The FREE Digital Gift Box - Short Stories

by J. Thorn

  Ben reached the intersection of Decatur and Canal. He had to stop running so his brain could process what it saw. He was too young to have seen combat in the Third and Fourth Gulf Wars, and had spent his teenage years as an insulated trust-fund brat in Chicago’s hippest neighborhoods. His experience with violence was limited to hockey fights at a Blackhawks’ game.

  To his right, one man had another pinned to the building. It wasn’t until Ben saw a slight flash from the polished steel that he realized it was a stabbing rather than a fistfight. Three people ran by, splashing him with the oily, contaminated water now rolling through the city. They yelled something but Ben couldn’t make out the words.

  Three bodies sat beneath a dark lamppost on the corner of the intersection, the current pushing their limbs as if they were dancing in a macabre water ballet. An office chair smashed into the street from several floors above, followed by two people who jumped to their deaths. Ben looked up and saw the building on fire. More shapes were silhouetted by the flames as they leapt from the floors above.

  I’m so sorry, Emma.

  I swear I’ll make it home, and never lie to you again. Ever.

  Ben felt a hand on his shoulder and spun, shaking off the last of the alcohol blurring his brain.

  “They’re saying we’ll be safe in the Superdome. They have pumps that’ll keep the water out.”

  Ben looked down. He stared into the face of an old man wearing a New Orleans baseball cap and strands of beads around his neck. He had a shamrock painted on his cheek, though it was smudged and leaving green trails like Irish tears.

  A tourist.

  “Yeah. I heard that, too. Follow Canal up to Loyola.”

  The man nodded and smiled as he hobbled into the intersection towards Loyola.

  Ben watched as a Jeep tore out of the darkness with only its running lights and barreled into the man, hurling him several feet into the air. The man landed then stayed motionless as water covered his arms and legs. Ben watched as the driver continued to plow through the rising water, running over bodies, some alive.

  The stabbing had ended and Ben could see the attacker was looking directly at him. He shivered, pushed through the water, crossed Canal and headed for Poydras. If the police were telling people to take Loyola, Ben figured he had a better chance of going further down Canal and taking the street with less traffic.

  All those people will die in the stadium.

  Ben ran, leaving the destruction at Decatur and Canal. Approaching Poydras, he saw fewer people, although the rising water kept depositing bodies like silt on a riverbank. Ben turned and leapt over several corpses crumpled below a mailbox. He hadn’t seen a single fire truck, police car or EMS worker since he ran from the French Market Inn.

  Ben realized his best chance at escaping New Orleans and reaching Chicago would be to ignore the police, rather than follow them.

  ***

  Ben passed more fistfights as gunshots echoed among the cries for help. Floodwaters rose slowly enough to permit people to break windows and loot, but too fast for him to stay still in the oily, slick water now at knee level. Ben’s mind wandered as he continued down Poydras toward the Amtrak station. He thought of the stories about the French Market Inn being haunted and how his buddy, Tim, laughed at the possibility of ghosts crashing his bachelor party. He said not to worry about the accommodations. They’d be spending most of their time drinking in the French Quarter and raising hell afterwards. Their room wouldn’t matter. Ben knew that wasn’t entirely true. He’d been to bachelor parties before, and although he wasn’t Tim’s best man and hadn’t planned the weekend bash in New Orleans, he knew what to expect. They would end up in a hotel room with a woman predisposed to removing her clothes, and then replace them with leather panties and whipped cream.

  “So much for the wedding,” he said, as he passed a man coming out of a convenience store with a roll of instant lottery tickets and a carton of cigarettes.

  By the time he made it to South Rampart, Ben could see the top of the Amtrak terminal. He hesitated, considering the best approach. Train stations were safer than bus stations, but not nearly as safe as an airport. He looked up and saw the first shades of dawn crawling over the edge of the horizon. Ben guessed it was around four in the morning. He reached for his Doodad again.

  “Time,” he said.

  The device stayed silent and dark.

  A gunshot shattered the window facing Loyola. Ben dove behind a tree.

  “We ain’t got room for you, bitch.”

