Coming to a stop at a rural junction, Calvin saw two corpses splayed out over the hood of a broken down car. Pockets were turned inside out, and the doors of the car stood wide open and the trunk was pulled up. The scene left little to the imagination, and it played before Calvin’s eyes in seconds in blue-black flickers, and ended just as he saw it now, in tragedy.
He slowed just enough to hope for peace upon the souls of the families of the dead, and to be grateful that he wasn’t the one lying there, perforated with bullets, stretched out like a deer across the hood of a car.
The advantage to being in the country during this moment was the benefit of not having as many people to dodge. The people in this neck of the woods were probably hurting and hungry, but they weren’t competing with millions of others for the rare materials of sustenance and survival. Statistically speaking, that was a very large advantage indeed. Calvin would drive along highway 79 almost as far as Memphis in order to avoid the Interstate highways, and he would pass, almost exclusively, through a few widely separated small towns—towns such as Hearne and Henderson and Carthage.
As he drove through the Piney Woods of Texas, he thought about all the places he’d seen and known and loved in the state. It was difficult for people who weren’t from there to understand it — how Texas had plains, mountains, mighty rivers, and woods and forests, as well as deserts, and oceans… and skies. Plenty of skies. Of course, the state also had its large cities and its little towns, and that was what made it special for him—as a native Texan who was also an outsider of sorts. Texas didn’t necessarily have the best in anything, but it had the bestof everything. It was self-contained in a way that other places weren’t. As the people often said, Texas is a whole other country. As he drove through the silent night, he looked up at the stars and saw that they were big and bright, and already he missed being deep in the state’s heart.
Outside of Shreveport, Calvin took gunfire. There was simply no other way around it. Shreveport, that is. The Louisiana city was a vexation that could not be avoided. Literally. He had to go through the town in order to reach the bridge that would take him over the Red River. The river, usually an afterthought, its muddy waters rolling lazily along as if the world and its affairs were none of its concern, had become a barrier that he needed to breach. Bridges, by nature, were bottlenecks, and danger always loves a bottleneck.
Calvin timed his approach so that he’d come to the crossing in the middle of the night. Winding his way south around the city, he came up to the bridge on 70th Street, running adjacent to the old skeletal structures of Hamel’s Amusement Park, which had closed down more than a decade ago when a tornado bent its Ferris Wheel in half.
He’d been thinking of the Ferris Wheel and comparing it in his mind to the recently destroyed one on Coney Island—the one from Hurricane Sandy— that he’d seen on the television and the Internet just before those forms of media had gone black forever. He was driving alongside the amusement park looking out over the rusty machinery, the steel and wood standing alone in its abandoned memories, remembering how the recent world had simply stopped in the wake of Hurricane Sandy when, out of the blue—or the black, actually—he heard a ping. Then another.
The shots ricocheted off the fender of his pickup, and he swiveled his head to see where they were coming from. He almost ran off the bridge just as he entered its mouth.
Somewhere back at the amusement park, he thought. Not amusing at all.
He hit the gas, tore across the river, and looked up into his rear-view mirror to watch the rusted old skyline disappear into the night.
“Why do you keep taking off your boots? Are you trying to slow us down?”
It was Val. He was standing over the round-faced man and sneering at him. The bespectacled young man, currently called Kent, peered into his boot and seemed to be searching for something that wasn’t there. He was a little drunk. They’d taken turns watching through the night, and Kent had spent most of his turn sneaking drinks of vodka from a flask he’d kept secretly in his pocket. In his mind, his life had turned to dung and the vodka made it almost, but not quite, bearable.
“Leave him alone, Val. Just don’t start it up again.” It was Steve. The silent one. Like his comrade Mike, he was getting tired of the constant bickering back and forth between Val and Kent, and he’d come to conclude that Val was mostly to blame. Val was like a rooster who, with nothing worthwhile at which to peck, pecked at anything near him that he deemed to be weaker than himself.
“Yes. Listen to our amigo, Esteban, here.” Kent felt himself slurring his words. When he said ‘Estaban,’ it sounded to him like ‘Esh-tra-gon.’
“Time’s out of joint…” (He was speaking so slowly!) “…no need to get your nose out of joint, too.” The words came out like molasses, awkwardly, and ran together in his ears like they did not in his head.
The brutish Val looked at him and thought that someone getting his nose pushed out of joint was exactly what was needed. They were waiting for Mike to come back from a little hike up ahead to scout out their direction, and passing the time with Val was, as usual, not turning out to be rewarding for Kent, so he excused himself to walk over to a small group of bushes to let the vodka finish its pass through him.
“Stupid idiot,” he muttered to himself as he half stumbled and half climbed up a small rise toward the bushes. “Of course, I’m trying to slow you down, you moron…,” he slurred to himself.
Walking over the rise, he stood at a small hedge line and was just about to unzip his pants when sobriety snuck up on him and a shot of adrenaline flew through his system like lightening. There, at the bottom of the hedges, in a small clump of trees, was a man dressed like an accountant. Blood, turned black and inky like impenetrable night, lay frozen in a pool around him.
The man held up his hand for his friends to shut up. They were gathered in a group at the foot of the bridge where they’d been sitting for several days — doing business. Stalled cars and buses formed a zigzag maze purposefully designed to block access to the bridge from all vehicles, and to force pedestrians to walk across the bridge — but only after paying a toll.
The friends had learned that it was easier to allow the food to come to them by standing across its mouth with knives, boards, and chains, than it was to go out in search of supplies for themselves. Looting was turning out to be dangerous business in the city. The rumor was rampant that some looters had even been cooked and eaten. Charging tolls was much safer. They’d placed a sign on the off-ramp side of the bridge that told the people who were escaping out of the city that they needed to pay to cross—a fee for the right to exit hell. The gang told the citizens that the toll was something like an indulgence, and the gatekeepers, the popes and priests of the new world disorder, administered punishments upon anyone who tried to exit purgatory without paying. The sign made it clear what forms of payment were acceptable…
Weapons. Food. Money.
It was unclear what they planned to do with the money.
“Hey. Shhh. Shhh. Shhhhhh.”
They watched as a couple of yellow suits on what appeared to be bicycles came drifting down the decline. The bikes were taking their time, weaving slowly in and out of traffic and the suits riding the bikes turning their hooded heads first to this side and then to that side. The yellow suit in the lead seeming to point out little features on the ground to the suit in the back as they crept lazily, silently, eerily, through the deadened line of vehicles.