![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
smackenzieShe was sixty-five miles from Columbus, then forty, then twenty-two. The sky was overcast but there was some sun, and Oscar hung his head out the window and occasionally barked at something off the highway. Marya just hoped it wasn't going to rain, but the light was that kind of flat and the sky was that kind of gray, even with the intermittent breaks for sun. She felt alone enough in the world as it was - rain would make it worse.
She hadn't been able to find a good, quick route to take her the long way around Columbus instead of just past it, but she figured if she didn't try to get off the highway and into the city she should be fine. And for all she knew, the crazy guy in the little white car was just that - crazy - and Columbus was no scarier than Pittsburgh had been. Well, hopefully it would be a little more welcoming, and at least she'd be entering it during the day. Or if the roads really were blocked like the guy had said, she'd just go around. She had gas and food, she was getting used to having to pee in the bushes, and she was on a tight schedule. She didn't have to stop there if she didn't want to.
She passed a mile marker - Columbus 6 - and under "Columbus" someone had painted "Abandon all Hope".
"That doesn't look encouraging,” Marya said to Oscar, who had pulled his head in after accidentally swallowing a bug. She would have thought he’d like bugs - he ate everything else, and after all it was protein - but apparently not. She guessed the wings kind of wigged him out, and she couldn't blame him. She didn't like wings on her lunch either, unless they were chicken wings and the chicken was completely dead.
The first exit for Columbus looked clear so Marya got off onto the access road. She turned onto the next road off the exit and cruised down it for about ten minutes before she hit a roadblock, an honest-to-god roadblock like you sometimes saw cops setting up on TV or in the movies. This roadblock had been accomplished by parking some police cruisers across the road so they blocked all lanes of traffic going in both directions. There were a couple of guys standing in front of the cars, one of them in a police uniform, and both of them holding shotguns. Marya slowed down until she was about twenty feet from them, and then she stopped and rolled down the window.
"Hey," she called, "what's up?"
"Turn around," one of the guys - not the cop - called back. He gestured with his shotgun.
"What's going on?"
"I said turn around." The guy started walking forward. "You can't get in this way."
"Why'd you block off the city?"
"Safety precautions. No one comes in, no one goes out. We're keeping law and order. Now turn around."
When he got closer to the van Marya noticed the gray in his hair and how steady his hands were on the shotgun. She wondered if he was a cop out of uniform, like the other guy was probably a cop still in uniform, or if he was a game hunter or did he just like shotguns. Were there gun clubs in Columbus? It didn't seem like enough of a backwoods city, but she didn't know anything about Columbus and maybe there were groups of people who went out into the woods on weekends and shot at geese or something.
"What've you got in there?" the guy asked. He'd come up to the hood of the van. He pointed at the windshield with the barrel of the shotgun. "You got any food? Weapons? Salt?"
"Clothes and a drumkit," Marya told him. "And a dog." Oscar barked. The guy didn't even flinch. Under other circumstances that would have been a relief, but right now Marya would've really liked for the guy with the shotgun to be a little afraid of dogs. But not the kind of afraid that came with a twitchy trigger finger.
"Where'd you come from?"
"East coast. Massachusetts."
"And you don't have any food in there."
Marya was glad she hadn't turned the car off, just hit the brakes. She was suddenly acutely aware of being female and relatively young and possibly vulnerable-looking, and faced with two older, heavier guys who probably knew how to shoot the guns they carried. If they wanted her stuff, they could take it.
She shifted her feet so one was on the gas and one was on the brake, and rested her hand on the gear shift. If this guy moved any closer or made any kind of remotely threatening move with his shotgun she was so out of there. She needed to be able to make a hasty escape.
Oscar barked again. 'Hush," Marya hissed, as if that would do anything. The guy with the shotgun hadn't moved, but now he knocked the end of the barrel against the van's hood and said "Go on, get out of here. Leave us alone."
Marya took her foot off the brake and slowly backed up away from him, and after he had walked back to the roadblock and taken his place next to the other guy, only then did she turn around and drive headfirst back to the highway.
