Author: TJ McAvoy

We were in Kansas City five days when the skies turned.

Lake Michigan rose up foaming as if from the underworld and it breached the Iowa state line washing out everything in its path, so we knew it was time to head elsewhere. My husband and I packed our twin girls into the van and knowing we wouldn’t ever return we headed west on I-80 out of Iowa City. With everyone else doing the same thing the road was soon clogged and impassible with parked or stalled-out vehicles by the time we arrived in Des Moines.

There were hundreds of people walking on the highway shoulder. All of them out of the city and into the immense flatlands beneath the open blue sky and we too fell in line, carrying everything we could with us including two sidearms hidden in our waistbands, one for my husband and one for me. The girls were very frightened and on the verge of tears. Now and then I’d see a dead person in a ditch on the side of the road and I’d point in the other direction at nothing in particular and the girls would look over to where I pointed, their eyes straining past the endless fields and out to the circling birds and webs of clouds. A sky so high and neat and endless. I couldn’t tell if either of the girls had already seen the body. Everything was nothing. There were no airplanes in the air and without the roar of traffic the world was eerily quiet.

We were always thirsty and we often talked with others on the road, exchanging information with the ones that seemed decent and had kids of their own. People told us they’d heard the day after the quake a nuclear reactor in Pennsylvania had failed and was contaminating the air. This besides the explosion we all knew about in Washington state. Or where Washington state used to be, now slipped entire into the ocean. Secretly I wondered about the plutonium plants, not to mention the nuke bombs and missiles, wherever they might be. The government wasn’t saying anything but there had to be serious problems. There had to be warheads nestled somewhere deep in the Earth’s mantle, just sitting there where the ground had swallowed them up.

I asked my husband about it that first night on the road. Our legs were tired beyond belief and our nerves frayed. I missed home. The girls were asleep under the moonlight and with the stars brighter than I’d ever seen them I whispered to him, What would happen if there were nukes buried down in the Earth? What would happen if they went off?

My husband had fought in Afghanistan and he said that I shouldn’t worry about such things. He said he’d walked through miles and miles of mine fields before and the worst thing you could do was think about the mines.

The both of us slept badly and the sunshine woke the girls early in the morning. We set off again southbound on US-69 with a thin line of people both in front and behind us, a wasted group of ghosts. I felt as though we were the last wretched souls on Earth, slinking slowly from the damned. Or maybe we were the damned, walking into the mouth of our eternal anguish.

This is an abbreviated chapter.

The girl walked toward the house of mirrors at dusk through the carnival’s aria and the sweet scent of popped corn and cotton candy. Little boys ran all around her. They ran toward her and then past, just dodging her, like those birds she remembered from downtown San Francisco. Those birds that would fly low and dive at your head, pulling up right at the last moment, and you could tell who the tourists were because, like her, when the birds came diving downward the tourists would duck or put their arms up in defense while the veterans of the city would just keep walking or standing in place. They didn’t allow the kamikaze birds to startle them, and it was the same at the carnival only instead of birds it was boys, boys racing each other through the crowd or boys chasing the girls with dirty feet and the lights of the carnival popped on with a thud and then a resounding electric hum, steady and monotonous, like blood in the vein of something horrible.

The pregnant girl walked toward the house of mirrors, alone. I’ll never get used to the stares, she thought. Fiendish laughter played on a recorded loop from the small speaker above the entrance, and she thought, The men stare and the women stare, each of them for different reasons, and the children stare, probably in wonder of how a person so young could have a belly so big.

Through the arched entrance made up like a gothic preservation and plunged suddenly into darkness, the girl took a right at the dead end of the narrow hall, suddenly surrounded by herself ad infinitum in the pulsing white light. Everywhere, the self. That same laughter from the entrance was amplified in the corridor of mirrors and she panicked briefly and began walking, looking past herself and through herself and around herself to discern a break in the labyrinth, to try and find a way through.

