by Noah Mann
“These would rather be working on the sixty-eight Camaro in my garage,” he said, chuckling to himself after a moment. “I’d like to think someone stole it and mounted quad fifties on it for some duel in the desert, but it’s probably rusting in some roadside ditch.”
“I’d pay money to see that,” I said, finishing with the filter. “The duel in the desert—not the rusting in a ditch.”
He took his cup of orange drink and sipped, spitting the mouthful out before swallowing.
“The damn ash is everywhere,” he said.
I closed the Humvee’s hood and watched Genesee toss what remained in his cup aside.
“Canteen water for the duration,” he said.
It was a quiet moment. But it couldn’t last. A few minutes later we were back in the vehicle, our gear stowed. I pulled out of the empty showroom, through the space where large windows had once let shoppers view the newest models of Fords from the street. A short drive up a four-lane road brought us to Interstate 5, and a quick turn onto the onramp put us on that thoroughfare.
Ten minutes later, as we maneuvered around an overturned delivery truck, Genesee shook his head at the view out the windshield.
“It’s getting worse,” he said.
He wasn’t wrong. The ash fall was increasing. Already there were a good six inches on the roadway, with drifts up to a foot and a half. Our top speed was a painfully slow fifteen miles an hour, making Dalton’s estimation of our trip’s duration more accurate than Genesee had thought at the time.
“It’s not going to get any better,” I told him.
Past the truck, we had clear road for an hour, then a partially collapsed bridge forced us to detour off the highway and creep along the flat edge of a shallow creek before we found a spot to cross. The Humvee’s wheels spun on the far bank, the slope slick with a mix of wet ash and mud. After a tense few minutes I drove us back up onto level ground and turned toward the highway.
Genesee took the map and spread it on his lap. He studied it as I steered us back onto the interstate.
“We still have rivers to cross,” he said, pointing to several on the map. “Bigger than that creek we just got past.”
“I know.”
“This rig can’t swim across a river,” he said.
“Hopefully it won’t have to.”
That didn’t do much to reassure him, but he held his worry and folded the map and stuck it back in its space atop the boxy dash. For the next ten minutes the road was clear and Genesee was silent. The wipers swatted ash from the windshield, the constant sweep of grit across the glass slowly working on its clarity. By the time we returned to Bandon I thought it might be nearly opaque.
“We should have brought spare wiper—”
“I think I’m in love with Grace,” Genesee blurted out, interrupting the mundane with the momentous.
I glanced right and saw the man looking straight at me, worry and determination both plain on his face.
“You think?”
He quickly reconsidered his wording.
“I’m in love with Grace,” he said.
I stayed focused on the road ahead, unsure of what I should say, particularly since my exchange with Grace just prior to leaving. To know that the feeling was mutual, to a degree, at least, was not a surprise. Grace was more than a good woman—she was a beautiful person. She exuded kindness and joy, even in times which had tested her.
“I feel like I need to tell you this, Fletch. Because...”
“Because of Neil,” I prompted when he hesitated.
Genesee nodded. He was reaching out to me, as one might to the father of an intended bride. In this instance, I was the surrogate of that role. The friend of the man who had been Grace’s husband. Who had fathered a child with her. I didn’t suspect that he was looking for my approval, or some blessing on my part. Instead I sensed that he was concerned, about reactions, possibly.
I was wrong.
“Fletch, am I...”
“Are you what?”
Once more he hesitated, that concern I’d noticed a moment before more apparent now. More tangible.
“Am I good enough for her?”
I wanted to look to the man, but forced myself to keep my eyes on the road. What he was asking was an impossibility to define. It was an intangible measure. Still, I understood why he had sought my counsel on the matter, though what assurance, or dissuasion, I could offer him was uncertain. The best I could do, without trying to weigh this man’s life against that of the friend I’d known almost my entire life, was to provide some perspective. Of a more personal nature.
“Elaine and I would have never been together before the blight,” I said. “Never. But then things changed.”
I heard Genesee laugh lightly at my choice of words.
“Have they ever,” he said.
“Old considerations went out the window,” I told him. “I looked at the world and everyone left in it with new eyes. That allowed me to see Elaine for who she was, and I loved what I saw. And I didn’t care what anyone thought about it, because the time we have now is too important to waste on worries. Even worries about yourself.”
Genesee thought on that for a moment.
“Neil was your friend,” he said. “Even with all that’s happened, I know he still means a great deal to you.”
“He does,” I confirmed. “But he’s gone, Clay. I’ve come to terms with that, and the reasons behind his death. I think Grace has, too.”
I sensed that his concerns weren’t completely assuaged by what I’d said so far. So I decided to hold nothing back.
“You’ve been kind of an ass,” I said.
There was no immediate response from the man to the judgement I’d just handed him as to his character. No quick defense or justification. In fact, from the corner of my eye, I saw him nod lightly to himself.
“That doesn’t mean that you are now,” I told him. “Or that you have to be going forward.”