  A woman crawled along the sidewalk through glass shards as the man stood over her yelling. His arm was outstretched and he clutched a black object in his fist.

  “Go on ’fore I cap yo ass.”

  Ben waited, watching a crowd emerge from inside the train station. Crime rates may have dropped in the late teens and early 2020s but that wasn’t the case in every city, and certainly not in New Orleans.

  The woman stood and walked down the elevated sidewalk towards the street, where water continued to rise. She turned one last time, raised her hands to the station, silently pleading with the people inside. When no one moved and the man with the gun aimed at her head, she turned and waded into the water towards the Superdome.

  ***

  Ben felt the water at his waist. He tried not to worry about the toxins and ethanol industry by-products contaminating his pores. He thought of For the People’s Lunar Base and shook his head.

  They can put a base on the moon but can’t switch from ethanol to biofuel.

  He considered approaching the front of the train station on Loyola, then reconsidered. He was most likely to get a hostile greeting, and besides, if the internet was down, trains wouldn’t be running. Ben sighed, tasting the last vestiges of alcohol on his lips. If this was the apocalypse, he’d be staring into it with sober eyes.

  “Yat! They’ll shoot first, whitey.”

  Ben spun to see the white eyes of a young black man squatting in the water beside him. “I’m not looking for trouble,” he said.

  “I’m here to rob you, that it? Kinda racist.”

  “I didn’t mean it like that.”

  “Then how did you mean it?” the black man asked. “You ain’t lookin’ for trouble but you think I am?”

  “I didn’t mean to offend you.”

  “You think I’m a thug with a gun, huh?”

  “Do you have a gun?” Ben asked.

  “Damn straight I do.” The man smiled. “I’m Jerome.”

  “I’m Ben. Nice to meet you, Jerome.” Ben extended his hand and shook Jerome’s.

  “I work in there,” Jerome said. He nodded toward the station. “I can get us in.”

  “Then what? Grid is down along with the ‘net. I can’t even tell what time it is.”

  “4:35 a.m.,” Jerome said. He tapped a battered digital timepiece on his wrist.

  “Is that a watch?” Ben asked. “Antique or replica?”

  “One-hundred-percent real, my man. Vintage 2015, right before folks stopped wearin’ them.”

  Ben reached for his Doodad out of habit then let his hand drop. “Why should we go inside?”

  “You’re the one scoping out the train station. Why you asking me? I was on my way to work. That’s why I’m here.”

  Ben squinted through the darkness. Jerome’s blue mechanic’s uniform was black where the water soaked through.

  “I need to reach Chicago,” Ben said.

  Jerome whistled and shook his head. “Y’all don’t think you’re gonna hop on the next ‘City of New Orleans’ outbound to Chi-town, right? There ain’t nuthin’ moving on tracks or sky.”

  Ben tilted his head sideways and sighed, not thinking of Emma. He squeezed the Doodad, trying to coax information from the dead plastic. “I’m not exactly sure what I’m doing here,” Ben said. “I thought with the highways clogged and—”

  “And now that you see black men with guns inside the station, you don’t want to try your luck on the rails.”

&n
bsp; “No, I guess not.”

  Jerome smiled again and placed a cold hand on Ben’s shoulder. “I want out, too. My dad told me what happened in the Ninth Ward during Katrina, and ain’t no way I’m sticking around for that shit. We get out together. You watch my back, I watch yours. I gotta git to Kentucky.”

  “How are we doing that, Jerome? Drive our own train outta this town?”

  “Sumpin’ like that, whitey. Follow me.”

  Ben shrugged and held both palms up.

  “Got me an old jigger in the maintenance yard. We get around back unseen and we’re off. I got the padlock key.”

  “What did you say?”

  “Not what you thought.” Jerome sighed as they maneuvered through the rising water and around the east side of Union Passenger Terminal. “A jigger. Pump trolley. A handcar.”

  Ben followed Jerome, waiting for an explanation.

  “Like in the old movies. We sit on it, pumping the lever so it moves us down the track. Maintenance department kept a few near the rail yards for repair. As long as the track ain’t busted, we can take the handcar to the North Fucking Pole.”

