The Great Wreck (33 page)

At
some point the desert on each side of me became the town of Deming and every
dead person was coming out to see what all the fuss was about. Of course, if
your dead, you already know what the fuss is about: the living.

I
flew through the town of burnt out buildings, abandoned cars and trucks
littering the road making it an insane obstacle course where one wrong move
would send me spilling to the asphalt. Breaking my neck and killing me if I was
lucky. Only breaking my leg or an arm if I wasn’t.

The
dead were pouring out of the buildings all along the highway and I knew it
wouldn’t be long before more sprinters joined into the fun. I had already
forgotten about the third sprinter scream I had heard just outside of Deming.
The sprinter reminded me that it was still there with another scream, this time
not only very close, but close enough to see. I saw her break free from the
crowd and zero in on me in my rear view mirror.

My
legs were already starting to shake with the exertion but I pushed harder
trying to put more distance between me and it. I began to hear more screams
from the surrounding town and wondered how I was ever going to make it out of
this. How far would I need to get from the sprinters before they gave up? What
if they were more dead on the other side of Deming marching north? How long
could I keep up this pace?

I
don’t know when I passed out of Deming and back into the desert. I was focused
on moving my legs up and down pushing the peddles as hard as I could. I was
covered in sweat, my legs were burning and shaking, and my mouth and throat
were bone dry from the hot, dry air that was tearing in and out of my lungs
with each breath. When I began to see little black spots in front of my eyes I
started thinking about how quickly I could unholster my pistol, put it into my
mouth, and pull the trigger.

I
looked behind me and saw that I had put enough distance between me and the dead
who were racing after me that I thought I had enough time to pull that off.
That gave me a small sense of relief that I could put a bullet in my head
before being eaten alive. Lucky me.

That
was when the road disappeared out from beneath me. One second I was tearing
down the road with the dead hot on my heals, the next I was flying over where a
bridge should have been but had apparently been washed out sometime after the
event started. I caught a glimpse of the remains of the bridge fifty feet below
me, the other side of the wash, and the rubble strewn arroyo that was about to
become my grave.

The
rims of my bike crumpled as I hit the slope of the arroyo and I found myself flying
over the hand bars. For a second I was in freefall. As I spilled over I saw the
sky and ground change places, then I smashed into the ground and began tumbling
in an avalanche of dirt and rocks. The dead were somewhere behind and above me.
They wouldn’t care about the washed out bridge, they’d just spill over the side
and tumble down until they landed on top of my broken and battered body and
begin to feed. I wouldn’t even get a chance to end it myself since my arms were
most likely to be broken and I was likely to be unconscious. Maybe the fall
would kill me?

I hit a boulder
with such speed that I flipped over it, felt something crack on my right side,
and then slipped over the edge of a twenty foot vertical drop. I dropped like a
stone and smashed into the sandy floor of the arroyo finally coming to a rest
as a smattering of stones and dirt poured over me. I could see far above me the
edge of the highway where the bridge had washed out. I expected to see the dead
pouring over the edge and following me down to the bottom of the canyon. I did
see a few tops of dead heads peek over the side but by then the unconsciousness
was swelling up and taking me down. My last thought before the feeding began
was that maybe I’d be dead before they got here.

*
     
*
     
*

I
woke up sometime later deep in the shadow of the arroyo. I expected the feel
the searing pain of many dead people biting into me, see them pulling apart my
stomach and spreading my intestines across the dry sand. But no pain came.
Maybe they had already eaten me and moved on? Maybe I was like that dead guy
who still had some brain functions left and I’d soon join the dead heading
north.

I
waited for something, anything to happen and when it didn’t, I gingerly reached
down expecting to find a gaping hole in my stomach or feel my face gone, or
find my arms and legs were missing. But my hands found that my stomach was
whole, my face was still there, and I could see all my limbs were still present
and accounted for.

