Part 3, Chapter 1 (First Half)

Well with another murder under our belts, here's the first chapter of Part 3. This is quite a long chapter so I'll break it into two parts again, as few people want an endless ream of text. I'll post the second half on Sunday. I also have a special update planned before then, about the state of free literature. Stay tuned!

Don't forget, if you can't wait for the next part, you can buy the ebook and support independent publishing for only $1.25 by following the links on the right. The ebook is available in just about every format you'll ever need, and a paperback is also available from Lulu.com (with a free ebook, if you email me confirmation of purchase).

If you're new here, this is the thirteenth chapter of A Pittsburgh Storm. It may be best for you to find your feet in the first chapter, over here.

Enjoy!

Dave

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Part Three
Bramble, PA

1

I spend most of the afternoon driving through the lower Hill District, then across Downtown, and into Pittsburgh’s Northside. Downtown is a mess, as bad as Oakland and the Southside.

I pass PPG Place; huge glass towers which Hank and I viewed from the roof of an apartment building in the Southside only days ago. We watched as a man pushed desks out of the windows and screamed obscenities into the wind. Now I can see, close up, the office furnishings smashed up and scattered across the road. There’s no sign of the man who did this.

Snow buries the ice rink at the base of the towers, where, every Christmas as a kid, I would visit with my dad, my brothers, and some cousins. The rink would fill with other children, families, teenage kids, and couples on dates, skating in rings, racing, and playing games.

The happy nostalgia that the rink conjures fills me with a tingling warmth and a thin smile, regardless of what I did only an hour ago. I know I should feel terrible and horrified, but I feel nothing; I’m cold to present reality. Only nostalgia and childhood memories seep though the frost. Everything else is mute.

One time, Emily and I came on a date here. We had to queue for an age to get on the ice and my boots were a poor fit, which made my toes go numb, but we loved every minute of our time there. All we did was skate in a loop for a while, race a bit, and fall over. I was so happy, but since all of this upheaval happened, I sometimes ask myself if I really loved Emily. I mean, I’ve barely missed her; she’s hardly been on my mind. I feel like her presence, or lack of, should weigh more heavily on me than it does. Then, when I think back on events like our date at PPG, I’m sure I did love her. I don’t know how I feel anymore.

There’s a whiskey bottle by the side of a corpse on the edge of the rink. I climb off the snowmobile to approach, but find the bottle empty. Next to it, the frozen corpse’s skin has adopted a milky white sheen. Perhaps this is how Hank now looks; it’s been an hour, after all. Then, maybe he didn’t die.

A banner advertisement hangs by one post with one of its ends trailing on the ground and fluttering in the wind. It reads, “ENJOY THE ICE AT PPG”. The movement catches my eye, before I return my attention to the body, sagging in the snow. In this man’s last moments, he decided to drink until he was numb and sit out in the cold to allow the comfort of death to take him from this waking nightmare. And now, here I am, scrutinizing the remains of this person’s most intimate and profound moment, and I reduce their life and loves and achievements to this.

A cold gust of wind wakes me from my daydream and again lifts the banner from the ground. The vinyl claps in aggression. Sheets of paper blow across the rink in their successful bid to escape a defunct office somewhere.

And the snowmobile takes me further north.

*

An unending slideshow of traffic and debris clogs the streets. A burst fire hydrant covers swathes of a sidewalk with sheets of ice and frozen sculptures have formed on the side of a car caught in the spray. Huge jagged teeth and spectacular spires of ice stuck to the metalwork.

I see many more bodies. Anonymous characters in cars or splayed across the sidewalk.

I pass shops, looted long ago. Offices made into makeshift fortresses with barbed wire windows and boarded up doorways. I don’t waste time checking for life.

Then I arrive at the Sixth Street Bridge and squeeze the snowmobile across. The Allegheny River rushes beneath me, swelled by the past few weeks of snowfall, and laboring under its own weight. It carries the occasional abandoned car on its surface, pulling it to the west, with the water black and muddy.

