Just a Moment

I stumbled for the seventh time since I started walking down the freeway. I coughed as a picked myself up the dust and ash still raining from the sky. I wasn’t sure how much longer I was going to make it. I had a plastic bottle of water and I kept itching to clear my dry throat. However, I knew if I did, the quest to quench would not stop and I would still have the same feeling and have no water and I had a long way to go.

In front of me between the bits of dust and ash were cars thrown about. My vision was getting used to the blackness which obscured the sun. The only light which I was grateful for was coming from the city some fifty miles away. Yesterday the light would have reflected off the clouds and been lambasted for being light pollution. Today it is the remnant of what is no more.

I couldn’t take it anymore and then I sipped at the water, sloshed it around and spit. The dust and ash would kill me although at this point the radiation might get to me first. I took another sip and swallowed this time and forced myself to put the bottle in my suit jacket. I had walked for fifteen miles so far, and it did not appear like I needed to worry about the way home.

Home. Funny to think of it that way. Larissa had called it the prefix. It was a rental home that we acquired for cheap while we worked up our savings to put money down on a real home. A home where we would gain equity and raise little kids of our own. However, that dream exploded like Knoxville during the strike. Nuclear bombs tend to do that.

I made my way down the off-ramp from Route 70 to I-40. I was following the interstate against traffic because that is the way she was coming when it happened. Those of us still left in my office saw the flash reflected on the walls and two minutes later all the windows blew in. Then the winds blew in from the other direction. Shanice my fellow attorney caught shards of glass in her face. Poor girl. We had a twenty minute warning, and we saw our own missiles from silos long forgotten or thought decommissioned take off into the air. Well we didn’t die lying down, that was something. Go America, yay.

In front of me was a red car, a standard sedan, but the fender was off. I looked for a sign that it was the Altima I had bought her last year when she got her job in Knoxville. It was a long commute but was paying much better than my small family attorney’s office was bringing in. She worked as a biologist for some start up chemical company that was synthesizing pesticides from natural plants. Larissa had graduated college four years ago, worked as an intern, and was recommended to ChemCoGrow. I started to cry, because we were so happy.

The red car turned out to be a Toyota, and the person inside was crushed. Empty baby seat in the back. Pity. Baby was likely dead or an orphan. I walked against the traffic as I said and kept checking the shoulder or off the shoulder. All these cars got thrown from the sonic blast. The actual fireball probably exploded in the air, and was likely the Tsar Bomba, a Russian design that had a 50 kiloton yield. By exploding it above Knoxville it ensured that anything under that explosion was now 800 degrees, and would likely stat that hot for up to a year. The shockwaves tossed every car hundreds of meters and skipped them on the road. Some people survived, I know because I saw them broken and damaged trying to walk in the opposite direction. Yeah, no good they destroyed Asheville too, bastards.

I departed the road because there was another crushed red sedan Considering how these cars were thrown all over the place, it just occurred to me that Larissa’s car might be on the other side of the road. This car turned out to not be her either, but from that point on I walked in the median.

All the cards would have been going along just fine, and then the EMP would have stopped all of the electronics. First you would have seen the world turn pitch white from the explosion. Then the car would stop. Then the shockwaves. If you could hear the explosion it probably muffled the 250,000 screams for those that had time to do so. I heard the explosion from my office while picking out the shards from Shanice’s face.

I checked three more cars, they were getting pretty dense now. Must have been stuck in traffic everyone trying to flee the end of the world. All cleared. I had to drink more water now, and my coughing got worse. I was hoping it was still the ash, but my fear about radiation sickness was becoming more real. The wind was blowing strong from in front of me, and the heat of Knoxvillecarried along with it. Each gust stole fresh air and the way forward was getting harder.

Another red car was in front of me but it was crushed and sitting upside down on the top of a semi. I used to watch all those nature shows with tornados, and when you see it on TV you are always impressed by how powerful it is. But when you see it in person you are in pure awe. It wasn’t just the cars that got thrown about, the road itself was everywhere. Where the ripples of the shockwave lifted the road, the wind behind threw it. I climbed on top of the truck but it was too difficult to see inside. Whoever was in this car was now a permanent resident, and the local Highway Patrol wasn’t coming along to clean this up. Frustrated to determine if it was Larissa but unable to check inside I got down and went around the back of the semi. The car had crushed the trailer of office supplies it had been toting and I was amazed that the trailer held the car. I had no way of getting up to see in the back, but I could see the license plate, and it came from Texas. I let out a loud sigh, coughed some more and kept moving. It wasn’t her.

