It’s the End,
Pennie Wilson

CHAPTER ONE

February 6, 2021

Pennie drove along I-40 in her blue hatchback, eyeing the darkening sky. The trees on either side of the interstate poked barren into the clouds, skeletal limbs stretched over dead grass and tire debris.
“I might make it down the mountain in daylight,” she muttered out loud. She’d noticed on the way up that morning that she had a headlight out. But it’ll be dark before I’m home.
Pennie turned up her car radio, electronic pop music flooding the cabin, and forced herself to unclench her jaw. She set her car to cruise five miles over the speed limit. Still, the other drivers were impatient, speeding up too close behind her only to jerk over into the left lane between transfer trailers.
The display in her dash lit up, and her phone ringtone played over the car speakers. She glanced over and saw her brother Grant’s name on the display. 
She used her thumb to tap the green phone icon built into her steering wheel. “Hello!”
“Hey, sis. Mom and Dad get on the road okay? They didn’t tell me when they headed out.”
“Yeah, they left over an hour ago. You will probably hear from them sometime tonight.”
“They left awfully late.”
Pennie reduced the speed of her cruise control. The limit was about to drop to fifty-five miles per hour. “Yeah. Dad says they can be in Tennessee in no time and they’ll get a hotel there.”
Grant made an exasperated noise. “…and my power just went out.”
As she slowed, more vehicles started passing her. She heaved a sigh. “What? Your power went out?”
“Yeah, just now. Are you still in the car?” Grant asked. “What are you doing?”
“I’m on the interstate. Right before that curvy section down the mountain, you’ll remember. Everyone’s just driving too damn fast. There’s a lot of truck traffic, too.” The road widened to three lanes in front of her.
“Be careful. There’s been some weird stuff happening over on the west coast with truck drivers lately.”
“Really?” She watched as a few trucks exited into the transfer trailer information lane, where there were large signs explaining the grade and location of the runaway truck ramp. A few more trucks, however, sped past the off-ramp. “Oh shit, some of the truck drivers aren’t stopping at that place at the top of the mountain. I think they can get in big trouble for that…”
“Wow. Do you think they’re trying to make up time?”
“Maybe…” Pennie let her voice trail off. She noticed there were transfer trucks in all three lanes ahead. The trailers were only supposed to drive in the middle and rightmost lane. She briefly lost sight of them as they dipped down around a curve.
“Everything okay, Pennie?”
She tapped the brake, turning off the cruise control. She’d been hearing a faint squeal for the last week; she probably needed to get her brakes checked. “I don’t know. There’s a lot of… rule-breaking happening right now with the transfer trucks.”
Her hatchback popped over the hill. Well ahead, she spotted the transfer trucks, all with their brake lights on. On the other side of the concrete barrier, there were also trucks driving in all three westbound lanes.
“—can you still hear me? Pennie?”
She gasped, realizing too late the speed at which the distance was closing between passenger vehicle traffic and the transfer trucks.
“Yeah… uh… Shit! Shit! They all stopped!” She stomped the brake and felt the hatchback groan. The steering wheel shook in her hands. Ahead, the road lit up with red lights that flashed and swerved. A large silver pickup truck with an extended cab lost control, the vehicle jerking hard to the right. The truck clipped a compact car before punching into the guardrail, the back end of the truck rising into the air. Pennie sucked in air and expelled it in a shout: “No!”
“Pennie!” she heard her brother call out.
A vehicle to her left grazed the concrete barrier and crashed into the back of one of the stopped transfer trucks. Pennie’s hatchback shuddered to a stop a few feet behind a work truck.
“People just died! People just died!”
“What’s happening—”
Behind her, there was a squealing sound, a metallic crunch, and then her head snapped back as the hatchback surged forward, propelling her into the back of the work truck. She felt a strong punch straight to the face and saw a white flash of light.
An irritating whine in her ears roused her. 
She coughed, the air thick with powder.
The whine eased off enough that she could hear the rush of blood in her ears. Her face pressed against something hard and rough and wet.
She tried to open her eyes. Only the left opened. Burning orange light pierced the side of her car, highlighting the dust motes traveling through the cabin. She tried to bring her arms up to push herself off the steering wheel. Sluggish to obey, her left arm felt numb and weak, rising only a few inches. She used her right and heard her face peel off the collapsed airbag, a squelching sound accompanied by stinging pain. 
