Kelly paused, allowing the flame to vanish, her eyes not prepared for the darkness which replaced it.
“We’ve seen no one all night,” she continued. “Maybe everyone’s gone. Or dead. We should at least try. Masks on.”
Kelly wiped the moisture from the inside of her gas mask with her finger and slipped it over her head, putting her weight on the bike pedal. She began to propel forward, past David, who did the same. They were so close they could taste it. Or was that the radiation?
“The river!” Kelly whispered loudly, pulling her bike to a stop, atop a small road bridge, a creek below them.
David wobbled up alongside, cold yet wet with sweat. It was now around 5 AM and the wintry gray sky was brightening. Panting, he removed his mask.
“Now what?” David asked, his eyes peering at the outline of the creek in the early morning light.
It was a damn good question. Kelly looked around. If only there was a boat prepared for them, full of blankets and food and drink. What a dream that would have been. She noticed the silhouette of a house on the other side of the road, down a long driveway.
“I don't know. Maybe we can hide there,” she said, pointing to the house with a barn alongside.
David turned and stared at the direction in which she was pointing. There was indeed a house and a barn, but was it safe?
“Guns,” said David. “And take these things off.” He pointed to his white overalls.
Kelly and David walked their bikes down the gravel driveway, sticking to the grass on either side to minimize noise. The dark clothing they had been wearing underneath their hazmat suits gave them a little more safety in the darkness, but not for long. There was a house, but they decided that the barn should be their destination. Kelly was silent, but desperately hoped that a miracle could occur and that they could find a boat inside with a working engine and a tank full of gas.
Approaching the wooden barn, they met an issue which had to be overcome. The large, wooden barn door had a padlock on the front, but the latch to which it was attached was affixed to the wooden frame with regular screws. David scanned the horizons and peered at the house nearby, while Kelly drew out her Swiss Army knife, selecting the Phillips head instrument. Raindrops began to patter the ground around them as she pressed hard, turning each screw an inch at a time.
“Rain,” said David, a worried look on his face.
“Yes,” said Kelly, busier with more important things.
“The rain might be full of radioactive particles from the sky and dropping them on us,” he added.
“Shit,” Kelly said, now understanding his sudden fascination with precipitation. She increased her speed, turning the six screws faster.
People aside, their two newest foes, rain and daylight, both began to increase in intensity. David kicked himself for suggesting they take off their hazmat suits, with potentially radioactive rain hitting their heads and clothing.
Undoing the final screw, the latch came away from the door frame, allowing the door to the barn to open with a gentle creaking sound, fortunately masked by the rain. The two stepped inside, pulling the door closed.
The high ceiling towered above them as they craned their necks in all directions looking for something to get them moving on the river. It took but a moment for their collective hearts to sink with disappointment. There was a modern-looking tractor, about a hundred bales of hay, commercial farming implements and various tools.
“This is useless!” David whispered out loud, the rain hitting the metal roof high above their heads. Kelly felt responsible for wasting their time, taking them here.
“I didn’t mean it was your fault,” David said, realizing how it could be construed as though he was blaming her. “You did great getting us here, but we can’t ride a dead tractor down the river.”
Kelly stood still, a thousand-yard-stare on her face. David paced around the dirt floor, the sound of the rain now heavy above them. He looked at the tools. There was nothing they could use to float on a river. He turned back to Kelly.
“Look. You did fucking brilliantly getting us here. We can only be safer here than back at home. We’ve moved a hundred miles. A hundred fucking miles in the blackness of night. That’s some Master and Commander level navigating.”
The compliment was nice, but Kelly was too upset to accept it. She’d pinned her hopes on there being some magical pot of gold waiting for them at the river. Some resolution. She’d put too much weight on this destination offering salvation.
“Kel, let’s just stay here today. We can’t go out in the rain anyway.”
David pointed to the columns of hay forming a wall at the back of the barn.
“Let’s get rid of these clothes and go lie down.”
Kelly nodded. She had to admit that she’d done well getting them here, but she also had to realize when they were defeated. She took her sweater off, revealing another underneath.
“We only had very brief contact with the rain, so maybe we’re OK?” she asked, not wanting to have to get naked in the freezing air.
“Let’s just get down to our thermals, grab the foil survival blankets and get in the hay,” David responded. “It’ll be much warmer in there.”
David pulled down a few bales of hay and Kelly tore at them with a large garden fork, creating a prickly but soft mattress on the ground, being their last physical act in an exhausting night. Covering themselves with hay and their foil blankets, they lay down and held each other for warmth.
David was the first to awaken, briefly confused by his new surroundings. The rain had stopped and daylight was visible through gaps in the barn’s walls. He looked at his wife, sleeping peacefully, hay stuck to her hair. What could they do, he wondered. He scanned the barn’s contents again, fruitlessly, the gentle sound of water trickling somewhere outside, behind them. This was stupid, he thought. They couldn’t wear the same clothes they’d arrived in for fear of radiation contamination and they couldn’t go out in just their thermal underwear under fresh hazmat suits or they'd freeze to death. They were trapped in a barn near the river they had fought so hard to reach. He looked at the tractor, its giant rear wheels sitting high above their heads. He briefly entertained the idea of taking the inner tubes out from the giant tires and floating down the river in them, but they would also certainly leave them exposed to the radioactive elements while getting them soaking wet in the process, almost certainly giving them hypothermia. What about the house, he wondered. Maybe there was something they could use in there. He had to try.
