Dark Road (12 page)

…

The roads the rest of the way to the fire station where Dan had been stationed were mostly clear. The main reason it took as long as it did to get there was their desire to not be ambushed, and to maintain a speed that was comfortable for Bekah. Being eight, she hadn’t yet graduated to a multi-speed bike, so there was only so much her little legs could make her bike do.

The two miles took three hours, and it was just after 3:00 when they pulled up to the fire station that housed the ambulance depot that had dispatched Dan. Hopefully the side trip would be worthwhile.

Like virtually every building they had passed since leaving their neighborhood, that was still standing anyway, most of the windows on the first floor were broken. The industrial security bars had prevented anything more than surface vandalism, and had kept anyone from entering the building. Most of the windows on the second floor, however, were still intact—which gave Dan some hope. He knew what was upstairs.

“We’ll pull the bikes around back and bring them inside.” Dan said. Even if the big roll-up doors were locked, he had keys to the double doors and could open just about any locked door inside.

By now the building had been completely abandoned, but it obviously hadn’t been left to the looters. While the front had taken the brunt of the vandalism, the back had been pretty much left alone. There were only a few broken windows and all of the doors were still locked. All of the fire trucks, and all but one of the ambulances, were gone. Dan was pretty sure that ambulance wasn’t running, which was why it was still here.

It only took a minute to unlock the double doors in back, pull the bikes inside, and lock the doors again.

“Rissa, I have no idea if anyone has decided to call this place home.” Dan said, looking at the shotgun sticking up over her shoulder from her backpack.

She nodded and pulled it out and jacked a round into the chamber. “Girls, stay close. We need to look around for some things and we’ll probably be spending the night here.” She said.

“Even if we don’t spend the night I’m hoping we can all get some sleep, at the very least.” Dan said.

With the back doors locked and no easy way to get into the garage from the front, Dan felt pretty secure leaving the bikes where they were. They left the garage through the ready room and took the stairs to the second floor, where the sleeping area was for the ambulance crews. This was also where the long-term ambulance supply storage was.

The main floor was mostly offices, so there just hadn’t been room for the boxes and boxes of everything they kept on hand to keep the ambulances topped off after each run. There were some things downstairs for quick access, but the bulk of it was kept upstairs under lock and key, and Dan, being one of the EMTs, had those keys.

The first thing they passed through, though, was the kitchen, and that stopped Dan and Marissa. “First things first,” Dan said, “see if there is
anything
we can use.” They found half a container of Quaker oats in the lazy-susan, and two unopened bottles of Tabasco sauce. Pickings were slim, but they would have oatmeal for breakfast, and now there was hot sauce for their soup.

Next were the dormitory style bedrooms. At this point, Dan didn’t feel the least bit bad about raiding them for anything and everything that might make their life on the road any less difficult. He knew that some of his coworkers had been of the “prepper” mindset and was hoping to find something useful, but none of the rooms turned up anything. He didn’t check his own room, other than a quick glance to confirm something. He’d be checking it out more thoroughly later on.

Finally, there was the storage area. “Please don’t be empty,” Dan said as he looked at the state of the steel fire doors. They had been beat on pretty hard with what looked like hammers, or makeshift battering rams—but they’d held. Luckily the doorknobs were still intact—without those, Dan’s keys would be useless.

“Fingers crossed,” Marissa agreed.

Dan skipped the first two doors since what he was hoping to find wouldn’t be there anyway. The third door was more of a closet than a room. It held medicines. Inside the room were locked cabinets, and each of those cabinets had locked boxes. This room held things like Xylocaine, for injecting prior to stitches, all the way up to Morphine. There were Nitroglycerine tablets, for people having a heart attack, and Cortisone for injecting into joints. They’d had Adrenaline and even shelf-stable Insulin that didn’t need to be refrigerated until after the seal was broken.

Dan unlocked the steel door and reached inside to flip on the light just like he’d been doing for years, even though he was holding a flashlight. “Duh, three months with no power and I reach for the light switch.” He said as he shook his head. “Some things just come right back to you.”

