by Justin Bell
***
“Rebecca!” a voice shouted inside the dark van, pulling her out of her memories, her remembrance of her first operation, the first time she fired her weapon in action, killing a man. An anguished ex-husband, a desperate man just trying to put his family back together with no other alternative but to—
“Fields, wake up!”
This time she did pull free, starting to sit up, but a burning stab of pain in her left shoulder snapped her back to vicious reality and she halted, drawing in a sharp, swift breath. She looked up through a haze of fogged vision and saw Rhonda looking over her shoulder from the driver’s seat.
“Sorry to bother you, Rebecca,” she said. “really sorry. Greer is feeling very hot. Like I can barely keep my hand on his forehead. We’ve been following Route 20, and it's heading in toward Toledo, should we stop there?”
Fields blinked her eyes and used her good arm to leverage herself to her feet, muffling a groan as she moved up by the passenger seat.
“What’s in Toledo?” she asked.
Rhonda shook her head. “I don’t know, I’m just worried he might not make it to Cleveland.”
“I think stopping in a city we don’t know is not a good idea. We gotta keep going.” She put her palm on his forehead, and it was slicked with hot sweat. “Yeah, he’s feverish for sure. I can’t tell how bad.” She pressed an ear to his chest, narrowing her eyes. “He’s breathing, and it doesn’t sound too raspy. That’s a good thing.”
Rhonda nodded as she drove. “Okay. I’ll get back on 90 and hope that traffic has cleared up a bit. We’re making good time at the moment, but who knows what could go wrong.”
“We always seem to run into problems by the city centers,” Rebecca replied.
“More people equals more problems. How’s your shoulder?”
Rebecca moved it slightly, then winced and let it rest back into place. “Hurts like crazy. I don’t think it’s bleeding anymore, but it’s sore. Real sore.”
“Sorry I had to wake you.”
“It’s all good. I was having a miserable dream, anyway.”
“Anything you want to talk about?”
Rebecca looked around the van. Winnie’s head rested against Tamar’s shoulder, and the young boy’s head was pressed against the window. Max and Brad both appeared to be asleep in the third row next to Phil whose eyes were pressed tightly closed beneath the improvised clothing wrap around his injured head. In the way back of the van Angel seemed to be sleeping soundlessly as well, for once taking a few minutes of shuteye rather than hovering over her.
She looked back at Rhonda. “Just some bad memories. One of my first field operations for SWAT. Nasty hostage situation, I had to… well… I shot someone first time out. I meant to injure him, you know, make him drop his weapon? But, I nicked an artery. Guy bled out in minutes.”
“Oh my,” Rhonda replied, her voice a hushed whisper. “I’m sorry, Rebecca. That must have been difficult.”
Fields remained kneeling, looking out into the darkness next to them as they continued down Route 20.
“I’ve been thinking about that a lot since… since the Shimizu’s.”
Rhonda didn’t reply. She kept her eyes facing forward, hands clamped on the wheel. She tried to push past the stone of guilt lodged deep in her guts, that hard and crusted nugget. The memory of her yelling at Rebecca that the Shimizu’s deaths were all her fault, and she bore complete responsibility.
Fields was tough. She was hard. A fully trained and experienced FBI special agent who strapped on tactical gear and automatic weapons for a living.
But she was still a person. Rhonda hadn’t known about her first operation, that hostage situation where the man ended up dead. It was enough to scar even the hardest, most tough-skinned woman.
“What I said, Rebecca. Back at the mall—”
“Don’t worry about it,” Fields replied. “It’s not you causing this. It’s me.”
“Yeah, but I’m sure I didn’t help.”
Rebecca didn’t answer this, she remained kneeling in silence, holding her hand to Greer’s head, easing her eyes nearly closed.
The van rounded a corner, veering from Route 20 up an entrance ramp, heading back to Interstate 90. As the only two people awake in the van, the two women could see even in the dim light of late night that the traffic was thinner here than it had been outside of Chicago and there was more room to move, even with Toledo only a stone throw’s away. Picking up speed, Rhonda looked out into the distance, and saw yet another ambient orange glow on the horizon, a soft and pale light, radiating against the dark clouds. Even from this distance, it looked like just another city on fire, but this fire was big. This fire was huge.