  Jerome slid behind a flap in a chain-link fence and entered the train yard. Water from the Mississippi Delta was creeping up and over the rails.

  “We got one with an old four-cycle gasoline engine on it.”

  “You mean gas? Where the hell’re we gonna get gas?”

  “All the stations have garages. We might find an old gas can in one. If not, you and me be pumpin’ our way north.”

  “What about hills, elevation?”

  Jerome ran to the far garage. The door was up and facing away from the windows in the passenger terminal. “If you wanna get to Chicago bad enough, you’ll find a way.”

  Ben nodded and followed Jerome into the garage. They pushed the handcar to the track’s edge and lifted it onto the rails, then sat in crude seats, pumping the lever. Bodies floated in the rising waters that flooded the streets of New Orleans behind them.

  ***

  Ben thought his arms would fall off. Muscles burned, and the blistering Mississippi sun drained his final few drops of remaining energy. He tried not to look at Jerome, who kept looking back at him with a full and awkward smile.

  He estimated their speed at 10 to 15 mph. Although the two men had to frequently stop and lift the handcar from the rails to bypass a deserted train on the track, they covered many miles, passing through several small, abandoned towns.

  “We need water,” he said to Jerome.

  “We don’t know who or what’s in those towns. Too risky to stop now.”

  “I don’t care. The sun’s hot, and I feel like I’m gonna pass out.”

  Jerome shrugged and kept pumping. “We should hit Jackson in an hour.”

  Ben thought of Emma and how much she loved to travel. He could almost feel her hand in his and smell her long, auburn hair on his shoulder. As he looked at the Mississippi lowlands stretching to the horizon, he couldn’t see anything manmade for miles. He nodded and pulled the back of his sweat-stained shirt up over his neck, his skin already red from the sun.

  ***

  Two more stranded trains delayed their arrival in Jackson. Ben could barely walk from his cramps. The gun shook in Jerome’s hand, rattled by his arm. Ben hoped the passenger lounge would be empty so his companion wouldn’t have to test the shaky aim of a tired limb.

  “Check the vending machines. I’m going ‘round back to the maintenance garage.”

  Ben nodded, walked down the platform steps, ducked under the sign that read “Jackson: Track 1 Location 4,” and pushed the glass door open. Stale, heavy air suffocated him, alongside the stench of decomposing bodies. He saw blood splattered on one wall and corpses piled at the other. Ben shuffled through the items on the floor and found three bottles of water that had not been destroyed when mobs trashed the vending machines. He stood and exhaled. A sharp crack shattered the silence. A single gunshot close enough to send warm urine running down his leg. Ben ran towards it.

  “He came at me with a knife,” Jerome said. He stood over an elderly white man dressed in denim overalls and a straw hat. Ben looked at the ground near the old man and saw nothing but a spreading pool of blood.

  “I don’t see a knife anywhere.”

  Jerome swung his gun at Ben. “Well, he had one. You find water?”

  Ben took one last look at the body and saw a blossoming wound on the man’s back as he lay face down on the concrete parking lot. “Three bottles.”

  “Gots a ways to go for we hit Kentucky.” Jerome dropped the gun and flicked the safety on before heading towards the handcar.

  “Gas?” Ben asked.

  Jerome shook his head. “Just ethanol. Ain’t many engines left running on gasoline.”

  “We gonna rest here for the night?” Ben asked.

  Jerome looked at Ben, then back to the handcar. “Guess we should.”

  Ben nodded and glanced once more at the body bleeding out on the ground. “Let’s keep a watch,” he said to Jerome. “So we don’t get, you know, ambushed by an old man with a knife.”

  ***

  In the time it took Ben and Jerome to pump their handcar through Tennessee and into Kentucky, the conversation shriveled to grunts and nods. Ben could have convinced himself it was the exhaustion of riding hundreds of miles on the rails fueled by nothing but muscle. He could have blamed the disappointment of not finding any stored gasoline to power the old motor. Lack of nutrition, scant water and deserted towns would have made even the closest partners sullen.

