Journey By Fire Read online

  Denver was no doubt hopelessly looted, when it came to food and necessities.

  They stood beneath the Union Station sign on Wynkoop Street; the sign had been drilled with rocks and bottles and the "Union" part of it drooped precariously. All Wade thought about was getting outside the city and heading south, by any means. Find Kara.

  "Where's the church?"

  "That way," the priest pointed.

  There used to be bars and restaurants here, lively neighborhoods in the cool, dry, glamorous Rocky Mountain evenings. Wade mused that a cold glass of beer would taste great right now. All the big American cities were like that. Cold drinks and cafes were vestigial luxuries of a lost time. Best not to think about those things.

  The street was wide and unlit and littered with trash and unfueled cars, rusting and missing their tires. Wade looked up into the sky and saw the glow and pools of burning slopes along the Front Range. It was beautiful, like a Northern Lights, save for what he knew it represented which was profligate destruction.

  It didn't matter that they walked down the sidewalk because everywhere was dark; there were no streetlights. He saw lights far down the boulevard which he figured were cooking fires and the meandering headlights of the few operable vehicles, much coveted targets for the crazies.

  He really should have his handgun out but he reminded himself that ammo was precious; he'd get the priest to the church, then he'd go all night to get out of the city.

  ###

  "What's you're name?" the old man said.

  "Michael Wade."

  "Saint Michael, the archangel. The protector. I can think of two fine shrines, in Italy and in Russia. I truly hope they still stand."

  "What's your name?"

  "Jedidiah Rutledge. So my young man, the southwest. It's a vast territory. How do you know which direction to go in? Where exactly are you going?" The priest shuffled along with one arm on Wade's shoulder. He talked steadily, like he'd recovered his energy.

  Wade was silent for a moment. The whole trip from Vermont had blown his mind so far.

  "A place called Sierra Vista. That's where I'm going. Because I have Kara's last location, the border of Mexico and Arizona. We talked. Her cell phone ran out. I told her to stay put if she could, or…" He didn't want to think or talk about the needle-in-a-haystack, quasi desperate quest he was on with the priest, who couldn't help him anyway.

  "The church is there," the priest pointed with his gnarled hand. It looked gloomy and hulking, unlit as it was, but in surprisingly good shape, a square brick structure with unbroken, stained-glass windows that reflected back the shimmer of the distant inferno. They couldn't tell if anyone was about but a tiny pale light glared from the interior.

  "This is fine," the priest said. He leaned on Wade's shoulder. They stood on a walkway overgrown with grass and just inside a wrought-iron gate. "I can make it from here. They know me. It's shelter, at least. I know you need to go. I'll be praying for you, and Kara."

  "Thank you."

  The man bent over tentatively and took the bible out of his satchel. "Take the book…please…the least I can do, along with prayer and hope. It contains the essentials."

  Wade accepted the gift, just to get things moving.

  "You sure you're okay?"

  "Yes, I'll be fine. Because of you, and your actions. I'm home now." Then he half-turned and he said "God speed, I hope we'll meet again," and he shuffled over to the stairs that led to the church's shadowy alcove.

  Wade watched him go, then assured that the old man had made it through the front door, he shoved the book, which seemed light for its thickness, into the top of his backpack, then turned left in a direction he'd already worked out. It led past the ballpark, the old Coors Field, toward Interstate 25.

  ###

  He had to regroup, in a place that had some light. He had to take stock of things. He heard dogs barking in the distance. There were stories of roving packs of feral dogs preying on people in the uncontrolled territories, especially in the cities. You couldn't sleep out in the open.

  Oh, for a train that went south into the old New Mexico…

  He walked in the darkest part of the street, where the trees hung over the sidewalk. Pools of light moved about in the darkened urban landscape like oversized fireflies. He was so hot he pushed his hat off his head and let it flop around on the strap behind him.

  After about 20 minutes of leaving the priest, he came upon an apple tree's branches that had left piles of mushy and rotten fruit on the street. He ducked beneath the branches and gorged himself with mostly small, tart, green apples for what seemed like an hour. He stuffed some of them in his pockets.

