Dark Road

by David C. Waldron

  “Good point. Keep the kids behind us both and slow down when you get to near the bottom of the stairs.” She said.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Everything looked the same in the garage as when they’d left and they made their way to the ambulance. Since Dan was the only one who really knew what he was looking for, Marissa continued to stand watch.

  At first glance, the inside of the ambulance appeared to have been ransacked, but upon closer inspection it looked to have been a cursory job, at best. A few of the interior compartments had been opened and the contents strewn about, but that was the extent of the mess. There were masks, and a couple of IV bags and tubing, and some syringes (still in their wrappers, for a wonder) but that was really it. It gave Dan a little hope. There wouldn’t be nearly as much in the ambulance as there would have been in the closet, but there might be something.

  Medications were in a locked compartment up near the driver’s compartment on the passenger’s side—at about head height. The compartment was still closed and locked. That was a good sign. Dan unlocked it and found two vials of Xylocaine and a few other things that would come in handy for either emergency or barter, if it came to that.

  He took out one of the vials he wanted and relocked the compartment. At his feet should be an EMT case, in another compartment. He bent to check, but that compartment was empty—someone had gotten away with a treasure trove of medical goodies.

  “Ok,” Dan said. “One more trip upstairs and then Mommy gets some shots.”

  For the third time that day, Marissa was on the verge of tears. She knew exactly what that meant, and had a hard time not herding the kids and Dan back upstairs.

  Dan had learned the hard way that you can’t be too prepared when it came to his job. He had an EMT kit in the house, in both cars, in his ambulance (job provided), and in a locked closet in his room at the fire station. They were headed to his room now. The irony of being so overly prepared in his work life, and yet so equally and woefully underprepared in his personal life, had not been lost on him.

  His personal EMT kit at work had been stolen twice. The first two had been the pretty, nice, shiny-red “toolbox” variety. The third was, too, but it was a little smaller and fit in a cardboard box. The cardboard box fit in his closet, under a second cardboard box full of stuff (mostly books), and had other stuff on top of it. The third kit hadn’t been stolen in four years. He was hoping it had also gone unnoticed during the last two months of looting.

  When they got to Dan’s room, the door was open, which Dan expected as they had walked by already. The room had been pretty thoroughly picked over, which was also expected. The closet was open, and the top of the closet had been gone through, but the bottom box was left unmolested. The box of books had worked. It had been too heavy to move to see what was underneath.

  With a smile, Dan moved the box of books to the floor, opened the bottom box, and extracted his mostly-full backup EMT kit. It didn’t have any medications in it, which would have been against regulations, but it did qualify as a pretty awesome first-aid kit, if he did say so himself.

  “Marissa, come here.” Dan said as he pulled out the proper gauge syringe, two Bactine wipes, and an alcohol wipe. Alcohol alone wasn’t going to cut it after three months, nope.

  “Are you sure?” Marissa asked, almost not believing her ears. She’d been in non-stop, almost teeth-gritting pain for the last three weeks, before the frantic flee for their life. The thought of relief was almost too good to be true. “I mean, do you have enough?”

  “I was there for a half dozen treatments; I asked each time how much they gave you in each spot, and I asked if I could feel where they were giving the injection,” Dan said. “Remember being embarrassed to the point that they mentioned your shoulders turning red?”

  Marissa started turning red all over again.

  “I see you do.” Dan grinned. “I have enough for at least eight ‘treatments’.”

  Marissa actually shed a tear as she came and sat down on the space that Dan had cleared on the bed and unbuttoned the top button on her shirt so she could pull down one shoulder at a time.

  “Is Mommy ok?” Jessie asked when she saw Marissa crying.

  Marissa smiled and even laughed a little. “Mommy is fine.” She said. “C’mere, Jess.”

  Jessie ran to give her mom a hug. Bekah followed suit.

  “You know how Mommy’s neck and shoulders hurt sometimes?” Marissa asked.

  Jessie nodded.

  “Well, Daddy has a shot that he can give me that will make it not hurt, just like when I went to the doctor before the power went out.”

  “Oh…and you’re crying because the shot will hurt?” Jessie asked.

  Marissa laughed again.

  “No, honey, it might sting just a little bit but it’s nothing like the ouchie in my neck and shoulders now.” Marissa said. “No, sometimes you cry because you’re so happy that you just can’t help it.”

  Jessie looked at her mom for a few seconds and then pronounced, “Mommy, that’s just silly.”

  “Yes, honey,” Marissa said with another little laugh, “it is, but it’s the truth. Now I’m going to let Daddy give me the shots so I can start feeling better, OK? I need to put you down so I can sit still.”

  Marissa put Jessie down and then sat up and Dan started feeling on her neck and shoulders. Dan whistled.

  “That bad, huh?” Marissa asked.

  “Like you need to ask,” Dan said.

  “True. It gets to a point where it’s, well it’s not background noise, and I’m not used to it, but it’s been there for so long that it’s just part of life.”

  “I understand, conceptually.” Dan said. He prepped the base of her neck and let it sit for a half a minute and then cleaned it with alcohol.

  “Ok, that’s cold.” Marissa said.

