Wandering Highway

by Ike Warren

  “Better to air dry like me than to put on your shirt and get it all wet.”

  “But I’m freezing.”

  “Come sit in my lap. I’ll warm you up.” He said as he grabbed her hand and pulled her down to him. They were facing each other and cold drops of water dripped off her hair onto his chest. Even though she was still shivering the warmth of her body felt nice against his skin. He wrapped his arms around her and rubbed her back to help warm her up.

  “What now?” She said looking into his eyes. Allan leaned in and kissed her neck and she closed her eyes to embrace the moment. She smelled like lake water and mud and sweat but there was another, more pleasant scent, penetrating through the odors that caught Allan’s nose. As he kissed along the back of her neck he found that it was her scent, a fragrance unique only to Jennifer that sweat and blood and a muddy lake water bath could not wash away, and as he kissed along her shoulder he felt himself become incredibly aroused.

  He reached to touch her breast but Jennifer grabbed his hand and pulled it away and she whispered. “We can’t.”

  “Why not?” He asked.

  “I don’t want to hurt the baby. After everything that’s happened I think he’s been through enough already.”

  “He’ll be fine.” Allan whispered and he reached for her breast again, yearning for her body, but he was denied for a second time.

  “You know about my brother and his wife. With each of their kids they always had sex on the last couple of days of her pregnancy to help induce labor.” She said. “We are in no place to be trying to induce labor here.”

  “That’s just an old wives tale.” This was not the conversation that he wanted to be having in his heat of passion. He reached up and ran his fingers through her hair and tried kissing behind her ear but she just felt stiff and uninterested. He wanted her so badly and he knew that there was one thing that he could do to get her to focus on their intimacy again. He placed his hand between her legs and he watched her face for a response and she closed her eyes again. This time she allowed him to continue.

  Their lovemaking that night was the most erotic moment that either of them had ever experienced. Their stiff joints and tired muscles and body odors all convalesced together into primal urges for each other’s bodies. When they were done they collapsed beside one another, naked on the beach, each gasping for air and ignoring all the sand that now clung to their flesh. When he caught his breath he looked towards the moon which was now high in the night sky and he noticed that it appeared hazy from all the smoke that was in the air.

  “Wow.” Jennifer said as her body dismounted from its tower of ecstasy. He turned and looked at her. It was clear that she had lost weight from their long march over the past couple of days. She looked tired and even in the moonlight he could see that her face was sunburnt and there were blisters on both her cheeks and forehead. Even her eyes seemed not to open as wide as they did before, as if her eyelids themselves wanted to tell the story of her journey through hell. Despite all of that he felt mesmerized just by looking at her. Amidst everything, she had managed to remain beautiful. Even at eight months pregnant and walking with a waddle she still had a grace about her in the way that she moved about.

  As they lay on the water’s edge looking into each other’s eyes it reminded him of the way they had looked at each other on their wedding day. The vows that he had said to her ran thought his mind. In good times and in bad, in sickness and in health, I will love and honor you all the days of my life. He felt like he had a deeper connection to the words that he had promised her so long ago, now in such a distant place it seemed, but the words still held true though it all.

  “I love you.” He whispered.

  “I love you too.” She softly whispered back.

  They lay on the beach looking into each other’s faces until a breeze blew off the lake that created more goose bumps on their skin.

  “It’s kinda cold.” She smiled at him as she shivered.

  “I think it’s time we put on our clothes. We’re a little exposed out here, naked like this.” He smiled.

  They got up and dusted the sand off each other as best they could, opting not to wash it off in the water and having to air dry their bodies all over again. They put on their clothes and as he lifted his shirt over his head and let if fall in front of his face he smelled his own terrible odors that had embedded into the fabric over the past few days. He regretted having to put on his clothes, especially his underwear, and he cringed when the filthy elastic band snapped against his waist. He lay against the eroded part of the beach that they had walked down earlier and Jennifer knelt down beside him and rested her head on his arm. He wondered if she smelled his stench but then he figured she must have been too tired to care.