  No one was about, but he kept moving toward the interstate and as he got closer to the stadium, he saw small groups huddled by the exits. Maybe a tenth of the lights were on inside the stadium; generators powered by natural gas, he guessed. People had to be living there. He heard someone talking on a loudspeaker; it was too gruff and authoritarian in tone to be trusted, so he made his way past the stadium as quickly as possible and soon he was on an entrance ramp to Interstate 25.

  I-25 was deserted. The only thing that came by was an open-topped Jeep over-loaded with riffraff of the type he'd just dispatched back at the train station. He walked fast but stealthily down the emergency lane, which was covered in fine dust, ash, tumbleweeds, and broken glass. He'd never been a killer before in his life, nothing close to that.

  CHAPTER 3

  When he'd left Vermont going after Kara, he'd packed a loaded handgun with a box of ammo, the crossbow, and a quiver full of arrows. He'd never owned a gun before, and he was a sport shooter exclusively with the bow. As in, go into the 17-acre block of woods behind his little home, on a hill above a village, and shoot at trees. He got pretty good, hitting any tree and any spot he'd wanted from 100 or 200 meters away. In Vermont, you were either a hunter or "not a hunter"; there wasn't a mediocre middle. He didn't shoot at an animal once, not even at the copious deer, but he did keep it in the back of his mind that if his family needed protein in an emergency he'd take down some deer.

  He was good enough to do that, but then he was almost nauseated with anticipated sadness to imagine how the poor animal, just trying to get through its day like him, would jerk, flail around, and probably squeal after being impaled with one of these steel arrows. He was sensitive, not squeamish; it just wasn't in his nature.

  ###

  He was actually a fairly dull, keep-to-himself guy, until all this chaos and mayhem transpired.

  The state of Vermont had a forestry/map app that academics and wildlife regulators and citizens could use, and it was his job putting the maps online and making sure the app worked. He got up early in the morning, drove 20 miles to an office outside of Burlington with a to-go cup of coffee, and sat in a cubicle pouring over maps and code most of the day. He took walks at breaks; he lifted weights some nights. His wife Lee was younger than him and was a teacher. He had one kid in college (Kara) and one in middle school (Shane). He was a burly former lacrosse and football player; Shane played hockey and lacrosse and shot a bow with him. Wade was forever looking at the handful of fat on his gut and thinking, "Nah, I'll deal with that tomorrow."

  He mostly drank with his wife. He was, as he thought then, calm and unremarkable, and Vermont had a tranquility and predictability and sameness to it that fit him.

  ###

  He certainly had no trouble seeing global warming coming. The forests told him that, acres of toppled over, diseased trees that conveyed an over-the-top climactic stress; something profound was happening. He liked the term "drunken forest" and he used it a lot when describing this problem to whomever would listen.

  But nobody saw coming what came. Not in its timing, the ferocity of its speed. Even the preppers were overrun. The California governor said in a paternal tone to his constituents "the state of California will burn" if they took no action on their emissions, and darned if it didn't.

  The heat trend moved d
own from the Arctic (which was already 13 Fahrenheit above average), the Golden State continued its epochal drought, then the entire state burned down, everything that wasn't desert. Cash-starved during a terminal recession, the depleted fire crews didn't stand a chance, then chaos and mayhem was unleashed as the fires "complexed" in a nightmarish cascade and began to take out the Pacific Northwest, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado. Feeding on itself, the atmosphere just got hotter and the society that vitally depended on it more fragmented and destabilized, and politics followed suit. As millions migrated east and thousands died along the way (most of the troops were deployed, fatefully, fighting the fires in vain), people wanted someone and groups to blame and scapegoat, and they found someone blunt and charismatic to do the blaming and the scapegoating.

  Even the headstrong president with the velvety voice and his bellicose handlers could only go with the frightful flow, however, and martial law became the norm. The internet went down, except for regionally, and there were news blackouts. Back in Vermont they heard terrible stories about mass crowds of starving people being herded into vast, sprawling open-air camps, the likes of which had not been seen since the Nazi POW camps on the Eastern Front during WWII, and certainly had never been seen before on the North American continent.

