For an instant he feels angry, but then a loud gunshot nearby changes his anger to fear.
“Hey,” he yells. “What’s going on?”
“Go no way,” comes the reply.
It’s John, the Pakistani-American who owns the store. Shelton recognizes the voice. Go no way means “go away.”
“John, hey. It’s me, Shelton Teasdale from over near Lake Park.”
Another shot. Shelton ducks, the dog barks. “John, can you tell me what’s going on? Down, Dix.”
Dixie whimpers and swingles her head, trying to locate an escape place.
John is always out to gouge somebody so of course he expects them to gouge him.
“I’m trying to get enough gas to go look for my wife, John.”
“No here. Go no way.”
“John, please let me get gas. My truck is about empty. Please.” Shelton tries to see him somewhere in the smoke but can see nothing but gutted shadows from the reflected fires on the glass. He can’t even figure from which direction John’s voice is coming.
“No gas!”
“Oh, Lord!”
“No Lord.”
“Quit messing with me, man,” Shelton says low. Then loud. “I’ll pay you double for a couple gallons, John.”
“No gas.”
“I don’t believe you, John.”
“You no believe.”
Dixie places one paw on Shelton’s leg in blue jeans, wanting to play and let bygones be bygones.
He has to get home. He has to pull himself together to get stronger. If the truck runs out of gas, he will run home and try to get to the bottom of this. He has to get home.
Chapter 4
It feels good to be off the highway, away from the thick of lights and racket, though Shelton can still hear behind him, all around, the sounds of car horns and sirens, almost blending, pleading.
Already he’s feeling better, stronger, just driving in the opposite direction. Elaine will probably be home by now. They will eat a late supper and go to bed and tomorrow being Saturday, she won’t have to go to work.
The sandy dirt road between close pines and hardwoods is opened up by the headlight beams but smoke twirls like playful fairies in the light.
“Bet she’s home, Dix,” he says to the dog, whose large square head he can see turned toward the woods, her short legs trotting in place, eager to get out and run ahead of the truck.
Yes. In a disaster like this, Elaine would have gotten out of the jeep and walked home, rather than wait for the mess to clear up. Has to be a terrorists’ attack, like 9-11 when the Twin Towers in New York were destroyed by airplanes and the whole world stopped, it seemed. Or maybe it’s a bomb, the big one everybody’s been waiting on since he can’t remember when.
He tries the truck radio. The alert signal is still on—be-ip, be-ip.
What would Elaine do if he was the one missing? She would look for him just as he has been looking for her. But she would pray while she was doing it, and he would too if he could. His prayers simply don’t seem to go anywhere but back at him and he feels like a fool talking to someone not there.
He has often joked with Elaine about her religion but he likes that about her too. It is part of her sweetness, like her clear, fair skin and her wide gray eyes with a flattish bridge like a baby’s. She is a pretty petite girly-girl, soft and flawless, “All girl,” as Shelton tells her.
He is almost to the house, can actually see the white west wall in the smoky headlights—no lights in the windows—when the engine sputters and the truck coasts to a stop.
“Okay, end of the ride, Dix.” He switches off the truck, opens his door and steps out. He can feel the air off the heavy dog as it leaps to the ground behind him.
Coughing in the smoke, Shelton tips the truck seat forward and feels behind it for his flashlight. Finds it and switches it on.
Dixie is whining again, hearing the sirens on the highway.
“Might as well get used to it, girl.” Shelton walks, shining the light through the dark and smoke. “They’ll get it cleaned up soon. Elaine! Elaine?” His calling is as reflexive as hiccups.
When there is no answer, no footsteps inside the house, he talks to himself through the dog. “Mama’ll be on. You’ll see.”
He tries not to imagine her in the hospital, maybe hurt, maybe dead. Not the police station either. Not in some mad man’s car driving to who knows where. But she has to be somewhere. She couldn’t have just disappeared.
“Elaine! Elaine!”
