They weren’t getting a whole lot closer to their destination but they were getting out of the heart of the city, and the going did seem to get easier the further out they got. The roads still weren’t clear, but it was better.
It was normally a trip that took a few hours, depending on the traffic. The highway was a mess which wasn’t uncommon but this was like a massive accident in the middle of rush hour that went on and on. The biggest roadway collision in the history of man. Jess instead chose to stick to the smaller roads by the lake. By the time he had reached the town of Pickering, he had to stop for a break. He pulled into a gas station. The pumps were not working but there was a kind of roof on stilts that protected them from the near endless onslaught of falling ash.
Jess turned the car off to preserve gas but kept the headlights trained at the small store attached to the station. The shop had already been ransacked but there were still potato chip bags intact here and there, most on the floor and pushed back under a low ledge. There was a dead body behind the counter. Jess peered over the desk only long enough to determine that there was no life in the face of the man who lay there. He took the snacks back to the boys and they tore them open from their packages and ate. The darkness seemed unending and there seemed to be no lights anywhere, although it was odd that the door dinged as he entered and left. The flashlight also didn’t seem as bright as it was once was and he was sure that the batteries were soon to expire. Packages hung from the walls but there were no batteries, just condoms called “Bareback Stallion’” and cardboard pine tree cut-outs in clear cellophane.
Once back in the van, he struggled to find the confidence in his decisions.
He looked over at his children. Dustin was asleep; Michael was yawning.
Across the street was a strip mall – a row of stores anchored by a big box company specializing in home furnishings and knickknacks for your kitchen and bathroom.
He jostled Dustin by the shoulder.
“Grab the bags,” he said, “and put your jackets on.”
There was a very cold wind that had kicked up now, blowing the ashes around in a myriad of directions. Jess momentarily permitted himself to ponder the illogical thought that months had passed rather than days. Was it possible it was winter?
“What date is it Orson?”
“I don’t have any databases to cross-check, but my own calendar indicates that it’s the 28th of August.”
“You know, I’ve seen some winter weather that could rival this, but never in August.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Michael said. “And they used to have dollar stores, where everything cost a dollar.”
Michael rolled his eyes.
“It’s true!”
“Whatever dad,” Dustin added.
The boys knew better – at this point – than to ask questions that contradicted their father’s orders. They scrambled across the parking lot, their feet leaving a trail in the ash behind them. The first store they came to was a pharmacy. Its doors were locked. Same for the music store next door. The biggest one, called HomeSense, had large, sliding glass doors. Jess passed underneath the door’s sensors and they parted like they would on a normal day, eager to admit more shoppers.
Inside, the power was off; no lights were on, yet the ceilings were abnormally high and allowed a small amount of light in from the outside, which was only marginally lighter than the interior of the store. An unmoving escalator went up to the second floor, where signs indicated that bedding supplies could be had here. Jess decided to do a quick walk-through of the place, starting with the ground level.
“Stay close to your brother,” he told Michael.
Michael grabbed a metal towel bar, ripped off the ends and held it at his side like a baseball bat. He put a hand on his brother’s shoulder and propelled him ahead, behind his father.
There were shelves lined with plates and pots and kitchen gadgets in cardboard boxes. Jess managed to pick up a few small candles, lit one with a lighter from his bag and filled his pockets with the rest. He took another handful and handed it to his boys, which they also stuffed into pockets and bags.
They had made it through the area for kitchen supplies when Jess noticed a door that must have led to a back storage area. He walked up to it and pushed it open slowly.
Inside the room were skids of boxes. There was a draught coming from somewhere – doors not completely closed near the back perhaps – and as he crept forward he saw a sliver of light that shone like a wide, thin beam into the room, creating the silhouette of what looked distinctly like a person.
They stood still for what seemed like several minutes, waiting. Michael tried moving forward and Jess put up a hand. Stay still. There was a cough finally, absolute evidence that this was a man. Jess extended the dying flashlight to draw the scene out from the shadows. He reacted by cranking his head sideways to avoid the direct light. Jess could see that the man was tall and thin. His beard was white and most of the hair on the top of his head was thin and stringy, save for a small clump of haphazardly pointed strands that arched out in such a way that made it clear that he had not showered in some time. The man’s face frightened him the most. He seemed to have various boils across his forehead, cheeks and nose – they were large, round pink glistening blisters. His eyes were red with aggressive veins. He put his arms out and a moan escaped his lips.
Jess could feel his boys huddling up close behind him. His eyes were slowly adjusting and he saw, cowering against some stacked boxes behind the man, a woman and two small children.
The man made another noise, barely audible.
“Please,” he said and followed this up with a series of violet coughs.
Michael lowered the bar. The others came out from their hiding spot, slowly; standing behind the old man, displaying clear trepidation.
“Are you okay?” Jess said.
The man fell backwards with limited control, sitting himself atop a box. An old woman – presumably his spouse – shuffled over to his side. When she spoke, all of them (even Dustin) noticed the barely restrained fear and panic in her voice.
