The Second Intelligent Species: The Cyclical Earth (16 page)

Moving automobiles from underneath underpasses used more fuel than I wanted to waste, but it was the only way to continue to Buffalo. Several times the wagons needed to be unhooked to maneuver the fork truck. Many miles had passed from the last blockade and we were rolling smoothly, when we noticed some of the burned vehicles had more damage than others we had seen along the way. I turned the light of the fork truck in the direction of the vehicles. Two cars were flipped on their sides. The skeleton of a semi came into view with only the chassis remaining. Apparently the truck carried some volatile fuel that exploded during the fire. I was so busy looking at the damage, I missed the crater created by the BLEVE (boiling liquid expanding vapor explosion—something I learned when I was in the fire department). Whatever the rig carried created a hole in the blacktop nearly four feet deep.

The fork truck shuddered as it tried to skid to a stop. The trailer’s weight pushed it ever closer to the crater. The nose of the truck dropped and
momentum abruptly ceased. Everyone in the train lurched forward, some nearly falling out entirely. Some of the supplies tipped over and landed on one of the children.

The sudden stop caused me to slam my head into the windshield. The force of my skull impacting the Plexiglas windshield caused the nearly indestructible material to break in half. I fought unconsciousness by thinking about how much the others depended on me. I needed to stay awake. I grabbed hold of the levers that raise and adjust the forks to avoid falling off entirely. The fork truck stalled out. I couldn’t prevent it. Stunned, I sat back down on the seat and struggled to ask if everyone was all right. Before I could muster the ability to speak clearly, I heard a now familiar voice.

“What to fuck are you doing?” Sarah screamed.

All the children were crying. I managed to turn to see the nurses doing their assessments of each patient.

Eve was screaming, while the others were only crying.

“I fell on her when he stopped so quickly,” Sarah said, trying to put the blame on anyone but her. “I think her arm might be broken.”

I heard other things, but was having a difficult time staying conscious.

The next thing I remember was Beth shaking me. “Nick, Nick… Are you all right?” She shined a flashlight in my face.

“What happened?” I was groggy. I knew Beth was talking, but couldn’t clearly understand her.

She was checking my pupils, and though the light was hurting my eyes, I was unable to resist her. She turned my head from right to left looking into each ear.

I was tired and needed a nap. I didn’t care about the fork truck, the children or anyone. I just needed a nap. All I remember is Beth helping me to the ground with the sound of a child crying in the distance.

In a state of semi-consciousness, I heard Beth’s voice. I remember taking a pill. I remember the sound of Beth and Sarah arguing. My body was powerless. My head ached horribly.

I don’t recall how long I lay there on the road.

Beth startled me by shining the light in my eyes again. “Can you get up and climb in?” Somehow they got me to my feet. I rolled into the first vat in the line of five, and that’s all I clearly remember.

I thought Beth was checking my eyes again, but realized it was the sun high in the summer sky. This time the light didn’t hurt my eyes. I was in my backyard during a barbeque. Sally bounced on my knee, while Beth played with Sally’s cousins
on the swing set. The wind blew a gentle breeze, but sounded different somehow, like a predictable monotonous mechanical heartbeat.

I lifted the cover of a grill I’ve never owned. This one looked like a homemade version of a smoker, all stainless steel, with wheels. I placed enough faux frankfurters on the searing hot grate to feed each family for the next three days. Beth would make up take home trays when they all left.

I felt my face’s muscles pull back into a smile. Then I turned to my right to see Marcos playing on the swing. Beth never even said a word. I was confused. I’d never met Marcos back home before, or had I?

While I thought about it, I opened up the lid of the grill to turn the dogs. I started to turn about thirty Phony Bologna wieners, when they turned into harry muskrats, tails and all. Their flesh burnt to a crisp.

Surprised, I stepped back to think. Something was wrong, but I couldn’t figure out what it was. I looked for Beth to see what her reaction to this was but couldn’t find her. Panic ran through my body. I could count my heartbeat without looking for a pulse.

Suddenly I knew we were going up a hill. The fork truck bellowed and I smelled the sooty exhaust. I felt acceleration as we rolled down the other side. I sensed every bump and joint in the
pavement. The wheels on the vats were made of solid rubber. The vats were not designed with suspension. Due to the constant joints in the road, I was fading out again.

Again, I was in my backyard. This time it was dark. Sally and the other grandkids were gone. Marcos must have gone home too. The grill cover was red hot, and black smoke billowed from the sides. I met flames when I lifted the cover and stepped back. I felt my eyebrows singe. There in the huge grill, I envisioned Beth charred like the dogs that turned into rats. I reached down to lift her out when some of her flesh tore from her body. As I pulled my burning hands away, the crucifix the priest gave her caught on my finger. As I pulled harder the chain cut into the burnt flesh of her beautiful neck. The more I tried to prevent it, the more it dug in. I screamed.

The fork truck slowed. “Nick, are you okay?” She stopped the rig and came running back to my personal car. “Nick?”

I had never been so glad to see her face as I was at that point. The nightmare was over and I still had her. “My head is killing me. Please give me a kiss.”

She did. She was as glad to see life in my eyes as I was to see life in hers. I took another pill and went back to sleep. My perceived reality depended on whether I was awake or not. Both felt
eerily real. I faded in and out of dreams from the past, but it was hard to distinguish which one was a nightmare and which one wasn‘t. I thought we were heading back the way we came. I didn’t question why, where, or how we were going; I had all I could do to know that we were.

Chapter 22

Thank God for the
Amish

The couplings of the wagons clinked together, telling me we were stopping. Still groggy, I could tell the light of the truck was being moved though the vehicle remained parked. I sat up to see Beth and Sarah walk ahead. I didn’t know what they were looking at, but I heard both of them scream. Their shrill squeals were soon followed by intermittent laughter.

