through the pain the whole way up the highway and I was maybe a little drunk from the Jack Daniels Saul had given me when it was clear the two aspirin in the first aid kit weren’t going to do much.
There was a small knot of people standing alongside a van with its hood up. Saul pulled to a stop beside them.
They stepped away as I rolled the window down with my good arm.
“Ma’am?” I called out. “Do you folks need some help?”
There was another silence before a single older woman turned toward us.
“We’ll be fine. Juan says he can fix it,” she said. “Where you folks headed?”
“We were thinking Provo or Salt Lake, but…”
“What’s going on?” Saul yelled past me.
“Keep going.” The woman shook her head. “Fire broke out this morning. Heard there were folks raiding from the south. They’d mostly kept everything peaceful here, but there ain’t enough firemen left to stop this.”
I studied the scene again, thinking about when I’d gone to BYU here. It seemed like a hundred years instead of just two since I’d left school to marry. I’d left a part of myself back in Antimony, and now another part was on fire here. Would I have any family left in Salt Lake?
Saul asked again if they needed any help, and the woman said no again. We decided to push on toward Salt Lake City, and she told us she’d heard there was more traffic in that direction.
I wasn’t sure if that was a good or bad thing, but Saul seemed to think it was encouraging. We left them to their van and stayed on the 15, hoping we could bypass the whole town.
We were past the north edge of town when Saul pulled off the highway.
“Gas station,” he said as he drove down the exit ramp. “I want to make sure we can leave in a hurry if Salt Lake City’s as bad as this.”
I nodded, trying to focus as he drove toward the gas stations. He passed one, then another.
“What are you-”
“There.” He pointed to the solar panels on the roof. “Short of an old-fashioned gravity pump, we need some kind of electricity to get gas out of these pumps.”
“Oh.”
The gas station wasn’t totally empty. The one nearest the highway had all the windows broken, but this one was intact except for the door forced open and hanging there.
“I’m going to see if I can get the pumps turned on,” he told me. “Do you want to wait in the car?”
I shook my head. “I want to find the bathroom and then see if I can clean this out. There has to be bottled water and maybe a fresh gauze or something.” I headed into the gas station as Saul set the truck up to start fueling.
The shelves had been picked over, but the tiny first aid section was still there. I found a few gauze bandages and some disinfectant cream. It promised to eliminate scars but I didn’t think that was likely considering I hadn’t even gotten the bullet wound to close. Thinking about that, I grabbed a sewing kit as well and headed into the bathroom.
Peeling off the makeshift bandage hurt more than I thought – putting up with the pain for hours ought to count for something, right? I guess not. I ran the water until it looked clean and scooped it up with my good hand, hoping that I was actually succeeding in cleaning the wound.
On the other hand, once I got over the fact that I was sticking a needle into my skin, the stitching wasn’t as bad as I expected. Then it was a thick layer of cream and the clean gauze.
“Hey, Saul, I’m done with-”
There were three guys crowded around Saul at the front counter. They were yelling and I could see that they had weapons – one had a baseball bat, and I saw something that caught the light, maybe a knife. I must have looked a sight in my ruined dress, blood stains over flowered print, missing a sleeve entirely. And of course I left my hunting rifle in the truck. I grabbed closest thing that looked like a weapon – the fire extinguisher – and hoped I looked menacing.
It slowed them down just long enough that I thought it might change their minds. When they rushed at me, I fired foam in the faces of the first two, then swung the extinguisher around and brought it down hard on the third one’s head. I hadn’t come this far just to die at a gas station outside Provo. With one unconscious and the other two spitting foam, I looked at Saul.
“Come on,” I told him.
“Go get the guns,” he answered. “I’ve almost got the pump on. We need it.”
I looked at the two men still moving and almost argued with him, but there wasn’t time. I ran to the truck and pulled out my hunting rifle. By the time I got back, one of them had gotten over the counter with a knife and I saw blood.
I thought about aiming for non-lethal areas, but that went out the window when the first recoil shot through my injured arm. Between the pain and the anger at seeing Saul bleeding, it was a lost cause. Instead I settled for praying as I fired.
