The day after: An apocalyptic morning

by Jessy Cruise

  "The bridge," he whispered to himself, his eyes taking in the sight of it. It was a single span, steel arch bridge that stretched about three-quarters of a mile from one side of the canyon to the other. The support structure of the bridge had been built beneath the roadway, a solid steel curvature that was fastened to the canyon walls at both ends. The steel was painted forest green. It was just over a half a mile in front of him, its outline a little indistinct through the haze of rain. As the two hunters had told them the day before, a mess of automobiles clogged the bridge at both ends, snarling the roadway.

  Beyond the bridge on the far side of the canyon, the roadway passed between two low hills and disappeared. Skip knew that the main part of the town of Garden Hill itself was just on the other side of those hills, out of sight. He also knew that there had once been expensive houses lining the upstream rim of the canyon. Those houses were no longer there. The changed shape of the hillside where they had been told him that either erosion from the rain or the earthquake had carried them into the canyon itself.

  On Skip's side of the canyon the topography was a little different. The roadway climbed upward, away from the near end of the bridge at nearly the steepest grade that the law had allowed, twisting through holes that had been blasted in the steep cliffs around them. The view from the top of the rise on this side was actually quite commanding and Skip immediately began to wonder why the people that were controlling access to the bridge below hadn't occupied it. He filed that thought away for later examination.

  "Keep down as you come up here," he told Christine and Jack, who were just now scrambling up next to him. "The bridge is down there and we're probably close enough to be spotted by the people that are guarding it if we silhouette ourselves."

  "We're at the bridge?" Christine asked excitedly, crawling on her hands and knees until she was next to him. She looked out over the landscape. "Finally."

  "It's still there," Jack said, coming up next to him on his right. "You were right, Skip."

  While the two younger members of the team took in the sights around them, Skip reached into his pack and pulled out the hunting rifle that had been in it ever since the shootout with the bikers. He put it to his shoulder and looked through the telescopic sight at the bridge, bringing the view closer. He trained the crosshairs on the near end of the bridge, where two Ford Expeditions and a Chevy Suburban had been placed, their tires flattened to keep them from being moved. Through the magnification he was able to see multiple bullet holes in the vehicles as well as two rotting corpses of men on the roadway of the bridge.

  "It looks like these people mean business," he said, moving the sight from one end to the other. "There are two bodies down there. They must be the people that didn't heed the warning shots."

  "We're not gonna be able to get across then?" Jack asked.

  "Well," he said, training his sight over the rest of the bridge and examining every visible portion of it, "we're not gonna be able to just walk right over it, that's for sure."

  "So what are we gonna do?" Christine wanted to know.

  "We're gonna scope this place out for a bit," he said, noting that there was a maintenance catwalk just below the roadway. It looked to be about two feet wide and hung about six feet under the center of the span. "We'll see how things work around here, see if we can observe any of the people on the other side, and then we'll decide what to do from there."

  "Do you think there's a way?" she asked.

  "Maybe," he said, training his sight on the hillsides across the canyon now, trying to spot their guards. "I can already tell that these Garden Hill people are not as smart as they think they are. If they were, they would be sitting up here on this hill right now and we never would have been able to get this close. This is the optimum place to guard the canyon approaches from."

  Neither one of them said anything to this, bowing to his superior grasp of tactics.

  He was not able to spot their guards or anything that resembled a guard position. He put the rifle back in his pack and looked at his two companions. "Let's go back down," he told them. "We'll try to find a place to camp down there and we'll keep a watch on this place until sunset."

  Christine stayed down at the campsite to guard it while Skip and Jack climbed back up onto the rise after dinner. There was about 45 minutes to an hour left of daylight and Skip wanted to see what, if anything, the townspeople did to protect the approaches to the bridge once the light was gone from the sky. Surely they wouldn't just leave it unprotected at night, would they?

  They didn't. Skip, seeing what they did, actually was impressed with their cleverness.

  It was about twenty minutes before dark, the light fading fast, when he spotted two people emerging from around the hill. They walked down the roadway, both of them carrying rifles over their shoulders, heading towards the bridge.

  "I got two people coming our way," Skip told Jack quietly. He put his hunting rifle to his shoulder once again, peering through the scope to get a better look at them. Since they were nearly a mile away from him and since there was a sheet of rain impeding the view, the magnification did not help all that much. Still he was able to make out that one was a male and one was a female and that they were wearing black rain slickers. "A man and a woman," he said. "They both have backpacks and rifles. I bet they're heading for those two SUVs that are blocking their end of the bridge."

  "You think they guard it from there?" Jack asked, his sharp eyes taking in the tiny figures as they walked down the road.

  "I think they do," Skip confirmed. "You see how they're right next to each other and facing outward. That's pretty smart. I bet they got those engines gassed up and they keep the batteries charged. If anyone tries to cross the bridge at night, they can turn on the headlights and spotlight the whole roadway in front of them. If they stay behind the cars, they can shoot with impunity since their targets will be blinded."

  "That is pretty smart," Jack agreed.