  Chapter 15: Disaster At The Lake

  Allan awoke as the sun rose above the eastern horizon over the city of Rockwall. His arm was numb from where Jennifer’s head had rested during the night and in a sleepy daze he pushed her head off of him and it landed on the sandy beach with a thud.

  She sprang up. “Huh?” She asked in startled confusion.

  “My arm was asleep.” Allan replied.

  “Huh?” She asked again with her mind still desperately clinging to sleep.

  “Good morning.” He said.

  “Good morning.” She said, her voice sounded groggy but her thoughts were finally becoming coherent.

  She stretched her arms and legs out and felt a strange discomfort in her abdomen and she reached down and rubbed her stomach.

  “What’s wrong?” Allan asked noticing the troubled look on her face.

  “Oh, nothing.” She replied not wanting to alarm him. “I guess you were just a little rough on me last night.”

  Allan grinned proudly.

  They retrieved their bicycle rig from behind the bridge pillar and pushed it up to the road deck. As Allan mounted the bike he saw thick black smoke billowing into the sky seeming to be coming from the roadway a couple of miles ahead. In the early morning dawn he noticed that the beautiful blue hues in the sky and the piercing sun of the days before had been replaced by unnatural colors of oranges and greys from the smoke and fires that raged out of control across the DFW Metroplex. The white puffy clouds that had previously danced around with the wind had now been exchanged with menacing clouds of smoke, the result of the dying world around them and its last toxic gasps for breath. Just as the people had set the fires the night before out of desperation, it was as if the Earth itself had given up hope and all that remained were fiery ruins.

  Allan breathed in the polluted air but he noticed that he could no longer smell the smoke that was visibly wafting through the air. He breathed in again, this time forcing his nose to focus on the odors but it could only detect a faint smell of smoke.

  “That’s weird.” He said.

  “What’s weird?” Jennifer asked as she sat down inside the bike trailer.

  “All that smoke in the air, and I can’t smell it.”

  “Maybe your nose is stopped up.”

  Allan breathed in heavily through his nostrils to indicate that his airway was clear, “I’m breathing fine.” He said.

  Jennifer inhaled to test the air for herself. “I can’t really smell the smoke either.” She admitted.

  Allan thought for a moment and said, “When I was younger I use to think about this. How we become conditioned to our environment.”

  “You use to think about smelling smoke? I always knew you were weird.” She giggled. Allan pumped hard on the bike pedals causing Jennifer to rock back in her seat in the trailer. “Ok, tell me about your little theory.” She smirked.

  “Well, my thought was that we, humans and all other animals, have been living and dying here on Earth for eons and eons, constantly expelling waste and gas and in our deaths we fill the air with the odors of our decaying bodies.”

  “Good grief, you were a weird little kid.” Jennifer interrupted.

  “But, when we breathe we don’t smell an
y of that.” Allan continued. “Why do you think that is?”

  Although Allan didn’t turn to see Jennifer shrug her shoulders her silence revealed her response.

  “Do the plants and trees work as a filter to clean the air of all the odors, does the rain wash it all away, or does the Earth really stink and we just can’t smell it because we’re just conditioned to it?”

  “Doesn’t seem like it really matters. Fresh air smells pretty fresh to me.” Jennifer commented.

  “Yeah, but if an alien from another world came to visit us on Earth, having never smelled our atmosphere before, would he think your fresh air really stinks?”

  “How about when an alien actually comes you can pull him aside and you can ask him.” Her lack of interest in the topic was apparent and Allan pedaled on pondering his thoughts in silence.

  He took one last look at the smoldering ruins of the Bass Pro Shop and remembered how years earlier he had waited for months in anticipation for the construction on the new store to be completed, yet the complete destruction of the building had only taken a matter of hours. He thought of it as an analogy of modern society in how it had taken hundreds of years to build but it was all gone in a flash.