"Well, shit," she said to Oscar after they'd gotten back on the empty highway and continued west. "That was kind of scary. How many people do you think are left in Columbus? You think they can really block all the roads leading in? How long do you think it took them to get that organized? And why?"
It was certainly different from Pittsburgh. And it was a little freaky that she could be turned away from a perfectly ordinary city, but at the same time it was kind of a relief to know that not only were there other people out here, but there were other people organizing into large groups. It gave her some hope that she'd be able to find her dad after all, that he'd actually be there to find and that southern California and points in between wouldn't all be ghost towns.
It didn't help her decision about whether to get to St Louis by way of Cincinnati or Indianapolis, but the decision ended up being made for her by virtue of the fact that she'd gotten on I-70 right outside of Columbus without really paying attention. So, fine, she'd go through Indiana. The guy with the white car and the handgun had told her not to go south to Kentucky anyway, and he'd been right about Columbus being blocked off and guarded, so the fact that she'd unintentionally taken his advice was likely a good thing.
The rest of Ohio and the beginning of Indiana were entirely uneventful, for which Marya was weirdly grateful. So far her encounters with other people had been kind of oddly helpful but at the same time not at all satisfying. She'd run into crazy people, mostly. It almost made her miss Cass, whose brand of crazy was at least one Marya was familiar with. Cass wouldn't barricade herself in her apartment with a shotgun. For one thing, she hated guns. For another, she knew she was just as likely to shoot herself in the foot as she was to hit someone trying to break in.
Marya stopped around one, if the dashboard clock in the van was anything to go by, to have lunch and pee and walk Oscar. Her watch said it was eleven-thirty but she knew she'd been on the road longer than that. She'd passed all the exits for Indianapolis without even stopping to check them out. She wasn't taking any chances and she also was in a hurry. Now that she knew other people were still alive and forming militias out in the rest of the country, she didn't need to stop and check out every single possibility. Once was enough until she got other information.
She pulled off the road onto the shoulder, jumped out of the van, and walked around the back way to the other side to let Oscar out. He got out of the van before she could put his leash on, which freaked her out for about ten seconds, after which it became clear that he wasn't going anywhere. Maybe he wasn't as dumb as she sometimes thought. He had to have figured out by now that nothing was as it used to be and that he’d be safer with her than running off into the fields that stretched out on either side of the highway, whether she has his leash on him or not.
So she hooked his leash to his collar and walked him up the road, across the road, and back. Oscar sniffed at the shoulder where there were still random bits of trash lying around, as if people had been driving up and down the highway and pitching their McDonald's bags and napkins and sandwich wrappers and cigarette butts out their windows all this time, and Marya had just stumbled onto a particularly quiet stretch of highway, and any minute now an eighteen-wheeler or an SUV or an old station wagon packed with roadtrippers and their gear would drive by.
"Come on, dude, you gotta pee," she told Oscar as he nosed into the brush next to the shoulder. "I'm not going to stop in fifteen minutes so you can go. I'll give you a Twinkie."
There were distinct disadvantages to having a deaf dog, and making him understand you was definitely one of them. It was hard to bribe a dog who couldn't hear your voice offering him tasty bribes. Well, fine, she'd just eat the Twinkie herself, because now she was really hungry.
Oscar eventually did his business in the grass off the side of the shoulder so Marya could lead him around to the back of the van and get out his little portable water bowl. The water was behind the front seat, though, so she took it back around to the side of the van, Oscar trailing after her, and filled it with one of the now room temperature bottles. The cooler had apparently stopped cooling, although nothing in it had gone bad yet, and she'd already finished the orange juice and was just about done with the cheese, so there was less to worry about.
She ate the rest of the cheese for lunch with some chicken, a tomato, and an apple, and finished off with a pack of Ho-Hos. Oscar begged for a Ho-Ho but she gave him some chicken instead, chocolate being bad for dogs and all. She sucked down a bottle of water and got halfway through a second one before she had the itchy, vaguely scary feeling that she was being watched. She was sitting on the running board behind the front passenger seat of the van, with the door open, looking out at the cornfields beyond the highway, and she couldn't see anyone or anything anywhere in front of her. She hadn't heard anyone or anything coming up behind the van either. She would have heard a car. She thought she'd stopped recently enough that she would have seen someone walking down the highway, although why someone would be walking was beyond her comprehension.
