Wandering Highway: A Desperate Journey Home

by Ike Warren

  "Any luck?" She asked as she rubbed her stomach in the way that all expectant mothers do. Allan replied with only a look of hopelessness.

  “Maybe it’s not so bad after all. You know, the power goes out at my home all the time.” Walter said as he pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped the sweat from his forehead. “You don’t see me getting all upset when that happens. I don’t see why this is such a big deal. Give everything a few minutes for all the computers to reset and everything will be working again.”

  “I think that’s being a little overly optimistic.” Allan said.

  “What other option do we have? Just wait here a little bit. Everything will start working again soon. You’ll see.”

  Allan shrugged his shoulders and leaned against his truck and began to wait to see if Walter might be right about the electronics, but mostly because he needed to think about what they were going to do next. What a mess this is. We’re 70 miles from home and it’s humid as hell out here and we have to find a way to get home to Samantha. How are we going to get out of this one? Allan wondered. They waited for nearly an hour hoping that everything would begin working again. Jennifer pushed the buttons on the remote to the truck door every few minutes hoping that with each button press that they’d hear the familiar sound of the locks inside the door reengage.

  Suddenly they heard a series of loud pops coming from the other side of the mall parking lot.

  “Oh God. That sounds like gunfire.” Jennifer exclaimed.

  “Is that what that is?” Allan asked stretching his neck to get a better view but he couldn’t see beyond the mountain of car hoods propped up in the air.

  “What else could it be?” Jennifer asked.

  “It could be anything. I wouldn’t worry about it.” Walter said dismissing their concerns and he reclined back in the seat of his car and let out a depressed sigh.

  “What should we do now?” Jennifer asked.

  Allan looked back at the mall entrance and saw that the river of people that had been flooding out of doors earlier had slowed to a trickle. On the sides of each of the big doors stood official looking men wearing white shirts and black pants and Allan figured that the mall had already dispatched their security guards to all the entrance points. Allan watched as a woman ran up to them from the parking lot and one of the guards put his hand up to stop her. He could see the man shake his head as if he was telling the woman that the mall was closed. The woman flailed her hands in the air and Allan imagined that the woman had probably left her purse in one of the stores or something. Eventually the woman turned around and walked back to one of the cars in the parking lot with her head held down in defeat.

  "It looks like we can’t go back into the mall and it appears that none of the cars around here are working. It seems to me that we've really only got two choices. We can stay here and wait to find out if that sound was really gunfire or we can start walking and get out of here."

  Walter chuckled and sat up in his seat. "Walk? You want to walk in this heat? Where are you going to walk to?"

  "Home or walk until we find help I guess." Allan replied.

  "You're planning on walking home!" Walter exclaimed. "I don't know where you live buddy but I live in Fort Worth. That's 30 miles from here."

  "We live in Greenville. That’s about 70 miles."

  “You’re crazy. I could cut my walk down to 20 miles if I walked in a straight line as the birds fly but even I wouldn’t do that.” Walter shook his head.

  “Our trip would be faster if we walked in a straight line too, but I think it would be safer to stick to the highways.”

  Walter’s tone changed. He began to speak with a sense of dread. "There's no way. I'm exhausted just from walking around in the mall and trying to open the damn hood on my car. You don't know what's out there. There could be all kinds of bad people out there on the road. There's just no way."

  "I'm with Walter honey." Jennifer added. "There's no way that I'm going to be able to walk 70 miles in this heat at eight months pregnant."

  "Well I’m hoping we'll find help along the way. There's got to be someone with a car that still runs. Older cars don't have all the electronics like our cars have today. Surely there's someone out there who has an old car that works who can give us a ride. But at least by walking we'll be headed in the direction of home, and towards Samantha."

  Samantha.

  In all the chaos going on around them Jennifer had forgotten to consider what Samantha must be going through. She knew that her daughter was in good hands with Ellie and maybe that's why she had neglected to think of what her daughter might be experiencing. She remembered earlier in the morning when she entered the living room where Allan and Samantha were watching television and the first thing that Samantha said to her was, “I don’t want to go. I’m scared.” The words kept repeating over and over in Jennifer's mind. If she was scared then, how terrified she must be now if Ellie’s power was out, with nothing working, and mommy and daddy so far away. She thought and she found herself staring at the ground as a sense of worry poured over her.

  "We have to walk." Jennifer said with complete conviction now as she looked back up at Allan.

  "Won't you guys stay and wait here for a while longer? Help is surely on the way." Walter pleaded with them.

  Allan looked up and surveyed the landscape once more. There were so many hoods up of the cars and trucks around them as if the first person to lift their hood up had set off a chain reaction for everyone else around them to do the same. There were many people looking down into the engine compartments of their cars and there were many more still running through the parking lot with frightened looks on their faces. The smoke from the burning airplanes nearby still billowed in the sky and it was all such a terrifying scene but in the midst of everything going on around him Allan noticed something else. There were no emergency services. There were no firefighters battling the inferno on the highway, no police officers except for the few mall security guards to calm and organize the mass of frantic people that had erupted from the mall. There were no helicopters circling overhead to cover the news happening on the ground. If the situation was localized then the place would have already been crawling with emergency personnel and news reporters but the fact that there were none told Allan that this situation, this disaster, was far more widespread.

