How to Find Peace at the End of the World Page 2

  Think. My boss’s truck is sticking out of the front of the building.

  I’m going to steal it. I’m going to high tail it to Dallas. To Amy.

  I go down the hall and tear the axe from where it hangs by the fire hydrant. I go back to the tech room. In one big swing I merely crack the glass. The next one doesn’t yield the results I had anticipated. I look at the glass again and remember the little metal wires it has crosshatched through it. I try swinging through the glass again with the axe. It bounces off and hits my thigh. Shit! I drop the axe and examine myself. It’d hurt a good deal but no blood because the axe head had bounced around and the blunt end had smacked me.

  I decide that a fire axe against the tough but bouncy glass is a bad idea. I aim at the door. It’s harder going than I expect but eventually I knock out the knob and cypher lock, taking a good chunk of wood off with it. I feel the axe head. It hasn’t got much of an edge. A part of me thinks it might be handy. I drop it, though. There’s another in the lobby.

  Inside the tech room I grab a few phones from their cradles. Then I take the cradles and the car chargers. I take ten extra batteries. I take three loaner tablet laptops, the newer ones with twenty hours on a charge. Extra batteries for those too.

  I’m not a crook, I tell myself. This might mean the difference between survival and death. Ha! How’s a laptop going to help you survive? You need to go get guns, ammo, MRE’s. That’s what you need to get, the rational part of my brain chimes in. I tell it to shut up and load all the crap into a cardboard box and head back downstairs. I sure look like a looter, I tell myself. It’s both hard to laugh and not to.

  10:45 AM. The box of tech is all I want from work. Work can take all the rest, the important files and documents and what not, and shove it. But I’m a man of honor: I even take the time to set the box down and turn off the lights before I leave. I load the box into the back of my boss’s lifted gasoline Super Duty.

  I look out at the parking lot and sweep my gaze to survey things. It seems so strange without a plane screaming overhead. Quiet and weird. Working so close to Hobby airport you almost get used to the noise, the regularity of it. On one side of the parking lot is the wood plank fence that we’d sneak behind to grab a smoke and watch the planes land, to talk on the phone without being seen by management. It must have happened early, this emergency. There aren’t that many cars. Most people usually don’t get in until eight thirty, nine. There are a few beaters here and there, all the poor temps and receptionists that work fixed and early hours. Some nice ones. Nothing I would take over the truck with a thirty three inch lift in a pinch, though. And then I see it.

  I see the CEO’s Ferrari parked in its usual spot. It’s very tempting, but not practical. I look around like I’m about to do something wrong. I am. Who cares? The only part that sees me, what I am about to do, is the rational part of my brain. You’re not taking this seriously Dan! I’ve always wanted to drive that car. I head back upstairs, to the other side, to the large corner office. There’s been a release. The air’s full of dangerous chemicals, Dan. Get the hell out of here as fast as you can. No time for joyrides. It’s a Ferrari Italia, though. I go through the doors to the big wig side of the building. The lights are all still on this side of the office. I guess they never got the memo about saving the environment.

  I’ve only ever been in the CEO’s office once and that was when my boss introduced me for our initial meeting. I remember Patrick patting me on the back while shaking my hand and baring teeth whiter than the snows of Kilimanjaro. Faker than fake, but of course I work for a marketing firm. Or used to work for a marketing firm, especially after today. I walk into the receptionist’s area lined with nicer carpet and plush cherry wood. I step up to the corner office door. Now or never. Go big or go home. All the lingo we use in our group to pump ourselves up before a pitch. I walk inside with a big fat smile on my face in case this has all been for Candid Camera. Empty. And just as other things have been going, there is the little key fob with the Ferrari horse sitting on his wide oak desk. Us common folk always seem to have more keys on our key rings. I wonder where rich pricks keep all theirs. Or used to. I guess they never needed them in the first place. Everything’s finger print and voice activated probably. I grab the Ferrari keys and stilt walk quickly out of the office. Downstairs, I hover over the beauty for a while. I look around again. I rub my hand over the red but seal slick skin of the car as if it provides its own frictionless coating to ease its passage through fluid air. This is the first time in my life I’ve ever been so close to such an elegant machine, unless you count auto shows. I’m somewhat of an enthusiast. I know it’s got 562 horsepower at redline and that it’s paddle shifted. I’ve watched countless videos on the driving mechanism. Everything should be good, right?

