Kate woke to a gentle nudge at her shoulder. "Dearie, wake up—I think you need to see this."
For a split second Kate didn't know where she was. She sat up and her hand went to her waist, groping for the chef’s knife. In a panic, her heart beat faster when her hand grasped nothing but cloth. The fogginess that enveloped her head evaporated, and she found herself in the inside of an RV. The serious-looking little old lady in front of her snapped back into focus.
The first thing she noticed was the burning smell of gas fumes in her nose. They'd all but disappeared the night before, true to Maggie's words. While moving—with the windows down—fresh air forced the fumes out the back.
"What—what time is it?" Kate asked in a voice thick with sleep. "Why did we stop?"
Maggie cackled and adjusted the thick glasses on her nose. "Almost noon. You slept all night and half the day away." A frown creased her wrinkled forehead. She pulled her own bandana up over the lower half of her face.
"It's no wonder you're so thin, child. You’re exhausted."
Kate rubbed her eyes and sighed. She took her own bandana and tied it around her face. As Maggie turned toward the front of the RV, Kate slipped her hand under the pillow and retrieved her knife. She stood and deftly draped her shirt over the blade at the small of her back.
I wonder how long it takes after this thing stops for the fumes to build up like this? She moved forward behind Maggie, tiptoeing past gas cans and supplies that took up every inch of space in the big vehicle.
Kate moved up front, stepping into what felt like the cockpit of a large airplane. Jonathan sat behind the oversized steering wheel, the blue bandana covering what had to be a mighty frown, judging by the set of his brow. Maggie perched on the edge of the passenger seat and they both stared out the massive windshield.
"That's more cars than I've seen in the past week," Kate muttered.
Jonathan grunted. "Been sitting here for the past ten minutes. No one's moved. Somebody came walking by with news the National Guard is somewhere up around the bend, couple miles ahead."
"Well, it's about time they got their act together," Kate said.
"You might not say that when we reach the head of this line," Jonathan replied. He turned and cast a rheumy look on Kate's disheveled appearance.
"They're checking papers, turning people away from crossing the Mississippi. Far as I know, this road," he said, pointing a thick, sausage-like finger at the windshield, "is the only route across the Mississippi for 50 miles in either direction—north or south."
Ice trickled down Kate's spine. "They're not letting anybody across?"
"I'd assume the traffic would move faster than this if they were."
Kate chewed her lower lip. Now what the hell was she supposed to do? Just a few miles ahead, somewhere around the corner through the pine trees, lay the Mississippi River. The last major obstacle in her path, keeping from reaching Jay.
"Go on, then. Tell her the rest," Maggie said, without taking her eyes off the mother of all traffic jams.
Jonathan sighed. "They're confiscating vehicles and taking supplies and gas from people who cause trouble."
Kate gripped the seats in front of her with white knuckles. "Are you serious?"
Jonathan shrugged. “So I've heard. Could be true…wouldn't put it past the government…”
"You're worried they're going to take your RV?"
Jonathan glared at Kate. "Miss, we've got ten times the fuel anyone in their right mind actually needs. Plus an extra vehicle. You think they're going to just wave at us? We've screwed."
He turned from her and stared at the car next to them. A small child, nose against the window, made a face.
"That's the scuttlebutt, at any rate."
"Annnd…" prompted Maggie.
Kate was so lost in the new worries cropping up in her mind she almost missed Jonathan’s statement. She blinked and looked down at the older man.
"Wait—what? You're giving me your car?"
Jonathan cleared his throat. "Well, it's not like I've been able to fit in that thing for the past couple years anyway and she doesn't drive it anymore. I don't know why we even brought the damn thing—"
"Jonathan! Language," snapped Maggie.
"…and besides," he continued, as if trying to get the words out before he changed his mind. "If they're gonna take it from me, I'd rather have it go somebody who can use it. If the Army takes it, they'll just give it to some damn politician…this way I get to flip them the bird. Greedy bas—” He paused, looking at his wife. Clearing his throat, he continued. "They won't be able to steal our stuff if we give it away first."
Maggie turned in her seat and placed a paper-thin hand on top of Kate's. Despite the fragility of her hand, the warmth came through strong as sunlight. "What my not-so-eloquent husband is trying to tell you, dear, is that we'd be happy to let you have it. You're in the same boat we are, but you're a far sight worse off.”
Kate looked at the tiny Smart Car's dashboard. She still couldn't believe Maggie and Jonathan had given her the vehicle. However, she had more pressing concerns than how to pay them back. The wall of cars in front of her was just as effective a barrier to getting home as the soldiers at the end of the line of cars or the river beyond. While she had been decoupling the car from the RV, a few people in nearby vehicles offered opinions on what they thought was going down to pass the time.
More than a few wondered at the strong smell of gasoline that poured out from the RV. Kate and Jonathan ignored them all and tried to focus their attention on what might be happening at the front of the line.
The consensus seemed to be that the National Guard was implementing a federal ban on interstate travel. Until the government could get back on its feet, the White House issued an executive order that, while not declaring outright martial law, basically did the same thing.