*

He sat on the bench eating a hot dog when he heard the cry for help. It sounded like someone was calling for a doctor so he dropped his hot dog on the asphalt and ran over to his little girl in line at the carousel. He grabbed her firmly by the wrist and pulled her and said, Someone needs our help, honey. They jogged to the house of mirrors and an old woman standing by the entrance yelling for someone to help her. I’m a doctor, the man told her.

There’s a woman in there, the old woman said, pointing to the gaping entrance of the house of mirrors. I think she’s having a baby.

Call the paramedics, the doctor told her, and pulled his little girl into the house of mirrors with him, met immediately by anguished screams and darkness. Hello? he said, and turned right at the end of the hall whereupon a room of seemingly infinite size and depth reflected back to him beneath the blinking strobe lights his own image, his right arm at his side connected umbilically to his daughter, whose face was scrunched into a tiny ball of worry or confusion, and he looked down to her as the screams from the woman in labor swelled as did some maniacal cackle of laughter from the speaker system, he looked down to his little girl, the real little girl at his side and not one of her million facsimiles patterned all about him and he said, Don’t be afraid.

He led them to a break in the mirror wall where they turned left, then right, then left again with the woman’s screams taunting them in the labyrinth and they finally found her lying upon a pile of someone’s clothes on the filthy ground. There was amniotic fluid and a great deal of blood. A woman kneeled next to her, holding her hand.

Hello, he told them. I’m a doctor. The woman in labor didn’t look like a woman at all but just a girl, fifteen or maybe sixteen, just a few years older than his own daughter. What’s your name? he asked the girl in labor. She screamed with pain and he looked down and saw the dark matted crown of the baby’s head peeking out from between her legs.

This baby is coming out right now, he said. You’re going to have to push, miss.

This is an abbreviated chapter.

When they came through Morse they were about a hundred strong and it was simply just a matter of packin up and joinin em. I’d been waiting for em to come down through the canyon and was ready to head out on my own when word came they’d be walking through. So I packed up all my essentials, if you will, and waited by morning light on the highway in that quiet valley until I saw them come forth off in the distance like a trickle of dust-burdened Moors. Straight up from the underworld. Then I watched em file past without so much as a nod from any of em and I fell in line and left Morse for good.

We moved our way down into Parachute and Halifax sticking to the quiet highway and some of em spoke to each other while we looked out west to where the Great Smoky Mountains used to reach up to heaven like god’s great violent reminder but were now just a memory. Vacant or discarded. We walked through Joliet and into Slumber where the abandoned mills and factories still hummed because the ghosts of this wasted country still need to work their ten hours to pass the time. By the end of the first day my feet were sore and blistered and our number had grown by almost half and we camped on the side of the highway at the foot of the pines, making small fires and eating canned beans and stew and chili with bread. Coffee bitter and boiling hot on the tongue. A few people had a group reading from their book and we slept in sleeping bags or else on blankets beneath the stars multiplied in the heavens awakened only rarely as a car or rig or van came peeling past us down the highway like thunder.

I’d grown up in Morse and spent my life there fishin like my old man and his before him. I played ball and chased the girls and watched em become women with somethin like fascination and awe. I volunteered for the army and was shipped off across the world to fight in a war I happened to believe in less and less with each passin day. I was over there when the quake happened. Very far from home indeed. I called in as soon as I could and never was able to reach anyone. Two weeks passed before I finally got an e-mail letter from my little sister sayin they were okay but they were all headin south, the whole town, basically the whole region. Or what was left of it. Because the Great Smokies were gone, she wrote, and Lake Morse, too, and the whole country was becoming dry. As if god picked up the world and shook it, she wrote. I remember her words but I don’t remember what I thought about them.

That first night on the road I didn’t sleep and was happy when we finally packed up and started out again with our shadows long and thin beside us down through Othello and the old ghost town of Golden with birdsong and a pallid sun growing higher in the air. We found the Charleston roaring past muddy and brown in the early afternoon just about where it used to be and we walked parallel to it, dipping our dirty hands and arms into it. I took off my boots and socks and set my feet in, feelin debris tickle at my toes and also like maybe it was the best thing I ever felt.

This is an abbreviated chapter.