In the meantime, I was still struggling over the decaying roads, hunting supplies and survivors along the road, and keeping the RV running.
Filling up with gas was a chore. I had a bicycle pump that I’d rigged to tubes so that it could be used to siphon gasoline from holding tanks outside of stations, but it was always a chore that could take a half-hour of pumping to fill the RV, and it was always a chore to get into the holding tanks in the first place. There was a heavy-duty metal lid that had to be pried away, and then I’d have to get past a secondary seal. Sometimes, I’d find the tank was dry. That happened more than you’d think. There was no shipping the final two weeks of the Flu. A lot of gas stations ran dry. When I did find gas, I’d have to put a filter on the end of my siphon hose. The gasoline in the storage tanks was slowly starting to break down, and it was starting to get slightly gelatinous as the liquids evaporated over time. The filters helped keep the engine of the RV from gumming up too badly, but I still worried about it. How much longer would I have gas? It made me more aware that there wouldn’t be any coming back from this trip. When I made it down south, I wouldn’t be visiting Wisconsin again. That part of the world would be dead to me.
After I pumped gas, I was always exhausted. My arms would be tired. My back would hurt. The RV wasn’t the most fuel-efficient vehicle on the planet, either. It drank gas pretty well. Too well. I was filling up at least once a day, minimum. It was just part of the routine, an unavoidable inconvenience like shaving or using the bathroom. It just had to be done. I would always go into the gas stations and poke around when I finished. If their doors were locked, I’d just let myself through the glass with a brick or something. In almost all of the stores, almost everything was picked clean. Smokes, booze, and adult magazines were always gone. Most of the candy, too. I could understand the smokes, booze, and candy—but why the adult magazines? I couldn’t see people actually breaking into these stores thinking, Welp, I’ll be dead in a few weeks. Better see what Miss February’s likes and dislikes were before I go, but that must be what happened. I couldn’t imagine being horny in a dying world. I was eighteen and virile, but I have not had a single bodily urge like that since the Flu hit. And just thinking about that now made me worry about myself. Was I okay?
I shook off that thought and reminded myself that all previous definitions of normal and okay were no longer applicable in the apocalypse. I was dealing with undiscovered country now. Any rules were rules I would set myself, and I decided that people in the apocalypse didn’t have sex. This was easy for me to do because there was no one with whom to have sex.
I hit the Ohio border and prepared to move through the three jewels of Ohio’s north side: Toledo, Sandusky, and Cleveland. I’d been through Ohio with my parents years ago. It took about three-and-a-half hours to drive through the state at highway speeds. However, I was estimating that it would take me a few days to get to Cleveland because of the gas, because of searching towns, and because of the condition of the roads. The humid, summer days just kept melting into more humid, summer days. I hardly noticed the nights because I would lapse into uneasy, exhausted sleep. I just kept myself going, though. What else was there to do? Survive. Just keep surviving.
Outside of Toledo, I was exploring the suburbs around Maumee. I turned down a road and followed it out of town for a while. I hit a stretch of road where to the left was a wide, flat plain of tall grasses. There, I saw something so amazing that I was forced to simply stop the Greyhawk and gawk. There, in the wild countryside, just wandering as natural as you please, was a small herd of elephants, I kid you not. A large bull was leading four cows, and at least one of them had a small baby elephant trailing after her. They were wandering near a grove of trees, stripping leaves from branches with their trunks.
A family herd of elephants was not something I anticipated seeing in Ohio, of all places. I was amazed they’d survived the Ohio winter, first of all. I guess they’re a pretty hearty beast (elephants did survive crossing the Alps with Hannibal, right?). They must have been released by a zookeeper at the Toledo Zoo when that keeper realized the writing was on the wall for primates. I wonder if he/she had been able to release other animals, too. Were there lions and tigers roaming the countryside right now? Were there hippopotamuses in the Mississippi River? If other zookeepers across the country had followed the same lead, it meant that there was a strong possibility that a whole mess of non-native critters were now roaming around the countryside. I could come face to face with a fully-grown male lion. There could be camels, ostriches, emus, and who knows what else scavenging over the countryside. In that instant, the world suddenly got more interesting. I always carried a gun when I went scavenging, even back when I was in familiar territory. It was never to kill, though. It was a tool, like any other tool. I anticipated using the gun to scare, mostly. Maybe use it to wound. My biggest fear wasn’t even animals. I knew there were bears and wolves in Wisconsin—mostly in the northern half, but they had been starting to move south after the encroaching threat of man diminished. I knew there were a few cougars and bobcats, too, but most animals weren’t keen to attack. If I’d made enough noise, most animals would have run scared. Now, I had to consider the chance that there were strange predators in the country, zoo-raised African and Asian predatory animals that might not have ever developed the skills to hunt. They would be hungry. They would be highly opportunistic feeders. A gawky young man with big feet who couldn’t run too fast would be a lot easier to eat than something that might fight back.
