Chapter Two: Coyote’s Call — Part 3

The next several hours pass in a blur of eerie silence. There are no lines of traffic, nor are there lines in the stores they go to. Jynx and ChoCho park and drive to each place on the list, moving quickly into the hardware store, getting the paint, a handcart, six rolls of masking tape, ten rolls of duct tape, some butcher paper, and three five gallon water bottles: two glass and one plastic, still sealed and waiting to be placed on the company water cooler. Jynx also grabs some massive clear plastic trash bags, and Ziploc(tm) Big Bags, big enough to seal away a soccer ball, if one is to trust the picture on the box. The two move quickly and act with very little conversation. They find nobody living in the stores, and want nothing to do with the dead. ChoCho asks to stop by an Irish pub, in which he finds and pulls two bottles of the most expensive whisky that is still fresh and sealed. His smile proves worth the delay.

The next stop entails to be an adventure in interpretation as ChoCho reads the code on a brochure for a Haulmark(r) Grizzly(tm) Gooseneck fifth wheel, and Jynx installs the appropriate hitching mechanisms to the back of her truck. Father has opted for an 8.5 by 32 foot trailer designed to carry 12000 pounds, with a note that The Girl is rated to 16000. ChoCho finds the trailer, and they confirm the code, and Jynx backs into the spot carefully, until ChoCho signals her to stop. She’s sweating, but when she hears the hitch settle, she knows it’s going to be all right.

Jynx steps down off of the tubular side steps, checks ChoCho’s hitch job even as ChoCho is reading the instructions and making sure the hitch is settled and locked correctly. In a few moments, Jynx is helping ChoCho install the breaking, lighting, and control mechanism, and in about twenty minutes, the two are headed to Costco. Jynx has prompted ChoCho to become as familiar as possible with the trailer in the limited time they have, and ChoCho is reading avidly the information on safe hauling and maintenance of the trailer, as well as ‘The Girl’s’ manual. Jynx is doing weight calculations in her head, having helped her father load a smaller trailer of similar design about a dozen times.

She’s chosen the Costco because it is the one that has the largest amount of emergency food rations buckets and bulk supplies. She pulls up to the front, lining the trailer with the cargo door entrance. After putting 200 flat cardboard boxes, a case of packing tape and a tape gun in the trailer, checking the tire pressure for the truck and trailer, leveling her oil, then pulling open the double doors and dropping the ramp to the trailer, Jynx pauses to make a few calculations on a piece of paper. She keeps the notebook with her and goes straight to the rations.

She smiles. “We’re going to need 265 buckets. Thank the floor manager that the pallets are all on the ground.”

ChoCho looks up, the five gallon buckets are arranged in pallets of a thousand, 10 by 10 by 10, taking up an entire shelving section. He lifts one experimentally. It doesn’t seem too heavy, so he starts to carry it out.

Jynx laughs a little. “Stop it with the machismo, already. Use the handcart. We’re moving four tons from this business alone.”

Jynx and ChoCho pull what equates to over 6000 pounds of stored food rations into the massive trailer, and then start loading the other items on the list. Jynx takes a tally of what they have at their disposal in space, and adds soymilk to the list of things she hadn’t considered. The hardest stock to move proves to be the water, which Jynx displaces with the food, so that it is evenly distributed along the sides of the trailer.

The next two hours move much more quickly. ChoCho and Jynx are aching horribly, but they manage to pick up books on organic farming, wilderness survival, and carpentry from a bookstore and a library. They double seal a dozen Apple(tm) laptop computers into airtight containers, pick up sewing supplies, patterns, and cloth for clothes from a fabric store, and some clothes from a clothing store they normally would never have been able to afford. Prompting Jynx to stop, ChoCho runs into an adult store, and comes back with three boxes of things he’s curious about, but won’t say what they are. The two finally stop by a sporting goods store and pick up some crossbows and bolts, as well as four compound bows and three hundred hunting arrows, just in case. ChoCho also finds and grabs six boxes of water purification straws, each good for one year of use, and of which they have 1,000. They also grab a magnesium fire starting kit.

They drive by their houses on the way out of town. ChoCho’s is burned to the ground, and the house Jynx grew up in has blown itself to pieces that litter the road and yard and alley around it. Jynx goes to a shed on the side of the remains of her house, and pulls out twenty more buckets of food, throwing them in the trailer.

ChoCho whistles. “That’s a lot of food. Were your parents Mormon or something?”

“No, they were Atheists.” Jynx locks the trailer hitch, heads back to the cab to start driving.

Neither expresses much emotion at the sight of their homes. Perhaps it is numbness, perhaps justification, but neither can feel anything for the loss of their families. The sun is setting as Jynx maneuvers the massive trailer back toward the freeway, headed south, intent on leaving the city and the pain behind. She is taken aback when a light shines nearby. The light jumps out through the darkness with practical defiance. The small LED flashlight, the super bright kind that she and ChoCho have acquired, starts to shut down, to dim unexpectedly as it exhausts its batteries, but by now Jynx and ChoCho have come to a stop, and are looking with some disbelief at a lonely man, holding a leash on which is a rather small but dignified dog. The man holding it is withered, though not old, necessarily, and his dog, waiting patiently on a retractable leash, is a Brussels griffon. Both the dog and the man have somewhat matching beards. The two fit well together, somehow.

