The Takeover, page 26
Eventually Fair Oaks became so jammed with vehicles she could no longer proceed in her wheelchair. Some trucks had smashed violently into the cars ahead of them, as if their drivers had tried to force their way through the traffic jam. The pushed cars sat askew or even sideways to the road. Nearly every vehicle was vacant. Many had their front doors open, as if their owners had made a mad dash for the exits and hadn’t bothered closing them. Rachel guessed that that was exactly what had happened; the dome wall from before today’s jump must have been just up ahead.
Curiosity got the better of her: she hobbled forward on foot as best she could, picking her way through the press of vehicles and using them as impromptu crutches along the way. Eventually she came to the spot where the dome wall must have stood earlier this morning, before the jump. The line of demarcation was as visible as if it had been marked out with chalk—except in this case the “chalk” was piles of dead bodies. The bodies as a whole made a bend that mirrored where the dome wall itself had stood.
Just up ahead, maybe twenty feet or so, she could see another pile of bodies bending the other way. These bodies curved away from her, as if they were mirroring a second dome that had stood close to the first but hadn’t quite merged.
Eventually she pieced it all together: before today’s jump, two domes must have stood close together but not quite touching—no doubt the Glendale Dome and the JPL Dome. All the dead she was seeing must have gotten squeezed into a narrow corridor between the two domes. No doubt they had come rushing out of each dome in an absolute panic as the air had run out. The sheer crush of humanity must have resulted in a terrible chokepoint. Most of them had probably been electrocuted on the spot as they got shoved back against the very dome wall from which they had just emerged.
She took in the awful prospect. Just to her right was a yellow sign announcing “Dead End”—literally true now, as the side street in question was strewn with dead bodies. No doubt it had been a pleasant enough side street back in the day, with neat homes and tidy lawns, but now it looked like an apocalyptic nightmare. Most of the homes had been burnt to the ground, and the trees that had stood in front of them appeared to have been chopped down for firewood. A pall of smoke hung in the air. Bodies were strewn everywhere, drooped over the railings of half-burnt porches, curled up in fetal positions on sidewalks, sprawled face-down atop trampled lawns. Her nose twitched. The whole place stank to high heaven—although heaven had nothing to do with it. This was the work of some devil from down below.
On some of the lawns she spied piles of bones stacked near impromptu fire pits. In one pit she could see a cat’s tail, but no cat, protruding from a fire ring. Other remains near other fire pits looked distressingly like dogs. She saw one or two scorched dog collars with no dogs inside and decided she’d seen enough for one day. Unbidden, a picture formed in her mind of survivors at their wits’ end, reduced to eating cats and dogs and squirrels and rats in order to stave off starvation.
At least the crows were happy: hundreds were hopping about the area. Rachel didn’t want to look too closely at what they were doing, nor did she want to focus too much on the feral dogs and cats helping themselves to the same bounty. She could hardly blame the poor creatures: turnabout was fair play.
It suddenly became crystal clear to her that she should stop heading south. South meant heading deeper into the chaos that was once L.A. Desperate urban survivalists were not the sort of people she wanted to be running into just now. She’d headed south mostly on autopilot, because that was where the nearest dome wall had been when she’d been trying to escape a week ago—but that logic no longer applied. North was the way to go, away from L.A. and towards the Angeles National Forest.
Another thought dawned on her quite suddenly: when the two domes had merged earlier this morning, only one of them would have survived. The Glendale Dome, most likely, since Glendale had a higher population than Pasadena and was closer to L.A. If so, the JPL Dome—her white whale—was no more.
Of course, the Glendale Dome would have a diameter of some twenty-four miles by now—so it would be big enough to encompass both her old home and lab even from its center in Glendale. She did some quick mental calculations and estimated the north end of the dome wall must be some eighteen miles from where she now stood.
There was no way she was going to wheel herself eighteen miles, much of it uphill, in a wheelchair. Clearly she needed a car.
Luckily for her, she had plenty to choose from—a whole traffic jam’s worth of them. All she had to do was find one near the back of the pack, preferably one without a dead body inside. With so many air-deprived people having made a last-minute dash for the dome wall, Rachel felt sure she’d find any number of cars with the keys still inside.
She hobbled back the way she had come and dropped into her wheelchair with a sigh. As she sat there catching her breath, she noticed a few intruders already sniffing around some of the local homes and businesses. So—some of them had survived, and now they found themselves inside the jump zone—probably the same ones who’d been willing to eat rats. She wanted nothing to do with them, nor they with her.
Wheeling herself towards the back of the traffic jam, she reached the last few cars and began peering inside. All were empty.
In the end she chose a Lexus RX with the key fob still inside and an almost full tank of gas. Hey, why not travel in style at the end of the world?
She pushed the start button. The Lexus hummed to life, and for the first time in a long while, Rachel smiled.
Eighteen miles in a wheelchair might have been a big deal, but eighteen miles in a Lexus was nothing but a joyride. She had to weave around a few dead bodies lying in the road, but other than that the drive through Pasadena was a breeze.
