The Flames. The Smoke. The Highway. The Terror.

It was the year of the wildfires.

Everywhere in Florida and south Georgia the forests burned, blazes started by God, Nature, human accident or intent. In the quiet of the nights, even from dozens of miles away, you could hear the distant roar of the flames, the whir of the helicopter blades, the shouts and screams of the firemen. The smell of smoke clung to every surface.

The Man and The Woman did not know in advance that this would be a time of fire from which they might need to escape. They had planned in advance not an escape, but a simple weekend trip. A celebration. An anniversary.

It was early June, 2007.

The trip itself had been pleasant, uneventfully pleasant. Fun. Their destination was a charming old harbor city in the Deep South. The Man and The Woman had eaten their fill on more than one night; they had toured the old river plantations nearby; they saw the headlines about the wildfires, but the fire and smoke and ash were too far distant to concern them. They were on vacation. Nothing could frighten them on vacation. Nothing could harm them.

Oh, there were signs that things were not normal. There was the evening walking tour of the old cemeteries, during which ghostly lights bobbed and flickered above the ground until you looked directly at them. There were the scraps of conversation overheard at nearby restaurant tables, from behind the hotel’s front desk: Interstate… still burning… shut down… no end…

But nothing could harm The Man and The Woman. The trip had been a success. They were untouchable. They were loading up their luggage; they were setting forth on the trip home.

First stop was a service station, for gasoline. The tank full, The Man went inside the convenience store to purchase soft drinks and snacks for the six-hour drive home.

The line at the counter extended the length of an aisle. His arms full, The Man (…highways….) looked around and eavesdropped (…roads…) as he waited for the line to move (…smoke). Just as he reached the end of the aisle — his turn would come next — The Man saw it. A small box of miniature metal figurines, pirate skeletons: sailors, the captain, even a skeleton wench cast of some inexpensive metal. On the display box behind the figurines, ships were engulfed in flames and smoke. Tiny burning figures leapt from the burning vessels into the burning sea.

The Man turned, paid for his purchase, returned to the car.

The Woman asked, “Was there a problem?”

“No problem,” said The Man. “Just a long line.” He did not mention the flames on the display card. He turned the ignition key, the car moved, they were off.

The Man and The Woman seldom listened to the radio in their car, not on long trips. They wanted music and they wanted conversation, and ninety percent of what they could receive from the radio would interfere with both. So they drove in silence for a while, sometimes listening to a CD, sometimes talking about the fun they’d had, how much they looked forward to returning to this city sometime. And about how much, nevertheless, they looked forward to getting home.

The first sign of trouble appeared on the interstate highway as they headed south. Traffic was backed up, they could see, evidently for miles ahead. Their progress slowed to a crawl.

“Should we get off?” The Woman asked.

The Man thought, briefly, of the headlines they’d seen in the newspaper delivered to their hotel room. He thought, oddly but briefly, of the burning ships, the skeleton pirate crew. “Umm, no, let’s just go another exit or two. Maybe it’s just an accident or something.”

They crept forward. The Man rolled his window down a little; the first faint whiff of smoke drifted into the interior of the car. The Woman and The Man looked at each other.

“I think we should maybe get off at the next interchange,” he said.

“I think that’s a good idea,” she said.

Still, they were not frightened. They didn’t really like taking interstates, when it came right down to it. Back roads always provided so much more… interesting journeys. The Woman fetched the road atlas from the back seat. “Oh,” she said after a few moments, “this will be easy.” She held the map up and pointed to it so The Man could see for himself, since traffic was for the moment at a standstill. “Look, we just have to take that next exit, cut down this way and then do this little thing over here, it’ll be easy, we can take this road almost all the way home.”

The exit approached. They pulled off, leaving behind a thousand cowardly fellow travelers.

The road they were soon on — a US highway — promised a fast trip. As they both knew, US highways in the Deep South alternated between smooth two-lane blacktop and larger four- or even six-lane surfaces, always well marked, freshly painted, and oddly (once you got out of the towns) strangely empty of traffic.

Yet they’d never seen anything like this.

Yes, the road was empty of traffic. They drove for miles with almost no sign of another vehicle — most ominously, no other vehicle coming towards them, from beneath the pall of smoke which they could see spanning the horizon. When The Man once saw headlights in the rearview mirror, they disappeared as that car turned down a side road. The smoke thickened.

