Under a Broken Sun (5 page)

A quick climb up the highway off-ramp and we could see the city of Philadelphia ahead of us, across a river.  The buildings stood as if frozen in a painting: no blazes or massive explosions.  Small fires sent thin pillars of smoke up on the horizon, but otherwise it could’ve been an ordinary Saturday.

Except for all the dead cars on the highway.  Thousands parked in their spots like the world's greatest 3D snapshot.  Drivers waking up into a nightmare got out of the cars they loved too much to abandon.  Some cars looked as if they were pushed to the side, and I couldn’t help but wonder why anyone would think that would fucking help. 

We walked up a bridge weaving our way between the cars.   About half way across the river the structure of the bridge bent away like a massive beast tore it with its bare hands, dropping the road down to the river.  A single thread of a girder connected our side to the other, about a hundred feet away. 

If we wanted to get to the city, we were gonna have to cross it.

5.    

To our right, the tail of another airliner poked out of the river two hundred feet below.  That made three failing aircraft just near the Philly airport.  Christ, how many dropped out of the sky yesterday?  How many dead? 

No time to think about that.  I scanned the area for another way across, for anyone who could tell us what happened.  Several cars clung to the edge of the remaining part of the bridge; one teetering like it would take a dive at any minute.

Some guy snoozed in a messed up Dodge Dart.  He jerked awake from behind the wheel when I tapped on his window.  A weed pipe dropped from his chest to the floor.  “Hey,” I said.  “What happened here?”

He rolled down the window and squinted at me.  “Huh?  Oh, plane hit the bridge going down,” he said.  “Took fifty cars with it.”  He looked up at me with lifeless eyes.  “All of them, dead.  We could hear them below, trying to swim.  Totally fucked up.  I’m stayin’ here.  Someone’ll come along.  Someone who knows what the fuck is going on.”

A deep boom from up ahead to the left shook the bridge.  The refineries.  Tons of them.  Exploding from the pressure, or the heat, or whatever makes oil tanks explode. 

“They’ve been doing that every hour or so,” the guy said.   He looked up at me again.  I wished he didn’t.  “Where are you going?” he asked.

“To the city.  Get some supplies.”

“Do you know what the fuck is going on?” 

I didn’t want to get into it.   “No.”

I didn’t have time for this.  I turned to walk on and the guy called back to me.  “Be careful out there, dude.”

I walked past to where the bridge ended, eyeing the beam spanning the river.  No wind.  Piece of cake. 

Ashley asked from behind, “What are you doing?”

I turned to her.  “Going to the city.  Gotta get across.”

“There are other bridges, ya know.” 

Marilyn passed by her and stood behind me.  I looked at Ashley.  “You comin’ or what?”

“I’m not crossing that thing,” Ashley said.

“Fine, I don’t really care,” I responded.  I really didn’t.  I knew what we needed, I knew where it was, and frankly, I didn't relish the thought of leading a bunch of people to safety.  I just wanted to get to Chicago and see what happens from there. 

I turned, stretched out my arms, and started across the bridge.

The steel beam girder stretched about three feet wide with three inch rivets on the edges.  Not too nasty, but when you know you’re two-hundred feet above a moving river, it can get intimidating.  I heard footsteps behind and knew Marilyn had come along for the ride.  Would Ashley?

Somewhere inside of me I felt a little guilty.  But really, this is survival.  I couldn't
afford
to care.   Did that make me a bad person?  Probably.  Dad wouldn’t have approved.  But to hell with him.  He never did approve of anything I did anyway.  All he wanted was for me to be excited about his work.  And I just couldn’t be.

I snapped out of my self-pity fiesta and noticed I stood halfway across.  I looked back and saw Ashley really playing up the high wire act.  Arms outstretched, moving at a snail’s pace.   “Ashley,” I yelled, “pick it up.”

Marilyn turned to look.  “Oh my God, she’s crying.”

“I’m coming,” Ashley yelled, looking up at me.  While walking.  Big mistake.

Ashley stepped on a chunk of concrete and turned her ankle.  Not bad, but enough to knock her off balance.  Her arms flailed.  She fell to her knee, and then from the pain moved to get off her knee.  Before I knew it, she was clinging to the girder, her eyes clamped shut, her body half hanging over edge.  Nothing but floating bodies and the bobbing wings of the airplane below, waving her down.