The Northside and the Northern residential districts take another ninety minutes to cross. Inching my way through debris, I take in the desolate homes and businesses that line the streets. My mind wavers in and out of the present, now churning over the events of the day with a detached, distant connection. The unmasking of Mistress Sylvia; the fall of Mecca; the murder I committed only hours ago.

A dog is howling from inside a home. As I drive by the building, I see the animal jump at the living room’s window. It’s a mean looking Rottweiler. As it sees me, it emits a howl of desperation and hate, its teeth gnashing and saliva splattering against the inside of the window. Trapped and desperate. I keep driving.

More time passes, the minutes tick into hours, and I notice that the snowmobile’s fuel gauge is pushing on empty. Furthermore, I’m famished. My throat is dry and bitter. I tilt my head and catch the falling snow on my tongue, but this is a more a gesture, not a practicality.

Before I do anything else, I need to keep the snowmobile running. I doubt I’ll find a fuel stash any time soon, so the only option left is to siphon gas from another vehicle. I know the basics of how to do this because I read about it in a survival book when I was a kid. It was on of those books which tells you how to survive in a rainforest or in the Arctic, how to escape from quicksand, and how to treat a snakebite. All those things that an inquisitive ten-year-old needs to know. I can remember the theory of how to siphon fuel, but I’ve never done it for real.

And on top of that, finding a suitable vehicle proves difficult. This is because news reports often blamed the spread of G9 on the dense conditions that defined city life, and consequently, millions of people fled to the country in a futile bid to outrun the disease. Countless cars filled the roads out of the city, all heading to relatives’ homes, or campgrounds, or wherever else the road could take them. Panicking crowds bought up all of the fuel supplies, legitimately fearing that gasoline would soon be a rare commodity. The problem is that none of these full gas-tanks are in the city any more.

And of those cars that were in the city, looters have already taken most of the fuel and batteries.

While all of this was happening around me, the sheer speed at which the society’s infrastructure fell apart left me in awe. Once a proportion of tanker drivers and long haul truckers fell ill, a vital link in the supply chain was missing. Stores, hospitals, and gas stations all rely on short deliveries – small and frequent – and so, when these finished, everything fell apart. Within days, a third of drivers were without fuel. Subsequently, stores were empty and hospitals ran out of oxygen tanks. The news broadcasts stated that power stations should have had a twenty-day supply of fuel to keep the electricity going and the water pumping. That’s in theory anyway. In reality, we all found ourselves in a lot of trouble, very quickly. There was little water, little gas, little food, little hospital resources, and the ever threatening G9 plague. So everyone who could run, did so. The roads turned chaotic and sluggish. It was a mess, and still is.

I hunt for old cars, which I assume will be easier to siphon. The first rusting heap I find has an empty tank and spits a lungful of sickening gasoline air. But the second car I approach has some has in the tank and I manage to pour a decent amount into an empty bucket found in a snow-filled gutter.

With that success under my belt, I take stock of the food situation. I have a few assorted pieces of food in my bag, and spotting an open diner, I decide to utilize the relative comfort. I choose a stool by the coffee bar. “Service please!” I yell into the back and there’s a clatter of pans in response. A rodent scared by my voice. But things like this no longer make me jumpy.

On the stool, by the bar, I eat my cold meal — an apple and pack of peanut butter pretzels – while admiring a photo of the Sydney Opera House, framed above the coffee machines. To my left, above the cake cabinet, is another framed photograph, this time of a battleship in profile, with guns pointing proudly and radar dish spinning against the setting sun. The image brings to mind of one of the few human-interest stories shown on the news broadcasts before the electricity stopped. Somewhere in the pacific, a U.S. cargo ship was sailing without direction. The crew were healthy, they claimed in a radio broadcast, but feared to return to a potentially dangerous dock. No doubt, some of the crew would have preferred to die with their ill families but the captain had decreed that they would stay at sea for as long as it took to clear things up on land. By now, I suppose, they have all starved. Perhaps they staged a mutiny and docked down in California. Or perhaps they’re still alive, perhaps sat on a desert island eating pineapples in the sun, hoping all this will blow over. Could there be a woman amongst them? I muse on this while eating the pretzels and taking long swigs from my water bottle.