Under the Gray Skies

by Jacqueline Druga

  Madison gasped so loudly I swore she would choke. “Yellowstone?”

  “Oh, hell no,” Ruth said. “That’s very northeast. But again, girls I’m guessing. Aren’t we all? It could have been nukes, It could have been a meteor, hell …” She finished the bottle. “Something could have hit the moon. It could have been a lot of things. Can I have another?” She extended her hand then stopped. “No, I shouldn’t.”

  “What volcano?” I asked.

  “Long Valley Caldera,” Ruth answered. “It’s due east of here and would explain why we aren’t buried. It’s big enough, probably set off the Cascadia Fault line. The suffocating, well, that has me leaning toward volcanic eruption. They say one third of all people in Pompeii died of suffocation, died holding their mouths, covering their heads. Instant death, sort of. Three breaths. Their first breath coated the lungs with a chemical ash that made like a concrete mixture in the lungs. Second breath thickened it. Third … sealed the airways. Death. I saw the bodies, I was there. Not in 79AD, mind you, I’m not that old, but on an expedition,” she exhaled. “And … there is a chance we may never know.”

  “So it wasn’t Yellowstone?” Madison asked.

  “Nah,” Ruth tapped Madison’s hand. “However, if everything is going to hell in a handbag, then it probably won’t be long before it blows.”

  Madison didn’t say anything, I believe Ruth was scaring her and I believe to keep her quiet, was why Madison handed her another vodka airline bottle.

  NOTEBOOK – DAY THIRTEEN

  Hey, Ev:

  I bet by now you are home from camp. I hope you had a great time. Boy, I wish you were with me. All those skills you learned in Scouts would come in handy right now. I met this woman named, Ruth. I don’t know if you remember Grandma Lucy, but she reminds me so much of her. Ruth was a teacher at a really big college. I was really glad to meet her. She is full of knowledge and she’s funny.

  We can’t travel for long. Each day we have to stop because it gets too dark to see. We are taking it one day at a time. We will get there. I promise.

  I love you.

  Mommy

  FIFTEEN – MOVING ON

  It was the first morning since everything happened that it was cold. Not just chilly cold, but winter cold. The sky was still semi-dark and we waited to leave. Finding a vehicle was going to be priority in our travels. The temperature in the building had to be about forty degrees. We needed more layers than what we had. I hated to do it, but it was necessary. I rummaged through some of the rooms looking for warmer clothing. I found a few items, they weren’t fashionable, but they’d work. I also found those paper disposable facemasks, which would come in handy. I checked the phone lines. I wasn’t expecting there to be any success. There wasn’t. But I had to try.

  I brought the warmer items back to the room, and then lugged our packs and the suitcase to the first floor. While Madison dressed and prepared Ruth, I then carried the four oxygen canisters down as well. They were heavy and took two trips. It was a good thing we rigged her wheelchair to carry them. Though I was pretty convinced they weighed more than Ruth.

  When I returned, Ruth was looking at the map with a magnifying glass.

  “Go south, southeast,” she said. “Just to be sure. Just to aim for warmth. I know you girls have to go north eventually, but stay as far south as you can for as long as you can. I am gonna suspect that the less ash, the more likelihood of finding others.”

  “That might not be a good thing,” Madison said, taking back the map.

  “Why do you say that?” I asked.

  “Because people are going to get desperate,” Madison said. “Desperate people do desperate things. If Ruth is right and this ash and cloud thin out maybe you are right as well, and there is help out there.”

  “If help is out there, our families are fine.”

  Madison nodded. “That’s what I would hope.”

  “Looks like you girls got it together,” Ruth said. “You don’t need help. You just need to get to your families.”

  “Do you have family other than in California?” I asked.

  Ruth shook her head. “No. Well … I think my grandson lives in Florida. Not sure.” She turned her head and looked out the window. “You girls better get moving. Daylight wasted is distance wasted.”

