Still Here

The future becomes terrifying once it feels normal. (B-Side #2)

In the quiet collapse that swallowed the world, some things refused to die: the morning commute, the time clock, and the stubborn belief that if you just stick to the routine, everything might still be okay.

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A notification vibrates on Matt’s watch: 7:25am.

He’s been up since six. He showered, brushed his teeth, flossed, dressed, made coffee, swapped out the air and water filters, and cooked his morning bowl of oatmeal. He leaves the cylinder of oats on the counter for his wife – she prefers savory oatmeal with bacon and cheese to his brown sugar and cinnamon. It’s one of the few irreconcilable differences in their marriage that he’s learned to accept.

The notification is his reminder that he has to be out the door in five minutes. In those five minutes, he finishes his coffee, says goodbye to his wife, grabs a protein bar from the pantry and picks up his keys and wallet from the shelf beside the door. He takes a moment to adjust the barbed wire wrapped around the driver side mirror of his car before opening the gate to the driveway. He drives through, gets out and closes the gate, chaining it shut and giving the lock a solid tug. By the time the front wheels of his car touch the road, it’s 7:30. The drive takes twenty five minutes, then there’s the five minute walk from the employee parking lot to his office. Assuming no delays, he’ll be in the building by 8:01 at the latest.

His iPhone connects via bluetooth, and his route to the Chris P. Snaxx Potato Chip Factory appears on the car’s console. The factory is one of the few still operational in the area; even with the current state of the world, people want their snack chips. There were some supply issues following the collapse of global trade, but as supply chain manager, Matt found some creative workarounds thanks to the rollback of government oversight and regulations.

Matt minimizes the map and selects the audiobook app from his phone menu. He pulls up his current listen and presses play.

“Chapter nine,” a voice says.

He notes the chapter length - twenty four minutes, fifty two seconds. Matt makes a mental note to pause it when the chapter ends so he doesn’t start the next one. He never ends a drive part way into a chapter if he can help it. Some days he’ll continue listening at his desk, but he prefers to listen in the car where he’s less distracted.

Matt knows seven different routes he can take to work. There used to be eight, but he doesn’t go through Ludlow anymore. No one does. Might as well be a crater on the map. He begins on his usual route, Columbia to the southbound interstate, then fifteen miles to the Wagner exit.

At the stoplight, the heat from the tan Audi burning on the side of the road radiates through his windshield. A blackened silhouette slumps in the Audi’s driver’s seat, unmoving. Matt rolls up the windows and sets the air conditioner to high, his eyes darting from the burning car to the stoplight over the intersection. Black smoke rises from the flames towering from the Audi’s mangled front end. As the light turns green, he notices the license plate – SALLGUD. He’s seen that car on his morning commute before; it usually turns before this stoplight. He acknowledges the obstacle on his map - Still Here.

Traffic pulses at the onramp. The illuminated sign beside the road announces an accident ahead - 2 miles - right lane blocked. Matt signals and switches lanes, cutting off a semi driver who flashes his lights in contempt. Matt grabs his pistol from the holster under his seat and waves it apologetically. He’s been out of bullets since February, but with the current state of the world, showing a weapon is sometimes enough to de-escalate a potential road rage confrontation. In this instance it works and the semi driver backs off, thankfully.

When he passes the onramp, the map flashes – recalculating. The route switches to the one Matt has programmed in his brain. He veers onto the lateral headed to the interstate bypass where he’ll catch the highway about four miles to the south. The detour adds an additional four minutes to his commute time. Matt presses down on the accelerator, driving ten miles over the speed limit. If he sustains this speed for half his commute, the added distance will be negated.

Traffic is lighter than he’d expected on the bypass, so he ups his speed another five miles an hour. Matt doesn’t want to be early any more than he wants to be late; he wants to be on time. When the world goes to shit, you cling to the few scraps of normalcy that you still have the power to control.

The audiobook narrator switches from the gruff male voice of the police detective to the nasally, lilt voice of the femme fatale witness. Matt rewinds thirty seconds after zoning out during part of the conversation. Upon second hearing of the femme fatale’s introduction, he realizes he didn’t miss much. Still, it’s better to be sure, and with the available time it made sense to do so.

When the bypass reconnects to the southbound interstate, the lanes on the northbound side lurch forward in a lethargic crawl, stretching over the cut in the hill beyond his sightline. Matt’s grateful his commute takes him opposite the flow of gridlock. The traffic on his side is non-existent, perhaps still dogged by the bottleneck he’d avoided. A grin of approval slides onto his face.

Cresting the hill, the fires dotting the landscape to the east are of less concern than the current ETA on his map - 7:53 am. He eases up on the accelerator as he approaches the remains of a deer strewn across multiple lanes of the highway. Bloody tiremarks trail away from its exploded stomach, intestines shooting out in all directions like party streamers. The deer’s head and partial rack of antlers straddle the dotted white line on the driver side. Matt swerves around it and acknowledges the pop up on his map, marking the obstacle as Still Here.

Once past, Matt glances in the rearview to see scavengers run out from their hiding spot in the median, machetes in hand to hack away at the remains of the animal. They cut what they can from the beast before the blast of an approaching semi’s air horn sends them back to the ditch. They’re becoming bolder, more active in the daylight.

An old billboard leans at a steep angle over the shoulder of the interstate, a rusted out police cruiser wedged under one of the supports. The cracked vinyl faces of three teens smile down above the caption Your Future Begins at Northern Kentucky University! Someone recently spraypainted NO IT DOESN’T along the bottom, underlining the words for emphasis. The billboard beside it has been stripped to the white backing with a single message painted in large red block letters: If you can read this, you’re still alive. Matt gives the billboard a slight nod.