I
seemed to be alive. Whoopee for me. I looked up and down the gully where I lay
and could see no dead. I could see the remains of my bike now smashed and
crumpled from our trip down the edge of the gully. But no dead.
 
If they had fallen down here with me, there
would have been at least a few nearby. But there was not a one. I looked up and
saw that there were none standing at the edge of the collapsed bridge either.

I
began inspecting my body moving first my arms. They seemed to be OK but sore
from riding so hard and for so long as well as the from the fall but I didn’t
see any bones protruding from them and I could open and close my hands. Good
enough.

I
gingerly sat up and felt a searing pain on my right side and could feel bruises
all over my back where I had landed on my backpack. I pulled up my shirt and
could see a huge bruise where I had hit the boulder on my way down. It extended
all the way around my side and back. I took a deep breath expecting to feel the
sharp pain of a brooked rib but only felt a dull ache so maybe nothing was
broken after all.

Then
I looked at my legs expecting to see them twisted into new and painful shapes
but they appeared to be OK too and after running may hands down each one of
them, I gingerly got to my feet.

I
was sore, beaten, and bruised but I was alive. Yay, me.

I
didn’t feel the elation that I’ve heard survivors talk about after surviving a
near death experience. Maybe it was because I still had to walk a few hundred
miles more to get to Sandia and there was still a world of dead between here
and there. Death meant I was finished and could rest for a while, maybe for
eternity. At this point I guess it really didn’t matter. I was alive and I
wasn’t spending the night at the bottom of an arroyo, so I adjusted my pack and
began looking for way out.

I
had to walked nearly a mile to the south where the remains of the bridge had
been washed out by a mammoth flash flood. I was able to climb up the rubble all
the way to the eastern edge of the arroyo.

I
stood up at the edge and looked east. Nothing. As far as I could see, there was
not a single dead person walking. To the west, I could just make out the town
of what had to be Deming. In my panic to outrun the hordes of dead, I must have
traveled a lot farther that I had realized.

I
turned and started walking east only to see a highway sign an hour later.
“Welcome to
Sunny!
Las Cruces” the
vast billboard stated. Really. Just like that with the exclamation mark right
after “sunny.” As though any visitor from out of town might miss the roasting
heat and intense sunlight hammering down on their heads every second of every
moment from sun up to sun down. I walked for another hour until I came across a
small gas station with the security gates intact. I dragged myself inside, made
sure that the place was empty and rolled down the gate. I pulled an industrial
lock from may pack and locked the gate tight, unrolled my bag and dropped on
top of it.

I
had made it. Las Cruces, the last town I’d go through heading east. I’d catch
I-25 and start heading north. For weeks I had been walking east but no more. I
actually felt pretty good about that. Heading north meant moving to cooler
climates and out of the furnace that was the Sonora desert. And I’d be there in
just a few weeks.

I
was wrong about most of these thoughts. It would turn out I had a little
farther east to get to Las Cruces, the burning dessert I had hoped to escape
would stretch all the way up to Albuquerque, and it would take me over a month
to get there.

In
the morning I woke up and filled my supplies from the nearly empty shelves of
the gas station, then unlocked and rolled the gate up after scanning the
surrounding streets for the dead. Again it was strangely quiet and empty but I
wasn’t going to sit around and wonder why. I headed for the highway just as the
sun broke over the horizon. The cars and wrecks were beginning to clog up the
highway again and I had to weave around their burnt out hulks, checking
frequently for trapped dead hiding in amongst the wrecks so I wasn’t making
very good time. I broke through a four car pileup and could see the highway
passing through the center of the city.

Straight
ahead I saw a tanker truck and on top of it I saw something glinting in the
early morning sunlight. Instinctively I ducked just as the windshield next to
me shattered with the impact of a bullet followed a fraction of a second later
by the sound of a rifle going off.
 

