Pandora's Highway

By Robert E. Taylor

The Collapse. Civilization swept away in the historical equivalent of the blink of an eye. Man reduced to little more than a parasite living off the carcass of the Old World. After twenty years, little was left for even the most diligent of scavengers to recover.
Animals had vanished, replaced with creatures that had never existed on Earth. Reproduction was difficult, water supplies poisoned and the world just kept on getting warmer.
As the saying went - The world was not what it was.

For Nathan Smith, inveterate wanderer, his latest trip was one of desperate need. His community was on the verge of falling apart due to lack of food, water and other vital supplies. If he couldn’t find them a place worth relocating to, well, he might as well not bother going back at all.

But he could not have imagined the extremes that he would find on this journey. Horror beyond his wildest nightmares and joy beyond anything he’d ever dared to hope.
The post-Collapse highways offered no free rides and no easy way. It was all or nothing and Nathan was about to learn a very important lesson.

On this road, there was no turning back.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Robert E. Taylor
• Release date: Aug 18, 2011
• ISBN: 9781466022676

Robert E. Taylor

Robert Taylor lives with his long-term partner just outside London, England. He has travelled widely, visiting most of Europe, much of North Africa and parts of the Middle-East. His jobs have included many diverse careers such as Bank Courier, Cinema Projectionist and even Scuba Diving Instructor. In his off time, he enjoys travel, reading, computer gaming and watching movies.

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Pandora’s Highway

By

Robert E. Taylor

*****

SMASHWORDS EDITION

*****

PUBLISHED BY:

Robert E. Taylor on Smashwords

*****

A Breath of Hope

Copyright © 2011 Robert Taylor

All rights reserved.

This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return it to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author’s work.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

I began writing over twenty years ago. However, writing is a lot easier than getting published. As anyone who’s tried this route will know, the road to publication is a long one, filled with endless rejections and disappointment. Eventually, I gave up on the whole enterprise. The worst part wasn’t the rejections, though. It was the total lack of any kind of constructive criticism from agents and publishers. I had never expected them to send my manuscripts back with a ten page critique, but I had hoped for more than just a complement slip.

So we come to the present day. Increasing concerns over my day job’s long term viability have prompted me to reconsider writing as a career. I dusted off those old files and set to work on them. There are undoubtedly mistakes and grammatical gaffes in this work. For those I apologize in advance. Proof-reading your own work is a difficult task.

I hope you get some enjoyment out of this novel and please, please leave me some feedback about it. Positive or negative, I can’t get better at this if I don’t know where I’m going wrong.

Enjoy.

Robert Taylor, August 2011

CHAPTER ONE

At the top of the rise, he brought the Jeep to a gentle stop in the middle of the road and applied the hand-brake. The engine purred fitfully, idling. There was no reason to turn it off and a dozen very good reasons to leave it running. Reasons to do with survival.

Before him, the blacktop stretched away in a dead straight line down from the rise and across what had once been mid-western scrubland. Now it was a little more desert-like. Wide patches of baked earth where nothing grew dotted with islands of mesquite and other hardy plants. Here and there succulents struggled to make a living from the parched landscape – Agave and Saguaro, mostly. It was an unforgiving vista.

Behind him, back the way he’d come, the scene was much the same. The only difference being that the road bent slightly in the far distance. The curve was obvious from the rise, but he did not remember having to turn the wheel whilst he was driving along it. Then again, the monotony of the drive did not exactly lend itself to making memorable moments. Besides, he’d had far more important things to watch out for than bends in the road.

He grabbed the roll-bar above the windshield and pulled himself upright, moving to stand on the drivers’ seat to gain a few more inches of elevation. He carefully scanned the immediate area, turning a complete three hundred and sixty degrees. A voice in his head, as usual at such moments, berated him for silhouetting himself on the ridge-line. Not good practice, it said. Not good practice at all.

But good practice wasn’t always so good these days. Good practice could get you killed just as easily as bad. If there was anything out there, human or otherwise, he’d rather have it see him from a distance and take a pop from long-range. Better to risk that than sneaking cautiously about and risk running into a face-to-face confrontation with something nasty. There were plenty of things around in the scrublands for which that would prove an almost certainly fatal encounter. At least it would be for him.

