Rubble & Ruin (Book 2): The Road North Read online

  RUBBLE AND RUIN:

  THE ROAD NORTH

  by

  JARRETT RUSH

  ****

  PUBLISHED BY

  Six to One Books and Media

  Copyright © 2018

  Another for the family

  Because they keep me on the straight and narrow.

  ONE

  Caroline and I are in an alley. It’s getting dark, and I’m watching for wailers. They’ve already started their chorus of howls. They don’t sound close, but I know that can change quickly.

  Caroline is searching through a pile of paper and plastic trash that the wind has gathered up against an industrial-sized bin. She’s rummaging through it with her hands, but the trash isn’t what she wants. She stirs the pile a minute more then reaches her second hand in, burying it to the elbows in tossed-asides, then comes up with an intact cinder block.

  She smiles. I fake one back. I’ll be honest, I’m still not used to this part. I suppose that at some point I will be, but not yet.

  Caroline raises the cinder block above her head, and I close my eyes and turn away. I hear the cinder block crash into the door handle and wait to hear the handle clatter across the ground. It doesn’t.

  I turn to Caroline and her block is missing a large chunk from where she struck the handle. There’s enough there for a second blow, but if that one doesn’t work we may have to move on.

  Caroline raises the block another time and I turn my head again. This time I hear the bend and snap of metal, and the door handle bounces and skitters in front of me. I kick it into the pile of trash, and Caroline tosses what’s left of the cinder block in there with it.

  She pushes the door open and steps inside. I follow her, putting another mental tick mark into the column that says “breaking and entering.” If we’re lucky, when we walk out with any supplies we need, I’ll add a mark to the columns for burglary and possession of stolen property.

  Caroline stops just in front of me and digs in her pack. She pulls out a flashlight that’s running on borrowed time. That’s why we are here. We need batteries and food. We always need food. The light comes on and casts a dim spot across an unorganized mess. Someone’s beat us to this place. It’s a small warehouse that I’d heard about from another traveler. He was headed south. We’re going north. We shared a camp with him, and he started telling us stories.

  He was crazy. Buggy eyes. A little too excited. But he was someone new. Caroline and I had been traveling in mostly silence since heading north. Part of it was the awe at the totality of the destruction of the areas just north of downtown. I hadn’t ventured this far out yet, and Caroline walked through here the night the boulders rained and everything around us fell apart. Now, though, we were seeing it in the daylight, and it took all of our words.

  Also, we were quiet, because we didn’t have a lot left to say to each other. We’d been each other’s closest companions for weeks. We’d tapped out all of our one-on-one conversations. We’d told each other our next steps--Caroline wanted to find her sister in a Dallas suburb; I wanted to get to a church I’d heard about in Oklahoma where people were starting a community. Now our focus was getting each of us to our respective end points. So when we ran into someone else, he was a new voice. That’s how you end up sharing a camp, at least for a night, with a total stranger. He was fresh conversation.

  He’d heard rumors of warehouses that hadn’t yet been ransacked. His fuzzy directions meant it took a day longer to find them than I’d hoped, and I can’t help but wonder if that’s the difference between us being the first here and being merely the first losers.

  Caroline is shuffling her feet through all the junk that’s spilled from the boxes that are scattered across the ground. A quick scan of the room, and I see a second door. It’s sitting slightly ajar. I start pulling open the boxes that have remained undisturbed. It looks like whoever beat us here didn’t do a thorough job of looking through what was inside. There are two rows of boxes still stacked and unopened across the back wall. So far it’s all been useless, stuff that might have been a good find if we had a car or place to call home. But for our needs, it’s not worth taking and having to carry the weight.

  Caroline joins me, starting on the boxes on the opposite end of the stack. We pull them open in relative silence, and I start to think about our traveling friend who’d told us about this place. In a moment away from Caroline I’d asked him if he’d heard about my church in Oklahoma, the place that my gut tells me I need to get to.

  He told me that he’d heard of it, but then also said he’d heard a lot of things. Only a few of them had proved to be true. Rumors had become the coin of the realm, some people trading information for supplies. So if you made up something that was believable enough, you could use it like cash for a few days until word got out that it wasn’t true.

  But I was digging through boxes inside of a warehouse he’d told us about, so that has to count for something. Maybe the church rumors are true. I’m still going to find out, if for no other reason than there’s nothing to keep me in a destroyed Dallas.

  Caroline and I get to our final boxes at the same time. I pop the tape off the top and open mine. Junk, at least to us. Caroline pulls her box open and quickly pushes it aside. She looks at me and shakes her head.

  “Well, crap,” she says as she stands. “I was hopeful there for a bit.”

  “Me too,” I say and pull off my pack. “But it wasn’t all a lost cause.”

  Caroline’s face twists in confusion.

  I start to restack some of the boxes that we’ve scattered, clearing a bit of space on the floor then say “At least we have shelter for tonight.”

  Caroline helps me then she grabs some of the torn apart and tossed aside boxes that whoever was here before us had left all over the floor. She places them in two sloppy stacks then lays on top of one. She smiles up at me.