  “Better cold than infected.” Dan said. “Ok, here comes a prick. I’m going to do four small ones around the base of your neck and six in your shoulder blades, you are a mess. I’m going to do them a little bit smaller but we can do them a little more frequently if we need to.”

  “You’re the…EMT.” Marissa said.

  …

  There were pros and cons to how Dan and Marissa were handling their evacuation. On the upside, it was allowing the girls to gradually get used to the fact that they weren’t going to be living at home anymore. On the downside, it was just dragging out the inevitable. This would be the second night that they spent in an abandoned building less than ten miles from home. They were still within the city limits, and it felt like they weren’t really making any progress.

  “Unless it’s raining in the morning,” Dan said, “we have got to leave first thing. Natchez Trace is not a small park, and it’s over ninety miles away.”

  “I know,” Marissa agreed. “And as bad as things are now they’re not likely to improve much. We’re probably in as good of shape as we’re going to be for this trip. We should try to get as much traveling in as we can each day now.”

  Dan nodded. “I don’t know how much Bekah can do, but if we can get ten miles done tomorrow, slow and steady, I think we could be off to a pretty good start. Assuming we can stay on the roads, and we don’t have to play leap-frog, and dodge broken glass like we did on the turnpike.”

  “Well, let’s start by getting an early dinner and getting three of us to bed.” Marissa said and then proceeded to yawn. That was one of the nice things about the injections; depending on how bad the muscle spasms were, the injections started numbing the muscle and surrounding area almost immediately and the resulting relief was just about euphoric in comparison. The injections themselves would actually be sore in a couple of hours, but hopefully she’d be asleep by then. She’d deal with the residual soreness from the injections tomorrow.

  Dan smiled, “I’ll take the first watch. You really haven’t slept that well in weeks. I’ll be ok and I promise to wake you up if something happens. I think we need to make some more soup and t
hen get you all into bed. We can pull mattresses into the common room so that everyone’s together.”

  Dinner took about half an hour to make and eat and then the girls crashed. Marissa had the pistol with her but Dan had the shotgun, since he was on guard duty. It was still only 5:00 and he wanted to make sure there wasn’t anything left in the rest of the fire station. There were the other two storage rooms to check out. It was always possible that there could still be boxes of medicines or usable supplies in those rooms, or so he hoped anyway.

  …

  Dan spent the first hour alternating between scouring the kitchen and checking in on the girls. While she was asleep, Marissa was one of his girls. Their first pass hadn’t been as thorough as Dan would have liked so now he was taking his time to really go through everything.

  He found one container each of coffee service sugar and creamer in one of the high cupboards where they had been almost totally hidden by a set of Southern Living Annual Cookbooks. The cookbooks had been donated to the fire station by an estate a number of years back. They broke them out at the holidays and made desserts mostly.

  Lying flat in another high cupboard he found a full bag of chocolate chips. How those had been missed all this time was beyond him, but Marissa would be tickled pink when she woke up. He was pretty sure he knew which of the firemen had hidden them up there, too. Terry was notorious for his sweet tooth.

  An hour’s worth of searching and that was all he had to show for it, a bunch of sugar.

  The next hour he spent slowly going through the rest of the bedrooms. He checked in every drawer and closet, checking under the beds and between the mattresses, looking on top of the closets. Dan learned more than he cared to about the personal lives of some of his former co-workers by the types of magazines he found under some of their beds, but that was the extent of it right up until the end.

  Dan was checking underneath one of the beds when he noticed that the batting under the box spring was coming loose and hanging down. The only reason he even noticed was because out of the twenty or so other beds he’d checked, none of the others had looked torn. In fact most, if not all, of the beds had been replaced in the last couple of years and were almost new.

  Curious, he shone his flashlight on the area of the box spring. It looked as though a couple of staples had been pulled out and the lining had been pulled away from the box spring and then tucked back in between the box spring and the bed frame. Usually, the weight of the box spring would have pinned the lining between it and the bed frame—but it must have come loose when the bed got jostled as the room was ransacked, and now the lining was hanging down instead of being held up and in place.

  Dan got up and pulled the mattress off and carefully turned over the box spring, trying to be quiet and not wake up the girls. He pulled off the lining from the corner and along the side and found a black nylon money belt folded up and hidden inside. Although he was tempted to open it up and look inside right then, he checked the rest of the box spring first to see if any other parts looked like they had been messed with—but they didn’t appear to have been.

  He put the box spring back, put the mattress back, and sat so he would have a place to open the money belt. Inside, there were cloth pouches that held small rolls of coins. At first glance, Dan was a little disappointed, but only for about thirty seconds. At first it looked like there was an even $25 worth of change in the money belt, until Dan took a closer look. There were twenty $0.50 pieces, forty quarters, and a roll of dimes. No big deal, until Dan looked at the dates.

  All of the dates were pre-1964, some as old as the 1950s. That meant that these were 90% silver and had been set aside for barter in case of…well in case the world came to an end. Now it was Dan’s turn to cry. He didn’t know if there would be anything else to find in this room, or even in the fire station, but on the off chance that they ran into someone who had something extra to trade, and they were willing to trade for silver, at least it was an option now.