  What was even smarter was what they did next. The female guard opened up the left SUV and took two objects out of it. Skip could not quite make out what they were, only that they were something black, about the size of a paperback book, and wrapped in clear plastic. While the male guard took up a position behind the opened door of the SUV, the female, still carrying the mysterious objects, began to walk out onto the bridge itself.

  "What're they doing?" Jack asked.

  "I'm not sure," Skip replied, continuing to watch. "It looks like they're putting something on the bridge."

  "Land mines?"

  "I don't think so. Land mines are kinda hard to come by in a yuppie town like Garden Hill." He chuckled a little. "They probably could've got some in Stockton though."

  Jack, finally figuring out that he'd made a joke, dutifully laughed.

  When the woman reached the far end of the bridge Skip was finally able to identify what she was carrying. "They're video cameras," he said. "What the hell?"

  As he watched, she removed them from their plastic wrappers and placed them in the backs of the two vehicles that were positioned on Skip's end of the bridge, one camera in the back of each vehicle, facing outward, towards the entrance to the bridge. It appeared as though they were resting on some sort of mounting device that had been fashioned. Once they were in place, she picked up cables from the inside of the vehicles and plugged them into the backs of the cameras in two places.

  "Son of a bitch," Skip said in wonder, taking his scope off of the woman and training it onto the back of the SUVs. Sure enough, barely visible unless you knew to look for it, was a black cable stretching out the back of each one. The two cables, which probably each consisted of an individual power supply cord and a coaxial cable twined together, joined each other and stretched back across the bridge towards the far end where they snaked into the guard post SUVs. "I bet you those cameras are the kind with night vision on them," he told Jack. "They keep them trained on the front of the bridge all night long on that setting and monitor them from the other end
on small television sets."

  "Won't the batteries die?" Jack asked.

  "No, they have a power cord running to their SUVs. They probably have the cameras and the monitors plugged into the cigarette lighters and they start their engines every now and then and run them just long enough to keep the batteries charged up. Impressive. They must've stripped that whole town of coaxial cable and extension cords to do it. Either that or the local Radio Shack managed to survive the comet."

  "So there's no way across the bridge then?"

  "Well now, I didn't say that," Skip said. "They're smart but they've left a few holes in their defenses."

  "What do you mean?"

  "I'll tell you once I've thought it all the way through," he said, watching as the woman raised a walkie-talkie of some sort to her lips and spoke into it. Back at the other end of the bridge her companion, who also had a walkie-talkie, said something back to her. She nodded and then started back across the bridge.

  Skip lowered the rifle and eased backwards a little. "Let's get back down," he said. "We'll get some sleep and then do some more surveillance in the morning."

  Skip and Jack both climbed back up at first light and resumed their positions. They arrived just in time to see the dismantling of the cameras and the pullback of the bridge guards. Skip, peering through his telescopic scope, noted that the guards were not the same ones that had put up the operation the night before. These two were both females. That meant that they had enough people to work in shifts. It also meant that they had some sort of organized group functioning. That was just what was needed if the human race was going to survive another year: organization.

  "We need to become a part of that group," Skip said, speaking mostly to himself, but loud enough for Jack to hear.

  "What?" Jack asked. "I thought we were just trying to get across the bridge."

  "We are," he said. "We're trying to get to Garden Hill. And it looks like Garden Hill has made itself into an enclave. They've pulled together, organized, and they are defending their borders from outsiders. If they can keep themselves organized and fed, they'll live long enough to see the sun again. If they live that long, they'll be one of the groups whose children and grandchildren will rebuild. We need to make ourselves a part of that."

  "But how?" Jack asked. "It don't look they want any more people in there."

  "No, it doesn't, does it? So we'll just have to convince them that they need us."

  "Why would they need us?"

  He smiled a little. "They need us," he said. "I'm just going to have to show them how much."

  "I don't like it," Christine said when they discussed the plan that afternoon. "They'll kill you."

  "I don't think so," he replied. "I've watched them all day and I'm convinced that they don't just kill people for the hell of it. Five times people walked up to that bridge and tried to cross it. Every time they just fired down into the cars near the front until the people decided to go somewhere else. They just want to keep people out."

  "But those are people that are just walking across the bridge openly. What's going to happen when they find you?"

  "If I do it right," he said, "they won't find me until I'm already well across. At that point the example I'm trying to make for them will be well-established."

  Christine was not convinced. "We don't really need to be a part of this town," she said. "We can do just fine by ourselves. We have so far."

  "We can't," he told her firmly. "We've done okay so far because we have a food supply and good weapons and we keep a sharp eye out. Our food supply is running out though and we don't have any way of getting more. Our luck will eventually run out as well if we stay out here. Eventually some desperate group of hunters is going to bag one or more of us. Our best chance of survival is to join a larger group that holds a defendable piece of ground. This is it, Christine. We have to convince them to let us in."

  She was struggling not to cry. "What if you don't come back, Skip?" she asked him. "What happens to us then?"

  "Then you carry on," he told her. "You do the best you can without me. You guys are fighters now. You're a bad-ass, ass-kicking team. But I will come back. I don't think I'm wrong about these people. They're not sadists. They're just ordinary people. Even if they reject me, they'll let me back out again. I'm sure of it."