  When I open the door and slide into the leather seats, that’s when the magnitude of what I am doing hits me. Not just the grand grand theft auto, but the simple insanity of this act, the way it crosses so many unspoken boundaries. For one, you never touch another man’s ride unless he gives you express permission. Fuck it. I already have the key fob here in my hands. If it’s just a dream, I’ll be creaming or pissing my boxers soon enough. Creaming, then, because when I push the start button, the throb seems almost to be something originating deep in the earth. It’s coming up through the thousands of miles of magma and crust up the through the soil and pipes and asphalt, through the thousand dollar custom racing tires, through the two thousand dollar bucket seats, and right into my genitals.

  I lean on my Internet video learning, at least what I can remember of the steps needed to make this ride fly and paddle my way up to first gear to get out of the parking lot.

  The office abuts a long, broad avenue in the corporate park, straight as a landing strip, flat and two lanes wide. We always wondered how pilots from the airport nearby never mistook it for one. Often I’ve seen the CEO drag racing others in the office, his Italia usually winning against kitted out Beamers and Vettes. Well, just me now. I rev the engine, fingers on the upshift paddle. The imaginary start lights in my head go off. Red. Red. Red. Green. I’m still sitting on the asphalt, idling.

  My foot hovers over the pedal, my hands on the wheel.

  What am I doing? I ask myself. I should be doing my damnedest to save myself. I should be trying to get to Amy.

  What am I doing? Amy’s fine. Got to be fine. She’s fine. There’s been, maybe not an evacuation, but an incident. But Amy’s safe in Dallas. Dallas is two hundred and sixty seven miles to the North. Amy’s safe. The network is out. Or she had to leave her phone behind as everyone fled North. She’s in Colorado or something. That’s where the National Guard took her to. The imaginary state borders have neatly contained this thing whatever it is. I’m coming unglued, I think. No. I’ll be fine, too.

  My foot comes down, the paddle in 1st gear. Five hundred and seventy horses kick me up to sixty in three point four seconds. I find that despite my concerns I can’t help from smiling. As if the corners of my mouth are being pressed back by the acceleration. The corners of my eyes are wet.

  I’m crying. I know. Pussy, right?

  All the strange things of the morning. Strange feelings. When was the last time, honest?

  I’m taxed.

  Fear. Exhilaration. Uncertainty. Paranoia. Madness. All of it comes out as the South East Houston Corporate park turns to a smear against the Italia’s windows. I’m blowing by all the nice pretty buildings, the manicured flower plots. How many times have I pulled the up paddle? What gear am I in? Sixth. God. One hundred and eight miles an hour. At this speed the road joints feel like running over pets and small woodland creatures, like the axles are going to tear off.

  A ringing starts in my ears. It’s the acceleration. Or it’s the crazy. The ringing is getting louder, closer. Are my eardrums about to burst?

  That when I catch it in the rear view mirror. I double take. Triple take. It’s hard to know where I should put my attention going at one hundred and fif
teen miles per hour: possible obstacles before me, or the impossibility I see in the rear view mirror. An airplane. For a moment I feel ridiculous. Surreally I am that little guy on Paradise Island. I’m screaming while pointing into the sky. We’re going to be rescued. But I feel myself wilt just like that little guys face wilts as he realizes, no, there aint going to be a rescue. The plane, a jet, is impossibly close. It’s angled so that I can see the full on circle of the nose. I’ve only ever seen them from way down here when they’ve been way up here. Never even been on one, but they land all the time at the airport a few miles away. We used to take cig breaks behind the dumpster, before I quit, and watch them loping through the sky. And now I’m staring one down the nose through the rear view mirror. I can even make out the windows maybe and I don’t even have to be close enough to know there’s nobody inside. It’s coming straight for me. It’s going to crash.

