Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalipse

Thin as our plans were, the car put an unexpected twist in them just south of the Wyoming-Colorado border. The vibration in the rear fans had been getting steadily worse, and I’d brought us down closer to the ground to reduce the strain on them, hoping to make it to another city before they died completely, but we were still quite a ways north of Fort Collins when the right one gave up with a shriek and the car dropped on that side, hit the ground, then slewed halfway around and flipped completely over. The air bags whooshed out to hold us in place again, but the one in front of Jody burst with a bang and I heard her shriek in surprise as she fell head first into the windshield.

"Jody!" I fought to reach her over the bags still holding me in place. We skidded to a stop, but with the car upside down they deflated slowly, so we wouldn’t fall to the roof and break our necks. I managed to squeeze out through the gap between the one in front of me and the one between the seats. Jody lay in the hollow made by the roof and the curved windshield, her face bloody from a gash in her forehead. She was groping for something to pull herself up against.

My first thought was that she should lie flat in case she’d hurt her neck or spine, but then I realized there wasn’t enough space for that and she’d probably be better off sitting upright anyway. I took her hand in mine and helped her twist around until she could sit on the roof. The seats were just over our heads. "Is anything broken?" I asked as I looked in the gap between seats and floor for a medical kit.

"I don’t know." She flexed her arms and legs, then said, "Doesn’t feel like it." She held a hand to her forehead to keep the blood out of her eyes while she blinked to clear them. "Both eyes are okay," she said after a moment. Her voice was a little slurred but completely calm, the result of years of training for emergencies.

I couldn’t find a medical kit, so I tore a strip of cloth from my shirt and used that to sop up the blood from her wound. She winced when I blotted her cut with it, but I was glad to see muscle instead of bone before the blood welled up again.

"I think you’ll live," I said, trying not to let her hear the worry in my voice. Her injuries probably wouldn’t kill her, but a night outside in Colorado in the wintertime just might. I bent down so I could look out the windows. The Sun was still fairly high over the mountains. We had a couple of hours of daylight left, but I couldn’t see any houses and I didn’t know how far we could walk to find one. The wind wasn’t as strong here as it had been farther north, but it was still blowing hard enough to drop the chill factor by twenty degrees or so. It was already sucking the heat out of the car.

Jody had been thinking along the same lines. "All of a sudden I’m not so happy the world’s empty," she said.

"We’re not in trouble yet," I told her. "For one thing, the world’s not empty." I flicked on the car’s phone, dialled upside down, and waited, hoping the transmitter could make contact with its antenna underneath us.

"Who are you calling?" Jody asked. "Dave?"

"That’s right. He’s the only one anywhere close to us."

"What makes you think he’ll help us?"

"I don’t know if he will or not. But it can’t hurt to ask."

We waited for ten or fifteen seconds while the phone tried to make a connection. Finally we saw a flickering, snowy phantom on the windshield, and Dave’s voice, shot through with static, said, "What now?"

"This is Gregor," I said. "We’ve been in a wreck just north of Fort Collins. Jody’s been hurt. Can you come get us?"

His upside-down face looked us over suspiciously. "This is a trick to get me out of here."

"No it’s not," Jody said. "Here, have a look." She bent down toward the camera eye and took the blood-soaked rag from her forehead. Dave’s expression grew a little more sympathetic, but not enough.

"Sorry," he said. "You got yourselves into this, you can get yourselves out."

I said, "Dave, we’re not just asking a favour. We could die of exposure out here."

"Quit being melodramatic. You’re resourceful—" His image broke up for a second, then came back."—must have brought coats and hats and stuff."

"We’re in an upside-down car in the middle of nowhere and you’re telling us to put on our coats? Damn it, Jody’s injured! We need to get her to a hospital and see if she’s broken anything. She could have internal injuries."

It was hard to read his expression in the snowy, upside-down image. I thought he was scowling, then for a brief moment the scowl reversed itself. "All right," he said. "I’ll come. It’ll take me a while to get out of the mountain, and an hour or two more to get up there and find you. Just sit tight." Then before either of us could say anything more, he switched off.

I thought for a moment about his sudden capitulation. I didn’t like the feel of it, and pretty soon I realized why.

"The bastard isn’t going to come."

Jody looked around at me sharply. "What? He just said—"