I made a mental note to always have a weapon nearby.
I spent a full day roaming through Toledo. I didn’t find anything worth noting, save for the weather. Oppressive was the only word for it. The humidity, even that close to Lake Erie, was a sauna. It felt like there was something physical about it, something tangible. It felt like if I’d tried, I could have cut out a donut of moisture from the very air and eaten it.
With no more television and no more weather forecasters, I’d had to become very good at reading clouds and noticing slight changes to the winds. For days, the winds had been pushing up from the south, from the Gulf Coast. It was bringing excessive heat and humidity. That day in Toledo was the worst of it. Sweltering, miserable heat. Even that night, when I was camped outside a rest stop along the interstate on the eastern edge of the city, it was too hot to sleep. The RV was stifling. I considered letting the engine idle for the air conditioning, but decided against it. It was too hard on the engine, not to mention the wasteful gas consumption. If I was moving to the Deep South, I was going to have to learn to live with heat and humidity.
It was too hot to build a fire. It was too hot to be in the RV. It was too hot to sleep. I stripped naked and sprayed myself down with mosquito repellent. I busted out my battery-powered clippers and buzzed my hair down to the scalp. I ate a can of tuna and slugged back bottles of water before pouring several bottles over my head and body to help the faint breeze cool me. I didn’t necessarily enjoy being naked. It felt very exposed, and I always got that creepy sensation that someone was watching me even though I was certain there wasn’t anyone for miles. I’d looked for signs, hammered the RV horn, and traipsed over the city for hours. No response. I was certain I was alone.
I thought that maybe ghosts were watching me. I didn’t know if I believed in ghosts, but I was willing to entertain the idea of them. I’m sure that two years ago, the idea of ghosts would have scared me. Now, I found it somewhat comforting. I imagined the ghosts were my parents watching over me, or maybe the ghosts of all my dead friends coming to see how I was doing. I was standing naked in a pair of Adidas flip-flops, dripping wet, at a rest stop in Toledo, Ohio. I don’t think that’s quite the wild, glamorous, party-all-the-time lifestyle my friends would have hoped I would have adopted in a world free of rules. If I were them, I’d probably be disappointed in me, too.
I have developed strange habits being alone. One of the strangest is that in these moments where I’m exposed and uncomfortable,
I start to sing Under Pressure by Queen and David Bowie. I don’t know why. It just fits moments where I’m stressing out where I have no reason to stress out. I hope you have the whole image in your head now: naked, sweaty, wet teenage boy in flip-flops singing Under Pressure to a darkened Burger King sign. I’m not proud of it. Things like this just happen. This was not Hollywood’s big-budget version of the Apocalypse, clearly.
While I was belting out that second verse, the wind shifted ever so slightly. Looking back, I should have noticed it. However, I was really feeling the Freddie Mercury jazz fills that night, so I ignored the shift. The air cooled slightly. A low-pressure system was dropping out of the north and colliding with the high pressure from the south. You don’t have to be a meteorologist to know what that means.
