She four-wheeled over the median in a place where the divider fence had been knocked down into the ditch. The black dunes of ash were sifting away, revealing too much. The slag-wrecks she could see in the northbound lane were getting much worse.
Those were cars. Tombs for people.
She navigated over into the southbound lanes, driving around the back-axle heap left behind by a tanker whose warped and tinctured wreckage was sprawled off into the breakdown lane. The huge wreck had created a shelter-shadow, a halo of relative unburned ruin. There were clotted mounds there in the road, where the windborne dust had choked on something wet and kept on sticking, creating sloppy clumps of oily residue. Part of a woman’s torso was lodged between two surviving tires, still flapping a scrap of crimson skirt. One connected leg had a pink pump still upon its foot. Blackened toenails peeked out.
Sophie, swallowing bile, stared at her dashboard as she drove by.
The gas needle bobbed erratically as she hit a deep pothole. The mis-calibrated needle bobbed, adrift between one quarter and empty.
How much gas do we really have? How much is leaking? How can we even know?
She gritted her teeth.
“—fuel pumps,” groaned a voice. Swallowing. Coughing. Silas was trying to talk to her again.
“Sorry?”
“I say, Pearson’s Corner. We got to stop there. Special emergency, emerg… fuel pumps…” He trailed off.
“There’s an emergency pumping station there? But wouldn’t that be a likely place? For survivors, I mean.”
“You think there any more?”
Sophie shook her head. They both knew that away from Denver, further north and east, there were many more survivors than they had before imagined. But were they people? She could not get the image of the black toes, the flapping skirt out of her mind. Run over or did she crawl under at the last, there was some of her leg and some of her belly, it was pulling apart, in the wind, she was…
“Don’t you know, no. How many people can there be. Nor do I.” Silas was tapping something. The mirror. He was staring at himself in the mirror. “Pearson’s though. That place is huge, see? RV park, showers, sleepers, everything else. Big, with a Hell of a lot of fuel pumps. And full-on FEMA-funded fuel bays with high roofs and emergency backups, regular and diesel and more if I recall. All kinds of fail-safes, after the Federal Bombing. Was all over the news, I drove Jenny up once just to check it out, all that buildup. She didn’t care. Naw, she was just after truck stop shopping and cinnamon rolls. You see what I’m saying?”
Sophie frowned. “I don’t think so.”
“Advanced fuel bay pumps are fast as Hell. Gas might still be there,” he said all in a rush. His eyes were wide, excited. Alive. “Gas is always underground, it defies gravity, right? You got backups, especially at a big fortified truck stop like that. Even if there’s power overload, and that happens with too many trucks through and forest fire crews and army convoys and thunderstorms and all, see, pressure plates auto the backup generators and the fuel’s just always on. Transfer switches. You pull into a sheltered bay, you fill, you go. Costs a little more but it goes straight to the fireman fund. You pay on the way out.”
Always on. The images in Sophie’s mind began to whirl, struggling to sync with Silas’ understanding. Sheltered fuel bays. FEMA funding. You pay on the way out…
“So…” She chewed her lower lip, a scab there. “You think these special pumps might still be working.”
“Yeah, if they’re still there.” Silas groaned again. “All built up, protected. Got to try.”
Sophie’s mind was reeling, shifting into determined focus, calculating.
Pearson’s Corner, that’s just a few miles off if I remember. Might still have the gas. Might have survivors, too. The lake did, Fort Morgan did. But even if there’s dying people there, the fuel bays are away from the restaurant, and always on. We go in, we gas, get out… The truck stop might well be ruined, or wiped entirely off the map. But it was fortified, and what if it was still there?
The plan was not perfect. But oh, it was. It was the only chance, unless Sophie wanted to try to siphon gas from some other slagheap wreck that they might find.
In this storm? And when’s the last intact wreck that you could see?
How much gas did they really have? There was no way to know, the damage from the bullet, the worse damage to the chassis from going over rubble, and the instrument shake-up caused when the H4 collided with the cave wall were all conspiring against her in a merry game of “You could run out now, you know. Why wonder? Empty soon. Why, you could die at any time.”
She made a decision. She gripped the wheel.
“Silas,” she said, “it’s perfect. Damn the danger. Help me find it, we’re going to try. If we see anyone, cover me. If we hear anyone, we’ll make a getaway, try to get as much fuel as we can first. Which exit?”
“Two fifty-four, if I recall.”
Sophie had no idea where they were, not precisely. But she knew she was somewhere near to Highway 60, near to US Route 34 or what was left of it.
Even at a five to ten mile an hour crawl, Pearson’s was very close. And after all, there was very little choice.
V-5
THE TOMB OF MANY CIRCLES
With Silas’ guidance, a crossing of the median and the chance revelation of a downed and fire-bleached highway sign (“… TTRACTION — EXIT 255 — MARIANA GOLF COUR…”), Sophie slowly found her way toward the sheltered ruin of Pearson’s Corner Truck Stop, Café and Bakery.
They made their way off the interstate and four-wheeled onto the trash-strewn frontage road, where the wrecks were fewer and the land a little lower. In some places, there were even identifiable remnants of the dead: skulls with faces, shoes, briefcases, leather jackets which had only blackened instead of melted. Bone piles and tire chains littered the byway, festooning the drifts of wind-trapped gravel. Almost-identifiable cars emerged from the blinding smog and the dunes of asphalt, garish silhouettes at the edge of sight. Trash and pieces of debris, aluminum siding and shreds of tire, blew overhead in tumbling gouts, buffeted by black wind.
Once the interstate was left behind, the lower ground gave way to decipherable vestiges and slaughter, the playthings of a recently exhausted Armageddon. After the first impacts over Colorado Springs and NORAD and Denver, survivors had fled along the interstate, bogged down, and taken to the frontage roads and even the fields in a desperate and futile attempt to flee. And then the second-wave missile impact at Loveland, and the end of everything.
There were lines of blackened RVs and burned-out buses, semi trailers, multiple lines of a never-ending traffic jam. “Lanes” through the labyrinth were nothing more than sizable gaps where later fires had gorged their way through, where gas tanks or coal trailers or even entire tankers had exploded. But some of the bigger trucks were almost whole, even readable as effigies of yesterday’s mundanity.
Home Depot, read one truck’s side, Wal Mart said another. United Parcel, Con-Way Transportation, North American Van Lines, Thompson School District…
As Sophie drove, ash-stained trucks loomed up on either side, gray monoliths, pillars in the wasteland tumbled over end.
Silas was sitting up in the back seat, panting, scratching at an open sore over his left knee where the bandage joints had opened. “There,” he said. He scrabbled at the shoulder of Sophie’s suit. “That say?”