Extinct (20 page)

Love,

Brad

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B
RAD
WORKED
ON
HIS
list for four days before he finally left the house. The snow stopped a week earlier. It switched to freezing rain in the middle of the night, layering his jacket in crunchy ice before he got back inside. In the morning, he cursed the rain. It made his snowmobile ramp into a treacherous sheet of ice.
 

Before the rain, his ramp was packed down by countless trips through with the shovel, and bolstered with pieces of plywood layered down. The ramp led up from the front porch up to the surface of the snow. Where he’d stopped shoveling and laying plywood, you could sink into the drifts like quicksand. You really needed to swim more than walk, he’d found out. He also found he could keep the snowmobile afloat in the fresh powder if he was careful. His snowmobile was long, and powerful. He usually rode established trails. Riding in the fresh snow required a lot of effort and a lot of standing.
 

His education began when he took the machine out into snow about ten feet deep. As soon as he left the ramp, he thought the sled would be lost forever. He almost rolled it over and couldn’t move it an inch. Brad eventually consulted a book from his library. He read it while perched on the side of the sled’s half-buried seat. Within a few hours, he wrestled the snowmobile back upright and cut a few trails through the yard. With the wind and continued snowfall, his tracks disappeared by the next day.

Now, the ice changed the whole equation. Brad tried to climb the ramp and slipped immediately. He spun as he fell and slammed his shoulder into the hard ice. He tried to chip through the it with his shovel and found it too thick to break up easily.
 

The top task on his list was to figure out a way to get the snowmobile up the ramp. The rest of the entries were items to pack for the trip.
 

The snowmobile took a day. Packing took the other three.
 

Over the years, Brad trained himself to find a quick solution instead of a perfect one. It was essential to staying profitable as a contractor. Most of the companies he worked for employed people who could engineer a really good long-term solution to their problems. The only issue was budget. Often, Brad found, a really good long-term solution to the problem was way outside the budget allowance for the project. And, Brad found, a lot of companies didn’t really need a good long-term solution, they just needed a cheap, short-term fix for a problem that would go away in the near future.
 

Of course, a lot of solutions took longer than anyone wanted to admit, but that was a different issue.
 

That’s how Brad made his money—he presented options. He evaluated the situation, figured out what the “right” solution should be, and also figured out what the “right now” solution could be. His clients paid him for that skill—the ability to see an imperfect solution which would fix a problem soon, rather than a perfect solution which would fix a problem eventually.

When trying to free his snowmobile from the porch and get it up the icy ramp, Brad almost fell into that perfect solution trap. His first approach consisted of melting grooves in the sheet of ice to line up with the tracks of the snowmobile. Then, as he tried to climb the ramp, the bumps in his snowmobile tracks would interface with the grooves in the ramp, and he could climb. It was a perfect solution which would be durable, repeatable, and take forever to complete. Brad abandoned the idea quickly.

His next idea was to use his chainsaw to cut through the ice. He didn’t know how well it would work, but he’d seen ice sculptors use chainsaws before, so it seemed plausible. Unfortunately, his chainsaw disappeared when his garage exploded in mud.
 

Brad returned to the ice ramp with a sledgehammer and a lot of aggression. By the end of the day he’d broken up enough patches of ice to get traction to the top of the ramp. He left the snowmobile parked on a flat spot in the snowfield.
 

The day was overcast with low clouds, but without the falling snow, he could finally see more than ten feet. Brad looked back at the house and gaped at the sight. Only the peak of the roof at the front, and the peak of the garage were visible. The rest of the house was a white mound of nothing. It was only a guess, but Brad figured the snow to be at least twenty feet deep if not more.
 

“Jesus,” he said, exhaling.
 

As slippery as the ramp was, the ice up on the flat wasn’t so hard to navigate. The freezing rain left the surface bumpy, like the individual drops froze before they could spread out too much. Brad walked up to the peak of his roof and saw that hot air from his chimney created a bubble beneath the snow. The top of it was still open, but if the snow continued it might close up, suffocating Brad’s fire.

On the edges of his clearing, some trees poked out of the top of the snow, but most were just more white mounds. In some directions, the view looked like rolling dunes in a pure-white desert.

Brad hauled his essentials up the ramp by hand and lashed them to the snowmobile. He wore a lot of his food provisions on his back in a hiking pack. In the morning he didn’t bank the fire, but instead left a note for the next person who might find his house.
 

He set out at dawn, or at least as early as he could see clearly.
 

Chapter 9: South is Dead

R
OBBY
LET
OUT
A
long, slow sigh. He turned around and sat on the center console so he could look back at the wrecks behind him. Behind the Wyoming trailer with the bucking bronco, Robby saw the corner of the boy’s car in the distance. Robby wondered if the boy’s face had slipped farther down the window, or if the boy’s hand still perched in the same position, or if it had mysteriously moved again.
 

His stare didn’t shift, but his hands found a box of cheesy crackers from the back seat. Robby crunched them by the handful while he considered his options. He could replace one flat with the spare, but did it matter? Would changing just one tire even help?

None of the cars stopped on the bridge looked heavily damaged. In fact, on his trip, Robby saw a lot of cars pulled over with exploded-eye corpses but only a few looked like they’d been in a big crash. He theorized they’d made some attempt to pull over just before their deaths and then rolled to a gentle, post mortem stop. This assumption led Robby to the depressing idea that most of the vehicles on the road would have remained running until they eventually ran out of gas.

