It was early morning and the sunlight blasting through the windshield of his truck was somewhat blinding. He’d lowered the visor and even sat up; straight-backed in the seat of his muscular Dodge Ram but still couldn’t completely keep the glare out of his eyes. And also, sitting straight-backed made it even more difficult for him to push the accelerator with his elephantine leg, which was leaking bloody green fluids now from several new eruptions.
Jonas looked down at the speedometer and he was pegging almost 100 mph. He looked back up and into his rear-view mirror and saw the red flashing lights that he knew to be those of a Highway Patrol cruiser- a few hundred yards behind him but coming up fast.
“Holy Mother of speeding tickets!” he said. “I am the last man on the planet except for a Highway Patrol Officer!”
Jonas immediately removed his rhinoceros-sized foot from the accelerator and gently placed his normal-sized 10 on the brake pedal. “I wonder if he just wants to…” he murmured aloud as the Highway Patrol car whizzed past him, lights a’flashin’, siren a’wailin’.
But Jonas then woke suddenly to find himself sitting behind the steering wheel of his truck, pulled over to the side of the road, onto the shoulder. The engine was running, and the gear shifted into neutral: not park; and the onboard clock said 11:47. He looked up and out the front windshield: the road was empty as far as the eye could see. He looked into the rear-view mirror and, ditto: the road behind was desolate as far as the eye could see.
He did not remember even leaving the salvage yard.
He reasoned that the poison from his leg must’ve caused him to blackout, or the whiskey and the pills, or all three. He recognized where he was on the road to town. He could see the empty gasoline cans in the bed of his truck. And though he had several hours of daylight left, there was much to do, and he wanted to be back to safety in his compound before dark. And he knew not what complications might arise, especially if the electricity was off at all the gas stations in town.
His lower leg felt like it was seized in the teeth of a bear trap, and his head throbbed as if he had a dwarf inside it pounding a snare drum. Jonas reached into his shirt pocket and fished out a couple of pain pills he’d brought for lunch and washed them down with warm beer.
When Jonas arrived at the old wooden trestle bridge that carried the train over the river, the signal lights were flashing red and the arm of the crossing guard was down. However, it didn’t matter; it had been smashed through long ago and no longer raised and lowered anyway. Jonas steered around the stub of a thing, encouraged that there was still electricity in town; otherwise, the lights wouldn’t flash- he reasoned. But he kind of reasoned it wrong.
The first gas station he came to had no electricity, which sort of made sense because none of the traffic lights in the area were working. But Jonas knew there were electrical “grids”: that is to say that one part of town might not have power, but the next street over would. So he drove to another gas station. There was no electricity at the second one either or the third. And he was about to give up searching for one with power, for fear that he was only burning up daylight when he spotted a yellow caution signal blinking at a crosswalk about a block from where he was. He had come prepared with a hand-operated pump just in case he needed it. But it was definitely much better to just pump the gas directly from the nozzle into the cans in the back of his truck than to be forced to hand pump gas from the underground storage tanks, especially since his leg seemed to be getting larger by the hour and leaking more and more blood and pus.
But even though the gas station seemed to have electricity, he couldn’t figure out how to turn on the gas to the pumps. He knew how to do it: had done it before. Most stations have some switches and buttons behind the counter, as did this one, but they just didn’t seem to get the pumps going. He tried the breaker boxes in the back of the station and that didn’t work either. Finally, he figured again, he was just wasting time and got back into his truck and drove to the station across the street… and Bingo!
He had half a dozen fifteen-gallon gas cans and five, five-gallon cans that he was able to fill with petrol in approximately half an hour, using all pumps. And he was simultaneously filling up the last two cans and the tank of his Dodge Ram when he spotted somebody at the tailgate of the truck removing a couple of the five-gallon cans.
It was weird- the first person he had seen in about a year and they- he or she- gender indeterminable because it was hidden beneath a black bandana with white Arabic letters on it; dark welder’s goggles and a deep bluish purple pork pie hat. They were also wearing big welding gloves and long, dark oilskin dusters like the old cowboys in the movies; and they were stealing cans of his gasoline.
“Hey! Hey!” he said. The purple pork pie hat-wearing, non-gender terrorist-looking individual took off running with a couple of cans of gasoline- sort of clumsy- but amazingly fast.
“Hey! Hey!!! Don’t steal from me!”The person or entity or whatever continued to run away- elbows and kneecaps flying at odd angles.
Jonas said, sort of to himself, “You can have it...” And he shouted after them, “I want to talk. I just… want to talk to you!” But the oddly dressed, refugee from a costume party person disappeared behind a building with Jonas’s cans of gas.
Jonas placed the gasoline nozzle into the pump and took off running after the oddly dressed thief… his gigantic foot slapping down prints of blood and pus. And as painful as it was followed the thief around to the back of the building. He should’ve just hopped in his truck and driven… but in the heat of the moment… and he was not thinking clearly anyway.
When Jonas got to the back of the building, the thief in the goggles and pork pie hat was stopped and pouring the gasoline out of one of the five-gallon cans onto the ground.
“What the fuck?!” Jonas said.
The thief kicked over the other, already opened, can of gasoline and turned to run. And it was then that Jonas noticed that the individual was not only a fashion mishap…but had a tail. A hole had been cut into the back of the oilskin duster- or designed into it- or whatever so that the tail could stick out. And it was ringed- the tail- like a lemur.