  “If you try hard enough you might be able to convince yourself this is a mattress.”

  I lay down on the second stack of boxes, and she’s right. And it doesn’t take as much convincing as I thought it might.

  Caroline switches off the flashlight and the room goes pitch black. I close my eyes and mentally erase the check marks I’d already put on my criminal record before I drift off.

  +++++

  Our days are uneventful. Surprisingly. I think that after we left Fair Park to head north, I suspected that we’d have to fight for every mile. But we don’t; our journey is mostly quiet.

  We walk north, following Highway 75 for the most part--up, over and around debris. There are diversions away from the road to find supplies when we need them, or in the evenings when it’s time to camp. We don’t run into people on the road; it’s essentially our own six-lane path leading us out of Dallas and into whatever life awaits us wherever we end up.

  What we do find are abandoned vehicles. Most are crushed. Some aren’t, and many of those hold treasures, as long as you have your thinking cap on. Our latest find, something we dug out of the back of a truck is a painters tarp. It doesn’t sound like much, but put it in the right hands ...

  Caroline tosses me one side of the tarp and we lay the paint-spattered bit of canvas flat on the ground in front of us. I put a boot on one corner that’s in front of me and a hand on the other. Caroline pulls her edges taut.

  She hammers bits of rebar into the corners of the tarp with a shoe. When she’s done I tie my two corners to golf clubs that we found a couple of days ago. I prop them up on the ground and bury the club heads into the damp soil. Once I get them secure, I step back. Caroline is already smiling. It’s not much, but it’s shelter.

  “Would you look at that? A roof,
” she says.

  “If we’re being generous.”

  “We are. Today, we are.”

  She’s happy. That makes me happy. And she’s right, even though it’s not much, it’s something. It’s shelter in a pinch. And even though we slept in the warehouse last night, most of our nights we’ve been sleeping out in the open. I’ll take something close to shelter for a second night. Now, if we could just find something that approximated a bed.

  Caroline has sloughed off her pack and set it next to our little lean-to. She’s pulled her machete and buried it handle-up into the wet dirt.

  “You sleep first,” she says. “I’m not that tired.”

  “You sure?”

  I slide under the covering. It’s just high enough that I can sit uncomfortably beneath it. I pull off my jacket, and consider, for a moment, taking off my boots, but I don’t.

  I need better shoes. That’s not something that I expected to say so soon, but it’s true. All of this walking has worn the soles of my boots thin and the cushioning--something that the guy who sold them to me said would never wear down--is almost non-existent. In fairness, I don’t think he ever expected me to wear them all day, every day for a month at a time.

  I’ve taken to wearing two pairs of socks as a work around, but I need new boots. If this were a few months ago I’d run down the street and buy them, but I can’t. Not anymore. We have nothing now, not unless we can scavenge it.

  Caroline pulls a small pocket knife that I gave her a couple nights ago from her jacket pocket. She tosses it in the air in front of her and watches it fall then snaps a stiff palm at the knife, and it stops. It’s caught hovering shakily a couple of inches from the ground.

  She starts working her fingers in a small circle, and the knife begins to spin. She reverses her circle, and the knife responds accordingly. She raises her hand; the knife goes higher. Drops her hand and the knife falls to the ground, like someone cut the wires that had been holding it in the air.

  She points two fingers from the opposite hand and pulls the knife back off the ground. She spins it quickly a couple of times then balls her hand into a fist. She pauses a moment then throws her hand forward. The knife tumbles awkwardly then falls to the ground. She grunts in frustration.

  “What?” I ask.

  “I still don’t have projection.”

  “Still? You’ve only been working on this a few days. Why do you say still? How fast were you expecting to pick this up?”

  “Faster than this.” She calls the knife back to her with the wave of a few fingers. It floats up and lands in her lap. She starts spinning it again in front of her.

  I lay down under our tarp and stretch my legs out past the edge of the covering. I pull a sweatshirt from my pack and roll it into a loose ball and place it under my head for a pillow, paying no more mind to the girl using her mind to levitate and spin a pocket knife in mid air. I still don’t like the idea of breaking into a building, but I seem to have accepted magic. Crazy.

  I begin to drift off when Caroline calls my name.

  “Mac?”

  “Yeah,” I say.

  “I need to go home.”

  I sit back up. “What?”

  “I need to go home.”

  “I thought that’s what we were doing.”

  “No,” she says. “Not to my sister’s. To our old apartment. There are things there that I want to get. Things I need to get.”

  We left Fair Park the better part of a week ago. We’ve been walking hours a day. We are in one of the northern suburbs now. Going back extends our journey by days. Probably a week. I don’t want to do it. I want to keep moving north, to get Caroline to McKinney and then me to Oklahoma. We have places to be. And even though it’s not official, we have a schedule to keep.

  Then I stop prepping my no and think about Caroline. She’s young. She’s buried her mother only a few weeks ago. The life that she’d been mentally planning for herself had been ripped from her when whatever it was that unleashed the wailers attacked us. If we lose a few days, it’s fine. It’s not like we are going to miss a train or something.

  “OK,” I tell her. “What is it you need?”

