How to Find Peace at the End of the World (11 page)

I have to laugh at myself. My quest seems so Quixotic now in the rational light of the morning.

I sit there on the escalator and crack the book open on my lap. What is in here that had felt so urgent? Of course, there was one line in particular warning about some impending doom that I had forgotten about but could not for the life of me remember on my own. However the book is made for TV, for some show meant to scare users into watching. Well, it wasn’t presented as a tragedy in the book, just a fact of what would happen, a doom to nobody in particular. No the real tragedy presented was for all the zoo animals and pets locked in their cages, no way of getting out unlike the Pinschers I encountered last night. I mince through the pages thinking that I will encounter those sad passages again before finding what I am really looking for. But no hesitation is necessary. I find the passages I had originally sought on page thirty five:
 

“About ten days after the disappearance of humanity, the nuclear power plants, having run out of diesel fuel to keep the cooling pumps running, will begin to go into full meltdown. Inevitably, the pressure inside the containment chambers will reach such a level as to cause volcanic explosions of radioactive steam and particularized nuclear material. Over days, the nuclear cloud will cover most of the Northern hemisphere, killing or sickening or causing secondary mutations in untold numbers of flora and fauna. However, the wildlife in the Southern Hemisphere will for the most part be safe: even taking into account the few advanced economies, such as Australia, there are only a handful of nuclear reactors in the southern hemisphere, three total in all of South America, actually. So, in this post-apocalyptic world, the rain forest will finally be mostly out of danger.”

And there it is. Black and white telling me to get the fuck south.

I scoff at the terrible juxtaposition, of course. The rain forest. who would even be around to give a fuck about the rain forest in such an “unlikely scenario?” I sure as hell didn’t. I snapped the book shut. Ten days. So I had ten days to get up there to Dallas and look for Amy and on finding her alive head back down to the Southern Hemisphere. The book didn’t say, of course, how far I would need to go, but I felt that crossing the equator, with plans to go further south as the North went into meltdown should be good enough. I figured I’d already wasted two and a half days with this pansy ass meandering I was doing. It might take me another two or three days to get up to Dallas, if I booked it. No more stopping for library books and Primo Mary Jane. I tucked the book under my arm and headed back out to the Beast. When I opened the door, Charley attacked me with a tongue barrage. “Happy to see you, too. After all of ten minutes,” I chuckle. I start up the Beast and make my way towards the freeway entrance ramps. I always used to get lost when I was downtown, and even now, now with use of the one way streets in either direction that I desire, I still get lost. Eventually I find the ramp to 45 North. “On to Dallas!” I say to Charley as I ruffle his fur and crack his window open to let him hang his head out.