Each red car I checked off the list got me closer. But apart from being exhausted, poisoned, and defeated, it was getting hotter. I wasn’t sure how much longer I would be able to continue. Ten minutes? Twenty?

Finally. There was her car. The red Altima, with the vanity license plates. “LARRISA”. I laughed. I had paid an extra $50 to the Department of Motor Vehicles of Tennessee just so my fiancé would know how much I loved her. Now that I found her again, each step was a burden. The vehicle had been lifted and came down right on the median wall. Funny how those things stood up to a nuclear explosion. The driver inside would not have suffered. It would have been quick as hell. Maybe a spin a twist and then…. Nothing. I cried, and I could feel the soot and ashes clump for my tears. I swallowed what water I had left, and observed the mile marker 403 as if that would ever be helpful. I mustered up the courage to see the finality of it all and inched my way to the car. My eyesight was starting to get blurry and I could not be certain if it was the combination of ash and tears, or radiation and time, either way I found my final resting place. The vehicle was completely backwards and upside down, straddling the median wall. I made my way over to the drivers back and looked at what little was left. Larissa’s purse, and some contents of it thrown about a 1 foot cubic space. There was no visibility to the front seat. Perhaps she had been thrown from the car.

I continued forward and discovered that she was still in the car. There in the little space between what would have been the wheel and the driver’s seat was a severed human leg. Bent backwards in the wrong direction. Closer to the median was the dried puddle of blood where it had come from. Attached to the leg was a pair of Larissa’s sneakers. As a lab tech, business wear wasn’t necessary. One of those things she mentioned she loved about her job. No uniforms. I cried at the thought of what I would find on the other side, but knew I must see it. Weak and weary I climbed the cement wall with less grace then a belly flop at the local swimming hole. On the other side of the wall the car was pivoted slightly upwards, putting her passenger window right in line with what little sight I had left. I wretched. Larissa’s head had not been decapitated, but that was just the generosity of the skin of her neck. I instantly regretted coming to say goodbye, but when the world ended I wanted to be with her. I forced myself to look again and Larissa’s body was at an odd angle. She must have fallen into the middle of the car when it was crushed upside down. I am relieved she did not suffer. Her other leg was near to her face the crushing blow just mashing all of her beautiful parts together. I wept. I wept until there were no more tears to weep. Then I slept. When I awoke I was covered by a layer of ash. I stood up and walked to the back of the car, I no longer wished to see Larissa as she is, but to remember her as she was. I took out my phone and tried to look at it, but alas the EMP from the nuke had gotten to that too. However Larissa kept a necklace, a locket with the two of us taken as a selfie in some random park we found along the Blue Ridge Mountains. I went to the front and was again horrified, at the result but when I gathered the strength to look the necklace was not there. I thought maybe it might be in her purse so I leaped the wall again and looked in the back seat where her purse landed.

I suddenly was afraid that it was crushed under the middle of the car. I tried to cry but had no more moisture for tears. I was dying. I used the last of my strength to take the wall again and look in the final portion of the car, the passenger’s back seat.

The back door was not crushed. In fact one could almost say it was pristine. The red paint on the side was still red. The chrome handle still reflected the light of the fires coming from Knoxville. I tried the handle. The door sitting at an angle almost hit me in the face as it pivoted open. Inside from the center of the crushed vehicle was Larissa’s hand. Outstretched between her fingers lay the white gold heart shaped golden locket I had given her. It occurred to me, that as the world was ending, her last thought to was to clutch the picture of the two of us. Only by fate did her arm wind up doing a 180 into the back seat to preserve the last remnant of us being together. I took the locket from her lifeless hand and fell into the road. I looked at the two of us one last time as I drew my final breath and whispered to no one in particular “I love you”.