How to Find Peace at the End of the World (3 page)

In the mirror, pieces of the jet are still tumbling but it doesn’t look like anything that could crush me. I hope.

Yet it doesn’t seem I can let up. It’s the adrenaline.

I need to stop myself before the straight bit of road ends and I shoot off into the bayou/nee drainage ditch.

I finally force my foot off gas, downshift to engine brake the car. The roar dies down and I can actually begin to feel the ache in my jaw muscles, in my gum. I’m at gear 4 and the turn is almost upon me. I step on the actual brakes. They’re more powerful than I ever imagined, and I’d forgotten to buckle in. My forehead slams into the wheel and I can feel things leaving my control. I fishtail, the landscape pin wheeling around me. The crunch of the car bottom as it hits the curb of the turn is enormous and the world upends, sky, ground, sky. Then another massive crunch as the car lands on the bank of the drainage ditch. I see only sky before I pass out.
?????PM?. I wake with a killer headache. What time is it? My watch is broken. I don’t think I’ve been out for more than a few moments. The sun’s not far from where it’d been. Either that or I spent the whole night out here in the crumpled Ferrari. Either way I haven’t been found, rescued. The plane crash wasn’t much of a help sign, apparently.

I clamber out and drop to the mowed grass. The pain is pretty intense at first but then loosens. I dry heave. No breakfast to lose. I need water. There’s a wad of cotton at the back of my throat. It’s been a warm winter and even in the middle of February the mosquitoes are out and since I’ve been so near the drainage ditch with the windows broken my face is covered with itchy little bumps.

I bring my hand up to feel my forehead where it hurts. There’s a much nastier bump there but I don’t feel either slickness or the dried stickiness of blood. I stand up and my vision resolves. So does my hearing, sort of. I can hear the blaring of a million car alarms but they seem muffled. That should clear up, hopefully?
I survey the wreckage I had just barely escaped: the fuselage of the airliner has split into three parts, or only three parts remain, cylinders that looked like crumpled toilet paper tubes, the innards of airplane seats and breathing masks spilling out,  yet still disturbingly attached to the body of the plane in little strands of metal flooring or clear tubing. The rest of the plane has completely disintegrated, none of the pieces really bigger than a few feet around and laying in piles and drifts around the big tube sections. I stumble towards the wreck, regaining my footage. I steel myself, even though a part of me already knows what I won’t find.
The wind carries things on the air, small and light things. Pieces of clothing. A lot of loose paper. There’s a surprisingly large amount of paper on an airplane. I think of all those business folios spilling their insides to the wind.

I enter the umbra of the plane’s crash, which extends almost to where my skid marks begin and continue on to the broken curb.

Twisted pieces of metal, pieces of luggage and airplane seats and this yellow foam, either the padding in the seats or from the airplane. Plastic cups, cans, bags of peanuts.

I come upon the first set of airplane seats still all attached to one another in a row, still pristine, untouched by the gore of passengers. This is, according to how things have gone this morning, what I do not expect to find. And I’m actually disappointed to be right. I know how insane this sounds because it banishes all thought of evacuation or emergency from the realm of possibility. You can’t really evacuate an airplane, can you, not without bodies falling all over the place. I look up and the sky is clear. I’m going crazy.

I almost expect another plane to be there, giant in my field of vision.

Where am I? Another planet, maybe. Some giant candid camera skit? A dream. I slap myself and all I feel is burning on my cheek and over the ringing in my ears the echo of that crack against lonely building facades.