He turned a second circuit on the seat before he satisfied himself that there was nothing in the immediate vicinity that meant him harm. Grunting contentedly he reached down to the passenger seat to retrieve a pair of battered binoculars. A second grunt, nothing to do with contentedness, escaped him as he straightened.

Getting too old for this. He thought to himself.

He realized then how thirsty he was and bent down a second time for the plastic two liter bottle of water that nestled between the driver and passenger seats.

Straightening, he glanced around again to make sure it was safe, before hanging the binoculars over the spotlight on the roll-bar behind him. The spotlight was long since smashed but it made an acceptable hanging point for things.

Cracking open the water bottle and putting it to his lips he took a long draught. The water was horribly warm and unsatisfying. Yet it took the edge off his thirst. At one time the bottle had contained cola, or maybe lemonade. He couldn’t recall now and the label had long since given up the fight and fallen off. It didn’t matter. A lot of things that used to exist were no longer around. Cola and lemonade were the least of the things the world had lost.

He put the top back on and dropped the bottle onto the passenger seat, then reached for the binoculars again. Starting with the area ahead of him, he made a thorough sweep of the land around him, horizon to horizon.

As expected, the land was devoid of life. Other than the few hardy plants swaying in the slight, hot breeze, he saw nothing moving. Not even buzzards or lizards. It was mid-afternoon and the heat was stifling. Anything with any sense was resting someplace in the shade, waiting for the cool of evening to venture out.

Only mad dogs and Englishmen... He reminded himself with a wry smile. The sound of his own voice was quite a shock in the relatively silent landscape. The only other real noise was the Jeep engine.

He scanned the area again, to be doubly sure, but nothing was moving. Satisfied, he turned the binoculars to the road ahead of him and followed it away into the distant heat-haze.

At the edge of visibility, barely perceptible due to the shimmer, he could see the gas station.

At this distance it was impossible to make out any details beyond the basic function of the place. A single, one storey building and attendant unmistakable pumping area equipped with a canopy to keep the sun and rain off.

Rain. He snorted. It hadn’t rained here in a very long time.

He watched some more, but the distance and heat shimmer made it impossible to make out much else. There was, however, no sign of movement, which was a relief.

He was under no illusions. The place had probably been picked clean years ago and would have little to offer him. But it was on his route and he could ill afford to ignore it. You never knew what treasures you might find. These days treasures meant food, water or gas and maybe ammunition. At least, on a personal level, that was what mattered to him. There were other things that he might scavenge, for trade or to gain favor back at his community. Lately, however, even that sort of treasure had been getting rare.

Which explains why I’m so bloody far from Fortuna.

Thinking about his route made him reach down to the passenger seat again and retrieve his map. A long time ago it had been a simple road map. The kind of map that every gas station such as the one ahead carried to sell to lost motorists and tourists passing through. He’d had this one awhile and it was falling apart at the fold lines. He needed to find a replacement pretty soon and consign this one to tinder-duty.

Opening it up gingerly, he examined the road he was on. Not surprisingly, it failed to show the gas station ahead. The map was relatively simple, showing roads, rail tracks and basic topography. Towns and cities were marked along with places of interest, but on the whole, it was woefully lacking in detail. Over the last year or so, he’d scrawled meticulous notes on the map, making additions showing old farms, gas stations and other information that might be of use. But it was badly worn and stained. Maybe he’d find a new one down in the gas station and be able to copy over the information.

Time was moving on, though. He ought to get a move on. Out here, darkness fell quickly and things that disliked the heat of the day would be out and about long before that happened.

Looking at the map, he saw this road continued on, apparently without anything of interest, for another twenty miles or so beyond the point he was at now. After that was a modest-sized town, Albertville. There might be a few more unmarked buildings between the gas station and the town that he could investigate. In any case, Albertville was the limit of this particular expedition. Then it was back to Fortuna to report his findings, few though they were right now. He refolded and dropped the map back onto the seat.

Back.