So travel across state lines was prohibited until the situation was in hand—or at least understood. Rumors flew back and forth down the line of cars, and there was more than a little debate over whether or not the earth would get hit with a second round of CME blasts or if the worst was over.
Others figured the governor had called out the National Guard to protect the state from a horde of people trying to flee St. Louis. They talked about all kinds of damage and chaos radiating out from the state's biggest city as the people trapped inside fought and struggled to escape.
At any rate, it boiled down to the same thing—Kate found herself unable to reach Illinois. At least not legally.
She looked down at Maggie’s borrowed map and blinked, grateful beyond words to not need the bandana anymore.
Most everyone around her was heading north, and the National Guard seemed determined to keep people from heading east to St. Louis. That meant she should go south. It would avoid most of the traffic and it might offer a less-guarded route across the Mississippi. Her mind made up, Kate got off I-44 at the 270 interchange after several minutes of horn honking and hand waving, and took her place in another long line of cars—this one heading east toward Mehlville.
Here too, the cars slowly crept forward over the course of the afternoon. Where Maggie and Jonathan had covered hundreds of miles while she slept, it took Kate almost three hours to travel a single mile in such congested traffic. Biding her time until she found a possible exit, Kate sat calmly behind the wheel, adjusting herself to the tiny cockpit of her little car.
As the sun headed toward the western horizon behind her, Kate crested an overpass crossing a local road in Concord and realized the embankments might be slight enough for her to drive the Smart Car down onto the surface road without flipping. Maybe.
She checked her mirrors about a hundred times making sure there were no law enforcement personnel or military people lurking behind her. In the gathering twilight, she could just make out a flashing blue light that had to be the National Guard outpost.
Kate knew the Mississippi lay only about five miles east of her position. She leaned over the passenger seat and peered out the window, wondering if she’d get another chance like this before she reached the checkpoint outside Mehlville. She didn't want to get caught up in the mess, but I-55 ran south out of Mehlville and that's what she wanted—she needed to get south of the chaos surrounding St. Louis and find a way across the Mississippi.
Screw this.
Kate shifted into low gear, turned tires, and goosed the little car. It rolled off the highway, across the shoulder, and right down the slight embankment. She realized she might have gotten in over her head when the front bumper dug into a clump of grass and the wheels locked. Kate twisted hard on the steering wheel in a vain attempt to free the bumper from the grass and soft dirt the tires had sunk into.
The right front corner of her car dipped down and then the world spun around her. Green then blue then green again flashed in front of the windshield, revolving in a sickening roll. Kate screamed as the little smart car lurched and bumped, cartwheeling itself down the hill.
The vehicle slid on some loose gravel and came to a shuddering stop on its side, just above the shallow ditch along the surface road. Kate took a deep breath, and moved trembling hands to unbuckle her seatbelt.
Hanging sideways, she was glad at least the little car was light. She actually had a chance of flipping it over herself. Before she could fully unfasten her seatbelt, rocks and gravel underneath the right side gave way and the car rolled one more time, finding its own way off the grassy embankment. In a shower of dirt and grass, the little crumpled Smart Car lurched to a stop on the surface street.
Kate waited for the dirt and grass to stop landing on the windshield, then took a breath. "Well…" she said, tucking loose hair over her ear. She squinted at the cracked windshield. "That happened."
She exhaled and wiped stray strands of sweaty hair from her forehead then looked up the freshly gouged embankment and saw several people poking their heads out of cars in the right lane, watching and pointing. Without waiting for a big truck that started to follow her over the side, Kate shifted into drive and spun off south down the access road.
She noticed the big 4x4 crashed to a stop on the surface street behind her, turned on its headlights, and headed east toward the river before disappearing from view. Kate ignored several other cars that attempted to do the same and figured the National Guard or local law enforcement would be on the scene soon enough to put a stop to any further escapes from the highway. She left her headlights off in the gathering twilight as she sped down the winding road toward I-55.
Kate slipped into the traffic—moving at a steady pace—heading south on 55 toward Arnold and points further. She squinted at the map in her lap. The town of Imperial, just south-east of Arnold, looked fairly close to the river. A little black line—a railroad bridge—connected Illinois and Missouri south of Imperial but the map didn't list a town name.
Hoping the dot represented a town or village or something other than a scenic overlook, Kate pressed on, passing without incident through Arnold. Smoke obscured most of what she could see. Fires raged in the western half of the little town. Not many cars moved in the beleaguered municipality.
Kate kept her head down and her speed constant. On the other side of Arnold, things loosened up a bit as more and more vehicles left I-55, presumably looking for river crossings.
Kate glanced at the map. Printed only two years before, it listed no bridges across the Mississippi anywhere south of I-55—back at Mehlville—for the next 50-odd miles. She swallowed.
Well, there better be something here at… She squinted at the map again in the fading light. Sulphur Springs. Ugh, that sounds charming.
Kate worked her way east until she ran into Sulphur Springs Road and followed that along the last mile toward the river. Most of the power lines that riddled the tiny little community either sagged from their poles or lay sprawled out on the ground.
