smackenzie (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
smackenzie) wrote2007-11-21 10:50 pm
smackenzie) wrote2007-11-21 10:50 pm
day 5
Her watch must be busted, because 4:00 was way too early for so much sunset. she adjusted herself, leaned over to rub the top of Oscar's head, and got back on the highway. If she hauled ass she could get out of Pennsylvania before she had to stop to sleep.
Marya had forgotten how boring Pennsylvania was to drive through. A few years ago, shortly after her dad had moved to California, she and her friend Salina had driven cross-country to see him. Well, Marya was going to see him - Salina wanted to visit a boy she'd met in college, who was from San Diego and apparently single. The two girls had taken a little over a week to make the trip, stopping at weird tourist traps and scenic overlooks and pretty much any place that looked interesting, and switching driving duties when one or the other of them got tired. Marya had wanted to go to Graceland but Salina said it was too far out of their way, and Salina wanted to see the Grand Canyon but Marya claimed to be afraid of heights. Salina said that was silly. Marya said she'd been denied the chance to see Elvis' Rumpus Room, and anyway, all the tourists were destroying the canyon. They compromised and went to Vegas instead.
Marya's dad couldn't understand how Las Vegas could be a compromise, but Marya told him they'd found an Elvis impersonator who would consider marrying two girls - never mind that Salina was straight and Marya didn't want to get married - it was the principle of the thing, and she got to see Elvis, and Salina won $60 at craps and they had lobster for dinner and maybe they'd stop at the Grand Canyon on the way home. Marya's dad had laughed and suggested they go to San Francisco.
They went to San Diego instead, so Salina could see the boy and Marya could go to the zoo, and there they discovered that the boy was not in fact single, and was in fact seriously dating another boy. Salina spent half the trip home bitching about the friend who'd told her he was single and bemoaning the failure of her gaydar and complaining that all the cute ones were gay or taken - to which Marya could only agree, although in her experience the good ones were either straight or taken, or just "experimenting," which more often than not meant that some girl was either trying to get over an ex-boyfriend by getting over guys, or she was just interested in making out with other girls in order to get the attention of some guy. That topic of conversation gave Marya a chance to bitch for a few hours, and by the time she was done, Salina was a lot less angry and mostly kind of amused that the universe had probably had a good giggle at the expense of her and her hormones. She still wanted to see the Grand Canyon, though.
It turned out that Marya wasn't quite as afraid of heights as she'd thought, although standing on the edge of the canyon with all the other tourists and looking down and around was tremendously awe-inspiring. She and Salina were both about average size for girls, although Salina was a wee bit taller and at that time skinnier, but very little in Marya's experience had ever made her feel as small as the canyon. There was so much nature, and so little of man's impact on it. It was gorgeous and a little bit terrifying, and she wasn't at all sorry they went.
But she was still kind of bummed that they never got to Graceland. To make up for it she sang Elvis songs at Salina all the way through Pennsylvania. Later on, Salina would joke that they got along fabulously the entire trip, until Marya broke out the Elvis playbook.
"Nothing will break up a friendship faster than six straight hours of 'Hound Dog'," Salina said. "Unless it's six straight hours of 'Jailhouse Rock'."
"I thought you liked that one," Marya protested. "Why didn't you tell me to shut up?"
"You were driving. Besides, you were getting me back for not letting you go to Graceland."
"You noticed." Marya grinned. Salina rolled her eyes.
"And you did let me bitch about Jerry for, what, three days?"
"Two and a half. It's too bad he was gay - he was cute."
"I know. Such a waste."
"Not if you're his boyfriend."
The next road trip Marya took was with Cass, of all people, down to Atlanta to see Cass' sister. That was a shorter trip, with more barbecue and slightly more arguing and absolutely zero chance of driving two hours off the highway to see something odd and interesting. Like, say, the Precious Moments Park and Chapel, designed and built by the same people who made those little Precious Moments porcelain figurines. Marya and Salina had found a brochure for it at a rest stop in Missouri, and they were intrigued by the overwhelmingly earnest cheesiness of the place. Marya bought her grandma a little statuette of a girl with a basket of flowers and Salina teased her about it for the rest of the day.