He didn’t look forward to that drive. But, fuel being as it was, he was nearing the point of no return. The spare fuel cans he’d brought with him were nearly all empty. And fuel, being as rare as it was, was increasingly hard to find. He’d managed to coax a couple of gallons from an old Buick he’d dug out of a collapsed shed. It had stank pretty badly. Gone off, but it still worked. But that had been all he’d found in nearly three hundred miles.

Of course, the roads he’d travelled were main highways, for the most part, and undoubtedly well scavenged by those who’d gone before him. This far east, though, he might find something of use. He certainly hadn’t found any sign of human habitation out here. No humans meant no scavenging. No scavenging meant he might find something. If he was lucky, that was.

He took one last look through the binoculars and then dropped them down onto the seat as well. A careful glance around revealed that his immediate area was still quiet.

Good, he thought and swung himself out of the Jeep by the roll-bar. For a moment or two, he just stood beside the still running Jeep.

For the times, he was an ordinary looking man. Just shy of six feet and well-built. There was a wiriness about him that spoke of inadequate meals more than athleticism. He was dressed in heavily repaired jeans and a tee-shirt that had seen better days. A faded and stained fishing vest was worn over the shirt, pockets bulging with odd useful items. A pair of worn leather boots, long un-cleaned, adorned his feet.

Glancing around suspiciously, he managed to catch a glimpse of himself in the wing mirror.

His chin was covered in a short, scraggly beard but the lines on the visible parts of his face told of a life of hardship and struggle. The shoulder length hair was beyond tangled and heavily streaked with grey. He was uniformly grubby.

God, I look like an old man. He thought. I’m only forty-one.

His own visage always surprised him, mainly because he went out of his way to avoid seeing it. The years, and the way of life, had taken their toll on him. He did not like to be reminded of that fact.

No pretty ones left anymore, Nathan. He told himself. You included.

At last he moved around to the back of the vehicle and reached in, plucking out the pump-action shotgun. He balanced it across the corner of the rear and then stood in the middle of the road to have a piss.

Just an old man, standing in the road, taking a piss. He thought with wry amusement.

He half expected, as he usually did, that someone would take a shot at him as he stood there. They wouldn’t have a better chance. But there was no gunshot.

Finishing he pushed the shotgun back into the cluttered rear of the Jeep and climbed back into the drivers’ seat. Without further ado, he began to drive down towards the distant gas station.

*****

From five hundred yards he had a much better view of the old station through the binoculars. He’d stopped again to give it a more thorough examination before he drove up.

Some people had told him he was too cautious. That he took too much time over things. Some people said he should get on with the task at hand and not waste as much time as they said he did.

Some of those people were still alive. But not all.

It was another reason he preferred to work alone. Most of the other scavenger groups were two and sometimes three person units. Whilst he knew that was handy when it came to a fire-fight – which was mercifully rare, these days – he also knew that two people used twice the food and water of one man. Two people meant they could not travel as far as one due to food constraints. Two people distracted each other with idle chatter and nonsense. Two meant there was always another person to watch out for. Two meant not paying proper attention to what you were doing because you assumed the other would have it covered. Two people were a tragedy waiting to happen.

Billy....

Nathan shook himself out of his reverie. No time for that now. He didn’t need a second person to screw things up if he wasn’t on the ball himself.

Engine still running, he peered through the binoculars again.

The gas station building was in a surprisingly good state of repair. True, the windows were cracked and shattered facing the forecourt area. But the basic structure seemed sound. The gas pumps hadn’t been tampered with, as far as he could see, but the protective canopy leaned at a slight angle.

Subsidence of the foundations, perhaps?

Or perhaps just one of the particularly vicious desert storms had tried its best to topple it. Its best hadn’t been good enough, that time. But the canopy’s days were numbered. At least it was leaning away from the station building. If it fell he wouldn’t have to worry about it crushing him. He already planned to spend the night in the place, assuming it wasn’t riddled with vermin, of course.

Parked by one of the pumps was an ageing pickup truck. At one time it would have been quite an imposing-looking vehicle. Now, sitting on four flattened tires, paint blistered and peeling, its windows filthy, it just looked pathetic.

He wondered if it had been there since the time the world went to hell. Or if it had been the vehicle of some other scavenger like himself. He hoped it was the first. If it belonged to a scav, then that person had clearly found no fuel there, or had met with an unpleasant end in some way. It was not a very encouraging thought.

