Wandering Highway: A Desperate Journey Home

by Ike Warren

  Something sharp ripped into his thigh and Allan flopped to the ground in agony. The pain seared through his leg. Jennifer stumbled against him and nearly landed on top of him but she was able to catch herself at the last moment and in doing so her hands scraped hard against the jagged rocks on the surface of the road.

  Chapter 8: Are Those Dead People?

  Allan’s pain was excruciating. He reached below the wound in his thigh and felt his knee and calf muscles just to see if the rest of his leg was still attached. Feeling that his leg had not been severed he looked down to inspect the wound but in the darkness he could not even see his own leg. Feeling around he could only feel the moisture of blood on his skin and he moaned in agony. Jennifer’s torn hands burnt in pain but she could tell from the sounds of her husband that something was far worse with him than her skint up hands.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked frantically.

  “Something cut my leg! It’s bad!” He yelled, and he felt sorry for screaming at her but screaming was the only thing that he could manage.

  “Let me help you.”

  “No, just see what that was!”

  She felt around where they hand landed, unsure of the danger around them. She feared reaching out and touching a hand of someone wielding a knife. She moved her hands in a circular pattern, searching for the unknown object like a blind person might feel around for a handle to open a door. Her hands came upon something sharp and metallic just above her head and she jerked back, fearing that there was an attacker at the other end of the sharp object. She listened for breathing or footsteps or anything to signal that someone was standing over her but there was nothing. Reluctantly she reached back out into the darkness and touched the object again. Whatever it was it felt jagged and bent and despite her husband’s injuries she breathed a sigh of relief as she realized that it was not the blade of a knife. The edge of the object felt wet to the touch and she knew that the wetness was her husband’s blood. She traced her fingers down the side of the object and felt a wrinkled metallic surface. She felt further down and could feel it become smooth like the glossy surface of a car fender and as she felt further she realized that it was indeed a car that she was touching. The car had been one of the casualties of the disaster of the day before. The driver had lost control when everything stopped working and crashed into a guardrail and it ripped a portion of the right rear fender nearly off and the car had sat right there, remnants of the torn fender sticking out into the air, waiting for Allan to come running into it.

  Jennifer leaned in close and told him, “It’s safe.” She felt where he was holding his leg and she could smell the odor of blood in the air. She strained her eyes to see in the darkness and as she forced her eyes to focus she began to see something shimmer on his leg. It was blood oozing out and it provided just enough reflection in the dark night to be visible. She knew that that if she could see the sight of the wound in the daylight that she would probably pass out or vomit but in the darkness she held her composure and whispered softly, “Oh Allan.”

  “It’s going to be ok.” He whispered back. Even though he was aware at how serious his injury was he was surprised at both their levels of calmness. He thought back to just a few minutes earlier when his knee slammed into the opened car door. He was so angry in that moment but now the thought of cursing or being angry did not even occur to him. It felt to him like it was fate that had caused him to fall over that car door earlier and fall into the stranger’s lap if only to help him remain calm through this moment.

  “Will you help me take off my shirt?” He asked Jennifer.

  Suddenly there was a loud thump nearby and there was the brief sound of moaning noises. They both stopped, frozen.

  “What was that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  They both remained still and listed to the sounds of someone or something moaning until it finally faded to silence.

  Jennifer continued and quickly removed her backpack and helped Allan unbutton his dress shirt and he slid out of it. For once Allan was grateful that Jennifer had insisted that he wear and undershirt because Jennifer had always said that it looked nice. Now the white undershirt would serve a new purpose to prevent his back from being exposed to the jagged road surface. He lay down and Jennifer wrapped his dress shirt around his leg wound. When she was done he fell limp against the pavement, exhausted. Jennifer elevated his leg with her backpack and she lay beside him and propped up his head under her shoulder and they slept.

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  “Javier!” Allan was startled awake to the sound of a woman frantically screaming nearby. “Javier! Donde estas? Javier!” The woman cried out in a deep Spanish accent over and over.

  It was still dark out and for a moment Allan struggled to remember where he was and the events that had taken place during the night. He felt that his neck was stiff from the awkward position that Jennifer had placed him in. His back ached as he lay on the hard pavement and only the dull throbbing of his leg brought him to the realization of where he was and what had happened in the darkness. He felt the rise and fall of Jennifer breathing beneath him and a soft snore that she always had when she was exhausted.

  “Javier!” The woman screamed nearby, startling Allan again.

  He waited for Jennifer to stir out of her sleep, hoping that the screaming woman would wake her up so that he could move out of the awkward position. He waited but Jennifer continued to snore and he did not dare move out of fear of disturbing her sleep and so he lay there, motionless and uncomfortable as he listened to the sounds of the frantic woman and he waited for the dreadful night to end.

  Thoughts began to race through his mind. How long have we been asleep? How much longer until daylight? What is Samantha doing? Hopefully she is safe and asleep. Maybe Ellie has shielded her from this disaster and turned it into a little game for her.