Stranger still was that every little intersection they came to was as deserted as the road (a US highway!) they were on. Convenience stores and service stations, houses by the road, post offices, the everyday markers of civilization in the deep Georgia woods: all deserted. No human form disturbed the shoulders of the road. Blinking traffic signals advised caution to no one at all. Bicycles and trucks on the shoulder, but no bicyclists and no truckers. No crossing guards, and no children crossing and in need of being guarded from the nonexistent traffic.

The Man turned on the headlights.

“Does this seem a little… strange to you?” he asked.

“I was just thinking that. Maybe it was a mistake to get off at that exit…”

But by now, they knew, it was too late to turn around. They now understood the reason for the interstate traffic jam: the smoke was covering the roadway; all traffic was being diverted onto some other road — probably something less than a US highway — even further south.

No, there was no help for it now. Now they would have to continue, through the ever denser smoke, in hopes that a larger town would provide some relief for the feeling of utter aloneness: a roadside diner, neon alight, with people milling around; a shopping mall, traffic entering and leaving the lot — surely people were still shopping?

The smoke wrapped the car like a blanket. It swallowed up the stripe in the blacktop. Trees swam into and out of sight. Yellow and blue and white orbs which might have been the headlights of other cars always disappeared, bobbed out of sight, the moment The Man and The Woman looked directly at them.

They drove on.

The Woman checked the road atlas.

“A town,” she said, “there’s a town coming up.”

They held their collective breath. Now Entering, said the sign, but the sign too was swallowed up before they could confirm the name.

Then suddenly, there was the town all around them: cross streets, houses, stores, fences, factories, office parks, schools, churches; a hundred vehicles parked on a dozen curbs; a functioning red-yellow-green traffic light.

And not bit of movement, not a single other blessed living soul. For a crazy moment, The Man imagined he could hear the splash and hiss of burning corpses hitting the water.

“This,” said The Man, “this is just a little too creepy.”

The Woman agreed, then asked, nervously, “How’s our gas?”

Their gas was fine, The Man reported. Which was just as well. He had no desire to leave the car for even a few seconds, let alone the minutes it would take to pump gas and pay for it — even to leave cash on an abandoned counter in a vacant store…

They drove on, the smoke ever deeper, ever less responsive to the tentative prods and pokes of the headlights. The Man turned on the windshield wipers, then experimented with the washers. They made no difference; the gray and yellow uncertainty continued to crowd the windows just as completely as before. He turned the wipers off.

Through more empty towns The Man and the Woman drove on, and on, past more unlighted businesses and homes, slicing in two vast smoke-shrouded emptinesses of fields and pastures. Conversation dwindled. The forests were not burning this far inland but were covered with smoke nonetheless. The trees here, spare and singly placed earlier, began to close in. They looked to The Man like the thousand masts, not yet burning, of a crowded harbor.

When they heard the thump on the roof of something large, heavy, and scrabbling for a foothold, The Man looked at The Woman and she at him. He applied the brake, coasted to a stop on the shoulder. The roof creaked. The smoke swirled around the car, a dense blanket of gray and brown.

“Be careful,” said The Woman.

The Man nodded. He checked once, pointlessly, in the useless sideview mirror. And then he opened the door.

________________________________________

Author’s note: This story is true in its general form. There was a trip to Charleston, SC, for example, and while there we went on a walking tour of old cemeteries; we left at the end of May and returned in early June, 2007; the smoke blown inland from distant fires caused traffic to be routed off the interstate highway; we left the highway and drove, how far?, maybe a hundred miles in smoke-wreathed isolation — empty roads, vacant stores, almost no other cars visible. The cars that we did see were quickly swallowed in the smoke. It turned out, as we learned later, that the smoke was so bad that citizens had been told not to leave their homes (sort of the opposite of an evacuation).

All that said, certain details have been (a) magnified for effect, in the same way that a smoke-everywhere landscape exaggerates certain features, and (b) even invented, just as some features of a real such landscape turn out to be wholly imaginary, born of fear.

The author also wishes to point out that there was no way he would have gotten out of the damned car at the end.