Just Plain Weird (25 page)

    
    
We started exploring by slowly driving down the side streets. The eeriness of not seeing any other human beings soon became almost overwhelming. Every house or apartment building we passed was shadowed and gave off the air of lonely abandonment. Some buildings had been fled with such haste or in such a panic that front doors remained open. Forgotten toys-- a big wheel, dirt bikes, a baseball bat and mitt-- left on front lawns now devoid of grass were disturbingly sad sights. When we reached the main street, we could see the small storefronts of the neighborhood business had fallen victim to the same rushed retreat of humanity. Some stores were locked down and dark. Others had their doors wide open. Even the florist shop, owned by the two elderly sisters who eternally trimmed rose stems and baby’s breath, stood coldly as an ancient tombstone. There were more cars on the main street. While some were neatly and normally parked beside the curb, other stuck ass-end out into the street so that Eliza had to navigate round them. A conversion van was abandoned, with all doors open and hood up, in the middle of the street. A station wagon had jumped the curb and crashed into a light pole, which tilted threatening to fall; it seemed only the electric wires run to it, strained by the weight of the post, were the only thing keeping it upright at all.

    
    
Eliza drove along slowly, silently gaping at the desolate images. I started thinking about my family. Oddly enough, I felt closer to them now than ever before. I wondered what had become of my mother. I wondered whether my father was on the road, alone, when the catastrophe-- whatever it had been-- had occurred. I even wondered what my brother had been doing, and did he have a moment to record some pithy prose to describe the chaos that must have taken place on the campus. In their absence and in the wake of a disaster, they seemed more of a family than they ever had when everything was normal.

    
    
On the corner ahead to the right, there was a gas station, and I instructed Eliza to pull into it. The hoses from the self-service pumps lay discarded on the ground, looking like thick black snakes. Eliza drove up to the front door, whose safety glass was filled with a network of cracks that looked like a large spider web. I jumped out of the car and entered the station. Inside racks of candy and other junk food were nearly empty. Old candy bars lay strewn on the floor and had been stepped on, flattened, as though a herd of munchies-craving college kids had stampeded through the small station. The coolers were empty except for a couple lonely cans of diet soda of an off brand. I went to the back wall, which was lined with shelves of overpriced automotive products-- plastic bottles of oil and transmission and brake fluid, gallons of anti-freeze-- all scattered or fallen over like dead soldiers. I found what I was looking for: cans of condensed air to fill your tires in an emergency. I grabbed a couple cans, and went out to the car and filled the tires until the air pressure was about what it ought to be. Before I got back into the car, I went back into the station and retrieved a few extra cans of air, in case we had a slow leak, and a five-gallon plastic gas can. With the electric out, I knew it would be impossible for us to pump gas at any of the gas stations we happened across, but I figured, if need be, I might be able to siphon gas from the tanks of abandoned vehicles. All I would need was a hose, which we could get from the yard of any house.

    
    
When we left, the car rode much more smoothly now with the air pressure raised in the tires. Eliza didn’t have to be so careful about avoiding potholes, and for a while even seemed to be aiming for them.

    
    
We came across an area of complete destruction. There had obviously been a major fire, and nearly every building within the square block area had burned. The walls of the brick buildings were charred and in varying degrees of collapse, creating a jagged landscape broken only by the gaps where wooden structure had burned down to the ground, leaving piles of ashy remains. The fire must have occurred at a time of high winds, which carried the fire from structure to structure, from the retail buildings in front to the garages of private residences in the rear, from the garages to other garages and then finally to the homes themselves. Through the gaps between the burned out hulks, you could see in the distance the yards of the homes, where metal storage sheds and here and there a kids’ metal swing set or
 
plastic play set miraculously survived what must been a ravenous conflagration.

    
    
“Omigod,” Eliza said, gaping at the ruins, instead of watching the street ahead. “What do you think caused that?”

    
    
“Just a small fire,” I said. “Watch where you’re going, huh? It would be a heck of a thing for two of the last three people on earth to get killed in a one-car accident.”

    
    
“But how could a small fire burn down block after block of buildings?” she wanted to know, still so mystified at the huge charred area she couldn’t take her eyes off it.

    
    
“It probably started after the fire department stopped operations, and then went out of control,” I guessed. “Now, will you please watch the street?”

    
    
It was true. There wasn’t a single fire truck in sight. No emergency call had gone in, and no response had been made; it was clear that the fire had occurred after the area was vacated.

    
    
“You know, we should look for the nearest fire station,” I suggested, a thought occurring to me. “The fire department was probably the last functioning emergency department.” That was always the way it was with firefighters: the first to respond to danger and the last to retreat. This was why they were such heroic figures. And yet when they weren’t facing great danger, their presence was so low-key that they were nearly invisible to the community. They were the living embodiment of peace of mind, but, really, if you asked everybody, how many people would know the location of the firehouse nearest their home? “Yeah,” I said, “I’m sure that they would have been operational longer than the police department-- maybe even longer than the hospital emergency rooms and local trauma centers.”