11:30 I stop at another Wal-Mart on the North side of town. There hasn’t been any construction on the north side, thankfully, and my progress through Houston’s northern half is much easier. I head inside and pick up a few things I forgot the first time and things to fill some new needs, namely two giant 100 lbs sacks and several cans of dog food. Charley is in there with me and I crack open a few cans right there. The floor looks clean enough.
Perfect. Two birds with one stone for him. Eating and exercise
, I think, as he nudges the pile of wet food around the floor, halfway down the aisle in fact. When he’s done he lifts his head up and looks back at me laughing at him. He barks. He wants some more but I tell him to hold on and continue pushing the hand cart down the store’s main aisle.
I feed him again on getting back to the truck, pouring a good quarter bag or so of dry doggie chow into the large metal bowl I’d gotten for him and topped it off with a few cans of the premium wet stuff. He devours everything. I mean, he looks well fed and he’d had a good bit of jerky but I realize now he probably hadn’t had much to eat the entire day before.
“Sorry boy,” I say patting his head while he eats.
While he polishes off the bowl and spends a few minutes exploring the other cars and the grassy embankment in the parking lot, I fire up the generator in the back of the truck. I remember now there was a reason I’d lugged my desktop with me beyond all the pictures and documents. Before I plug it in I open up the case and make sure nothing’s been loosened by my less than polite driving. All the cards and cables seem to be well seated. Nothing rattles. I plug the PC power cable into the back of the truck and hook it up to one of the tablet displays I’d gotten from work. I take a six hundred gig travel drive I’d picked up in the Wal-mart out of its packaging and stick it into the PC. I spend a few minutes searching through the hard drive grabbing all the things I want to access, the main thing being the full Wiki download I’d made a few weeks before. While I’m at it, I fire up the Wiki on my computer’s server and look for dog species. A few searches yield too many results, and the main listing of dog breeds is head spinning. Then I try “Large Dog Breeds,” and on the second page I find it. I say to Charley, who has since come back from the grassy embankment having done his business “Guess what. It says here you’re a Great Pyrenees. A mountain dog.”
“Ruff.”
It’s my turn to tilt my head at him, now. If I squint, he kind of looks like Ruff, the white shaggy dog from the Dennis the Menace comics. I consider the alternative to the name Charley but Charley seems, at least to me, to stick better.
“Charley,” I say.
Ruff.
“So be it.”
I laugh at myself for talking to a dog. Then I thank whatever personal god I might still have watching over me for leading me to him, or him to me.
Then, finally, I’m on the road again. I get out of the muck of downtown and rise on to I-45. No blockages, thankfully. There’s a clump of cars on an elevated portion but I’m able to find a way around: it seems that many have flown off the elevated stretch of highway. This is confirmed a few hundred feet down when I see an eighteen wheeler has plowed into the side railing and knocked it over and a car has followed right after it. The car rests now on the roof of a popular dim sum restaurant downtown that Amy and I had often patronized when she was in town.
Pretty soon I’m going at speed. Actually, fuck it I say and seeing the way clear before me I gun it up to a hundred and ten.  
Charley seems to like this, actually. I keep the passenger window open and Charley sticks his head out. I have to be careful to keep my eyes on the road because the wind makes these cool, almost hypnotic patterns against his fur. His tongue flops rhythmically against the side of his head. So do his big floppy jowls. Every once in a while he pulls his head back in to lick his dry chops and check up on me.
“So, Great Pyrenees, tell me what the road ahead holds for us,”
“Ruff!”
Ha! It works in so many situations.
“Am I going crazy?”

“Ruff!”
You know what? I think he’s right.
12:50 PM. I stop the Beast and consider the cluster fuck before me. I’m at the 45 and Beltway 8 juncture. Another glob of traffic has chosen to lodge itself here, even though there aren’t any construction barriers funneling things to a stop here like a bottleneck. I imagine cars running out of speed, bouncing down the highway like pin-balls. Eventually, still in drive, they would just travel at idle speed until bumping into an obstruction in the road way itself: the concrete barriers would, until then, act like the kiddie bumpers at the bowling alley.
I bring the Beast to a stop about five hundred feet away from the pileup. I look around. There is one single car stopped before the pile of other cars. Its sides are smashed to Hell but it’s just stopped there. I get out of the Beast, holding Charley in before softly closing the door. I get out my pistol and slowly creep up to the car to investigate.