“Bekah, honey, I need you to come hold the flashlight for me.” Dan said. “Mommy needs to stay outside and watch the hallway.”

“Mommy might go a little crazy in there, too.” Marissa muttered under her breath. She knew what they kept in there, and with some of her medications having run completely out over a month ago she’d been in a
lot
of pain. She was coping, but chronic pain and the end of the world are not something that most people like to contemplate together in the same sentence.

Dan went to the third cabinet and unlocked it, and saw that somehow the locked boxes were all still there. The second box from the left on the second shelf was what he wanted for his wife—the Xylocaine. In the past, she’d gotten trigger point injections—and that was what he was after right now. Unfortunately, they didn’t have any of the medications she was on, so he wouldn’t be able to do any refills for her. He could, however, give her some relief; and hopefully she could get some sleep.

“Bekah, honey, can you shine the light inside this box please.” Dan tried to keep the panic out of his voice. He could see by some of the glow of the flashlight that the box wasn’t as full as it should have been. In fact, he couldn’t see any vials in the box at all.

Empty. There wasn’t anything in the lockbox. The door had held but someone had beat him to the medicine room after all.
OK, stop, think. Start going through boxes one at a time and see if there is
anything
still here. There might still be something of use.

Slowly, Dan started going through the lockboxes one at a time. Atropine, Epinephrine, Insulin, Morphine, Nitroglycerine, even the Acetaminophen and Ibuprofen were gone. As he was going through the boxes it had become obvious that something was wrong and, at the end, Marissa asked if there was a problem.

“Possibly, but let me check one last thing,” Dan said. “Actually, two last things, and in increasing order of likelihood of finding something—back downstairs.”

On the off chance of there being something in the out-of-commission ambulance in the garage, Dan wanted to rummage around there first. He also wanted to check on the bikes, and mentioned as much to Marissa as they got to the stairs.

“Good point. Keep the kids behind us both and slow down when you get to near the bottom of the stairs.” She said.

Chapter Thirteen

Everything looked the same in the garage as when they’d left and they made their way to the ambulance. Since Dan was the only one who really knew what he was looking for, Marissa continued to stand watch.

At first glance, the inside of the ambulance appeared to have been ransacked, but upon closer inspection it looked to have been a cursory job, at best. A few of the interior compartments had been opened and the contents strewn about, but that was the extent of the mess. There were masks, and a couple of IV bags and tubing, and some syringes (still in their wrappers, for a wonder) but that was really it. It gave Dan a little hope. There wouldn’t be nearly as much in the ambulance as there would have been in the closet, but there might be something.

Medications were in a locked compartment up near the driver’s compartment on the passenger’s side—at about head height. The compartment was still closed and locked. That was a good sign. Dan unlocked it and found two vials of Xylocaine and a few other things that would come in handy for either emergency or barter, if it came to that.

He took out one of the vials he wanted and relocked the compartment. At his feet should be an EMT case, in another compartment. He bent to check, but that compartment was empty—someone had gotten away with a treasure trove of medical goodies.

“Ok,” Dan said. “One more trip upstairs and then Mommy gets some shots.”

For the third time that day, Marissa was on the verge of tears. She knew
exactly
what that meant, and had a hard time not
herding
the kids and Dan back upstairs.

Dan had learned the hard way that you can’t be too prepared when it came to his job. He had an EMT kit in the house, in both cars, in his ambulance (job provided), and in a locked closet in his room at the fire station. They were headed to his room now. The irony of being so overly prepared in his work life, and yet so equally and woefully underprepared in his personal life, had not been lost on him.

His personal EMT kit at work had been stolen twice. The first two had been the pretty, nice, shiny-red “toolbox” variety. The third was, too, but it was a little smaller and fit in a cardboard box. The cardboard box fit in his closet, under a second cardboard box full of stuff (mostly books), and had other stuff on top of it. The third kit hadn’t been stolen in four years. He was hoping it had also gone unnoticed during the last two months of looting.