David climbed out from underneath the hay, and put on a pair of farmers overalls hanging on the barn wall, before putting on his shoes and mask and picking up his pistol. Prizing the barn door open, he scanned the landscape. Overcast skies and fenced, wet fields spread out before him, once home to grazing cattle that had almost certainly been shot and eaten by looters. The house was about 40 yards to his left. For the first time he could see that its front door was wide open. Either the owner was home and loved the feeling of freezing air or its owners were gone and their house had already been looted. If it was looted, David pondered, why didn’t they also loot the barn? Maybe there was someone home after all, protecting their property. He had to find out.
Making sure there was no sign of visible human activity on the road, he walked quickly over the grass and to the edge of the house, placing his back against it. He didn’t want to stay outside in the radioactive air for a second longer than necessary. David raised his head up to the house’s living room window, aware that doing so could get it blown off. His eyes absorbed the image before him. It was a ransacked home. Looted.
David moved around the front door and carefully slipped inside, gun aimed in front. His shoes paced softly on the cream colored carpet, made dirty from muddy footsteps, making it evident that he certainly wasn’t the first to come here. Going from room to room, it quickly became apparent that there was nothing of value. Sure, there was plenty of furniture and many modern, unusable appliances, but nothing useful f
or their current apocalyptic situation. Another wasted venture. The kitchen pantry and fridge were empty, even the bathroom cabinets were bare. Though, in the bedroom there were still some clothes, which they desperately needed. It wasn’t a complete waste, David thought, suddenly feeling like he was in a computer game, going through a map and collecting things of value for an upcoming quest. God help him if this game had a final ‘boss’ to defeat, he wondered.
David put on the clothes in front of him, covering the farmers overalls he was already wearing. The clothes were made for a larger man than himself, older too, judging by the beige and brown colors and patterns. He picked up another pair of pants and a sweater for Kelly, and made his way back to the barn, going around the back to lower the chance of detection, before opening the door to see Kelly awake, the rifle aimed straight at him.
“Oh,” David said, surprised.
“David,” said Kelly, putting the gun down. “Where the hell were you? I woke up alone and freaked out.”
“I was at the house. I got you some clothes.”
“Is there anything useful in there? Like, maybe a 40 foot yacht in the living room?”
“The whole place has been looted. It’s empty.”
Kelly didn’t reply to this bad news, getting up and removing her water bottle from her bicycle’s drink holder. David did the same with his own bottle, sitting down next to Kelly on the hay, placing the clothes on her lap.
“Jesus. Forget crazies with guns, I’m more scared of being caught by the fashion police,” she said, again finding humor in a dire situation.
“We’re gonna need more water eventually,” said David. “I heard rainwater trickling when I woke up, going down the gutter into a tank behind the barn, but we can’t drink that.”
Kelly gestured to the tractor, a few feet away.
“What about if we floated down the river on those tires?”
“Already thought about that. The only benefit to that idea would be that we’d die of hypothermia before we died of radiation exposure.”
He was right. Chances are, if there was a boat, even an inflatable dinghy, it would have been stolen weeks ago.
Kelly scanned the barn, the silence only broken by the rhythmic tapping of water droplets dripping down the gutter outside. A light went on inside her mind. David noticed her facial expression begin to change and his eyes narrowed a little in curiosity. Kelly then got up and put on the clothes David had brought her.
“You’re thinking of something,” David said, giving Kelly a sideways glance. “What are you thinking?
Kelly looked serious. She wasn’t sure yet, and didn’t want to give David, or herself, false hope.
“Just stay here a minute,” she said, putting on a fresh hazmat suit and slipping her mask over her face.
Kelly scanned the perimeter from the barn door for a few seconds and walked out. Through the gaps between the wall’s wooden boards, David could see her moving around the side of the barn. She was back inside just thirty seconds later, removing her mask to reveal a cunning smile.
“The water tank,” she said.
“We can’t drink it,” David replied, worried that she was starting to forget the seriousness of the invisible radiation quite possibly buzzing around them.
“No,” she continued. “We can use it like a boat.”
It took David’s imagination a few seconds to join the dots, but, by God, she was right. She explained her simple plan, though it wasn't necessary. It was ingenious.
“It’s plastic. We can drain it and cut the top off it.”
For the first time since that moment just before he crashed his bike into a car some hours before, David felt genuinely optimistic.
“Let’s do it,” he said, getting up.
Kelly turned on the tap at the base of the large tank, spilling its contents onto the grass at the back of the barn. It was almost full, so it would take a few minutes to drain. David, meanwhile, was rummaging through the tools in the barn, finding a large wood saw. He went outside to see Kelly peering inside the tank, through a hole in the top, about the diameter of a dinner plate.
