At the End - a post-apocalyptic novel (The Road to Extinction, Book 1) (18 page)

We hit Vancouver by four. It was the last
major Washington city before the border into Oregon All the lanes
were packed, dense and unyielding. At one point, I was pushing six
cars at once, until they separated and a gap appeared. The bus was
old, retrofitted with new technology, including the rectenna that
constantly collected energy from an electrical relay plant. We
would never have to stop off I-5 if the batteries didn’t die, and
new batteries lasted ten years or more before they went out. The
bus still made noise, since Jacob never fiddled with the wiring,
but I had turned the knob to its lowest setting, barely a rumble,
though the grating of vehicle on vehicle did nothing to hide our
position.

I could see lights on for kilometers and
kilometers, all around us, and as the sun drifted lower, more
popped into view. Without warning, the lights all around started to
flicker.

“What’s going on out there?” Tortilla
asked.

An alarm belled from the bus speakers. Then
a woman followed: “Power failure. Connection to electrical relay
plants severed. Batteries switched to primary power source. Check
dash for charge levels.”

“Look!” Tortilla pointed out the window to
the right. The city’s skyscrapers became massive black towers of
portending doom. Within a blink, all the lights vanished, and we
were drowned in a sea of darkness.

“They must have shut down the solar
stations,” I said, slamming on the breaks before we crashed into
two white SUVs. “I don’t know if the bus can make it all the way
down to Pasadena.” We sat, idling.

“What are the battery levels?”

“In total it says 96%, but hitting these
cars puts a lot of strain on the motor and the batteries.” I
searched for hope in his burnt eyes, but there wasn’t any to be
found, only misery and ache.

“We’ll probably have to switch again.”

I nodded my concurrence.

Amanda strode up to the front. “What
happened out there?” Her saddened eyes possessed confidence beyond
any of us. A hope also glimmered in them; hope that her sister
would be rescued, if not by all of us, then by her boldness alone.
Yet, reliance was also present, a reliance on us as adults, or at
least the closest people to adults around.

“The solar stations were probably shut
down,” I told her.

Amanda eyed me intensely. “Does this mean we
have to abandon the bus?”

“At some point, yes,” Tortilla spoke up.

She glanced out the window into the world of
shadow; it was beyond creepy to see. “Jacob is getting worse, I
think,” she reported.

“Make sure he drinks a lot of water,” I
said. “Give him some food and the green pain relievers to lower his
fever.” I smiled, but I doubted it was as cheerful as I meant it to
be.

Amanda nodded and returned to her sister and
the coughing, shivering Jacob.

“You want me to take over driving?” Tortilla
asked.

“Sure,” I said. “My butt is cramping and my
legs are stiff.”

We swapped seats. Tortilla drove until the
sunlight escaped our side of the world.

“We shouldn’t drive at night anymore,” I
told Tortilla. “We’ll be a million times easier to spot.”

“You don’t have to tell me,” Tortilla
snapped.

I glared at him. “You okay, bromigo?”

He shook his head. “Just exhausted. Sorry.
But you don’t have to tell me obvious things like not driving at
night with all the other lights off.” He pulled over to the left
lane and powered down the motor.

“I’ll go check on Jacob.”

He yawned. “Sounds good, bramiga.”

I offered Jacob a green pill and he took it
with some water and a quarter bag of jerky. “You doing any
better?”

His eyes were sunken in and discolored.
“No.”

“I didn’t even know you were sick, what
happened?”

Jacob continued to shake as he talked. “I’ve
had a cold the whole time, I’m just pretty good at hiding it. Not
getting much sleep isn’t helping at all.”

“We need to get you some medication
tomorrow. Do you remember what you took the last time you had
it?”

“Something romycin . . . and pradnisone, or
something close to that. They gave me steroids and antibiotics.
Which is which, I don’t remember.”

“The romycin is the antibiotic,” I said
confidently. “I’ll leave you alone so you can try and get some
sleep.”

He smiled, then broke out a sharp cough.
“Yeah, thanks.”

I peeked over at the twins. Jane had cried
herself to sleep in the late afternoon, and Amanda slowly trailed
her sister into dreamland. They were slumped against each other,
warmer than the rest of us.