  "And what if you are wrong?"

  He looked at her levelly. "Than I'll die. Sometimes you have to gamble. I think this is a good one."

  She said no more. She only turned her face from him and wept softly. Beside her, Jack was fighting not to do the same.

  It was late afternoon again when he departed; about two hours before sunset. He kissed Christine, shook Jack's hand, and then gave both of them a few encouraging words and some final instructions. He then left them, climbing up the rise again. He traveled lightly, absent of his pack and his sleeping bag. He left his M-16 and his hunting rifle behind as well, taking only his trusty .40 caliber, which was strapped to his waist. He wanted to be able to maneuver freely and, most important, he did not want to appear to be an immediate threat when he was finally discovered.

  His observations throughout the day had shown him exactly where the daytime guards of the bridge were located. They had hidden their bunker well but had foolishly given away its location by the muzzle-flashes of the guns they fired to keep intruders away. Predictably it was near the crest of the hill overlooking the bridge. Keeping this location in mind, Skip always kept boulders between it and him once he reached the top. He then started down the far side, the side that was not visible from the Garden Hill side of the canyon.

  The going was a little rough at first and several times he very nearly lost his grip and went sliding downward. But at last, about three-quarters of the way to the bottom, the angle leveled out to something a little less suicidal and he was able to move more freely. He nearly trotted the rest of the way down until he was once more in the safety of the trees and shrubs. Being in the open had scared him more than the threat of falling.

  Once at the bottom, he worked his way carefully, moving tree to tree, keeping a sharp eye and a sharp ear out around him. There were probably a lot of people about, camped out in the woods trying to figure out a way across the bridge. He had no desire to run into any of them.

  It took him the better part of an hour to reach the road. In a way it was surreal seeing a stretch of two-lane blacktop after so many days of wandering in the wilderness. Though it had undoubtedly been washed out in many places and rendered all but impassible, this section was still intact. He paused near the edge of it, watching both directions carefully for any signs of life. Seeing nothing he finally crossed, doing it at a full-out sprint and diving into cover on the other side. He kept another watch on that side for a few minutes to see if he had attracted any attention.

  When he began to move again, he paralleled the pavement, sticking to the woods to travel but walking exactly twenty yards from the roadbed as he closed with the bridge. In front of him loomed the large granite ridge that had been opposite the one he and his group had observed from. The two hills had once been connected until high explosives had blown them in two so the roadway could be constructed.

  Skip, during his observations of the Garden Hill security measures, had noted a fatal blind spot in their plan. The crest of the upstream hill was hidden from the view of the guards by the bulk of the downstream hill. He exploited that blind spot now by climbing to the top. The going was a little steeper than what he had endured on the other side and it was doubtful that anyone with a full pack could have negotiated the ascent, but less than ten minutes after he started up, he was at the summit, crouching behind a rock and looking out over the small portion of bridge that was visible to him.

  He looked out over to the summit of the other hill, which was about a quarter mile away. He couldn't see Christine and Jack there - they were too well concealed - but he waved at them anyway, knowing that they would be glad to see that he had made it that far. They did not wave back - he
had taught them better than that - but he knew they had seen him.

  The downside of the hill was even steeper than the upside over here. He worked his way towards the canyon, necessarily confined to a narrow portion of the hill that was hidden from the guards view. He slipped several times and had to grasp for dear life onto boulders or rocks to keep from bouncing and tumbling all the way down. For the first time he began to wonder if this was really such a good idea as he realized that, if he fell, he would not stop at the bottom but would instead continue over the edge of the cliff, falling several hundred feet into the rushing waters below.

  "Relax," he told himself, taking a few breaths and regaining his equilibrium. "Just take it slow."

  He took it slow. He continued to work his way downward and finally, after nearly twenty minutes, he was resting on a narrow outcropping of rock that protruded out over the canyon. He was below the roadway of the bridge itself by about twenty feet. A narrow ledge led from where he was to the point where the steel support section joined the walls about a hundred yards away. He edged along the ridge slowly, trying not to look down into those rushing waters, until he had gone as far as possible without being spotted from the guards' lookout. He then began looking for a place to conceal himself.

  He forced himself into a tight ball between two outcroppings of rock and kept his head down. From here he was able to peer through a small gap and see the two SUVs at the front of the bridge but hopefully, not be spotted when the guard came to set up the cameras. He thought he was fairly safe from detection as long as they did not look directly at the spot where he was hiding. To help minimize this threat he put his fingers into the brownish muck that had accumulated under the rocks and smeared it all over his face, hair, and any exposed clothing. When he was done he was nothing more than a shadow among shadows.

  He waited.

  As the light faded from the landscape and night began to fall, he saw the guard approaching the SUVs that guarded his end. It was another female, different from any he had spotted the night before. She went through the set-up procedure quickly and then spoke into her walkie-talkie. Apparently receiving the answer that she wanted to hear, she turned and began to move back across the bridge, passing out of his line of sight.