Route 101 – Thunder Part 9 of 9

Flotsam

And that's the Road's history from beginning to end okay I so I left out the numerous attempts to travel the one mile of Road by various different thrill seekers and extreme sports nuts but that's a given really this sort of phenomenon always attracts the crazies.  There is of course one small fact that I have left out about the Road and that is no one has succeeded in traversing the full one mile they didn't just fail they all died.  My heart is pumping fast and I am beginning to think I've bitten off more than I can chew.  In the middle distance the dance of the lightening bolts lights up a circular patch near the school bus and I see just for a brief second the headless body of Robert Jones, the hair on the back of my neck and arms stands up straight.  If I make it I'd be famous otherwise I will be very dead indeed might even end up like Robert Jones.  This is it either I turn around now or I go hell for leather, I give my old hunker some gas it doesn't move and that would be because the hand brake is still on.

My mood shifts from sheer terror to a fit of the giggles which takes me awhile to get under control, once I've stopped laughing the Road is still there waiting for me its next victim.  The terror is gone now it has been replaced with never ending determination, I realise that I still got my foot on the gas so I drop the hand brake and my old hunker leaps away like a startled bull frog towards the chaos of the Road.

I drop the shielding into place across the windshield making it quite difficult to see out but I'm glad  to be wearing sunglasses I think would have been blinded as soon as I entered the storm zone.  I hear a number of loud thumps and I am pretty sure I can smell something burning, no point in looking in my rear view mirror there's nothing to see the cab is pretty much closed in with shielding plus I'm wearing the cloak as well which is quite warm.  Nothing truly bad has happened yet that I can see although I'm hardly into the heart of storm yet.  As I get closer to the half way mark I have to slow down there are far more wrecks in the way not many vehicles made it past this point and I having great difficulty navigating round them.  There is an awful lot of metal on metal sounds although I can barely hear that through the sound of the storm itself which like having a twenty pound artillery gun going off next to your ear every few seconds.  I'm now down to a complete crawl, I open the glove compartment to find something to stick in my ears, I don't really hear it more sort of feel it.  There's an explosion at the back on the nearside pretty sure that was the back wheel punctured I'm probably driving on at least one rim at the moment.  I see gap in the Road between the wrecks and I scrap slowly through, with cotton wadding stuffed in my ears the storm's voice is a little easier to take.

I'm past the half way point and Road is almost clear and I can see further down to the shadow of the over turned bus, I know I could scrap past the front of the bus at a reasonable speed which should give me enough momentum to make it out of the storm, there is another muffled explosion to right. The back of the hunker skews to right I do my best to turn into skid and just when I think I lost control my old hunker rights itself and I gear down to get some speed up.  I'm nearly up to fifty miles per hour when by the light of three simultaneous lightening bolts that hit close to the school bus whilst all around goes dark I see Robert Jones's headless body directly ahead I am mere yards from him, despite the fact he is most certainly dead I cannot bring myself to drive through him and I yank the steering wheel in attempt to swerve round him.  I must have missed him by mere inches however my swerve didn't end there as my hunker spun into a skid I heard the sickening crunch of the front axle tearing loose under the sudden collision with the bus but the bus did not stop the motion of my hunker but caused it to spin and then slide down off the side of the Road into the ditch.  The hunker starts to roll and I am tumbling over and over fortunately I have had the sense to wear my seat belt.

The hunker finally stops rolling and lands mostly upright, I can still hear the sounds of the storm outside but I cannot tell if I was far enough off the Road to attempt getting out of my hunker and walking the last two hundred yards or so. Still alive despite considerable bruising to my ribs, just as I was contemplating getting out the driver's airbag went off a little late and the sudden crunch in my nose leads to me suspect I now have a broken nose but compared to the pain in my ribs I barely notice it.  I pull a hunting knife from my boot and deflate the airbag, the driver's side door is completely buckled inwards no chance of leaving that way and it is closest to the storm so probably best to try leaving via the passengers side.

This door isn't bust however feels like something is blocking it so I roll down the window,  then lie on the bench seat and start kicking at the shielding I had attached to my hunker.  The fact that it survived the roll down the side of the Road is testament to my hardware skills but at the moment I want it to break very soon indeed.  It takes about five or six smacks of my heavy boots to knock the shielding loose at which point the light of the storm explodes into the cabin and not even my sunglasses are doing much good.  I squeeze my eyes shut as tightly as possible and pull the hood of the cloak close over my head, okay as clever ideas go not so good but it is still my only option of getting out alive.