  “The books.”

  “Books?”

  “The books on magic,” she says then pauses, her mouth open, like there’s another thought that she’s not ready to say. “Mom’s books.”

  Maggie. Caroline hasn’t mentioned her since we left Fair Park on our walk north. I’d half expected that. Everything she’d done since her mom was killed in the wailer attack had felt final. She’d buried her. She’d created a headstone. She’d burned just about everything her mother had collected after the night that the world fell apart. Caroline had done her best to not just close the door but lock it and bar it and seal it shut. I didn’t imagine that she’d want to talk much about Maggie or that night or any of the nights that led up to it. I haven’t brought her up, but there was going to be a point that she had to acknowledge her again, and here it was.

  “Sure. We can go get her books.”

  “Because I’ve been thinking,” Caroline continues, like she hadn’t even heard me. “I need to get better at it, the magic. I’m not saying that I can get to the level mom is at. She’s been doing this all her life. But if we are going to be out here, knowing more could come in handy.”

  She’s right. Magic could help. The wailers are still a threat. We hear them every night. One will call. Its cousins will respond. Their cries seem to have grown more shrill and sound more aggressive. And it was a bit of magic that let us survive the big attack that took Maggie and Walter and everyone back at our camp. Having Caroline knowing more could be good. Could be great. Could keep us alive.

  “Sure,” I say again. “We can go get her books.”

  “Good,” Caroline says. She spins the knife one way and then the other. She flips it end over end then stops it and wills the blade out of its home. She turns it over until the blade is facing down then drops her hand. The knife falls, and the blade buries itself into the dirt.

  “Thanks, Mac.”

  A wailer shrieks somewhere that’s always too close. A moment passes and others call back. I lay back down and roll over so my back is to Caroline.

  “Sounds like they are getting wound up. I’m going to try an get a little bit of sleep before they start singing too loudly. Wake me if you need me.”

  “Will do,” Caroline says.

  +++++

  Last night was far from quiet. I slept poorly. Worse than poorly. I heard Caroline playing with that knife for at least another hour. I heard her muffled frustration as she worked over and over again to perfect what I assume was projection--getting the knife,or whatever-- to shoot from its little floating bubble like it’s been thrown.

  She woke me near midnight, and I’ve been up since. The sun is about to rise and everything is taking on the peaceful glow of morning. I stand and pull Caroline’s machete from the mud where she’d stuck it last night. I grab it by the blade and begin chunking it at the ground, being careful to not let the blade rotate more than once before it buries itself back into the soil.

  Caroline stirs and mumbles something I don’t understand. She does this most nights, dreaming something that at least doesn’t appear terrifying. I envy her that. The nights I am able to dream, my thoughts are filled with wailers and Walter and Maggie. I’m often back in Fair Park underneath our Ferris wheel. The wailers have attacked, and I’ve somehow been cordoned off some place where I’m safe from harm but have the perfect vantage point to watch Maggie and Walter get killed. I’m helpless. They die, and I can’t save them.

  It’s either that dream or the other one that’s worse. Caroline has magicked up her little bubble of light that kept us safe on the night of the main wailer attack, only this time the bubble pops. The wailers swarm. Caroline is overtaken. I wake before I can find out definitively what’s happened to her, but I know. I’ve told her about the other dream. I haven’t told her about this one.

 
I give the machete another toss. It buries into the soil with a wet thunk. Caroline rolls over. I pull the machete out of the ground and poke her lightly in the shoulder with the tip if the blade. She shakes it away and I poke again.

  “Up and at ‘em. You’re leading this expedition today. We don’t leave until you’re ready, and we’re burning daylight.”

  “How old are you? Who says burning daylight that’s not, like, 70.”

  She sits up and rubs her eyes with the heels of her hands. She looks around, a bit lost.

  “Where exactly are we?”

  “North of 635. Richardson somewhere,” I say and point the machete toward the south. “We need to head that way.”

  “No,” Caroline says. She begins looking around, getting her bearings. She stops, orienting herself to the south then points off to the west. “We go that way. Then we go south.”

  I shrug. “I’m following you.”

  I’d rather we stick to the highway. It just feels safer to me, like following the river through the woods. It’s a point of reference, and you know it’s going to dump out somewhere at some point. Moving deeper into the trees--into the city--is just an easy way to get lost. But I’m going to trust that Caroline knows where she’s going.

  We gather our tarp and repack our bags. We each shoulder our packs, and we move out into parts of Dallas that are brand new to me.

  +++++

  Caroline is walking with confidence. She does seem to know where she’s going. And she’s conceded to me that we stay as near main thoroughfares as possible. She argued that this would make the trip take longer, and she’s probably right. But this feels better to me. The roads are damaged and broken and tough to navigate at times, but the land around them, at least for now, is open. Wailers can’t wait behind trees or in shadows until we pass then surprise us. Not that they’ve ever been anything but a lumbering horde. Still, it makes me feel better.

  We are now following Preston Road south back into the heart of Dallas. We’ve come upon the bridge where Preston crosses a major highway. I suggest that we stop. Caroline thinks for a moment then agrees.