Breakdown

by Joseph Monninger

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  PART ONE: THE MILK TRUCK

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  PART TWO: GREEN TREES, BROWN DIRT

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  PART THREE: CALM

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  PART FOUR: MENTAL SURVIVAL

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  PREVIEW

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT

  SURVIVAL TIP #1

  * * *

  Survival begins in preparation. The better prepared you are, the better your chance at survival. Although it is impossible to anticipate every contingency, general preparedness will always bring dividends. Most disasters can be broken down as follows: approach, endurance, survival. If you carry sufficient food and water for three days, you will stand a good chance of making it through the initial stages of a disaster. Encourage your parents to keep an emergency kit in their automobiles, at home, and on their person when practical. A package of nuts can be both a lifesaving means of nourishment and excellent bait to trap larger animals. A compass is easily transportable and indispensable when needed. Think ahead. Don’t assume an extraordinary situation cannot happen to you.

  The blackout dropped across the Minnesota north country like a tablecloth being fluffed out and draped over a table. If you had been in a plane and happened to look down, you might have marveled at how smoothly the blackout moved. The largest cities went first, the tall buildings snuffing out like candles in one large huff. The power continued to fade under the spreading darkness, slithering down the center of smaller channels, extinguishing things as it proceeded.

  A softball stadium in the town of Blue Earth went dark in the middle of a fly ball.

  In Austin, Minnesota, the lights at the local skate park went out a second after a skateboarder jumped on his new deck and headed down the biggest incline in the Sioux Rec Center cement canyon. He had to ride blind.

  A thirteen-year-old babysitter on Sidle Street in Little Falls had two arms in the tub washing down a three-year-old when the lights went off in the house. For a second, she did nothing at all. The house went quiet, too quiet, and suddenly the only sound audible was the enormous grandfather clock ticking in the study. It sounded like a heartbeat, it always had, but then it grew louder and louder. She didn’t dare move, didn’t do a thing except wait for the lights to come back on.

  But the lights didn’t come back on.

  It was the biggest blackout to ever hit Minnesota. It took a snapshot of almost everyone in the state, a giant flash exploding for a second, then freezing everyone in place. The difference was that no one smiled for this picture. They simply gazed up with worried looks, red eyes sizzling for a second before the state plunged into a darkness it hadn’t known in more than a century.

  At Camp Summertime in northern Minnesota, the blackout didn’t have much of an impact. No one bothered to check if the blackout extended beyond the camp. Blackouts happened frequently at Camp Summertime, a result of trees flicking down to snap a line or squirrels eating their way into a transformer. When the power died, as it had on four occasions over the course of the summer, an enormous generator kicked on in the tool shop beside the boathouse and provided backup energy. Blackouts were a fact of life at Camp Summertime. No one imagined it could last more than a couple of hours.

  Besides, it was closing day for the camp, the morning after the final bonfire, August 27. Parents had already picked up hundreds of kids, each family unit celebrating a mini-reunion followed by the long slog with sleeping bags and trunks back to the parents’ SUVs. Once they departed, the families didn’t bother calling back to inform the camp of the generalized blackout. For one thing, they didn’t have a sense of how broad and far-reaching the blackout extended. Not at first. No one did. It wasn’t until near sunset the next day that the electric company, Minnesota Power and Light, issued a bulletin about the blackout. The bulletin outlined the blackout’s unprecedented dimensions, attributing the malfunction to the demand for air-conditioning in the record late-summer heat, but the alerts went out over radio waves, and only people in cars, or ones with battery-powered transistors, received those messages initially. Parents driving away with their kids heard the news, but once they left it didn’t occur to them to call back to Camp Summertime. The place passed quickly out of their thoughts as they pointed toward home. Summer was officially over. They had Labor Day picnics and school to think about.

  In the confusion caused by the blackout, no one gave a thought to the white commuter van — called the Milk Truck by the campers for the putrid odor of spoiled milk that clung to the interior — that carried the kids who were making plane or train connections a half-day drive’s away in International Falls. The kids left in the Milk Truck at ten fifteen in the morning. It was the last van of the season, the last group to leave. Every year, in a joyful ceremony, the owners of the camp, Dave and Margaret Wilmont, toasted the final departure with a bottle of champagne once the Milk Truck disappeared. They raised their glasses to each other, smiled at the knowledge that another successful summer had been completed, then handed the keys to Devon O’Neal, the winter caretaker.

  Devon O’Neal was a wannabe novelist who liked the quiet of a winter beside the lake. He spent the dark months in the nurse’s apartment, huddled next to the woodstove. Occasionally, he would go ice fishing to break up the monotony, or try to complete a five-part fantasy novel called Roman Winter that he had been writing for three years. Devon accepted the keys with a few last-minute instructions, then watched as the Wilmonts climbed into their Otter aircraft and roared up the lake to leave.