“Can you turn off the vents?” Rebecca asked. “Air is thick out here.”
Rhonda nodded, and she’d noticed it as well. A charcoal smell, the pungent barbecue stench of burning meat and burnt wood. Snapping off the vents, she realized it was too little too late, and the van was full of the stink, her eyes pinching closed and stinging.
“Where is that coming from?” Rebecca asked, leaning left gingerly, avoiding putting any weight on her bad arm. She angled her head to look through one of the driver’s side windows and noticed the pale amber sky in the distance. “That’s a big campfire.”
“Yeah, we’re steering way clear of that, whatever it is.” Cars began to grow in moderate frequency as they moved closer to Toledo, and Rhonda veered around them, maintaining lane discipline, then pushed through the glut, the pathway opening back up again a short distance later. She looked down into the rearview mirror and nodded.
“I think we might have a straight shot from here to Cleveland.” She glanced back as they drove, catching Winnie out of the corner of her eye. “Everything okay with Winnie?” she asked. “She’s been pretty quiet.”
Rebecca looked over at the girl, whose head rested peacefully on Tamar’s shoulder just next to her. Her eyes were closed and her breathing was heavy and regular.
“She’s asleep,” Rebecca replied.
“Yeah she is now, but she was awake for a bit, just staring blankly out the window. I didn’t get a chance to ask Angel about it.”
“She didn’t seem to want to talk about what happened at that house,” Rebecca confirmed. “They got in here and crashed.”
Rhonda glared in the mirror, shifting her gaze toward Angel, curled and shrouded in the darkness near the right edge of the van’s interior. His chest rose and fell in rhythm and she decided not to bother him.
“Is that Toledo?” Rebecca asked, leaning forward to look out the front windshield. Rhonda followed her gaze, barely making out the shadowed forms of buildings rising out from the front of Lake Eerie, a vague glow surrounding the city like a strange, mystical energy, a beacon, waving and flickering among the starlight.
“Is it burning, too?” Rhonda asked, her eyes catching the stuttering orange glow in the backdrop of the city.
“I think so,” Rebecca replied.
Her eyes scanning the signs lining the right edge of the highway, Rhonda angled the van toward the right lane, looking to where 475 connected and headed south. Interstate 90 was converging with Interstate 80 and plowing a trench right through the downtown, and she’d seen enough cities to know that this was not a good place to be.
“Getting off?” Rebecca asked.
“Yeah. If we jump on 475 that will wrap south around the city and connect back up with 80 on the other side. I don’t want to risk downtown, especially if it’s on fire.”
“The condition Greer’s in, I’m not sure we want to waste time going around,” Rebecca replied.
“We need to think about us, too. And the kids. He’d want us to.”
Fields nodded, acknowledging the truth in that statement and Rhonda took the branching roadway, meeting up with 475 and heading south toward the perimeter of the city.
“Whoa,” Rebecca said quietly and Rhonda looked out her window as she drove, taking her eyes off the road for a mom
ent. From the angle they were driving, she could see the long, twig shaped fingers of flame, crawling up the side of one of the tall skyscrapers, making its way up the angled wall, engulfing the entire building and reaching up toward the sky. In the dark of night they couldn’t see the smoke, but they were starting to smell it, and the light from the fire illuminated several buildings around it in a serene, gestating glow.
Smaller buildings around it were alight in flame as well, a subdued flicker brightening the windows.
A sudden, echoing boom shattered the night, its resonating shockwave rolling over the roadways, and hit the van as if it were a physical object. Less than a second later, another skyscraper next to the one on fire blasted apart, windows shattering under a thick cloud of impact, chased by blooms of yellow light.
“Holy sh—!” Fields shouted. “One of the buildings! It exploded!”
Another boom roared across the horizon toward them, the sound of the exploding skyscraper a few precious moments after the horrifying vision.
