The Sapphire Express (23 page)

“Well, the sky
is
falling,” I said and picked up my tray and walked to my favorite table.

As I was starting to enjoy my sandwich, a wild bum ran into the restaurant and started screaming bloody murder. I turned around and looked at the hairy beast curiously. His eyes met mine, and he ran to my table and shouted with a raspy voice, “Brothers, sisters, it is impossible. Don’t blame us. Man is what he is. He is not meant to be happy forever, to be perfect, to have lasting peace. It is war, victory, chaos, exhaustion, order, stability, complacency, greed, cronyism, elitism, detachment, incompetence, laziness, discontent, anger, fury, uprising, and then war again. Please understand. Please, save us, brothers! Please help us, sisters. We have seen the flower of hope and peace so many times, but we will never learn how to give it enough water, never!” Then he stopped his rant and started staring at my Chicken Supreme like I had stolen it from him.

“You are absolutely right, sir,” I said and gave him the sandwich. “Now, fuck off.”

The bum took the sandwich, stuffed the whole thing into his mouth and started running like someone had put a firecracker in his ass. Then he slammed into the restaurant’s front door like a confused moose, and a large chunk of the Supreme flew out of his mouth. He picked up the wet lump and a half-eaten tomato slice off the floor and shoved them back into his pie hole. It was beyond me how he managed to fit the whole damn thing in his mouth because the Chicken Supreme was a monster sandwich. Well, at least it shut him up for a minute or two.

I ordered a new sandwich and drove home. Then I read twenty pages of my history novel and went to bed. It was time to get some rest before I would begin my journey to the coast where unpredictable and dangerous events were guaranteed to entertain a lonely man.

11

Autobahn

I woke up at noon the next day and turned the TV on. All hell had broken loose during the dark hours of the night, and the news anchors looked depressed, borderline manic. The nuclear disaster was the biggest news story of their lives, but none of them was celebrating. They were visibly shaken, and some of them seemed totally lost; it was clear that they were struggling to keep their professional masks on.

The major networks had started moving their staff from their East Coast offices, and it was evident that the whole entertainment world was in total panic mode. The live shows were constantly interrupted by unplanned commercial breaks, and some channels had stopped broadcasting altogether. A static image had swallowed the happy TV people, and the loyal viewers were left at the mercy of the unknown. Some stations had interns doing the jobs of million-dollar celebrity anchors, and some just put a text on the screen saying: “Be smart and evacuate now.” I would have, however, preferred the following text: “Life is a live broadcast.”

Most local radio stations were quiet, too, and the staff had left town. The whole goddamn enchilada was just a very surreal thing to experience, and it was unbelievable to witness how fast a well-oiled society collapsed when truly a giant piece of crap hit the fan. I had no doubt in my mind that it was going to be back to sticks and stones in no time, and I had no desire to join that primordial circus. The dormant animal instincts that had been planted in people’s brains thousands of years ago were waking up with a vengeance, and it was guaranteed that blood would start flowing soon. The stores were already emptying fast of anything potable, edible, or shootable—even faster than the town was emptying of people. It was every man for himself, even if none of us even knew where to find a stick or how to throw a stone.

The stock market was paralyzed, and most of the brokers, financial experts, hedge fund managers, and whatnot had already escaped the upcoming carnage. The lucky few with access to private planes and helicopters were crisscrossing the crowded skies like fly-parasitized zombie bees, and several bizarre accidents had already happened in New York City and elsewhere in the country. A private Gulfstream had crashed into a church in Harlem, killing fifty people, and a brand-new Sikorsky was hanging from a black tupelo in Central Park—the dead pilot and a handful of masters of the universe still trapped inside. The liberal mayor of New York City had been bludgeoned to death with a mallet inside Gracie Mansion, and his security detail had been badly injured in the incident. Someone in South Carolina had ridden a giant wild hog through the window of a small country bank and gotten away with five hundred dollars and a broken popcorn machine. The whole thing was just a goddamn mess, and I was glad that I wasn’t part of the herd that tried so desperately to save their lives. I felt like a bored Puritan at a Chrystal Meth Anonymous meeting.