“We’ll definitely have to chop the top off,” Kelly confirmed.
“Yeah. I mean, we’ve both lost a lot of weight, but unless we Kate Moss it up, and throw up every meal from the last three months, we ain’t squeezing through that hole,” added David.
With the water drained, Kelly and David pushed the tank onto its side and rolled it around the side of the barn, getting it safely inside, away from any prying eyes that might be traveling on the road.
“We’ll have to clean it. It had radioactive water in it,” David pointed out.
But what would they clean it with, he wondered.
“I guess we just need to get the particles off,” he added.
Using all the chemicals and liquids they could find in the barn, they washed and rinsed the tank, inside and out, rubbing it with hay, before hacking at it like mad with the wood saw he found.
“Babe. We can use these as paddles,” said Kelly, holding up a spade and a shovel.
“Good good good,” said David. “Get the stuff off the bikes and get ready to go.”
With the coast clear, David and Kelly rolled the topless water tank up the long driveway toward the road, stopping every now and then to check for signs of human activity. It took at least five long minutes to move the device to the bridge and slide it down to the water’s edge.
“Don’t touch the water,” David said to Kelly, climbing into the tank, their bright white overalls standing out against the wet bushes around them. Kelly rocked the tank, walking it on its edges further towards the water, before climbing in herself.
“It doesn’t feel very stable,” she said, the tank rocking around them, its edge still in contact with the ground.
The freezing water swirled around the outside of the tank, the two of them bottomed out on the ground.
“We’re grounded,” Kelly said, looking over the edge with a shovel in hand. “Try wiggling it.”
The two of them bobbed about in their dark green, plastic vessel, while Kelly pushed the shovel against the embankment. Suddenly, the tank turned around, caught by the moving water, setting itself free from its earthly mooring.
“We’re moving!” David yelped.
“We’re fucking moving!” Kelly responded.
Trying desperately to keep the tank from tipping over, Kelly pushed at the ground with her shovel. The large green cylinder bobbed and swirled in uncontrolled circles toward the center of the stream, beginning its lengthy journey to a larger river, its two bright white occupants on their knees, churning at the water with their garden tools.
“This might just work,” said Kelly, allowing herself a brief moment of pride.
The morning’s heavy rains were initially unwanted when they started falling, perhaps some eight hours ago, but their effects were of great help. The normally foot-deep creek was now twice that depth and the increased body of water meant they were moving at two or three miles per hour, sometimes faster, sometimes slower. It was going to be a long and uncertain journey, but it was definitely faster than walking, plus it also meant that they didn’t have to expend any energy as the river did all the work. Kelly and David had agreed that, once they get to a larger body of water, in the unlikely event that they found an actual boat, they would abandon their homemade craft and take that instead. But after three hours on the water, there was no sign of any boat, or any human activity for that matter, allowing a very welcome sense of calm to descend. They took turns paddling, although there was very little actual control involved. The main job of the paddler was to simply keep the tank away from the riverbanks and fallen tree logs which occasionally blocked the path, while the flow of the water did the gruntwork.
With each mile they traveled, the creek gradually increased in width and volume, which told Kelly that they were on their way to another, larger river. However, she had no real way of knowing where they actually were; a problem w
hich grew as the sun set. David, who was on his knees, shovel in hand, crouched down to voice his concerns to Kelly, resting on the tank’s floor.
“It’s getting kinda dark, Kel,” he said, stating the obvious.
“I know,” she replied, holding back the urge to say, “Well, duh.”
“How far do you think we’ve traveled?”
“Yeah, I was thinking about that myself. I honestly couldn’t say for sure. We’ve lost track of where we are on the map, but if we’re going at about two miles per hour, then it would be about seven hours from where we started to reach the Appomattox River.”
Crouched on the floor of the tank, David did some guesstimating.
“We’ve been going for about five hours now. Maybe six. We might even get there before it’s completely pitch black.”
The large plastic tank, about the size of a compact car, briefly scraped against the ground, its momentum turning it clockwise and and setting it free from its brief, earthly grasp. David popped his head up to scan the river ahead through his foggy mask, only to be whipped in the face by a leafy branch.
Kelly saw it all and laughed. The whole situation was ridiculous.
“Look at us,” she said, a pained smile on her masked face.
“Two neon-white rejects from a Beastie Boys video in a chopped off water tank, floating down a river, completely lost.”
Realizing the absurdity of their situation, David let out a good laugh. It really was a sight to behold.
Sleep that night was erratic and unsatisfying, with both travelers being perpetually cold and cramped in what was little more than a glorified bucket. They were moving but the tank was effectively out of control unless both of them were paddling on opposite sides, as a single paddler caused the craft to simply turn around in the water like a spinning record. Given the overcast darkness of the night, they both gave up on trying to avoid rocks or logs, meaning that the tank would bang into unseen objects regularly, causing the walls to jar with an unpleasant noise, immediately releasing both crewmates from the embrace of sleep. Conversation was their only tool to alleviate boredom, and given the gravity of the situation, it wasn’t very jovial.
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