He had to turn sharply to get up the off-ramp as there were several vehicles parked at odd angles in his path. He aimed his truck to drive between them, hitting one out of the way so that the vehicles behind could follow. The top of the off-ramp was blocked with a small car on its side, and he slowly pushed it to the side as he went up the wrong way and got onto the northbound side of I-95, driving south.
“That was pretty close back there,” Captain Mallory stated to the others in the cab. “I don’t suppose we are going to have a moving traffic problem coming the opposite way.” He smiled as he saw the four vehicles still following them in his rear-view mirror but his smile quickly faded when he saw the dozens of crashed vehicles blocking their way in front of them on northbound I-95.
It was hard work driving; the convoy could do no more than a few miles a hour, continually having to veer around blackened and crashed vehicles everywhere. The road was icy and slippery and the snow was a foot thick in some places. Some parts of the asphalt or concrete could be seen through the white covering and had only a light dusting as the snow had blown into drifts on the sides of the highway.
For the first mile, they traveled slowly until they had to stop. A tractor trailer had turned over and was on its side with boxes of what looked like frozen chicken products everywhere. Most of the boxes were already just mounds under the snow. The truck had flipped over onto two cars and had crushed them nearly flat. There were dead human and chicken bodies everywhere as the truck had ploughed down the highway for quite a ways, piling up cars in front of it.
There was no easy way to get through, so the captain asked the fire engine to pull up close to the rear of the truck. After pulling a couple of frozen bodies out of the way, the fire engine slowly touched the back of the truck, its bigger bulk helping as it pushed the rear of the truck slowly and opened up a space for them to drive through.
“John, get some help and collect those ropes hanging loosely on the side of the trailer, they look strong and we might need them later on,” Captain Mallory shouted to his co-pilot as he drove up next to him. “We should pick up several cases of frozen chicken as well. Throw some in your vehicle. We can have a BBQ for dinner. I was thinking of siphoning off some fuel from the truck, but it’s diesel, so it is of no use to us. No worry, though. Hey! A light bulb just went off in my head; we have plenty of fuel in all these abandoned vehicles on the highway. We can siphon it out of car tanks, whenever we need it.”
They drove on for another hour without having to stop. The smoke was slowly clearing the further they drove away from the city, and the number of stationary vehicles was getting fewer and fewer. At one point the vehicles managed 100 yards of highway without passing a single vehicle and they felt a bit relieved, until they got over the crest of a hill and observed several cars and two trucks in a heap in front of them. For the second time they had to come to a complete stop.
For the first time that day, and two hours into their trip they saw clear sunlight for the first time. The smoke was gone and there was a slight wind from the south. Everybody was beginning to feel a little more relaxed. The leaders took this time to let everyone out for a quick stretch and to bask in the sunlight—something, it seemed, no one had seen for days.
This crash looked worse than the last one. Again, a tractor-trailer had turned over. The cab had completely ripped off from its trailer and had wedged a smaller truck and a small bus up against the outside crash barrier. The three vehicles were totally black from the fire that must have been out for hours now, and blackened bodies could still be seen sitting in what must have been seats in the bus, the tops of the bodies covered with a dusting of frozen ice from the heat. It was not a pretty site.
On the other side of the trailer was a yellow moving truck—a small Penske Chevy—pinned against three cars, which in turn, were pinned to the rear of the trailer. This area of the accident had not been part of the fire.
“Shall I see what’s in the trailer?” asked John, and the captain nodded. He watched John climb up over a broken car and suddenly stop. He crouched and slowly backed down and ran back to Captain Mallory. “You are not going to believe this, but I just saw a lion and a lioness eating the remains of a human body back there. They are about 100 yards away.”
“What?” asked Captain Mallory, not believing what he was hearing. “Bloody lions, for Christ’s sake!” replied John. They were quiet for a couple of seconds.
“Must have escaped from a zoo or something,” Captain Mallory replied. “Get everybody back in the vehicles. I’ll shoot a few rounds and see if I can scare them off.”
He waited until everybody was loaded back in, and he then climbed up the side of the overturned car, looked past the trailer, and there they were—pulling meat off a bloody body in the middle lane of northbound I-95, as if they were in the middle of Africa. He shouted at them and they immediately looked up, spotting him. He shot three rounds close to where they stood, and they bounded away from him, headed south. He watched them go a couple hundred yards before he looked down and straight into the dead and frozen eyes of the driver of the car he was standing on. He jumped with shock and landed in the snow in front of the car, just managing to stay on his feet.
He pulled the door to the trailer open and it was full of garden supplies; fertilizer and topsoil for some hardware store. He checked to see if the lions were returning, couldn’t see anything, and returned to the SWAT truck. He instructed John and the guys in his truck to get a hose and some of the empty gas containers they had tied to the back of the fire engine’s ladder.
The Chevy’s cab was empty and the back of the truck was filled with somebody’s now broken furniture, but the large fuel tank positioned under the door to the cab was not dripping, and Captain Mallory opened it. It was close to full and they siphoned 30 gallons out of it. This filled the tanks of the fire engine, the Studebaker, and the ambulance. The SWAT trucks were still half full, so they emptied the 44-gallon drum, filled the two remaining tanks up, and threw the large drum out, keeping all the attachments.
When they were done, the fire engine pushed the car with the dead, frozen driver out of the way. It was the lightest vehicle in their way, and the fire engine made quick work of it. They all passed through the gap, all looking out of the windows for lions. It wasn’t every day that one could see lions on I-95!
They caught up with the big cats half an hour later. The lions were faster than the vehicles, which were now traveling at a good five to ten miles an hour. They were spooked by the sound of the vehicles, and hid behind a car under a bridge as the convoy passed by.
Forty minutes later, and still crawling around hundreds of vehicles on the highway, they reached the 295 bypass and decided to stay on it going south. By this time, they were past Trenton, New Jersey and a large gas station came up on their left with a clear feeder road off the highway. Captain Mallory was not comfortable getting off the highway just yet. There could be trouble in the more populated areas and he felt that they needed to wait for a more rural area to find a gas station that was safer.
Two hours later, they were bypassing Philly and the dead vehicles in the more densely populated area slowed them down to a snail’s pace for quite a while. They drove past the exit to Philadelphia International Airport and were finally able to speed up to nearly 20 miles an hour once they had passed the airport. They saw no signs of life and no obvious aircraft accidents, but large fires were still burning in and around the cities they passed, and they didn’t know if they were the only ones alive. They had not seen any other moving traffic on their trip since the gang they had dealt with that morning. The snow was clearing on the asphalt as the sun was melting it. Ice might be a factor in the mornings and Captain Mallory wanted to get as far south as possible before dark.