by Eli Constant
I finished the leftover beans. Not too bad. Jason just ate a protein bar. Megan washed down her food with water and Kara fell asleep quickly, formula running down her chin.
I dozed again, but this time only for a short while.
It was past nightfall now. Jason had been at the wheel since our roadside conversation. I'd popped another three aspirin tablets and was feeling up to driving again. He hadn't found ibuprofen at the pharmacy, which was a shame.
"Switch off for a couple of hours?" Jason said, fighting a yawn.
"Sure." We pulled over. We were within town limits of Madison, WI. As always, Jason had driven slower than I would have liked.
Had I been driving, we would have made a lot more progress. I wasn't going to openly complain though, remembering what it had been like when I was the only driver- how I'd always been tired and never felt rested, but was too afraid to stop and close my eyes and when I did stop, I couldn't sleep because fear ate away at my brain.
We decided to drive through the night. The quicker we could solve the mystery of Mount Rainier, the better.
From Madison we took 51 North to Interstate 94. I envied Jason. Not five minutes after switching off, he was audibly sleeping in the passenger seat. Megan and Kara fell asleep not too long after.
Two hours into my driving shift, I got a bit lonely for conversation. You know how it's supposed to be okay to talk to yourself as long as you don't answer yourself? Well I suppose by those standards, I'm completely certifiable.
When Jason stirred, I was having a very heated discourse with myself. My train of thought was interrupted by a manly throat clearing. I wonder how many great minds in the world lost sight of prolific ideas because some idiot cleared their throat?
"Um... Elise? How long have you been driving and should I have replenished your anti-psychotics at the pharmacy?"
"Oh no, Jason! How could I forget my crazy pills? We are all going to die!" I stuck my tongue out at him childishly. "I haven't been driving long enough to fully realize and understand my inner insane person."
"I'm just pointing out that it's not exactly healthy to argue with oneself," Jason said, a smile tickling the corners of his mouth.
"If you can point me in the direction of another intelligent person with which to argue, I will most definitely quit relying on myself for sole intellectual stimulation," I bantered back.
"I would point at myself, but then I'm afraid I'd be jack-slapped with another endless supply of your snide word-vomit." And that jerk had the nerve to stick his tongue out at me.
"Sticking your tongue out is a total girl move. You got something you need to get off your chest?"
"The only thing I need to get off my chest is this amazing set of pectorals." Jason pushed his upper chest out suggestively.
"Don't make mountains out of molehills."
"I won't if you won't."
"I know you are, but what am I?" I tried to stay sounding bitchy, but actually found the banter amusing, so it was nearly impossibly to remain 'fake stoic'. "All right, all right. Truce?"
"Truce... for now." He said it with a crooked smile. I had to admit that that smile was beginning to soften my resistance to his... male persuasions. "How long have I been out?"
"A little more than two hours. Your snoring added a wonderful soundtrack to my driving."
"Don't get me started on snoring! You and your girls were a dang chorus last night. No wonder I'm exhausted."
"I don't hear my girls now. Quiet little angels." I glanced in the rearview mirror. My girls- despite all the bullshit- were perfect. I flicked my gaze to the side mirrors, catching a quick view of Jason while doing so. For the second time since I'd known him, Jason's expression was unfathomable. "Why are you looking at me like that?"
"Like what?"
"Like being with me and my girls makes you deeply happy and deeply sad at the same time."
"I don't know what you're talking about. This is my face. Its changes in expressions aren't my doing."
"It's just a feeling I get." I looked at him questioningly, staring a little longer than was safe whilst driving, but my stare yielded no response.
"Drop it. If I wanted to air my dirty laundry, I'd buy a damn clothesline- the cheap kind that wouldn't support my weight if I decided to kill myself." I looked at him oddly. Jason seemed like a lot of things, but suicidal wasn't one of them. And men say women over-dramatize. He'd rate an Oscar for his affected, self-loathing attitude.
