Everyone Dies in the End #40

Cindy

The road was rough and her butt sore, but she didn’t feel sorry for herself, couldn’t feel sorry for herself. At least she had a butt to be sore. The friends she deserted in Charlotte did not. A day ago, maybe even twelve hours ago, that would have brought tears to her eyes, but the tears were gone. They were no good to Zak, his soldiers, or herself. She was sure that a small piece of her soul died when the tears departed. A good piece, a piece she might have needed before the missiles came, but something that was just excess baggage now. Still, her butt was sore. 

It was sore because the bench was hard, as was the wooden seat lining the opposite side of the U.S. Army (Was there still a U.S. to have an army?), troop truck.  The floor was metal, also hard, and above her stretched the tough canvas of the bed’s cover. The roads were rough because, well, everything was rough now. Wasn’t like there was a Department of Transportation to maintain the asphalt, concrete, or whatever these highways and byways were made from. They were headed northwest on Highway 176, a smaller road that paralleled Interstate 26. It was night, of course, and Ramzke sat in the cab, riding shotgun, so to speak. She spoke with him before they mounted up, shortly after dusk. She pointed out that Interstate 26 would be quicker, at least until they got anywhere near Charlotte. The thought almost brought the tears, but the tears were gone.

“Quicker, perhaps,” he had replied, “but also more dangerous. This country is a dying beast, but not dead yet. We don’t want to be caught in its death throes.” She had nodded, understanding, thinking of Zak and his men, striving to keep order in an orderless world.

Her fellow passengers explained that they had a large stock of army vehicles in Philadelphia. “We inherited them,” smirked the tall, red-haired man who still read The Gunslinger. Currently, it sat on the hard, wooden bench next to him. It was too dark to read. An assault rifle, the kind with a banana clip, had taken its place in his lap, because her fellow travelers were not really fellow passengers, they were her guards. Not that she was going anywhere with the anklet ready to blow her foot off.

“Fuck a truck,” replied the second guard, although he would not be guarding anything in the immediate future. A thick, white bandage covered his eyes. Another casualty of her screw up in Charlotte she learned. Looking directly at a nuclear detonation isn’t good for the retina. She had little sympathy. Zak and her friends had also looked directly into the detonation, but they had bigger problems than flash-blindness to worry about. Or maybe not, maybe they had no worries at all.

“Fuck it all,” the man muttered, and she thought she saw moisture glistening on his cheeks.

“Hurt?” she asked, not honestly caring.

He didn’t answer, at least not directly. “Maybe there’s a Doc in Philly that can help.”

She could see the red-haired man shake his head. What did he know? She didn’t care what he knew, basically she didn’t care, period.

“One second. I was looking, Tony and Brian (She guessed these were the other two men in their entourage) weren’t. I just finished a smoke. A Marlboro. Found the case under a stack of Pampers at Cassie’s Convenience on the corner of 2^nd and South. I crushed it with my boot, twisting back and forth, then I looked up, then it happened.”

She didn’t need to ask what “it” was. 

“If I had taken one more puff, twisted the butt under my boot one more time, I wouldn’t be blind. Fuck time.” He sobbed, loudly at first, then more quietly, and finally he was quiet. Cindy saw the moonlight gleam on his wet cheeks.

She guessed he was finished, but she guessed wrong.

“You see the Superman movie?”

She didn’t really care about this man, or his preference in movies. She had pain of her own to deal with. She answered anyway. “Yeah, I saw it.”

“He wouldn’t be blind.”

“You think? Of course he wouldn’t be blind,” sarcasm was heavy on her tongue. “Not unless it was a Kryptonite bomb.”

“Na, no,” He waved his hand at the air. “I don’t mean that. Lois died, but he saved Lois. How did he do that?”

Cindy was quiet for a minute, a long, thunderstruck minute. Then she whispered. “He traveled back in time.”

           “Not exactly,” he chuckled darkly, “but you got the idea.”