  Madison nodded. “Forward, or back?” she asked me.

  I knew what she was referring to. Did I want to walk backwards or forward when we carried Ruth down the stairs?

  “Doesn’t matter,” I answered. “I can do either.”

  Madison covered Ruth and then grabbed a facemask. “I want you to keep this on. We don’t need you breathing in too much ash. And if you need oxygen you let us know.”

  Ruth stopped Madison. “I’m not going.”

  “What?” Madison said with a laugh. “Of course, you are.”

  “No. No. I’m not. You have a rough road ahead, the last thing you need is to have me as a burden.”

  “Ruth?” I walked around for her to see me. “Do you want to stay because you don’t want to go, or are you just being a martyr?”

  “Why does that matter?” Madison snapped.

  I held my hand up. “It does. Trust me.”

  Ruth exhaled. “I’m going to die soon anyhow.”

  Madison chuckled emotionally. “Um, Ruth, you’ve been alive for ninety-two years, you lived through this, I don’t think you’re dying any time soon.”

  “I will eventually run out of food and water and die.” She forced a smile.

  “Alone,” Madison said. “You’ll die cold, hungry and alone. I won’t have that.”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Okay?” Madison asked.

  “Okay.” I took off that hideous green coat I had found. “I’ll bring our stuff back up here.”

  “What are you doing?” Madison asked.

  “Staying. You don’t want her to die alone, I don’t want her to die alone and I’m pretty sure Ruth doesn’t want to die alone.”

  “She’s super spry, Lace.” Madison pointed to Ruth. “We may be here for a while.”

  “Not if we don’t give her much food and …” I lifted the blanket from Ruth. “Let her be cold and live like we found her. I mean … more than likely hypothermia will set in long before she starves. She’s not too spry for that.” I winked at Madison. “I hear that’s not too painful and is actually peaceful.”

  “Oh my God,” Madison barked. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

  I kept a smug look on my face staring down at Ruth.

  “You’re willing to let me starve and freeze to death?” Ruth asked.

  “I got places to go. I refuse to walk with guilt over leaving you here alone to die. So I stay. I’ll just speed up the process.”

  “You’re being a dick on purpose,” said Ruth.

  “Yeah.” I nodded. “This is not the first time I dealt with something like this. I was apartment agent at public housing. One time, during a bad winter, all power went out to the senior building. One woman, eighty, refused to leave. I said the same thing to her. Know what happened?”

  “She left?” Ruth asked.

  “No, she died …” I paused. “Kidding. She left. Ready?”

  Almost in shock, Ruth nodded and murmured. “Yes.”

  Madison grabbed the blanket from my hand. “That was really twisted.”

  “Yeah, but it needed to be done,” I said, putting my coat back on. “Would you leave her?”

  “No.”

  “Neither would I.”

  Madison gave me another scolding look, hating my methods of convincing Ruth. What choice did we have? Every second was distance we didn’t get in the daylight.

  Madison wheeled Ruth down the hall, and once at the stairs we carried her down. I walked backwards holding on to the bottom of the wheelchair. Once in the lobby, we gathered our items, hooked the oxygen to Ruth’s wheel chair, and we left for the next part of our journey.

 
We would head south once we got a sense of direction.

  <><><><>

  Ruth tried to hide the fact that she gasped, but it wasn’t from the air or ash, it was from the sight of everything. I suppose it was a lot different looking out a window than it was being in the thick of it.

  She had spent days not seeing anything at all, the only light coming into her room was blocked by a mattress. Then when we moved her into another room, that view was limited.

  She was facing destruction she wasn’t ready to see.

  Moving her through the ash and around bodies and debris wasn’t easy. Ruth was lucky she weighed eighty pounds, but pushing that chair wasn’t easy. Madison and I switched off and on pushing her, and there were times it took us both to move the wheelchair. We weren’t moving fast, nor were we making much distance.

  We had to find a means of transportation if we wanted to head southeast and try to clear the ash.