  He stopped the biked and looked out across the apocalyptic landscape with shock in his eyes. Nothing seemed untouched by the effects of the disaster. Everywhere he looked there was wreckage and destruction. Even the water had an unnatural murky brown tint to it and Allan could see debris floating in little clusters across the entire surface of the water. He was thankful that they had made it to the lake in the darkness or else the scene would have ruined any hope for a bath let alone any chance for intimacy.

  He drove the bike forward across the first of the two bridges where Interstate 30 crossed over Lake Ray Hubbard. When they reached the end of the first bridge they noticed that there was a small park to their right. Allan must have passed by this particular spot near the lake at least a hundred times in the past and it never really caught his eye until now. There was a large cluster of tents and tarp shelters that had been setup amongst the trees and the scene reminded him of the shanty towns that he had heard about during the Great Depression. People in the camp were busily moving about in the early morning dawn stoking fires to cook their breakfast and hanging laundry out on lines stretched between trees.

  Directly in front of them Allan could see that the thick black smoke was indeed coming from the roadway ahead of them. On the day of the blast the pilot of a Boeing 737 jumbo jet, equipped with manual servo tab backup controls, had tried to make an emergency water landing on the lake after his engines abruptly stopped but the plane was going too fast and his landing site on the lake was too small. As the pilot steered the plane over the water he realized that he would not be able to clear the bridge. The pilot desperately pulled up on the manual controls but they did not respond fast enough and the plane ripped into the eastbound I-30 bridge in a fiery eruption that engulfed 20 cars and trucks in the resulting blaze. By now the flames had burnt out but the smoldering ruins continued to emit thick black soot high into the sky. The eastbound bridge had collapsed into the water on the first day and Allan could see pedestrians walking in both directions on what remained of the westbound bridge. As they walked past the wreckage they all seemed to lean their bodies away from the blackened remains of the crash, as if the smoldering ruins were still extremely hot. He watched as man lifted a young boy into his arms and he held him out over the water to get the child as far away from the heat as possible. One slip of the hand or trip of the man’s foot would have meant instant death for the boy as he would surely tumble down into the rocky waters below. The little boy was wearing a bright orange hat and he was flailing his arms and legs with complete terror on his face and his mouth was open screaming cries that Allan could not hear. He watched the man successfully cross over the bridge and he pulled the little boy back to safety and Allan let out a sigh of relief.

  Allan turned to Jennifer, “It looks like it’s still really hot up there but I think we can get through it if I pedal fast.” Jennifer clinched her abdomen with a terrible grimace on her face.

  Suddenly an enormous explosion rocked the entire overpass, the concussion from the blast nearly knocked Allan off the bike. He looked back to where he had seen the dark black smoke billowing into the sky but now there was nothing but a cloud of dust. Huge waves emitted from the water underneath the dust cloud as if a huge ship, far too large for the waterway, had just passed by and the waves began crashing against the rocky embankment on the land bridge beside them. Seconds passed and a breeze began to scatter the dust cloud out over the water and all that Allan could see where the westbound bridge had once stood was an enormous hole. The smoldering fire and the wrecked cars and trucks that were on the bridge before were now gone. The people who had just been walking across the bridge had vanished. Allan looked down and saw heaps of concrete and rebar and the remains of the jet aircraft and cars lying in a tangled heap down in the water.

  Allan stood straddling the bike watching the scene unfold in shock. It felt like he was watching a movie. Down in the water, in amongst the waves and debris, Allan could make out human bodies. Some were thrashing about, fighting to swim against the angry waters, but most were lifeless and twisted among the ruins of the fallen bridge. Beside one of the bodies he saw a bright orange hat floating in the water and Allan knew that the little boy and the man that he had just watched cross over the bridge were gone.

  “Oh my God!” Jennifer called out from inside the bicycle trailer. Her response to the disaster seemed delayed and Allan thought maybe she was in shock to what they had just witnessed.

