by Justin Bell
“I didn’t forget you, Bradley,” Rhonda continued. “Let’s get home to our house first, then we’ll get you to your parents, okay?”
He nodded but didn’t look particularly reassured. To be fair, Rhonda didn’t feel particularly reassured herself.
But at least there was a plan. Such as it was.
Chapter 4
As Phil glared out his window he was stunned to see that the sun was slowly setting in the sky above them as the van angled from pavement to gravel road, heading towards the hill back up to the cabin. Pink skies crowded around the darkening clouds as the first full day of post-nuclear America prepared to rest its eyes and tuck in to bed.
Hopefully it would open them again the next morning. For the first time in his life, Phillip Fraser wasn’t sure that it would. Or that they would. Everything seemed so completely sideways.
“Did anyone unpack?” Rhonda asked as the car began drifting up the gravel road. Each side was flanked by thick rows of trees, concealing the faces of the various homes. Rhonda peeked to her left and saw the vague shape of a house buried within the woods, but the lights were off and there were no cars in the driveway.
“I don’t think so,” Winnie replied. “I don’t remember.”
Rhonda looked at the vacant look in her eyes through the rearview mirror with a sense of concern and foreboding; there was a visible numbness there, a milky cloud of unfocused thought, and she worried that it was something that her middle child might never crawl out of. If she would even have the opportunity to try.
By all accounts, the United States had suffered a series of devastating attacks. Numerous significant nuclear detonations occurred in various large cities throughout the West Coast. Even if the radiation dissipated prior to crossing the Rockies, would the country survive the complete annihilation of such a critical part of the economy? California drove much of the gross national product of America with the sixth largest economy in the world, larger than even France, Italy, or Russia, and if three of the larger cities were indeed flattened as all the news indicated, the effects would be widespread.
Today was just getting better and better.
“Nobody’s home, huh?” Phil said from the passenger seat.
Rhonda looked back out her window and then out the passenger window. Every single house they passed was drenched in darkness. The further the sun set, the darker and dimmer the entire world around them seemed to be.
“Mom?” Max asked nervously, sliding up in his seat and clutching the back of her seat.
“It’s okay, Max,” she replied, switching her headlights to high beam. “We’re almost back to the cabin, then we’ll pack up and get out.”
In the wash of headlights, the gravel road lifted up, revealing the reflective diamond shape of the ‘No Outlet’ sign. The van crawled up one more length of road, veering right, and headed towards the cabin.
Rhonda gasped, slamming on the van’s brakes and locking the tires into a rock throwing skid, shifting slightly right as she stopped.
She looked out the windshield, her headlights spilling a pale white light on two cars blocking the front driveway of the cabin.
They were parked nose-to-nose, two twenty-year-old sedans kitty corner, fencing off the walkway to the front porch.
“What the hell?” Phillip asked, straightening up in his seat.
“Kids, stay down back there,” Rhonda said in a hushed whisper.
“What’s going on, mom?” Winnie asked.
“Stay down!” Rhonda twisted, craning her neck to prepare to reverse course, but another pair of headlights flashed into view, rising up the hill behind them. She punched the brakes again as the light shined into the van, illuminating everyone in brilliant light. Rhonda shielded her eyes and cursed under her breath.
She turned back around and saw an open window in one of the cars ahead. A man was behind the wheel, his flannel-covered arm hanging outside, dangling against the car door. As she watched, he slowly pushed open the car door and stepped out, and she noticed a rifle clutched in his left hand.
“Does he have a gun?” Phil asked.
“Quiet, Phil,” Rhonda said. She glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the vague, dark shapes of two figures stepping out from the car behind them. They crossed in front of the headlights and stood behind their Honda. Like the driver of the car, they each clutched long, narrow weapons in their hands.
In the back seat, Winnie hopped up and down, spinning around and looking out the rear window, then turning and looking back out the windshield.
“Mom, they’ve got guns. I think they’ve got guns!”