Do I ever have any other kind of thoughts?

There was no sign of movement. Either there was nobody home or they hadn’t heard him coming. The interior of the station was dark and he couldn’t see much, even though the broken windows. Could be anything in there, he told himself.

Yeah, but there probably wasn’t. Just empty shelves and dry tanks.

Only one way to find out for sure.

Gently, he drove the remaining distance to the station, stopping on the road just before the turn off for a last look. No movement.

He reached behind him into the back of the Jeep without taking his eyes off the station and found the shotgun, which he placed across his lap.

Reluctantly, he allowed the Jeep to roll forward the last few yards into the gas station.

*****

He parked short of the pumps and waited for a good five minutes, engine running, before he got out of the Jeep, shotgun in hand. He made sure the safety was off and that there was a shell in the breach before reaching back into the Jeep and turning the key to the off position.

The sudden silence was both alarming and rather restful. He’d always been appreciative of the silence that came after a noisy engine or machine was switched off. Somehow, it seemed the most intense silence of all. To him it was the audible equivalent of the golden light that photographers used to speak of. That time in early morning when the sunlight had a particular quality due the position of the sun. It was a beautiful moment.

But it passed all too quickly.

In the wake of the engine’s rumble new sounds impinged on his awareness. The faint noise of the wind, insect sounds, his own breathing. The faint pinging sounds the engine began to make as it cooled. The golden moment of silence passed all too soon.

Cautiously, he moved forward towards the station building. Each step was slow and measured, designed to make as little noise as possible. As he moved, his head turned constantly this way and that, seeking any signs of trouble. But there were none.

The pickup truck had a corpse in it. Long dead and desiccated. A thing that was more bone, hair and dried skin now. A man’s remains, it lay across the seats as if sleeping. The drivers’ door was slightly ajar and he carefully poked the barrel of the shotgun into the gap and eased it further open.

The corpse was still dressed, though its clothing was heavily faded and decayed. The glove compartment was open and empty. Door pockets likewise held nothing. Undoing the filler cap gave not even the faintest whiff of gasoline.

He’d already seen that the bed of the pickup was empty as he approached it, so, disappointed, he moved on to the building itself.

Reaching the broken windows that fronted the structure, he peered within, shotgun raised up to his shoulder and ready to fire.

Empty. He thought, looking within.

The typical paraphernalia of such gas stops was little in evidence here. True, there was the usual shelving making three neat aisles. There were the hooks from which had hung the usual array of car accessories and other junk. But all were empty. Stripped to the bone. Picked clean.

Some plastic and paper littered the floor, the discarded packaging from looters’ spoils. To the left as he looked in, he could see the counter and till. As with the rest of the place, it looked like nothing had been left by those that had scavenged before him.

Moving to the door he reached out to the handle, shotgun held one-handed before him. The door opened without much effort, but creaked alarmingly. He paused to check his surroundings again. Nothing.

Slowly he moved though the doorway, letting the door creak closed behind him. The shade of the interior was a welcome respite after the fierce heat of the afternoon. He paused for a moment, for once not cautious, just appreciative of the fact the sun was no longer beating down on his head. He was aware of a faint pounding in his skull – a headache courtesy of the sun he had now escaped.

Probably a bit of dehydration, too. He thought.

It did not look, however, as if he would find any fluids to help him here. He moved about the store area, poking and prodding, up one aisle then down the next. But there was literally nothing left of any use. Previous scavengers had taken everything. Shelf labels were all that remained, tantalizing him with such mysteries as why anyone would bother to loot anti-freeze or a windscreen squeegee.

As he reached the counter he saw that the till had been ransacked. Again he wondered what the looters had thought the money was going to be useful for? Tinder, perhaps, but little else. Money, like so many other things, had ceased to have any function long years ago.

Of course, he could be doing the looters a disservice. The till might have been robbed twenty odd years ago, when the world went to hell. There might have been the vague hope things might get back to normal then. Later, food and drink would have been looted, along with gasoline and oil. Then car parts, tools etc. Later looters might have taken maps and trinkets. Only the last looters would have bothered with the useless junk. Maybe they hoped to trade it for something useful. Maybe it had just ended up being dumped somewhere in the desert.