I clamber across debris to the opening to one of the large cross sections. I pause. I still smell a trace of kerosene in the air, the fumes, the remnants, not enough to keep the plane aloft forever, circling in its autopilot pattern around the airport beacon. Everything has to come down sometime. I shiver, the image of the plane empty of all passengers, and pilots coursing through me and leaving me feeling cold.
I need to get to her. I need to find out. I turn away from the wreckage. There’s nothing to see inside other than madness. I walk back towards the parking lot, careful of the glass blown away from the side of my building. The alarms are still blaring and get only incrementally louder as I approach. I need to find medical help. Is there still medical help to find?
In my mind I’ve already made a resolution. A direction. North, towards Dallas, towards Amy. I don’t know how far this freakishness goes. I’ll go North until I’m stopped by the troops or whatever. I’ll go North until whatever agent has made this quarantine necessary strikes me down dead. They’ll find me on the road face down pointing North.
2PM. Since the first, I’ve seen two other planes go down. Or heard them, really. Smudges in the distance, then a column of black smoke. The one that came down near me was fairly clear, only some burning upholstery. No fuel left to burn. The other planes must have crashed into something explosive. I saw one go down near the closest refineries. I listened for some alarm to run towards, but there was only quiet.
OK. Think. I’ve got the phones and laptops in strapped bags. I grabbed water from the office fridge and took my time carrying ten packs of 24 bottles each. I loaded it all in the back of the Beast. I grabbed the boxes of donuts and kolaches somebody had brought, too. Before that I’d sat in the upstairs lounge and gobbled up a frosted one that somebody had not yet finished. I was so hungry. Thirsty too as I downed two more bottles of chilled water after. Then promptly I wretched half of what I’d just consumed onto the marble reception floor.
I took the sharp axe from the downstairs fire kit. Then, two more tins of gasoline: on breaking into the emergency generator room in the office I found two ten gallon cans. Power is still on thankfully. Don’t know how long that will last. I’m thinking about stopping by the gas station and taking a few more cans. The survivalist part of my mind points me back to Mad Max: why not find a tanker truck? I smirk. Pyrrhic smirk.
I walk towards the edge of the parking lot and then turn to look at my effort: before starting up the truck I’d spent a few moments clearing out the plane’s debris from the exit of my parking lot. Not too bad. The plane’s wing had only snapped the light poles near my office and most of the debris was glass and a few twisted metal fragments from where the side windows of the buildings had blown out.
The car alarms are also now mostly off. Some are too far to bother with but at least I can hear them. To my relief, my hearing is moment by moment returning. Hell, I never would have thought I would one day welcome the noise.

I press some of the alarm fobs at hand to try and locate the last ones. I could have just left them there, like that, but something felt wrong about it. I’d gone back up into the office and began going from office to office collecting the key fobs. I shouldn’t have done that, actually. A shard of glass cut my shoe and nicked my foot as I was doing this. Small wound, not bleeding too bad, but I’ll have to stop by a pharmacy to get some bandages. Surveying the glass, a sense of how lucky I was came over me. Heh, luck, if you can call it that. If I had been in the building instead of indulging my boyish fantasies when the plane landed, then I most certainly would be wanting for a blood infusion that is now no more.

From the side of the building where all the glass was out I could stand from the exposed offices and turn off the cars accordingly. Still, I brought two stuffed pocketfuls of key fobs out to the parking lot and clicked the alarm buttons until the parking lot was much quieter. Eventually, there were still two cars  going at it. Part of me wanted to take the hatchet out from the beast and tear into the hoods, but I remembered how I’d almost hacked my leg off trying to get into the storage room. I decided to cut my losses and went back up just for the supplies. When I was up there, I happened upon another fob and turned the car off from inside the building.
Now, I’m loaded up. And the only thing left is a Buick going crazy in one corner of the lot. God, I think of all the car alarms I’m going to pass along the way. Enough to make a man wish he were at least deaf. I feel tired. Like lying down. Maybe a little nap. How can I sleep. The alarm. I remember something somebody told me about not going to sleep when you’ve just had a knock on the head. Possible concussion or something. Better to stay awake for a few hours and see how things pan out.