“Calm down, Winnie,” Rhonda said. “Just calm down. Everything will be okay.”
Phil hooked his fingers in the handle of the door. “Let me talk to—”
“Phil, no!” Rhonda shouted. “Sit down. Shut up. Let me handle this.”
Everyone in the van drew in a breath and held it, the entire vehicle silent and motionless like a rounded, four-wheeled tomb.
The driver rounded the sloped hood of the minivan, walking slow and purposeful, dragging the palm of his hand across the hood, his skin squeaking on the smooth metal.
His boots crunched on the gravel with each slow step, and Rhonda’s heart locked, then beat with each stride towards her door. She pressed the window button and rolled it down as he approached, then looked out as he came to it, like a police officer making a highway stop.
“Evening,” he said, leaning down and looking into the open window.
“What can I do for you?” Rhonda asked, leaning back slightly to get a better look at him. He had a broad, rigid face and dark hair pulled tight into a ponytail, though the dark hair was clearly graying at the roots and tips. He had a thick goatee of mixed gray hair which thinned out to a permanent five o’clock shadow closer to his jawline. His breath was hot and sour, and Rhonda was fairly certain she smelled more than a hint of old gin baking off of him like dried sweat.
“This your place?” he asked with an overt sense of innocence that Rhonda didn’t buy for a second.
“My parents’,” she replied. “Gerard and Jodi Krueller.”
He nodded and moved his mouth as if chewing on something particularly hard to swallow.
“Were you here this morning, by chance?” he asked.
“For a few minutes, but we had to go into town.”
“What time was that exactly?”
“I’m not sure, mid-afternoon maybe? It was after lunch, that’s for sure. Can I ask what this is about?”
“Well, you see…earlier this morning, my brother said he was going to head up this way to grab some supplies. Your mom and dad…well, they’ve given us an open invite to use their basement to store some of our gear. Gear that we needed.”
“Is that so? They never told me that.”
“Yeah, that is so, sweetie. That is most definitely so.”
Rhonda’s stomach churned. The combination of his stench and his false machismo made her want to lean out of the window and throw up on his shoes.
“We never saw anyone this morning,” she said.
“You sure about that? His name’s Lance. He’s my brother. He said he was coming up this way, and then, well…he just never came home.”
“Yes,” Rhonda replied. “I’m sure. We never saw him.”
The man stood back, keeping his eyes set on Rhonda, then lifted his left hand, the one with the rifle, and set it on the roof of the van with an audible metal bang.
“See, why am I finding that hard to believe?”
“I’m sorry, I can’t help you.” Rhonda looked out through the windshield and saw that suddenly there were three more men out there, spread several feet apart, all holding weapons and all staring at the van. Flannel shirts and blue jeans seemed to be the uniform up in these parts, though one of them just wore a black t-shirt with the elaborate logo of some heavy metal band inked onto the chest. Glancing out through the rearview mirror she saw three men behind them, not just the previous two, an
d again, bracketed in the glow of headlights, each one of them appeared to be toting rifles.
They had them surrounded and completely outgunned. Nowhere to go and they weren’t taking no for an answer.
The man next to her window bent back down again, looking into the car. “How about you, sir, did you see my brother?”
Purely by instinct, Phillip turned towards him to answer.
With a scowl, the man’s face hardened into stone. “Well, well, well…looks like you got yourself into a little bit of a skirmish, didn’t you?”
Rhonda saw his face shift from one of minor suspicion to one of dead solid certainty and on the roof, the rifle scraped slightly as he stood, pulling it towards him.
“Yeah, you know,” Phil replied, “had a little trouble at Pete’s.”
“Is that so?”
The man by the window had shifted slightly again. He straightened up and pulled the rifle even closer to him across the roof.
“I think maybe the two of you ought to step out of the car for a minute. We’d like to have a word with you and no reason for the kids to listen to our grown up conversation, right?”
