How to Find Peace at the End of the World

by Saro Yen

  And there it is. Black and white telling me to get the fuck south.

  I scoff at the terrible juxtaposition, of course. The rain forest. who would even be around to give a fuck about the rain forest in such an “unlikely scenario?” I sure as hell didn’t. I snapped the book shut. Ten days. So I had ten days to get up there to Dallas and look for Amy and on finding her alive head back down to the Southern Hemisphere. The book didn’t say, of course, how far I would need to go, but I felt that crossing the equator, with plans to go further south as the North went into meltdown should be good enough. I figured I’d already wasted two and a half days with this pansy ass meandering I was doing. It might take me another two or three days to get up to Dallas, if I booked it. No more stopping for library books and Primo Mary Jane. I tucked the book under my arm and headed back out to the Beast. When I opened the door, Charley attacked me with a tongue barrage. “Happy to see you, too. After all of ten minutes,” I chuckle. I start up the Beast and make my way towards the freeway entrance ramps. I always used to get lost when I was downtown, and even now, now with use of the one way streets in either direction that I desire, I still get lost. Eventually I find the ramp to 45 North. “On to Dallas!” I say to Charley as I ruffle his fur and crack his window open to let him hang his head out.

  11:30 I stop at another Wal-Mart on the North side of town. There hasn’t been any construction on the north side, thankfully, and my progress through Houston’s northern half is much easier. I head inside and pick up a few things I forgot the first time and things to fill some new needs, namely two giant 100 lbs sacks and several cans of dog food. Charley is in there with me and I crack open a few cans right there. The floor looks clean enough. Perfect. Two birds with one stone for him. Eating and exercise, I think, as he nudges the pile of wet food around the floor, halfway down the aisle in fact. When he’s done he lifts his head up and looks back at me laughing at him. He barks. He wants some more but I tell him to hold on and continue pushing the hand cart down the store’s main aisle.

  I feed him again on getting back to the truck, pouring a good quarter bag or so of dry doggie chow into the large metal bowl I’d gotten for him and topped it off with a few cans of the premium wet stuff. He devours everything. I mean, he looks well fed and he’d had a good bit of jerky but I realize now he probably hadn’t had much to eat the entire day before.

  “Sorry boy,” I say patting his head while he eats.

  While he polishes off the bowl and spends a few minutes exploring the other cars and the grassy embankment in the parking lot, I fire up the generator in the back of the truck. I remember now there was a reason I’d lugged my desktop with me beyond all the pictures and documents. Before I plug it in I open up the case and make sure nothing’s been loosened by my less than polite driving. All the cards and cables seem to be well seated. Nothing rattles. I plug the PC power cable into the back of the truck and hook it up to one of the tablet displays I’d gotten from work. I take a six hundred gig travel drive I’d picked up in the Wal-mart out of its packaging and stick it into the PC. I spend a few minutes searching through the hard drive grabbing all the things I want to access, the main thing being the full Wiki download I’d made a few weeks before. While I’m at it, I fire up the Wiki on my computer’s server and look for dog species. A few searches yield too many results, and the main listing of dog breeds is head spinning. Then I try “Large Dog Breeds,” and on the second page I find it. I say to Charley, who has since come back from the grassy embankment having done his business “Guess what. It says here you’re a Great Pyrenees. A mountain dog.”

  “Ruff.”

  It’s my turn to tilt my head at him, now. If I squint, he kind of looks like Ruff, the white shaggy dog from the Dennis the Menace comics. I consider the alternative to the name Charley but Charley seems, at least to me, to stick better.

  “Charley,” I say.

  Ruff.

  “So be it.”

  I laugh at myself for talking to a dog. Then I thank whatever personal god I might still have watching over me for leading me to him, or him to me.

  Then, finally, I’m on the road again. I get out of the muck of downtown and rise on to I-45. No blockages, thankfully. There’s a clump of cars on an elevated portion but I’m able to find a way around: it seems that many have flown off the elevated stretch of highway. This is confirmed a few hundred feet down when I see an eighteen wheeler has plowed into the side railing and knocked it over and a car has followed right after it. The car rests now on the roof of a popular dim sum restaurant downtown that Amy and I had often patronized when she was in town.

  Pretty soon I’m going at speed. Actually, fuck it I say and seeing the way clear before me I gun it up to a hundred and ten.

  Charley seems to like this, actually. I keep the passenger window open and Charley sticks his head out. I have to be careful to keep my eyes on the road because the wind makes these cool, almost hypnotic patterns against his fur. His tongue flops rhythmically against the side of his head. So do his big floppy jowls. Every once in a while he pulls his head back in to lick his dry chops and check up on me.

  “So, Great Pyrenees, tell me what the road ahead holds for us,”

  “Ruff!”

  Ha! It works in so many situations.

  “Am I going crazy?”

  “Ruff!”

  You know what? I think he’s right.