She decided to stop at her old homestead first. She needed clothes and whatever valuables might have been left behind by the intruders after they’d finished ransacking the place. The good news was, she knew something they did not: there was a stash of cash and other valuables tucked away inside a safe in the basement, concealed behind a pile of flattened moving boxes. No intruder ever would have thought to look there, which was exactly why she had hidden the safe in that spot in the first place. She would need those valuables going forward if she was going to survive the next few weeks.
Pulling into her driveway—home sweet home—she hobbled down to the basement one slow step at a time and found the safe intact. She carried it upstairs even more slowly, placing it inside the trunk of the Lexus and making sure to lock the vehicle this time around. Then she packed a suitcase full of clothes and toiletries up in her bedroom. Otherwise there wasn’t much to bother with, except a small collection of gold and silver jewelry hidden away in a shoebox in her closet where the intruders hadn’t thought to look. They had made a mess of everything else in the house, but who cared? She wasn’t planning on coming back anyway.
*****
On her way out of town, she passed her former laboratory at JPL. Being the curious scientist she was and always would be, she couldn’t resist popping in for a final look around. Limping over to the lab door, she tried her electronic badge and found it didn’t work, but her physical key did. Once inside, she hobbled over to where the ovate had been—and found nothing but ash and the remains of a scorched metal truss. The ovate was gone, reduced to a thick pile of dust on the floor.
So—her white whale really was gone. She rejoiced for reasons of her own, even though she knew there were plenty of other white whales out there to worry about—including the one whose belly she happened to be in right now. That thought catapulted her into action. She hurried as fast as her bum leg would carry her back to the car and peeled out of the parking lot.
Before long she came to a junction and had a decision to make. To the northwest was undomed Santa Clarita, considered a safe haven, but she suspected it would be mobbed with people by now. To the northeast was the Angeles Crest Highway, a thin snake of a road that climbed into the San Gabriel Mountains for some sixty-five miles before depositing you more or less in the middle of absolute nowhere. Her gut instincts told her to go that way—away from people—and so she did.
After several minutes of twisting and turning along the winding roads, she saw what she had been expecting to see for some time now: the shimmering wall of a dome.
“Hallelujah!” she breathed. She drove through the dome wall—out of the belly of the beast—at seventy miles per hour, just for the hell of it, whooping all the way.
Chapter 28
January 11 – Dorrance, Kansas
Ken Stubbs’ beer belly was long gone. Looking down, he could barely recognize himself anymore—he could even see his own feet. Normally that would have been a good thing (his doctor would have been so proud), except in this case he’d lost the weight because he and Marie were starving.
He’d gone from fat to gaunt, and Marie, who had been thin to begin with, looked downright emaciated. Kansas, it turned out, wasn’t America’s breadbasket after all, at least not in the depths of winter when you were on foot with nowhere to go.
They might have been able to eat raw corn or wheat from the fields at a different time of year. They could have soaked the wheat grains in water long enough to make them chewable and digestible—but there was nothing growing at this time of year. The only crop was snow.
He thought of the animals they’d freed and wished for two of his horses back. If wishes were horses….On horseback they could have made it to Kansas City by now. Plus, you could eat a horse, if worse came to worst. The only thing cars were good for at this point was temporary shelter at night—and without gas there was no heat to warm them up, only the slim protection of the exterior to shield them from the worst of the elements.
They moved east, always east, during the day, past an endless cavalcade of vehicles frozen in place as if by a spell. The town of Salina was somewhere up ahead, but who knew how far? It wasn’t much of a city, but it was better than nothing.
They averaged eight or nine miles per day, picking their way through a minefield of cars and semis and—increasingly—dead bodies. Maybe they could have done better if Marie had been in better health, but her shoulder continued to bother her, and her toes were frostbitten, and her heels covered in blisters. She wasn’t used to walking long distances, and her shoes were the wrong sort for hiking anyway. She’d assumed she’d be arriving by pickup truck in Kansas City a few hours after they’d left, not trudging through the snow along the highway margins day after day like vagabonds.
They were shivering and coughing and half-lame to boot, and their food was all gone. Ken kept dreaming about those candy bars that had slipped through his fingers. He’d never been one to have recurring nightmares, but seeing that food fall out of the bag and between the cars had stuck with him somehow. The hungrier he got, the more he dreamt about it.
The snow served them as water now. Food was whatever crumbs they could get from others out of charity. They had literally nothing left to their name—and they were just two among thousands in the same awful predicament.
On the eighth day, they had come to Hays and had stayed the night in a Walmart Supercenter near the edge of town. The Walmart had been swept clean of all merchandise. It was like sleeping in an airport hangar it was so empty—except for all the people, that is. It was stocked with plenty of those, hundreds upon hundreds of them, all coughing and starving and sick. They’d slept in the aisles where shopping carts had once held sway.
Hays itself had been raided by so many other footsore travelers before them that nothing remained except the empty husks of old buildings. They’d passed a McDonald’s, an Applebee’s, and an Old Chicago Pizza—just the names were enough to make them drool—but one glance told them all they needed to know: these establishments had long since given up the ghost.