Salina had moved to Virginia a year and a half ago, and now, as she cruised through Pennsylvania in her packed-to-the-gills, metallic blue van with the sun in her face and her dog hanging his head out the passenger-side window, Marya wondered what had happened to her and Why didn't I remember to call her? She could only hope Salina was ok and most importantly still alive and not disappeared.
"I'm kind of a shit friend," Marya told Oscar. He was too busy hanging out the window and enjoying the rush of air in his face to pay attention.
And Pennsylvania was still boring. And it was getting dark. She did see one other car, a pickup heading in the other direction. There was an armchair tied down in the bed of the truck along with what looked like a lot of boxes. Marya wondered where the truck had come from and where it was going and why the people inside it had bothered to take an armchair with them. Maybe it had sentimental value or something.
She drove west, into the setting sun, watching her fuel gauge and the speedometer and occasionally pulling her iPod adapter out of the cassette deck to see if she could pick up any radio stations. She couldn't. She popped the adapter back in and scrolled down to her Elvis playlist to listen to the King's croon as she passed signs for Route 220 and 522 and Altoona and towns she'd never heard of and would never be back to see. She tried not to miss Salina and tried not to feel guilty that she hadn't even thought of the girl until now. Oscar hung his head out the window and barked occasionally and just seemed really really happy to be in the van driving somewhere. Marya kind of envied him.
After the sun dropped below the horizon it got dark really really fast. Marya drove with her sunglasses on for about forty miles before she realized it was dark enough that she should probably take them off. It was getting a little cold in the van, what with the passenger-side window being rolled down and all, so she turned on the heat. She didn't want to pull Oscar back inside. He was enjoying himself. She figured she could let him do that. Besides, she'd driven with the windows down and the heat on before. Well, technically she'd been a passenger and not a driver, and she'd been out bar-hopping and was thus a little buzzed, and she really really wanted to feel the wind against her face, but still. Windows down, heat on. At least she'd never been ridiculous enough to take a convertible out in November with the top down. That was just asking for windburn and possibly frostbite on one's face.
Eventually Oscar got tired of riding with his head out the window, and he managed to turn himself around in the seat enough to find a comfortable spot and lie down. Marya was relieved, because now she could roll the window back up. Thank god for driver's-side window controls for the passenger-side window. And if Oscar was napping, that meant he didn't have to eat or pee, and if he didn't have to eat or pee, Marya didn't have to stop. She wanted to be within at least smelling distance of something that might pass for civilization before she stopped. She hadn't seen anything particularly weird yet, but that didn't mean nothing weird was out there. She just had a feeling.
She started seeing signs for Pittsburgh about the same time she started wondering where she could pull over to sleep. She slowed down a little to get off at what looked like a good exit. It was hard to tell where exactly the city was, as there were no city lights and not much of a moon. When she was in the middle of BFE, Pennsylvania, it didn't matter that the power was out everywhere, because there were no cities to miss. Now that she was close to one - a city she knew was there - it was more than a little spooky to not be able to judge the distance by the ambient light. She didn't have a specific map for Pittsburgh and didn't want to get lost and therefore stuck in the city, but she had to know if anyone was there.
She drove slowly once she got off the highway, trying to read the signs by the light from her headlights before she passed them. She followed 22 into the city. Once she got close enough she could see the tall buildings of downtown Pittsburgh, distinguishable only because they were darker rectangles against the sky. It was eerie and unreal to drive down wide city streets, past office buildings and government buildings and apartment buildings and stores, and not see a single person. She did pass a couple of cars, their drivers apparently driving as cautiously as she was, because even if you'd lived in a city your whole life, it took an entirely different skill set than a lot of people had to navigate in the dark. And not just late-night dark, too late for people to be out or for stores and offices to be open, but grid-failure dark, the kind of dark you only got during a total power outage under not much of a moon. Total dark.