Marilyn shuffled quickly forward to her, with me close behind.  Marilyn stepped over her, knelt, and grabbed Ashley’s left arm.  I knelt down and grabbed her right.

“Pull yourself up,” I shouted.

Ashley grunted.  “I can’t,” she sobbed.

“We don’t have the leverage to lift you,” I said slowly.  “You’re going to have to do it yourself.”  We pulled, trying to stay on balance ourselves.  Ashley’s face contorted and she let out another grunt, trying pulling herself up.

I slipped.  In a blink I was on my stomach and gripping Ashley’s arm with everything I had.  But it was covered with sweat.  Slipping.  Ashley screamed.  Her feet flailed above the flowing blue river.   She held onto nothing but me.

Marilyn yelled for help.  I looked up – either no one heard or no one cared.  The stoner in the Dodge Dart must’ve been sound asleep.

I had no leverage.  Nothing to brace myself against.  If I kept hanging on, I could go with her.  Marilyn’s grip slipped.  This was crazy – Ashley wasn’t that big. 

My arm scraped against the side of the girder.  It felt like it was gonna snap.  “Marilyn,” I yelled, “on the count of three, lift straight up.  Don’t lean back, just straight up.”  I looked at her to make sure she got the message.  She nodded, her face contorted in pain. 

We either drop Ashley, drop ourselves, or somehow pull her up.  “One.  Two.  Three!”  We yanked and I sat straight up.  Then in one motion, I twisted to the side and brought most of Ashley’s body on the girder.  That was enough.  She grabbed the other end of the girder and pulled herself over.  

She hugged herself to the girder and sobbed.   “I wanna go home,” she cried.  Yeah, that makes two of us.

Almost across.  Ashley gripped my shirt, ensuring that if she fell she didn’t fall alone.  Walking on the girder became like walking on hot coals.  My shirt clung to my chest as sweat poured down my back like a leaky faucet.  We wouldn’t be able to keep up this pace in this heat.

As we stepped on concrete for the first time in what seemed like hours, Ashley collapsed in relief and Marilyn had to catch her from behind to stop her from falling backwards.  More cars littered the other side of the bridge, and the fires up ahead didn’t help the heat at all.  Part of me almost wished I did fall into the river.  At least it’d be cold.

In the city we walked amongst the towers of cement buildings and the deserts of concrete roads, each absorbing the heat of the sun and shooting it off like invisible flames.  Other people milled around, mostly wandering aimlessly searching for some hint as to what happened, who to trust, and where to go next.  A police officer would occasionally ride a bike or a horse past us, but you could sense the scales in the city were tipping towards chaos.  I didn’t know where but some ticking time bomb sat waiting for someone to set it off.  A pissed off guy who gets shoved by a cop.  A woman starving and needing to feed her baby.  Someone gets breathed on wrong.  Then riots, looting, who knows what.

“Where are we going?” Ashley whined.  I began to wish I had ditched her at the airport.  A flash inside of me even wished she’d fallen off the bridge.  I pushed that away.  Pain in the ass, sure, but still.  She was just a kid.

I looked around.  “Hospital.  And a drug store.  We need supplies.”

“I’m hungry,” she whined again.  I turned to her and saw Marilyn loaded and ready to smack if required.

“When we get to a drug store we’ll get lunch.  Got any cash?”

Ashley shook her head.  I looked at Marilyn who just shrugged.  “I didn’t have time to go through the tip jar.”

I had twenty bucks in my wallet – didn't matter.  I had a good feeling that no one was accepting credit cards anymore, and money was the least of our worries.  Hell, most of the cash registers were electronic anyway.  Probably couldn't open them without a key or a sledgehammer.

A left turn down Market Street, and there at the corner stood a Rite Aid.  Even at that early hour in the morning, people crept out of their houses, whispering to each other about what was going on.  Why wasn’t anything working?  What seemed like an overnight power interruption hadn’t been fixed.  Phones were dead.  Many people cried as they realized something really fucked up had occurred.  Whispers of Armageddon.  Of the Second Coming.  Of World War III.  Everyone needed an explanation, and no one could give them one.

We turned to the Rite Aid entrance.  Closed.

Everything, in fact, was closed.  Lights out. 

I went around the back and tried the steel rear-entrance door.  No luck.  “Now what?” Ashley asked.

