Crisis Event: Gray Dawn (3 page)

This was hard work.

The dull, pewter landscape offered little visual stimulus, and the human mind was just not built for a monochrome environment. Humans had evolved in a world of vibrant colors and constant movement and prevalent threats from various feline and canine and hominine predators.

Hundreds of sources of danger had honed human survival instincts to a sharp edge, and despite the dulling of those instincts by civilization and its minimized dangers, the human nervous system needed
stimuli.

The stillness and dull gray landscape she’d faced for days was definitely lacking that. The sameness was beginning to wear on her, nibbling at her sanity like teeth nibbling the last of a gooey Rice Krispie treat.

Fifteen minutes later she broke the silence.

“Toothbrush,” she said. “And toothpaste.”

This was a mental note she kept making and then ignoring anytime she arrived some place that might have a new toothbrush or toothpaste available.

It sucked, but every time she’d found herself facing an abandoned or looted drugstore or supermarket or residential dwelling whose roof hadn’t collapsed under the weight of dust and ash, she’d forced herself to weigh the danger of entering a dark building against the reward of a toothbrush and toothpaste.

Every time she’d opted to keep moving—alive with bad breath instead of dead or bleeding out with a red tube of Close-Up clutched in her fingers.

“I’m going crazy myself,” she said, and giggled a little as she strode along the road.

She stopped long enough to sight her scope west along the Interstate ahead, thinking about all the cognitive science lectures she’d heard at college—lectures that explained how the human psyche begins to break down in isolated and dangerous environments.

“Just call me Missus Sleeping Bag Maniac.”

The image of the crazy guy on the pink bike leapt into her mind, only instead of the crazy guy on the bike, she saw herself.

“Focus, Sadie,” she said when she found herself atop the overpass crossing I-80.

How did I walk two miles without even noticing it?

Sadie walked to the breakdown lane of the overpass. She un-slung her rifle and sighted toward the west, looking for movement behind the dusty windshields in the long line of abandoned cars on I-80. She saw what looked like mummified bodies through some of the windshields—those that for some reason weren’t coated with dust.

Other windshields were blotched with a black fuzzy mold, a sure sign the bodies inside had sprayed blood or worse over the car’s insides.

After a minute of looking she walked to the other side of the overpass and sighted east along the line of cars. Still her mind wouldn’t stop running old movies, and after only a few seconds she gave up trying to check out each car windshield.

It was a mistake, since she had a great vantage point here. Despite the constant flickering lightning and drifting gray dust, she could see for several miles in all directions.

To the south, the Youngstown skyline rose up, its hazy buildings wreathed in lightning and dust. To the west and east, lines of cars seemed to stretch out forever.

She should take time to thoroughly search the horizon in all directions.

To be safe.

To be cautious and meticulous, like her grandfather and professors had taught her to be.

But her nerves were ragged. Her mental focus was slipping.

She was getting weak from constant undernourishment and living on the verge of dehydration. She was reaching the point where some days she had trouble caring. Despair, they used to call it a few centuries ago. In the twenty-first century they called it “depression.”

It was a hazard of living alone, which she’d done for a long time now.

Maybe she’d been
too
cautious so far, she thought.

Maybe she should have taken a few more risks in exchange for moving faster.

“Doesn’t matter now,” she reminded herself, and continued along the dust-choked road, descending the ramp over the Interstate, then slowly leaving the Interstate behind.

A mile or so later she came upon a line of abandoned cars on the farm-to-market. She was on the outskirts of a town called “Hubbard.” The cars were buried so deeply in dust Sadie would have had to spend too much time digging them out if she wanted to scrounge them.

She wasn’t willing to take the time for that. The road had narrowed and was bordered by dead, dust-choked trees that seemed to loom over her like gray, shambling monsters. Now all she wanted to do was hurry.

She picked up her pace again, moving to the center of the road, taking longer steps as she half walked, half-ran between the two lines of car. She tried to keep her focus out in the distance while at the same time remaining aware of the cars she was passing.

This was dangerous.

Possibly deadly.

If she tripped and fell she could hurt herself bad enough that she’d die from the injury. Broken skin or broken bones. Either could kill her.

Even a sprained ankle could get her.

And if someone stepped out from behind one of the vehicles and swung a machete or a bat or a pipe wrench at her she’d be dead.

All her caution and careful planning and difficult journeying would be for nothing.

She’d never make it to Texas, or reach her grandfather’s land, or see her parents alive again—if they were still alive.

There was no guarantee of that. She hadn’t talked to either of them in eight months, since the early days of the Crisis, when the satellites began to go down and order began to break down and the telecommunications grid collapsed.

Seven months ago Sadie had called her mother’s cell phone on a whim. She’d gotten to the voice message box—farther than she’d gotten in months. But before she could leave a message the call was dropped.

Sadie couldn’t get through after that, and it nearly killed her. She’d cried for more than an hour, dialing the number over and over, getting the error message every time, until what was left of the charge on her smart phone finally ran out and she was left staring at its dead black face.