Marya was not afraid of the dark. Marya had never been afraid of the dark. But she was afraid of this. Here and there she could see lights - candles in apartment windows, most likely - but there was nothing to light up. No streetlights, no stoplights. No lights in office buildings so the cleaning crews could see to do their jobs. No lights in stores to fake out anyone who might want to break in. Nothing.
"I am creeped the fuck out," she told Oscar, who had woken up and was now just sitting on the seat looking out the windshield. "I do not like this. This is not right." She knew there were people left in Pittsburgh - law of averages, right? Even if nine-tenths of the world's population had vanished, a larger city would have a larger number of people left. Nine-tenths of half a million was more than nine-tenths of fifty thousand.
But she did not want to stay in this dark, empty city any longer than she had to. She turned around and went back the way she'd come, watching for signs to I-376 or I-79 and trying and trying to ignore the increasing feeling that something was watching her.
Good Christ, this was terrifying. Now she was afraid to stop, and that just would not do. She couldn't keep driving until sunrise - she'd fall asleep at the wheel and they'd go off the road. And she had not packed up her van and taken her dog on the road to find her dad only to drive off the highway in Pennsylvania in the middle of the night, because she was too afraid of the dark to stop and sleep. She needed a motel or something. A rest stop. Someplace small, so if there was no one there, it wouldn't be quite so creepy, because it was less likely to be full of people than, oh, say, a big city.
Except for about ten minutes when she was convinced she'd gotten lost in the middle of Pittsburgh and would have to essentially double-park along the side of a major road in order to get some shut-eye, Marya managed to get out of the city and back on the highway ok. She was actually a little impressed with herself and her sense of direction. She headed in what she hoped was a westerly direction and floored it until the weirdly ghostly skyline was out of view. That was not an experience she was eager to repeat. The only thing worse would be if she'd seen zombies roaming the streets or something, although in that case she'd probably think she was in the middle of a bad z-grade nightmare because she was really in a coma because she'd fallen asleep at the wheel and run the van off the highway and into a tree. As it was, she was just convinced the world had ended and she would have to survive in some kind of post-apocalyptic America, only she couldn't say what exactly the apocalypse was.
And so far, the only remotely encouraging thing that had happened to her was that she'd found a gas station and had been able to fill the van's gas tank. And she'd seen three other vehicles on the road. Three was better than nothing, but at the same time? She'd like to see more.
Marya drove until she passed a sign welcoming her to Ohio, at which point she started looking for a rest stop or a police station kind of place, like they sometimes had off the side of the highway. State trooper headquarters or something. She didn't imagine they'd have lights on in their parking lots any more than any other place, but the thought of parking in between two state trooper cars so she could get some shut-eye was a vaguely comforting one.
"Keep your eyes peeled for a rest stop," she told Oscar, and then there was one, with restrooms and picnic tables and vending machines and racks of tourist brochures. Excellent. Marya pulled up in front of the building, one space away from an SUV with two bikes in the bike rack on the back, reached into the back seat to grab Oscar's leash, felt around in front for the flashlight, and got out of the van. She went around to let Oscar out so he could pee and stretch his legs, and so she'd have some company while she peed and stretched her legs. Oscar either felt her unease or just wanted to get back in the van and go back to sleep, because he did his thing with a minimum of sniffing and time-wasting and was not particularly patient while Marya did her thing.
She let him back in the van, climbed in the back seat, and unhooked his leash by reaching between the front seats and grabbing for it. Oscar yawned at her. She patted him on the head and told him he was a good boy, then moved everything sitting on the back seat so she could lie down. She reached into the back of the van to drag her sleeping bag over the back seat and on top of her. It wasn't very cold out but it wasn't warm either, and the van's seats were vinyl which didn't hold heat at all after the sun went down. As an afterthought she felt around for the blanket she'd taken off her bed and draped it over the front passenger seat for Oscar. He'd probably get tangled in it in the middle of the night and wake her up trying to get out of it, but at least she didn't have to worry about him being cold.