My parents weren’t big outdoors people. I went through that phase as a kid where I wanted to go camping. I went through outdoor magazines in the school library and looked at outdoor goods ad circulars and catalogs when they came to the house. I talked incessantly about going camping as a family. Eventually, I wore my parents down. We borrowed a big tent from a guy my dad worked with and headed up to Devil’s Lake State Park in Wisconsin for two days of hiking and cooking over a campfire. The first night was fine. I was having fun. The second night, a thunderstorm swept through the region, and I thought we were all going to die. We had to abandon the tent in the early stages of the storm. We had to rush back to my dad’s SUV and just watch as lightning struck so often that we could have read a novel by the incessant blasts of light. Hail pelted the campsite. Dad’s SUV suffered a few dents. The tent was leveled. After that night, I’d had my fill of camping. So had my parents. We never went again.
I was in an RV now, but RVs aren’t armored trucks. The material that makes up the shell of one has to be durable, but lightweight. Ever see what a tornado does to a trailer park? Same materials, more or less—but flimsier. When I was back in Wisconsin, I used to watch for storms with diligence. It helped me plan my days. I never thought about watching for them while on the road. It hadn’t occurred to me.
Jump ahead to four hours later. I am passed out on the bed in the back of the RV, Fester curled up next to my head. We are not touching because it’s too hot to have a furry mammal on any part of my body. I have every window in the RV open, the roof vent open full. It was miserably warm, but I was also exhausted. I’d had to fight the Sandman to give up the magic dust that night, and I was just touching the edge of Dreamland.
The storm started with lightning in the distance, but I was out. I didn’t see it. The first rumbles of thunder were low and distant. They weren’t going to bother me, either. I woke up when there was a crack of thunder near enough to rattle the RV from tires to roof. It made me jump out of sleep. Winds had picked up to alarming speeds and were whistling through the screens of the Greyhawk with force. The air had cooled thirty or forty degrees. Before I could pull on a pair of shorts, hail started pelting my home; thick, heavy balls of ice smashed into the RV. One of the plastic side windows cracked. A swell of panic rose into my gorge.
I leapt to the driver’s seat and started the engine. It had barely roared to life when I slammed it into Drive and stepped hard on the gas. The RV lurched, spun its tires on a few chunks of hail, and then caught pavement and launched ahead. I ripped the RV onto the highway, but then realized that was a stupid move. What was I going to do? Outrun the storm in a bulky RV? Not likely.
Lightning dotted the sky with frightening frequency. All around me were streaks of angry, blue-white light. The thunderclaps slammed above, each one sounding like it was just outside my car. I used the electric window controls to roll up the driver and passenger windows, but the side windows and the roof vent were still open. Nothing was muffled, nothing lessened. The winds were getting stronger. If you’ve never driven what is, in essence, a gigantic box with zero aerodynamics during a windstorm, you can count yourself lucky. I don’t know how semi drivers deal with it. The wind was surging off the driver side of the RV. It was a constant fight to keep it on the road. Every blast of the wind would push me at least a foot or two to the right, and I would have to yank the wheel left to compensate.
I knew that being on the wide-open highway in the middle of a painfully flat prairie area was probably the worst place to have the RV at that moment. I needed to get off the highway and find shelter. I needed to be away from the hail and wind. I had no idea how much longer the next exit along the highway would be, and I wasn’t going to turn around and drive the RV into the storm. Hail continued to pelt the Greyhawk. It sounded like someone was attacking me with baseball bats and crowbars, just sharp, hard cracking noises. I saw a highway overpass ahead. I remembered seeing television footage of people hiding from a tornado in the ribs of an overpass bridge once. I also remembered seeing many articles afterward telling people not to do that. I didn’t see a lot of other choices, though. I needed protection from the wind and the lightning. I brought the RV to a stop under the overpass. The noise from the hail decreased immediately, although the rear panel was still being touched-up pretty good. I grabbed Fester, but he freaked out. He clawed and kicked at me, struggling to get away. He slashed my wrist badly with his rear claws, and I dropped him. He bounced to the table, and then leapt to the overhead bunk and hid behind the wall of water bottles. I couldn’t get to him. I didn’t want to leave him, but I didn’t see any other choice. I sprinted out the side door of the RV and charged up the paved hill to the underside of the bridge. I clambered to a spot where I was protected from winds and rain, and braced myself against the concrete to wait out the storm.
