Why not north?
Reasons were presented. More volcanoes? Possibly. Just in case the Yellowstone one decided to blow… got it.
Did it matter? We knew nothing. We hadn’t a clue what really happened. The only part about heading south that made sense to me was hoping for warmer weather.
The dashboard thermometer read that the outside temperature was forty-three degrees. Was it ever forty-three degrees in California during summer?
Chances were we’d stop for the night before we ran out of gas, and in stopping we had to think about staying warm, especially for Ruth.
The first hour of our car ride, I thought a lot about my family. How it had been two weeks since they spoke to me. In their minds was I already dead?
Ruth napped. Then again, she napped a lot. She actually fell asleep twice as we wheeled her through town before we found the car.
I didn’t realize how quiet I had become lost in my own thoughts, until I spoke out randomly. “I saw a movie once.”
“Oh, she speaks,” Madison said. “I thought you were sleeping or mad.”
“No. Just thinking.”
“About your family?” Madison asked.
“Yes.”
“Me, too.”
“Do you think they think we’re dead?”
Ruth mumbled from the back. “Probably.”
I shook my head.
“What movie?” Madison asked. “You said you saw a movie.”
“Oh,” I sat up some. “I saw a movie. A bad one. Not porno bad, but B bad. Made in 1960 I believe. It was called ‘The Last Woman on Earth’. And it was about these three people scuba diving. They came up and all the air was gone.”
“For real?” Madison said with some disbelief.
“Yeah. Weird huh? And everyone was dead. No destruction. No earthquakes. Just the air was gone. It came back, but they were the last people on earth.”
“What caused it?” Madison asked.
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t remember?”
“No. I do. They never said. They ran around guessing.”
“What the hell? How can they do that and never say what caused it. It’s lazy writing,” Madison said.
“Maybe he was being realistic,” Ruth said. “No people. No power. No news. Under those circumstances, those people would never know…. Do you? There’s a chance you can go the rest of your life and never know. Thank God for me it won’t take long.”
Madison looked up to the rearview mirror. “You know, you’re awfully spry. Are you sure you’re ninety-two?”
“Don’t I look it?”
“No,” I answered. “Not at all. I wouldn’t peg you for older than seventy-five.”
Silence.
Madison snorted a laugh. “Oh please. She looks ninety.”
It was a momentary pause in the seriousness with some friendly bantering. That, however, didn’t last long. The focus had to be on driving. I was the second set of eyes that was needed. It was hard to see anything. The twilight appearance of the day played tricks on my eyes and debris and other things that blocked the road were hard to see.
Just before the sky darkened, instead of focusing on where we would stop, we began a search for our next vehicle.
We put over two hundred miles on the car but estimated we only made it a hundred and eighty from Longview. The ash didn’t thin, the destruction didn’t lessen, the temperature didn’t warm, nor were there any less random bodies. Even that many miles didn’t stop the death or ruination.
A few miles after our low fuel indicator dinged, we found our next automobile at a repair shop in a small suburb just north of Bakersfield. Madison announced she found a car that started but we didn’t transfer to that one, we left it in the garage. It was time we had to stop for the evening.
That car would be our travel source the next day. Until then, with about a half an hour daylight left, we foraged the Kwik Shop across the street for what food we could. Not that we needed it, but we wanted to replenish, then we retreated back to the economy sedan.
It was cold and the temperature had dipped to near thirty degrees Fahrenheit. Making a fire or building a source of heat had been far from our minds. Actually it never crossed my mind. It did when I grabbed that handful of lighters. For the night though, we used what little fuel we had remaining in the car to run the heater and stay warm. Windows cracked for airflow, it was our only option. We’d have to do better in the future, think ahead, especially if we wanted to survive however far we had to travel.
Whatever had happened to the world, didn’t just cause a reset of thinking, it definitely reset the daylight savings time thing. For how long, I didn’t know, but for the time being, total darkness encompassed fourteen hours of the day. The other ten hours teetered between almost dark and the look of dusk when the day was at its brightest.
There was no sun.
I couldn’t even pin point in the sky where it was. The thick dark cloud coverage was threatening looking and loomed at a low altitude.
When it was light, it was barely light. When it was dark, I couldn’t see my hand in front of me.
Quick moments of bright came at night only when the lightening started and it always did, every night a weird electrical storm started, always accompanied by ear deafening thunder, then it would rain.
That night in the car, it didn’t rain.
I was grateful.
We lit candles in the car and that helped to add heat. Being a small car, it stayed relatively tolerable. We discussed what we could do if we had to stop for another night and left to our own resources. None of us had ever built a fire. Hopefully we’d put enough miles behind us and find some sort of help or at least get to a warmer area.
If not, we’d figure it out. There were plenty of cars for the time being. Like with that movie I saw, the world was pretty much a resource center for us. Unlike the movie, it wasn’t as pretty, it was ugly. Ever since Ruth mentioned the moon, I kept likening our surroundings to that. As if it were a mash up of the earth and moon. That’s what it looked like.
I was the last to fall asleep. The candles in the car lit it enough for me to write in my journal. After Stevie’s name and story, I added Gregory Bannerman, the owner of the economy car that got us near Bakersfield and kept us warm. Gregory smoked. Empty packs of cigarettes were all through the car along with crushed energy drink cans. He had a chocolate bar obsession and judging by the amount of McDonald’s receipts, he ate there often.
Gregory spent a lot of time in his car.
I put that in my journal.
Madison poked fun at me and then she fell asleep. My watch read it was near five AM when I blew out the last candle and finally positioned myself to go to sleep. Hideous green jacket closed tight and moving the blanket over me, I rested my head against the window and fell asleep.
Somewhere in my slumber the car ran out of gas. The silence of a dead engine woke me and I had to depress the side of my watch to light it.
It was dark in the car and it shouldn’t have been. By my watch we should have had some daylight.
I didn’t hear anyone moving or breathing and some instant neurotic moment hit me and I feared Madison and Ruth died of carbon monoxide poisoning.
“Anyone up?” I called out.
“I am now,” Madison said groggy and sat up. “Is it still night?”
“No,” I answered.
“Oh, God, please don’t tell me we lost more daylight. What time is it?”
“Ten thirty.”
“It should be a little light.”
“I know.” I turned to the back seat. “Ruth, you okay, back there.”
“I’m cold.” Ruth sat up, bringing the blanket tighter to her.
“I am too.” I lit the candle. “Maybe we just need to wait it out.”
“No,” Madison said. “Look at the windshield.”