“Hell of a fuck-up.”
Hayden didn’t respond. He was digging his fingers into the abandoned car’s gas cap cover, trying to swing the metal door open.
“Not like that.” She pushed down on it and it clicked back open. “Farm boys should know how to open a gas tank.”
He unscrewed the black plastic cover within, and peered into the small hole. “We need some kind of tube to feed in there.”
“Oh, I’ve got about ten feet of it in my back pocket. I also have a jerry can shoved up my ass in case of emergencies.”
They found another locked vehicle half a mile on. Hayden took a rock from the ditch and smashed his way in through the passenger side. He rummaged through the glove box and console finding nothing of value. He tried the trunk button, but it did nothing. Caitlan was already a hundred yards down the highway.
“You can break into a hundred of these things along the way,” she said once he’d caught up. “It ain’t going to help without something to carry the gas in. Hopefully we’ll find what we need in that town of yours. How much further?”
“Two miles… maybe three.” He shoved his hands into his pockets and slowed his pace, allowing the shorter woman to keep up. “Did you have family, Caitlan?”
“Everyone’s got family.”
“You know what I mean. Were you with anyone when it happened?”
“I was with my partner, Megan.” She looked up at Hayden. “You gonna give me flack for being a lesbian, too?”
“I could care less that you’re gay, or that you’re black… Or that you’re a bad-tempered, paranoid bitch. I’m just trying to make conversation.”
Caitlan studied her worn sneakers as they walked, and remained quiet for a full minute. When she spoke again, her voice was much softer. “We were thirty miles east of Winnipeg when it happened. We pulled over onto the side of the road like all the other folks were doing and got out to watch. My God, Hayden… I never thought I would see a real mushroom cloud. I wrote about stuff like that, you know? Pictured it in my mind dozens of times. But to see it actually happening before your eyes?” She started to weep. “It was… beautiful. I hated myself for thinking it, but it was true. I still think it’s true. Watching something that destructive, that powerful… all the people it wiped out.”
Hayden hadn’t seen it happen. He had been nestled inside a hole in a hill with his son and horse. He thought about Jake Heez. Jake had seen it happen. It had boiled skin off his body, and burned the sanity from his mind at the same time. As bad as it had been for Hayden, there were others who’d suffered far worse.
“What happened to Megan? Why isn’t she with you now?”
“Some asshole driving a semi came along, gawking along with all the rest of us. Megan wasn’t standing far enough off the shoulder… he ran her over doing fifty miles an hour.”
Hayden stopped and watched her walk along another half dozen steps. “I shouldn’t have called you a bitch.”
Caitlan turned to him. “You calling me that stuff is probably the nicest thing you’ve said since we met, and I deserved every word of it. Yeah, I lost the woman I loved… but you lost loved ones, too. So did your boy, so did Angela, and those twins… Jesus Christ, those poor kids.”
“Those poor kids,” Hayden repeated. He walked up to her and held his hand out. “Let’s try this again… Hayden Gooding.”
She shook his hand. “Caitlan Turner.”
Chapter 30
There were more vehicles further on. These ones hadn’t been simply abandoned; they had been smashed and burned. All that remained were the smoking metal frames and the charred husks of tires. Hayden counted a dozen in total, some of which were difficult to distinguish from one twisted mess to the next.
Caitlan commented on the scene first. “You think there was like a big pile up when the bombs hit… more people staring out the side windows instead of watching the road?”
“Not this many vehicles… not on this stretch of the Number 1. Looks like it happened recently, maybe in the last day or so.” Two of the cars had been flattened, as if a giant hand had pressed down from the grey sky and pushed until all the tires popped out to the sides.
“Then what the hell happened?”
Hayden could make a guess, but decided to keep it to himself. Brayburne was less than a mile ahead. As they approached, a question that had nagged in the back of his brain for the last two weeks resurfaced—where had all the people gone? He’d spoken to Angela about the small amount of survivors they’d come across since the bombs hit. Most of the population had been wiped out in the city—and probably every other major city in North America, Hayden was certain—but it didn’t explain the almost total desolation of the rural areas. They’re keeping themselves hidden away, Angela had offered. They’re scared of radiation sickness and disease outbreak. They’re in basements and dirt cellars. They’re storing up, and waiting it out in sewage tunnels. Anyplace underground where the air is still clean and the water hasn’t been poisoned.
It had started to make sense to Hayden; a vast majority of the cars no longer worked, so there were very few people driving between the destroyed cities. But still, there should’ve been more people—people like them—wandering out in the open, searching for others.
Many of those questions were answered at the outskirts of Brayburne. It had once been a small farming community with a population that never exceeded a thousand. There had to be at least triple that number now. Giant tents had been set up in the streets, making it look as though the circus had arrived in town, but the tents were dark green, and this circus was run by the army.
“I don’t like soldiers,” Caitlan mumbled as they made their way through the first cluster of survivors. “It’s guys like this that got us into this mess.”
“They’re just doing the job they were trained to do… helping people, offering food and shelter. They didn’t drop the bombs. The dimwit world leaders were responsible for that.”
They spoke to a few people as they worked their way towards the town center. Many had been on the Trans Canada Highway when the attack took place. Their vehicles—those that had been within fifty miles of an impact site—had stopped running, and they’d either walked to Brayburne from whatever direction they were headed, or they had been picked up by the military convoys days after. Brayburne, it seemed, was that one town furthest away from most of the immediate fallout. It was approximately a hundred miles west of Winnipeg, and a hundred miles east of the next major Canadian city, Regina. No one spoke of the “dud” missile that had missed its southern target and wiped out so many of the northern farms where Hayden had come from.
They learned from a haggard-looking man that the silos in North Dakota had launched all of their weapons before finally being destroyed. He was from Fargo, and he’d been heading to some northern lake with his son for a week of fishing. “My wife was killed with everyone else there. I told her she should’ve come with us… told her for years we had to do more things together.” He looked down at his son who was sitting cross-legged in the dirt. He was chewing on something that looked like a hamburger without a bun. “But we made it, didn’t we, Todd? And we hit them assholes right back. The US showed those Russians and North Koreans what was what.”
Caitlan wanted to punch his teeth out. His wife was dead because of ideological differences and ignorant racism, and here he was, passing along the same line of bullshit to his son. She pulled Hayden along.
A soldier approached them. “You guys look new here. Have you been assigned a sleeping area? Any injuries or illness to report?”