Back to the front.  I checked left, then right.  No movement on the street; people too confused or scared to do any damage so far.
Well, the looting has to start sometime.

I picked up a cinder block from an abandoned worksite nearby, walked it to the front door of the drug store, and started to raise it.

“Wait a minute,” Marilyn said grabbing my arm.  “What the hell are you doing?”

“What, afraid we’ll trigger the alarm?”

“What if the power comes back on?”

“Trust me.  We’ve seen the last of ‘The Power’ for a long time.”  I hurled the cinder block through the glass door exploding it inward.  A part of me shrunk back in fear of the loud noise that should've followed.

But there was nothing.  I climbed through the broken glass door and into the shadowy store, lit only by the sun rising outside.  The two girls followed behind.  I could barely make out the products, but I knew where I needed to go: the pharmacy.

I grabbed a duffle bag from the seasonal section.  “Summer Fun!” a sign announced.  The bag had some dipshit cartoon character smiling and waving with the writing “Life is Good” underneath it.  The fuck it is.

I zipped it open, and went to the sun-bloc aisle.  Scooped up an armful of whatever was there and dumped it in the bag.  Wouldn’t stop the radiation, but it was on my dad’s list, and that was good enough for me.

Next was water.  I heard shuffling in the candy / food aisle, and then the girls ripping open boxes.  I dropped bottles of water into the bag, weighing it down.  But what choice did I have?

I set the bag down, grabbed another, and went to the front.  I had to make sure when I grabbed pills from the pharmacy; we only had one chance to get it right.  I had to be able to see.  I went around the counter and grabbed two fistfuls of lighters and a pocket flashlight.  I turned the flashlight on but nothing.  I checked, and saw batteries in the compartment.  Why wouldn’t batteries work?

This wasn’t just an EMP.  This was something Dad didn’t anticipate.  He used to talk about solar flares and EMPs, and he said most electronics would still be functioning – more than people think.  Electricity, he said, would be interrupted, but not altered.  Electrons would still flow.  I tried another flashlight.  Nothing.  Then another.  “Fuck,” I said, flinging them to the ground.  I noticed the rack of magnets near the cash register had a pile of magnets counter.  I raised one and put it to the metal.  It fell right off.  Nothing. 

My mind created a whole new shit list that I really didn't want to deal with.  Magnetics.  Magnetosphere.  The poles.  Something had seriously fucked up the Earth.  But what?  How?

Didn't matter.  Fire just became the highest priority.  I grabbed a newspaper, the President’s smiling face on the cover waving.  Sucks to be him right now, I thought.

Sucks to be all of us.

I rolled up the newspaper and lit it, then carried it back to the Pharmacy.  No need to worry about sprinkler systems or alarms.

In the pharmacy I scanned the shelves and found a box full of little pills.  I checked my dad’s list: Amoxicillin.  The names matched.  Penicillin.  Definitely a requirement.  "You girls on any meds?" I asked. 

"No," they replied.

"No bullshit, guys.  This is our only chance.  If you’re on meds and don't take them-"

"Zoloft," Marilyn replied.

"Birth control pills," Ashley shouted out.  That threw me.  She couldn't have been more than sixteen.  "For my periods, before you start thinking anything fucked up," she called back.

I grabbed a huge bottle of Zoloft, and a box of what I hoped was birth control pills.  And a smaller bottle of oxycodon.  The good stuff.  Just in case.

I stuffed a few tubes of antibiotic creams into the weighty duffle bag and zipped the bag up.

I nearly dropped it when I heard Ashley scream.

6.    

I’ve never stepped on a human hand before, especially when it belongs to a dead guy.  But as I turned down an aisle to see what the hell Ashley was going on about, I saw her looking down at the floor near my feet, and that’s when I stepped forward, onto a hand. 

Instinct shot me backwards and an apology almost escaped, but I knew the guy was dead.  He couldn't have been dead long - must’ve died from a heart attack or something, because he looked like he was frozen in shock.  And in this heat, nothing was frozen. 

I knelt down to get a good look, and caught a whiff of something I wish I hadn’t: the guy had crapped his pants, probably after he died.  Which means in the not-too-distant future things were about to get really foul-smelling around here.  I looked up at the girls, and behind them, through the front window, I saw a cop looking in.  Busted.  I killed the torch, but that just smoked up the place.  We had to move.