"I think you're full of all kinds of turd-colored platitudes and they're so infertile I couldn't grow potatoes in that crap." Unusually for him, he didn't respond to my half joking, half cutting remark. I decided to lay-off on the fun-making until his cheery-boy side reemerged. My normal tendency was to be unrelenting, persistent until I got answers, but the expression on Jason's face was so closed off... I couldn't bring myself to push the issue.
"Do you think you got enough sleep? I'm definitely okay to drive more."
"No, I'm good. I can switch off if you're ready."
"Why don't you eat something first." He nodded and reached behind his seat. Most of the food was stored under the floorboards, but we left one bag accessible. Jason pulled out a pop-top can of Vienna sausages- a drugstore acquisition- and began to chow down.
"I always thought those things tasted like glorified dog food."
"I've had dog food; this ain't it." Jason remarked, around a mouthful of flesh-colored, pressed meat product.
"I haven't had the pleasure. Although I have been called 'bitch' several times in my life... undeservedly of course."
"Of course." He grinned and, just like that, the Jason I was used to came back to me... the Jason I was growing rather fond of. Funny how I was starting to rely on that smile.
We were in Eau Claire, Wisconsin now. Unlike some of the other ghost towns we'd ridden through, I knew jack and shit about Eau Claire. My lack of knowledge didn't really matter though. It was well into the night- about 10 pm- and there was no talk of stopping to see the sights. It did seem like a relatively large city though.
I pulled over next to the entrance to a park; it seemed as good a place as any to switch drivers. What looked to be an outdoor skating rink snaked its way through the park's central. I was stepping out of the van, envisioning what that lake would look like with children gliding across ice. I was imagining winter- the laughter as a child slipped, the smell of snow, couples cuddling under warm blankets- in all it's frozen glory. That's when I saw a small figure stumbling across the ice- although this time of year was still too warm for ice. Odd.
The improbability of ice should have given me pause to think. If not because of ice, then what was making the figure fall? The silhouette in the distance would fall, stand, and then fall again. The figure looked no bigger than Megan and not nearly so dexterous.
"Jason, look over there."
He was standing by me now and looked in the direction I was indicating. The child was less than 50 yards in the distance. His or her back was turned to us. Before Jason could caution me, I called out to the child.
"Over here. Over here! You need to get out of the open."
I was frantic. I was thinking about my own children alone in the dark... the dark where beasties prowl. I wasn't thinking rationally. The child froze and slowly pivoted in our direction. It was very dark, but at the instant the child was fully turned, moonlight shone from between a stretch of clouds and illuminated its face.
"Elise, that's not a child. At least, it's not a human child."
I'd never seen a juvenile undergrounder before. I'd always figured the beasties kept their babes away from the surface until they were developed adults. It explained never seeing a child-sized humanoid.
This figure was definitely young and definitely one of them. But it was standing erect and it was wearing an oddly shaped stretch of cloth across its body. I was scared and the small monster seemed equally nervous at our presence. It reared back its strangely stretched, elongated mouth and began to screech.
Mommy dearest couldn't be far away...
She wasn't.
It emerged from an uncovered manhole. And it was definitely adult. By comparison, the beast-baby was eerily humanish. How could they change so much from one generation to the next? I feared the time when the humanoids were so like us that the difference was indiscernible.
"I'm really not in the mood for a fight. Are you?" I was already moving fast towards the passenger door.
"I'm man enough to run away and live to fight..." And that was all he wrote. The full-grown humanoid started in our direction and we jumpstarted our asses straight into the van. The sound of peeling tires and screeching baby undergrounder made for an ear-bleeding duet. The adult undergrounder tailed us for several miles and then turned around. Possibly some parental instinct prevented her from straying further from her offspring.
"Did you... did you see what it looked like? It was covering itself, standing up." I held myself tightly. My arms wrapped around my healthy size 10 frame in a gesture of self-comfort. The goose bumps littering my arms were indicative of my disturbing thoughts. "They are becoming more like us. In a few generations, they will be us."