I don’t find anybody inside. I look around and it’s quiet all around. I look back inside the cabin and see the car is still in D, its tank empty. I chuckle to myself. What are the chances? Maybe it was already low on gas that morning. I imagined the car, driverless, slowly idling though all the concrete innards of downtown Houston, bumping and scraping into the concrete dividers but being pushed back on its merry way, until here, miles away from where it had been, deep in the city, it finally ran out of gas. I laugh to myself again: I’d given myself a nice scare. The scare being that maybe I wasn’t alone in this forsaken city. The roads, except for vehicles that had become stuck on the sides, or wrecked completely or overturned on their roofs were the only ones I’d encountered. Some idiot part of my mind imagined some other crazy survivor driving around in this beaten up wreck of car, stopping precisely where I’d stopped before the mountain of cars ahead. I think about my bowling alley analogy, the concrete barriers like bumpers, the car like a weak throw you might have made as a kid that stops before it even reaches the pins. I smile and ruffle Charley’s fur as I climb back into the Beast.
Well, this stoppage situation is easily solved. I drive back in the opposite direction on the freeway and take the off ramp on to the I-45 feeder road. Driving down into the dip I see where a bunch of cars, taking the path of least resistance, have ended up below the interchange. One is even stuck up on an isolated concrete island between two pillars. I pass by the flying interchange ramps, looming over me like mountains. I drive down the feeder until the next feeder ramp and get back on the freeway. Once I’m past the interchange, I turn back around and go up the interchange ramp that I had just passed under: it goes about ninety feet into the air. Near the apex of the ramp I do a three point turn. It’s thrilling in its own little way: I have never before had chance to stop on the apex of a freeway ramp. I get out and let Charley out, too. From my duffel I remove a pair of binoculars. I spend way too long just scanning the horizon with them. I glass downtown, from where I had come and check out all the skyscrapers glinting in the sun. All the fires are down and, except for the large airplane hole in Heritage plaza, it looks pristine, like from a post card.

Then I turn around and glass north up I-45. Except for some cars that have edged off the side of the road it’s clear for miles. I call to Charley, who has worked his way further down the ramp and is nudging something interesting to him with his snout. He comes back and licks my hand.
I take the opportunity to top off the tank again and make sure everything in the back of the truck bed is secure. Then I get back in the Beast with my fluffy white friend and gun it down the ramp onto the highway to Dallas.
2 PM. Dammit. For some reason the driverless cars like to gum up the worst places. In the big cities at least you had feeder roads where the cars were likely to get funneled. Here in Texas we have a lot of these long stretches, especially over river ravines, that are surrounded by concrete on all sides. Several times these are clogged up with cars like logs stopped by a bend in the river. I find myself backtracking and taking the back roads, especially when there’s no feeder, like at these bridges. One time I even get lost on some back roads and it takes me half an hour to find my way back to the interstate.
 

All the while I’m driving, certain passages from the book I went into the dark library to get are replaying in my mind.

Ten days after AHV-day (the author’s shorthand for All Humans Vanish, sounds like some old religious holiday with roman numerals or something), the nuclear reactors sprinkled around the North American landscape will go critical, their maintenance and cooling mechanism having lost their external power supply.
Why even power the cooling systems externally? Why not use the power the nuke generates to cool the thing? Maybe only use external power when there’s a problem?
That’s always a question that came to my mind on hearing about nuclear disasters past.

One by one or all at once the nuclear reactors in the United States will replicate what happened at Chernobyl in 1986. Containment domes with concrete four feet thick will pop like needle pricked balloons from the thousands of pounds of steam pressure that has built underneath them. Giant clouds of atomized radioactive material will rise up for thousands of feet into the air and, catching crosswinds, will quickly disperse. The heavy radioactive metals will then begin to fall out as if through a sifter. Or the radioactive dust will be taken in by clouds and will fall with the rain and be soaked up by the water table. Water will be contaminated. Earth will be contaminated. Living things that don’t die almost immediately, such as the trees and heartier plants, will take up the radioactive poisons and the environment will be uninhabitable for people and creatures larger and more complex than cockroaches for thousands of years.

That last line is hardly worth mentioning, I think, especially for a book titled Vanished Humanity: How the World Will Reclaim Itself after Humans are Gone
 

I stop a few times along the way to chew a piece of jerky with Charley and sip some Gatorade and read a few more passages from the book.

Listen to this, I say to Charley, and then I read the passage out loud.
“Ruff,” Charley always says after.

“You’re god-damn right,” I always say after.
 

Somehow, despite my wounds, despite these circumstances, the miles crawling by slowly, the dog with its head resting on the shoulder of the car door, the window down and the air rustling through, things begin to seem almost routine. Some other normal, despite how weird that normal might be.