“He’s sick,” she said. “He was out when the blast hit, taking out the garbage. These are our grandchildren. Don’t hurt them. Please.”
She nodded at the two children, one boy, one girl, both holding tightly to her on each side.
“Their parents are out trying to find a working vehicle for us.”
“You’re alone?” Michael had spoken up.
“Yes,” the woman said. “I’m Patricia and this is my husband George. These two little critters are Grace and Peter.”
George took a large pair of glasses out of his pocket and put them on.
“Forgive me,” he said. “I can’t see well without them but sometimes it also hurts more just to wear them. Might actually be better not to see half the time.”
The boils were larger on the outside of his hands and he gazed at them for a brief moment contemplatively.
“How did you survive?” Jess said.
“Our house is old, older than me, and it has very thick walls,” George said. “I only opened the door for a moment. The blast knocked me right off my feet, like a hurricane. The others were all sleeping. What’s your story?”
“I was at work,” Jess said. “These two were getting ready for bed.”
He explained that they were trying to get out of the city.
“The ash seems corrosive,” George said with his creaky, strained voice. “I think it gets into the engine of vehicles. Causes them to stop working.”
“How long have you been here?” Michael said.
“Since two days ago,” Patricia said. “There are many large and fluffy beds upstairs, so if you have to spend the night, it should be comfortable.
The idea didn’t make anyone feel better but they were slightly buoyed by the new company. The world at least, hadn’t perished. Not yet.
“Is it day?”
“I believe so – we have a working smartcard but we’ve been
trying to conserve the battery.”
The group gave Jess and his sons a tour of the area upstairs. It was surprisingly cozy, although they explained that it wasn’t completely meeting their needs. They had no food.
Jess unzipped one of the backpacks and withdrew a few packages of the most nutritious snacks he could find. He gave them two each. He hardly felt that granola bars were great meals but the family ate them up quickly, except for the old man, who ate one and passed the other on to the children, who took it without question.
Michael was acting restless, bouncing from one foot to another. He finally yanked on his father’s jacket and they moved off to the side and spoke in whispers.
“What are we doing here? We should keep moving. The food won’t last forever.”
“We need to rest,” Jess said. “None of us have slept in a bed for days. We need a good night’s sleep and then we can start fresh tomorrow with our heads clear so that we can plan out our next steps.”
“They never care about what we have to say,” the old man said. He waved his hand through the air as though he were swatting away some unseen insect. “We’re old; we don’t know what we’re talking about. We have nothing to offer.”
They had positioned several reclining chairs in a semi-circle with a view to the front windows of the store. They could all oversee the parking lot before the store, but little could be seen out there apart from the falling ash in the dim light of the waning day.
“When I was a boy, we ate the same thing day after day,” the old man said. “And we had single mattresses on the floor, which we had to share with our brothers. Mattresses that were little better than sleeping on the floor itself. If the springs didn’t get up under your armpits and jab you in the ribs you could on your brothers doing it.”
Michael watched the ash fall from the windows. It was so light and silent that it really did look like snow from a distance. It was the only thing that moved outside the windows.
The old woman was at least correct about the abundant bedding on the upper floor. A pathway for shoppers separated the two families in their chosen beds. A single candle was placed between them upon a large plate, collected from the lower floor.
Jess could see that his sons were still tense with worry. The small flame sparkled off their open eyes.
Dustin’s voice fluttered out into the air with a question.
“Do you think Mom will be okay?”
Jess had tried not to think about it. He wanted to hold tightly to his hope as much as his boys did.
He kissed them both on their foreheads the way he had done since they were both babies and whispered for them to go to bed.
“She’ll be okay.”
Chapter 21
Jess woke, wondering what time it was. Michael had the smartcard. Dustin’s black digital Ironman wristwatch was attached to his arm. It was tucked up under his slumbering head.
It still appeared to be night but Jess’s body told him otherwise. He rarely slept past sunrise. He had trained himself to wake up at the same time for the last 10 years and it was almost always right on schedule. For the first year or two of their marriage, Toni would watch him walk over to the alarm clock and turn it off, often a minute or two before it filled the room with sound. He never needed the blasted clock but he continued to use it all the same.
He peered out to the large bay windows on the second level, wondering what they should do next. He only knew that he had to keep his children safe. That’s what Jess would have wanted. When his boys were babes, he would jump from sleep when they jostled in their cribs. Several years of sleepless nights caused his temples to go grey.
It was now early enough that Jess’s internal body clock told him it was time to get up. He was used to getting up at the same time every day. He was unaccustomed to the lack of visual clues however. Because though it was still dark when he usually woke, there was always a tell-tale purple hue to the sky that indicated that the sun’s appearance wasn’t far off. Now, it was difficult to tell exactly where the horizon started as the view before them was a large dark canvas. The ashes, at least, had slowed in their descent, or perhaps less was falling. The sky was not filled with the stuff now. It instead fell unimpeded. A layer of frost had formed in the corners of every window.