  But Ben knew it was none of that. The situation’s looming desperation had sapped their hope. The closer they got to Fulton, Kentucky, the more withdrawn Jerome became.

  “Fulton. That the end of the line for you?”

  Sweat glistened off of Jerome’s arms and beaded his face. He glanced up at the withering southern sun and licked his chapped, cracked lips. “Told you back in N’awlins I was headed there.”

  “It’s a woman, isn’t it?” Ben asked.

  “What the fuck you know ’bout me, whitey? You ain’t got no right to be askin’ shit like that. My momma be there, asshole. So, yeah. It’s a woman.”

  Ben nodded, eyes fixed on converging rails kissing the distant horizon. “Sorry.”

  “No you ain’t. You scared. You scared of what I might do to you if you piss me off.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “It is. You scared ’cause I’m black, right?”

  “I’m scared because you shot an old man in the back.”

  “You’re about to get a whole new education, son. Surviving on the streets, watching yer own back — this all be shit poor black folk been dealing with for years. Katrina wasn’t the first time we were left behind. All this,” Jerome said, moving his blistered hands from the handle to spread them. “This is what we been feelin’ since Civil Rights back in the day.”

  “You weren’t alive then. That isn't your past.”

  “Bullshit,” Jerome said. “That be all our past.”

  Jerome returned his hands to the pump. “How much longer to Fulton?” Ben asked.

  “Three, maybe four hours.”

  Ben looked at his hands, ignored the sweat burning raw skin beneath his blisters and held Emma’s face in his mind. He had to reach Chicago so they could start the rest of their lives and leave the lies and destruction behind him.

  ***

  “You tried your Doodad lately?”

  Ben looked over the fire burning a foot above the garbage can and tossed a chair leg into the flames for something to do, not needing the heat. Several cans of baked beans smoldered in the fire.

  “Search internet. News,” Ben said.

  The Doodad blinked, recognizing the command, but, like the dozens of times since the floodwaters had first started to rise, it wouldn’t connect with the internet. He turned his device outward to show Jerome the effort’s futility.

  “Why you still wearin’ it?”

  Ben reme
mbered shopping for the Doodad with Emma and the afternoon they spent together, ending with them naked on the kitchen floor. “I can’t believe it’s like this everywhere, can you? You really think America’s entire grid is down? You think the internet crashed? I know there were floods in New Orleans, but we haven’t seen anyone since—” Ben paused, catching himself in a lie. He had seen someone: an old man with a bullet in his back. “You mentioned you heard other news breaking, a terrorist attack or something?”

  “Yeah,” Jerome said. “One of my boys heard that before his Doodad went out. Feds thought maybe the Chinese were gonna catch us with our pants down when the storm hit.”

  Ben felt a flutter in his chest, and swallowed another gulp of air.

  I should have been there to protect Emma. I’m nothing but a filthy liar.

  “I gotta get home, take the car to Chicago.”

  “Suit yerself,” Jerome said.

  Ben nodded. “I’m going to Chicago. The last thing I said to her was a lie. I gotta make that right.”

  Jerome stood and brushed silky ash from his pants. “I don’t give a fuck where you go or why. I needed your arms to get us here. Ain’t like we was friends.”

  Ben watched Jerome shuffle off, around the front of the maintenance shed and into the night. He looked at the lonely rails then at the stars overhead, hoping Emma was seeing them, too.

  ***

  He didn’t know whether the birds stopped singing in the morning or whether it was always so quiet in North America’s forgotten interior. Ben sat up and saw a thin tendril of smoke pluming from the trash. Bright sun crested the horizon, pouring a steady pulse of heat onto the baked August earth.

  He walked to the shed and pissed on the back wall. When he came around the front, his heart lurched in his chest.

  The handcar was gone and Jerome was nowhere. He ran into the shed and then around it once. Other than an empty, crinkled plastic bottle, it was if the manually operated rail car and its conductor never existed.

  “Fuck,” Ben whispered. “I should’ve seen that coming.”

  “You shoulda seen us coming, too.”

  Ben turned toward the phantom voice.

  A fist smashed into his chin and dropped him into unconsciousness.