ChoCho is shocked to find Jynx rolling down her window. “You seem to be waiting for us. We’re not the city transit, old man.”

“I’m not that old. I predicted your course based on the size of the trailer you chose some twenty miles back, and the lay of the land. I threw Gryph in the backpack, and intersected you by running ahead and here we are, lucky and cunning, waiting for you.”

“How did you live, anyway?” ChoCho asked.

“I’ll tell you my theory on the way out of town.” The man smells like singed hair. “My name’s Jude, and this is Gryph.”

“We’re headed south, out of town, then back around the city and North. Where were you heading?” Jynx reaches down and pulls the old man into the back sleeping area, currently clear and open, its seats submerged into the base plates.

“Anywhere but here. This place is a dead zone.”

The griffon, whose beard makes him look something like an upside down lion in miniature, snorts at ChoCho, and then licks him. ChoCho laughs. The dog is ten pounds of quiet observation. His eyes seem to hold intelligence not normally present in the dog species, and he eyes Jynx as she eyes him through the rearview mirror. ChoCho notices on a less than verbal level that Gryph’s tail isn’t docked. Jynx however, is quick to notice this. In fact, the dog’s tail had been a weighing factor in her stopping for Jude.

“My power had been turned off.” Jude says, matter of factly.

“What?” ChoCho answers back quickly.

“For maintenance. A water pipe leaked into the walls, causing a minor electrical fire. My building is totally electric, no gas lines for heat. I live on the second floor, and my power was cut two days before the incident. I was sleeping on an air mattress in a bedroom that has a double mesh grid built around it, so that nobody can interface with my computer.”

“You sound like a spy.” Jynx says.

“Actually, I am a corporate researcher in metaphysics.” Jude replies. “The information I was working on was quite sensitive. Now it’s probably worthless. But I pulled my data drives anyway. If they still work, when we get where we’re going, maybe the information won’t be so useless.”

“So your system doesn’t have an internet connection, in other words.” ChoCho considers, remembering a movie where a computer was in a copper mesh cage. In that movie it was to keep the bad guys from hacking their way in.

“It was a stand-alone system. It only had two hours of battery power, which was just enough time to back up the data during the first power outage.” Jude starts scratching Gryph on the head. “I think I lived because of the double grid. The outside grid got so hot it started to melt. The inside grid flickered and sputtered with electricity. Gryph and I were asleep at the time, sleeping on the floor on that air mattress, because our bed had been destroyed by water from the broken pipe.

“I almost feel bad, wondering if we are leaving anybody behind.” ChoCho says.

Jynx keeps quiet, but she does not sympathize.

“I heard the explosions in the distance, I got a scooter running, drove around the city on the second day, after the rain put the fires out. I sent up signal flares. If anybody else lived, I didn’t manage to find them.”

“We didn’t find anybody living either.” Jynx says this, nearly choking.

“It’s a big city.” ChoCho says hopefully. “Looks like it’s going to rain again.”

“You guys been using the warm rains as a shower too?” Jude asks.

“Yeah.” Jynx states this in a matter of fact way.

They’ve reached the edge of the city, and are headed into the desert when clouds start to form again, pushing in on a warm, building wind. Jynx considers the situation, and pulls off the road into a parking lot for a small park. She pulls out her shampoo and other essentials and waits. The old man and ChoCho move to the other side of the truck and start undressing, giving Jynx some space.

Gryph watches the humes, running back and forth between one side of windows and the other. Just like the two nights before, the storm takes about twenty minutes to subside, only now Jynx has gotten faster, and she’s already in the car, in a robe they picked up at Costco, watching the men, their backs to her, robe up and put their clothes on the hood, with Jynx’s clothes. Without asking, Jude moves to the trailer in the back, checking the stock around him while ChoCho sets up two thick comforters and a sleeping bag.

Jynx looks inside. “You going to be okay back here?”

Jude smiles. “Gryph and I will be just fine. You stacked this trailer like you do it for a living.”

“My family ran a courier service.” Jynx says. “I helped load a lot of trailers.” The joy washes from her face, and Jynx smiles after a pause. “We’ll set out in the morning.”

Jude is suddenly exhausted, and he falls asleep staring at the two hundred gallons of diesel fuel whose containers have been double sealed in airtight containers on both sides of him. Jynx suspects the obvious, that Jude is wondering what two teenagers on a hording spree would take from Costco. Tomorrow morning, she decides, she will pull out one of the laptops and auto chargers, and let ChoCho and Jude play with it. Tomorrow night may well be a good night to break out the brandy and pipe tobacco they took from one of the shops that had such beautiful churchwardens and meerschaums.

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