She'd heard that a deaf dog's other senses sharpened to make up for the loss of hearing. They could see better, smell better, and could sense other creatures better. But clearly Oscar's heightened senses weren't, because now that he'd walked around, gone to the bathroom, and had some water and a snack, he was lying on the pavement next to the van as if it was the most normal place possible for a nap. He didn't seem to be asleep but he hadn't so much as twitched.
"What kind of guard dog are you?" Marya demanded of him. "I think something's watching us. Or someone. You're not going to protect me, are you." Oscar, unsurprisingly, didn't answer. Marya put the cap on her water and put the bottle on the floor of the van behind her, slid off the running board, and wrapped Oscar's leash around her hand. She climbed back on the running board, this time to see if she could see across the van and out the windows on the other side. Nothing but sky and some fields on the far side of the highway. She craned her next to see out the windshield, but the view there was more of the same. She twisted again to look out the back windows, and she wasn''t sure, but -
"Shit!" she cried. There was a person back there, on the road. It looked like they were riding a bike, and they were getting closer.
A bike? That didn't make a whole lot of sense. Who the hell rode a bicycle on the highway, and why now? There were a lot faster ways to get where you were going. Although this guy wouldn-t have to stop for gas....
And it was another human being. Maybe not a sane one, but an actual person, someone who wouldn't run her off the road for trying to get close to a city.
Marya backed out of the van, slid the door closed, and nudged Oscar with her foot until he got up.
"Someone's coming," she told him, leading him around the back of the van. "A guy on a bike. I wanna say hi."
words; 2276
total words: 40,814
She hadn't been able to find a good, quick route to take her the long way around Columbus instead of just past it, but she figured if she didn't try to get off the highway and into the city she should be fine. And for all she knew, the crazy guy in the little white car was just that - crazy - and Columbus was no scarier than Pittsburgh had been. Well, hopefully it would be a little more welcoming, and at least she'd be entering it during the day. Or if the roads really were blocked like the guy had said, she'd just go around. She had gas and food, she was getting used to having to pee in the bushes, and she was on a tight schedule. She didn't have to stop there if she didn't want to.
She passed a mile marker - Columbus 6 - and under "Columbus" someone had painted "Abandon all Hope".
"That doesn't look encouraging,” Marya said to Oscar, who had pulled his head in after accidentally swallowing a bug. She would have thought he’d like bugs - he ate everything else, and after all it was protein - but apparently not. She guessed the wings kind of wigged him out, and she couldn't blame him. She didn't like wings on her lunch either, unless they were chicken wings and the chicken was completely dead.
The first exit for Columbus looked clear so Marya got off onto the access road. She turned onto the next road off the exit and cruised down it for about ten minutes before she hit a roadblock, an honest-to-god roadblock like you sometimes saw cops setting up on TV or in the movies. This roadblock had been accomplished by parking some police cruisers across the road so they blocked all lanes of traffic going in both directions. There were a couple of guys standing in front of the cars, one of them in a police uniform, and both of them holding shotguns. Marya slowed down until she was about twenty feet from them, and then she stopped and rolled down the window.
"Hey," she called, "what's up?"
"Turn around," one of the guys - not the cop - called back. He gestured with his shotgun.
"What's going on?"
"I said turn around." The guy started walking forward. "You can't get in this way."
"Why'd you block off the city?"
"Safety precautions. No one comes in, no one goes out. We're keeping law and order. Now turn around."
When he got closer to the van Marya noticed the gray in his hair and how steady his hands were on the shotgun. She wondered if he was a cop out of uniform, like the other guy was probably a cop still in uniform, or if he was a game hunter or did he just like shotguns. Were there gun clubs in Columbus? It didn't seem like enough of a backwoods city, but she didn't know anything about Columbus and maybe there were groups of people who went out into the woods on weekends and shot at geese or something.