“What’s going on up there?” I had all I could do to lift my head over the side of the vat. My head felt like it weighed fifty pounds. The light of the forklift hurt my eyes even though it was aimed forward away from me. I felt sleepy again and lay down. They would get me if they needed me.

I lifted the grill one more time to check the dogs. Again the smoke curled around my head. During the summer my eyes were always bloodshot due to the smoke of my grill. My next memory took me to the Yoder farm. Mr. Yoder handed me two steaks and said they had another gift for me.
Mrs. Yoder came out of the house with something in her hands. When she got closer, I noticed the woman was Beth in Amish garb, not Mrs. Yoder. She held something that seemed to squirm in her hands. “Don’t touch it. It’ll bite your finger off.” Again I was confused, but I was getting used to it. I knew she was alive and these were only hallucinations. I could rest in peace. But when the thing in her hands turned into a snapping turtle, I knew this was a concussion-related dream. As she drifted away the turtle turned into the cross and chain the priest had given her. This was all a hallucination that would soon go away.

The train began to move again. The jolt brought me to a consciousness I hadn’t experienced in days. “Where are we going?” I asked Maria, who was in the adjoining car.

“We’re heading south to Pennsylvania. I told the others there are a lot of Mennonite farms from here and all the way to the bottom of the state. Beth didn’t want to go, but then reconsidered. We have seen remnants of Amish farms, but no Mennonites yet.

“Why does it make a difference? None of them would have survived,” I said, more awake than I’d been in a long time. My headache had subsided.

“Many of the Mennonites use the old tractors, those that ran on diesel, just like this machine,
right? I knew a few of them down in the lower half of New York. More live in Pennsylvania. I suggested we head south because we could find fuel. I hope I didn’t do wrong suggesting it to them.” Maria lit a cigarette.

The train stopped again. Beth got down. Marcos followed her to the front. This time it was Marcos who carried the shelled reptile. The first one was not a dream. I looked in the vat behind me and saw three animals crawling over each other, two smaller painted turtles and one big snapper. “Thinking about having seafood for supper?” I asked Beth as she went past back to the fork truck.

“I thought we could keep them for when you can’t catch us some food,” she responded.

Hours passed till the lift needed more fuel. “How much is left?” I asked Beth as she pumped more fuel into an empty water jug.

“It’s hard to tell,” she said. “Maybe enough to fill up two or three times more. We need to find a place with an old burned tractor with iron wheels.

“Iron wheels, what are you talking about?”

“The Mennonites used tractors, but they weren’t allowed to use wheels with rubber. When we find steel wheels, we may find more diesel fuel. We just need to find their underground tank.”

She climbed aboard and we were on our way. I lay back down to get more rest. The engine sang its tired song, lulling me to sleep.

I woke when we stopped. I found enough energy to set our barrel trap in another culvert hoping to catch some more muskrats. Marcos wired the drum to the culvert preventing its movement in the current. We had no more food. The children would go hungry for a few more hours. The turtles would be kept for more dire times when nothing could be caught. I built a fire and water was placed on to boil. One by one each child’s crying ceased as they went to sleep. No shelter was needed. No precipitation fell, though the air seemed cooler. Little wood could be found in the area. What we did find along the ditches remained underwater and needed to be dried.

After what seemed like three or four hours, Marcos and I checked the inside of the trap. It held three more muskrats. Three seemed to be our lucky number. I skinned them and was about to throw away the guts and the fur when Beth came over to me and asked, “Could we use those furs for anything?”

I washed my hands off in the pond water. “I can’t imagine what you would use them for, but I’ll put them in the back.”

All were fed and we were on our way again. Sprinkles of rain started to fall on the windshield and on our passengers. With no tops over the wagons, the children were getting damp. We needed to find steel roofing. The first home we came to
supplied the material needed. I bent the steel to keep the rain off everyone’s head, but the vats slowly gathered water at the bottoms. We needed to find shelter.

“Look, there’s a metal wagon wheel beside that foundation. These must have been Amish,” Maria said.

I shined the light beam over towards the stone cellar. “This was an Amish house, they won’t have any fuel for the truck, but their garden should be close by.” The growing season was nearing an end, but harvest season had been interrupted by the end of the world. We all took some time to dig through the soil next to where the barn used to stand. Nothing remained above ground, but after some poking around in the rich dirt, small potatoes and turnips showed themselves. Carrots and beets were found in other rows, the withered and burnt plants above ground revealed their locations.

The barn had been shadowed by a silo at one time. The barn had burned to the ground, but the silo remained. The old concrete structure withstood the earthquake that toppled larger buildings in the city. Though no roof covered the vertical cylinder, it was the only shelter for miles. Since the corn missed harvest, it was nearly empty. We decided to camp out in it for supper.

I started a fire in the center with what dry wood we had. The smoke swirled as the wind blew occasional drops of rain in on us. One side of the silo remained nearly dry, so that’s where we took cover from the elements.

Soon the pot was stuffed with vegetables. We were full for the first time since this happened. After eating the children were getting restless. They would run around and around the inside of the circular hotel. On the far side, a puddle of water formed the more it rained. Of course each one was drawn to it, splashing each time they went past. Their shoes weren’t waterproof. Only Tara refrained from the chase game. Her vice was the fire.

Beth constantly asked Tara to keep away from it, but she was mesmerized by flames. She would toss any remaining boards back into the flames after they had tumbled out.

“C’mon, honey. Get back before you get burned.” Beth said for the hundredth time.