Oblivion Journey

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Disclaimer

  Ash Deposition Zones

  Epigraph

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35: DECEMBER 3, 2025

  CHAPTER 36: DECEMBER 5, 2025

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40: DECEMBER 7, 2025

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  EPILOGUE: NEW YEAR'S DAY, 2026

  URL

  More Fiction

  To The North

  Book 3:

  Bruce W. Perry

  Text copyright © 2018 Bruce W. Perry

  All Rights Reserved

  Author Goodreads page:

  https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/ 1012941.Bruce_W_Perry

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Image credit: Science News; https://www.sciencenews.org/article/supervolcano-blast-would-blanket-us-ash

  The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

  John 1:5

  We live as we dream–alone.

  Joseph Conrad, Heart Of Darkness

  Chapter 30

  Garner stood up and went to the door of the Motel 6 room, carrying his pistol. He'd heard the muffled whinnying and stamping of horses. He opened the door partway. Flakes of ash drifted in from the cold darkness. He whisked them away like a spider web one stumbles into.

  "It was my impression Tremonton was an empty town," he whispered to the others. Through the crack, he saw the thick, boney legs of a white horse, shifting over the ground like a synchronized dance step. The rest was lost in the dark swirl of ash, like moths against the night sky.

  "It seems we might have guests," Lance said. "But you don't have to carry that gun around. This is not a diplomatic way to greet a stranger."

  Garner thought about Lance's cold tone with the scared sign carrier back on the road. And he didn't want to be lectured anyway.

  "You never know what their motivations are," he said. He peered through the crack again. "You just never can know."

  He could see flashlight beams stab the darkness. He heard a few gruff voices. He thought of the posse. "Especially this far north."

  Laura stood at the front window and parted the shade.

  "They seem to be leaving. They look like shadows; three, four people on horseback. No, they're going across the parking lot. Perhaps around back…"

  Garner had cut the room lights; Lance clicked them back on.

  "Clearly…" Lance said, with an uppity assurance. "They're looking for shelter and food, just like everyone else. We can ignore them. For now." He walked over and shut the door.

  "I hope you're right," Garner said, feeling a tingling of dread, that black spirit he'd had trouble dispelling on the road. Webster stared at him from across the room.

  "It's that posse we saw hang the man," he said in a monotone. "The men who tried to rob us at the gas station. They're not likely to forget. I'd lock the door and keep it locked."

  "Now don't start jumping to conclusions," Garner answered. But he latched the lock, as he would've in any motel.

  Still standing at the shade, Laura turned back to the others. "They're gone. So strange, riding horses in these conditions. They're going to kill the poor animals. They can't breathe. How would they water them?"

  "The vehicles must be breaking down. Three, four feet of ash, and it's simple for tiny amounts to ruin the engine. The region is reverting back to the Old West," Garner said.

  "Right," Webster quipped acidly. "The Old West, lawlessness and anarchy. Vigilantes, hangings…"

  "I'm going to get some sleep," and leave the pistol by my pillow, Garner thought. Webster's bitter ramblings exhausted him. "We should go at sunrise."

  "Agreed," Lance said, going back to his laptop. "We should waste no time to get to the epicenter."

  "I don't know where I'm going to go," Webster mumbled pitifully. "Anywhere, but to go commit suicide at the epicenter, with a couple of…cellular ambiguities."

  "You can take the next wagon train south," Lance shot back, eyes not leaving the laptop screen. Garner laughed.

  "Well, we only have two beds; I'm taking this side, Tanya's over here…hey Laura, I'll make a lot of room, and you can take the rest of the bed." Anyone sleeping next to me but Webster, Garner thought. He had to admit he craved Laura's companionship. The warmth. The feminine vibe. She was real enough to him.

  He heard Lance's tapping, then the lights went out again. The mattress depressed gently as Laura lay down next to him. He wondered if Lance was jealous; he could feel it in the air…an inhibited anger and envy.

