Chapter One: Sullen Skies — Part 2

Dawn comes with disorienting calm. Jerome, a shy little town with a ‘come hither’ attitude, has become a burned out wreck. Reclusive and alone, the cluster of buildings smolders on the mountainside, a slow fire working its way out from the villas cape. Rocks drift near Jerome’s foundation, torn away by unseen forces, settling harshly to ground, unwilling to fall despite their unnatural positions. The rumbling of rock and smell of smoke wake Jynx, who in turn wakes ChoCho. The water has receded. The two, having stripped off their clothes the night before, put on what is still damp and cold. Jynx has lost her panties to the storm, and the quilt has gone with the wind. Outside Girl’s windows, the landscape has changed. Water and wind have ripped at trees and torn open fresh gouges in the rocky clay. Nothing can be seen of their possessions, not even when scanning the terrain from the cab of the truck. It will take all four wheels and careful observation to get them back to the open road. While the sky is clearer than either have ever known, the clay and stone are still dark with rain. The blue of the day before is almost white, as if everything noxious has been scraped from the bowl above them.

ChoCho scans the horizon in every direction. “The world is not as it should be.”

No Shit, Jynx almost says. She sees the service road, reaches down for the secondary gearshift, and pushes it to the right, then down in a lightning pattern. “Thank the engineers for four on the floor.”

“Four on the floor, heheh.” ChoCho says, “Sounds kinky.”

The comment earns him a smack on the arm, but Jynx smiles just the same. “Shit.” She has to back up, having come over a small hill, stopping blind against a boulder whose entire geological make up is completely out of place.

“I don’t remember that being here yesterday.” Jynx sounds nervous, but ChoCho can’t tell if she is or not. “Cho, love. Can you give me a reading on the GPS, or the compass?”

ChoCho shrugs. “GPS says ‘waiting for signal.’ Compass is pointing north into the morning sun. The radio is still scanning in a circle. Your cell phone’s got no signal.”

Jynx backs up and works The Girl around with enough skill to keep it from tipping, all the while driving at an angle against a muddy slide to get her back up and around the boulder. Splinters of shale and clay grind against her tires, and Jynx starts to sweat, trickles of salt stinging her eyes, forcing her to wipe her face with a towel. Occasionally her tires slip, encouraging her to slow or drop gear ratios just to keep her hold on what should have been firm ground. Thinking to cool Jynx down, ChoCho turns on the AC, but Jynx shuts it off.

“We need to save fuel.” Jynx is obviously concerned.

ChoCho considers, and then finds himself distracted by the radio. “Maybe our antenna’s bad.”

“Maybe.” Jynx keeps her tone hopeful.

“Where are we going?” ChoCho asks, his question more immediate than the answer he receives.

“We were south of the 89 before the storm. I’m trying to get us North by the sun’s reckoning, and then back to the one-seven.”

“Didn’t we come up through Wickenburg?” ChoCho says with a hint of concern.

Jynx maneuvers to where the dirt road ripples in between clusters of scrub, but a flood against the drainage canal has taken out the cattle guard, and she has to work carefully around twisted barbed wire and muddy indentures in order to get to the service road. ChoCho watches the road, waiting to see the familiar cars and trucks. His disappointment builds into a desperate anxiety that expresses itself as temporary verbal and emotional paralysis. Five minutes of maneuvering have Jynx sitting in the runoff canal of a forestry service road, pitched to drive up it. The service road has been empty of cars since she first spotted it some twenty-five minutes before. Because of her location, she still can’t see the highway. She also can’t hear the highway, even with her window down.

Jynx clears her throat of dust, coughing in a controlled staccato, bracing herself for the unexpected. She takes a deep breath, eases onto the accelerator, pushing the stick into place, and works slowly up the side of the road, coming onto the pavement. She looks back to Jerome, then down into the Verde Valley. Where the highway cuts the land, a twisting snake of smoke rises above it in puffs. The smoke dots into the sky here and there, forming a head where Jynx reckons Cottonwood should be. Smoke rises wherever towns and cities rest in the landscape.

“So we’re going through Cottonwood?” ChoCho observes, now that Jynx seems less distracted.

“We need to stock up on supplies.” Jynx says.

Shifting back into two-wheel drive, Jynx pops her neck, stays on the access road, and keeps her focus on the signs and directions. Sometimes she feels lighter, or heavier, even though the road looks level to the eye. Sometimes the compass will shift slowly in another direction, but never to what should be true north. Not once does the GPS system come back on line. Cottonwood, not technically on the way, is proving farther than she expects, farther, at least in driving time, than the eight or ten miles she estimated previously. Jynx half expected trouble once she took to pavement, and had planned to avoid doing so at least until she could see the freeway with her own eyes. The storm, however, has forced her to change her strategy. Pushed onto the 89 by a flooded out section of access road, Jynx travels about two miles before she comes to a screeching halt. Hundreds of cars are piled up, all of them burned to slag and littered with ash. Some of the larger vehicles are still smoking. Gentle gray tufts of weak, steamy smoke rise intermittently into the stagnant air.

