“Those are driven by gasoline engines,” the clerk said.
“Oh,” Flesh said, “gas. Jesus, that never occurred to me.”
“Did you want a room, sir? There’s no air conditioning but you can cool off in the pool. Usually there’s no swimming after 9 p.m., but because of the power failure we’re going to keep it open all night.”
“There’s no filtration,” Flesh said. “It’s stagnant water. There’s no filtration. It’s kids’ pee and melted Mister Softees and gallons of sweat.”
“It’s heavily chlorinated, mister. It’s been supershocked plenty. We’re spending a fortune on chlorine and pH minus.”
He stayed. He stayed because in an odd way the clerk spoke his language and Flesh had caught hints in the man’s speech of his own concerns and obsessions. The motel people had made, he suspected, on their level, the preparations he had made on his. There would be a ton of ice to preserve their meats and keep their Cokes cold. There would be flashlights and extra batteries — candles would be too dangerous, Coleman lamps would — on the nightstand and on the sink in the bathroom. He signed the registration card in the gathering dusk.
That was not the first time he was fooled. Two days before he had left Interstate 80 at North Platte, Nebraska, and doubled back east along U.S. 30 to Grand Island. It had already turned dark in Grand Island. The phones were working and he called Nebraska Power and Light. This wasn’t a power failure but a localized brownout; he was told that the electricity would be back on by morning. He decided to continue driving. If the brownouts were localized he could probably find a town farther on where there was still juice. He consulted his Shell and Phillips and Mobil maps of Nebraska by the beam of his flashlight. His best bet would be to leave U.S. 30 and get onto 34. That way, heading toward Lincoln, he would hit Aurora and York — York showing in fairly large type on Shell and Mobil — and then Seward, then Lincoln itself. If nothing happened by Seward, State Route 15 looked promising. He could head north to David City and Schuyler or south to the junction with U.S. 6, leave 15, and continue on 6 the three miles to Milford or the twelve to Friend. He would keep his options open. At Schuyler, if nothing was happening, he could get back on U.S. 30 and head west again to Columbus, represented on all the maps in type just a little less bold than Grand Island itself.
That’s what he did finally. It was very dark now. There was absolutely no moon. It seemed odd to Flesh that after days of such horrendous sunlight there would be no moonlight at all. Did that mean there were clouds? Was the weather about to break? (Yet the air felt no heavier; he could not perceive heat lightning.) He drove with his brights on. State Route 15 was unimproved road, paved, but gravel kept spitting itself at the Cadillac, putting great pits in its body and undercarriage. The gas gauge was dangerously close to empty, and Flesh pulled off to an improved county road that he would have not seen at all if he had not had his brights on. He stopped the car and went with his flashlight to the trunk. This was the first time he had had to use any of the gas from the five-gallon cans. As he emptied each can he got back into the driver’s seat and read the gas gauge. Five gallons was a spit in the bucket to the huge Cadillac tank and he found that he had to empty four cans and part of a fifth before the gauge read Full. This left him with only three and a fraction cans in reserve — he had not yet purchased all twelve five-gallon cans — perhaps seventeen or eighteen gallons at the most.
He closed the lids on the empty cans as tight as he could — this pained him, aggravating his M.S. as any contact with metal did — and returned to his car. Somehow he forgot what he was about and continued by mistake for perhaps three miles on the dirt road. The sheer comfort of the ride on the dry, packed dirt — it was like riding on velvet, the smoothest journey he had ever taken — lulled him, so that finally it was his comfort itself that warned him of his danger, that taught him he was lost. Oh, oh, he mourned when he discovered what had happened. A pretty pass, a pretty pass when well-being has been so long absent from me that when I feel it it comes as an alarm, it a symptom. He looked for some place he could turn the car around and came at last to a turnoff for a farm. Dogs howled when he pulled into the driveway. He saw their grim and angry faces in his headlamps and feared for both them and himself when they disappeared from sight — moving as slowly as I am, they will be at my tires now — dreading the thump that would signal he had killed one. But he managed to turn back up the dirt road he had come down — it no longer seemed so comfortable a ride — and regained State Route 15, turning north toward Schuyler.
As he had feared, Schuyler — allowed only the faintest print on the map, and not on the Shell map at all — was nothing but a crossroads, a gas station, a tavern, a couple of grocery stores, an International Harvester Agency, and three or four other buildings, a grange, a picture show, a drugstore, some other things he could not identify in the dark, homes perhaps, or a lawyer’s or a doctor’s office. He stopped the car to consult his map again.
It would have to be Columbus, eighteen miles west. The 1970 census put the population at 15,471. A good-sized town, a small city, in fact. Sure. Very respectable. He had high hopes for Columbus and turned on the radio. He could not pull in Columbus but he was not discouraged. It was past 2 a.m. after all. Good-sized town or not, these were solid working people. They would have no need or use for an all-night radio station. He started the engine again and swung left onto U.S. 30. (U.S. 30, yes! A good road, a respectable road, a first-class road. It went east all the way to Aurora, Illinois, where it spilled into the Interstates and big-time toll roads that slip into Chicago. It paralleled Interstate 80 and even merged with it at last and leaped along with it across 90 percent of Wyoming, touching down at all the big towns, Cheyenne and Laramie and Rawlins and Rock Springs, before striking off north on its own toward Boise and Pocatello and west to Portland in Oregon. He was satisfied with U.S. 30. U.S. 30 was just the thing. It would absolutely lead him out of the wilderness. He was feeling good.) And when he swung west onto 30 and got a better view of the Schuyler gas station, he saw the pump in the sway of his headlights. The pump!
Good God, what a jerk he’d been! Of course. Oh, this night had taught him a lesson all right! That he need never fear the lack of gas again. All he had to do when the gauge got low was to head for the hick towns with their odd old-fashioned gas pumps that didn’t give a shit for brownouts or power failures, that worked by — what? — hydraulics, principles of physics that never let you down, capillary action, osmosis, all that sort of thing. He was absolutely cheerful as he tooled along toward Columbus. He was tired and grotty, but he knew that as soon as he hit Columbus things would work themselves out. He would get the best damn motel room in town. If they had a suite — sure, a town like that, better than fifteen thousand, certainly they would have suites — he’d take that. He would sleep, if he wished, with the lights on all night. There was electricity to burn — ha ha — in Columbus. He felt it in his bones.
And sure enough. In fifteen minutes his brights picked up the light-reflecting city-limits sign of Columbus, Nebraska — population 15,471, just like the map said — touched the glass inset sign and seemed to turn it on as you would turn on an electric light. And just past it, somewhere off to his left — and this must still be the outskirts — two great shining lights. Probably a party. Two-thirty and probably a party. Oh, what a live-wire town Columbus! He would have to build a franchise here. Tomorrow he’d scout it and decide what kind. Meanwhile, on a whim, tired as he was, he turned left on the street where the two great lights were burning and drove toward them.