Sagging back in her seat, she reached up and grazed her face with her fingers. They came away red. Her right eye felt gummy and swollen, with a sharp pain along her hairline. Pulling up the hem of her shirt, she swiped at her eye, trying to clear the blood. Her hand felt shaky and difficult to control.
She dropped the shirt and wiped her fingers across her stomach. When she next blinked her left eye, the right peeled open.
“Grant?” she muttered, confused. Her voice came out cracked and high-pitched.
The whining and swishing sounds in her ears faded, and she could hear a horn blaring and car doors slamming.
She looked down in her lap, where glass pooled blue and purple, dotted with fresh blood. She reached up again and pressed the heel of her hand against the gash in her hairline. 
Her windshield, a crazed web of glass, sagged down onto the dash. She’d hit the work truck off-center, and there was debris from the truck in her passenger seat.
Over the sound of the horn: pop! pop! pop!
“What?” Sluggish thoughts trickled through her brain as she tried to put a name to the sound.
A man slammed his body into the side of her car and reached in through her broken driver’s side window. She cringed away from him, from his fingers that scrabbled down her useless arm and the spittle that sprayed from his mouth as he shouted unintelligible words.
She shrieked from terror and pain, her heart hammering in her chest. Her left shoulder came to life with a burning roar. Lashing out with her right arm, she struck him in the face, scratching.
“Ow! Stop it, I’m helping you!” He pulled back and started yanking on the door handle. “You have to get—”
There was another pop, and the man flinched, his head rocking to the side. A dark ribbon oozed down the side of his face before his body dropped out of sight. 
Another cluster of shots rang out.
Her breath came hard and fast, an audible, repetitive gasp. Her right hand grabbed at her seat belt buckle, fumbling until it released. She tried to make herself small, sliding down in the seat and twisting, digging her good hand between the seat and the door to grope for the seat adjustment levers. 
Pennie directed the seat backward and laid it down so she could slide into the footwell. 
The sun dropped below the horizon. The inside of the car was dark, but it spun around her until she squeezed her eyes closed. Her ears strained for clues about the chaos outside. The blaring car horn ate up most of her attention; she couldn’t focus on anything else. She covered her right ear, grinding her left into the seat to block out the sound. 
She stayed that way for a while, not asleep, not unconscious, but unable to move. Tears leaked down her cheeks, burning as they oozed out of the corner of her swollen eyelid.
A long time later, the cold roused her. She was shivering, but her heart rate had settled. She opened her eyes and lowered her hand from her ear. The horn was silent. 
“Hey!” a distant voice called. “We ‘bout to leave if anyone else needs a ride!”
Getting out of the footwell was going to be a problem; her legs were weak and cramping, and she only had one good arm.
“Got room for one or two more!”
She drew in a breath and tried to shout. “Wait!” her voice squeaked out.
Pennie pushed with her legs and grabbed the door handle, trying to drag herself out of the floor. She got her bad arm up into the seat and flopped onto her back. Her shirt rode up, exposing her pale stomach to the cold air. She reached up and grabbed the headrest with her good arm.
“Argh!” she shouted, pulling with her arm and pushing with her feet at the same time. “Wait!”
“Hey, man, I heard someone over in that cluster!”
“Wait!” she shouted, her voice stronger. She yanked on the door handle, but it wouldn’t open. 
Footsteps approached her car, shoes crunching on the glass. 
“You ain’t armed, is you?” a man asked, his voice rough.
“No! I’m just… Ugh, this won’t open!” She thumped her fist on the steering wheel in frustration. A flashlight beam struck her in the eyes and she cringed away.
“Sorry, ma’am,” he said, and the beam lowered.
Pennie blinked away the spots in her vision.
“We need to hurry,” the man said. “It’s getting cold out here.”
“I need help getting out,” she said. She looked to her right, where she’d last seen her purse on the passenger seat and her phone in the vent cradle. The purse was nowhere to be seen, presumably buried under the debris. She didn’t see her phone anywhere.
The man jerked on her door handle a few times before reaching in to press the lock. She heard it click on and off, but the door still didn’t budge. “You’re gonna have to come out the window,” the man said.