Must have been a real mess around here when everything went to shit. She could only imagine how the wires would have sparked and set fire to the trees and small houses nearby. Indeed, as she drove through, only a few houses remained standing. Just about everything had been reduced to charred rubble.
As Kate grew closer to the river, she grew more and more nervous—she saw no signs of any railway at all. There ought to at least be some old tracks or something, but she only saw the residential road before her, lined with charred trees and burnt underbrush that hadn’t seen pruning shears in decades.
Kate gripped the wheel and drove through the last intersection, glancing left toward the river. The glitter of moonlight on water caught her eye, but she didn't spot any train tracks, just an old walking path—she hit the brakes and ground her car to a halt.
That's not a path!
She pulled the little car onto the walkway and realized someone had merely filled in the tracks with concrete. The Smart Car's tiny frame easily fit on the path, so she followed it south. An estuary at the extreme southern edge of Sulphur Springs sported a sagging train crossing. Just on the northern side, another track crossed at right angles, stretching into the trees to her right.
But reaching out across the river before her stood a wooden train bridge. She squealed like a girl on Christmas morning and quickly backed the car up. Taking a glance to see if anyone had seen or followed her, she sped down the dirt path toward the river and skidded to a stop in front of a rickety wooden barricade that blocked vehicle access where the train tracks left land. She hopped out of the car and stumbled the last few steps to the barricade in order to examine the bridge.
In the peaceful night air, she heard the river gurgling softly some 20 feet below along the banks. The cold wind bit her lungs, a far cry from the heat in Death Valley and the initial days of her escape from Los Angeles. Kate rubbed her fingers together as she examined the bridge.
The wooden beams looked ancient and brittle. She wasn't sure it even went all the way across, but the unmarked, forgotten bridge was her best bet to circumvent the blockade. She had to reach the other side. The dark swath of land cutting off the slightly less dark river at the far edge of her vision was Illinois.
Home.
Her mind made up, Kate grabbed the decaying barricade and gave it a shove. The boards, long neglected, almost felt apart in her hands. She got back in the car, said a quick prayer, and gunned it. She only turned on the headlights after she smashed through what remained of the barricade.
The little car was just big enough to fit the wheels on either side of the rusted railway irons. The jarring thump thump thump of the tires as they bounced along jarred her teeth and shook her to her core, but Kate pressed on, not daring to stop for fear she might never get going again.
Please hold together, please hold together, please hold together…
She was about halfway across the bridge when she saw headlights wink on behind her, back on the Missouri shore.
"Shit!" she hissed, putting her eyes back on gleaming lines of metal that stretched to Illinois and freedom.
Blue and red lights flashed in the rearview mirror. The local police must have been watching people as they exited the interstate. She took a quick look out the side window and was immediately sorry she did so.
Kate found herself up some 20 or 30 feet above the Mississippi without guard rails. She doubted whether the tracks had been used in the last fifty years.
Three quarters of the way across the bridge, she spotted lights bouncing up and down behind her. Oh God—they're coming after me!
Kate pushed the Smart Car to its limit, hitting the gas and gripping the wheel with white knuckles as it bounced and bucked along the train tracks, daring her to lose her grip. It was almost like the damn thing wanted to jump off the bridge.
Only a hundred yards to go…
The car bounced and jostled even wilder than before. The bridge on the Illinois side was in much worse shape than the Missouri side. She gritted her teeth and prayed again to make it to shore.
Fifty yards to go and one of her tires went flat with a loud pop. Sparks flared out her window when the bare rim hit the rail. The car now not only bucked up and down but wanted to twist side to side as it balanced precariously on three wheels.
Ten yards out from shore, she no longer cared whether the car made it or not. She could ditch it and swim at this point. Kate glanced down at the water. It was a long way down, but at least she could swim ashore.
Before she knew it, Kate smashed through the barricade on the Illinois side and found dry land once more. She gunned it, taking a quick glance in the mirror to see the cops had traversed perhaps halfway across. She still had a few minutes before they made landfall.
Kate gouged a track in the soft dirt as she clawed her way up the riverbank toward civilization.
Once Kate crested the bluff on the Illinois side and gained purchase on gravel, she came to a stop. Kate got out of the car, figuring she'd be able to go faster on foot and escape. She couldn't be found with the Smart Car—police or National Guard or whoever the hell had chased her across the river would assume she stole it.
Headlights blinked and bounced in the distance. Her pursuit had come about three-quarters of the way across the river.
You guys don't give up easy, do you?
Kate turned around. She stood on a wide flood plain. Without lights—from cars, houses, or anything—she was blind. Her only option lay in walking down the road or hiding in the stunted trees and bushes that dotted the landscape.
If I leave the car, it'll only be a matter of time before they find me.
Kate looked back at the cops, maybe National Guard, who approached the Illinois side. If she stuck to the road, they'd run her down in just a few minutes after making landfall.
Screw it. If you're going to keep chasing me, I'm not going to make this easy. Kate scooped up the last of her meager supplies, turned from the ghostly river, and jogged into the bushes.