“What is going on in there?” Rhonda demanded, easing the van around a bend, but keeping it on the relatively empty stretch of 475. The way they’d turned, she could more easily see the skyline, and as she watched, four sets of orange tracers arced through the air, peppering another skyscraper, walking up the flattened wall of the building, tearing at it with thrashing lights and smoke. A dull whump followed and another explosion, this one out of sight, but a bright light illuminated the entire skyline, silhouetting ruined buildings and flaming wreckage ahead of it.
“There’s a war going on,” Rhonda whispered.
“Where is that?” a panicked voice called from the back seat and Rhonda turned. Winnie and Tamar were both awake and peering out the window, eyes wide, mouths open as if in mid-scream. Tamar had both palms pressed to the window with Winnie looking out from around him. Max, Brad, and Phil were awake in the third row and Angel stirred slightly in the rear.
“That’s Toledo,” Rhonda replied. “We’re staying far away, kids, don’t worry.”
As Winnie watched, two more muffled blasts bellowed from the downtown area and the tallest building shuddered with the impact, then blasted apart, the top fifteen floors of the building disintegrating in a massive, white light explosion, flaring the dark night into daylight.
“Mother of Mercy,” Angel whispered, looking out through the third-row window. “Are we being invaded?”
“I don’t know,” Rebecca replied, “but we’re just going to keep driving.”
“What if Cleveland is like this?” Winnie asked, looking toward her. “What if we can’t stop there?”
“We have to try,” Rhonda replied. “We have to try.”
“Rhonda?” a weakened voice came from the passenger seat and she swung her head around toward it, prying her eyes from the scene in Toledo. “Look out!”
She saw it then, at the last moment, Clancy Greer’s finger extending toward the windshield. Her single headlight shone out onto 475 in an off-white pool and caught upon a thick crowd of people, walking across the road, aimlessly wandering from the dark to the dark, momentarily caught in the frozen beam of light.
Rhonda’s eyes drew wide. “Hold on!” she screamed and barreled her foot onto the brake, hoping and praying that she wasn’t too late.
***
It took a few precious moments for it to register with Rhonda what she was seeing. Even as far as they were from the burning city, the road was baked in a light pallor of orange and yellow, a somber bright mixed with the pungent, smoke stench of the fires. She peeled her eyes away from the shattered skyline of Toledo, the tallest skyscraper now a jagged wound, and when she did, she saw them. A thick wall of humanity. People crossing the Ohio Turnpike, side by side, end to end, a methodical march, clutched together like a moving wall of flesh.
Scenes like this had been seen countless times on American television, but typically they were news stories shot from battle-torn African and Middle Eastern countries, an endless line of wrecked and broken refugees, trudging from what used to be their home into the unknown, walking a direction simply because it’s the direction someone chose, without a particular destination in mind.
Refugees. Dozens of them. Hundreds. Thousands. Perhaps more. Right here, in the heartland of America, walking across the Ohio Turnpike. Her mind almost couldn’t make the connection, the vision seemed so strange and out of the ordinary, it simply couldn’t be real and she hesitated for a time, her foot frozen, not sure what it should be doing next. Even as she heard them screaming in her ear to watch out, to stop the van, to do anything but plow through those ragged and beaten people.
Her foot slammed down on the brakes and her hands cranked a hard left turn on the steering wheel, tires catching pavement in a shrill, whining scream of flaying rubber and blackened asphalt. The van jerked sideways, moving in a shuddering skid as it barreled toward the throng of people, but as Rhonda shoved the brakes down to the floor and held the wheel turned left, it shook, rumbled, and finally stopped a few blessed meters from the huddled group. The engine purred its haggard growl, the screeching of tires fading into the dark night, the thick group of wanderers glaring at them with wide eyes and vacant, open-mouthed stares as if they had never once seen a four-wheeled vehicle in their lives.
Rhonda looked over past Greer who was awake, but remained lying in the passenger seat, setting her sights outside the passenger side window trying to make eye contact with any members of the crowd of refugees. They all looked back curiously, but she couldn’t find anyone in particular who looked as if they might have some answers or any semblance of leadership.