I figure my best hope is to go feet first and head away from the storm which despite my cotton wadding is very loud indeed.  Fortunately I'm not an unfit guy, quite slim in fact and going through the cab window is fine then I land awkwardly on my left foot, I feel my ankle twist so I purposefully lean to right and promptly fall over but at least I out and no bolts have hit me yet.  I use my hunker as a base to work from and on all fours I ease myself slowly out onto the plain.  I risk a brief look back, the light from the storm is very bright indeed but it is probably a safe enough distance to stand up and run like hell.  Whilst running I trip over what I assume is a big ass boulder which sends me flying, I put out my hand and there is definite crack as I hit the ground along with the sudden increased pounding of the storm's voice although the pain in my ribs still getting most of my attention.  My breathing is very difficult, there is a very sharp stinging feeling in both of my hands and to cap it all off my left foot feels far to big for my boot.  The boot is probably the only thing that is keeping me walking well it is more of a limp now.

And then as if by magic the noise ceases and it is completely quiet, I change my course and head south back towards those who sent me into this damned Road in the first place.  I see their lights, they obviously can see me because they are pointing in my direction and gesticulating but I hear nothing. I get within perhaps a hundred yards and then the lights go out.

Jetsam

Opening my eyes I see I am in a hospital room both my hands are bandaged, I can barely breath due to the wrapping around my ribs and the breathing is still quite painful.  Pretty sure my head and neck are in something of a neck brace, I fumbled around until I find the button to call the nurse and give good ten second push.  For a hospital it is damn quiet almost deathly in its stillness, I would click my fingers if they weren't so bandaged up, my mouth won't open but I don't remember any injuries to my face during my stupid adventure down that Road, holy hell what was I thinking.  The door opens in walks a nurse and doctor they seemed to be speaking but nothing is coming out out of their mouths, is this death did I die? Definite feeling of panic trying to get up out of this nightmare what happened back on the Road have I become trapped like Robert Jones.  Two nurses in the room now gently pushing me down, the doctor has pulled out a notebook and is writing on it.  He turns the notebook round and shows it to my face.  It takes a while for me focus on it but when I do I stopped fighting and lie back on the bed, although I don't think the doctor's professional bedside manner really let me down easy with those three words he wrote on the notepad.

Route 101 – Thunder Part 8 of 9

The last of the D-Shifts appeared at the north end of the Road as a shiny black circle about forty feet in diameter and yet it had no thickness to it.  If you walked around it, it disappeared.  A young drifter by the name of T. Smith discovered it, nobody ever knew what the 'T' stood for but he normally answered to Smithy.  Smithy worked out what this D-Shift did before anyone else did and he used it to his considerable advantage until the cops caught up with him in Reno.  Part of the evidence that locked up Smithy came from the D-Shift, you see it showed you the past but not your past.  It did however show every person within fifty miles you merely had to concentrate on a particular person to zoom to their past like you would with two fingers on a phone pad to zoom into a image someone had emailed you.  Smithy had zoomed all right and then spent a week blackmailing all of the locals.

Once the cops brought Smithy back into range of the D-Shift, Detectives were able to record Smithy's past of him viewing someone's past and that was that for Smithy.

The D-Shift itself do not move despite all attempts by the government boys so in the end they encased it in a fifty foot high concrete and a lead lined bunker just be sure nobody tried to x-ray it.

Four D-Shifts on the four points of the compass seems a little unreal to me unless you factor in the Dwell's and the Grey's landings, definitely makes you wonder.

And yes I am still here staring down at the Road turning over the history in my head, a series of events that turned this Road into the deathtrap it is today.  Not far to travel now.

Remember I spoke about a D.S. Agent that visited the D-Shifts on a monthly basis, well I was lucky (not that I believe in luck mind you) enough to meet him on the day I arrived in town.  I had come to look at various different plots of land but the weather was looking particularly dark and stormy so I stayed inside at the local diner.  The locals were quite friendly indeed, asked me if I was Australian to which I was tempted to ask if they were Canadian however I was brought up to be polite.  I told them I was from Great Britain, a farmer looking for land.  Questions came, cattle, sheep or corn. I thought it best at the time to stick to telling them it would be most likely an old fashioned crop like corn not that I said old fashioned to them.  I didn't want to rub potential neighbours the wrong way on my first day in town of course nothing ever turns out the way you expect.

