After he inspected the last car, he mounted his bike and pedaled toward Golden. Smoke discolored the horizon ahead, and the smell of burning grew stronger. Eric kept his bike close to the shoulder, listening for the sound of an approaching car or anything else threatening. He watched for places to hide if he had to. The best plan, he thought, would be to stay out of sight. Whatever happened at the tunnel, people were shooting at each other and a boy on a bike could be fair game.
The closer he got to town, the slower he pedaled. The road, he remembered, ran above the north side of town. From it, he should be able to look down to see what’s happening, but he felt too exposed. On his left, the canyon rose steeply, in many places unclimbable, and there wasn’t a bush any bigger than a fruit basket to hide behind. On his right, the shoulder sloped to the river. His forearms ached from gripping the bike handles so tightly, and his heart raced. Blood pounded in his ears.
This isn’t fair, he thought. In the movies, the hero isn’t scared every second. Rambo sneaks right into the enemy’s camp. He looked at his hands. His knuckles were white. Stopping the bike, he unclenched and forced himself to breathe slowly. He recited a mantra he’d learned when he was little, a tongue twister that made him feel better though it didn’t mean anything. “Sixteen stainless steel twin screw cruisers,” he said. He repeated it twice more, then moved on.
He knew when he rounded the next bend that the canyon would open up and he would be able to see Golden. Smoke filled the sky. The air in the canyon was hazy. He stood on the pedals—the bike glided downhill—to get a first glimpse.
When he stopped the bike finally, he should have been able to see all the way into Denver, but Golden was burning. Much of the center of town, made up of turn-of-the-century Victorian homes, was blackened, and nothing remained of the quaint brick homes except a few, low, broken walls or a handful of chimneys poking out of the rubble. Some fires still burned there, though mostly the excitement appeared to be over. On the north side of town, however, thick, black smoke poured out of the Coors plant.
Eric watched for several minutes. He didn’t hear sirens and he didn’t see anyone moving below. The streets were empty, no traffic at all.
Initially he thought of the burning of Atlanta from Gone With the Wind, but then the more obvious connection came to him. It looked like King Kong had visited Golden, maybe in one of his later incarnations where he met Godzilla. Eric could imagine nothing else that could cause so much destruction. King Kong lives, he thought.
How will I find Dad in all this? The world had never seemed so big.
Smoke billowed from the Coors plant. Wind swirled the impenetrable darkness, and for a second, the black clouds formed the shape of the great ape. Just for a brief instant, Eric could see King Kong straddling the wreckage of Golden. Just for an instant he could hear him shrieking his challenge at the powers of the earth, and at this instant, there was no one to answer.
Chapter Seven
CROSSROADS, COMING AND GOING
“Are we still being watched?” asked Eric. Rabbit shrugged his shoulders. “Maybe.” He stopped, scanned the edges of the canyon, then tilted his head to the side as if listening. “Yes.”
“How do you know that kind of stuff? I can’t do that,” said Dodge crossly. “You give me the heebie-jeebies.”
Rabbit shrugged again. “Sometimes I get a feeling.”
Eric laughed. Sometimes he’d felt they were being watched too. It wasn’t anything big, a shiver when he wasn’t cold, a sense of being on stage, of things moving behind him or just below the horizon. It made him want to run around bushes and yell, “Boo!”
Rain clouds swelled to the east. Thunderhead piled on thunder-head like mushroom clouds, and flickers of lightning flashed at their base. The plains are getting a washing, Eric thought. During the Gone Times, he didn’t pay attention to the weather. Buildings were air conditioned, artificially lighted and always dry. Car heaters held out cold or rain or snow. Now, he checked the weather automatically. Red sky at morning, sailors take warning. Red sky at night, sailors delight.
They hiked quietly for several minutes. Eric decided the storm would stay out on the plains. They needn’t worry about finding shelter from wind or rain tonight. He snapped a glance over his shoulder, trying to catch whatever might be following them, but he saw nothing. Rabbit walked in front of him nonchalantly. If Rabbit wasn’t frightened, then there was probably no need for him to fret. Rabbit “intuited” better than anyone he had ever met.
“What kind of car did you have, Grandpa?” asked Dodge. Eric surveyed the path before them. Following U.S. 6, they had turned into Clear Creek Canyon a half hour earlier, but a rock slide covered the highway now and they would have to pick their course carefully over the broken and loose rock. Heat waves shimmer off the rock-strewn slope. He could see almost no evidence of the line of gun-shot riddled cars he remembered from years ago. The slide had buried them.
“I drove several, but I didn’t really have one.” He decided to head down to the river. The rocks looked less steep and jumbled there. “I was too young to get a driver’s license before the plague, and there didn’t seem much point in owning one particular car afterward. For a year or so, everybody who was left could own a hundred cars if they wanted to.”
Dodge jumped from rock to rock like a mountain sheep. Eric shook his head ruefully. He couldn’t recall the last time he felt that limber and careless of his well being. He continued, “Of course, that was only for a year as I said.”
“How come we don’t have cars now? Phil said he still had some that worked. I sure would have liked to drive in one. It’d save us from a lot of walking.”
Rabbit sat next to the river, waiting for them to catch up. “Car won’t do you any good where we’re going,” he said. He gestured up stream where the river tumbled through the clutter of boulders. “We’ll be on a path soon enough,” said Eric. He remembered the fishing trail that went away from the highway at the old, blocked tunnel. “But Rabbit’s right. Most places I expect a car won’t go too far. A car needs a very special environment, a road, and the roads are falling apart.” He lowered himself onto a rock that overlooked a deep pool in Clear Creek. Five trout a foot or so long each lazily swam to the other side when his shadow fell on the water. Heat broadcast from each sun-baked rock. Eric jerked his hand off the black granite. The stream looked refreshing and cold. “I suppose in some parts of the country, the roads will stay good for centuries. After all, when I was a child there were places in the prairie where one could still see one-hundred year old ruts left by covered wagons. If ruts can last that long, highways ought to also. Mountains and winter, though, are tough on roads, and a car needs good ones to get anywhere.”
“Why don’t we fix them?” asked Dodge. Rabbit said, “Cars don’t work.”
“Phil said something interesting I hadn’t thought about.” Eric led them upstream. A rusted mass of metal jammed between two rocks showed that they were at least to the point where the Cars had been parked, which would put them within a few hundred yards of the tunnel, but looking ahead, Eric couldn’t tell. Time had reshaped the canyon. “He said it’s all a problem of shelf life. Some things last and others don’t. A car will last a long time if you keep it out of the weather, but two of its elements Won’t, the battery and gasoline. You can run a car without a battery, but gasoline has additives that evaporate over time no matter where it’s stored. A couple years after the plague, it became very hard to find gasoline that was usable. Without fresh gasoline, most cars can’t run, and no one has made gasoline for sixty years. So, gasoline’s shelf life stopped the car a lot sooner than bad roads.”