  My foot falls the rest of the way. The car pushes me back into the seat as if saying “hold on.” I’ve watched so many videos of inexperienced drivers wiping out in sports cars. The muscles in my arm strain against the slight wobbles at such speed, hands clenched to keep the wheel perfectly straight.

  My eyes flick back to the rear view. I see the tip of the plane’s left wing come down, sheer light poles I’d zoomed by moments before. The poles, stalks of steel fifteen inches in diameter, snap like dry spaghetti, their tops spinning off in every direction. Peripherally I see a big steel bar fly towards my office building, right at the Beast where it sits in the parking lot, before pitching up at the last second and slamming into the glass façade, billows of glittering shards exploding outwards onto the parking lot.

  Then, time slows even more. The tip of one wing touches the grass embankment and as if upon hitting a plow blade the embankment erupts in a vertically flowing sheet of dirt and grass. Then the wing snaps off, the wide blade of metal disintegrating into millions of pieces. The spinning turbofan blades were blasted everywhere, chunks of metal flying faster than the tumbling plane body, landing all around and even in front of the car. The wing’s detachment spins the plane fuselage sideways. The body’s bank of empty windows turns in my rear view, and then I see the blank roof and then the windows on the other side. The other wing, still attached swings down like a falling axe and it seems the sun is being blotted out. I gun it, flipping into the last gear and pull away. Behind me the ground shakes. Sparks fountain from behind me, molten bits of metal flying past, pieces of glass splattering in the grass embankments and concrete all around. In the mirrors a spinning storm of metal and passenger’s seats and suitcases flying open, internal cargo blooming and shedding in a split second. The demon cyclone seems to follow the car, the pieces of the plane’s fuselage billowing out in a great cloud, threatening to consume me as it rolls forward swallowing me.

  I keep the gas pedal floored. God. God. God. My tongue squirms against gritted teeth.

  In the mirror, pieces of the jet are still tumbling but it doesn’t look like anything that could crush me. I hope.

  Yet it doesn’t seem I can let up. It’s the adrenaline.

  I need to stop myself before the straight bit of road ends and I shoot off into the bayou/nee drainage ditch.

  I finally force my foot off gas, downshift to engine brake the car. The roar dies down and I can actually begin to feel the ache in my jaw muscles, in my gum. I’m at gear 4 and the turn is almost upon me. I step on the actual brakes. They’re more powerful than I ever imagined, and I’d forgotten to buckle in. My forehead slams into the wheel and I can feel things leaving my control. I fishtail, the landscape pin wheeling around me. The crunch of the car bottom as it hits the curb of the turn is enormous and the world upends, sky, ground, sky. Then another massive crunch as the car lands on the bank of the drainage ditch. I see only sky before I pass out.

  ?????PM?. I wake with a killer headache. What time is it? My watch is broken. I don’t think I’ve been out for more than a few moments. The sun’s not far from where it’d been. Either that or I spent the whole night out here in the crumpled Ferrari. Either way I haven’t been found, rescued. The plane crash wasn’t much of a help sign, apparently.

  I clamber out and drop to the mowed grass. The pain is pretty intense at first but then loosens. I dry heave. No breakfast to lose. I need water. There’s a wad of cotton at the back of my throat. It’s been a warm winter and even in the middle of February the mosquitoes are out and since I’ve been so near the drainage ditch with the windows broken my face is covered with itchy little bumps.

  I bring my hand up to feel my forehead where it hurts. There’s a much nastier bump there but I don’t feel either slickness or the dried stickiness of blood. I stand up and my vision resolves. So does my hearing, sort of. I can hear the blaring of a million car alarms but they seem muffled. That should clear up, hopefully?

  I survey the wreckage I had just barely escaped: the fuselage of the airliner has split into three parts, or only three parts remain, cylinders that looked like crumpled toilet paper tubes, the innards of airplane seats and breathing masks spilling out, yet still disturbingly attached to the body of the plane in little strands of metal flooring or clear tubing. The rest of the plane has completely disintegrated, none of the pieces really bigger than a few feet around and laying in piles and drifts around the big tube sections. I stumble towards the wreck, regaining my footage. I steel myself, even though a part of me already knows what I won’t find.