She scrunched down under the sleeping bag, more for security than warmth, and eventually fell asleep.
words: 2705
total words: 35,473
note: the precious moments park and chapel does indeed exist. i have not been there, tho. it actually looks a little creepy, in a relentlessly cheerful and sunshiny twee kind of way.
Marya had forgotten how boring Pennsylvania was to drive through. A few years ago, shortly after her dad had moved to California, she and her friend Salina had driven cross-country to see him. Well, Marya was going to see him - Salina wanted to visit a boy she'd met in college, who was from San Diego and apparently single. The two girls had taken a little over a week to make the trip, stopping at weird tourist traps and scenic overlooks and pretty much any place that looked interesting, and switching driving duties when one or the other of them got tired. Marya had wanted to go to Graceland but Salina said it was too far out of their way, and Salina wanted to see the Grand Canyon but Marya claimed to be afraid of heights. Salina said that was silly. Marya said she'd been denied the chance to see Elvis' Rumpus Room, and anyway, all the tourists were destroying the canyon. They compromised and went to Vegas instead.
Marya's dad couldn't understand how Las Vegas could be a compromise, but Marya told him they'd found an Elvis impersonator who would consider marrying two girls - never mind that Salina was straight and Marya didn't want to get married - it was the principle of the thing, and she got to see Elvis, and Salina won $60 at craps and they had lobster for dinner and maybe they'd stop at the Grand Canyon on the way home. Marya's dad had laughed and suggested they go to San Francisco.
They went to San Diego instead, so Salina could see the boy and Marya could go to the zoo, and there they discovered that the boy was not in fact single, and was in fact seriously dating another boy. Salina spent half the trip home bitching about the friend who'd told her he was single and bemoaning the failure of her gaydar and complaining that all the cute ones were gay or taken - to which Marya could only agree, although in her experience the good ones were either straight or taken, or just "experimenting," which more often than not meant that some girl was either trying to get over an ex-boyfriend by getting over guys, or she was just interested in making out with other girls in order to get the attention of some guy. That topic of conversation gave Marya a chance to bitch for a few hours, and by the time she was done, Salina was a lot less angry and mostly kind of amused that the universe had probably had a good giggle at the expense of her and her hormones. She still wanted to see the Grand Canyon, though.
It turned out that Marya wasn't quite as afraid of heights as she'd thought, although standing on the edge of the canyon with all the other tourists and looking down and around was tremendously awe-inspiring. She and Salina were both about average size for girls, although Salina was a wee bit taller and at that time skinnier, but very little in Marya's experience had ever made her feel as small as the canyon. There was so much nature, and so little of man's impact on it. It was gorgeous and a little bit terrifying, and she wasn't at all sorry they went.
But she was still kind of bummed that they never got to Graceland. To make up for it she sang Elvis songs at Salina all the way through Pennsylvania. Later on, Salina would joke that they got along fabulously the entire trip, until Marya broke out the Elvis playbook.
"Nothing will break up a friendship faster than six straight hours of 'Hound Dog'," Salina said. "Unless it's six straight hours of 'Jailhouse Rock'."
"I thought you liked that one," Marya protested. "Why didn't you tell me to shut up?"
"You were driving. Besides, you were getting me back for not letting you go to Graceland."
"You noticed." Marya grinned. Salina rolled her eyes.
"And you did let me bitch about Jerry for, what, three days?"
"Two and a half. It's too bad he was gay - he was cute."
"I know. Such a waste."
"Not if you're his boyfriend."
The next road trip Marya took was with Cass, of all people, down to Atlanta to see Cass' sister. That was a shorter trip, with more barbecue and slightly more arguing and absolutely zero chance of driving two hours off the highway to see something odd and interesting. Like, say, the Precious Moments Park and Chapel, designed and built by the same people who made those little Precious Moments porcelain figurines. Marya and Salina had found a brochure for it at a rest stop in Missouri, and they were intrigued by the overwhelmingly earnest cheesiness of the place. Marya bought her grandma a little statuette of a girl with a basket of flowers and Salina teased her about it for the rest of the day.