  Help is not on the way. But a guy like Walter relies on help in a situation such as this. Walter is right. With his enormous size there is no way that he is going to make the 30 mile hike to his home in Fort Worth. Allan thought and he knew that Walter would sit there in his car and wait, and wait, and wait for help to arrive and the longer that he waited the hungrier and more dehydrated and exhausted Walter would become until just walking out of the mall parking lot, nevermind a 30 mile hike, would become impossible for him. Despite the fact that Allan and Jennifer’s walk would be more than double that of Walters, Allan knew that it was their only way out of the situation.

  "I'm afraid that help is going to be a lot longer wait than you think." Allan said.

  "I am prepared to wait it out." Walter replied.

  “And if that was gunfire just now, then I don’t think this is a safe place to be.” Allan warned.

  “I’ll be fine right here.” Walter said and he stuck out his big sweaty paw. "Thanks for helping me with my hood. It was nice to meet both of you."

  The three exchanged handshakes and then Jennifer returned to the cab of the truck and grabbed her purse off the floor and then unzipped it and inspected its contents. Whenever Samantha would complain of a sore throat or when Allan would ask for a piece of gum Jennifer would always dig around in her purse and find something for them. She reached deep into the handbag that she had cleaned out the day before to make it lighter for their trip to the mall. All that remained was a small makeup bag, her wallet, a hairbrush, and her asthma inhaler. She zipped the purse back up and took a long gaze over the inside of the truck, looking for anything that she might have forgotte
n. She turned and pushed the automatic door lock button but there was no response from the truck and her face blushed red in her error. She pushed the manual door lock down and walked around to do the same for the driver’s side door but before locking it she stopped and turned to Allan.

  “Is there anything that you need to grab from the truck to bring along with us?” She asked.

  Allan stopped and considered all the items in the truck that might be useful to them on their journey like the spare tire equipment that sat under the passenger seat or the wrench and socket set or the long tow strap that he kept in the toolbox. All of those items might have uses to them but as he looked down he saw Jennifer’s bulging stomach again and he realized that they were already carrying more weight than they could possibly carry for 70 miles and anything else would just slow them down even more. Still, he felt it would be necessary to carry a weapon of some kind.

  Allan reached around to the back of the truck and retrieved the long screwdriver that he had used on Walter’s battery earlier. “Stick this in your purse, it’s lightweight and might come in handy as a weapon if needed.”

  Jennifer looked at the screwdriver. “That’s all you want to take?”

  “I can’t think of anything else that would be worth its carrying weight. Some of the other tools in my toolbox might come in handy or they might not, and if not then we’ll just be wasting a bunch of energy hauling them around.”

  Jennifer unzipped her purse and stuck the screwdriver inside and then she locked the driver’s side door of the truck.

  “You ready for this?” Allan asked.

  Jennifer nodded her head. “Surely we won’t have to walk all the way home. The National Guard or FEMA or someone should be here soon don’t you think?”

  “I sure hope so.” Allan replied.

  Chapter 4: Heading Out

  They walked down the long corridor of cars as they exited the mall parking lot. It seemed as if many of the other stranded people around them had already taken their cue and began walking out of the parking lot as well. They walked past a Golden Corral restaurant where the patrons were still hovering around the building apparently unsure of what to do next.

  Allan pointed at another restaurant called Salt Water Willy's, "If we enter the parking lot of this restaurant and double back, there's an exit onto the service road that we can take." He told Jennifer.

  "Why don't we just cross over in the median?" Jennifer asked.

  "I'm afraid of one of us spraining an ankle or something and then our troubles will be much worse. I think it would be safer to follow the pavement."

  "You can double back and go the safe way. I'm walking across the grass right here." Jennifer said as she stepped off the road and onto the grass. Allan stood alone for a moment contemplating whether he should argue with his wife or join her across the grassy median. He decided it wasn't worth arguing over and besides, Jennifer had already made up her mind. There was no changing her mind on anything once she set forward on an idea. "Wait up honey." He said as he darted off the road and offered his hand out as support for her to hold onto.

  They reached the service road where several cars had stalled and they saw that one of the cars had lost control and had hit a tree. Allan and Jennifer walked closer to inspect it but neither the driver nor any occupants were anywhere around. They had apparently taken off walking just like everyone else seemed to be doing now. Allan looked back at the vast expanse of the mall parking lot and saw hundreds of people walking along the service road that ran in front of the mall.

  Everyone around them seemed to be moving about in different directions like they were in the middle of a disorganized elementary school fire drill. One couple who was wearing light jogging attire zipped past them as if the disaster going on around them had yet to interrupt their morning jog. Allan hoped that the couple wasn’t quite that oblivious and that they just lived close by and were only trying to get home as fast as possible.