  She lay down on top of the blankets; he was already beneath them. The air was cold; the motel had no heating. After a minute, he sensed her shift around. He rolled around in Laura's direction; she'd pulled part of the blanket over her. He loosened his own grip on the blanket, and tossed another section of it over the exposed part of her torso.

  He watched her shoulders go up and down with the breathing. He reached over and felt for his pistol on the side table. He felt warm, purposeful; he was protecting someone again.

  He pulled the blanket up to his chin and fell deeply asleep, imagining the road north. He'd examined his maps before laying down. He had just 200 miles left to Ketchum, Idaho, and he'd made it almost 1,000 miles already from Las Cruces.

  From the land of the centimeter ash, to the land of ash as high as a cornfield in August.

  # # #

  The evening was quiet, except for a mysterious knock coming from elsewhere in the dead motel. He figured it was possibly the pipes: freezing, thawing, and popping.

  He thought he heard someone laugh, followed by more laughter, harder, but then it went silent as he lay in bed listening.

  Lance was up before sunrise. Garner looked over and Laura was still asleep. She'd slept silently. Is sleeping something they can do? he could hear Webster say. But the whole claim they were synthetic was something he'd tried to set aside days ago. Survival and reaching his goal is what mattered the most.

  Lance stood looking out the window, then seemed to go back to his laptop in the dark. Garner had found the cheap-o Mr. Coffee the day before, but it was useless without electricity. His stomach growled too. He found one of the beef stew cans he'd harvested from the diner back in Fence Lake. They still had matches and a couple of crusty, stainless steel pots and pans.

  He went outside. He made a crude little fire, out in the parking lot as the sun was coming up, then heated up the stew and water. It kept him busy and occupied with a low-level goal: food. He thought of being in Ketchum at the end of the day. In maybe two.

  He shared the food with Webster, who followed Garner around like a whipped dog. He seemed frightened; dreading some form of abandonment. Garner made cheap coffee by dissolving it in boiling water, sifting the grounds from left-over envelopes in the motel room.

  Laura rolled off the bed and gathered her things into the backpack, yet once again, neither she nor her partner wanted any food, Garner noticed.

  The Jeep started up fine, and they sat idling in the parking lot. Lance glanced back at Webster, expecting him to make a decision.

  "Are you staying, or coming?" he finally asked.

  Ken opened his eyes wide, in a near panic. "Do I have a choice? I don't see a bus stop around here. In fact, I don't see anyone else here, except for those ghostly renegade horsemen from last night, and believe me, their presence doesn't inspire confidence in a southern journey. Me, alone?
No, I'll choose companionship, for now," he said, looking out the window at the empty highway entrance ramp.

  "Don't get me wrong…I appreciate the ride," he added meekly. "And the company." He looked at Garner and Tanya, sitting with him in backseat.

  "Then we'll get moving," Lance said, peeling out in the sand and ash of the parking lot and heading up the ramp to Interstate 84 north.

  The highway was empty, except for a few tire tracks that wended their way through the dust blindly towards the surrounding scrub, with no signs of a vehicle, as if it had blown away with the tumbleweeds and shredded mesquite.

  The wind sculpted the ash across the road in waves. Lance put the Jeep into low gear and they began the slow grind north. Thirty-five miles to Idaho.

  CHAPTER 31

  The landscape was stained black and red in places, from the smoke of recent forest fires. Still at the wheel, Lance glanced back at the others absently.

  "The volcanic ash was so hot it lit wildfires," he said. "We have to be careful." Dirty brown rags of ash plumes sailed across the sun, which had only just risen. Black plumes rose in the distance from still smoldering fires.

  Garner wondered how anyone in these parts survived the eruption. They'd run away, or were lying around dead in the woods somewhere. They drove the empty road into the crumbled remnants of a town called Blue Creek, Utah. The long abandoned settlement had wooden homes that had collapsed on to their foundations, as much by neglect as the cataclysm just north of them.