He hadn’t confirmed this idea. The thought of getting close enough to one of the exploded-eye corpses to see the gas gauge was not even slightly appealing to him. At the other side of the Wyoming trailer, another idea waited for him. The car hooked up to the trailer also had a bike rack attached to it. Two full-sized mountain bikes and a kid’s bike—pink with handlebar streamers—were lashed to the trunk. Robby gathered everything he could fit in his backpack, and grabbed the keys to the SUV before he let himself out to stand on the bridge.

The wind blowing up the river bit at his skin. Robby zipped up his coat until the zipper hit the sore spot on his neck. The sore spot made him think of his father. He felt naked walking up the slight slope of the bridge deck to the wrecked car. The bucking bronco painted on the trailer stared at him with a half-crazed eye. The horse gave the impression of brown, but it was really composed of colorful strokes of random colors. Rings of blue and purple made up its flared nostrils and streaks of red flowed down the horse’s chest like blood. Robby focused on the bikes and tried to ignore the horse mural.
 

When Robby approached the back of the car, he just stared at the bike rack. He figured they would be locked to the rack, and he would need the driver’s keys to unlock them. He almost couldn’t believe his luck—they weren’t locked. The bikes were merely lashed to the rack with nylon straps. In minutes, Robby unhooked and rested them against the side of the trailer.

Both of the adult-sized bikes looked good, so Robby chose the one with the pack of tools and pump clipped to the frame. He coasted down the slope of the bridge and waved goodbye to the SUV as he passed. It felt strange to ride a bike without a helmet. Robby didn’t pedal, he let gravity take him down the road and looked back and forth carefully, watching for any sign of danger. He felt stealthy on the bike, but less insulated than in the SUV.

He planned to trade in his bike for the next functional car or truck he could find.

Not far down the road the first exit led to Market street. Robby rolled down to the stop sign and rode up onto the sidewalk of a fairly big road. Just up the road he found small neighborhoods mixed with clusters of businesses. A little farther, Robby found a shopping mall with a bunch of cars grouped near the entrance to the Best Buy.
 

He let his bike slow to a stop and put his feet down. When he saw movement over by the store, he hunched over the handlebars. Robby shuffled the bike over to a clump of bushes decorating a concrete island in the parking lot. He laid the bike down and crept between the evergreen shrubs.

Past all the parked cars, color lined the sidewalk next to the Best Buy. Closest to the door, behind some velvet ropes, people had set up tents; farther away, they had sleeping bags and lawn chairs. The movement which caught Robby’s eye was the flap of a big purple tent, fluttering in the breeze. The whole line looked messy and disorganized against the clean facade of the building.

Robby’s family never shopped on Black Friday. Their Thanksgiving always consisted of dinner at Grandma’s followed by his mom and grandmother working on little projects around the house. Grandma never asked for help, but she worried around the edges of something until someone would come to her rescue. That someone was always Robby’s mom.

Robby had seen the lines of people on TV though. He’d seen them camped out on the news, waiting for the big post-Thanksgiving sales. Now, witnessing the line of shabby tents and chairs, Robby saw them in real life. Or, perhaps “real death” would be more appropriate, he thought.

Even from his distance, Robby saw that these would-be shoppers suffered the same fate as everyone else south of Portland—the sitters all sat with slumped heads and eye goo on their jackets. Most of the others were splayed out on the sidewalk. One unlucky man in a black jacket and a black cap had fallen forwards. The velvet rope propped him up under his armpits and the stanchions on either side leaned towards him, like drunken buddies propping up their passed-out friend.

Robby stood up and glanced around, feeling stupid for having ducked because of a tent-fly flapping in the wind. He rolled his bike down the aisle of the parking lot over towards the group. He figured this would be an easy place to score another vehicle.

He started scanning the clump of cars looking for a nice, big, new-looking vehicle. With a few candidates in mind, he looked down the line of corpses, trying to determine which body belonged to what car. He decided to try to correspond each car’s parking lot position to the place of the person in line.
 

He couldn’t see the occupants of the first tent, but guessed from the big double-wide tent that the people belonged to the first tan minivan. The third guy was easy. His wheelchair matched him nicely with the van in the handicapped spot. Robby thought about going directly for the wheelchair guy’s keys. The van looked capable and sturdy. Then he remembered a thing he’d seen on TV—people in wheelchairs were likely to have their vehicles retrofitted with hand controls. Robby didn’t want to learn something new; he was still getting comfortable driving a normal car.

Robby walked past the handicapped van and paused at the travel lane to look both ways before crossing. He smiled at his habit—who was he expecting to drive by? Robby pushed the bike and then stopped quickly when the bike made a weird sound. The freewheel clicked twice and then made a weird “swooshing” sound. The sound stopped almost as quickly as the bike. Robby leaned down closer, but didn’t see anything wrong with it.

He pushed the bike forward again, waiting for the familiar click from the rear tire. Once again, as soon as he heard the second click, he heard a swoosh. He stopped the bike again, and the swoosh was followed immediately by a complementary “whoosh.”
 

Without moving the bike, he heard it again. "Swoosh-whoosh.”

Robby realized the sounds weren’t coming from the bike. He looked up. His eyes tracked down the length of the line towards the corner of the Best Buy.

A giant puddle spilled down from the sidewalk into the parking lot. As he watched, another wave of liquid gushed from around the corner of the building and joined the puddle. The crest of the new flood made the swoosh sound, and it spread out into the puddle with the whoosh sound.