Bad Glass

Traffic began to thin as I hit the middle of the state. Most of the remaining vehicles were military vehicles. I watched long convoys of Jeeps, transports, and drab-green tractor-trailers shooting west, back toward Seattle. They had I-90 pretty much to themselves and didn’t seem too concerned about the posted speed limits. Once, about fifty miles shy of the city, an open-backed transport passed, heading in my direction. It swerved around my car, easily hitting 110 mph in the far left lane, and suddenly I found a dozen helmeted soldiers staring back at me over the waist-high tailgate. They all had bored, empty expressions on their faces. What did they know about their destination, I wondered, about the place looming up ahead? Were they privy to government secrets, to the things we mere civilians couldn’t possibly know? Or were they, too, wandering around in the dark? I guessed the latter.

As I watched, one of the soldiers sparked a match and lit a cigarette. He protected the flame with his cupped hands and nodded the cigarette forward with his mouth, like a bird grabbing for a worm. I briefly considered trying to get some pictures of the transport—wondering how difficult it would be to dig out my camera while simultaneously flooring the accelerator—but the soldier with the cigarette lifted his head and saw me watching. A scowl spread across his face, and he flicked his match my way, bouncing it off the middle of my windshield. I let the truck go.

About a mile from the military barricade, I pulled to the side of the road and got out my telephoto lens. I sat on the hood of the car and counted soldiers through the long glass, steadying the heavy camera on my steepled knee. When the count hit thirty, I got back into the driver’s seat, returned the camera to my bag, and pulled out a map. There was a whole web of smaller roads sprouting out from the city. I figured not all of them would be this well guarded.

I started the car, crossed the median, and headed back west.

I was starting to get nervous. Until now, I’d had a precise plan, a course of action I could follow step by step by step. I’d spent the last couple of days crossing items off a list: I cashed my father’s final tuition check; I went shopping for supplies—photography gear, food, clothing; I packed up my tiny dorm room. For God’s sake, I had a fucking TripTik! An honest-to-God, Triple A—endorsed map pack, showing my course highlighted in bright neon yellow. I didn’t really need the damned thing—nothing could be simpler (California to Seattle via I-5, then Seattle to Spokane via I-90)—but there it was, sitting on my passenger seat. A course. A plan.

Now that I was off the TripTik, things had changed. Suddenly—uncertainty. I found myself grinding my teeth, and my knuckles had turned into tiny bone-white mountains, tensed atop the steering wheel.

I took the first exit and started wending my way north, sticking to the largest roads I could find. There was no life here, off the highway, nothing but shuttered strip malls and empty parking lots. By all accounts, the phenomena afflicting the city didn’t stretch out this far, but that hadn’t stopped people from fleeing, leaving behind this … this empty borderland. It was eerie. Nothing but convenience stores and gas stations. Abandoned and silent.

After a couple of minutes, the strip malls gave way to cookiecutter developments and middle-class suburban housing. A few chimneys billowed smoke, but most of the houses looked empty, and there were very few cars parked out on the streets. I passed a woman walking a black-and-white collie. They both stopped in their tracks and stared after me, their expressions nearly identical: wide-eyed curiosity mixed with fear.

I wondered how much looting there was out here now, how much home invasion. Not much, I guessed. It seemed like people just wanted to stay the fuck away from this place. And I was guessing that that included criminals.

I passed through the last of the housing developments and veered east, entering a small patch of well-maintained woodland. A park. The road dipped and angled back up north, finally terminating at the lip of a valley.

I stopped in the middle of the street and studied the map for a minute. The Spokane River was somewhere down below, flowing by at the bottom of this little gorge. I craned my neck and tried to catch sight of the city to the east, but it was blocked from view.

I turned my car in that direction.

I ran into a barricade at the mouth of Fort Wright Road. There were just two soldiers at this one, guarding a line of orange-and-white barrels, the sand-weighted kind that you see at the side of highway off-ramps. When I first rounded the corner, the soldiers were lost in private conversation. One was standing with his arms crossed while the other gestured wildly, drawing grand figures in the air. They both had rifles slung across their backs.