  “The bridge collapsed.” He explained. “I guess when the plane that crashed into it weakened the support columns…”

  “My water just broke!” Jennifer interrupted with a scream. What a horrible time for jokes. Allan thought and he spun around to scold her but as he turned to her the look on her face was clear. She was in obvious pain and it was apparent that she wasn’t joking. The disaster unfolding on the bridge in front of them seemed like a distant concern and everything grinded to a halt before him. Moments ago it had felt like he was watching a movie of bridge collapse but now it felt as if entire world had stopped spinning. He stood there with his body twisted around the bike frame, in a mental and physical whiplash, with his feet still pointing at the calamity happening on the bridge and his face and shoulders focused on the larger calamity happening inside the tiny bicycle trailer.

  “Don’t just stand there. Do something!” Jennifer yelled.

  “What do you want me to do?” His mind raced to find an answer to his own question.

  “Take me back to the park that we just passed and see if there is a doctor there.”

  “No.” He said. What am I saying? That’s a good idea. He thought.

  “What do you mean no?”

  “I don’t trust those people over there. I don’t trust anyone. They could take advantage of us and steal our baby for all we know.”

  “Then what do you want to do?”

  To their left was a set of rusty railroad tracks and a single flat rail car sitting amongst a grove of overgrown trees.

  “Let’s go over there.” Allan pointed at the trees.

  “But there’s no one over there.” Jennifer proclaimed.

  “Exactly.”

  “We can’t just hide in the trees and hope this problem goes away. I’m having this baby whether you like it or not.” She said frantically.

  “We are going to hide in the trees and we are going to deliver this baby together.” He replied forcefully and he began pedaling the bike into the direction of the trees. Jennifer held onto the sides of the bike trailer as they crossed over the rough terrain between the road and the rusty railroad tracks. When he reached the group of trees Allan dismounted off the bike and pushed it to a spot between two old vine covered oak trees where they could not be seen from the road. He unzipped the cover of the bike trailer and carefully he
lped Jennifer to her feet.

  He removed his undershirt and went to place it on the ground for Jennifer to lie on when she interrupted. “Won’t you need that to swaddle the baby in?”

  Allan’s knees went weak with the realization that they were actually delivering their baby beside a set of old railroad tracks and that the baby’s first clothes would be his filthy undershirt.

  “I don’t know if I can do this.” The forcefulness had already fallen completely out of his voice.

  “You can.” Jennifer replied softly.

  “It wasn’t supposed to happen this way.”

  “It is.”

  He looked up at her and she reassured him with her eyes.

  “Help me out of my pants.” She instructed. Any other time those words would have been exciting to Allan but this time the words terrified him. His hands shook nervously as he helped Jennifer remove her shoes and pants and then her underwear and then he assisted her down to the ground. It was if her labor took lying down as a signal to intensify for as soon as her bare bottom touched the ground the rate of her contractions and the level of her pain increased dramatically. Amidst her screams Allan wanted so badly to tell her to be quiet but he knew that she would never forgive him for such a demand, so he kept looking back over his shoulder, watchful for curious onlookers or intruders who might be approaching from the highway. Thankfully the disaster still unfolding at the collapsed bridge seemed to grip everyone’s attention and no one bothered them.

  Jennifer’s pain was unbearable but there was no other option but for her to bear it. Between the heat and the filthy ground and her exhaustion she was in no place or condition to give birth, but the labor was upon her and there was no stopping it. She was not one of those new-age women who wanted to be tough and refuse medication. Jennifer understood that women had given birth for centuries without drugs, but she also understood that modern medicine had been developed to make childbirth less stressful on both the mother and the baby. She had gladly received an epidural when she gave birth to Samantha and afterwards her sister-in-law, who happened to be of the new-age mindset, seemed to look down upon her as if Jennifer had committed a crime against her body and her baby.