I
sat there behind a Honda civic on four flat tires and felt my heart sink. I
didn’t even have to wonder who might be shooting at me. It was James. Somehow
he had caught up and found me and had decided the best way to say hello was to
take a few shots at my head as I walked down the highway. I don’t know how he
did it. It really didn’t matter. Somehow I knew eventually James would find me
and we’d start our co-dependent relationship up again.

But
I had learned a thing or two as I made my way across the dessert. I set my pack
down and unstrapped my rifle. I made sure I had the scope adjusted so the
sunlight wouldn’t reflect off of it. I screwed the silencer on so that I
wouldn’t attract any dead nearby, then I slowly peered over the truck of the
car I was hiding behind. I spotted the tanker and could see a figure laying
down on the top behind one of the hatches that had been opened up. I slide my
rifle into the butt of my shoulder and peered through the scope. James, larger
than life, popped into my line of sight. He had a rifle similar to mine with a
small scope and no silencer. He was scanning the area around me but had
apparently lost sight of me when I dived behind the pileup that hide me from
his view.

I
had his forehead right in my crosshairs. I could squeeze the trigger and send
that bastard right into the next life. But I didn’t. How many people would
suffer for my inability to shoot a man down in cold blood. I didn’t know but
that question would haunt me for a very long time.

So
instead I aimed at the metal tank hatch he was hiding behind and fired. The
bulleted pranged off of the hatch so close to James’s head that for a second I
thought I’d killed him anyways. James jerked back but not before the hatch
slammed down on top of his head. He pushed the metal plate off of him screaming
and cursing as he rolled off the left of the tanker and spilled down onto the
highway. I carefully aimed again and put a bullet into his back pack. I could
see the poof of dust and the bullet tore through the fabric. James scrambled
out of my rifle sight. I think he might have decided to kill me right there as
he huddled behind that tanker or maybe he had already decided that all along
and was just waiting for the right time.

Apparently,
it was not right at that moment since a second later I saw his arm pop out from
behind the cab of the truck holding a filthy white tee shirt that he waved
frantically up and down. From the quarter mile or so away, I could hear his
manic laugh as he yelled, “Whoo-hooo! Haaayooo mother fucker! Jonnie put your
gun away!”

I
stood up from behind the wreck and kept my rifle up just the same in case James
wanted a little payback. As I approached the tanker he poked his head out from
behind the cab. James looked so bad, I actually stopped and thought for a
moment that he was dead. But even though some of the dead were strange they
didn’t take up guns and start shooting at people, so I decided he just looked
like shit.

“You
done shooting at me, fuck-chunk?” he said.

“You
started it. Is shooting at people your version of tag or something?”

“Oh,
well aren’t we funny, Mr. Cock-a-Waffle,” he said as he stood up and
ineffectively brushed the dirt and grime from his jeans, “Looks like you
developed a sense of humor after all since we parted.”

Then
his gaze drifted off to the south and he said almost to himself, “Do you know
how many times I could have killed you? Waltzing down the highway looking this
way and that. What the fuck were you doing anyway? Playing James Bond?”

“Looking
for dead in the cars. What do you think?”

“I
think you moved slower than a constipated dog taking a shit or maybe a bunch of
senile old fuckers with their walkers hobbling across the dessert. Were you on
fucking vacation? Saint Stephens on a stick, you took forever!”

“I
was being cautious after you left me,” I said, “With the door to the room open
and the dead pouring in to say hello. Thanks for that.”

“You
needed a lesson in survival, penis monkey. And I had some things to take care
of. You’d have been a useless ball pooper and just got in the way, so I gave
you a little alone time.”

“I
thought you might have headed west again, back to Los Angeles. What were you
doing anyways? Checking out property values? Thinking on settling down in the
Phoenix area? Maybe take another shit at Chase Stadium.”

“I
needed to take care of some stuff.”

“What
kind of stuff, huh? What in this big fucking world could you have needed to
take care of? Visiting old friends? Stopping by to visit the parents? Paying
some old bills? What James? What the fuck did you need to take care of you
raging cock sucker?!”