  “I turned the lights off so that we can pretend to camp out like we’re out in the woods.” He imagined Ellie telling Samantha. “We’ll get some blankets and sleep right here in the living room. We’ll light some candles and pretend that they are a camp fire.” He could see Samantha smiling at the joy of getting to do something fun like that with her grandmother, and although their conversation was only imaginary he felt comforted in thinking that his little girl was safe and enjoying her time at her grandmother’s house just as an innocent child should do.

  He listened to the sounds of the highway. Without any running cars, the constant roar of a thousand rubber tires churning on the pavement was gone. The rumble of several hundred engines speeding down that particular stretch of roadway was no more. The only sounds on the road were a few crickets and the occasional footsteps of those passing by as they walked along the highway. The quiet of the road reminded Allan of the times that he went camping with his family as a child. His parents would always plan their camping trips weeks in advance and Allan would always feel so excited leading up to the day that they could load the truck up and head out. They would arrive to the campsite, often beside a lake or a stream and he would marvel at the beauty of everything around him and how awesome the camping trip was going to be. But after a few hours at the campsite he would begin to miss the television and radio back home. By the time night came when it was finally time to climb inside the tent and go to sleep he missed his toys so bad that it felt like he was being tortured. The hard ground was uncomfortable to sleep on and he was either too hot or too cold inside his sleeping bag. In his misery time seemed to pass so slowly and the night at the campground always seemed like it would last forever. He only wanted the night to be over so that they could go home and be back inside his comfortable house and get back to all of the regular everyday things. When morning finally came he was always the first one up, packed and ready to go and as he packed his things up he always made an effort to make extra noise in order to wake up the rest of the camp.

  As Allan lay on his back against the hard surface of the highway it felt like another one of those miserable camping tr
ips from when he was a kid and again yearned for the night to be over so that he could go home and try to get back to regular everyday things. As he drifted off to sleep again he wondered what regular everyday things would be like after everything that had happened.

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  “Mommy are those dead people?” A child asked as he walked by. The words tugged at Allan and pulled him out of his sleep.

  “I don’t know Matthew. Don’t look at them.” The child’s mother responded. Allan stirred on the ground and tried to regain conciseness.

  The little boy gasped. “Look mommy! That one’s moving!” The boy shrieked with fear in his voice.

  Jennifer stirred from her sleep beside Allan and the couple slowly rose to seating positions like two corpses returning back to life. Allan propped himself up with his arms extended behind his back but when Jennifer tried to do the same she jerked back because of the pain from the sores on her hands from where she had scraped them against the pavement during the night. They looked at one another, each with a frightful look across their faces. Jennifer’s hands and shirt and pants were stained with blood. At first Allan thought that his wife had been severely injured, until he looked down at himself. The dress shirt that they had wrapped around his leg wound during the night was completely soaked in red and streams of the dried blood ran up and down each side his leg from the site of the injury as if there had been an explosion in his thigh and all the goo inside his body had spewed out in all directions. Even the pavement was not spared from the bloodshed as it too was stained with dried puddles of blood.

  “Oh my God Allan. You bled so much.” Jennifer said. “How do you feel? Are you ok? Can you get up?” Her rapid fire questions declared her grave concern for him.

  “I’m ok. I think.” He replied and he pushed his body up from the seated position and stood against the body of the car. His injured leg screamed at him to sit back down and instantly he saw stars in his eyes and he began to feel dizzy. In the medical field they call that vertigo. Allan thought, but he figured that a better description of his sensation would be, passing out after walking through hell. His knees buckled under him and he fell back to the ground.

  “Baby are you ok?” Jennifer reached over and cradled him.

  “I’m ok. I just got up too fast.” He replied and looked at Jennifer’s face as the dizzy stars still clouding his field of vision. Suddenly something caught his eye. There was something sticking out in the air behind Jennifer’s head. It was the jagged car fender that ripped into his leg during the night. There was blood on it too, along with pieces of torn fabric and flesh. Upon seeing that Allan added nausea to his ongoing list of discomforts that morning.

  Jennifer caught his gaze on the fender. “Eww, that doesn’t look good.” She winced her face at him.

  “Well, at least it it’s not rusty. So I don’t have to worry about getting a tetanus shot.” Allan said gratefully.

  “Tetanus has nothing to do with rust.” Jennifer corrected him.

  “Yes it does. You step on a rusty nail. You have to go get a tetanus shot. Standard procedure.”

  “No, the rust on the nail is irrelevant. It’s the tetanus bacteria on the nail that is the problem, and it doesn’t come from rust.”

  “I can’t see bacteria. I can see rust and there’s none on that fender. To me that means I don’t have to get a tetanus shot. Let’s try to think positive and leave it at that. Besides, even if I did need a tetanus shot, I doubt I’d be able to find one under these circumstances.”

  “Why don’t you relax and let me re-dress the wound. That way I can see if it needs to be cleaned or sewn up or what.”