He looked over at his boys in the bed beside his. Both faced the other, deep in the grips of a dream that was, Jess hoped, better than their current situation.
He sat up in his own bed, pushed off the sheets and walked over to the glass, looking closer at the sky and saw a fissure of sorts. Just a crack in the darkness where the cloud seemed to split and a thin line of grey-blue peeked through. It only lasted a moment but it was like being lost at sea and catching a glimpse of land in the distance. Yes, he had repeated over and over that they would be okay, but this was something he had to do for his sons. Now, he found himself believing it. It wasn’t just positive reinforcement of a bleak possibility. There was still a sky. It was still possibly blue; the sun, presumably, was still up there and the moon still pulled the tides in and out.
Then he heard something that broke his concentration: the sound of movement somewhere below them; a distinct sliding sound, like children shuffling their feet across a frozen pond.
He stood up and looked around quickly. Their new companions had taken up the biggest bed they could find. The old man and woman had their grandchildren between them and were all wrapped up tight, only their heads poking out from the top of a thick white blanket.
He heard the sound again. It might have been the automatic doors, he thought. First, they had opened, now they closed as whatever it was moved in or away from the sensors.
Movement could be heard below. No one else was awake. Jess took two long and quiet steps over to his son’s bed, laid one hand each on their backs and shook them gently, his ear trained toward the movement below.
Michael woke first. He sat up immediately. A second shake was required to rouse Dustin.
“Something is downstairs,” he whispered. “Get ready to move.”
Michael nodded his head and threw back the covers quickly. Both boys were still wearing everything but their shoes, which could be found just off to the edge of the bed.
Jess took stalking-like slow steps over to the unmoving escalator, found a display of heavy brass candle holders nearby and took one in each hand. He stood at the peak of the stairs, waiting. There was no further sound. What could set the doors off? A blowing leaf? A rolling tin? A hungry rodent?
He told his sons to stay put and took very slow and deliberate steps downwards, one at a time, pausing to listen with each sound.
He was halfway down the escalator steps when a horrendous sound stiffened his body. It was similar to the sound of the explosion yesterday. You couldn’t ignore it; it seemed to come from everywhere all at once, like a wall of sound, or a wall of noise, escalating in pitch until you wanted to cover your ears, and then, it stopped as suddenly as it had appeared.
He stood still - halfway down the escalator steps when a follow-up sound came: something broke in front of him. A plate or something made of glass. He knew the sound from the recesses of his own memory banks. Children running through the kitchen.
The stair beneath his feet jostled. It jerked and heaved and started moving him downwards. The noise of the mechanics below his feet were deafening. The power for the escalator had come back on and was delivering him to whatever waited below. At the bottom, he stepped off, stopped, waited and listened, trying to hear above the steady grind of the moving stairway. He heard more sounds; feet, scampering quickly, towards him.
Something small quickly advanced on him. He readied one of the heavy candles in a hand, to strike, if needed. But it stopped, several feet in front of him; a figure hunched close to the ground, the only movement was a tail and its backside whipping back and forth.
Yellow and thin, its hair waved with the layering of moisture upon its back. The eyes of Jess and the dog met, both uncertain. Jess saw a leash trailin
g behind the beast, a flash of a metal tag hanging from its collar. He put both candlesticks in one hand and took a chance, bent at the knees and extended a hand outwards. This was the equivalent of a welcoming handshake for dogs. He had remembered his father teaching him this. This way, you took on a gesture that was not threatening and you found out quickly if things were friendly, or not.
The yellow dog wagged its tail quickly back and forth and moved forward, head bowed. Toni would have been proud, Jess thought.
Chapter 22
Computers were beeping. Heat was coming out of the vents. Then it stopped again and everything turned off.
Dustin noted that the power had been on for exactly 28 minutes.
“Maybe someone’s trying to fix the power system,” Michael said.
“Maybe,” Jess agreed.
Michael said that he was still able to tap into the wi-fi coming from the music store next door. He projected the screen up on the nearest wall but most websites presented 404 Page Not Found errors.
“I can confirm that,” Orson added. “Google was still running, though their news feeds had content that was several days old. There were few reports on what was happening. Some blog posts and tweets but very little coming from large news sources except one article published by the Dallas News indicating that survivors were attempting to move north to flee the mounting tide of violence and suffering.”
“That voice sounds so familiar,” the old man said.
Patricia nodded.
“Orson Welles,” Michael said. “I don’t even think you’re old enough to remember him.”
Jess wrapped an arm around Michael’s shoulder as one web address after another failed to load.
Then Michael typed something else and the screen of the smartcard filled up with a web page for the high school’s football team. Michael posed with the football in a photo after a touchdown, holding it like a prized trophy.
“I’m sorry I missed the last game,” Jess said.
“It’s all right,” Michael said. “It was a Friday. You work late on Fridays.”
Among the Roaring Dead Page 17