  After Dan had gotten himself back together, he put the coins away and started looking through the rest of the room. It had been picked over already, and there wasn’t anything left to find. The remainder of the rooms were the same way. Dan was still happy when we went to start on the rest of the supply rooms.

  …

  Seeing the dented steel door brought his spirits down a little, but not much. There were other medical supplies he could gather and take with them, and they had been able to get some relief for Marissa out of the ambulance. The remainder of the supplies would be useful, but bulky, items. Dan wished they had the room to carry the contents of both rooms with them, along with an AED.

  You’re back in the building for three hours and all of the sudden you’re back at work. Dan shook his head. The world has moved on, Dan. Let it go and get what you can to help your family, and be ready to go tomorrow morning.

  In the first room, he gathered cotton balls and petroleum jelly, which would be good as tinder to start fires in the future. He’d gotten good at starting fires with a single match over the last several weeks, but that little trick he’d gotten from the library book. If he’d had a flint and steel he could catch the cotton ball, and the petroleum jelly would keep it burning for several minutes.

  Next were tongue depressors. Made of wood, they were individually wrapped in plastic and would be waterproof and dry, so they would be great tinder or kindling if everything else was wet. He could start the fire and hopefully dry out natural stuff, and so on and so forth.

  Bandages, ok, Dan—don’t go crazy. You have gauze, you have tape, and you can make bandages. So how about that wrap that sticks to itself, but not to skin?

  So next came the sports-type wrap that doesn’t stick to skin, and some extra tape—but not too much tape, because tape is heavy and bulky.

  Burn gel? And we’ll be in the woods, so poison ivy and itch cream, in general, might come in handy. I really wish there’d been some steroids in the other room, Dan thought. Stop thinking like that, deal with what we have. This is making a difference.

  Burn gel, itch cream, and calamine lotion.

  Ok, I could be in here all day; time to go check on the girls and then hit the other room.

  The girls were fine, and then it was time for the last supply closet, which turned out to be a rather pleasant surprise.

  “Ensure!” Dan exclaimed, and then clamped his hand over his mouth. They didn’t have a lot of it on hand but they had a case that they kept to refill the ambulances, since they kept a couple of cans in each one. Again, it wasn’t perfect, and it wouldn’t last long, but it was six meals per person for his family! At one a day, that would last almost a week. “Too bad it’s not chocolate,” Dan said to himself.

  Dan spent the rest of the time carrying his additions to their supplies to the common room where the girls were sleeping, and then poking around the fire station. He found an unused bar of soap in the janitor’s closet and then decided to grab some hand sanitizer from the supply closet.

  At about 11:30, Dan gently woke Marissa up. “Hey, Riss, you sleep ok?”

  “Like the dead, but now I really have to pee.” Marissa said.

  Dan laughed. “I say pick one of the inside bathrooms and just use it. Don’t worry about flushing; just use one of the further away ones for right now. We aren’t going to be here long and it’s not worth risking going outside.”

  Marissa nodded and when she got up, her flashlight hit the pile of boxes that Dan had brought in. “More stuff?” She asked.

  “Yeah, we’ll go through it in the morning and break it down.” Dan said. “I think you and I should go through the supply rooms, too. I don’t want to forget anything, and another set of eyes will be good.”

  Marissa nodded again and set off.

  When she got back, Dan was getting ready to try and get some sleep. The girls still hadn't even moved.

  “Are you going to be ok for a few hours?” He asked.

  “Yeah, I'll be fine. I really did get plenty of s
leep and it helped a lot.” Marissa said. “You, on the other hand, look worn out. Try and get some rest. I'll be ok, I promise.”

  With that, Dan took Marissa at her word and let her stand watch, and undoubtedly poke around the fire station until she needed some more sleep, or until they all woke up.

  …

  It was a pity they couldn’t take one of the mattresses with them. Marissa had actually slept better here than she had the last couple of weeks at home. Admittedly, part of that was probably the fact that her neck and shoulders weren’t the throbbing mess that they had been, but, whatever.

  Well, I’m not going to just sit here and watch them sleep, she thought. Dan obviously found some useful stuff; wonder if he missed anything because he didn’t think it would be useful?

  Marissa noted that everything seemed to have come from either the supply closets or from somewhere inside the building proper. She decided to check out the ambulance and see if there was anything that could be used for non-medical purposes. She’d always been good at out-of-the-box problem solving.

  She did a quick walk through of the building as quietly as she could before heading to the garage to check on the bikes and start on the ambulance.

  At first she didn’t know where to start. The inside was a mess and it was dark. All she had was her flashlight, and the last thing she wanted to do was run it down in the middle of their third night out of the neighborhood. On a whim, she went to the front and opened the driver’s door and found the headlight switch. Even if there was a battery left it was probably dead, but she figured she would give it a try.

  Nothing; no click, no spark, no sign of life. Oh well, it’d been worth a shot.

  Back in the rear of the ambulance she cleared off a place to sit, and then turned off the flashlight and thought.

  What would they have in here that we could use that wouldn’t be obvious? What else can we salvage?