“Okay…” She reached out through the window toward the man. The stranger wrapped her in a bear hug and yanked, pulling her out with a grunt. When her feet touched the pavement, he released her, though he kept his arms outstretched.
“You good?”
“Yeah… Yeah, I feel okay. I’m good.” 
“Don’t look down, and watch your step. There’s a dead man down there. You got a coat?”
“In-In the backseat…” She turned, squinting at her car and trying not to look at the pavement. There were headlights on here and there, but that made seeing her hatchback somehow more difficult. The man pointed his flashlight toward the back seat. She realized the back window had also broken.
She fished out her coat and shook out the glass. She got her bad arm into the coat and the man held the other side up so she could slide her good arm into the sleeve.
“You need to get anything else? You prolly won’t be coming back up this way.”
She reached into the pocket in the back of the driver’s seat and pulled out a handful of disposable face masks, shoving them in her coat pocket. 
“I have a bag in the hatch,” she said. “And I can’t find my purse.”
“You ain’t getting in there, honey. Ain’t no hatch left.” The man pointed his flashlight toward the back of her car.
He was right; another driver had pancaked the back of the vehicle between her passenger compartment and his pickup truck. 
“Don’t look too close at that truck, neither,” the man said. “Take my arm; you have to watch your step.”
“I don’t have my phone—”
“Ain’t no signal, and I don’t—”
“Y’all coming?!” another man shouted. His voice cracked as he called out.
“Yeah!” her good Samaritan called back. “We’re coming now!”
“Look,” he continued in a normal tone of voice. “We have to go. We don’t have time to look for no phone.”
“Okay…” she said. She had a few numbers memorized for emergencies. 
Pennie reached out to the man with her good arm and linked her elbow with his. He led her closer to the stopped trucks and then across, weaving between stopped and damaged vehicles. They passed between the guardrail and the line of trucks.
“Where are the truck drivers?” she asked, her voice quiet.
“Most of them parked their trucks and left on out of here. Had getaway drivers parked just past the stopping point. One’s dead, though. Came back to get something and someone shot him.”
On the other side of the transfer trailers, a pickup truck idled, steam flowing from the tailpipe. 
“Took you long enough,” someone sitting in the back griped. “We’re freezing.”
“Help me,” the man beside her said, calling up toward the front of the truck. “She’s hurt.”
The front door popped open and a short man with a thick, dark mustache jumped down, hurrying toward the back. 
“Watch her arm, she’s favorin’ it!”
Before she could do more than reach toward the truck, the two men and a third up in the bed had hauled her up onto the tailgate. The good Samaritan climbed in beside her and dragged her back into the bed. 
“Pull your legs in,” he said, gesturing for her to scoot further back.
She did, and the driver closed the gate and jogged back to the front of the truck. They pulled away from the trucks and into the night.
She thought dimly that she should probably have a mask on, but she was too cold to do anything about it. She wrapped her good arm over her bad and cringed away from the wind, bumping shoulders with the man who’d helped her.
“Where are we going?” she shouted, her voice carried away by the wind.
“The One Stop,” he shouted back. “Old Fort! This is the third truckload!”
The trip took about five minutes, though it was long enough that her nose ran over her upper lip. She swiped at it with her sleeve and sniffled. Overhead, the overcast sky blotted out the stars, though she could still see the glow of the moon. 
They were pulling into a dark parking lot when she registered that there were no lights on. “Is the power out here, too?”
“Yeah,” the man said. They pulled underneath the awning, between the bagged pumps. “Where else is it out? Black Mountain? Swannanoa?”
“Seattle,” she said. “I was on the phone with my brother…”
The man grunted. “Hmm. Could be a fluke. A coincidence.”
The truck stopped, and the man reached over the tailgate. The gate dropped with a groan. Pennie felt like groaning as well as she tried to scoot forward and off the back of the truck. 
An older woman stepped out of the dark and reached toward Pennie.
“Let me help,” she said. 
Pennie took her hand and let the other woman help her down. “Thank you…”
“No problem. You just go over to the store. They’re letting us stay inside out of the wind.”
A pale young man with a flashlight and a yellow vest met her halfway. “You can come right in here, ma’am.” He ushered her toward a pair of glass double doors.