I turned the TV off and started packing for my road trip. The same show was playing outside the theater so there was no reason to watch it in my house.

I put some warm clothes in a large garbage bag and organized my toiletries neatly in a small cardboard box. Then I grabbed some simple food items from the pantry, filled a three-gallon plastic jug with fresh water, and put fifty thousand dollars of my insurance money in the hunting bag. The most important item was, however, the Sig Sauer and a full clip of ammunition. The second in importance was the machete, and all of my other weapons followed closely behind. I needed to be prepared to defend myself fiercely because I knew that a van with a full tank of gas was something that the crazies would love to take away from me. It was the end of days, after all, and the lunatics would be out in numbers that I had only seen in disaster movies. It was more or less guaranteed that I was going to have to shoot a few of them.

As I was putting my knives into the hunting bag, I thought about the doomsday preppers and wondered what they felt like now that they could finally use all the crazy shit they had stacked in their underground bunkers and shoot all those assault weapons they had hoarded and cleaned so patiently for all those years of relative peace. I wasn’t sure whether they were happy that they could finally prove themselves right, or if they were scared shitless like the rest of the good folks in the nation. My guess was that the satisfaction that filled their hearts from being right was stronger than fear, and they were smiling victorious smiles as they led their families underground and started devouring those yummy dried beans and gobstoppers. Too bad they had to stay with the earthworms and lucky rats for a year or two. At least they were right, and that was most likely all that mattered to them. The proactive men and women were going to survive the nuclear winter and emerge one day as true winners with a lot of facial hair and some very, very dirty underwear.

Before I knew it, I was all packed and ready to go. I put the food, the water, and all my personal belongings in the back of the van and threw the hunting bag on the passenger seat. Then I secured the two loaded Remingtons carefully behind the driver’s seat and made sure that I could pull them out fast. The shiny shotguns had to be ready for my command to turn a prospective carjacker’s head into an empty space on his shoulders. I might have been an Armageddon newbie, but I sure knew how to pack for a good old zombie road trip.

The Econoline had, once again, transformed into a van from hell that only a man with a serious death wish would want to approach. Its driver was a cold-blooded killer with blood dripping from his unforgiving fangs, and he had the best weapons money could buy in his bag. The peculiar van/man combo was a sword of cruel terror and merciless punishment, ready to unleash its fury upon the unwise and indecorous without any hesitation. It might have looked benign to the untrained eye, but it was deadly as hell.

I glanced at my borrowed nest unemotionally for the last time and started driving toward the freeway that would take me to the coast of salvation. The air still smelled like hope, but smoke was rising from many different parts of the town. That wasn’t a good sign, and it was evident that the doomsday party had already begun. I knew that I needed to get out of the urban area fast if I wanted to arrive at my destination uninjured. The good news was that I was heading east, and if I managed to reach the freeway, I would most likely make it all the way.

I glanced at the map and decided to take a shortcut through a rough neighborhood that I normally avoided like the plague, because I knew that any extra mile would be a dangerous mile, even a deadly mile. I figured that all the neighborhoods were probably pretty rough on a special day like that, and I was confident that the Econoline would protect me from any flying objects and charging crazies. The Sigs and the Remingtons would take care of the rest, and I was prepared to plow through the fields of fire like a devil’s combine harvester.

As I was cruising in the blighted town curiously and trying to keep my focus on the road, I saw four cop cars hauling ass with their lights on, and a group of frantic, crying people desperately trying to stop them. The officers just kept going and almost ran over the wretched souls who tried to get too close to them. They seemed to be occupied with something very important, like protecting the mayor, and I knew that if I got in trouble, no one was going to hear my scream. I didn’t blame the men and women in blue, though, because they did what they were ordered to do, and no sane person would have stopped in the middle of a suicidal mob that was completely out of control. If I had been a cop, I would have just stolen the police car and driven to my family in San Jose, or some other place far, far away from the crazies and the corrupt ass of the mayor.