  This was the inferno that some foresaw but nobody had predicted for this century, in the year 2025. In Vermont, it still rained. Once in a while. Everything was relatively okay for the Wades with the exception of one terrible problem. Kara had wintered in Baja, Mexico for a semester abroad in marine biology and when she'd needed an airliner home there was none to be had.

  Wade had considered himself pretty well prepared for anything, but it was more like a hobby. He kept a first-aid kit that contained wraps, bandages, gauzes, ibuprofen, aspirin, two rounds of antibiotics; scissors, tweezers, iodine pills, and a tiny bottle of propylene glycol. He had a Swiss Army knife with a five inch blade and features that could open cans and act as screwdrivers. Their land included a pond with about 80,000 gallons of water that could be boiled if the well ran out. The woods behind his house were stocked with unlimited supplies of wood for heating and game animals; they had an orchard full of apples and blackberries and a 20-by-20 vegetable garden in season; he bought raw milk from a farm four miles away. Lee would poke fun of him with quips that he was "prepared for the end of the world."

  Now his backpack contained the Swiss Army knife and the first-aid kit, but he'd left the antibiotics with Lee.

  CHAPTER 4

  His eyes drooped, begging for sleep. He trudged along the side of the highway. The smoke from the fires had risen like a blanket over the mountains and it blocked the stars. He could smell it in the air; the charred effect lingered in his sinuses. The flames poured like water through the ravines and along the creeks and were on their way to Denver and Boulder.

  Not a single car had passed him. He mused how nice it would be to have a motorcycle and some gasoline. The orange glow was still pretty and it looked like the sun was coming up, permanently. Somewhere down the end of the road was Colorado Springs and Pueblo. He felt helpless and inadequate; he was still light years away from Kara. He didn't know where the hell she really was. What time was it; maybe 1 a.m.?

  He saw the flickering of a small light up ahead on the highway. Then a second one. He thought they might be flashlights so he decided to duck down a culvert. But the lights didn't move; they stayed in one place and whipped around in the night winds. He didn't hear any voices. He cautiously approached. The culvert was dark and dropped down to dried up berms and rocky drainages and clusters of woods before the broken and abandoned highway sprawl started to flood the darkness again.

  He crept closer and saw that they were two torches aflame. The road was full of debris. Rusted pieces of other cars and small junky appliances and boulders and piles of wood and tires obstructed the breadth of the highway, with a lit torch on either side of it. Whoever made this pile wanted to block the highway and was taking a break now, he thought, probably to sleep. When he got closer, he saw a sign leaning against the junk pile and crudely spray-painted: "STOP!! LYV ALL YOUR VALUBULLS! SCRAM!!"

  So they, whoever they were, had erected a kind of ad hoc toll plaza and the price was probably your life. But none of them were around; they were most likely collapsed off in the culverts somewhere. Zonked out on that nasty weed…

  He looked down the highway north in the other direction and he saw two headlights, approaching in the distance. Going highway speed. They were higher off the ground, like those in a sizable truck. He leaned his backpack against a rock and took one of the torches and walked twenty meters north towards the on-coming headlights. He waved the torch back and forth, and as the truck cab approached it slowed, but he was just going to think Wade was one of the crazies, he thought.

  Rather than stand in the middle of the highway in a pugnacious way, he crept to the side and began making the international distress signal, waving his arms back and forth. He'll just have to trust that the driver will notice him; view him as a friendly.

  The sixteen-wheeler flicked on its high beams, slowed down with a burst of released air from down around the axles, and threw the disordered obstacles in its path into stark relief. Wade made a sign with his hands to cut the high beams (he didn't want this new band of highway robbers to come down on them, but surely he thought that they were already discovered).

  The driver, bearded and wearing a bandanna, reached over and rolled down the passenger window, showing a sawed-off shotgun. Wade looked up at him and said, "If we move some of it, I think the truck can do the rest."