“This is going to sound selfish,” Genesee warned me. “Before everything went to hell because of the blight, I was looking to get out of the Navy. I’d done my time and then some. I had plans. Private practice. Make some actual money. Travel. Hell, I didn’t even want to find anyone and settle down. I wanted to live, on my own terms. But...”
He quieted for a moment.
“All that seems so trivial now,” he continued. “I was bitter about it, though. About losing a chance at that life.”
“And now?”
“I still want out of the Navy,” he said, adding a chuckle which I joined. “But I don’t want to spend the time after that alone. Not anymore.”
The man wasn’t seeking some grand understanding of whatever change had come over him. I thought right then as we drove through the dark rain of ash that he’d already come to the conclusion that the future he wanted included Grace.
“Clay, I know you’re not looking for my approval, but let me just say that everyone deserves a chance at happiness. Grace does, and so do you.”
“Thank you, Fletch LOOK OUT!”
The abrupt shift of his words from appreciation to warning coincided with my own eyes seeing the old van appear in our path. I slammed on the brakes and steered left, but the layer of ash upon the surface of the road had, at times, made the vehicle react as if we were driving on ice. This was one of those times.
“Hold on!”
I shouted the warning as the nose of the Humvee swung left, then right, its beefy bumper slamming hard into the stationary old van, long ago abandoned on the highway. The impact shoved the boxy Ford hard to the right and into the guardrail. We slid past it and skidded to a stop near the same barrier which had prevented the van from going over the highway’s edge.
“You all right?” I asked.
“Fine,” Genesee said, just slightly shaken by the incident.
I reached for my AR and the door at the same time.
“Let’s check our front end,” I told my companion. “Grab your weapon.”
The reminder made Genesee hesitate as he was about to climb out empty handed. He retrieved his M4 and followed me out, each of us securing dust masks over our faces as we stepped into the swirl of blowing ash. A wind with no constant direction was spinning the warm grit at us from every direction. I wondered it the volcanic event could create its own weather pattern, one that would intensify and become more erratic the closer we came to its origin.
“Nothing major,” I said, shining my flashlight on the front end of the Humvee.
“Fletch...”
I looked to Genesee, his form almost erased by the rain of ash between us. He was maybe twenty feet away, standing at the driver’s door of the van we’d hit, but at that scant distance he was already difficult to see.
“What is it?”
“Come here,” he said, shining his light through the broken driver’s window.
I went to where he stood and looked to the interior of the van, my heart hurting as soon as I saw what he had.
Two adults and one child, father at the wheel, mother and daughter holding each other in the passenger seat. There was little ash inside, indicating the broken window had been intact before our collision. Just a smattering of black granules had been deposited on the desiccated bodies, the remains partially mummified, skin pulled taut over the bones beneath, mouths gaping in some grotesque silent scream.
“They died on the highway,” Genesee said, slightly shaken by the discovery. “They ran out of gas, or broke down, and that was it. There was no one to help them. No one to call. They just gave up.”
“Clay, we’ve gotta get moving,” I told him.
He shifted his light, focusing on the mother and child.
“They died first,” Genesee said. “At least a year ago. Probably closer to two.”
“Clay...”
The beam moved again, to the father, his slack corpse leaning back in the driver’s seat.
“If they’d all died together, he’d be huddled with them. But he kept driving until something gave out. Then he gave up. He sat in that seat and waited for it to come. Death.”
“We’ve gotta go,” I prodded him.
Genesee switched his flashlight off and looked to me, nodding. There’d been shock in his eyes just seconds before. Now, though, something else had replaced it. Some fire. Some determination.
“No more dying,” he said. “No more.”
He turned and headed back to the Humvee, returning to the passenger seat. I joined him, taking my place at the wheel. The man, the officer, the doctor, was staring straight ahead into the blizzard of black lit by our headlights.
“You all right, Clay?”
He shook his head slowly, as honest a reply as I’d ever seen from the man.
“I’ve seen death, Fletch. Doc Allen’s wife from the virus. The child from the same. Your friend shot down by Olin. All those bodies that washed ashore. But this...it has to stop.”
“You can’t lay a marker like that, Clay. Not in our world.”
“I can today,” he said, looking to me. “I can for the people I know. They’re not going to end up dead in a Humvee on some highway somewhere. Not like this family did. So let’s go get them.”
I nodded, understanding his fervor, wanting desperately to believe that his desire would find its ultimate satisfaction.
“All right,” I said, turning the Humvee back onto a straight course along the interstate.
Seven
Five hours after waking and setting out, we reached Eugene.
Or what had been Eugene. The only indicators that we’d arrived in the once pretty city on the Willamette River were intermittent signals on the GPS we’d been given and reflective lettering on green road signs blazing briefly in the dimmed glare of our headlights. Otherwise the place might have been just a hellish moonscape, black grit falling from the unseen sky, dusting everything with smoking, choking ash.
“What’s our best route?” Genesee asked. “The interstate skirts the east side of the city.”
