“Can you even ride, though?” she says.
M hits the throttle and does a quick lap around the plane, barely even wobbling.
“Well okay then,” Nora says with a satisfied nod.
I want to knock M’s grin off.
“Hey,” Julie says, twisting around to look at me. “Will your kids be okay by themselves?”
I look up at the plane. I see them watching me through two rear windows, having apparently broken out of their restroom prison. They stare at me blankly, their faces offering no clues to their inner states.
“They’re Dead,” I mutter. “What’s safer than that?”
Abram sighs loudly, tiring of our deliberations, and blasts off down the freeway in a cloud of dust. M follows him and Julie follows M, and the ancient city of Detroit ripples like a mirage on the horizon.
? ? ?
The apocalypse didn’t happen overnight. The world didn’t end in a satisfying climax of explosive special effects. It was slow. It was boring. It was one little thing at a time. One moral compromise, one abandoned ideal, one more justified injustice. No dramatic wave of destruction sweeping across the world, just scattered spots of rot forming throughout the decades, seemingly isolated incidents until the moment they all merged.
Some cities maintained the illusion of independent prosperity for many years, like the leaves of a felled tree denying their severed roots. But Detroit was the bottom branch. It’s been dead so long, it looks more like an archaeological site than an American city. The modern climate has turned much of the surrounding grassland into desert, and brown sand covers everything, piling up in drifts against crumbled buildings, forming small dunes in parking lots. The rising sun catches the tops of broken towers, lighting them up like beacons while the rest of the city sulks in shadow. I have no doubt we’re the first people in years to travel toward this place.
I tighten my grip on Julie’s waist as we bounce onto the bridge over the river that was once the Canadian border. Gaps in the bridge’s pavement reveal the murky reddish waters below, choked full of rusty cars and garbage and ancient human remains. I lean into Julie’s neck, inhaling her cinnamon scent as a defense against the aromas from below.
Some might find my position on the back of the bike emasculating, but there are worse ways to travel than pressed against the backside of a beautiful woman. Bumps in the road produce movements that belong in a bedroom, and I’m glad M is in front of us where he can’t watch. For a moment I worry about embarrassing myself with an inopportune erection, then I smile darkly. Still these adolescent worries. Still the fears of a fresh pink boy living in a world of shame. That world died years ago—people struggling to survive have no time to fear their own bodies—so why does its corpse still cling to me?
We are human beings bonded by love and we deserve the gifts our bodies offer us.
Which of these assertions do I doubt?
? ? ?
Once we’re over the bridge and into the city, the road worsens dramatically. The ride loses any trace of eroticism as the bike bucks under us like an angry bull, levitating me above the seat then slamming me back down. Julie eases up on the throttle, but these are street bikes and this can barely be called a street. I see M and Nora struggling, too, Nora’s arms pressing deep into M’s sides to keep from flying off the bike as it sinks into potholes then bounces back up over chunks of debris.
“Ab-b-bram!” Nora shouts over M’s shoulder. “We have to st-st-stop!”
I can see Abram weaving through the junkyard with equal difficulty, Sprout clinging to his back like a frightened baby monkey, but he predictably ignores Nora’s advice. He ignores it for two more blocks, then he rounds a corner onto an arterial street, and the city overrules his decision.
The road is completely jammed with car carcasses, a river of rust and rubber. Stacks of flattened vehicles occupy all the side streets, remnants of some long-ago effort to clear a path. What made this particular traffic jam the last one? The one that would endure through the ages like a monument to a bad idea? Was it a war? An undead invasion? A descending cloud of unbreathable air? Or simply a mass realization? A thousand people getting out of their cars, looking around at the unnatural disaster of their lives, wandering home to their families? I doubt anyone knows for sure. Under the smothering cloud of fear and jamming signals, history has gone the way of art and science and most other human achievements: backward. Fact has blurred into rumor, knowledge into suspicion. Even the current year is open to debate.