  The big truck's engine idled and rattled beneath its metal hood. The driver thought for a moment, then leaned back toward the driver's door and opened it, dropping down onto the pavement. He still held the shotgun, but less in a threatening manner. They stood in the pool of his headlights with the fire's reflection quavering above the mountains.

  "Wiley," the man said, and stuck out his hand, which looked big with long fingers.

  "Mike." They shook and headed wordlessly over to the pile of wreckage. Together, they lifted and moved some of the more pliable things: a small fridge, a jumble of wood, and car tires, which Wade rolled into the dark culvert.

  "Where're you from?" Wiley said.

  "Vermont."

  "You've come far."

  "I've got a ways still."

  They needed to move two more small cement blocks, then it looked like the truck could plow through the rest.

  "Where're you from?"

  "'riginally, Buffalo, Wyoming."

  "What do you have in the truck?"

  "Idaho potatoes." Then Wiley looked off into the darkness suspiciously. "I'll betcha they'd love to get 'em. It would keep these gangs eating for a year."

  Wade picked up the crude sign and using both hands winged it to the side of the road like it was a giant Frisbee. The both of them rolled a junked motorcycle out of the way. A tipped-over VW Bus covered the other half of the highway, and it looked like they could maneuver around it. Wade looked back at the other man.

  "I can ride with you, can't I?"

  Wiley sized him up for a moment, partly in jest. "Well I guess you can, if you aren't some kinda serial-killer hitchhiker, like they show in the movies."

  "Nothing of the sort…" Then Wade saw Wiley nodding in the direction of the mountains. He saw a line of torches coming quickly across a distant field toward them.

  "Let's go!" he shouted, but Wiley was already climbing up the steps into his cab. Wade ran over to where he had left his backpack, hauled it onto his shoulder, then made it over to the truck and climbed up into the passenger seat. He slammed the door behind him.

  He heard a shot ring out, then another. The second bullet clanged into the metal of the cab. "I guess they think we're unfriendly," Wiley said. The engine growled and shuddered into gear as Wiley hauled on the gear shift. With a kick the truck moved forward slowly, through the area they'd cleared then t
hrough another small pyramid of tires and wood and metal debris. They heard two more clangs of bullets hitting the cab and the side of the truck. Wade swallowed hard. He looked and saw that the row of torches was within about 200 meters of them. As they painstakingly pushed through the debris, the headlights illuminated a pile of adult bodies slumped in the breakdown lane, all necklaced with car tires and badly burned.

  "Good God," Wiley muttered. "It's a fuckin' death factory." Then he stopped the truck again.

  "What are you doin'?"

  "The Goddamned cable there! And we've got to get our asses out of here!" He looked behind him quickly, and his eyes were bugging out. "I knew this wouldn't be as easy!" He thumped the steering wheel with both hands and picked up his shotgun. "We're in a mess of trouble, we are!"

  In the headlights, they could see that a metal cable had been strung across the highway, only about a foot high, but a formidable and inconvenient impasse. Wiley took the truck out of gear. Wade dug out the handgun with the two shots left, the .38 Specials in his backpack, opened his door, and stepped down to the black tar in the grim shimmering light of the smoke and stars.

  He smelled burned, rotting flesh.

  "How many shots do you have in that shotgun?"

  "Two," Wiley said. "A few more in back."

  Wade looked quickly behind him and saw one torch running ahead. They might have a minute. They reached the cable and Wade bent down and lifted it up. It had a tightly strung weight. "Take it out." Wiley put both barrels of the shotgun against it and shot once, twice, two loud hot cracks, and Wade let go of the wire on the second one just before it tore out of his hands and clanged across the tar. Then they both ran.

  A head grinned in the red rear lights and yelled "Hey fucker!" and raised the barrel of a rifle. A guy running along behind him held a torch. But Wade raised his Beretta first and shot him twice in the chest and he fell dead in front of his partner, then Wade scrambled up into the cab and he hadn't closed his door yet as the engine roared into gear. Wiley was laughing and cackling with crazed relief as he moved the big diesel engine from low to higher gear. The driver put his head down and laughed uncontrollably and Wade, exhausted, just looked at him with his mouth agape.