The answer to his question came in the form of a skid, the Humvee sliding on the layer of grit coating the roadway as I slammed on the brakes. I’d caught just a glimpse of what had necessitated our sudden stop, an absence of the familiar directly ahead. Had I been going fifteen miles per hour instead of ten, Commander Clay Genesee and I might have ended up riding the Humvee as it tumbled over the severed edge of the bridge that crossed the Willamette.
“Jesus!”
Genesee shouted the exclamation as the vehicle lurched to a stop, its bumper just feet from the end of pavement, a dark abyss filled with swirling ash before us.
“Find us another way across, Clay.”
“Right,” he said, coming down from the rush of fear which had just filled him. “Just a minute.”
I backed the Humvee away from the broken edge of the span and turned around as Genesee checked the paper map on his lap.
“There’s a bridge to the west of here,” he said. “Just get off the interstate and follow a road that parallels the river.
I followed his directions, as well as one could driving through the volcanic soup falling from the sky. At times we barely crawled forward, slowing to gently push wrecks to the side so that we could pass. Ten minutes after swinging around and leaving the fallen bridge we reached our other chance to cross the Willamette River.
“Coburg Road,” Genesee said, comparing the name on the map to the bent-over street sign just outside his window. “Maybe this will take us right to them.”
“It’s got to get us across the river first,” I said.
I turned onto the road and felt it begin to slope up, rising toward the span that, hopefully, would bring us to the other side. Five miles per hour was the top speed I was willing to chance as glimpses of the bridge’s steel structure appeared overhead.
“Keep your eyes on the road,” I told Genesee.
“It looks good so—”
KTHUNK
The left front of the Humvee dropped, metal frame and suspension smashing into the road surface as we drove into a hole. It was nothing as dramatic as the complete failure of the interstate bridge, but, for the moment, it stopped us dead in our tracks.
“I’ve gotta back us out of it,” I said.
Doing so was not as easy as saying so. The vehicle had sufficient power, but something had hung up on whatever solid support members lay beneath the road surface.
“Come on...”
Urging the Humvee didn’t work, nor did rocking back and forth, through forward and reverse gears, as one might when stuck in soft earth.
“You want me to get out and check it?” Genesee asked.
“No, just give me a minute here.”
I stopped trying to force our way out of the hole with brute force and, instead, shifted to a plan of finesse, however much that was possible in the beefy military transport. With light pressure on the accelerator I shifted into reverse, nursing the wheel backward. Metal scraped on the road as we crept to the rear, then I felt the tire’s rubber find purchase on the edge of the hole.
“It’s working,” Genesee said. “Keep it up.”
A little more pressure on the gas and the nose of the Humvee came back up, the tire climbing fully out of the hole. Genesee reached over from the passenger seat and gave me a congratulatory slap on the shoulder.
His glee, though, was short lived, as the entire bridge began to shake, swaying back and forth.
“Earthquake,” Genesee said.
“Hold on!”
I shouted the warning and jammed my foot down on the accelerator, steering right to miss the hole that had almost ended our journey. The tires spun for a second, then grabbed pavement beneath the ash that the treads cut through. We lurched forward as the bridge shuddered, the steel framework that supported it actually screaming. A series of loud, metallic bangs cut through the shaking as pieces of the arch above began to break away, the tremor a final nail in the span’s structural integrity.
“Fletch!”<
br />
Genesee saw what I did, a twisted length of something resembling a sculpted I-beam fall right in front of us. I had no time to react to avoid the obstacle and simply kept my foot on the gas, slamming into the metal support. It bounced off the Humvee’s already tested front end and was launched clear, disappearing into the ash.
“We’re gonna make it,” I said.
I didn’t know if my companion believed me. The truth be told, I wasn’t sure. Everything around us was whipsawing left and right, the bridge swinging severely east and west. What worried me, though, was not what I could see, but what I couldn’t. Beyond the veil of ash the entire span might be coming apart—or might have already just ahead of us, much like the interstate bridge had. We’d been able to turn back, there, but here...here there was no turning back.
“I see the end,” Genesee said.
Through the gritty smoke, as the shaking slowed, I, too, saw road that lay upon solid earth, not suspended over churning waters. A few seconds more on the gas and we were clear of the bridge. I slowed and stopped, taking a look in the side view mirror. What I could see behind us no longer resembled a piece of exact engineering.
“It’s leaning,” I said.
Genesee looked, shaking his head at what he was seeing.
“We’re not getting home that way.”
“We’ll find a way,” I said, and got us moving again.
* * *
“Coburg,” I said, reading the signage on a post near the curb.
It had taken just twenty minutes to reach the town after our close call on the bridge. But this place was no more a recognizable town than any we’d passed through. It was little more than vague glimpses of buildings seen through the gauzy black rain of ash.
“How far are we?”
Genesee looked to the GPS. Its signal was still dubious, at best, but the pin that marked the location where our friends were, or had been, glowed bright on the small screen, as did the circle around it. He laid the device atop the paper map on his lap and compared the two.
“We’re inside the circle,” he said.
“They’re close,” I said, about to tap on the vehicle’s horn when Genesee jabbed a finger toward the left, pointing at something.