He spoke to someone just inside: “We’ve got some more injured people.”
The first part of the night flew by. The man in the yellow vest turned out to be Adam, the gas station attendant. He passed her on to an older woman named Jean, who was running a sort of first aid station in the store’s corner. She had a teenage assistant named Trey, whose job it was to hold the flashlight. Jean used cold bottled water and paper towels to wipe the blood off her face. 
Pennie took in Jean’s cloth mask and gave a start, patting her pocket with her good hand. “Hang on… I have masks in here.”
“Wait,” the older woman said. She had smooth umber skin and close-cropped silver coils. “Let me finish washing you up and then you can put one on.”
The woman squinted at her wound in the dark and shook her head. “I can’t glue that. Or use butterfly strips. You need stitches. Don’t have any sutures here, of course. So… congratulations, you get to use our last roll of gauze.”
She also examined Pennie’s arm. “Just a bad contusion, I think. Fingers are tingling? Yeah, that arm’s gonna hurt, but I think it’ll be alright.”
When Jean finished with her, a woman with blonde hair escorted her to the bathroom, shining her flashlight into one stall to check for toilet paper. “This one looks good.” 
This was when Pennie discovered she’d pissed her pants. She blotted herself the best she could with toilet paper and then dropped onto the icy toilet seat, letting out a hiss.
“I heard that!” the other woman said, laughing. “Cold ass toilets, right?”
“Yeah,” Pennie said, giving a shaky laugh. 
“We got someone handing out snacks when you’re done. Joan says that we need to keep everyone’s blood sugar up.”
When she’d finished, Pennie shuffled out of the stall and over to the sinks. The other woman kept the flashlight beam pointed at the floor. 
“So obviously you had a wreck,” the woman said.
“Yeah…” 
“Me, too, though mine was farther up, and just a fender bender.”
“They did that on purpose! And then there was a lot of shooting…”
“Yeah, some of that was a misunderstanding, I think.”
Pennie turned off the water and felt around for the paper towel dispenser. “That’s…”
“… some misunderstanding, right?”
“Yeah… And none of the phones work?”
“No signal. I thought it was something to do with the power being out, but Adam says they have backup batteries and generators for power outages.”
“Surely the fuel shortage didn’t affect the cell phone companies that bad?”
“I would have said no, but here we are. Come on, let’s get you something to eat. I’m Courtney, by the way.”
“Pennie.” She followed Courtney out of the bathroom. As they walked, she realized there were people everywhere, curled up on the floor, stretched out along the aisles. She could hear children, too, chattering away toward the back.
They stopped at the front by the cash register. Adam handed her a bottle of water and a packaged snack cake, then Courtney walked her back over to first aid.
“Joan wanted you to sit over here with her. She said the head injuries gotta stay close.” Courtney pointed the flashlight at an empty spot on the floor next to a woman with a bandaged eye. “Right there.”
She eased herself to the floor. The woman next to her grunted but didn’t speak, nor did she pull away when Pennie’s arm brushed hers.
After she ate, she sat sipping her water and listening to Joan talk to people as she bandaged them up. 
“No politics indoors,” Joan said to one woman, who insisted they could lay this fiasco at the feet of President Biden, who’d taken office a month prior. 
“Or maybe it was more insurrection,” muttered a man sitting close by. Pennie couldn’t see him in the dark, but he sounded young.
“I am serious,” Joan snapped. “If you want to talk politics, you can do it out in the parking lot!”
“Those truck drivers aren’t coming back, right?” Trey asked, anxious. Pennie worked as a high school secretary, and he could have been one of her students. She wondered where his family was.
“That’s why we have a watch,” Joan replied. “And with the police and highway patrol out there, we will be okay.”
Shortly after, the store filled up with flashing red and white lights.
“That would be the ambulance,” Joan said. “Trey, go inform our diabetic patient, and I’ll go get the compound fracture.”
Pennie capped her water and sat it to the side before pulling her mask up over her nose and mouth. She let her eyes drift closed and her knees collapse inward against each other. The fingers of her right hand tapped rhythmically against her thumb, soothing her until she dropped off to sleep.

©️ 2023 Caryn E. Gibson, All Rights Reserved. Permission is not granted for use to train, test, or otherwise engage with AI.