I looked behind me; one crazy was far off in the distance, jogging towards us. That was the one I had shot I thought. The remaining four crazies had given up the chase instead they gathered around the one we had ran over, it was flopping around on the asphalt, clearly alive and very upset. Just as clearly it was suffering from several broken bones. Somehow that made me smile.
I had slipped back down inside the SUV before I realized I was missing one of his revolvers. I started to frantically look for it.
“What’s wrong John?” he asked.
I gave up and sat down. I held out one of the Colts for him and said
“I lost the other one; I am so sorry Mr. Tucker.”
I surprised myself even as the words came out of my mouth. I knew that OMT loved those guns; at least I thought I did. He glanced over at me and then to my surprise just asked if I would please reload it. He kept driving, his knuckles white on the steering wheel, I looked at the speedometer and it looked like we were going over 90. I took a box of bullets from his pack and pulled the spent shells, replacing them with live ones. I held it out to him and I was afraid that he could see how upset I was because my hand was trembling. But instead of being angry, instead of yelling at me, he just shook his head.
“John, those are just guns, tools, and hunks of metal. They really don’t matter. People matter.” he paused then added “we matter John, you and I and the people we love, that is all that really matters.”
I sat there for a moment, holding the revolver out to him. “Why don’t you just leave it on the dash, we might need it again soon and you see better than I do” and OMT smiled at me. We sat there together, driving towards Morgantown at 90 miles an hour, neither speaking, both of us; at long last, understanding.
Later that afternoon we pulled off onto an exit ramp and then onto the overpass. OMT said that from the extra height we might make sure we were not being snuck up on. We parked and got out but he left the engine running just in case. OMT was reaching into the back seat for a couple of MREs and some bottled water and I walked around to the front of the SUV. I ran my hand over the hood, the metal was torn, ripped open by the creatures fingers. There was a yell from Tucker, he held up the colt I thought I had lost. Each rupture was between 5 and 10 inches long, violent gashes with the metal pulled upwards as if there had been an explosion beneath it. I ran my finger carefully over one and with a start realized that there was no blood, no damage to the Z from this. I startled as I looked up and saw OMT watching me. He held out a bottle of water to me and said
“Pretty damn scary ain’t it?”
I nodded in agreement and opened the water and drank. He handed me one of the MREs and we both leaned against the front of the SUV. I looked at it, ‘spaghetti and meatballs’, should be fine I thought, I glanced at his, ‘
chili con carne’
, figures. Then in honor of my little sister I said
“Ain’t is not a word.”
He barked out a laugh.
After our lunch I asked OTM how much further and after he considered it he said
“Maybe 3 hours? Not too sure where we are exactly.”
I nodded and walked back around the passenger side, looking the direction we were heading it appeared that a storm was heading our way, the sky on the horizon was very, very black.
“Check it out.” I said nodding towards the black clouds.
He had the driver’s door open so he just stepped up into it just to gain a bit more height. “Hmmm...” was all he said.
“Think we are in for some bad weather?” I asked.
“I don’t know John.” he said.
He reached into the SUV and produced our binoculars. He watched for a minute then stretched across the roof and handed them to me.
“What do you make of that?” he asked.
I actually got into the SUV, popped through the moon roof then climbed up onto the roof itself. I looked for a few minutes.
“I don’t think those are clouds” I said, “I think those are from a fire.”
I looked down at him and he said
“I agree, and it’s a big one.”
We finally got back on the road but kept our speed down to about 60. After 15 minutes or so we began to smell the smoke, it was revolting, burned rubber and wood smoke and lots of other things I didn’t recognize. I didn’t have to ask because OMT slowed the car even more, even though the highway was still basically clear with the exception of an occasional abandoned car or truck on the side of the road. Ten minutes after that we came to a complete stop at the city limits of Fairmont, West Virginia, it was only about 20 more miles to the outskirts of Morgantown. OMT said it was a bit more than half the size of Morgantown and from where we were it looked like the whole of the city was on fire.
We sat and watched for a few minutes when suddenly OMT yelled “LOOK!” and he pointed at an incredibly fast, low flying jet aircraft came from our west and headed right for Fairmont. The noise from the jet reached us a few moments later, that was followed by a thunderous explosion and while we couldn’t see what the jet fighter had done, it clearly had done something because a new wall of flame was reaching into the sky obscuring the jets path.
“What was that?” I asked.
“It was a napalm run, basically a jellied gasoline bomb” he said, “but if you mean what kind of plane it was I have no idea. I have not been able to identify anything since the Phantom.”
We watched for a minute or two more and then we heard or more accurately felt the rumble of large artillery fire, but we couldn’t see where it came from or where it was going. It was more like thunder that was bouncing around in a valley someplace.
“So, what do you think?” I asked.
“Well,” he said clearly buying time. “option one, we can turn around and go home but if we do we will still be in the same situation as before, option two, we can try and find a way around Fairmont, but there is no way of knowing if there will be any route that is better, or option three, we can drive right through that.” and he nodded in the direction of Fairmont.
I thought long and hard about the problem, well not really that long, but I had no intention of driving through a city that was on fire and most likely a warzone between the U.S. military and a bunch of Z’s and I said so.
“I agree” he said, “but we need weapons so I don’t want to turn around unless we have no choice.”
“That leaves number two then.”