  He looked down the length of the service road and saw a chaotic arrangement of cars that had stalled and wrecked during the blast. Ahead of them they heard the sound of a woman moaning in pain and they could see that a crowd had formed around a black sedan that appeared to be wedged underneath the trailer of an eighteen wheeler. As Allan and Jennifer got closer they could see a woman thrashing around inside the car. She had blood running down the side of her face and her nose looked swollen and crooked as if it had been broken.

  “We need to get help for this woman!” Someone in the crowd yelled.

  “We need to get the fire department out here and get her out. They need to bring a Jaws of Life to cut her out.” Someone replied but everyone just stood there looking around hoping that someone would magically produce a working cell phone to call for help.

  Allan looked at Jennifer and saw that she had tears in her eyes as she stared at the woman who was trapped inside the car. Allan looked into the car and he saw that a piece of square iron tubing, ripped off of the back of the semi-truck’s trailer during the crash, was imbedded into the woman’s abdomen and impaling her all the way through the back side of the driver’s seat. Allan grabbed Jennifer’s hand and pulled her away from the scene of the accident and whispered to her, “Come on. There’s nothing anyone can do to help her.”

  They continued walking and crossed three more grassy medians until they reached the foot of an overpass on the main road. "This is highway 121. We've got to head south for about a mile until we reach the mixmaster ahead." Allan said and Jennifer looked up and saw the large bridge network that connected highway 121 with highway 635 in the distance.

  "What do we do when we get there?" Jennifer asked.

  "We'll take 635 east. That's the highway that we came in on." Allan replied.

  "Is that the most direct route home? I mean, it's how we got here in the car, but wouldn't it be faster to cut across neighborhoods and side streets now that we're on foot?"

  "It might be faster, but I'm not very familiar with this area. Obviously we don't have anything with a GPS to tell us where we are. We might wind up getting lost. Plus, like I was telling Walter, I think the highway will be safer than walking in the neighborhoods." He said and Jennifer nodded in agreement.

  As they walked onward the roadway appeared as if it has been laid out in front of them in high definition. They could make out all the fine details of the asphalt surface of the highway that Allan had never noticed before like tiny pebbles and little pieces of glass embedded into the roadbed, potholes and long cracks that seemed to go on forever, black tire marks and fluids from leaky engine compartments that stained the road. The most remarkable was the sheer amount of litter that was present. It had all been an unseen blur when they were speeding down the highway in their truck at 70 miles per hour but now at a walking pace everything seemed so clearly visible.

  So disgusting.

  Allan was shocked at the sheer quantity of beer bottles that he saw lying on the side of the road. For every beer bottle that he saw on the ground there had been someone, at one time, who was drinking and driving down that stretch of road. It made Allan wonder how many drunken motorists had he shared the road with on a daily basis without even realizing it. Allan also thought of all the times that he himself had thrown liter out of his own window. A candy bar wrapper with smears of chocolate on the inside that he didn't want dirtying up the interior of his truck. An empty soda bottle that rolled around the floorboard with each curve of the highway, annoying him as it rattled against the side his door. Throw it all out the window where, unless someone with a road crew picks it up, it might lie and rot for the next thousand years. He saw the litter as if it was all his own trash and he felt disgusted with himself.

  They walked for twenty minutes when they passed under an exit sign that said 635 South. Allan had traveled this road before but it had always been at highway speeds. Walking made everything seem so foreign now and he began to question himself. Is this the right exit? Aren't we supposed to be walking east? Why does the sign sa
y south? Are we even walking in the right direction?

  "This is where we cross over isn't it?" Jennifer asked. Her question answered his own inner questions and he immediately felt certain that they were headed the right way.

  "Yes, this is our exit." He replied as he grabbed her hand and they merged over into the exit lane. As they crossed over the painted dividing line in the road Allan looked back over his shoulder as if he expected a car to be there in his blind spot.

  "Checking for traffic? Really babe?" Jennifer smirked.

  "Old habits I guess. It took every part of me to not reach for the blinker when we crossed over into this lane." He chuckled.

  Allan tugged at his pants every few minutes in an attempt to keep them on his waist but after a few steps they began to sag once again. At first he tried tightening his belt but he had lost some weight recently and he was now at the last belt hole and soon the humidity in the air soaked into the fabric, weighing it down, and the sagging pants made it difficult for him to walk. He made a mental note to use the screwdriver in Jennifer’s purse to punch a new hole in his belt as soon as he got the chance.

  They crossed under a double bridge overpass with a highway sign that said Bass Pro Dr. He thought how the store might have some gear that would come in helpful in a situation like theirs. As he tossed around the idea of making a detour off the highway he realized that the store was a half mile out of the way and besides, if it seemed like a good idea to him then it probably seemed like a good idea to a thousand others. He figured that the place was either a mad house or already looted and cleaned out by now. He was reminded of the Black Friday videos that he had seen on YouTube of all the highly excited Christmas shoppers pushing and shoving, running over one another as they stampeded their way through the doors and how entire aisles of marked down items were cleaned out in a matter of seconds. A place like that is no place for a pregnant woman and he dismissed the idea all together hoping to instead find a more obscure store closer to the highway that would be less of an attraction to everyone around.