He points the flashlight at the fallen section of porch. The dog shoots past him, up the concrete block they use for a step to the plank leading across the floor joists of the porch, which is no longer funny.
Elaine had taken his laziness in stride, often laughed about it with friends from church and work. And Shelton would laugh with them, cocking his head and grinning. Everybody says he looks like Tim McGraw. Truth is, as long as he could hold the fallen porch up as a joke between him and Elaine, he wouldn’t have to break up the sections and haul it all off. He had dreaded when she quit laughing and started crying because then his downtime would be up.
Inside, Shelton flips the latch on the kitchen door. They’ve never locked doors; living at the end of this peaceful dirt road, with no neighbors, they’d felt no need to. Now, Shelton needs to, though he doesn’t know why. He’s just scared.
Flashlight in hand he goes over to the scorched and dinged white laminate counter by the stove. He can smell coffee from breakfast and wonders what happened to the butane gas or rotting onion—another mystery. In the cupboard over the boxy white stove he takes down a box of kitchen matches and goes into the living room, strikes one and lights the tiny flame of a vanilla-scented candle on the small round table next to the couch. Behind the candle Elaine’s face in the small silver-framed picture looms up. Her face is the size of a moon with monster lips and swollen-shut eyes from being stung by a yellow jacket in the lean-to goat shed.
He lies on the couch, just as he’d been before the disaster, and stares at the flame and Elaine’s swollen face. So funny! He has to smile, recalling how she’d handled her allergic reaction to the sting by making fun of how she looked.
The dog comes tipping out of the bedroom where Shelton and Elaine always sleep. She whines.
“Not tonight, girl. Come lay down by me. Morning-time, we’re going after Mama.”
Chapter 5
Shelton wakes to the tapping of steady rain on the tin roof and wind whipping the white curtains on the living room windows. In the dawn light he rushes from one window to the other, slamming them shut.
He is shocked when he looks at his watch. Nine o’clock—he would have guessed earlier; he is shocked too that he has slept so hard with Elaine likely in danger.
At least he is rested up, no longer shaking. No longer panicky and confused, but ready to get back out there and do what he has to do.
Flipping a wall switch he finds that the electricity is still off. No need to try his cell phone because even if he has service now it won’t be charged.
In Elaine’s jeep, she has a mobile charger. He will go after the jeep and then go looking for her. But first he has to feed the goats and then persuade John to sell him some gas.
When it rains the goats’ stink reduces to musk and he can hardly bear to smell them. He steps over the slumped wire fence anyway and goes into the lean-to shed and dips a quart coffee can into the drum of goat feed. It smells mealy and bland. Black and white bony faces nudge and butt at his camouflage rain jacket while he trips around them to pour the feed into a trough made from an old charcoal grill bottom.
Usually he would pepper them with a few choice curse words, but this morning he’s too anxious about their mistress. Stepping over mud puddles with his cowboy boots, he sets out old pots and pans to catch rain water for them in case the power doesn’t come on right away. Rain pitters on the metal bottoms then pips as the water rises.
Gray rain falling evenly ov
er the dirt yard, hissing in the chinaberry trees. A good morning to sleep but he’s alarmed awake by fear for Elaine. Doesn’t even feel the urge to go back to his couch and wait.
Shelton sets out up the road with a red plastic gas can. Rain taps on the hood of his jacket and the can.
The sky looks muddy with clouds, darker clouds banking and hiding the sun. The wind whips in gusts and now and then streaks of lightening crack the west wall of sky. He cannot hear the thunder yet which means the storm is still a distance away.
He walks fast, smelling the dampened burn from the automobiles on the highway, staying to the high-ground in the straddle of the road to keep from wading through the water in the ruts on each side.
He has left the dog to keep from having to watch out for her and also to greet Elaine if she should come home before he gets back. That dog is her heart.
Almost to the highway and still he can hear no traffic, maybe because of the wind rushing in the tall pine tops. He walks faster as the rain comes faster, pricking his face and pecking on the hood of his jacket. Light smoke now swirls in the gusts of rain-driven wind.