“They’re killing us!” one of the refugees screamed, a large woman, with an unruly cascade of braided hair spilling out from underneath a tied bandana over her head. She took a few steps away from the crowd. “They killin’ us in there!” she screamed again, pointing a thick finger back toward the city. As if in response to this accusation another volley of dull thumps, followed by an orchestra of cascading explosions barreled from the broken city, rolling over the grass hills and paved roads.
Rhonda activated the window switch and the passenger window crawled a slow path downwards as the woman drew closer. No longer so afraid, the crowd as a whole began to shrink in on the vehicle, and Rhonda grew somewhat uneasy as the waves of humanity closed in.
“What’s happening in there?” Rhonda asked, shouting out through the open window.
“We at war!” the woman replied. “World War III, only we fighting ourselves!”
“What do you mean?”
“People out west,” the woman replied. “They be tryin’ to come over East. Leavin’ their wrecked homes to settle here. They crashed through some blockades over in Chicago an’ brought some military with ‘em!”
“Military? Like, actual military?”
“They look actual!” the woman replied. “I seen ‘em. Tanks. Carriers! Dudes in camouflage. Whole nine yards.”
“So what happened?”
The woman jerked a finger over her shoulder. “Eastern folks don’t want ‘em here. They’s afraid they gonna drain the resources, as if we got any.”
The story was similar to what they’d heard in Chicago on the way over, although there it had not yet gotten to the point of full blown civil war.
“Most of us, we lived in Toledo,” she said. “But they started shellin’ each other. Wreckin’ buildings, blowing crap up. We got us the hell outta there!”
“Smart idea,” Rhonda replied.
The woman nodded emphatically as if Rhonda was the smart one, and she was agreeing with her.
“East sent out the Army and the Marines,” the woman continued. “Things are gettin’ nasty in there. Toledo’s the official front line of the next civil war!”
The idea chilled Rhonda to the bone. As if living on the precipice of nuclear annihilation wasn’t bad enough, now the entire nation was at war with themselves over what was owed to the survivors. It had all broken so quickly and so thoroughly.
>
“We decided we’re heading away. Don’t know where, just far away from here. I hope this war don’t spread, that’s all I’m sayin’.”
“I hope so, too,” Rhonda replied.
The woman nodded, then halted in mid yawn and focused a slanted stare at the woman in the van. “Say, lady,” she said inquisitively. “How many people you hold in that thing?” She jerked her head toward the van and upon hearing the words, a knot of danger tied around Rhonda’s insides, a coiled rope twisting within her organs, and pulling taught.
“We’re full up,” she replied. “Plus, we need to head to Cleveland. I have a sick person in here. He’s dying.”
The woman nodded, her eyes shifting toward Greer who still laid in the passenger seat. “Damn shame,” she replied quietly. “But, if’n he’s gonna die, and we got plenty of people here who are gonna live… maybe you make the right call and swap some bodies?”
Rhonda’s muscles tensed as the crowd drew in upon itself, moving closer as if orchestrated by the words the woman was speaking.
“I’m sorry,” Rhonda replied. “We’ve got children in here. We need to move on to Cleveland. I’m sure you understand!”
“Oh yeah,” the woman hissed. “I unnerstand. I definitely unnerstand.” She charged toward the van and raised a hand, starting to reach through the open window, scrambling for the switch that would unlock the door. Rhonda’s fingers fumbled next to her for the window close button and finally found it as the woman was elbow deep inside the passenger window. She thumbed the button and raised the window, catching the woman’s arm and starting to lift it up. The woman squealed lightly and stumbled back, whipping her arm from where the window was closing before it could get caught inside.
“That how it’s gonna be?” she screamed at Rhonda from outside, her words clearly audible even with the windows now closed. Ahead of the van, the horde of humanity converged, building a thick, bunched wall of angry eyes and thrashing fists.
“Give us the van!” a voice shouted.