Pushing on past Hays, they’d hoped to find more civilization in Russell, but two days later their hopes had been dashed yet again. The detour off the highway just to get to Russell had been grueling enough, but to find it deserted was even worse.
Where was everyone? Where was FEMA? Where were the Red Cross and the Salvation Army and Feeding America and dozens of other charitable organizations? It felt to him like the people of Kansas had been abandoned to their fate and good riddance. One part of his mind told him that was unfair—that the entire country was one big Kansas right now, and that the scope of the disaster was so huge that no organization could cover it or be everywhere at once—but to have walked nearly a hundred miles and seen not one refugee camp or homeless shelter was hard to accept. On the other hand, he had to admit that they were in the middle of absolute nowhere right now, and that it would have been next to impossible for any charitable organization to have gotten here, given the atrocious conditions of the interstate.
He’d never realized before just how big Kansas was until he’d had to cross it on foot. He’d never thought of Kansas City as being all that far away from Goodland—just four hundred miles or so!—but walking that distance was a whole different matter than driving it. They might as well have been trying to walk to the Moon.
Marie mumbled psalms to herself as she shuffled forward on the eleventh day of their seemingly endless journey. She rubbed her bruised shoulder over and over again like a talisman. Ken propped her up whenever she stumbled, which was more and more often lately.
He quietly cursed—not God, but himself, for all the stupid mistakes he’d made. Why hadn’t he brought more food? (Because he’d thought they’d be in Kansas City on the same day they’d set out, a voice said inside his head.) Why hadn’t he gone north or south instead of east? (Because there was even less civilization in those directions, the voice said.) And why had he dropped those damned candy bars? (Because he was an idiot, the voice admitted.)
He figured they had maybe two or three days left before they simply keeled over and died from exhaustion by the side of the road. They’d have plenty of company, that was for sure. But he hoped against hope they’d make it to Salina before then.
As if to demonstrate just how bad things had gotten, Marie suddenly toppled sideways without warning and lay flat on her back in the breakdown lane. The snow turned red near her head where she’d hit the pavement on the way down. Ken was instantly by her side, calling her name and patting her on the cheek to try and revive her. “Marie, Marie!” he said. “Marie.” He listened for breath sounds and heard none, tried to feel for a pulse and felt none.
He wept by the side of the road when she didn’t open her eyes.
She was gone.
He carried her into the snow-covered field by the side of the road and laid her down, then laid himself down beside her, encircled her in his arms, and slept. Or tried to sleep. His emotions were too overwrought for that.
Instead, his mind wandered in a million different directions, finally settling on that tiny mouse that had saved him all those months ago. That mouse had shown him the way out of the dome when it was still barely the size of a yurt. No doubt the little fella was dead by now, suffocated by the dome when it ran out of air after one of its many jumps. That didn’t sound like such a bad fate to Ken anymore as he lay there shivering beside his wife. He was tired of the struggle, tired of the cold, tired of the constant deprivation and hunger. Sleep was about the only thing that sounded good to him anymore.
Eventually he did drift off to sleep. He dreamt of candy bars as usual, except this time he caught one as it floated down like manna from heaven. He grabbed it in his hand and devoured it in three bites. Another appeared and he devoured it, too, and then another. Suddenly things didn’t seem so bad anymore.
His wife woke up and he said, “Have a bite,” and she did. Marie smiled her lovely smile and said, “That tastes good,” and he nodded and held her hand and looked up to the heavens as candy bars drifted down like snow all around them.
The cold was brutal that night. He never woke from his dream and didn’t mind at all.
Chapter 29
January 12 – Truth or Consequences, New Mexico
Will’s U-Haul job only lasted three weeks, then the flow of people who could afford U-Hauls slowed to a trickle before grinding to an abrupt halt. Moving one’s possessions had suddenly become something only the ultra-wealthy did. These days, if you got out of a city alive, you were doing well, and if you had a car filled with luggage and a few cardboard boxes, you were thriving.
Fortunately Will was able to pick up work at a farm cooperative on the outskirts of town. Food deliveries from the outside had become so unreliable that the townspeople had decided to grow their own crops and fend for themselves. Will’s job was to keep the books that showed who grew what, whose parcels were whose, which vegetables were bartered for which, and a hundred other small accounting tasks.
To supplement his meager salary, Cynthia worked out in the fields themselves growing winter vegetables. Her hands turned raw and blistered at first, then callused as she became used to the work. She hoed and weeded by hand, waiting impatiently to see the results of her labor. Her “salary” was a share of the grains and vegetables that would eventually be harvested.
More and more people were finding agriculture was where the jobs were at these days. Anyone with gardening experience was considered valuable and put to work. Even those without a green thumb could do grunt work and earn enough to avoid starvation. The town had tractors and harvesters and such, but gas had become too precious for such mundane tasks. Human muscle was cheaper, and plenty of people were desperate for work.
The town was fortunate to be situated near Elephant Butte Reservoir, a dammed section of the Rio Grande River, so water supply wasn’t an issue, but getting it where it needed to be in the newly tilled fields surrounding town was a major undertaking. Laying irrigation pipe was an ongoing project, one that Cynthia and her fellow laborers pitched in to help with each day.