  It used to be a railroad stop; tourist guides even referred to it as a ghost town.

  It had taken them an hour to go 20 miles, the Jeep bogged down at times in ash that rose to the bumpers. They swerved a snake's path through the dust, with Lance slamming the vehicle into four-wheel drive. Garner could hear the high whine of the gears as the vehicle fought and bumped past no more than a handful of broken homes and barns.

  He watched Laura stare through the windshield at the empty, featureless expanse buried with what looked like shifting sands. It used to be desert with some hills and sagebrush. Now it was almost uniformly covered in a gray blanket. Laura seemed oddly at peace, contemplative, considering where they were going.

  "Great motor on this rig," Garner said, breaking an awkward silence. "However much I miss it, I'm not sure the old Bronco could have made it a mile through any of this crap."

  "As an engine that runs so well on a salt solution, hypothetically, I'd like to see the specs for the design," Webster said.

  Lance grimaced. "That would not be possible," he grunted.

  "I'm an A.I. researcher myself, so naturally I have an interest. I've worked on artificial brains, the neural equivalents of humans, for the military and intelligence agencies. That's why I'm interested in where you and Laura came from."

  "I don't see how we have anything to do with that."

  "Where were you born?" Webster asked, seemingly testing again.

  A long impatient silence from Lance, then "Gaithersburg, Maryland."

  "What did your parents do?"

  "They were a professor in art history and a civil engineer who designed bridges. What is this, a job interview?"

  "I'm just the inquisitive type. Don't take it the wrong way. I'm from New Jersey myself; my father was a mathematician. My mother, well, I guess you'd call her a homemaker. I think she could have done anything she wanted to do professionally, with her smarts, if she had the opportunity."

  "Lack of equal rights and opportunities for females in the workplace," Laura said, as if by rote. "Breaking through the glass ceiling, is necessary, for a more optimal society."

  "You seem to have led an interesting professional life, yourself, Laura."

  "I'm…satisfied."

  They passed barren fields with a few lonely shells of wooden structures. Everything was in ruins.

  "Lance, did you have a happy childhood there in Maryland?" Webster wasn't letting go.

  "Of course," Lance said, as if everyone did.

  "How many brothers and sisters?"

  Lance was quiet for a minute, then responded, as if reaching his irritation limits, "you can stop your annoying questions now."

  "I have something you might be interested in," Webster said, digging around in his luggage bag. He produced a red plastic disk with a black connector cord. "The collected works of Kenneth Webster. These are the specs for the working brain of an advanced form of artificial intelligence; a man's…or woman's…brain. But better. It's all there." He placed it on the plastic shelf next to Lance that held the emergency brake lever.

  "Plug that into your laptop and take a look. I have a feeling you'd be able to comprehend it. It's a neuromorphic chip, but of the most advanced form. I own the patent for it. It can understand several languages, create natural speech, control arms, legs, and torso, compute math, of course, do everything, at speeds that leave us mere mortals in the dust…so to speak. I'd be interested in what you think."

  Lance looked down disdainfully at the hard disc.

  "I don't think so," he said.

  "Digital machines perform better than human minds, in almost every respect," Webster added proudly.

  "Almost?"

  Garner glanced out the window at the buried roadside and fields, temporarily bathed in sunlight. It looked like a giant beach, without the sea. He thought of being alone, perhaps tomorrow.

  "They haven't been live tested yet." Then Webster nodded knowingly at Lance and Laura.

  Lance maneuvered to the side of the highway, in a huff, ash bunching to the hood of the Jeep. He stopped the vehicle, abruptly, then glared back at Webster.

  "Just what are you getting at, with this line of questioning?"

  "Nothing, really. Just thought you'd be interested in my work."

  "Do you think I'm synthetic, some kind of machine? A prototype? Is that what you think?"

