“We have been flying over country that once contained towns and small cities, big cattle ranches, farms, highways, mines, schools, businesses, all the trappings of daily life. But there is not a whisper of life below us.”
Abel pulled away from the television screens in the midst of the reporter’s remarks and sat down in a chair. He glared at the screens, his face placid and pale.
“I guess this is as close to a funeral as I’ll ever get,” sighed Abel.
“Huh?” Bobcat wasn’t paying much attention to his friend.
“This closes the book on Liz. It really does.”
Bobcat turned his head to look Abel over. “What?”
Abel wasn’t focused. “Think of it, Bobcat. You fall in love and marry somebody, like everybody else does. You try to live as husband and wife, do the best you can. Some people marry for life. Some don’t. Liz and I, we couldn’t pull it off. We tried. Put some real effort into it, too.
“But nobody thinks about their dying day. There it is, though, right there on the screen. There’s Liz’s deathbed, right in front of us. That’s all the funeral Pelee and I will ever attend, right there.”
Bobcat now locked onto Abel’s words. The man had Bobcat’s complete attention now.
“You know what, Bobcat?”
“What?”
“I didn’t put 100-percent stock into what you had told me about mass extinctions. I just couldn’t imagine the full scope of it. But this, this is it in black and white. I get it now. I really get it.”
“No one could imagine this, Abel.”
Abel raised a finger and pointed to one of the television monitors with its screen filled with the hellish images of a geological ground zero.
“Look at that thing, Bobcat. That’s our dying day staring us right in the face.”
Chapter Seventy-Four
Holding a palm out to the skies, Winnie felt for cold pinpricks of precipitation. She wanted rain, blessed rain, an inch or two at the very least. Once and for all there would be some relief from the drifting, swirling gray dust off the western plains. Rain would allow her to start her car and keep it running.
Obsessed with the desire to flee the metropolitan area, Winnie hastily packed several bags of clothes and retrieved a meager box of emergency rations from a hiding place under her home’s porch steps. All went into her painstakingly cleaned Jeep Liberty, along with bottles of water, toiletries and makeup, her laptop, shoes, boots and maps. She stowed three precious five-gallon containers full of gasoline, procured with a $200 bribe.
Chilly rain fell throughout the day. Winnie waited until the earth got a good soaking, worrying all the while about the Jeep getting decent traction with its new all-weather radials in the greasy ash slime that coated the roads.
Time to go. Dropping into the driver’s seat, she turned the key. The car started quickly and purred smoothly. “Thank God on high!” she howled at the windshield, fogging it.
Winnie reached Interstate 70 eastbound in fifteen minutes. An exodus in slow motion was underway, traffic bumper-to-bumper eastbound. Westbound lanes were empty. Virtually every vehicle rolled eastward toward St. Louis, away from the suffocating gray ash blanket that lay like a rotting casket shroud on the plains. St. Louis, on the Mississippi River four hours normal drive time away, had endured just nine inches of ashfall. But windblown dust was a hellish problem there, too. Transportation and communication breakdowns plagued the Gateway City, but less so than the nightmarish troubles that locked down the westerly burgs of Kansas City, Tulsa, Oklahoma City, Topeka and Des Moines.
Drivers desperate to leave the Missouri River Valley piloted cars outfitted with summer treads. Coated with several inches of oozing ash slime, the interstate became a luge run. Cars careened off into the median or spun out and rammed others, sweeping them off the highway. Traffic speed slowed to less than thirty miles per hour, bringing an end to the chaos. Winnie was grateful for the slow, safe speed, and thrilled just to be moving, to be free behind the wheel of an automobile once again and going somewhere, anywhere.
At Columbia, Missouri, Winnie rolled off the interstate to top off her tank, fully aware fuel supplies would be unreliable. Gasoline tanker trucks supplied mid-state gasoline stations with fuel from bulk-storage port depots on the Missouri River near Kansas City. Long-standing contracts locked suppliers into regions. With driving conditions difficult because of blowing and drifting dust, and the roadways often impassable, west-central Missouri ran dry of gasoline.
Rather than the useless pumps, it was bobbing yellow police tape surrounding a Dunkin Donuts chain store next door that commandeered her attention. The retail outlet was deserted. Coffee, the lubricant of business life, had stopped flowing. The plate glass on every window of the building was smashed to pellets. The interior lay in shambles. Winnie stood in the snow before the yawning holes in the glass, curiosity gnawing on her bones. She stepped through the fractured entry.
The serving counter and display racks were stark, empty, and coated gray with a thick film of ash dust. Counter coffee machines had been thrown about the building, the computers as well. Winnie slipped behind the counter and dodged into the preparation kitchen. The big doughnut fryers were intact. She peered into the vats and discovered a residue of fryer fats. Some unknown soul, using a spoon, had scrapped and scrapped down the walls of the Fryalators to get at the last molecules of grease.
The storeroom door latch and lock had been rammed with something heavy until they failed. Whoever the raiders, they had been after the storehouse commodities: bulk bleached flour, sugar, vegetable shortening and sacks of coffee beans. All had been removed, and, remarkably, it appeared someone had swept the floor, as if to come away with every runaway coffee bean or every last gram of spilled sugar or flour.
In the retail area on the way out, Winnie stopped amid the cheerless magenta and orange decor, now colors of a commercial desert. The refined sugar and flour, fat and caffeine-dispensing medusa had lost one of its many heads. The doughnut empire must be withering away, she thought. Certainly the supply pipeline at Columbia, Missouri had been severed.
Dunkin Donuts, Winnie imagined, was the very definition of eat-‘n’-out success, long a darling of Wall Street suits. In six months, after many decades of robust growth and corporate vigor, it must now be comatose, its fast-food chain cousins and poor relations wasting away, too, shriveling in suburban gutters.
Winnie left the gas depot, the Dunkin Donuts and the interstate behind. She’d try her luck away from the major transportation arteries and run a rural route to the northeast through Mexico and Hannibal, Missouri and on to Davenport, Iowa and, hopefully, out of the Yellowstone ash slick.
Crawling in low gear for fear of skidding off the secondary roads, Winnie thought it might take her twenty-four hours to eventually work her way along the upper Mississippi River watershed to Minneapolis.
Motoring through black walnut and hickory stands in the low hill country above the Mississippi River just south of Hannibal, the woman worked out a plan in her head. An hour north of the Twin Cities, at St. Cloud, she’d turn west again, back under the Yellowstone ash shroud. She’d push her Jeep as far as humanly possible due west toward the bluffs at the northern end of Big Stone Lake, hoping the four-wheel drive vehicle might actually deliver her to Independency village and Abel Whittemore.