Salina had moved to Virginia a year and a half ago, and now, as she cruised through Pennsylvania in her packed-to-the-gills, metallic blue van with the sun in her face and her dog hanging his head out the passenger-side window, Marya wondered what had happened to her and Why didn't I remember to call her? She could only hope Salina was ok and most importantly still alive and not disappeared.
"I'm kind of a shit friend," Marya told Oscar. He was too busy hanging out the window and enjoying the rush of air in his face to pay attention.
And Pennsylvania was still boring. And it was getting dark. She did see one other car, a pickup heading in the other direction. There was an armchair tied down in the bed of the truck along with what looked like a lot of boxes. Marya wondered where the truck had come from and where it was going and why the people inside it had bothered to take an armchair with them. Maybe it had sentimental value or something.
She drove west, into the setting sun, watching her fuel gauge and the speedometer and occasionally pulling her iPod adapter out of the cassette deck to see if she could pick up any radio stations. She couldn't. She popped the adapter back in and scrolled down to her Elvis playlist to listen to the King's croon as she passed signs for Route 220 and 522 and Altoona and towns she'd never heard of and would never be back to see. She tried not to miss Salina and tried not to feel guilty that she hadn't even thought of the girl until now. Oscar hung his head out the window and barked occasionally and just seemed really really happy to be in the van driving somewhere. Marya kind of envied him.
After the sun dropped below the horizon it got dark really really fast. Marya drove with her sunglasses on for about forty miles before she realized it was dark enough that she should probably take them off. It was getting a little cold in the van, what with the passenger-side window being rolled down and all, so she turned on the heat. She didn't want to pull Oscar back inside. He was enjoying himself. She figured she could let him do that. Besides, she'd driven with the windows down and the heat on before. Well, technically she'd been a passenger and not a driver, and she'd been out bar-hopping and was thus a little buzzed, and she really really wanted to feel the wind against her face, but still. Windows down, heat on. At least she'd never been ridiculous enough to take a convertible out in November with the top down. That was just asking for windburn and possibly frostbite on one's face.
Eventually Oscar got tired of riding with his head out the window, and he managed to turn himself around in the seat enough to find a comfortable spot and lie down. Marya was relieved, because now she could roll the window back up. Thank god for driver's-side window controls for the passenger-side window. And if Oscar was napping, that meant he didn't have to eat or pee, and if he didn't have to eat or pee, Marya didn't have to stop. She wanted to be within at least smelling distance of something that might pass for civilization before she stopped. She hadn't seen anything particularly weird yet, but that didn't mean nothing weird was out there. She just had a feeling.
She started seeing signs for Pittsburgh about the same time she started wondering where she could pull over to sleep. She slowed down a little to get off at what looked like a good exit. It was hard to tell where exactly the city was, as there were no city lights and not much of a moon. When she was in the middle of BFE, Pennsylvania, it didn't matter that the power was out everywhere, because there were no cities to miss. Now that she was close to one - a city she knew was there - it was more than a little spooky to not be able to judge the distance by the ambient light. She didn't have a specific map for Pittsburgh and didn't want to get lost and therefore stuck in the city, but she had to know if anyone was there.
She drove slowly once she got off the highway, trying to read the signs by the light from her headlights before she passed them. She followed 22 into the city. Once she got close enough she could see the tall buildings of downtown Pittsburgh, distinguishable only because they were darker rectangles against the sky. It was eerie and unreal to drive down wide city streets, past office buildings and government buildings and apartment buildings and stores, and not see a single person. She did pass a couple of cars, their drivers apparently driving as cautiously as she was, because even if you'd lived in a city your whole life, it took an entirely different skill set than a lot of people had to navigate in the dark. And not just late-night dark, too late for people to be out or for stores and offices to be open, but grid-failure dark, the kind of dark you only got during a total power outage under not much of a moon. Total dark.
Marya was not afraid of the dark. Marya had never been afraid of the dark. But she was afraid of this. Here and there she could see lights - candles in apartment windows, most likely - but there was nothing to light up. No streetlights, no stoplights. No lights in office buildings so the cleaning crews could see to do their jobs. No lights in stores to fake out anyone who might want to break in. Nothing.