“We really have nothing to talk about,” Rhonda replied. “Now if you’d please let us get through, we just came back to pack up our things and go home. Then we’ll be out of your hair and you can have all the supplies in the basement that you want.”
He stared in at her through the window, his eyes narrowing until she could barely see the whites in the soft glow of the car’s headlights behind them. The man in the flannel shirt seemed to be considering this seriously, working out the options in his evidently complex mind.
Then, the decision was made. “No, I don’t think so. I think you need to step out of the grocery getter and come have a word with us.”
Neither of them moved. Rhonda could feel the light touch of her daughter’s hand on her arm and heard the rapid breathing coming from Bradley in the third row seat. That poor kid would be remembering this trip for the rest of his life.
“Okay, let me rephrase that,” the man said, stepping back from the car and pulling the rifle from the roof. In one smooth motion he swung it up and around and clamped it in two hands. It looked to be a heavily modified AR-15 semi-automatic, but Rhonda hadn’t been made to field strip one in a very long time, and she had no idea what could have changed.
What hadn’t changed, however, was the sickening feeling in her gut as the second person in as many hours aimed a gun in her direction. The man in the flannel shirt clutched the weapon and began to swing it around to point in the car, and Rhonda had every reason to believe he was about to open fire.
***
At certain times in a person’s life there comes a moment that they know they’ll remember for whatever might be left of their life. It’s a moment of strange, artificial clarity, as if the normality of every day is suddenly broadcast in HD, with every tiny detail and line forever etched into the stone of their memories. During those moments, time has a tendency to slow down, to crawl forward frame by frame, as if to ensure that they remember every single second of this important event. To prove that it happened, that they witnessed it, and that it changed them forever.
The man at the window shifted, his flannel shirt pulling tight around his muscular arms as he brought the weapon around. Out of the corner of her eye, Rhonda saw Phil flinch and she moved that way, wondering if he’d somehow been shot and she hadn’t heard the weapon go off. But as she turned, she saw it. The purse was in his lap, his hand was thrusting out, and her revolver was clamped within his firm grip. Everything was moving so slow, Rhonda had a moment to look at his fingers, consider admonishing his trigger discipline for even the briefest moment, then the weapon fired, a flat crack of thunder inside the tight confines of the Honda minivan.
Rhonda jerked her head back as the weapon punched fire and the man at the window scrambled away, his AR-15 lifting and firing two shots clean over the minivan’s roof.
She didn’t think, she didn’t hesitate, she didn’t consider her actions; Rhonda just slammed the van into reverse and brought the full weight of her right foot down on the accelerator, sending the Honda leaping backwards. She heard muffled shouts from behind her, the stunned reactions of three armed men who had flanked the vehicle. Then the rear of the van plowed into them, continuing backwards until it slammed hard and swift into the hood of the car behind them.
Don’t look, don’t think, don’t breathe, Rhonda’s mind rattled and she palmed the shifter back into drive and adjusted her foot, shooting the van forward, cranking the wheel hard and tight to the left. Tires grabbed gravel and kicked rocks back in machine gun staccato as the van’s back end swerved around in a makeshift bootleg turn and pointed them back down the mountain from where they’d come. She could already see the man in flannel adjusting his stance, bringing the AR back around towards the car. She floored the gas, throttling the van down the hill towards the road back to town.
Rhonda screamed as the chatter of semi-automatic fire rattled behind her, bullets thwanging off the metal hide of the sloped rear hatch of the van.
“Go, mom, go!” screamed Winnie from the back seat, her voice shrill to the point of cracking.
“I’m impressed, Phil, that was a great distraction!” Rhonda shouted as she hauled the wheel to the left, narrowly avoiding diving into the low ditch on the right side of the road. The van slammed and whumped back onto the curved surface of the gravel.
“I was trying to shoot him in the face!” Phil still held onto the revolver, keeping it pointed in the general direction of the floor as he kept adjusting it uncomfortably in his hand.
A handful of pings scattered off the rear roof of the van and Rhonda could see twin blobs of headlights following her crooked course back down the mountain road.