  When Devon saw the plane disappear at last, he smiled, happy to regain his island of personal isolation. He had a million things to do to shut down the camp and tuck it away for winter, but for the moment he simply wandered around, assessing the damage and the work to be done. Besides, it was devilishly hot, well above ninety degrees, and that simply did not happen in northern Minnesota. He thought about going for a swim or taking a nap. He did not give a thought to the Milk Truck, the most decrepit van in the fleet and the one with the longest journey across the most isolated road, the only van traveling north toward International Falls. Devon swung the security gate closed on One Hundred Mile Road — the road that took the Milk Truck northward through a couple million acres of Minnesota spruce forest — then he padlocked the gate and turned back to the camp, wondering what he would cook for dinner on this, his first night alone.

  The first thought Albert “Flash” Ellsworth, age sixty-three, had when he felt the Milk Truck dying underneath him was, I told you so. He had told everyone he could think to tell that the Milk Truck, the van purchased from the St. Paul’s school district at least a quarter of a century before, was too darn rickety to trust. Vans were well made, he knew, especially Fords, but all machines made by human hand had an earthly limit. That’s what he thought. He had told the bosses of Camp Summertime that the van needed to be junked and a new one bought. But did they listen? Of course they didn’t. They told him the Milk Truck was a tradition and a part of camp lore.

  No one listened to Flash Ellsworth. That was fact.

  But as usual, he was right about what he knew. He didn’t pretend to know everything, but he knew engines, and he knew the Milk Truck better than any engine around, and he knew it was dying when they had turned onto One Hundred Mile Road.

  He heard one of the kids make a mocking sound — probably Tock, the troublemaker — when the van began to s
hake, and he glanced in the mirror quickly to tell him to knock it off. The Milk Truck had dignity, he wanted to say, and everything would get old one day, even them, but what good did it do to try and reason with spoiled kids? He shook his head and tried to lift the gearshift into a soft second, but the van kicked and complained and began to grind.

  His second thought was, We’re a lot of miles from somewhere, and a few miles from nowhere.

  One Hundred Mile Road wasn’t called One Hundred Mile Road for nothing, he knew. That was another thing he would have told Margaret and Dave Wilmont if they had been standing in front of him. He would have said, You’ve got a girl here, Olivia, who has to get to International Falls. Or You have another one, Maggie, who is going from here to LAX, then onto Japan for some sort of special exchange. Two of the boys, Preston and Simon, are heading out to the East Coast. Bess, too, she was going somewhere. You do not send a bus filled with kids hurrying to make a connection over One Hundred Mile Road on one of the hottest days of the summer and expect to wave good-bye and hop in your fancy Otter aircraft and head toward the Outer Banks as Dave and Margaret Wilmont did every autumn. You do not lock up the camp, lower the security gate behind the Milk Truck, and wave them off. No, you give them first-class transportation, and you supervise their travel, and you make sure the itinerary makes human sense. But not the Wilmonts. That wasn’t the way things went at Camp Summertime.

  “Hey!” someone yelled from the back of the van. “Hey, what’s going on?”

  “Mind your knitting!” Flash said.

  “What does that even mean?” Maggie asked.

  “It means it’s too hot to listen to you kids. Mind your own potatoes.”

  He didn’t know for sure if he was talking to them or to himself or to the Milk Truck.

  He gently moved the gearshift back into first and tried to even her out with gas. But the Milk Truck started to shudder even harder. Then it wheezed and bucked, and he knew the party was over. He eased the truck to the side of the dirt road. Not that it mattered if he put her on the side of the road, he reflected. They were the last vehicle coming this way until the snowmobiles took it over in winter. Gates blocked the road from either end — that was a steadfast rule the Wilmonts had instituted many years before — so that no drifters or joyriders could make it out to Camp Summertime and steal whatever they could carry. It was his job to take the last group out, and Devon would lock the door behind them.

  He gave the van one more squirt of gas, then listened to it pop three times in quick succession. He turned it off quickly, and silence suddenly filled in the empty places. Then the van jerked a little to the right, and the front tire crumpled on the shoulder of the road. A few trees dragged their bony fingers over the roof of the van, and the forward momentum of the vehicle grinded the van into a dull, teetering halt. They weren’t going fast enough to cause any real damage, but the van sank a little on its axle, as if it had settled down to die.

  Then the kids began to clap.

  “Do you people have any brains in your head?” Flash asked, his anger at the phony applause rising up in him as quickly as a bead of mercury in a thermometer. “Does even one person here have a particle of brain?”

  It was too hot for this nonsense. Way too hot. He turned in the driver’s seat, his eyes moving over the passengers. He was tired of kids, he realized. It happened by the end of every summer. He felt them growing on him like a mold or fungus. By this time of year, late August, he had a stomach full of them and had little patience left.

  “Now be quiet and let me think for a second, would you?”

  “Is it broken down?” Quincy asked.

  “Duhhhhhhh,” Tock said, his voice twisted up to mock Quincy.

  Tock was the bad egg, Flash knew, but Quincy had asked a pretty silly question just the same.

  “Looks like it,” Flash said, getting himself under control. “You can get off the bus and stretch your legs if you want. There’s nothing around here, so don’t wander off. Is that clear?”

  “Camp Summertime strikes again!” Maggie said.

  “Is that clear?” Flash asked again, ignoring her and raising his voice so there could be no mistake. The heat wouldn’t give him a second to clear his head.