I said. We got back into the car and started looking for an alternative route. OMT knew that Fairmont and Morgantown were on US Highway 79 and had been along that highway a few times but he had never actually explored the area but then again what did we have to lose?
We tried a couple of exits but finally had some success on something called White Hall Blvd. We turned north and followed along the bank of a rather good sized river. For a while I could see a road on the other side but I didn’t like looking too much. There were burnt out cars and military vehicles. When the Fairmont Airport just became visible across the river we turned away. I had seen hundreds of corpses on the river bank, some in army green, others in civilian clothes; a few others seemed to have that black bug armor. We crossed several other intersections when we came to a bridge, it was a wreck and flaming vehicles were scattered all over it. Some of them so hot that the flame appeared to be under pressure, like a propane torch.
We drove carefully, painfully across the wrecked bridge. Several places the guard rails had been punctured and in at least one the road bed had fallen away to the river below. We had to swing wide to get around it but we finally managed. We reached the other side but still did not make much better time. Several times OMT used the SUV to shove wrecks to one side or the other of the road. I noticed that the road we were on had several names; Highway 250 and Fairmont Avenue being the most noticeable. Finally things cleared a bit and we started making better time. I could tell that things were straining OMT. He didn’t like to leave things to chance and on this trip nothing had gone according to plan.
Suddenly OMT seemed to regain some energy and he looked at me with a grin,
“I know where we are!”
It was so genuine I could not help but smile back. We took the next exit and to my amazement we were back on Highway 79 but this time heading south, we crossed a bridge that seemed basically undamaged. I read the name of the river
“Mono-go-ella?” I asked.
“Monongahela” he said and looked at me excitedly.
“What does it mean?” I asked. “Well, it’s a native American word, it means something like …”,
He seemed to be looking for the words in his own head,
“Something like ‘the river bank falls in’, something like that.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked. “What does the river bank fall in?”
He laughed “into the RIVER John, the banks fall into the river.”
I was getting confused “What river?”
He was barely able to keep from breaking up “The Monongahela!”
He seemed to think this was hilarious.
“So you mean to tell me that the river banks are falling into a river called the river banks are falling in?”
He just about had a heart attack, he was laughing so hard all he could do was say
“Who’s on first?”
“What?” I asked.
This caused him to laugh even harder; I decided to change the question.
“Okay, what tribe was so clever to name the river like that?” I asked.
More laughter but he was able to choke out “The Monongahela”.
I was beginning to like him better when I hated him, still I could always shoot him later. I thought it about it some more and said
“So you mean to tell me that a tribe of Native Americans called “the river banks fall in lived along a river where the river banks fall in and called it the river banks fall in?”
He was laughing so hard I swear he had tears on his cheeks and I gave up muttering
“Stupid name for a river anyway.”
Once we were across the bridge we went a couple more miles then made a sharp hairpin turn onto a road that didn’t have a name as far as I could see. Thank God I thought, my luck it would have been the
‘road on the bank of the river with the bank that falls in avenue
’. OMT cut the wheels and entered a large parking lot that was paved with gravel. At the far end was a huge warehouse. There was a sign saying “
Dray’s Firearms Sales
”, its web address and some store front hours below that.
There were no cars that I could see but there was one diesel big rig with a trailer was on the side of the building and was backed up to a loading dock. A second trailer off to one side but that one looked rusty and as if it had not been used in decades or centuries, maybe even since the Bush Administration. He looked at me.
“We made it John.”
I looked at him, he was still wearing that annoying smile but I didn’t fall for it, instead I picked up the .41 colt from the dash board and we both got out of the SUV. I looked over at him, he had the double barrel shotgun in his hands and a Beretta M9 stuffed into his the waist band of his jeans. I shoved the colt into my holster and picked up my M16. It dawned on me that I was getting pretty comfortable with weapons for a 12 year old. We walked slowly, carefully across the lot but 50 feet from the front door we could see that a huge metal garage door looking thing had been lowered and locked in place behind a glass front.
“Great” I muttered and looked over at OMT.
He was looking around then said “Wait here John”
He walked around the side of the building to the Freightliner. He looked inside then hopped down and opened the door. He poked around in the rear sleeper area for a moment then he climbed in. A moment later the big 14 liter 6 cylinder started to turn over and in a moment it caught and the diesel roared to life. I could hear him yell in victory then shut off the engine and got out. He walked over to me and he handed me the shotgun.
He jogged back to the SUV and got in. A few minutes later he started it up and revved the engine.
“Oh crap” I thought, “is this the only plan this guy ever comes up with?”
He backed up a bit then peeled out and there was a tremendous crash as the SUV bashed through the glass wall and made contact with the garage door thingy. The garage door was pretty solid but not enough for a SUV going 40 miles an hour. The SUV was sitting there, the engine having died and the rear tires lifted into the air by the strange angle at which it landed. The rear wheels were spinning slower and slower and bits of glass kept falling but there was no other sound. I began to get nervous, what was I going to do if that crazy old man had just killed himself. Suddenly the rear hatch of the SUV popped and it was slowly raised. Old Man Tucker’s face appeared; he had some blood running down his forehead and looked as if he had just been hit between the eyes with a baseball bat.
“Come on John, we don’t have all day!”
I shook my head as I climbed into the rear of the SUV, which was outside. I exited the drivers’ door of the SUV which was inside. I was beginning to miss Mr. Samuel’s history class.