"What've you got in there?" the guy asked. He'd come up to the hood of the van. He pointed at the windshield with the barrel of the shotgun. "You got any food? Weapons? Salt?"
"Clothes and a drumkit," Marya told him. "And a dog." Oscar barked. The guy didn't even flinch. Under other circumstances that would have been a relief, but right now Marya would've really liked for the guy with the shotgun to be a little afraid of dogs. But not the kind of afraid that came with a twitchy trigger finger.
"Where'd you come from?"
"East coast. Massachusetts."
"And you don't have any food in there."
Marya was glad she hadn't turned the car off, just hit the brakes. She was suddenly acutely aware of being female and relatively young and possibly vulnerable-looking, and faced with two older, heavier guys who probably knew how to shoot the guns they carried. If they wanted her stuff, they could take it.
She shifted her feet so one was on the gas and one was on the brake, and rested her hand on the gear shift. If this guy moved any closer or made any kind of remotely threatening move with his shotgun she was so out of there. She needed to be able to make a hasty escape.
Oscar barked again. 'Hush," Marya hissed, as if that would do anything. The guy with the shotgun hadn't moved, but now he knocked the end of the barrel against the van's hood and said "Go on, get out of here. Leave us alone."
Marya took her foot off the brake and slowly backed up away from him, and after he had walked back to the roadblock and taken his place next to the other guy, only then did she turn around and drive headfirst back to the highway.
"Well, shit," she said to Oscar after they'd gotten back on the empty highway and continued west. "That was kind of scary. How many people do you think are left in Columbus? You think they can really block all the roads leading in? How long do you think it took them to get that organized? And why?"
It was certainly different from Pittsburgh. And it was a little freaky that she could be turned away from a perfectly ordinary city, but at the same time it was kind of a relief to know that not only were there other people out here, but there were other people organizing into large groups. It gave her some hope that she'd be able to find her dad after all, that he'd actually be there to find and that southern California and points in between wouldn't all be ghost towns.
It didn't help her decision about whether to get to St Louis by way of Cincinnati or Indianapolis, but the decision ended up being made for her by virtue of the fact that she'd gotten on I-70 right outside of Columbus without really paying attention. So, fine, she'd go through Indiana. The guy with the white car and the handgun had told her not to go south to Kentucky anyway, and he'd been right about Columbus being blocked off and guarded, so the fact that she'd unintentionally taken his advice was likely a good thing.
The rest of Ohio and the beginning of Indiana were entirely uneventful, for which Marya was weirdly grateful. So far her encounters with other people had been kind of oddly helpful but at the same time not at all satisfying. She'd run into crazy people, mostly. It almost made her miss Cass, whose brand of crazy was at least one Marya was familiar with. Cass wouldn't barricade herself in her apartment with a shotgun. For one thing, she hated guns. For another, she knew she was just as likely to shoot herself in the foot as she was to hit someone trying to break in.
Marya stopped around one, if the dashboard clock in the van was anything to go by, to have lunch and pee and walk Oscar. Her watch said it was eleven-thirty but she knew she'd been on the road longer than that. She'd passed all the exits for Indianapolis without even stopping to check them out. She wasn't taking any chances and she also was in a hurry. Now that she knew other people were still alive and forming militias out in the rest of the country, she didn't need to stop and check out every single possibility. Once was enough until she got other information.
She pulled off the road onto the shoulder, jumped out of the van, and walked around the back way to the other side to let Oscar out. He got out of the van before she could put his leash on, which freaked her out for about ten seconds, after which it became clear that he wasn't going anywhere. Maybe he wasn't as dumb as she sometimes thought. He had to have figured out by now that nothing was as it used to be and that he’d be safer with her than running off into the fields that stretched out on either side of the highway, whether she has his leash on him or not.
So she hooked his leash to his collar and walked him up the road, across the road, and back. Oscar sniffed at the shoulder where there were still random bits of trash lying around, as if people had been driving up and down the highway and pitching their McDonald's bags and napkins and sandwich wrappers and cigarette butts out their windows all this time, and Marya had just stumbled onto a particularly quiet stretch of highway, and any minute now an eighteen-wheeler or an SUV or an old station wagon packed with roadtrippers and their gear would drive by.