  A hundred miles, maybe that would get us clear. A decent car with a half of tank of gas could get us there.

  My fingers were cold and getting numb, not even moving kept them warm. We had Ruth covered from head to toe and she didn’t complain about anything.

  Finally, after about three miles of walking, we spotted the building that could be our answer for shelter. The gray cinder block building would have been camouflaged between the overcast sky and the ash, had it not been for the bent yellow and black sign.

  It was one of those instant oil change places. The ones that claimed it took only ten minutes, but in reality the wait was closer to an hour.

  A car had crashed through the front window and one of the garage doors was open.

  After saying, “Hold up,” Madison made her way over.

  I watched as she entered, was in there for a few seconds and then came back out, making her way to us.

  “There’s two cars in there. One, the hood is open. The other is just sitting there,” she said. “I’m gonna see if I can find the keys behind the counter if they aren’t in the car. It looks in good shape.”

  “Think it will run?” I asked.

  “If it starts, I don’t see why not. I mean, more than likely it was just in for oil, right?” Madison walked back to the garage and pushing Ruth, I followed. We waited just outside, behind the car that had gone through the front window. There were bodies in the car, I could see that. After a few minutes, the left side of the garage door opened, “It started,” Madison said, then retreated back in.

  She pulled the car out from the garage and we loaded the bags, then Ruth and finally her wheelchair. I left the driving to Madison and I got in.

  We were fortunate, the economy sedan had nearly three quarters of a tank of gas. We could make some distance as long as obstacles didn’t get in our way.

  The best choice for a route was a straight one. While back and secondary roads could be blocked with cars and debris, the highways presented a different problem. Overpasses could have collapsed or were in a dangerous state.

  We opted for the secondary route. We had three good hours of daylight still and we headed south and south east.

  I didn’t understand that at first. What was the difference? I wasn’t a cartographer, but by looking at the map, if Ruth’s theory was right, Long Valley Caldera was almost perpendicular to where we were. Going directly East would take us into dangerous territory.

  Why not north?

  Reasons were presented. More volcanoes? Possibly. Just in case the Yellowstone one decided to blow … got it.

  Did it matter? We knew nothing. We hadn’t a clue what really happened. The only part about heading south that made sense to me was hoping for warmer weather.

  The dashboard thermometer read that the outside temperature was forty-three degrees. Was it ever forty-three degrees in California during summer?

  Chances were we’d stop for the night before we ran out of gas, and in stopping we had to think about staying warm, especially for Ruth.

  The first hour of our car ride, I thought a lot about my family. How it had been two weeks since they spoke to me. In their minds was I already dead?

  Ruth napped. Then again, she napped a lot. She actually fell asleep twice as we wheeled her through town before we found the car.

  I didn’t realize how quiet I had become lost in my own thoughts, until I spoke out randomly. “I saw a movie once.”

  “Oh, she speaks,” Madison said. “I thought you were sleeping or mad.”

  “No. Just thinking.”

  “About your family?” Madison asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Me, too.”

  “Do you think they think we’re dead?”

  Ruth mumbled from the back. “Probably.”

  I shook my head.

  “What movie?” Madison asked. “You said you saw a movie.”

  “Oh,” I sat up some. “I saw a movie. A bad one. Not porno bad, but B bad. Made in 1960 I believe. It was called ‘The Last Woman on Earth’. And it was about these three people scuba diving. They came up and all the air was gone.”

  “For real?” Madison said with some disbelief.

  “Yeah. Weird huh? And everyone was dead. No destruction. No earthquakes. Just the air was gone. It came back, but they were the last people on earth.”

  “What caused it?” Madison asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t remember?”

  “No. I do. They never said. They ran around guessing.”

  “What the hell? How can they do that and never say what caused it. It’s lazy writing,” Madison said.