  The wind carries things on the air, small and light things. Pieces of clothing. A lot of loose paper. There’s a surprisingly large amount of paper on an airplane. I think of all those business folios spilling their insides to the wind.

  I enter the umbra of the plane’s crash, which extends almost to where my skid marks begin and continue on to the broken curb.

  Twisted pieces of metal, pieces of luggage and airplane seats and this yellow foam, either the padding in the seats or from the airplane. Plastic cups, cans, bags of peanuts.

  I come upon the first set of airplane seats still all attached to one another in a row, still pristine, untouched by the gore of passengers. This is, according to how things have gone this morning, what I do not expect to find. And I’m actually disappointed to be right. I know how insane this sounds because it banishes all thought of evacuation or emergency from the realm of possibility. You can’t really evacuate an airplane, can you, not without bodies falling all over the place. I look up and the sky is clear. I’m going crazy.

  I almost expect another plane to be there, giant in my field of vision.

  Where am I? Another planet, maybe. Some giant candid camera skit? A dream. I slap myself and all I feel is burning on my cheek and over the ringing in my ears the echo of that crack against lonely building facades.

  I clamber across debris to the opening to one of the large cross sections. I pause. I still smell a trace of kerosene in the air, the fumes, the remnants, not enough to keep the plane aloft forever, circling in its autopilot pattern around the airport beacon. Everything has to come down sometime. I shiver, the image of the plane empty of all passengers, and pilots coursing through me and leaving me feeling cold.

  I need to get to her. I need to find out. I turn away from the wreckage. There’s nothing to see inside other than madness. I walk back towards the parking lot, careful of the glass blown away from the side of my building. The alarms are still blaring and get only incrementally louder as I approach. I need to find medical help. Is there still medical help to find?

  In my mind I’ve already made a resolution. A direction. North, towards Dallas, towards Amy. I don’t know how far this freakishness goes. I’ll go North until I’m stopped by the troops or whatever. I’ll go North until whatever agent has made this quarantine necessary strikes me down dead. They’ll find me on the road face down pointing North.

  2PM. Since the first, I’ve seen two other planes go down. Or heard them, really. Smudges in the distance, then a column of black smoke. The one that came down near me was fairly clear, o
nly some burning upholstery. No fuel left to burn. The other planes must have crashed into something explosive. I saw one go down near the closest refineries. I listened for some alarm to run towards, but there was only quiet.

  OK. Think. I’ve got the phones and laptops in strapped bags. I grabbed water from the office fridge and took my time carrying ten packs of 24 bottles each. I loaded it all in the back of the Beast. I grabbed the boxes of donuts and kolaches somebody had brought, too. Before that I’d sat in the upstairs lounge and gobbled up a frosted one that somebody had not yet finished. I was so hungry. Thirsty too as I downed two more bottles of chilled water after. Then promptly I wretched half of what I’d just consumed onto the marble reception floor.

  I took the sharp axe from the downstairs fire kit. Then, two more tins of gasoline: on breaking into the emergency generator room in the office I found two ten gallon cans. Power is still on thankfully. Don’t know how long that will last. I’m thinking about stopping by the gas station and taking a few more cans. The survivalist part of my mind points me back to Mad Max: why not find a tanker truck? I smirk. Pyrrhic smirk.

  I walk towards the edge of the parking lot and then turn to look at my effort: before starting up the truck I’d spent a few moments clearing out the plane’s debris from the exit of my parking lot. Not too bad. The plane’s wing had only snapped the light poles near my office and most of the debris was glass and a few twisted metal fragments from where the side windows of the buildings had blown out.

  The car alarms are also now mostly off. Some are too far to bother with but at least I can hear them. To my relief, my hearing is moment by moment returning. Hell, I never would have thought I would one day welcome the noise.