"Come on, dude, you gotta pee," she told Oscar as he nosed into the brush next to the shoulder. "I'm not going to stop in fifteen minutes so you can go. I'll give you a Twinkie."
There were distinct disadvantages to having a deaf dog, and making him understand you was definitely one of them. It was hard to bribe a dog who couldn't hear your voice offering him tasty bribes. Well, fine, she'd just eat the Twinkie herself, because now she was really hungry.
Oscar eventually did his business in the grass off the side of the shoulder so Marya could lead him around to the back of the van and get out his little portable water bowl. The water was behind the front seat, though, so she took it back around to the side of the van, Oscar trailing after her, and filled it with one of the now room temperature bottles. The cooler had apparently stopped cooling, although nothing in it had gone bad yet, and she'd already finished the orange juice and was just about done with the cheese, so there was less to worry about.
She ate the rest of the cheese for lunch with some chicken, a tomato, and an apple, and finished off with a pack of Ho-Hos. Oscar begged for a Ho-Ho but she gave him some chicken instead, chocolate being bad for dogs and all. She sucked down a bottle of water and got halfway through a second one before she had the itchy, vaguely scary feeling that she was being watched. She was sitting on the running board behind the front passenger seat of the van, with the door open, looking out at the cornfields beyond the highway, and she couldn't see anyone or anything anywhere in front of her. She hadn't heard anyone or anything coming up behind the van either. She would have heard a car. She thought she'd stopped recently enough that she would have seen someone walking down the highway, although why someone would be walking was beyond her comprehension.
She'd heard that a deaf dog's other senses sharpened to make up for the loss of hearing. They could see better, smell better, and could sense other creatures better. But clearly Oscar's heightened senses weren't, because now that he'd walked around, gone to the bathroom, and had some water and a snack, he was lying on the pavement next to the van as if it was the most normal place possible for a nap. He didn't seem to be asleep but he hadn't so much as twitched.
"What kind of guard dog are you?" Marya demanded of him. "I think something's watching us. Or someone. You're not going to protect me, are you." Oscar, unsurprisingly, didn't answer. Marya put the cap on her water and put the bottle on the floor of the van behind her, slid off the running board, and wrapped Oscar's leash around her hand. She climbed back on the running board, this time to see if she could see across the van and out the windows on the other side. Nothing but sky and some fields on the far side of the highway. She craned her next to see out the windshield, but the view there was more of the same. She twisted again to look out the back windows, and she wasn''t sure, but -
"Shit!" she cried. There was a person back there, on the road. It looked like they were riding a bike, and they were getting closer.
A bike? That didn't make a whole lot of sense. Who the hell rode a bicycle on the highway, and why now? There were a lot faster ways to get where you were going. Although this guy wouldn-t have to stop for gas....
And it was another human being. Maybe not a sane one, but an actual person, someone who wouldn't run her off the road for trying to get close to a city.
Marya backed out of the van, slid the door closed, and nudged Oscar with her foot until he got up.
"Someone's coming," she told him, leading him around the back of the van. "A guy on a bike. I wanna say hi."
words; 2276
total words: 40,814
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-11-25 02:27 pm (UTC)(Shall we set up a betting pool? Ghost/not ghost? Friendly/not friendly? Nuts/not nuts? Yes, those are separate categories.)
no subject
Date: 2007-11-26 05:06 am (UTC)*resists the urge to type "good, bad, i'm the guy with the gun"*
no subject
Date: 2007-11-25 06:14 pm (UTC)Also want to see who the bikedude is. I'm voting non-ghost, friendly, kinda nuts.
*Yes, those are words. You can wordify anything if you just verb it.
no subject
Date: 2007-11-26 05:09 am (UTC)columbus was a bastion of law and order, for a certain definition of "order". also me picking a city at random and going "ok, you guys are going to be slightly nuts with the martial law, have fun!"