He slows walking. What if he gets to the highway and all the vehicles from last night have been hauled away? What if they haven’t? Why does he always feel the need to see what’s up ahead before he gets there? Maybe in this case, to prepare him for the shock of last night.
When he does reach the highway, in fact, it’s just as it was last night except that most of the rashly burning cars are smoldering, slow fires, slow smoke, a kind of calm as if it is over, whatever it was.
Walking north toward Valdosta, he begins stopping and peeking inside parked cars, the ones still intact, spying nothing but purses and jackets and baby seats still latched. So strange. In one car, a pewter Chrysler, a child’s plump teddy-bear is sitting up in the back seat, with a fluffy pink jacket next to it. A mini-school bus, with its yellow paint scorched, is parked between two hot smoking cars. Inside, text books, composition books and book bags look dropped by students in a hurry to get out.
Listening to the rain pecking on the hollow roof, he thinks there is something about an abandoned school bus that must cut to the heart of every human. It’s like a baby’s cry. Like nails scratching on a chalkboard. Like lonesome wind. It’s like loving somebody who is lost.
The rain picks up with the wind and Shelton walks on, not peeping inside automobiles now but pulling his jacket together in front because the zipper is broken, like everything else in his world. Not a single moving automobile, behind or ahead, that he can see.
John’s convenience store with its red, green and yellow chevrons on the cement-block walls is still dark and empty-looking, but on the front panel of glass is a radiating hole—maybe from a rock or a bullet.
Shelton dreads facing him. One more glance up the highway, trying to see through the screen of rain whether Elaine’s jeep is still there, and then he lopes down and up a streaming ditch and onto the rain-pattered blacktop of John’s parking lot.
If only John weren’t so paranoid and could speak better English. If only he didn’t have a gun—few people do since a couple of years before when the law came out revoking guns and invoking warnings against selling, trading or swapping firearms. Ammunition had become so expensive anyway that few could afford to buy it even if they kept their guns.
Shelton should have hidden his shotgun and rifle because all he’d used them for was to shoot deer, birds and skeet. And he had a constitutional right to bear arms, as he told Elaine. But she had convinced him to do the legal thing and turn them in.
Now Shelton can hear booms of thunder, lightening so close he feels the sizzle and smells the ozone. He ducks under the broad eave of the south wall and sidles along till he gets to a small window, peering in with his free hand shielding his eyes.
Water gushes from the eaves and sheets across the black-top to the weedy fields each side and behind the store.
A storage room door at the other end of the room is either opening or closing. It’s so dark that he has to wait for flashes of lightening to make out the inside of the store. Then a brilliant blaze of lightening like a prolonged camera flash lights up the shelves of canned foods and hanging bags of chips and John standing stiff, gazing back at Shelton.
He is a broad, dark man with drawn-together black eyes, generally standing with his big belly strutted and bouncing on his heels. Black shoes, black pants, white shirt. Shelton’s never seen him dressed in anything else.
“John, John! It’s me, Shelton Teasdale from down the road.” Shelton knocks on the glass, talking to the dark. “I need to talk to you. Just talk.”
Ready to duck beneath the window if the next flash of lightening shows John with a gun drawn on him, Shelton keeps knocking on the glass.
Suddenly something sharp punches him in the back and he wheels to see John with his shotgun. His thick nose and dark hooded eyes are the centerpiece of his grim face. He means business. He nods toward the back of the building and Shelton walks ahead of him, again feeling the gun barrel in the center-point of his spine.
Rain gutters into a shallow sandy pool next to an open metal door, which, when closed, would appear almost invisible in the solid dingy wall.
Shelton is still holding to the handle of the red gas can but his arms are raised to show he is harmless and willing to play by John’s rules.
Across the fields running to woods, behind the store, rain drives at a slant like splintered glass.
John points the gun toward the open door and Shelton walks through to a damp, dark room. Either a freezer locker or a vault, he can’t tell. In the watery light of the open door, he can see John just standing, maybe trying to spot Shelton in the corner where he has ended up.
