The 5 of us—me, Evelyn, Haley, Jeremy, and Fred—made our way along the highway, fleeing our Small City not due to immediate danger, but to avoid more long term danger. The resources in town felt limited. The resources in the Big City seemed plentiful.
That was our motivation. It might have been possible to rebuild in the place we were when the world ended. I admit it might have been.
But catastrophe so often spurs migration. Famines, fire, despair, war. These things prompt movement, change, disruption of the norm. We weren’t so different from other refugees. The precipitating tragedy was novel, but maybe there are some things that don’t change.
The certain had become uncertain, so we opted for the unknown. We didn’t really know what we would find when we got to the Big City. We just hoped and, I suppose, assumed there would be more. Of everything.
That might be another side effect of catastrophe: hoarding. The lumber in the back of Jeremy’s truck haunted me the entire walk. He said the wood was meant for a deck-repair project he just hadn’t managed to start. That was weeks ago, but the wood stayed in the truck. Now, the deck project was pointless, so the lumber would keep on sitting there unless we came up with a way to transport it. Wasted.
We saw more trucks and cars along the road as we walked. They were like the others we had seen, dented and dirty. Windows shattered, bumpers on the ground. Jeremy’s truck was an anomaly.
“You think the battery’s dead?” I asked him as we walked.
“Maybe, but I tried my portable jumper. I guess I should have tried taking a battery from one of those other cars.” He was blaming himself.
“Nah,” I said, though I had thought the same thing. “Let’s just get situated. We can come back and try to fix it later.”
As the blazing sun became a purplish sunset, we walked down an exit ramp Evelyn had pegged. She had spotted the roadsign showing gas stations on the side of the highway and wisely suggested we stop. I hadn’t spent a night outside since the world had ended. I wasn’t sure what happened at night in this new reality, so I concurred with her.
Jeremy hadn’t mentioned anything strange at night, and he and Fred had slept in their flimsy roadside shelter for several nights. Still, real walls and a real ceiling would be welcome. Haley had spent her time since the disaster in her childhood home, only leaving to scavenge. She wasn’t keen on sleeping outside, either.
The exit ramp intersected a county road, where a sign indicated gas stations in either direction. “Are we Richardson’s or Global Petrol people,” I asked.
“Global Petrol,” Haley responded immediately.
“Huh. You seem convinced. GP it is then,” Jeremy volunteered. I didn’t bother to ask for a vote.
It was a good choice, regardless. The front door was smashed, so we had an easy entry. I pushed an ice cooler against the door when we were all inside. Fred immediately began ransacking the food aisle while Evelyn peered at the diner attached to the convenience store.
“Think we can get a stove to work?” She asked.
“We can try,” Jeremy said, and they disappeared into the kitchen.
Haley walked toward Fred. Her expression looked like it did when Evelyn and I had first seen her in the park, as if all the muscles in her face has suddenly relaxed. Her eyes seemed blank.
“Hey, Haley, are you good? I’m going to see about the plumbing,” I said.
She was silent for a moment, but then replied, “Yeah, I’m fine,” a tiny speck of energy seeming to animate her, just for an instant, before her face went slack again.
“Ok. Grab some water from the cooler. I’m going to see if the showers work.”
The GP had regular, gendered restrooms, and attached to each was a shower facility. In other times, truck drivers and road trippers could sign up for shower time and wait for a voice on the PA system to tell them it’s there turn to get clean.
I went to the men’s room. I’m not sure why. Social convention was no longer salient, and I still went to the men’s room automatically. The comfort of normalcy, I suppose.
I suddenlly had to shit and found myself speed-walking to reach a stall. I hadn’t felt the need to shit moments before. Seeing the appropriate place, my intestines came to life, convulsing, dropping their pretense.
Outside, on the side of the highway, would have been an equally appropriate place now, but my body hadn’t adjusted to new social expectations.
The toilet flushed. I was relieved. I wasn’t sure it would. It indicated functionality in plumbing.
I washed my hands, noting the brownish sheen of the water, but disregarding it. There was soap.
I badly needed to clean my body, so I turned toward the shower area. It resembled, in arrangement if not aesthetics, the shower at the gym I went to in the pre-catastrophe world. Five tiled shower stalls with ragged curtains shared a drain in the center of the room. The floor was caked in dried soap and human dermatological matter, clearly not having been cleaned when the calamity struck. A white/gray sheen covered the tiles and the drainage grate.
I went to the nearest stall to test the water, mindful of the dirty water from the sink. I turned the knob to the left, and the shower head sputtered for a moment before bursting forth, like my intestines minutes before.
I was instantly covered in a fetid black mess of thick, viscous fluid. Not the brownish tint of the sink. A tacky, sticky tar-like substance, indefinable in the moment, but resembling what I imagined crude oil might look like. Feel like. Sticky, slick, warm.
I bolted back, out of the stall, leaving the shower running. It hadn’t gotten into my eyes, but it had drenched my torso and legs. I reached for the towel cabinet and grabbed a pristine white terry-cloth towel. I wiped myself down vigorously, violently, getting as much substance off of me as I could.
I dropped the towel, now black and slimy, and ran back to the sink, splashing the brown water on my face, my arms, my legs, leaving me a drenched, dirty disaster.