  "Well, I wouldn't know. You have an amazing ability, how else can I say it, to go without food."

  "I'm sick of your idiotic questions. You lunatic scientists. You're ruining everything, with your doomsday inventions. Maybe this will settle it for you."

  He pulled a hunting knife out of his gear pack.

  "Lance, put that away," Laura said.

  He addressed her, defensively. "You know, he thinks the both of us are machines. Like blood, human blood, doesn't flow in our veins. Here…"

  He rolled up one of his sleeves.

  "Don't do this," Laura said.

  Lance looked at his bare arm, as if fascinated by it for the first time. He placed the tip of the knife on the underside of his forearm and drew it across, making a red line. Carmine blood began to seep out of it, like a tiny tide flowing out. He looked up at the others, faintly pleased.

  "You see…that should settle things, that I'm human."

  Webster looked at him eyes agape, chin slightly quivering. A large spot of blood pooled on Lance's forearm, as he clenched a fist. He appeared triumphant.

  Laura furiously rifled through her own gear bag and produced a roll of gauze, which she quickly applied by wrapping up Lance's forearm and taping it over.

  "That was a rash, illogical thing you did," she snapped. "We don't have time for it. This could cause problems for us later, for our mission. Self injury; I can't comprehend it. Don't do it again."

  "Some people don't listen to reason," Lance muttered, clenching and unclenching his fist, still proudly watching the dark blood stain on the bandage.

  "I have a lot of blood," he claimed dreamily, still staring at his forearm. "I have more than I need."

  "We are wasting our time now," Garner said, aggravated at the direction things had taken. "Here by the side of the road in the desert. You said you'd take me another one hundred fifty miles north. I thought we could make that by sundown."

  Then, from the backseat, Tanya began to bark at something outside the windshield. They all looked up. A large truck, heading south in the other lane, rolled slowly towards them, headlights on. Then another behind it, and another. I
t was a convoy, and appeared military.

  "This is a good development," Lance said. He started the engine and pressed a button on the dash, which operated a blinking red light on the roof of the Jeep. Then he got out of the Jeep. He closed the door and stood next to the road waving his arms. Tanya kept barking.

  Garner got out too, and closed the passenger door. Laura got out and followed him. The first truck slowed down. It was the first vehicle they'd seen, except for a few sedan and pickup carcasses at the side of the highway, since Salt Lake.

  They saw a man, in a green khaki uniform with a HazMat mask on, in the driver's seat. The man rolled down his window; lifted the mask.

  "You stuck here?" he yelled out.

  "No," Lance said. "Who are you?"

  "Western National Guard. I'd turn around and go south if I were you. There's nothing up there. There's nothing to survive on. It's very dangerous."

  "Where are you going?"

  "Salt Lake…they're opening up a hospital. We have casualties."

  "Do you have room for one more?"

  "Are they hurt, or ambulatory?"

  "They're not hurt or sick. They just need a ride."

  "Well, then I think so." The man looked back at the other trucks idling behind him, impatient to get going.

  Lance opened the passenger door on the roadside.

  "C'mon Webster, get out. This is your ride home."

  Webster looked down sheepishly, then began to gather his things. He stuffed the hard disc back in his luggage, and got out of the car. Tanya stuck her head out, sniffing the vaguely contaminated air.

  Garner looked down at the ground, coughed, then said, "Can you take one more, too, a dog?"

  "Sure," the driver said. "But we have to leave now. We have to make the city by daylight."

  Garner looked over at Tanya, then walked over and began to pet and stroke the fur on her head and back. Tanya still stood on the backseat of the car with her tail slowly wagging.

  CHAPTER 32

  "Listen kid," Garner whispered. "This is as far as you're going. I'm not going to bring you up into that mess, but I have to go. This is my thing. I don't want you to die up there, just because you were with me. That's the last thing I want. You've been a wonderful companion. I couldn't have gotten this far without you. Thanks for being there for me."