Behind the counter all was gone. Empty cupboards and shelves were all that he found. Someone had, years ago by the looks of it, scrawled We’re all fukked! on the wall behind the counter.

You’re not wrong, pal. He muttered to himself in agreement.

At the back of the shop area the rear wall was pierced by three doors. All were open. One led to the single unisex toilet, another to a small office with a tiny window that looked out onto the store and till area. The final one led to what had been a storage room. Everything had been removed from the office and store room. The toilet, even after years of not being used and being totally dry and odorless, was an unpleasant sight to behold. The looters had been creative and clearly increasingly upset with their diminishing returns as the store yielded fewer and fewer goodies over the years.

Between the doors had been a couple of vending machines. Both of them were drinks machines. Both had been thrown on the floor and smashed open. Both were completely empty of contents.

In the store room he found a ladder leading up to a roof hatch. He climbed carefully, a little awkwardly because of the shotgun and popped the hatch open.

The roof had clearly also been visited by the looters over the years. There was evidence of a camp fire, some empty beer bottles and a couple of crushed drinks cans. Anything lighter than that had been blown away by the wind over the years, but his attention was drawn to what looked like a sheet of white plastic.

It had fetched up against the very low retaining wall at the edge of the roof. He prodded at it with the barrel of the shotgun, finally catching a hole and lifting it up. A lot more came free from the decades of dirt that had drifted against the wall. He dropped it with a disappointed sigh. It was all that was left of an inflatable sex-doll. She wasn’t too pretty now, bleached by the sun and hairless.

Idly, he wondered how she’d got there. She didn’t seem like the kind of thing that would be sold in a gas station. Had she been the station attendants late night time-waster? Or something one of the looters had traded for elsewhere and couldn’t be parted from? Either way, she was no one’s plaything now.

He turned his back on her and made a circuit of the roof, looking out over the desert at the area around the gas station.

To the rear of the building was a dumpster on its side and a couple of burnt out car wrecks. Nothing of value there. To the front, the canopy over the pumps leaned away from the building and to either side was just more desert.

The sun was getting low now. It was noticeably cooler than it had been when he got out of the Jeep. Time to make a camp before things got too late.

He returned to the hatch and climbed down, then headed to the Jeep. In the back was a large backpack complete with bedroll, ready to go. He shouldered the pack and grabbed an old shopping bag filled with firewood. Lastly, he grabbed his water bottle before struggling back inside the gas station.

He had to make a couple of trips up the ladder before he had everything up top. His final task was to move the Jeep around the back of the building and park it close up against the wall.

Emergency get away. He smiled. Just in case.

In the store he shifted one of the aisle shelf units until it blocked the main entrance and half the windows, Satisfied, he turned, intending to head up to the roof and settle in for the night.

On the floor, where they had no doubt lain hidden under the shelving unit ever since their vending machine had been bust open, was a pair of drinks cans. Hardly daring to believe his luck, he went over to them.

One was labeled PolarCola and the other was a Zesto lemonade can. Both of them were unopened and full. Grinning like a fool, he picked them up and put them in his jacket pockets. Suddenly hopeful, he manhandled the other shelving units aside in the hopes of finding more. However, it seemed that the fates, whilst being kind, weren’t feeling overly generous. There were no more treats to be found.

A little disappointed, but still looking forward to the unaccustomed luxury, he climbed back up to the roof and closed the hatch behind him. The latch was long broken, so he was in no danger of being trapped up there.

As the afternoon faded into evening, he cleared up the previous camp fire area and readied one of his own. The previous campers had used a sheet of metal, probably a panel off one of the vending machines, to form a base for their fire to sit on. He re-used it, building a fire that he could light later, once the night’s chill had settled in.

Baking by day, freezing by night. He thought. Deserts really were such pleasant places.

Of course, the night’s chill brought with it condensation and even frost in the higher areas. It was probably only that which made the scrubby wastes remotely habitable. Creatures emerged to lick the moisture off leaves and rocks greedily, hurrying to get as much as they could before the first touch of dawn began to evaporate it away again.

His