I sat next to Tortilla. He was staring out
into the blackness that swallowed the globe. “So do you want to
look for a pharmacy?” he asked.

I locked my hands in his. “They’ll be too
hard to find. We should just go to a hospital. I know there’s that
one on the hill in Portland, that monstrous one.”

He squeezed my hands. “All right, but it
might be hard to get to.” A yawn struck him. “I can’t keep my eyes
open.”

I glanced up at him. His lids were shut, and
in the darkness, he was soon out. “Goodnight,” I said softly.

“Goodnight,” he whispered.

When morning broke upon my swimming eyes, I
crawled out of Tortilla’s comforting embrace, and stretched out my
legs, scanning the Vancouver skyline. So many buildings just sat
there, cold and monotonous, as if all the color had been stolen
during the long night. The green solar panels didn’t seem so green
and alive, but more charcoal and dead, dead without their function
to perform for the world.

“The days are growing grayer, or maybe it’s
just our moods,” Tortilla commented. He stroked my back in a gentle
massage.

“The world doesn’t look right without lights
. . . without electricity.”

“The world doesn’t look right without
people,” he responded. His hand froze in the middle of my back.
“Are we going to make it?”

I shuddered at the fear in his voice. “We
have to protect those girls.” My shoes squeaked as I spun
around.

“You didn’t answer my question.” He stared
at me, still tired even after a night of rest.

“As long as we have guns in our hands, we’ll
survive,” I told him.

Tortilla hung his head. “Darrel and Penelope
had guns.” His voice quavered, full of despair. “They had guns . .
.”

“What do you want me to say? I don’t know
what answer you’re looking to find, but I tell you we’ll survive,
and that’s what I think.” I grabbed a hold of his fingertips. “We
have to protect those girls, you understand?”

He nodded. “But what about Darrel and
Penelope . . .”

“They’re not dead,” I whispered, tearing.
“We both know that.” I swallowed back words.

He pulled me close to his chest, tears
dropping onto my hair.

Neither of us said another word until Jacob
woke up from a painful, bursting cough. His coughs were
intensifying, increasing in both harshness and rapidity. At times,
he even fell over, clutching the seat in front of him, yellow
phlegm exploding out his mouth.

We ate breakfast together, gathering around
Jacob. No one spoke. Hungry bellies growled fiercely. Done with
breakfast, I climbed into the driver’s seat and started smashing
bumpers. For all the fun that it had been the first few hundred
times, it was terribly boring the few thousand times after and it
was really starting to take its toll on the bus once we lost the
front bumper. Not to mention the toll on my nerves.

By the time Portland came into view, the
batteries were in the red, almost completely drained. My back ached
from all the impacts, and my jaw was so tight and sore from
clenching my teeth every time I rammed a car out of the way. But no
one complained.

We crossed the I-5 bridge over the Columbia
River. I sighed in relief when I noticed how empty the bridge was
compared to the rest of the interstate.

Portland: a city of bridges. Bridges spanned
rivers and roadways everywhere within sight. It was nothing like
Seattle or Vancouver, both the Canadian and American cities. The
glassy green of the skyscrapers reflected off in the sun, blinding
glares of warmth. At first glance, it appeared that all of the
city’s buildings remained intact, which couldn’t be said for
Seattle. But I didn’t know the city skyline at all, and numerous
buildings could have been scattered as rubble, out of eyeshot.

The Hill, a slope brimming with medical
buildings, lay close to I-5, beacons of hope and promise, something
we desperately needed. As I studied the view, the clouds hovering
above the city drifted, parting for a second to show a glimpse of
an alion ship.

“They’re here,” I reported.

Tortilla spotted the ship just before a
cloud cloaked it again in a gray blanket. “Figures. Darrel and
Penelope could have been taken there instead

. . .”

I didn’t reply. It was too much to think
about.

The batteries died before we reached the
nearest off-ramp to the hill of hospitals. I had always hated that
about batteries, they never told the truth when they were in the
red, always half the time they approximated.

“Can you carry anything, Jacob?” I
asked.

He nodded. “I’m not dead.”

“But you look pretty tired,” Tortilla
responded.

