“What did you do for a living?” I asked.
“Prior to kids… I worked at Sears, now I’m a stay at home mom.”
“You don’t give yourself enough credit for living tough. That’s a hard job.”
“Yeah, yeah it was.
“Where are you from?”
“My home is in Indiana,” she said. “I’m trying to get there, hoping my husband and boys are still alive.”
I looked at her curiously. “Why home? We just really need to get help right?”
Madison laughed subtly and stood. She grabbed remaining items and placed them in the car. With a serious expression she looked at me, while her fingers oddly rubbed a locket she wore around her neck. “There’s no help out there, Lace. None.”
She wasted no time getting in the car. Barely had I eked out a, “what?” and she was in my car waiting to go.
I got in, pulled out of the station and we began to drive. Madison stared out the window for the first couple blocks, obviously in deep thought.
Then she exhaled and looked at me. “Where are you from?”
“West Virginia.”
“So we’re both in foreign land then, so to speak.”
“You can say that.”
“Tell me why you are so convinced there’s help out there?”
“There has to be, right?” I said. “I mean, it makes sense.”
As we drove toward the mountain road, I told her my story. How I ended up in California, and was leaving when everything happened. How I was trapped for ten days in that air pocket.
“Then you don’t know what happened,” she said.
“No, do you?”
Madison shook her head. “Not really. It would be an educated guess, and really not that educated. You know, like when you know you are sick and have something and you go on line and put your symptoms in, and a whole bunch of different things pop up?”
“Yeah.” I nodded.
“Well, I can give you all the symptoms I saw, but it matches a dozen things. So instead of WebMD, it would be like DisasterMD.”
“Is that why you are convinced there are no rescue stations or help?”
“That and…”
It was the second time it happened. Mid conversation we had to stop. I didn’t get to hear why at that moment, because just at the crest of the mountain road, we had to stop. Our pathway was blocked.
Two cars and a truck, all smashed, blocked the lanes. A trail of rocks scattered around them and the shoulder of the road had crumbled in some sort of landslide.
“This happens a lot,” Madison said and opened the door. “Get so far and something blocks the way. We’ll find another car.” She got out and immediately began taking things from the car. “At least it’s not hot.” She peered up. “Will you look at that sky.”
I did, it was gray and thick.
“It’s not even like an overcast day,” she said. “It’s like a big thick cloud of smoke is hovering.” She lifted her hand. “It’s almost like if I stand on tip toes I can touch it.”
Madison was right. It hovered over us, close, too. Probably because we were at a higher altitude. I shouldered my bag and grabbed my suitcase. “Guess it’s time to walk,” I said.
“You’ll get used to it. At least it’s all downhill from here, right?”
I followed as she began a slow paced walk. “The map shows a town at the bottom of this road. Maybe there will be someone there, or help?”
She shook her head. “There you go with that help thing again.”
“Why are you so quick to dismiss that thought?”
Madison stopped and looked at me. “Because I traveled over two hundred miles in the last ten days and you are the first, and only, person I have seen alive.” She turned back around. “That’s why.” She continued walking.
We moved down that road in near silence, little conversation. Both of us saving our energy. In my mind I imagined looking down on a town and seeing movement, possibly even gloating to Madison about it. However, as soon the town was in view, all hope of finding help was lost.
Longview, California was probably a quaint and lively small town at one time, but it was nothing but gray now.
Immediately I saw that the buildings and other structures had partially crumbled. Cars were scattered everywhere about the roads, pieces of debris were not only on top of them but clumped about on the road. What made it different and grimmer was it was covered with a thin layer of ash. It covered everything like snow.
“Pull up your face covering,” Madison recommended as we walked into town.
The wheels of the suitcase made a crunching noise as it moved over the ash.
Madison paused, bent down and touched the ash. She rolled her fingers together and winced. “Ow. Damn it.” She rubbed her hand on her leg. “Keep your nose covered. This ash has glass in it.”
“Glass?”
“Debris that blew in from somewhere.” She started to stand but paused. “Oh, God.” Her words were laced with an ache.
“What? What is it?”
Madison looked over her shoulder at me. I couldn’t see her facial expression because the cloth covered her nose and mouth. But I could see her eyes and they screamed horror. I peered beyond her wondering what she had seen, but it didn’t take much searching.
Those clumps that were sporadically throughout the streets, the ones covered in ash, they weren’t debris after all, they were bodies.
She closed her eyes. “That one is a child. I can’t look.”
My eyes shifted down and a twitch hit my stomach.
“Let’s go, walk around, something, not through.” She said. “We aren’t finding a useful car here.”
I nodded and followed her lead. “What happened here? I mean, the bodies are covered in an ash.”
“I know.”
“They died before the ash fell. How? How did they all die?”
Madison paused and shook her head. “DisasterMD answer… the choke. I can’t be sure, because I can’t see them.”
“You said that term before, the choke. What are you talking about?”
“It’s… you know what? Let’s just get away from all this debris, and this ash, then I’ll tell you. I promise. Because if you have to ask, you didn’t see it happen.”
Again in keeping with our cliffhanger conversations, Madison said no more, she just kept walking.
I was in complete agreement on getting away from the town. Learning about the choke could wait. We had nothing but time. After seeing Longview, California, not only was my hope of finding rescue crews diminished, I faced the harsh reality that the devastation was a lot bigger than I had even imagined.
TWELVE – Blocked Window
At first, I didn’t understand quite why Madison did it, I thought it was an impulse. She walked right into that building.
Before that we were having a conversation as we walked. Nothing deep because neither one of us wanted to breathe heavily.
Then out of the blue, mid sentence, she stopped.
A lot of things about her made me wonder. She seemed like a solidly good person, and I couldn’t determine whether it was the circumstances that made her act, for lack of a better word, bipolar, or it was just who she was. Now, granted she didn’t go from down to angry or extremely happy. But, like a flip of a switch, Madison went from talkative, to quiet and almost sad.
The sadness, I understood. I fought that myself. I tried to focus forward, getting help or finding my family which ever would come first.
There was no real easy way to get around the small town of Longview. None. While we pushed through what I believed were the outskirts, we were still in the middle of the town. There were still houses that had partially crumbled, cars and bodies in the street. We strolled through and around, slowly through the ash, looking for a new vehicle. Transportation wasn’t our only concern.