I force myself to open the door of the Beast and climb inside. Where to? I should probably get some food, just in case. Stop at the Wally world. Then I remember I have some stuff at home from before the last hurricane scare. I start the Beast and pull out of the front of the building. The asphalt crackles as the beasts wheels crush all the glass I’d left on the ground. I slowly creep through the parking lot and the adjacent street, watching carefully for anything that could give the truck a flat. It’s strange driving, especially since my car is so low to the ground. I feel like I’m riding an elephant. I edge the Beast down the side street and onto the main street and turn it towards my house.
3:30 PM. I passed another plane crash on the way home. It had taken out half of the strip mall where I go for wings and trivia on Thursday nights. Or where I used to go for wings. No explosion or anything, just a bunch of debris all over the place, the only thing recognizable as plane like the tail and wings. A smaller plane, maybe one of those private jets. I briefly think about how much easier it would be if I could get a plane and fly it to Dallas. But then, I have no fucking idea how to fly a plane.
Other than the plane, nothing else has changed. Nothing has moved. The same cars, parked or crashed, exactly where they were since I passed them this morning. That pickup lodged in the lobby of the McDonalds. That compact wrapped around the sign for the gaudy Valentine that was the Heart-breakers sign. It’s weird because my mind expects a certain amount of dynamism, of change. My mind expects activity like blinking and blaring emergency vehicles, or at least the aftermath, the wound, patched up to an extent. Instead, no activity. I had crawled, edging down the road, keeping my eyes open for any sign, any movement. Nothing. The world looks feels like a diorama, a slice of frozen time that I’m crawling through, ant like.
I get home at 3:35 and the sun is making moves towards some clouds on the horizon. The pickup on the retainer wall. The garbage truck mid dump. The forgotten yard implements. The blower engine has stopped idling, though. I pull back into my house and even that feels weird: I’ve never seen it from this high up.

I’d been plotting the whole way from work what to bring along. There is the computer where basically my whole life is contained: four terabytes of pictures (amazing and personal and pronographic), movies, TV shows, papers, all the way from high school, backups of books, notes, love notes, saved instant messenger conversations, everything.

I debated the merits of other things. I didn’t have much that wasn’t digital. All the older photos were at my folks place up in Wichita. All the trappings of my childhood. Posters and old toys and things once special to me. I’m glad for it, to a certain extent. I feel free now, thinking of that faraway place, to focus on what I need, right away, what will get me to Dallas and the woman I love.

I open the pantry. It’s floor to ceiling blue and red cardboard boxes. I don’t cook so there aren’t any utensils nor jars full of uncooked pasta nor spice bottles nor unused appliances-I was waiting for Amy to move down to purchase those. Instead at the very bottom there are ten boxes labeled: property of the U.S. government. Not for resale. This was from Rita not so long ago.

I had a friend in the National guard and he stayed with me, showing up one night with the back of his car full of these medium sized boxes. We opened up a few of them on the days where all the local restaurants were still closed. Inside are pouches labeled with things like: Meat Loaf dinner. Beef Steak. Pork rib. Chicken Tortellini. Everything came in bags of thick plastic. Brown bags on the outside, and inside a puck of clear plastic hugging the vacuum sealed dinners. Tommy, my military friend, showed me how to cook them, cutting the flat bags open and filling them with water to the line, then stuffing them back into the thick brown bags so that the exothermic chemical reaction could heat the meals up. Just heat them up, of course, only got to a little over boiling. Some of them were quite good, tasted like good canned stuff. Some were horrible. It was food, though, food that would last. That was years ago, but not yet ten. He told me there was a shelf life of ten years. I often look in the pantry and wonder how the heck I’ll ever finish a hundred meals when it gets to the time to retire them. It’s been seven years. Good as time as any to start. I load the ten boxes, each with ten meals, into the back of the Beast.

I should go for some fresh food. I make a note
Outside I stop to think back to my “list.” Computer. Food. What else? It’s hazy. I go back inside and grab a message pad and make a list:
Water
MRE’s
Fresh Food
Computer
Extra phones/Cameras
Laptops
Clothes
Gasoline
Axe
Guns/Ammo
I go back for the clothes, sheepish that I forgot something so basic. I grab the changes of underwear and some solid shirts and heavy coats and stuff them into my biggest bag.