Christina looked back down the canyon. Water covered the park and the lower road that the X-car had travelled only minutes ago.
“We’re cut off,” she said. “The way back is flooded.”
“Can’t go over it, can’t go under it, gotta go through it,” River said, chanting the chorus from a popular children’s song. “Though technically I guess we’re going over, not through, the mountains.”
“Unless the truck trail is a tunnel,” Christina said, “which I doubt.”
“I think we’ll be lucky if we can tell the trail from the rest of the terrain,” River said as she put the car in gear.
The road rose and twisted, and they lost their view of the city almost immediately. The pavement ended, and the Mini bounced along on dirt. Fortunately, summer was the dry season; if the road was wet, their little car would quickly be mired in mud. As long as River kept their speed at a crawl, it looked like the truck trail would lead them across the San Gabriel range.
Christina was amazed by the wildness of the place, so close to one of the world’s biggest urban centers. Low-elevation forest shaded the steep, winding canyon chosen for the trail. Other than a few signs warning of twisty road and possible rock fall, there was no evidence of human activity. Further into the wilderness they drove. She saw an occasional hawk flying high overhead. Blackened branches appeared in some of the trees, and they came to an area completely burned by a recent wildfire.
“You’re not getting car sick, are you?” River asked when Christina opened her window.
“No, I just wondered if it was cooling off,” she said, sticking her hand outside.
“It will,” River said. “After dark, the temperature probably drops twenty degrees. Even more once we make it to the higher elevations.”
The sun was sinking low in the sky, and sections of the road were already in the dark shadow of the mountain. River turned the lights on.
“Want me to drive for a while?” Christina asked.
“I’ve got it for now,” River said. “Are we going to stop for the night?”
“No,” she replied, checking the odometer. “At this rate, we can’t afford to lose time.”
“Then you should take a nap,” River said. “I’ll give you the wheel in an hour or so.”
Christina tilted the seat back as far as it would go—which wasn’t at all far enough—and tried to sleep. The sharp twists in the road were making her a little sick. After days of bad food and high anxiety, her stomach was vulnerable to this fresh insult. She loosened her lap belt and curled up on her side. Miraculously, she managed to slip into a light slumber.
Crunch.
The sickening sound of impact wrenched Christina awake. Total darkness had settled outside. In the faint illumination from the dashboard, she struggled with her seat belt and tried to sit up. The car wasn’t moving.
“What happened?”
River’s face was ashen in the pale light. “Rocks.”
One of the Mini’s headlights was out. The other shone on a pile of rocky debris which covered the narrow trail from one canyon wall to the other.
River’s voice cracked. “There was a bend—almost a U-turn—I was going slow, but it’s so dark…” The words caught in her throat.
Christina opened her door and stepped out of the car. The night was black to an extreme, unfamiliar to city dwellers, and the air felt cold. Other than the sound of the idling engine, silence blanketed the canyon. She hugged herself for warmth and moved into the beam of the surviving headlight.
A jagged stone about twelve inches tall was wedged under the fender. It lifted the front of the car into the air; the front wheels no longer made contact with the ground. Many more rocks had tumbled off the main pile and lay scattered over the road.
Christina pushed the X-car, trying to nudge it off the rock and to the earth. Nothing happened.
“Looks like you ran over a rock,” she said. “Can you back up?”
River gently engaged the accelerator, and the front wheels spun vainly in reverse.
“Help me,” she said.
Her cousin joined her. She noticed how quickly River had regained her composure. Despite River’s reputation as a gadabout, she could be tough and disciplined when necessary.
“We have to push it off the rock,” Christina said. “On the count of three.”
Both young women threw their full effort into shoving the vehicle clear, but it didn’t budge. They tried to rock it back and forth, but the boulder was embedded in the chassis. The only way to free the car was to lift it straight up.
“I’ll find a jack,” River said and scampered to the hatchback.
While River unloaded the backpacks in search of tire-changing equipment, Christina clambered up the rock pile. Shivering, she looked around from the top.
The truck trail snaked away on the other side, but even if they could get the car moving again, they couldn’t pass the rock slide. It probably happened during one of the earthquakes, she thought. Rocks blocking us forward, water blocking us back. This journey was not going well.
Her gaze wandered up the barren mountain slopes. While she slept in the car, they’d ascended above the forest. No trees, only hardy scrub, grew in this arid landscape. Tonight the moon was only a sliver of light, and the stars shone more brightly than she’d ever seen. Even the Milky Way was visible, and she marveled at how modern humans had lost touch with the heavens. She couldn’t identify a single constellation, yet the ancients could track the movements of all the stars. Throughout human history, except for a blink in the previous century, night had been a time of darkness.
The noble silence and majesty around her made Christina philosophical. If the petroplague went global, humanity would be thrown backward in time to the pre-industrial era, when night meant darkness. But they would go crippled by modernity, lacking beasts of burden, and without any understanding of how the natural world works. They would not recognize the stars, or the heavenly signs that it was time to sow or time to reap.
Most of them would die.
“Found it,” River shouted.
Christina slid down the rocks. River was under the car on her back with a flashlight, trying to find the best place to position the jack.
“I’ve never done this by myself,” River said, “but I think it’s not hard.”
“Don’t bother,” Christina said. “We’re ditching the car.”
River sat up, inadvertently stabbing Christina’s eyes with the flashlight.
“What do you mean?”
“There’s no way around the rockslide, so there’s no point wasting our time on the car,” Christina said.
“We could turn back to the city and try another way.”
She shook her head. “Even if the flood from the dam is over, we’ve burned too much fuel. Every mile we drive back is another mile we’ll have to repeat on foot.”
She dragged her backpack onto the road and unzipped the compartments, checking the inventory and familiarizing herself with where things were stashed.
“Chrissy, on foot we’re, like, a week from getting out of this,” River said.
“Don’t you think I know that?” Christina said, standing up and glaring at her cousin. “I don’t want to walk that far, but that’s how it turned out, okay?”
She fetched the specimen box from the front seat and carefully secured it in her backpack. When she faced River again, her cheeks were wet with tears.
“If you want to go back to L.A., I’ll help you with the car. But I have to keep going. I have to get these specimens to a lab.”
River packed up the jack. “Of course you do. And we stick together.”
Together, they helped each other hoist their heavy packs onto their backs.
Christina took a deep breath. “It’s not over yet. Once we reach the freeway, maybe we can hitch a ride inside the containment ring.”
River tightened a padded strap against her hip and said, “Nice night for a walk.”