  “Maybe he was being realistic,” Ruth said. “No people. No power. No news. Under those circumstances, those people would never know…. Do you? There’s a chance you can go the rest of your life and never know. Thank God for me it won’t take long.”

  Madison looked up to the rearview mirror. “You know, you’re awfully spry. Are you sure you’re ninety-two?”

  “Don’t I look it?”

  “No,” I answered. “Not at all. I wouldn’t peg you for older than seventy-five.”

  Silence.

  Madison snorted a laugh. “Oh please. She looks ninety.”

  It was a momentary pause in the seriousness with some friendly bantering. That, however, didn’t last long. The focus had to be on driving. I was the second set of eyes that was needed. It was hard to see anything. The twilight appearance of the day played tricks on my eyes and debris and other things that blocked the road were hard to see.

  Just before the sky darkened, instead of focusing on where we would stop, we began a search for our next vehicle.

  We put over two hundred miles on the car but estimated we only made it a hundred and eighty from Longview. The ash didn’t thin, the destruction didn’t lessen, the temperature didn’t warm, nor were there any less random bodies. Even that many miles didn’t stop the death or ruination.

  A few miles after our low fuel indicator dinged, we found our next automobile at a repair shop in a small suburb just north of Bakersfield. Madison announced she found a car that started but we didn’t transfer to that one, we left it in the garage. It was time we had to stop for the evening.

  That car would be our travel source the next day. Until then, with about a half an hour daylight left, we foraged the Kwik Shop across the street for what food we could. Not that we needed it, but we wanted to replenish, then we retreated back to the economy sedan.

  It was cold and the temperature had dipped to near thirty degrees Fahrenheit. Making a fire or building a source of heat had been far from our minds. Actually it never crossed my mind. It did when I grabbed that handful of lighters. For the night though, we used what little fuel we had remaining in the car to run the heater and stay warm. Windows cracked for airflow, it was our only option. We’d have to do better in the future, think ahead, especially if we wanted to survive however far we had to travel.

  <><><><>

  Whatever had happened to the world, didn’t just cause a reset of thinking, it
definitely reset the daylight savings time thing. For how long, I didn’t know, but for the time being, total darkness encompassed fourteen hours of the day. The other ten hours teetered between almost dark and the look of dusk when the day was at its brightest.

  There was no sun.

  I couldn’t even pin point in the sky where it was. The thick dark cloud coverage was threatening looking and loomed at a low altitude.

  When it was light, it was barely light. When it was dark, I couldn’t see my hand in front of me.

  Quick moments of bright came at night only when the lightening started and it always did, every night a weird electrical storm started, always accompanied by ear deafening thunder, then it would rain.

  That night in the car, it didn’t rain.

  I was grateful.

  We lit candles in the car and that helped to add heat. Being a small car, it stayed relatively tolerable. We discussed what we could do if we had to stop for another night and left to our own resources. None of us had ever built a fire. Hopefully we’d put enough miles behind us and find some sort of help or at least get to a warmer area.

  If not, we’d figure it out. There were plenty of cars for the time being. Like with that movie I saw, the world was pretty much a resource center for us. Unlike the movie, it wasn’t as pretty, it was ugly. Ever since Ruth mentioned the moon, I kept likening our surroundings to that. As if it were a mash up of the earth and moon. That’s what it looked like.

  I was the last to fall asleep. The candles in the car lit it enough for me to write in my journal. After Stevie’s name and story, I added Gregory Bannerman, the owner of the economy car that got us near Bakersfield and kept us warm. Gregory smoked. Empty packs of cigarettes were all through the car along with crushed energy drink cans. He had a chocolate bar obsession and judging by the amount of McDonald’s receipts, he ate there often.

  Gregory spent a lot of time in his car.

  I put that in my journal.

  Madison poked fun at me and then she fell asleep. My watch read it was near five AM when I blew out the last candle and finally positioned myself to go to sleep. Hideous green jacket closed tight and moving the blanket over me, I rested my head against the window and fell asleep.