When a storm hit back when I lived sheltered in a house, and had TV weathermen to tell me how fast the storm was moving and a helpful radar image to show me where the storm was, it was almost disappointing how fast a good storm clipped along. Often, before I could really get to a point of enjoying the lightning and thunder, the storm had passed by leaving a curtain of dull, gentle rain behind it. Now that I was pressed against concrete slabs and hearing wind howling only feet from my head, the storm seemed to last forever. In the frequent lightning, I could see the hailstones piling up like snowfall, a carpet of lethal, icy chunks ranging from quarter-sized to softball-sized. I was at Nature’s mercy. There was nothing to do but ride it out and hope it didn’t get worse.
I could hear the winds surging in the distance. A familiar freight-train noise was building. Tornado. I’d survived a tornado over a year ago in Wisconsin. I remembered it too well. It sounded far away, but I knew how a tornado could travel. I knew how it could dance through the countryside beholden to no one, save its own whims. I closed my eyes and hunkered down. A tornado coming close to the bridge would likely destroy the RV.
An eternity passed. The winds eventually died down and a simple rain followed the storm front. I was still alive. The RV was still intact. I left my hiding spot and returned to the RV. In my haste to find shelter, I’d left the stupid thing running. I walked around the Greyhawk and inspected the damage. The right side and the roof were dimpled like a golf ball from hail damage. The rear side had taken a dozen direct hits from large chunks of ice and the large plastic window in the rear was cracked in a corner, but not broken. All in all, I got off lucky. It could have been much, much worse.
I slept in the Greyhawk under the overpass the rest of the night. In the morning, my wind-up alarm dragged me from my bed. I considered sleeping in that day, but I was anxious to see if the countryside had suffered damage. I wanted to see if I could find a tornado’s path and judge how close I’d come to serious misfortune.
I fed Fester dry cat food and skipped breakfast myself. I had no appetite. The temperature had cooled somewhat, but it was still summer, still hot, and with the new rainfall the humidity was going to rise even higher.
I found the path of the tornado. It had come pretty close to getting me, geographically speaking. The twister had touched down in the middle of an overgrown field just outside of a little blip of a town called Stony Ridge. Th
ere was a wide swath of turned-up grasses and fallen trees leading into the collection of houses that made up the town. I drove into town to survey the damage.
What is it about human nature that makes us love and fear images of destruction? Any time there was a storm that destroyed a barn or took down a tree, my friends who lived near the fallen object would post pictures on Facebook. If there was a flood in Florida, we’d all be glued to video footage of people kayaking through streets. When I was a kid, a tornado took out a single house just north of Sun Prairie. My mom and I got into a car to drive out to see the splintered wreckage for ourselves. Even in a world filled with entropy, I was still drawn to the majestic damage of storms.
I drove into Stony Ridge. It was one of those loose collections of older houses that was entirely forgettable, even more so now because most of the houses in town were obliterated. The tornado had done its best to erase the town from the map. Nothing remained except wild piles of splintered two-by-fours and concrete footings. Home goods and assorted debris were scattered across the streets. I spied at least two desiccated corpses tossed among the wreckage. They looked like thin, gray-green paper pulled over a skeleton frame, hollow skull-eyes staring and vacant.
The rain was little more than a drizzle, and curiosity got the better of me. I shut down the RV, got out, and started poking through some of the wreckage. Whenever I entered someone’s home, it made me feel like an archaeologist. I was learning things about people, people who had lived and died before me. I could learn about their religious practices, what they ate, what they did for fun, and sometimes, if I opened the wrong drawer in a bedroom, I could learn about their sexual practices. I didn’t really enjoy that part of it. It always felt a little skeezy.
In one of the homes, in what remained of the basement, I found a horde of bottled water and canned goods on a bunch of steel racking. On one of the shelves, I found twenty small, thin bars of pressed gold in a steel lock-box. No lie. I suppose it would have been something like $100,000 back when society still functioned, maybe more. I could only imagine the guy who had the gold anticipated the collapse of the markets and dissolution of currency. He must have invested in it well before the Flu, though. Judging from his basement stores, he looked like one of those guys who had been preparing for the fall of society. Fat lot of good it did him. He was dead. The gold was worthless. I left it where it lay and got back on the road, heading east into the rising sun.
The Survivor Journals Omnibus [Books 1-3] Page 27