  12:50 PM. I stop the Beast and consider the cluster fuck before me. I’m at the 45 and Beltway 8 juncture. Another glob of traffic has chosen to lodge itself here, even though there aren’t any construction barriers funneling things to a stop here like a bottleneck. I imagine cars running out of speed, bouncing down the highway like pin-balls. Eventually, still in drive, they would just travel at idle speed until bumping into an obstruction in the road way itself: the concrete barriers would, until then, act like the kiddie bumpers at the bowling alley.

  I bring the Beast to a stop about five hundred feet away from the pileup. I look around. There is one single car stopped before the pile of other cars. Its sides are smashed to Hell but it’s just stopped there. I get out of the Beast, holding Charley in before softly closing the door. I get out my pistol and slowly creep up to the car to investigate.

  I don’t find anybody inside. I look around and it’s quiet all around. I look back inside the cabin and see the car is still in D, its tank empty. I chuckle to myself. What are the chances? Maybe it was already low on gas that morning. I imagined the car, driverless, slowly idling though all the concrete innards of downtown Houston, bumping and scraping into the concrete dividers but being pushed back on its merry way, until here, miles away from where it had been, deep in the city, it finally ran out of gas. I laugh to myself again: I’d given myself a nice scare. The scare being that maybe I wasn’t alone in this forsaken city. The roads, except for vehicles that had become stuck on the sides, or wrecked completely or overturned on their roofs were the only ones I’d encountered. Some idiot part of my mind imagined some other crazy survivor driving around in this beaten up wreck of car, stopping precisely where I’d stopped before the mountain of cars ahead. I think about my bowling alley analogy, the concrete barriers like bumpers, the car like a weak throw you might have made as a kid that stops before it even reaches the pins. I smile and ruffle Charley’s fur as I climb back into the Beast.

  Well, this stoppage situation is easily solved. I drive back in the opposite direction on the freeway and take the off ramp on to the I-45 feeder road. Driving down into the dip I see where a bunch of cars, taking the path of least resistance, have ended up below the interchange. One is even stuck up on an isolated concrete island between two pillars. I pass by the flying interchange ramps, looming over me like mountains. I drive down the feeder until the next feeder ramp and get back on the freeway. Once I’m past the interchange, I turn back around and go up the interchange ramp that I had just passed under: it goes about ninety feet into the air. Near the apex of the ramp I do a three point turn. It’s
thrilling in its own little way: I have never before had chance to stop on the apex of a freeway ramp. I get out and let Charley out, too. From my duffel I remove a pair of binoculars. I spend way too long just scanning the horizon with them. I glass downtown, from where I had come and check out all the skyscrapers glinting in the sun. All the fires are down and, except for the large airplane hole in Heritage plaza, it looks pristine, like from a post card.

  Then I turn around and glass north up I-45. Except for some cars that have edged off the side of the road it’s clear for miles. I call to Charley, who has worked his way further down the ramp and is nudging something interesting to him with his snout. He comes back and licks my hand.

  I take the opportunity to top off the tank again and make sure everything in the back of the truck bed is secure. Then I get back in the Beast with my fluffy white friend and gun it down the ramp onto the highway to Dallas.

  2 PM. Dammit. For some reason the driverless cars like to gum up the worst places. In the big cities at least you had feeder roads where the cars were likely to get funneled. Here in Texas we have a lot of these long stretches, especially over river ravines, that are surrounded by concrete on all sides. Several times these are clogged up with cars like logs stopped by a bend in the river. I find myself backtracking and taking the back roads, especially when there’s no feeder, like at these bridges. One time I even get lost on some back roads and it takes me half an hour to find my way back to the interstate.

  All the while I’m driving, certain passages from the book I went into the dark library to get are replaying in my mind.

  Ten days after AHV-day (the author’s shorthand for All Humans Vanish, sounds like some old religious holiday with roman numerals or something), the nuclear reactors sprinkled around the North American landscape will go critical, their maintenance and cooling mechanism having lost their external power supply. Why even power the cooling systems externally? Why not use the power the nuke generates to cool the thing? Maybe only use external power when there’s a problem? That’s always a question that came to my mind on hearing about nuclear disasters past.

  One by one or all at once the nuclear reactors in the United States will replicate what happened at Chernobyl in 1986. Containment domes with concrete four feet thick will pop like needle pricked balloons from the thousands of pounds of steam pressure that has built underneath them. Giant clouds of atomized radioactive material will rise up for thousands of feet into the air and, catching crosswinds, will quickly disperse. The heavy radioactive metals will then begin to fall out as if through a sifter. Or the radioactive dust will be taken in by clouds and will fall with the rain and be soaked up by the water table. Water will be contaminated. Earth will be contaminated. Living things that don’t die almost immediately, such as the trees and heartier plants, will take up the radioactive poisons and the environment will be uninhabitable for people and creatures larger and more complex than cockroaches for thousands of years.