The traffic remains light for the rest of his commute until it backs up at the off ramp to Wagner Road. As he approaches, he sees a group of bandits have set up a checkpoint, harassing drivers to pay up for safe passage. Even with the evil clown Halloween mask obscuring the top of his face, Matt recognizes the shirtless psycho terrorizing the exit lane. It’s Bob Foster; Matt hired Bob fifteen years back as the night shift sanitation lead. He eventually worked his way up to night shift supervisor, but at the first sign of societal collapse, Bob resigned his position to try his hand as a post-apocalyptic bandit chief. He took most of the plant’s night shift cleaning crew with him, all eager to give the bandit life a try. Bob had asked Matt if he had any interest in joining up with him, but he declined. Matt was too old to do anything different; this was all he knew.

Bob waves to him and Matt rolls his window down.

“Hey Bob,” Matt yells. “How you been?”

Bob shrugs. “Ahh you know, more messes but less mopping. How’s things at the plant?”

Matt shrugs as well. “End of quarter budget crunch, but we’ll survive. Always do. How’s Barb?”

“She’s good! I finally talked her into getting a pair of motorcycles, we’re gonna head down to Georgia once the dust storm eases up over the Carolinas.”

“You’ve been talking about doing that since I hired you,” Matt says. He reaches into the backseat for a variety box of Chris P. Snaxx chips and tosses it to Bob. “Can you ask your boys to let me through, I’m running behind.”

Bob opens the lid but doesn’t bother counting. He knows it’s all there. He whistles and yells something to the similarly dressed men and women further up the lane. Before Matt leaves, Bob leans down against his window and asks, “Why don’t you and Karen join us when we go down to Georgia?”

Matt hesitates. Just long enough that Bob notices.

“Come on, it’ll be fun,” Bob adds.

“You know we’ve talked about getting out of here,” Matt says. “Once or twice.”

Bob’s grin peaks out from the bottom edge of his mask. “What’s stopping you?”

Matt pulls a bag of snack chips from the passenger seat. “These chips,” Matt says, shaking his head. “Sometimes I feel like these things are the only thing that’s keeping society going, you know?”

Matt doesn’t really believe that, except for the part of him that needs it to be true.

“Think about it,” Bob says. “You’ve got time, we won’t be heading out until at least August, perhaps September.”

“I will,” Matt replies, knowing he won’t.

He tosses the extra bag of chips to Bob and drives on. When he glances in the mirror, Bob is still standing in the middle of the road watching him drive away. Matt returns his eyes to the road to navigate past the jack knifed tractor trailer blocking the onramp north. If that’s still here in the evening I’ll need to take a different route home, he thinks.

The factory sits about a mile down the road from the exit on the other side of the tracks. Railcars barricade the road with armed guards perched along the top. Matt flashes his employee badge and the guard closest to him nods and gives a hand signal. The railcars separate and Matt drives through. A few new bandit heads are perched on the spikes above the Chris P. Snaxx sign by the entrance, but none of them look familiar.

The audiobook goes quiet, then the narrator’s voice says, “Chapter ten.” Matt pauses the playback and turns off the radio.

Pulling into his parking space, Matt tucks his pistol into its holster and puts on his work issued bump cap and safety glasses. He gets out of his car, nodding to some coworkers as they head towards the entrance. He pulls out his phone to text his wife to let her know he’s arrived at work, oblivious to the commotion of security guards at the south delivery entrance where a tanker truck idles at the gate.

As Supply Chain Manager, Matt is wired into the factory’s delivery schedule, but it takes him a moment to register that they hadn’t scheduled any tanker deliveries for this morning. He returns to his phone to contact the shipping coordinator, but before he can dial the tanker explodes.

The shockwave throws Matt from his feet and slams him against the side of his car. Car windows shatter, peppering him with broken glass. He rolls underneath his car as glass and shredded bits of metal rain down over the parking lot.

A moment of eerie silence follows the blast, replaced by ringing in his ears. As the ringing dies down, other sounds dulled in the background grow louder. Screams, alarm sirens, rifle reports, more screams. Matt crawls out from underneath his car and rushes towards the building, ducking whenever gunfire calls out and sheltering behind the round concrete trash can by the employee entrance when he runs out of cover.

The gunfire is sporadic but close. He huddles down in his hiding spot, his hands trembling. He knows he can wait for the head of security to announce the all clear over the intercom, but Matt will not abide this unplanned chaos to dictate his schedule. He steadies himself against the concrete receptacle, breathing deeply through his nose and out through his mouth. Again. Again.

Before he can talk himself out of it, Matt dashes towards the entrance. Gunfire erupts all around him, but his focus stays on the door handle. He reaches for it, makes a quick swipe of his badge, and yanks the door open. A hot bite of pain radiates just below his shoulder as a bullet zips past him and embeds into the wall beside the employee time clock. When the door slams shut, Matt takes a second to gather himself with another round of deep breaths then checks the wound on his shoulder. Just a graze, small enough to cover with a bandage from the first aid box. His shirt is ruined, but he keeps a spare in his office for occasions like this.

Matt’s phone dings. It’s a text notification from his wife.

♥️Love you

For a moment, Matt pictures himself on a motorcycle roaring down the coast. He can almost taste the salt on his lips from the warm ocean breeze. Karen’s arms wrap tight around his chest as they lean into every curve. No schedules, no factory, no chips. Just open road.

An alarm notification buzzes on his watch: 8:01 am. The image is gone.

Matt stands, straightens his bump cap and safety glasses, and disappears into the factory.