  Flash gave them a last look, then swung out of the van and walked to the front of it. He didn’t possess the slightest hope that he could repair the engine. Old was old, done was done. But he needed to give a look anyway, and he needed time to think without the kids’ eyes on him. He buckled up the hood and climbed onto the front bumper to see into the engine cavity. At the same time, he listened to the kids clattering off the bus. The kids laughed and joked, and Flash made himself bend over the engine so he wouldn’t feel compelled to slap them down.

  He took one long look at the engine wafting smoke into the air, waiting for a miracle cure to occur to him. He didn’t touch anything. There was no point in pretending. The engine was cooked. Done. The Milk Truck had taken its last trip. He smelled a deep, acrid electric burn that he associated with overheating motors. The smell floated like a cloud around the van. Not even a breeze came to push it away.

  He stepped down off the bumper. A dull, sick headache started forming along his hairline. He reached in his jacket for his cell phone, but he knew without checking it that they were well beyond cell range. He walked a few feet away and checked it anyway. No bars. No contact, he saw when he looked. He slid the phone back into the chest pocket of his jacket. He looked around, calculating his next step.

  This, he realized, was one giant pickle.

  Tock threw a rock at a gray squirrel and missed it by a few inches.

  The squirrel didn’t move. It stayed exactly where it had been a moment before, its pointed face staring at him. Tock didn’t expect to hit the squirrel precisely, but it was fun to try anyway. He knew the other kids watched him.

  He threw a second rock at the squirrel, and the rock veered away in a left-hand curve. He listened to it rattle off into the brush. The squirrel chattered a little bit then, and Tock hustled to grab another rock. Before he could throw it, Maggie stepped in front of him and refused to move.

  “That squirrel hasn’t done a thing to you, Tock,” Maggie said, her voice tangled and angry. “Leave it alone.”

  “Get out of the way,” he said.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “There’s no way I’m going to hit the stupid thing,” Tock said, feinting a little to one side to get past Maggie. “I’m just playing.”

  “Play somewhere else,” Maggie said, slapping at his arm when he began to throw. He kept his hand out in a stiff-arm to keep her away. He threw a rock, but it was way off. He couldn’t even see the squirrel anymore.

  “Why are you so mean?” Maggie demanded. “You’re mental, you know that? You’re really mental. Why would anyone try to hurt a squirrel?”

  “It’s gone now, anyway. Big deal.”

  He turned and chucked a rock down the dirt road. It made a couple of skips, then died. He rubbed his hands on his camouflage pants. Squirrels went up a tree in a swirl like the red stripe went up a barbershop pole. He knew that. He walked ten yards down the road, hoping to see the squirrel resting on the other side of the tree. But it had disappeared.

  To kill time, he went down onto his hands and toes and did twenty push-ups. It was hot as blazes to be doing push-ups, but he didn’t care.

  He did them fast and well. He tried to do at least two hundred a day. Most days he did more. He liked the way they made his arms look, the back of his triceps like fat, angry roots, but he also liked the strength gain. He could feel the power when he flexed. He was twelve years old. In six years, a little less, he could join the Marines. That was his dream.

  When he finished with the push-ups, he sprang back to his feet. No slow climbing up like an old man for him. He did things crisply, like a Marine.

  “Is it cooked?” he asked when he saw Flash going back into the van for something.

  Flash didn’t answer. He just shrug
ged.

  “We are so stranded!” Tock yelled, and laughed. “We are so burned!”

  He looked over at Simon — he always looked over at Simon — put his hands up like claws, and made a scary rumbling sound in his throat.

  “Bigfoot’s going to get you,” he said to Simon.

  Simon shook his head harshly from side to side. Then he began to cry.

  Bess stepped between Simon and Tock and turned her back to block Tock. Like a basketball screen, she thought. Tock never left her brother alone. Not for long anyway. He was like a fly on garbage, or a shark circling, always waiting to torture her brother at the first opportunity. She couldn’t count how many times she had stepped between Tock and Simon over the summer. It went on and on and on. The kid was a bully, a semi-dangerous one, she imagined, and he preyed on her brother’s weakness.

  “It’s okay,” she said to Simon for the millionth time.

  Tock kept making scary sounds behind her. It’s what he did. She looked around at some other kids — Maggie and Preston — and understood she would get no help from them. Tock scared them. Tock scared everyone except her and Olivia. The kids stood around in loose clusters, watching. It struck her as ironic that Maggie would intervene to stop Tock from hurting a squirrel but wouldn’t bother helping her to stop Tock from hurting her brother.

  She put her arm over Simon’s shoulders and walked him away from Tock. She walked him toward the edge of the forest. It was strange to her that they could stand on a brown tongue of dirt that went on for miles, but all around her, everywhere, pines stood ready to gobble up the light. It was a little unnerving.

  “It’s okay,” she whispered to Simon. “He just does things like that because he knows he can get a rise out of you. Do you understand? If you don’t react, it will take all the fun out of it for him.”

  Simon nodded.

  He suffered from Asperger’s syndrome. Well, no, not Asperger’s syndrome, Bess corrected herself. The medical profession had changed the name of his diagnosis. It was now called autism spectrum disorder.