  That last line is hardly worth mentioning, I think, especially for a book titled Vanished Humanity: How the World Will Reclaim Itself after Humans are Gone

  I stop a few times along the way to chew a piece of jerky with Charley and sip some Gatorade and read a few more passages from the book.

  Listen to this, I say to Charley, and then I read the passage out loud.

  “Ruff,” Charley always says after.

  “You’re god-damn right,” I always say after.

  Somehow, despite my wounds, despite these circumstances, the miles crawling by slowly, the dog with its head resting on the shoulder of the car door, the window down and the air rustling through, things begin to seem almost routine. Some other normal, despite how weird that normal might be.

  At one point I have to remind myself:

  How long has it been since I last thought of my fiancée? Several hours at least. Strange when you think about it. So much has happened. Or does it only seem that way? No, so much has happened, so many discrete things. When I was working and living that life just forty or so hours ago, I would often catch myself asking how long it had been since I last though of Amy. It would usually be a day or two, whenever we both got enough of a breather, between work and time at the gym and eating dinner in front of the TV alone. Such was a long distance relationship between two people who were not strangers to being alone. The longest I ever caught myself not thinking about Amy was four days. Four days. Time is now compressed. I thought about her no more than five or six hours ago, but it seems lifetimes away. It is like the scale of magnitudes for earthquakes. Each level up is like, what, ten times more powerful than the last level? I feel like how I’m living now, each additional hour I live is increasingly like another life. Each day will likely no longer be exactly same as the last. I don’t really know how I feel about that.

  I call her again. You’ve reached the voicemail of Amy Seager, junior partner-

  I have this love hate relationship with my phone, now. It’s a nervous tick but also a sort of comfort. There seems to be almost something alive, something human in the rounded numbers on the screen, the tiny text in the buttons. The actions and motions whisper of other ages and a vanished humanity. I hold in my hand my last connection to the past, to what might have been had I been a better person or something. Surely that must be it. Since it’s just me, none of this would have happened had I listened a little more, been a little less apathetic, a little less inconsiderate.

  The road is quiet and elongates, luxuriates in front of me, stretching out like a housecat.

  She had said that she wanted to work it out. She had said that long distance was do-able. Maybe a few years. That’s all it would take. And after those few years of sacrifice then both of us would be advanced enough in our careers to have the life we’d always wanted. Did we?

  On I drive. What else is there?

  ??? - The longest stretch out of Houston is through Conroe and it’s just as cluttered as I’d feared.

  Well, there will be miles and miles, long stretches, wide open or with one off cars but once every ten miles or so I’ll hit a massive clump that has me driving on the shoulder or getting out and cutting the wires on the median fencing. I’ve contemplated just driving the Beast over the low wire staked out in the grass divider but then usually contemplate myself right out of it: I only have one spare and I’m not about to do anything stupid, like driving over wrecks a la The Crushinator at a monster truck rally.

  Going is slow. Before this and in no traffic it might be a five hour hump up to Dallas. Now it takes me two hours just to cover twenty miles, average. One mean five mile stretch of freeway had me loosening the barb wire on some graze land because the median was solid concrete divider.

  Out in the open Charley and I had somewhat of a blast, actually, doing what I’d always occasionally fantasized of doing on those long stretches of I-45. I took the Beast at a good clip over all the hills I could find, jumped it over little creek ravines, left giant loopy figure 8’s in the scrub grass. Childish and time consuming, but fucking worth it.

  The other thing holding me up is all the stops I make. Charley is a worse road trip companion than Amy ever was. A rest break every hour is nothing compared to Charley barking his head off every ten minutes. Admonitions of “No Charley” only eliciting more barking and, eventually, the most pathetic whine I’ve ever heard, from dog or fiancee.

  Admittedly, I am one to indulge. I’m a sucker for it, what can I say? The stupid dog saved my life. I pull over to the median and Charley goes running off into the tree line, marks a few trees and then comes bounding back, tongue flopping about like a kid off ADD meds.

  I really should have been more careful, what with the Beast eating up a gallon of gas every eight miles. I’m down to a quarter tank of gas and ten gallon plastic jug. Ten gallons. Eighty miles. Driving conservatively, that will get me to city limits. I shouldn’t be too concerned: I’ve got that plastic siphon thingy and there are plenty of wrecked cars along the way to feed off of. Shouldn’t be a
problem I tell myself over and over again from the back of my mind somewhere.

  Still, I stop at the place I usually do on my way up to Dallas, this truck stop and tourist trap place called the Hitchin’ Post. I decide that it’s a good place to get some more gas because not only is the faux wood cabin building a nirvana of knick-knacks and treats from my childhood: multicolored rock candy grown on a wood stick, a wall of clear plastic bins filled with sour worms and gummy bears and coke bottle candies, but I distinctly remember there being this bright red novelty gas pump, hand crank powered, and the thing worked, too. It was a monumental gag, I remember thinking, this huge line for this hand crank pump that took forever even to bring the fuel up, and you could only get the lowest grade. Not good for an Audi, but for the Beast...