Payback: Alone: Book 7 by Darrell Maloney

Author:Darrell Maloney
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2017-04-16T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 27

The last three nights traveling on Interstate 40 in Arizona were tortuous for Dave.

Just before the blackout occurred a year and a half before the Department of Transportation and the Arizona Highway Department jointly undertook a massive repaving operation.

For twenty one miles they’d had traffic moving in only one lane in each direction.

It was like a convoy in one of the trucker movies from the 1970s.

“Hey, you got your ears on, Pigpen?”

“10-4, good buddy.”

“Why don’t you pull that hay wagon in behind that tanker and join up in our convoy?”

Dave wasn’t even alive during the trucker craze.

But he’d stumbled across his dad’s old CB radio in the attic one day and asked his father exactly what it was.

It brought back a lot of pleasant memories for his father, who’d used the radio to help woo Dave’s mom. On moonlit nights they’d park on lover’s lane and chatter with other radio operators until they got bored. Then his father would spend the rest of the evening trying to talk his mother out of her jeans.

“My handle was The Maverick, he told Dave. Your mom’s was Sexy Suzy.”

“Stop right there, dad,” Dave had pleaded. “I don’t want to hear anymore.”

“Why not, son? It was a very fun time in my life.”

“Because any story that includes my mom being called ‘Sexy Suzy’ is a story I don’t want to hear.”

Still, Dave had been curious about the whole citizen’s band radio craze and the whole trucker thing. Curious enough to rent copies of a couple of old movies.

He’d enjoyed them but they were quickly forgotten.

Forgotten, that is, until he had to spend three long nights dodging a long line of tractor trailers, recreational vehicles and passenger cars in a single file twenty one mile-long line.

The vehicles had been creeping along at twenty miles an hour with very little space between them when they’d all rolled to their final stop.

They’d been in the outer lane, the inner lane being separated by orange cones. Asphalt on the inner lane had been chewed up by some type of machine and was loose and broken but not yet picked up with a front end loader and placed in the back of dump trucks to be hauled away.

If the EMPs had assaulted the earth on a weekend the equipment would have been neatly parked and the repair lane would have been fairly empty. Dave could merely have cruised down it to pass by all the abandoned vehicles.

But that wasn’t the case.

When the EMPs came, operations were running at full bore by a contractor who was behind schedule and trying very hard to catch up. It was a beehive of activity, with all kinds of equipment and vehicles scattered everywhere.

The highway was very similar to a slalom course, only instead of dodging orange flags Dave was dodging hundreds upon hundreds of shadowy vehicles of every type.

Each time he changed lanes he had to navigate either a two inch drop down into the repair lane or a two inch rise up to the traffic lane.

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