A selection from "Perpetual Motion Blues" by Harper Hull

Perpetual Motion Blues

by Harper Hull

The Last Trip, Day 2

T

he taller old man in the group opened his backpack, pulled out a ragged,
yellow rain slicker and quickly pulled it over his arms, up onto his
shoulders. Behind him, his three equally elderly comrades followed suit and wriggled their weary bodies into their own waterproof clothing of different fabrics and colors.

“I hope Howard found new coats this time,” said one of the women, pulling her hood over her yellow-grey hair and tightening the cords below her neck.

“He’ll never find new coats, Jenna! Surely you realize this by now.” The yellow-clad man snorted, throwing a withering look back across his shoulder towards his elderly wife. “Like he’ll never find that part.”

The second woman in the group shook her head slowly and slipped her thin arm through that of the man beside her. He was leaning heavily on a thick, slightly curved stick of weathered wood. He was breathing raggedly and every step seemed to cause a grimace across his leathery, sun-beaten face. He stopped a moment and stared into the sunny blue skies above and beyond, the woman beside him smiling at him in a mournful way and rubbing his elbow with bony fingers.

“This is our last time, Eric.” She projected her voice to reach the man in yellow.

“You always say that,” said Eric, turning around to face her. “It’s never the last time. You’ll travel again. Both of you! If he makes it, that is.” Eric waggled a derisive finger at the wheezing man.

A short way off along the dusty road where the sun-scorched hills dipped to meet a narrow, dirty river a baton of lightning arrowed from the sky; a solitary black cloud was rumbling over the near horizon, a dismal blot in a canvas of blue.

“Why, it looks like a flash storm! How unexpected!” Eric said in a sarcastic tone, rolling his eyes.

The rain began to fall, heavily. The four elderly people slowly made their way along the road that was becoming slick and muddy beneath their feet. No one spoke as they reached the low-humped hills, followed the trail across them, and stopped on a slope overlooking the splashing river. On the near bank lay an upturned wooden row-boat. One edge sat off the wet dirt upon a small rock, and there were two oars lying on the ground beside it.

“Whose turn is it? Does anyone even care?” asked the sick old man, whose name was Jason. “You should do it, Eric, we’re all tired and it is for your benefit.”

“Let’s just go another way this time!” said the woman arm-in-arm with Jason, “if it doesn’t work out and we don’t get there, well, I don’t think I – we – really care anymore.”

Beside her Jason sighed and nodded his head. “I’m with Molly. I’ll happily risk it all ending in a week at the chance of a few extra days that are just different. This isn’t living anymore, is it? Was it ever?”

“Shut it, you two!” shouted Eric, “I’m sick to death of this. Go, if you want, I don’t care. Enjoy the light show. We’re going on as usual. Wait here, Jenna.”

Eric strode over-confidently down the path to the riverside, barely keeping his balance on the slick ground as the rain pelted off his coat. As he approached the upturned boat he slipped his backpack off and pulled a large knife from a side pouch. Grunting, he bent down and grabbed one of the wet oars from the ground and thwacked it against the side of the boat. A brown-and-yellow diamond-striped snake came wriggling quickly from beneath the boat, skirting the small rock. Eric leaned forward and chopped down with his knife, decapitating the snake in one well-practiced swipe.

“Us one thousand, five hundred and sixty, snake one!” said Eric loudly, with little joy in his voice, gesturing to Jenna at the top of the slope to come join him.

The First Trip, Day 1

Molly shouted to Jason as she twisted a key uselessly in the car ignition.

“Completely dead! Not a thing. You get anything else on the TV?”

Jason ran back inside the cabin before reappearing a moment later, shaking his head.

“Nothing, it’s kaput too! Everything electrical has died.”

Molly rushed back to the cabin, finding herself glancing up at the sky as she did, and pulled Jason inside with her. In the main, spacious room Eric and Jenna were fiddling with the dead television and a small, silent weather radio.

“Okay, kid, let’s think it through here. This is crazy,” said Molly, pulling her loosened red hair away from her face with both hands. “They said we had one week. They said there are transports leaving Centralia up to and including the seventh day. They expected all communications to be lost quickly – and they were right. They didn’t mention everything with electrical power going down.”

“This is freaking insane,” yelled Eric, punching the top of the television, “we get an emergency broadcast out of nowhere telling us we all die in a week and we’re supposed to just accept it as fact? I want some goddamn proof!”