"If it weren't so freaky, it would be amazing." Jason mused. "In six and half months, they've adapted at a rate that would make Darwin swallow his beagle and sail his ship straight down the voyage crazy." Despite the tension, I chuckled softy at the image of a spotted white tail hanging out of Darwin's mouth.
Jason took one hand off the wheel and ran his fingers through his hair, mussing the strands up. I found the disheveled style attractive.
I pushed a wayward strand of my own brown hair out of my vision. It fell back again. Maybe it was frivolous, but I couldn't wait for the bad haircut to finish growing out. It had been seven months since I cut it, but the super short bangs were still too short to tuck solidly behind my ear.
Before I could get frustrated and bat at the stubborn lock, Jason's hand gently pushed it away. It didn't do any good, but the soft touch was surprising and unexpectedly nice.
My eyes moved to meet his. His eyes shot forward to focus on the nighttime beyond the windshield.
"Jason. Tell me about yourself."
"Elise. Tell me about yourself." Jason's voice took on a very psychiatric tone.
"Don't mock me; I'm serious. We're as close to family as exists now. I'll admit we aren't the old society's version of a traditional family, but that's null and blood relations are overrated. So... so I want to learn about you."
I was being sincere. I wanted to know about him- his favorite food, where he was born, what he prized most in his old life. And I wasn't going to let him blow me off this time. I wasn't going to back down from the conversation if he got all moody and introverted.
"Not much to know really. I was born in New Mexico- stayed there my whole life. We were hit hard during the first wave of attacks. I lost everyone and everything. End of story."
Jason's mouth shut in a hard, determined line and I knew he considered the subject closed. He had a lot to learn about me. My husband, David, used to tell me that I didn't know when the horse was dead. It'd be months later and I'd still be beating the decaying corpse with sledge-hammer resolve.
"Your ring finger is a little lighter... were you married?"
"Divorced." One word answer. Now that wouldn't do at all.
"What happened?"
Jason heaved a sigh, his shoulders rising and falling dramatically. He spoke quickly, expelling the words with barely restrained violence.
"I had a shit lawyer and she got our boy. She was a drunken bitch who wanted child support to fund her alcoholism. I didn't give a flying fart in hell about her, but Michael was my life. I failed. I couldn't get to him in time. Her apartment was a mess like in some moment of lucidity she'd actually tried to pack and get out of town. I found her suitcase wide open, her clothing coated in dried, brown blood. They were both gone. He was gone. Explanation enough for you?"
The outpouring of words was more than I'd expected and more than I had a right to know; each sentence hit me hard and left me breathless, pained. I realized how invasive my curiosity was. I hurt him because I wanted to know him.
Jason still faced forward. His eyes were hard as steel, but glistening. He was at that brittle point where one wrong hand gesture or simpering word of understanding would send him over the edge; he would lose his resolve completely and shatter against a truth he'd been avoiding. So I kept my mouth shut like a good girl.
The next few hours were very silent- giving me plenty of time to contemplate my state of being a complete and tactless jerk.
The scenery sped past in moon-lightened shadows. My mind was too busy to appreciate the surreal quality of the landscape. Jason kept to I-94. He wasn't much for the scenic route. It was probably safer. I silently willed Jason to talk to me, forgive me for making him relive such terrible things.
We ran into a lot more fender benders and congested areas than usual. The cars were abandoned haphazardly and the side of the road was littered with the tunnel openings indicative of undergrounder emerging.
Our headlights danced across shiny bumpers, reflected off side mirrors, bounced off taillights. The effect was mesmeric... an odd illusion in the night. The double cones of light illuminating the dark shone on something else also, something less mesmerizing- something that made my eyes clamp shut.
Tonight was the first time I actually saw... half a person. I didn't want to reopen my eyes. But I had to.