  Allan agreed and Jennifer knelt down and began to unwrap the bloody shirt-bandage. When she had it unwrapped she paused, “Well I see why you bled all over the place.” Allan grimaced his face, waiting for the awful news to pour out of her mouth.

  “I didn’t even get the bandage wrapped over the wound properly. It was so dark last night. I missed it by that much.” She raised her hand and spread her fingers about an inch apart. “The cut isn’t really all that bad.”

  Allan rose up and looked at his leg. There was a two inch gash in his right thigh and he was immediately surprised at how tiny the cut was compared to all the blood. He put his thumb and index finger on either side of the cut and gently spread it open. The wound was pretty deep but he couldn’t see bone and from what he could tell it was clean inside. He felt silly for having freaked out over such a small cut.

  “I need stiches.” He said, trying to make the injury seem as dramatic as it had been a few moments ago.

  “I’ll look around for a new bandage or something to put around it.” Jennifer said ignoring his request for stiches and Allan wondered if she thought that he didn’t need them or if she knew that finding a clean needle and thread was going to be near impossible. She got up and walked over to the car with the ripped fender and rummaged through it for a moment. When she returned she was carrying a dusty white towel in her hands.

  “Wow a towel. Good find.” Allan cheered.

  “It was covering the dash of the car. It’s dusty but it’ll do.” She said as she began to beat out the dust by slamming it against the roof of the car. She started beating the car ferociously with the towel, over and over and over, and when the dust had long escaped the towel she kept hitting it. Allan realized that she was punishing the car for what it had done to him during the night. She grunted as she put everything she had into each blow.

  Finally she stopped and turned to him. “That feels better.” She said and they both smiled at one another. She wrapped the remarkably dust free towel around his leg and then used the jagged car fender to cut a piece of fabric from his blood stained dress shirt and used the torn piece of fabric as a rope to secure the towel around his leg. Jennifer tossed the rest of the ruined dress shirt aside and Allan rose to his feet, this time not feeling quite so woozy but he braced himself against the car just to be safe. His legs were on fire and he realized that although his leg injury hurt him, the real pain was emanating from the muscles within his legs.

  He had let his gym membership expire five years ago after hearing about a new gym that was opening up in Greenville. He told Jennifer that he was going to hold out on renewing his existing gym membership because he was tired of the musty smell in the men’s locker room and he wanted to check out the new gym. The real reason that he wanted to wait on renewing his existing membership was that he just didn’t enjoy working out anymore. When he first started exercising in the afternoons after work it was enjoyable to him. Trying out all the different machines and learning how each one worked and then pushing himself to his limits. But over time it all just became another chore. He began to dread going to the gym, because of the musty smell in the locker room, because nobody ever wiped off their sweat off the exercise equipment when they were done, and because it was just too much work that he was having to pay for instead of the other way around. After letting his membership expire he never stepped foot in the new gym once it opened up in town. That was a decision that he sorely regretted now. His legs revolted at all the new exercise that they had received over the past two days and if they could speak they would scream at him, “Why didn’t you use us more often? You’ve been lounging around for the last five years in your sedentary lifestyle and now all of a sudden the shit hits the fan and you expect us to walk your ass 70 miles home? We don’t think so buddy.” He closed his eyes and winced, absorbed in the pain. Jennifer saw him in his agony and looked down at the towel wrapped around his leg.

  "Does it hurt bad?” She asked.

  “It’s not so much the injury. It’s more my leg muscles.” He replied.

  “My legs are sore too.” She said. Allan opened his eyes and saw Jennifer smiling back at him. She was not in any apparent agony as he was, yet she had walked the same distance that he had, step for step, with an 8 month baby inside of her. He admired her strength, her calm nature, and her will to be strong and to push on. He closed hi
s eyes and tried to dismiss the pain in his legs just as she had done.

  He reached down and picked up Jennifer’s backpack with her big purse still inside of it and flung it over his back. Jennifer reached up and put her hand on his shoulder and gently massaged it as they stepped away from what had been their home for the night beside the wrecked car and as they stepped away they saw that they had slept on the top of an overpass. Down below them there was a woman on the road wearing a light blue dress that looked like a hotel maid’s uniform and her black hair was pulled up into a bun. She was kneeling down in the middle of the road clutching the body of a young boy. They could see that a small pool of blood had gathered near the boy’s head and they could hear the woman’s cries, “Javier! Oh Javier!”

  It was the same cries that had awoken Allan during the night. In the darkness of the night the mother and son had become separated and the boy had lost his way and had fallen over the bridge and tumbled to his death.

  Allan looked at Jennifer and whispered, “Do you remember that thud in the night when you were helping me take off my shirt?”

  Jennifer cupped her hand over her mouth and muttered, “Oh my God” in horror.

  They looked back down at the woman and the dead boy and Jennifer took Allan’s hand in hers and together they said a prayer for the deceased and they thanked God that Samantha was not there to witness all of the horrors that were happening around them.