“Look around!” shouted Jenna. “Nothing works! You think a power outage took out everything with batteries, and the car?” She dropped her face into her hands and became silent.

A huge boom rocked the cabin, sending plates and cups falling from shelves in the kitchen and smashing on the floor. Jason ran outside and headed towards the back of the cabin where he thought the explosion had come from. Looking out across the forest he saw a thick chimney of black smoke trailing up into the grey sky. Thinking fast, he took off running towards the tree line. Behind him, the others watched from a window, faces ashen. Eric slipped an arm around his wife and pulled her close. Molly crossed herself as she watched her husband disappear amongst the trees.

Forty minutes later Jason returned, dirty and out of breath. The others saw him coming and met him at the door.

“Start packing,” he said, huffing. “That was a commercial passenger ‘plane. No survivors.”

“Who is doing this?” asked Jenna. “Who is trying to kill us?”

“It doesn’t really matter, does it? We have one week to get to Centralia, of all places, without any transport. Let’s get some shit together, fast, and head out.” Jason moved towards the bedrooms to collect backpacks.

Within the hour the four were on their way and heading in a direction away from the crashed airplane, much to the relief of Jenna. Each wore the backpacks they had brought along for the weekend in the cabin, stuffed full of processed food, water and a minimum of extra clothing.

“Look on the bright side,” said Eric, his dark hair blowing in the breeze as he looked back and saw the cabin fading in the distance behind them. “We’re not in a city. Imagine the freaking chaos there right now, all those people trying to get out on foot. They’re probably killing each other. If I’m going to go down, I’m glad it’s with you guys.”

The Last Trip, Day 4

Molly approached a green SUV on the side of the highway and opened the rear doors, pulling them wide before reaching inside and unstrapping a wheelchair that lay folded in the cargo hold. Without a moment of hesitation or thought, she pulled and clicked the chair into place and wheeled it to the center of the highway where her three friends waited. Jason was being held up by Eric and Jenna, his face towards the ground.

“OK honey, sit down. It’s relaxing time again.” Molly looked at Eric with pleading eyes and the old man sighed.

“I’ll push you first, buddy. The girls can do the goody run.”

Molly and Jenna started walking briskly along the vehicle-strewn highway. They stopped occasionally and opened a door on a particular car or truck. They clambered inside and came out with some kind of swag, be it half a bottle of juice, an unopened packet of cookies or a bag of deli chips. The women each covered one side of the highway, and never came out of a vehicle empty-handed. Every treasure-point was deeply ingrained in their minds, a map of refreshments and snacks plotted out over many runs. As Eric slowly pushed Jason along the asphalt towards the women, Jenna called back to him.

“Do you want the boots from the white Jeep?”

“Not this time, these are still good.”

Jenna shrugged and moved on to a metallic-blue Lexus, pulling a straw hat from the passenger side. She put it on, struck a silly pose and smiled back at the men that trailed behind.

“Gotta have my lucky hat!”

Eric leaned down and whispered into Jason’s ear. “That freaking thing’ll never work,” he said.

Jason laughed, coughed, and spat onto the ground. Eric pushed forward, wondering if they could find a wheelbarrow or something before they reached the wheelchair next time. It was getting harder and harder to get Jason to that point; this time had about killed them all. He made a mental note to ask Howard to find something. It was a miracle that they had managed to carry him all that way on the first trip.

He watched his wife skip between the abandoned cars in her silly hat that she would later throw off a bridge with a silent wish and wondered how she stayed cheerful. They’d never had the chance to do all those things they’d planned when they first married. No trip to Venice. No renovating an old house. No children. They’d honestly had nothing, for 30 years, except each other. Eric knew that Jenna was the only reason he did this. In this world, with no hope and no deviation, she was the only thing on the entire doomed planet that stopped him from climbing to the highest point he could find and throwing himself off with one final middle-fingered salute to the heavens. At least they had been able to grow old together; noone could take that away from them.

The ransacking of abandoned vehicles came to an end as they reached what they had dubbed Death Mile. A huge pile-up of traffic, mostly vehicles containing corpses of fractured and burned people spread ahead of them as far as they could see. No one looked into the vehicles if they could help it, picking their way around the wreckage with eyes to the ground. The first time had scarred them all for life.