertinaed into so much scrap metal. The hill of vehicles blocked all of the lanes ahead and other drivers, not caught in the initial carnage had swerved left and right in an effort to avoid the barrier, their vehicles blocked both the breakdown lane and grass verge as well as the median, so he couldn't simply maneuver around it.
It was no problem. He'd already encountered similar accident induced barriers, all he had to do was dismount, shoulder the bike, and climb over the truck as carefully as he could. In the twilight darkness cast by the freeway lighting, he was going to have to be extra careful. He didn't want to fall and break anything out here. Help would never arrive.
Jim glanced at his wristwatch as he jumped off the bike and prepared to climb. The display glowed 20:35. He had made good time, considering the circumstances; helped by a strangely deserted stretch of freeway along the Agoura Hills section of the freeway. The last freeway sign he had passed had indicated that he was only a mile or so from the Greenwich Village turnoff, which put him close to three miles away from his destination.
Simone's parents lived a few blocks down on El Dorado Drive. If he took the East Janss Road exit, he would be there in an hour or so.
It was when Jim glanced up that he saw the man waiting for him. He looked to be in his twenties, dressed in a business suit that fit his linebacker-sized frame just a little too tightly. The suit was expensive looking but torn in several places along one arm and covered in spots of dirt and oil and blood. The man had fashioned a tourniquet out of his equally expensive looking silk tie and fastened it around his left calf just above a large black stain of dried blood.
The man held a baseball bat.
Jim lowered the bike cautiously from his shoulder as they stared at each other across the ten feet of asphalt that separated them.
Jim broke the silence. "Are you okay, buddy?" he asked with as much concern to his voice as he could muster.
The suit looked hard at Jim, summing him up. Gauging my threat level, Jim thought
When the man spoke it was in a voice thick with southern syllables. "Give me the bike," he drawled making the word bike sound more like bark.
Jim shook his head. "Can't do that. I have to get to my wife. I'd be happy to …" Jim barely had time to duck as the stranger covered the distance between them with lightening speed, savagely swinging the baseball bat through the air that his head had just occupied.
Christ! This guy is going to kill me, Jim thought as he ducked the blow. Well, Duh! Ya' don't say, Einstein.
The momentum of the missed strike propelled the stranger forward past Jim. The guy had put all his energy into a one-shot deal to get hold of some transport, he guessed. The assailant now stood panting and gasping from the exertion of the attack, his blood-shot eyes lupine in their wariness of him.
Jim had dropped the bike instinctively when he avoided the incoming bat and now the attacker stood between him and it. He could just leave the bike, give it over to this stranger and avoid anybody getting hurt, but who knew where he would be able to lay his hands on another? Bikes would be like gold dust for as long as the freeways and roads were blocked.
"I don't want to have to hurt you," Jim said, and then added "but I will if I have too."
The suit must have thought this was funny because he grinned insanely, raised the bat to his shoulder, and stepped up to the bike. He spread his feet wide and waited in a stance that clearly said, try it.
The guy easily had fifty pounds on Jim, plus he had a weapon. Of course, it looked like his attacker was injured but he couldn't be sure how debilitating that might be.
Jim scanned the ground around him searching for anything he might be able to use to defend himself.
The remains of a VW Beetle rested beneath the overturned body of an SUV, its domed roof crushed beyond recognition, its neo-hippy owner now surely nothing more than pulp behind the compacted steering wheel. The Beetle had collided with the upturned truck that blocked most of the lanes but it had been in a skid when it hit because the car had come to rest sideways against the truck, the chrome front bumper torn from one of its mountings by the impact. The bumper lay glinting in the gloom, beckoning to Jim.
Jim took a step sideways. The thug in the suit matched him but didn't
move away from the bike. Certain that he wasn't going to be suddenly battered Jim backed the few remaining feet to the VW. The suit didn't move, guarding his prize like a lion who had just stolen a kill from a hyena.
Casting a nervous glance over his shoulder. Jim turned his attention to the bumper. The impact of the crash had torn one of the metal L-brackets holding the bumper to the car's chassis free, that side now rested loosely against the ground, but the second bracket was still fixed firmly by its welded joint. It was going to take the application of some brute force to separate it.
With a final look over his shoulder to make sure his attacker wasn't going to jump on the bike and attempt to ride off into the darkness, Jim braced his foot against the hood of the Beetle, grabbed the bumper, and pulled. The already stressed and twisted metal of the mounting squealed and screeched its resistance, but Jim felt the ancient rusted metal give somewhat. He was going to have to twist the joint to get more torque and that meant pushing the bumper upwards and leaving no question in his assailant's mind that he was trying to obtain a weapon.
Squatting down Jim spread his legs wide for better leverage, took the free end of the fender in his hands, resting it uncomfortably against his shoulder. Pushing from his knees, he wrestled the length of chromed steel towards the sky. As he heaved, he felt the resistance increase until finally, as it reached the one o'clock position, he had to set his feet back a step and lean into the upright piece of metal, his entire body weight now pushing against it. With a squeal that began to increase in frequency the bumper slowly began moving towards its apex until, with a final effort from Jim, the metal fixing snapped.
Jim hurtled forward, his right knee catching the curved hood of the destroyed beetle, momentum sending him sprawling onto his back and the now free bumper clattering and clanging to the ground beside him. Scrambling hastily onto his knees, Jim reached out and hefted the chrome bumper to his chest, testing its weight. Using the remainder of the bracket fixings as handles, he held the bumper in front of him like a staff.