The No Survivors Rule by Ethan Lake

Author:Ethan Lake [Lake, Ethan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-02-04T00:00:00+00:00

18

The Depot

By the time I saw the first signs for Shipley, the sun had been down for two hours. Stiff gusts now buffeted the Tavvy. The winds off the flats gathering their nighttime strength.

Along the way, the look of the land had changed, too. The limestone bedrock had given way to granite, darkening the dust from yellow to pink, until the reddish haze in my headlights recalled the apocalyptic sky of last night.

I could just see the windbreaks at the edge of town when something loomed on the side of the road. Massive shapes thrust up from the ground. They looked like the ribs of some long-dead beast, unearthed by the winds, but they were rocks, weathered to the smoothness and pallor of tombstones. I was still eyeing their skeletal shapes in the rearview, when I realized that they were letters, crudely carved, and that they spelled out Shipley.

Inside a deep windbreak of dust-caked cedars, I passed farm plots crisscrossed with mesh screens, shielding the soil from the thieving wind. Beyond the fields stood the shadowy hulks of derelict warehouses. Buildings that probably dated back to Sazi and were likely the reason the town existed.

Back when the freight companies wouldn’t go within five miles of a colony, long-haul truckers used to unhitch their trailers on the roadsides and get away as fast as they could. Carting the goods the final leg was the colony’s problem. But when Ridgers started stealing shipments meant for the sick, the warehouses went up. Then came charging stations, then the diners and hostels, and the little off-colony towns like Shipley were born. Thirty years later, they were still here. Same as the colonies.

Where the highway entered town, I drove beneath a faded green, red, and white banner that bore a familiar greeting: Bienvenidos Migrantes! I glanced at the brownie wrapper on the seat beside me and kept my eyes open for Great Tasting Grains.

In the lots up and down Main Street, locals and traveling merchants were pitching their tents and hawking their goods. Tailgates and kiosks advertised hot food, cold beer, and everything from disposable phones to diapers. Along the roadside, sandwich boards pointed the way to campgrounds with drinking water, toilets, and showers.

In front of the hostel, a horseshoe of supper buses formed a food court. Their speakers blared Latin pop, and giant screens played soccer broadcasts in Spanish. Beneath a striped tent whose sign said ice cold cervezas would be served all night, a dozen young migrants lounged at picnic tables. Some still wore their dusty roadwear. Others looked freshly showered and dressed for some nightlife, with gold chains at their necks, and their gaudy boots polished to a high shine.

But on the opposite side of the supper buses, beneath the streetlights above a weedy gravel lot, a very different crowd, a crowd of survivors and their families, looked like they were waiting out the rapture. Haggard and twitching, some sat in parked cars, some on their luggage. Some lay in the dirt.

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