“They’re right behind us!”
Several car-lengths behind, the flannel man leaned out of the passenger window of the ancient Oldsmobile, the AR-15 tucked tight to his shoulder.
“Hairpin turn coming up!” shouted Phil. “Take it easy.” He paused for a moment and twisted in his seat. “Kids, get your heads down and cover your ears!”
A dull whack echoed from the rear of the van, a sound very similar to the bullet-off-metal sounds that they’d heard before, and just as Rhonda was wondering what the noise was, the rear windshield starred and shattered, breaking apart and falling into the rear hatch of the vehicle.
Phil twisted in his seat and reached his arm around, the revolver still clutched in his hand.
“Don’t shoot the kids!” Rhonda screamed, but Phil was already pulling the trigger. Three quick gunshots roared inside the van, the muzzle flashes baking the ceiling and windows in bright white light.
Winnie screamed and screwed her eyes shut while Max stared agape at the firing weapon, blinking at the crack of each round that belched forth. If Phil hadn’t known better, he’d have thought his son was even smiling.
“You’re not going to hit anything,” Rhonda shouted, doing her best to keep the van straight and level just in case she was wrong. “Stop wasting bullets!”
Another swift ping rebounded off the rear of the van, then a muffled thump and bang followed in rapid succession. The van lunged to the left, tires catching on gravel and almost yanking the wheel right out of Rhonda’s hands.
“Tire!” she shouted as her knuckles clenched white against the contoured surface of the steering wheel. “He got the tire!”
The van thundered left across the rough ground, veering diagonally across the unkempt back road. Rhonda torqued right, trying to compensate for the swift left motion, but the rear left tire slid while the right caught and the van lurched back the other way too dramatically. Phil clung to the handle above his window, his eyes darting to the road as it made its hairpin right turn, and he realized that the van wasn’t making the turn along with the road. With one last crunch, the vehicle leaped into the air, then dipped and slammed headlong into a thick tree bordering the dirt and gravel path as it
transitioned from road to woods.
For a few beats there was just silence. As they had just started to adjust to the sudden lack of sound, a few startling new sounds emerged. The echoing of twisted metal and snapping wood and the low, rhythmic clicking of a dying engine, all winding down to silence again.
Rhonda pushed herself out from the inflated airbag and turned towards the rear of the van. “Is everyone okay?”
She saw Bradley nod first, rubbing his shoulder where the seat belt had held. Max ran a hand through his long tussle of dark hair, and Winnie rubbed aside a streak of faint blood from her forehead from an injury that Rhonda could not see but could tell was not serious. Steam from the busted radiator rose from the crumpled hood outside and she looked over towards Phil who was working his own way out of the airbag.
“Phil? Breathing?”
He nodded, though he looked dazed and uncertain of exactly where he was.
“Okay, everyone,” Rhonda shook her head slightly, trying to clear the mess of fog and cobwebs that were clouding her thoughts. “They’ll be on us in a second. We need to move right now. Can everyone do that?”
She heard the click of disengaged seat belts as a sort of wordless agreement.
“Mom, my back hurts,” whispered Max as he moved towards his door.
“I know, honey,” Rhonda replied. “Move first, then we’ll figure out the extent of the damage. That’s the best I can do right now, okay, sweetie?”
Max nodded as he pushed open his door, the automatic motor whining in protest as it worked against the bent metal tracks. Rhonda did the same, slipping out and landing in the ditch that ran alongside the dirt road before making her way towards the back of the van. She could hear Phil and Winnie exiting from their side, feet crunching on gravel.
“I’m grabbing the bag from the trunk. Everyone in the woods! That way!” Rhonda pointed towards the thick cluster of trees across the road from where they crashed, the vague shape of firs stacked on firs only barely visible in the low light of evening. It was dark and the moon had not yet made its full presence known, draping everything in a darkened cloak of shadow. Her family dashed across the road, but Winnie stopped halfway across and turned towards her.