“This accident should have been on the news.” ChoCho says, trying to get the radio to work.

This accident should be swarming with police. Jynx thinks, but doesn’t say.

She can smell burnt metal and charred plastic, can feel heat from the accident even as she passes, but everything else is silence. She can smell other things, too, burning cloth, a hint of charred flesh still lingering sweetly in the air. She doesn’t comment on the shadowy remains of a skeleton she sees through the window frame of a wrecked semi truck, mostly because ChoCho is in overload as it is. Jynx doesn’t want the sixteen-year-old boy to lose what little control he has by hitting him with every concrete detail of reality as it happens. Denial, at the moment, seems to be the only thing holding ChoCho’s mind in one piece. She doesn’t want to startle him just yet.

So instead, he startles her. “Nobody’s moving. Nobody’s moving anywhere.” He says it abruptly, loud at first, fading toward the end.

Jynx makes a note that maybe ChoCho isn’t as frail as she might first have thought. She drives once around the wreckage, looking for any signs of life or movement, or perhaps even a hint of recent death in place of burned skeletal remains and the sickly sweet smell of human ash. When they find nothing to indicate life in any form, she finishes her circle and heads back for Cottonwood. She’s already making a list in her mind of necessities, already preparing for the worst. Jynx isn’t one to ask why the world has suddenly come to a halt. She isn’t either over conceited or too particularly humble to wonder why she lived while so many others seem to have died. Rather, she is more interested in making sure that she and her tag-along boyfriend can keep moving forward. The first list is a small one because there are too many unknown variables. Jynx follows a gut instinct, and when she reaches the Main Street for Clarkdale, takes it North, following its loop.

“I thought we were going to Cottonwood.” ChoCho says, reading the signs.

“We are, through Clarkdale.” Jynx says, passing another burned out car.

Clarkdale is a small city, and Jynx feels a twinge of guilt at why she chose the route she did. Some houses are burning, some are smoldering, and most look damaged in one way or another. Again, the world is absent of living things. At the moment, she can find no evidence of the dead. Jynx works around crashed cars, working on a hunch. Her suspicion that the curve in the road would help clear the inside corner is proven completely accurate. It takes ten minutes to drop into the business district of Cottonwood. Jynx frowns, coming to a dead stop. The source of the smoke she had seen earlier is now apparent. The Union 76(tm) station she had been counting on for fuel has burned from the tanks up, leaving nothing but molten metal, shattered concrete, and charred slag in its wake. Not even the convenience store had survived. In its place are the remains of cinder block walls and molten panel windows that had once allowed the world to see into the store. Jynx slows to a stop, puts her head on the steering wheel, feeling the heat from the recent explosion of fuel on her cheeks. ChoCho stares at her for a moment. She isn’t bringing her head up.

“What’s wrong?” he asks suddenly.

“We came the long way around to get out of town. We emptied our tanks joy riding around the desert yesterday, you know, when GPS and our compasses still worked. If we’re going to make it home, we’re going to need to fill the tanks, check the tires, add oil.” Jynx says. “This bad boy runs on Diesel, there’s supposed to be a way to mix it fresh, but I don’t know how.”

“Hardware store isn’t burned too much. Didn’t you mention something about supplies?” ChoCho intends this as a distraction, and it seems to work.

Jynx puts The Girl into gear and pulls into the parking lot. The front door is shattered, probably a result of the percussion from now disintegrated propane tanks that had exploded, like nearly all other combustibles, the night before. Though it’s still locked, and the glass is still intact enough to bar entry, the store no longer looks or feels secure. The store must have been closed the night before the storm, lying on the floor is a closed sign with an analog clock whose minute and hour arms have been pointed at twelve and ten, respectively. Jynx knocks, but gets no response. Before Jynx can consider her options, ChoCho throws a bottle from the trash through the broken, tinted glass, reaches in through the hole, turns the latch, and holds the door open for Jynx. The two listen, half expecting to hear an alarm. The only light in the store is from the street. There is no sound from within, and Jynx lets the door close behind her. A beam of light from ChoCho’s hole in the door pushes through a thin haze of dust that has been impossibly slow to settle. ChoCho feels suddenly off balance, like gravity is both weaker and set off its normal axis, but he keeps quiet, thinking that maybe it’s a result of the stress.

Jynx sees the flashlights while ChoCho’s eyes are still adjusting. She uses a razor knife to cut the clear plastic container open, and loads the lithium batteries into an LED flashlight that provides a powerful beam of light, at which point she begins looking for supplies. She finds a model with an LED bulb nearly two inches in diameter. It has a rechargeable battery pack that can be plugged into the lighter socket, so she takes it and puts it aside. Jynx throws several pocketknives and a couple of small saws into a plastic tool bin with a wrench set and a hatchet she had picked up just moments before while ChoCho grabs several five gallon containers, a siphon hose, and a funnel. The hardware store carries oil, most of which has survived unscathed, and Jynx grabs a case of 10w40 synthetic and puts it by the front door. She’s got a list longer than her mind can see, and she doesn’t want to forget anything.

