Kyle climbed wearily to his feet, grabbed the handle of his cart, and after a long, deep breath, resumed pulling. The stretch of highway he was on seemed unusually barren, with fewer vehicles, no houses, and a complete absence of fellow travelers. A few miles ahead, Kyle could see a semi that he hoped would provide good shelter from the bad weather. There were a few smaller cars and a pickup closer, but past experience had proven that they would be too small and uncomfortable to wait out a storm, especially if it lasted more than a few hours. He scanned the horizon and spotted a couple of homes off in the distance, set back off the road, but there was no guarantee that the people, if there were any there, would be willing to help him.
The wind blew harder, and the temperature seemed to drop with each fresh gust. About a mile from the semi, Kyle felt the first hints of rain, tiny drops that stung his cheeks in the driving wind.
By the time Kyle reached the semi, he was in the middle of a driving rain, and his clothes were soaked completely through. Cold and shivering, his only thought was to get somewhere dry and out of the wind. The word “DEAD” was scrawled in large red letters on the driver’s side door of the cab and struck Kyle as unusual, but he was too cold to care what it meant. After quickly parking his cart under the trailer, he hurried back to the cab.
The door was locked, but the triangle window had been broken out, making it easy for Kyle to stick his arm through and pop the lock. Hurrying to escape the deluge, Kyle tugged the door open just as another gust of wind whipped up, catching the door and ripping it from his hand and knocking him from the step. He quickly recovered and climbed inside, then had to fight against the wind to get the door pulled shut behind him. Kyle was leaning back in the seat, shivering and wet, when an overwhelming feeling of nausea swept over him.
He twisted to the side and vomited onto the floor between the seats. Another heave wracked his body as he braced himself on the passenger seat for support. He took a deep breath and become instantly aware of a sickening smell and an unfamiliar buzzing sound. With a quick glance around the back of the cab, Kyle spotted a cloud of flies swarming over a dark object on the bottom bunk. Covering his mouth and nose, Kyle sat back up, fighting the urge to vomit again.
With his arms braced on each of the seats, Kyle avoided his pool of vomit and stepped between the front seats towards the back. With his second step, he froze in his tracks. What had at first looked like a dead dog lying on the bed was instead a human corpse, gazing up through eye sockets filled with writhing maggots, its skin blistered, wrinkled and raw, and swarming with flies. He dropped to his knees and vomited again, heaving so violently that the bitter bile drained out of his nose. As he gasped for air, flies swarmed around the fresh, steaming vomit and up into his mouth. Doubled over, Kyle coughed and swatted at the flies, and felt his hand brush against a cold, meaty object. Revolted, he turned and saw an arm hanging from the bunk, its shriveled flesh hanging from the bone, the fingers resting in a dark, fly-covered stain on the carpet. Kyle’s own hand seemed to burn from the contact with the decomposing flesh, and he wiped it feverishly on the back of the front seat.
Pulling himself to his feet, Kyle lunged for the door, rushing to escape the unexpected sepulcher before another bout of vomiting commenced. Desperate to get out, he fumbled with the door handle, opened it, then dove through the opening and crashed roughly onto the wet pavement. Dazed and ill, Kyle lifted himself onto his knees and crawled through the rain towards the back of the truck, heaving twice more along the way.
Huddled behind his cart, Kyle shielded himself as best he could from the bitter wind that whistled around him. Unable to purge from his senses the smells and images from inside the truck, he sat for a long time, vomiting until there was nothing left in his stomach but a clear, bitter liquid that burned his sinuses and hung in strands from his nose and lips. He had seen more dead people during the past seven weeks than in his previous thirty-seven years, but nothing to this point in his life had prepared him for this ghastly experience.
In the time since he’d arrived at the semi, the rain had turned to sleet, and then to snow, and now the air was filled with thick, heavy flakes that fell more sideways than down and accumulated in the grass along the edge of the road in fluffy piles and in a thin, slushy layer on the road.
The wind had shifted from the west and was now blowing in hard from the north, biting sharply through Kyle’s wet clothing. He pulled out his bag of clothes and dumped the contents in front of him on the cart, searching for something to replace his drenched clothing that was providing little protection. The shirts left in his bag were wet in patches from where water had leaked into his duffle bag, but were drier than what he wore. He stripped off his shirts and put on the dry ones, along with his thin, cotton jacket, all the while wishing he’d been able to find a heavy coat somewhere along the way.
He had hoped to make it home before the weather got too severe, but it felt severe already as he crouched under the trailer of the semi-truck, with the wind cutting through his layered shirts. Kyle wrung out the shirts he’d removed and put them on over the dry ones to add layers. He took off his pants and put on a mostly-dry pair of sweats, followed by a drier pair of jeans.
He tried to get into the trailer, but a thick, round padlock kept it tightly secured, even after taking three shots at the lock with his pistol. With the semi offering no practical shelter, Kyle wrapped his sleeping bag around his numb body and stumbled down the road, looking for someplace to keep him warm and dry.
The sky had dulled to a charcoal gray, and as the temperatures and snow continued to fall, the slush on the road thickened to the consistency of oatmeal while the snow on the sides of the road accumulated to three and four inches, even approaching a foot in places where it drifted in the raging wind. Kyle spotted a sedan a mile away and trudged stiffly towards it. His feet, wet and cold from the slush, felt like cinderblocks tied to the ends of his legs.
When he arrived at the car, Kyle tugged desperately on the door, which, to his surprise, swung open effortlessly. Bending to climb inside, he saw that the seats were filled with snow that had blown in through a broken out window on the passenger side. He yelled in a fit of anger at his bad fortune and slammed the door shut.
Kyle jumped up and down in the driving wind and stomped his feet, trying to restore some of the sensation he had lost in them. His toes had quit tingling, and while he didn’t miss that discomfort, he knew in the long run that no sensation was worse than the discomfort. Kyle weighed his options. He could curl up in a ball in the front seat of the car, or he could continue on. If he stayed in the car and the weather improved, he would be okay, but if it didn’t, he knew there was a good chance he would freeze.
Kyle took one glance at the still darkening sky, shook the snow out of his hair, and plodded on. As he trudged through the snow, the misery compounded with each step. Snow melted in his hair, sending icy water down his neck and back, while slush splashed up his legs, numbing them even more.