"I am creeped the fuck out," she told Oscar, who had woken up and was now just sitting on the seat looking out the windshield. "I do not like this. This is not right." She knew there were people left in Pittsburgh - law of averages, right? Even if nine-tenths of the world's population had vanished, a larger city would have a larger number of people left. Nine-tenths of half a million was more than nine-tenths of fifty thousand.
But she did not want to stay in this dark, empty city any longer than she had to. She turned around and went back the way she'd come, watching for signs to I-376 or I-79 and trying and trying to ignore the increasing feeling that something was watching her.
Good Christ, this was terrifying. Now she was afraid to stop, and that just would not do. She couldn't keep driving until sunrise - she'd fall asleep at the wheel and they'd go off the road. And she had not packed up her van and taken her dog on the road to find her dad only to drive off the highway in Pennsylvania in the middle of the night, because she was too afraid of the dark to stop and sleep. She needed a motel or something. A rest stop. Someplace small, so if there was no one there, it wouldn't be quite so creepy, because it was less likely to be full of people than, oh, say, a big city.
Except for about ten minutes when she was convinced she'd gotten lost in the middle of Pittsburgh and would have to essentially double-park along the side of a major road in order to get some shut-eye, Marya managed to get out of the city and back on the highway ok. She was actually a little impressed with herself and her sense of direction. She headed in what she hoped was a westerly direction and floored it until the weirdly ghostly skyline was out of view. That was not an experience she was eager to repeat. The only thing worse would be if she'd seen zombies roaming the streets or something, although in that case she'd probably think she was in the middle of a bad z-grade nightmare because she was really in a coma because she'd fallen asleep at the wheel and run the van off the highway and into a tree. As it was, she was just convinced the world had ended and she would have to survive in some kind of post-apocalyptic America, only she couldn't say what exactly the apocalypse was.
And so far, the only remotely encouraging thing that had happened to her was that she'd found a gas station and had been able to fill the van's gas tank. And she'd seen three other vehicles on the road. Three was better than nothing, but at the same time? She'd like to see more.
Marya drove until she passed a sign welcoming her to Ohio, at which point she started looking for a rest stop or a police station kind of place, like they sometimes had off the side of the highway. State trooper headquarters or something. She didn't imagine they'd have lights on in their parking lots any more than any other place, but the thought of parking in between two state trooper cars so she could get some shut-eye was a vaguely comforting one.
"Keep your eyes peeled for a rest stop," she told Oscar, and then there was one, with restrooms and picnic tables and vending machines and racks of tourist brochures. Excellent. Marya pulled up in front of the building, one space away from an SUV with two bikes in the bike rack on the back, reached into the back seat to grab Oscar's leash, felt around in front for the flashlight, and got out of the van. She went around to let Oscar out so he could pee and stretch his legs, and so she'd have some company while she peed and stretched her legs. Oscar either felt her unease or just wanted to get back in the van and go back to sleep, because he did his thing with a minimum of sniffing and time-wasting and was not particularly patient while Marya did her thing.
She let him back in the van, climbed in the back seat, and unhooked his leash by reaching between the front seats and grabbing for it. Oscar yawned at her. She patted him on the head and told him he was a good boy, then moved everything sitting on the back seat so she could lie down. She reached into the back of the van to drag her sleeping bag over the back seat and on top of her. It wasn't very cold out but it wasn't warm either, and the van's seats were vinyl which didn't hold heat at all after the sun went down. As an afterthought she felt around for the blanket she'd taken off her bed and draped it over the front passenger seat for Oscar. He'd probably get tangled in it in the middle of the night and wake her up trying to get out of it, but at least she didn't have to worry about him being cold.
She scrunched down under the sleeping bag, more for security than warmth, and eventually fell asleep.
words: 2705
total words: 35,473
note: the precious moments park and chapel does indeed exist. i have not been there, tho. it actually looks a little creepy, in a relentlessly cheerful and sunshiny twee kind of way.