Jynx looks occasionally through the front window, but there is no traffic, on foot or by car. No police drive by to check for looters. A raven pauses on the trash, caws, then flies away, taking any sense of life it had with it. Jynx unloads the snack bin and sports drinks into a carry case and starts to move the merchandise into The Girl. She ignores the beef jerky, hoping to avoid the carnivore lifestyle, but finds a pair of high-powered surveyor’s binoculars — so powerful that they come with a tripod. The set is painted a brilliant yellow and highlighted by red reflective stickers. She turns to ChoCho, who has started loading supplies into the back of the truck. He’s determined, apparently, to leave the store as quickly as possible.

“I’m going to the paint aisle, finish loading up, and get twenty gallons of water in the back.” Jynx says this politely, but distantly.

Jynx steps around the corner of the paint case with a crowbar in hand. She drops the crowbar into the latch crevice and pulls back until she hears a satisfying pop. The cage door falls open. She takes twenty cans of paint in more or less equal measure: olive drab, black, desert brown, deep wooden brown, all in a lusterless finish, as well as a clear coat of non-reflective epoxy finish. She heads back through the dark shop, moving cautiously for the front door. Her footing feels unstable, as if the floor is somehow slipping a little to the left. ChoCho taps one of the register drawers with his knuckles hard enough that he can hear the loud jingle of change within.

“With that crowbar, we could pop these bad boys open.” ChoCho says, half joking.

Jynx finds her voice passionless but stern. “We don’t need money right now. We need fuel.”

“Maybe we should check some houses or something.” ChoCho says, holding up a plastic gasoline container.

Vultures are circling over the city by the time Jynx is at the wheel again. She passes a neighborhood where the houses are still standing. She and ChoCho park The Girl, and head out on foot with their fuel containers in hand. The two find themselves knocking on doors in the false hope that somebody will answer. When nobody replies, they each find themselves heading into back yards, checking for sheds that aren’t burned completely to the ground. They are careful of dogs that aren’t moving, of hints of people who might once have been around. Nothing, human or otherwise, seems intent on barring them from the things they seem to need.

The storm had put out most of the fires, except, apparently, for ones involving buoyant combustibles like gasoline. ChoCho finds a green plastic container that is completely unscathed, and nearly full, marked ‘diesel’ on the side, right next to a can that is red, and marked ‘gasoline.’ ChoCho’s smile is unbearably cute. He looks something like a child who has just been given a big chocolate bunny for Easter, only to discover it is made entirely of chocolate, rather than being hollow like the other chocolate bunnies. He holds the container out to Jynx so she can test its heft, and Jynx looks at him like he’s crazy. He’s too happy to let her curious misgiving dampen his spirits.

“Five gallons.” He says proudly. “So now we have like what, thirty five gallons to go?”

Jynx searches several houses down, while ChoCho puts the can out where he can see it on the way back. She siphons some fuel from a diesel truck, makes certain the cap on her carry all is tight, and then seals the fuel tank again. ChoCho comes back after thirty minutes or so, walking awkwardly with a two gallon and five gallon can sloshing on either side of him. The two head back and forth until The Girl, greedy for fuel, has both tanks filled, and head out one more time to fill their reserve containers. Jynx sees patterns to the damages in the houses standing, and in the sheds not burned out or down. Propane tanks all down the street have essentially popped, whether one by one, all together, or in some haphazard manner. Wherever they sit, the houses are shattered. Neither of them talks about the dogs laying dead on porches, or in yards. Neither of them talks about the absence of people, or pets. Nor are they ready to wonder why the ravens and the hawks are circling in the sky, while creatures of the land are nowhere to be seen.

“The only sheds standing with fuel in them were made of plastic. Plastic sheds without metal frames. None of mine were wired for lighting, either.” ChoCho is leaning against the hot passenger windshield, his cheek compressed flat against it.

“It’s like lightning crawled up from the ground, ate its way into anything metal.” Jynx says, headed back to the freeway. “Some of the trees have burns running up them, too.”

“I think the trees are gonna live, mostly, because of the rain.”

“You got a lot to say about rain.” Jynx smiles.

ChoCho shrugs, looking past his knees. “It felt good on my skin.”

“Could you keep a notebook handy, love?” Jynx says. “I have a long time to think, and when I get an idea, I need you to jot it down. Make a list of things. Take dictation.”

“I’ll be your dictator.” ChoCho says, putting the pen and tablet in his lap.

Jynx looks sidewise at ChoCho. His entire focus is on the paper, as if at any moment she might blurt out the finalizing equation in a principle argument unifying various mathematical principles on gravity and timespace. There is no hint of humor in his expression, except in the way the tip of his tongue has unconsciously settled slightly out of his mouth and over the left corner of his upper lip. Later, when she’s mentioned about a dozen stores, asking ChoCho to write items in a row next to each place as she thinks about them, she thanks him for being her secretary, and hopes he catches on the subtle correction. ChoCho lies down with his head on her lap, just like he had on the trip up. Jynx drives carefully around slowly growing numbers of pile-ups and debris, thankful for the sunlight.

The streetlights, she is certain, will not ignite with the setting sun.

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