Jonas stopped and stared in disbelief as the pork pie hat, duster-wearing, goggle bespectacled, ring-tailed lemur thief disappeared around a corner.
“What is going on?” he muttered. “Am I dreaming or hallucinating or dead? Am I dead, and Hell is a Disney carton or some shit?” Talking aloud to himself had become a fairly common practice since there had been no one else around to talk to for a while.
Jonas slowly collected his two gasoline cans and went back to his truck, leaving a trail of footprints in his own pus and blood intending to, as quickly as possible, refill the two five gallon cans and get back to the compound. But unfortunately for Jonas, there were a couple of more of the pork pie hat wearing punks at his truck and they’d already poured out half of all the gasoline cans that he’d just filled.
“Holy fucknuckles!” he said as he removed his 9 mm Beretta from its holster on his hip and raised it at the two… whatever they were. “Why are you doing this?” He said and fired over their heads. Not that he really believed that he could start a fire or cause an explosion with a gunshot, but he didn’t want to take any chances.
The two ludicrously attired miscreants turned and ran and sure enough, Jonas could see that they both had ringed tails.
By the time Jonas got the gas cans refilled; filled the passenger side seat and floorboard of his truck with canned goods and frozen foods and other supplies, and got back on the road to the compound, he was starting to run out of daylight. And he didn’t really want to be caught after dark away from the security of his salvage yard. And besides that, he was feeling pretty sick.
Jonas knew that the booze he was drinking and the pills he was eating to kill the pain and mitigate the reality of the fucked up situation he was in were not helping his state of mind. His hideously swollen and perversely misshapen, pus and blood trickling lower leg was probably going to kill him…. soon. He figured gangrene had already set in by the smell of. But if he was going to die he much prefer to it in the comfort of his own bed. He just didn’t want to feed the wild dogs. But, he figured, something or other would end up picking the flesh of his bones.
“You have got to be…” he said aloud, not completing the thought.
The timber trestle bridge had collapsed… or been blown up… or something.
“Fucking kidding me!” is what he would’ve said in his brain had he finished the thought.
For almost a full minute Jonas stared through the windshield of his truck at the trestle bridge. It wasn’t the entire trestle bridge actually that had been destroyed, just the first ten yards or so. He didn’t know what to do. He did not want to try and find a place in town to shelter in place as they used to say in the early days of the Visitors. What bad advice that turned out to be.
Jason threw the gearshift into reverse and stomped on the accelerator with his gangrenous, stinking foot and was ready to haul ass... there was another old wooden bridge that he knew of that crossed the river some miles away but it did cross the river and maybe he still had time if he hurried to get home before the darkness of night had swallowed the sun… or something like that but… the Lemur Boy triplets had come up behind him from out of nowhere and were stood, arms akimbo, blocking the road.
Jason would’ve had no qualms backing over them after what they’d done to him already but he wanted answers more than revenge.
“Did you have something to do with this?” He shouted, waving Big Medicine. “Huh?! Huh?!”
There was no answer from the three… collectively or individually.
“What’s the matter!?” he said, “No speak Earthling!? Cat got your tongue?! Too cool for school!? What Goddammit?! Did you have something to do with this bridge being out?!
Had it been a scene in a movie… the Camera would have pushed in slowly on one of the Lemur Boys- the one in the middle- and he would have slowly raised his hand and pointed upward toward the sky.
And Jonas would’ve looked up and the camera would’ve reversed to show his point of view: AN OLD SCHOOL FLYING SAUCER HOVERING IN MIDAIR.
“Holy Frikkin’ Moly!” Jonas would’ve said.
But it wasn’t a movie.
Jonas woke suddenly. His forehead was against the steering wheel of his truck... only it wasn’t his truck. It took a couple of seconds for his head to clear enough for him to begin to grasp the exigency of the yet unfamiliar circumstance he’d awakened to.
He’d apparently managed to get across the trestle bridge before it collapsed behind him.
There was canned food and beef jerky and canned food and some cracker snacks and stuff like that in the cab with him. But he was behind the wheel of a gasoline tanker truck.
Jonas had a cousin once who drove 18-wheelers and big rigs and the like and he’d actually been at the wheel of a couple of tanker trucks that hauled propane. So it didn’t surprise him that he’d climbed into this one and liberated it from its disuse or whatever. He just didn’t remember. Evidentially he had lost consciousness before he rolled up onto the trestle bridge or maybe halfway over because the metal base of the crossing guard signal light was crushed and rolled under the front bumper of the tanker.
The motor was still running so whatever happened hadn’t happened very long ago. The gauge in the dashboard told him that the tanker had a full tank of gas...
There seemed to Jonas to be an alternate reality in existence or something...but he’d been down that mental rabbit hole already. Was he on the other side? Was the multiverse more than a computer game? Fuck Robert Anton Wilson, he thought, and Erwin Schrödinger!
But then, in almost immediate contriteness, he asked himself: Why bring Schrödinger into this really? Or Cardinal Richelieu, the man who invented the spoon? He popped the big truck into gear and romped on the accelerator and hauled ass.
Time was a wasting as they say... and daylight was fading from the sky as quick as the blood drains from the face of a man whose throat has just been cut… well, maybe not quite that fast but it was starting to get dark.
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