The man with the knife went down with the second shot. I fired a third at the other man standing, but he was running away a minute later. I let him go.
“Saul?”
“Go open the gas cap and get it ready, then I’ll turn it on.”
Once again I did as he said, seeing how it was the best option to get out of there. Once the pump was ready to fill the tank, I waved to Saul and the gas started flowing. I expected him to come out while it ran, but he must have needed to hang around to turn it off.
When the pump shut off because the tank was full, I waited another minute for Saul. He didn’t come.
Cursing myself for not realizing something must be wrong, I made my way back inside. The man with the knife was still lying on the counter, now in a dark red puddle.
I didn’t see Saul at first, walking past the counter to see if he was behind one of the racks. When I turned, though, I saw him crumpled on the floor. I rushed over to him and tried to turn him over.
Only then did I realize that he was crumpled over another body, probably the actual owner of the gas station – and by the look of it, that man had died of plague.
I started praying for the second time in twenty minutes as I pulled Saul’s body away from the others. He had been stabbed deeply and there was plenty of blood soaked into his shirt but he was still breathing, so I assumed the knife hadn’t hit anything too important. I couldn’t do much if it had, so I had to hope for the best.
I had used up almost all the gauze on myself, but I used what I could find to bind him up, pressing paper napkins and hand towels from the automotive section into service. It wasn’t perfect, but nothing would be.
Strength was never my strong point, even when I didn’t have a hole in my shoulder. Dragging was the best I could do, and getting Saul back to the truck was slow going. I bundled him into the passenger seat and then scrambled into the driver’s side. It didn’t look like there was any hope of getting him a doctor here, but maybe if I could make it to Salt Lake City, maybe civilization still reigned there.
I could hope, anyway, and I could pray. That was all I could do.
Outside Salt Lake City, UT, March 2013
Saul slept through most of the drive from Provo to Salt Lake City. I could hear him breathing, barely, but he was in no place to distract me from my thoughts.
If Provo looked like this, what was the point of going on to Salt Lake City? Would that be any better? I supposed that as long as it was standing, it couldn’t be much worse. And Saul needed… a doctor, probably. To get out of the damn truck and washed up, for sure.
I wasn’t sure what was going on in Salt Lake, but if my family was still alive, presumably they would. I figured the sooner I got Saul out of the truck, the better, so I took the earlier exit for their suburb instead of going straight into the city.
The town itself was eerie in the same way Antimony had been, silent and echoing. It looked almost the same as the last time I’d been here, when I told my parents I was dropping out of school to get married. That day it had been stiflingly hot, with the streets full of children and dogs and sprinklers.
I pulled up t
o my parents’ house, fighting off the sick sense of deja vu. I parked and turned off the engine, but I couldn’t bring myself to open the door for a long breath.
Saul coughed in his sleep, and I remembered that this was about more than just my issues. I opened the door and went up to the house, took a deep breath and knocked on the door.
“Who’s there?” I thought it was my younger sister’s voice, but I wasn’t sure.
“Mailman,” I answered, an old joke between us.
“Lacey?” she threw the door open. “Lacey! Is it really you? What are you doing here?”
“Long story,” I told her. “Where’s Mom and Dad?”
She got quiet.
“Oh, god, no… Janie, have you been here alone?”
“Some of the neighbors check on me. I’m not the only one, and a lot of the other kids are worse off. I’ve been okay. We have lots in the pantry for one person.”
I bit my lip, thinking of the argument I’d had with my dad the last time I’d been here. He said I was abandoning God and abandoning my family. Maybe he’d been right, but there wasn’t anything I could do to fix that now.
“I need your help, Janie. There’s a guy in the truck, he helped me get here. We were attacked, and he got hurt pretty bad. Can I bring him inside? Is there still a doctor or a clinic working around here?”
“There’ll be a doctor round tomorrow,” Janie said as she started toward the truck. “What happened?”
“We were trying to get gas outside Provo.”
“I heard Provo’s pretty bad.” She opened the door and Saul