“We need this stuff, all of it.” He bent
over and grabbed the backpack with inhalers and other medical
supplies. He had been sucking on them like cough drops, puffing a
mist into his mouth every half hour, or so it seemed.

He was right though; we needed all of it. We
had left so many bags in different places, on the run and out the
door in a hurry. “We’ll have to consolidate again.” I started
placing the bags we absolutely needed on the right side of the bus,
and digging through others to make sure nothing essential was left
behind. We had four duffels and three backpacks full of supplies.
Tortilla handed Jane the duffel with blankets, and I gave Amanda
the backpack with food. Jacob and I exchanged the pack with
inhalers for the duffel of food, so he would only have to carry one
bag. After I adjusted the backpack, I picked up the duffel of water
bottles, which left a backpack of cooking supplies and the duffel
with guns for Tortilla.

With everything sorted, we planted our feet
on the road, heading south for an exit sign. We found one,
continuing onto I-405, pointed towards the Oregon Health and
Science University. Taking the first off-ramp, we hooked around
under an overpass until we reached the foot of the hill. Cars were
parked up and down the road, littering the streets at angles,
almost as if the people had been frantic to escape before they were
taken.

Jacob coughed, wheezing with the duffel bag
strapped around his shoulder, across his chest and back. He
clutched an inhaler in his left. “I’m okay,” he answered in a weak
voice when I asked him how he fared.

“Let’s rest here,” I said, pointing to a
group of chairs surrounding a table outside a café. Jacob said he
didn’t need it, but no one else argued, so we stopped. The
buildings of the hospital campus were close now, viewable above the
tall trees that surrounded the hill.

Jacob sat down and hacked up a glob of
yellow.

“That’s gross,” Jane said.

“You’re gross,” Amanda taunted.

They started quarreling, poking at each
other. “Enough,” I said in a tone too harsh for the dismal mood.
They were only having fun.

They ceased their game and sat in
silence.

When Jacob’s breathing slowed, we started up
the hill again, leaving behind buildings for a long tree-tunnel
road. Walking underneath dozens of sky bridges, we found a small
entrance at the north end of the campus. “Look for anything that
says pharmaceuticals, that will be our best bet at finding
something.”

Tortilla ran to a desk and began searching
through drawers. “Found a directory.” I scrambled over to him from
a desk across the walkway. “Looks like there are pharmaceutical
storage rooms on the third, tenth, and twenty-fifth floors in this
tower. There is a pharmaceutical lab on the nineteenth floor in
tower J, which is pretty far from here. There are others—”

“Let’s try the third floor first,” I cut in.
“You guys can stay down here; we’ll be back in a few minutes.”

Jacob was resting in a lobby chair, next to
Jane. Amanda watched for movement outside through the long
rectangular window in the door. “I’ll keep them safe,” Jacob
said.

“So will I,” Amanda added. In the last few
days, she had taken a liking to carrying around a pistol. She
clinked the muzzle against the door, winking.

Tortilla and I headed up the stairs,
cautious, with every nerve on edge. My heart didn’t want me to
explore, but Jacob required the drugs. I tried thinking positive,
happy thoughts, but I kept coming back to Mike being pulled from
the window. It was so gruesome. They could take us at any moment
without alerting our ears in the slightest. Their steps were more
than deathly quiet.

The third floor was as quiet as the first.
Guns raised, we crept down a long tiled hall, its white reflective
floor shining in the daylight. “Here.” Tortilla pointed his gun at
the room numbered 377. A blue Pharmaceutical Lab sign hung by the
door, directing traffic to the pain relieving contents inside, and
a glimmer of hope burst in me as the door swung open.

I started shuffling through white
containers. “Look for something that has romycin at the end of its
name, and another drug called prednisone.” The bottles that still
sat on the shelves were empty. Every lid I popped off revealed the
bottom of the plastic.

Tortilla jerked up, throwing a bottle high,
whipping around to the back. “Did you hear that?” His voice shook.
“Did you? Did you?”

My gun was up in an instant. “I didn’t hear
a thing, bromigo.” The room had a dozen shelves three meters tall.
With my back against the first shelf, I sidled along until I came
to the end. Breathing heavily, I twirled around the edge, expecting
to see an alion. I let out a long, long sigh. “Nothing here. Come
on, let’s try the tenth floor.”