    
    
I watched Eliza as she drove. Once or twice, she started to turn her face toward me, as though about to speak but then thinking better of it.

    
    
“What is it?” I asked.

    
    
“What’s what?” she said innocently.

    
    
“What’s on your mind?”

    
    
“Nothing, why? Oh, you’re reading my mind now?”

    
    
“No, if I were, I wouldn’t have to ask.”

    
    
“It’s nothing, really,” she said. “Just a passing thought.”

    
    
“What is it?”

    
    
“Just an observation,” she explained. “I’d rather not say.”

    
    
“Why?”

    
    
“Well, it might sound a little ghoulish. I don’t want you to think I have a creepy mind, you know?”

    
    
“I already think that,” I said. “So what’s the observation? Give it up.”

    
    
“Well,” she said, and hedged long enough to get in a bite at her low lip, “I was just thinking that we have covered pretty many blocks already, right? We still haven’t seen another living being yet, right? Well, considering that some kind of disaster occurred, there is something else we haven’t seen.”

    
    
“What’s that?”

    
    
“We haven’t seen any dead people, either,” she said. “Shouldn’t there be dead people?”

    
    
She was right-- absolutely right. There ought to be dead people, at least some. If not dead people, dead something: dogs, cats, birds… anything. But all we had seen was property-- homes, businesses, vehicles-- all having been abandoned in a mad rush to avoid-- what? What kind of disaster leaves nothing dead in its wake? It seemed like a curious omission, all right. People get killed, if not from the disaster itself, during the mindless, selfish scramble to flee danger: people trampled to death while trying to escape a burning building. Any time you have thousands of people, each looking out for number one in a life-and-death struggle, you’re bound to have some killed, either accidently or intentionally, by somebody who wants nothing more than to survive, and if you, another innocence human being who also wants nothing more than to survive, happens to get in the way-- oh, well, sorry Charlie, it’s either you or me, and guess what, by the way, I have a gun…so out of your car, jerk-face, mine broke down. Don’t want to go? Let me help you. Bang! Bang!… When everyone is in danger, nobody is harmless.

    
    
“It does seem strange,” I finally agreed. “Listen, forget about the firehouse. Take a right up here, and head downtown.” Downtown, I reasoned, was the area that would have had the densest concentration of people. That was where we really ought to see something, gather some clues as to what had occurred.

    
    
Rather than taking the expressway into downtown, we stayed on a main street-- the longest street in the city-- which headed straight into downtown and gave us a better view of the desolation along the way. We saw more abandoned cars and trucks, more deserted buildings and businesses, but not a single person, living or dead. The entire ride was eerily remindful of showing up two hours after some massive blast of a party had ended: we saw the mess left behind, but none of the partygoers.

    
    
As we approached downtown, I could see ahead in the distance already, even under the twilit sky, that something didn’t look right. Although I’d gone into downtown this way many times before, it suddenly seemed that we weren’t going the right way. I couldn’t put my finger on what was wrong; whatever it was was so vastly wrong that it eluded my senses. I had to check and recheck landmarks we passed-- an old church and schoolhouse, a small park where an ancient army tank was made into a monument-- to assure myself that, despite the way it looked, we were indeed going the right way. But it wasn’t anything nearby that was amiss, but something ahead down the street. The darkness seemed to dip too low, to hover too near the ground in the distance, as though the dark particles in the upper atmosphere were reaching down and blocking out the horizon, the horizon that should have been jagged with the forms of modern high-rises, most of which were constructed of aluminum and glass and on sunny days would sparkle like gems. The downtown area was not large-- not like Chicago, or New York, or even Cleveland-- but it was not small either. Most of the structures were fairly new, built in the last thirty years, and had a modernistic look to them. The skyline of downtown inspired the city’s motto: the city of the future. But now the skyline, which should have been visible, seemed to be cloaked in darkness that appeared to be drifting down from the sky above. I wasn’t sure whether this was an optical illusion or what. I knew that on some dreary days, the clouds could hang so low that the upper floors of some of the taller skyscrapers seemed to be missing, but this was different. The darkness appeared to be so low that it spilled onto the ground, onto the very street on which we now drove. When we were a couple blocks from the edge of downtown, the problem-- fantastic as it seemed-- became apparent.

    
    
“Travis…” Eliza murmured. Her eyes were focused on some point down the street.

    
    
“Maybe you better slow down,” I suggested. She’d been driving at thirty miles an hour, slowing only now and again to avoid a discarded vehicle. She dropped down to a crawl as we neared the optical illusion that wasn’t an optical illusion.

    
    
We could clearly see now that downtown simply wasn’t there. The street ahead ended, and beyond there was a vast sea of nothingness.

    
    
Eliza stopped the four by four about a hundred feet from where the street abruptly dropped off. We both climbed out and wandered up to the edge and gazed down into the crater. It was impossible to guess how deep the crater was; its lowest recesses were pitched in dark shadows. But it was pretty deep, all right, as well as being wide and long enough to occupy the entire area on which downtown once stood.