The body, if it could be called that, was in the middle of the roadway. I could only tell that the frame was male proportioned. Even with the headlights fully illuminating the corpse, no more gender-specific details could be gleaned. The face was sundried and the lower half of the body was missing. The stringy, fleshy entrails looked like turkey jerky. My stomach heaved and my mouth filled with saliva.
I was thankful both girls were still sleeping. I was happy they didn't see me roll down the passenger window and loudly vomit. The wind pushed the puke in an airborne stream down the side of the van. It was a smelly and unattractive decoration. Jason patted my back. Our bout of silence was broken by my sickness.
"You okay?"
"You know..." I gulped in air, trying to regain composure. "I managed to avoid seeing a dead body for how many freaking years? And then these freakazoids invade and I get to see gore and death every flipping day."
"Really? No obligatory funeral attendance?"
Not only were we talking again, but Jason seemed genuinely interested in this new nuance of my strangeness. I rinsed my mouth with water and wipe my chin with my shirt sleeve.
"Always made up a lame excuse. Eventually, people realized that last goodbyes weren't really my thing."
I'd seen enough dead bodies on survival-road to realize that my aversion to funerals made me saner than the rest of the morbidly curious ex-population.
In the wake of corpse central, I was calmer than expected. It was as if the vomiting not only emptied my stomached, but purged the emotional relevance of death. I moved my tongue around in my mouth, wishing I had a breath mint. Water could only dull the aftertaste, not remove it.
"I'm sure your excuses were believable enough." Jason's voice sounded slightly amused. I rolled my eyes.
"One time I claimed to have debilitating nausea from inhaling oven-cleaner fumes. Thanks for humoring me though."
"That sounds... plausible."
I laughed loudly.
"Sure... it might have been plausible had I not told the same person a month earlier that I couldn't attend her grandmother's funeral because I was temporarily blind from an experimental drug my doctor prescribed for insomnia."
We both laughed then.
I heard a noise from the back seat and looked in the rearview mirror. Megan's eyes fluttered and she shifted in her seat. I watched her until I was sure she was deeply asleep again.
It was about two in the morning. The night seemed to be trailing on forever. Jason and I talked off and on
and any stretches of quiet were comfortable. He was an easy companion.
We revisited the undergrounder child, discussed the implications of adaptation, and how earth's social order would reform with undergrounders at the helm. It was all conjecture, but it gave our minds something to concentrate on. It made us feel like we could affect change in a disturbingly changeable world. As if.
Three o'clock. I dozed for a bit and woke up to the clock reading five o'clock. My eyes closed again. Six o'clock. Jason had been driving for eight hours.
The first rays of dawn began to creep over the horizon. The girls stirred. Kara's little arms shot upwards in a big stretch and her face scrunched up. She sighed and her eyes opened just a tad and then closed again. She was a hard sleeper and many times woke up grumpy. Just like me.
On the other hand, Megan was annoyingly chipper in the morning. She got that from David. I'd always burn the midnight oil over being the early bird. I didn't really care for worms anyway. When I was a kid, I read a book about ketchup and fried worms. Like so many children, I tried the combination. Take my word for it. The flavor of fried worms is not the slightest bit improved by even the most liberal dousing of ketchup.
"Morning, Mom." Megan did her own little wiggly stretch and sighed loudly. "Where are we?"
That was a good question. I hadn't been paying attention to the road. It was strange to trust Jason so much already. He got behind the wheel and I felt safe.
Conveniently, we passed a sign.
"Looks like we are right outside Bismarck, North Dakota. Hungry?"
"Yep, but I need to use the bathroom."
For once, Megan's bladder need wasn't dire so we opted to bypass Bismarck. The sun was up and slowly lifting above the horizon. Lately, I'd felt bad making Megan use the pee-bucket in the van. It was a bit embarrassing with a boy in the car. Jason tried to avert his eyes and hum a little to mask the sound of tinkling, but it didn't help. Megan's cheeks would turn bright red and she'd end up wetting her underwear trying to squat and pee quickly.