When they got to Dan’s room, the door was open, which Dan expected as they had walked by already. The room had been pretty thoroughly picked over, which was also expected. The closet was open, and the top of the closet had been gone through, but the bottom box was left unmolested. The box of books had worked. It had been too heavy to move to see what was underneath.

With a smile, Dan moved the box of books to the floor, opened the bottom box, and extracted his mostly-full backup EMT kit. It didn’t have any medications in it, which would have been against regulations, but it did qualify as a pretty awesome first-aid kit, if he did say so himself.

“Marissa, come here.” Dan said as he pulled out the proper gauge syringe, two Bactine wipes, and an alcohol wipe. Alcohol alone wasn’t going to cut it after three months, nope.

“Are you sure?” Marissa asked, almost not believing her ears. She’d been in non-stop, almost teeth-gritting pain for the last three weeks, before the frantic flee for their life. The thought of relief was almost too good to be true. “I mean, do you have enough?”

“I was there for a half dozen treatments; I asked each time how much they gave you in each spot, and I asked if I could feel where they were giving the injection,” Dan said. “Remember being embarrassed to the point that they mentioned your shoulders turning red?”

Marissa started turning red all over again.

“I see you do.” Dan grinned. “I have enough for at least eight ‘treatments’.”

Marissa actually shed a tear as she came and sat down on the space that Dan had cleared on the bed and unbuttoned the top button on her shirt so she could pull down one shoulder at a time.

“Is Mommy ok?” Jessie asked when she saw Marissa crying.

Marissa smiled and even laughed a little. “Mommy is fine.” She said. “C’mere, Jess.”

Jessie ran to give her mom a hug. Bekah followed suit.

“You know how Mommy’s neck and shoulders hurt sometimes?” Marissa asked.

Jessie nodded.

“Well, Daddy has a shot that he can give me that will make it not hurt, just like when I went to the doctor before the power went out.”

“Oh…and you’re crying because the shot will hurt?” Jessie asked.

Marissa laughed again.

“No, honey, it might sting just a little bit but it’s nothing like the ouchie in my neck and shoulders now.” Marissa said. “No, sometimes you cry because you’re so happy that you just can’t help it.”

Jessie looked at her mom for a few seconds and then pronounced, “Mommy, that’s just silly.”

“Yes, honey,” Marissa said with another little laugh, “it is, but it’s the truth. Now I’m going to let Daddy give me the shots so I can start feeling better, OK? I need to put you down so I can sit still.”

Marissa put Jessie down and then sat up and Dan started feeling on her neck and shoulders. Dan whistled.

“That bad, huh?” Marissa asked.

“Like you need to ask,” Dan said.

“True. It gets to a point where it’s, well it’s not background noise, and I’m not used to it, but it’s been there for so long that it’s just part of life.”

“I understand, conceptually.” Dan said. He prepped the base of her neck and let it sit for a half a minute and then cleaned it with alcohol.

“Ok, that’s
cold
.” Marissa said.

“Better cold than infected.” Dan said. “Ok, here comes a prick. I’m going to do four small ones around the base of your neck and six in your shoulder blades, you are a mess. I’m going to do them a little bit smaller but we can do them a little more frequently if we need to.”

“You’re the…EMT.” Marissa said.

…

There were pros and cons to how Dan and Marissa were handling their evacuation. On the upside, it was allowing the girls to gradually get used to the fact that they weren’t going to be living at home anymore. On the downside, it was just dragging out the inevitable. This would be the second night that they spent in an abandoned building less than ten miles from home. They were still within the city limits, and it felt like they weren’t really making any progress.

“Unless it’s raining in the morning,” Dan said, “we have got to leave first thing. Natchez Trace is not a small park, and it’s over ninety miles away.”

“I know,” Marissa agreed. “And as bad as things are now they’re not likely to improve much. We’re probably in as good of shape as we’re going to be for this trip. We should try to get as much traveling in as we can each day now.”

Dan nodded. “I don’t know how much Bekah can do, but if we can get ten miles done tomorrow, slow and steady, I think we could be off to a pretty good start. Assuming we can stay on the roads, and we don’t have to play leap-frog, and dodge broken glass like we did on the turnpike.”