The lawlessness and the absence of police didn’t really bother me, but I still preferred not to be kicked to death on a dirty asphalt road by a mob of frantic Econoline fans. I wanted to be the master of my own demise, and no one was going to steal that title from me—no one.

I figured that the looting and madness I witnessed was standard in any bona fide disaster where authority was totally absent, and I accepted it as a fact of life. The only difference with the nuclear kind was, however, that the good citizens who had decided to stay behind knew, or should have known, that they were going to die or get very sick within a couple of days, and that perhaps boosted their madness slightly. The crazies were running rampant, and their only mission was to steal as much as possible, as fast as possible, and live another day. I still didn’t quite understand why they needed a new refrigerator when they had only days to live, but maybe I wasn’t even supposed to understand that. Maybe the crazies knew something I didn’t. “Carpe diem, motherfucker,” they would have probably told me, and I had to admit that it wasn’t too bad an idea to at least keep your final meal properly refrigerated.

They crazies didn’t seem to be very interested in me or the Econoline, and I started to feel optimistic about my chances of making it out alive. That optimism was, however, short-lived, and after two miles of uneventful cruising, my luck ran out big-time. A mindless lunatic in a giant dirty diaper threw a brick at the Econoline’s windshield, and the impact formed a large spider web in the glass.

I took the Sig from the bag, rolled down the window and pointed the gun at the giant baby. The confused infant looked at me with vacant eyes and started jumping up and down in front of the van like someone had poured a bottle of Mad Dog 357 Plutonium 9 Million Scoville Pepper Extract in his ass. Then he picked up another brick off the ground and started running toward the Econoline like a zombie from a cheap horror movie. I tapped the gas pedal gently with my eager boot and gave him a little kiss with the bumper. The baby hit the grille like a freeway mosquito and landed on the concrete with a painful thud. I shrugged, drove around the diaper avenger, and glanced in the rearview mirror. The crazy bastard was getting up again and soon started to jump up and down like someone had poured two bottles of Mad Dog 357 Plutonium 9 Million Scoville Pepper Extract in his ass. I figured that the fucker was on PCP or bath salts—or both. There was no way in hell that a normal man would have gotten up that fast, and I knew that I needed to shoot the next shitbird in the face just to be on the safe side.

I got my chance after a couple of minutes when two big men with a sawed-off shotgun and a large Rambo knife started rushing toward me like I was John Rocker’s twin brother. They wanted the van; that was 100 percent guaranteed. I knew that I had no time to play games with them, and I opened the window and let the Sig Sauer recite a deadly, but, oh, so beautiful, sonnet. With an unforgiving heart, I emptied the clip in the running men, and they fell fast and without any unnecessary protesting. Then I hit the gas hard, and the furious Econoline roared forward like a Kodiak bear that had been shot in the rear end. I had seen enough of the apocalyptic madness for one day, and I decided that I was going to simply run over anyone who wanted to challenge me. Fighting the crazies was getting old fast, and my ears were ringing from the earsplitting roar of the Sig Sauer. I was more than ready to enjoy the freedom of the open freeway and just be alone with my trusted Econoline. Killing zombies was a young man’s game.

I drove like a mad horse with blinkers and ignored all stoplights and traffic signs. I refused to yield to anything or anybody, and my survival was the only thing that mattered to me. I plowed the desolate fields of misery and hopelessness with my modified harvester like the Grim Reaper 2.0 and reached the eastbound freeway ramp after killing—or severely injuring—two more crazies with my unforgiving doomsday machine. It was a fine tactic, and I realized that I should have chosen to follow the virtues of offensive driving right from the beginning.

A burning police car was partially blocking the freeway ramp, and I had to carefully maneuver around it to avoid the hot, contagious flames that were dancing on the hood erratically with the ominous wind. I glanced at the smoldering lump of fallen valor with sadness glowing in my tired eyes as I entered the freeway to perdition.