Several of the locals were contributing to the discussion about the best land in the area for corn when the D.S. Agent walked in, although at the time I just saw him as a youngish guy in a city suit.  When the locals saw him they hailed him like an old friend and waitress ask if he wanted his usual fair, which turned out to be steaming hot black coffee and a slice of freshly made apple pie.  His name was Robert Jones but all the locals called him Bob, I could tell however he didn't really liked being called Bob.  He looked to be in his early thirties, I was introduced to him by the locals they seemed quite proud that a city man visited their town on a monthly basis.  Of course he wasn't just any man from city he was a government man here to check on the local D-shifts make sure nobody had been tampering with them.  Upon talking with him it became apparent that he was very proud of his job and even prouder of his wife and two kids, the picture he showed of them was an almost perfect family shot. Two smiley kids in front with him and his slim black haired wife standing behind.  They say the irony of the Universe is that bad things happen to good people in this case I would say it was very true.

That dark and stormy weather I telling you about had just in the hit town when Bob was showing his family photo to me, he had just finished of eating his pie and was warming his hands around the coffee mug.  This was about midday yet it looked more like six in the evening with storm clouds covering the town and when the rain came it wasn't just water in those drops there were huge chunks of hail and ice coming down.  And this D.S .Agent was getting up to leave apparently he had a schedule to keep no storm was going to stop him from completing his assigned tasks on time.  After a lot of badgering by the locals and myself included we persuaded him to wait out the storm until it had passed the town.  It wouldn't take long to pass and as I look back at it now I wonder whether we did the right thing or not.  Fortunately the hail didn't last long although one large chunk hit the diner front window and cracked it badly, we could see a few lightening strikes across the town but nothing really bad.  The worst of it lasted no more than ten minutes and slowly the light returned, when it stopped raining we all came of the diner to see the dark clouds heading north.  We could hear in distance the occasional ripple of thunder, Robert Jones waved us all goodbye and that was the last time I really saw him apart from the photo of him in the local rag.

Robert Jones had a schedule which took him first to the northern end of the Road where he would check on that great big concrete bunker and then he would travel down the Road and take a dirt track towards the 'Sweeper' although he ever managed to travel off-road in that dinky little city car he drove I will never know.  The storm got there ahead of him and because we had persuaded him to ride out the storm in the diner he saw the school bus coming back from its monthly service.  If we hadn't delayed him he might have been safely off the Road when the storm hit, the effects of the storm on the surrounding D-shifts or perhaps it was the other round was an almighty deafening explosion that was heard three hundred miles away, not a single window in town remained unbroken and many of the larger buildings including the Baptist Church in town looked like they had been punched by a giant hand.  Fortunately at the time of the explosion I was in the toilet and it was without window, what I came out into was the sort devastation you see on the news after a tornado has hit a town or perhaps one of those Escher type D-Shifts.  It took a long time and a lot of hard work by the emergency services to bring some resemblance of order back to the town and none even considered what might have happened to Robert Jones on the Road before the storm hit.

Whilst I was doing my best to help everyone and you would think that I helped at all would have put me in the locals good graces when I bought that widow's land, no not at all they are just mean to their boots, the government boys were searching for the cause of the explosion which they tracked back to the Road.  Although they couldn't get very close even with heavy shielding, they soon discovered all four D-Shifts were no longer in residence and what was left behind was a never ending lightening storm which defied all forms of known weather along with the fact that the lightening bolts themselves weren't electrical in nature but they definitely packed a punch when they hit.  They also saw two thirds down the Road the school bus on its side with the twisted corpse of the driver attempting to climb out the emergency exit at the back of the bus.  About five yards away on the other side of the Road was Robert Jones's city electric car or at least what was left of it and his body stuck half way through a run towards the bus.  His head wasn't connected to his body that was lying mostly intact close to the front of the bus, none of the big scientists from the city have been able explain what is holding Jones's body in place.  In fact there was some mention that he might still be alive ,I'm not sure how that works when your head is five yards from your body something about stasis fields apparently.