Sadie remembered the pain of that experience—the near hopelessness that had descended upon her. Even now the feeling was so real and clear and vivid that she had to fight to keep from descending into it again. She became so focused on the fight that she stumbled and dragged her right thigh along the dented front fender of a Ford Ranger. The mishap tore a rip along her camouflage pants and dug into the flesh beneath.

“Come on!” she said. She strode with more purpose and care—for a while. She made a hundred or so yards before she felt the blood trickling down over her knee, and the pain beginning to mount.

Sadie stopped walking. She bent and pulled the rip in her pants upward until she could see the wound beneath. She was relieved to find a minor scratch.

Still, it slowed her down.

She had to pull off her pack and get out the four ounce bottle of isopropyl alcohol. As quick as she could, she dropped her pants and poured the alcohol over the scratch.

“Ow,” she said, clenching her fist against the sting, then wrapping a strip of sterile gauze around her leg and taping it off with electrical tape.

She almost wished she’d elected to ride a bike. Since dumping her car she’d come across several good ones. Road bikes and mountain bikes much better than the Sleeping Bag Maniac’s junker.

She’d been tempted to take one, especially the mountain bike she’d seen on the bike rack back in Salamanca. But riding a bike was riskier than walking or running. Sadie was a good shot, thanks to her grandfather’s training, and she could snap off a rifle shot in a second while on foot. But shooting a deer rifle off the back of a mountain bike could only be done in a circus.

“Best to take it slow,” she heard her grandfather say. “Getting in a hurry can get you killed.” And since he’d spent decades making specialty fireworks for a living without blowing himself up, she was fairly sure he’d known what he was talking about.

At the sound of her grandfather’s voice in her head, she snapped her attention to the present and slowed down. As soon as she reached the next gap between cars she moved to the side of the road and slid down into the ditch, stretching out full length on her back like a soldier hiding from an enemy.

She’d been walking without thinking again. The Swiss Army watch on her wrist had told her that the last time she checked—what seemed like only minutes ago. But something inside told her it had been more than minutes.

I’m losing it.

When she looked up at the narrow ribbon of sky between the dust-covered trees, all she saw was a thick wall of gray fluff that pulsed and glowed white from distant lightning. Not even a faint hint of the sun was there, like she’d seen a couple of times in the last month. Just those little glimpses of the pale disk in the gray sky had helped her hold onto hope, had reminded her that the distant ball of warming fire was out there, and that someday, as the earth began to heal itself, it would be visible again.

But the disk was gone now, and she had an irrational fear that she’d never see it again. Every day henceforward would be a nightmarish monochrome vista the color of galvanized pipe.

Sadie fought down panic. Her head felt like she’d taken too much cold medicine. For an instant she wondered if she was back in her old wood-framed house in Boston, sweating out a fever and a Nyquil overdose.

But then a fork of lightning reached down and struck one of the buildings in the skyline of Youngstown—which seemed so much closer than it had from the I-80 overpass.

Briefly, she wondered if she’d see the sun again before she died, but cut the thought off with her mantra: “Doesn’t matter.”

A chill rose up her back and spread to her whole body, not from fear, but from the sweat that had soaked her underwear and t-shirt. She was going to need a fire or some kind of heater tonight when she got past Youngstown.

If she got past Youngstown.

She summoned the courage to look at her watch.

“Crap,” she said. The watch read: 3:06.

She tried to remember the last time she’d scanned the road behind her—or ahead. She’d been hemmed in by the two rows of cars, hurrying through what felt like a tunnel, fighting off the urge to panic and run by letting her mind wander, remembering her college friends, and her job search, and her grandfather and his land.

Escapism bordering on dissociation.

And it was suicide.

Someone could be stalking her right now and she wouldn’t know it.

Rolling over and uncapping her rifle scope, she slithered up the bank of the ditch. She sighted the road behind her. She was at the top of a rise, so when she stood up and rested the rifle on the roof of a car she could see for a long way back.

Nothing was moving against the gray landscape.

The car she’d slept in was long gone, as were the few topographical markers she’d seen around it. The road had curved south and west for miles.

Ten or twelve? Fourteen?

She couldn’t be sure because all her daydreaming and past-pondering had made her miss any mile markers or road signs that would have kept her aware of her location.

After double-checking her back trail, she turned her scope forward.

The road ahead descended gently, curving toward what the compass on the red paracord loop around her neck told her was south.

The skyline of Youngstown was right there, framed by the dead gray trees that lined the road. Thousands of empty buildings and houses awaited her passage.

This was the milestone that marked the end of the first leg of her journey—six hundred or so miles of the eighteen hundred miles she needed to travel.

She estimated a two mile walk to the city limits. She knew she could make that much distance easily today, but if she could get over the river she’d feel a little safer—and a little more hopeful.

On the other side of Youngstown she’d have a fairly straight, flat road to Columbus—and then to St. Louis. Then the hills and mountains and rugged terrain and cold weather that had slowed her progress for the last four months would be behind her.

“Maybe I’ll get a toothbrush today,” she said, and shrugged a shoulder through the rifle strap. “Hell, maybe I’ll find a hot guy my age, a shower, and a clean bed.

And champagne.

And fresh roses.”

Her grin lasted all of two seconds.

“Might as well dream big,” she said. Then she set her mouth into a grim line and stepped forward.