John picks up a flashlight left standing on the floor next to the door. He slams the door, shutting out the light and the sluicing rain.
“John, man, what’s going on?” Shelton asks in a pleading gentle voice. “What happened last night, do you know?”
“No know.”
The flashlight is blinding Shelton. He thinks John is saying no no, but then figures he means he doesn’t know.
“Was it a bomb? Terrorists’ attack?”
“I no know.”
The room smells of mold and dust and sounds hollow, voices bouncing off the walls.
Shelton starts to set down the gas can but the light jerks and John is holding the gun by his right side and pointed out like a wild-west gunslinger.
“Man, they catch you with that gun they’re gonna slam you in the pen.” Shelton knows he doesn’t understand but maybe his chummy tone will change something.
“Gas a gallon twenty-five Euros.”
“Twenty-five Euros! I said double, man, that’s triple.”
“Twenty-five Euros.” John shines his light on the wet red gas can.
Thunder quakes the whole building.
Shelton can see John’s black eyes like a rat’s. But he feels strangely focused, not as afraid as he probably should be.
John switches the light beam to another door, leading further inside the building.
Uncomfortable about moving, Shelton eases toward the door and fumbles it open. The main part of the store is only a shade lighter but outside is white with rain, sheets of rain.
When Shelton gets to the middle aisle of the store, John points him in the direction of the room at the far end and the door that Shelton had earlier seen either opening or closing. On each side are shelves of canned foods, stale chips and crackers that John loads up on from some black-marketer. Almost everything he sells has been shop-lifted by gangs, then “cleaned-up,” meaning re-labeled, re-dated and re-priced and sold to Indian, Arab or Hispanic shop owners.
The room at the far end of the store reeks of gasoline from the crowded, oil-caked fifty-five gallon drums; makes Shelton’s head feel light as a balloon. But he’s okay; he’s feeling okay.
“Man, how’d you come by all this gas and it being rationed?”
&n
bsp; “No know.”
While John holds the light on him, Shelton switches on the battery-operated tank and pokes the nozzle into the opening of his gas can, hearing the swishing of gas and smelling the fumes rising up like ether.
John motions enough by slicing his free hand through the air.
“But...” Shelton knows it’s not full, not a gallon, but he is desperate to get out and go after Elaine, to get to Valdosta and find out what’s happened. Going back home is not even an option.
At the cluttered counter up front of the store, John in his white button-up shirt steps around, head bowed and eyes walled in their sockets. He leans the shotgun, barrel up, in a corner between the west wall and the counter. Along the dark wall behind John is shelving with nests of loose papers and old bound books like the kind everybody used to read before computers took their place.
Shelton wishes he had a can of Copenhagen—an old habit—when he sees the small round cans stacked next to the blue and white scanner gizmo on the counter. It is flat with a small screen, a Game-boy type of device, which reminds Shelton of the scanner his post mistress used to use to take a picture of his signature on certified letters from the IRS. The good old days, his Copenhagen daze. But he wouldn’t dip John’s Copenhagen if he gave him the whole column of cans.
Still holding the gas can with his left hand, Shelton places his right hand flat on the counter and John passes the broadband Radio Frequency ID scanner over it, blue white flash and fizzing sound.
Chapter 6
Lugging the can of gas down by his side, he makes his way through the wrecked and burned bodies of cars and trucks and those not even scratched by the catastrophe. All is quiet except for the rain tapping on the hood of his vinyl camo jacket and the red gas can. The smoke and acid tang of burned metal and upholstery takes his breath. His eyes tear and sting as he stares ahead, searching for the brown jeep. He can’t decide whether he hopes it is still there or hopes it is not there.
He starts to call out Elaine’s name but is afraid to, though not sure why. John is the only human he’s seen since the disaster, except for those rushing along the road shoulders last night and the two people in the EMT wagon, who do not count because he never spoke to them and they were so quickly gone.