The Day the Cars Died

Fiction

Visual by Sandolore Sykes

This piece is part of The Lot, the first volume of SUM FLUX. Featured in Edition 3—the culmination of Volume 1—this work is one of eight contributions to this edition. Read more about this zine and its theme here: https://sumflux.substack.com/p/volume-1-the-lot.

Everyone knows where they were the day the cars died. For a while, it’s all anyone talked about; it was hard not to. Everywhere you went, they were there. Frozen in time, their lack of movement so contrary to their purpose. It was a hot day, like every day back then. Windows half open, trunks ajar, doors gaping, like we were all trying to cool the planet with the aircon in our cars, trucks, mini-vans, and S-U-fuckin-V’s.

It’s not like it was a surprise.

They had a countdown on Madison Square Garden for the end of oil, down to the last barrel. I heard some tech Trillionaire bought it. He set fire to it in a dried-out swimming pool watched by his money-drunk flunkies, drinking something French, something cold. I don’t remember the last time I drank something cold.

“It’s our Exodus,” screamed the naked preacher from the roof of his burnt-out church bus. But that wasn’t right, when were they ever right?

We were trying to get to my parent’s place, and the irony wasn’t lost on me. I hadn’t seen them in seven years, and the universe wanted to make it eight. I had left it late, maybe too late, but I had promised her we would try. Like some twisted Disney story, we were doing this for her.

I walked past the traffic jam with my life in a rucksack and our child in a trolley. Traffic Jam. What a joke! This traffic wasn’t jammed. It was junked. The whole country was a car park. But not the organised, well-spaced, geometric car parks you find in middle-class malls. This was the crazy drunken, “Ooops! I’ve accidentally invited a few million keg-heads over to the frat house on social media” kind of car park.

On the day, the noise was insane. Everyone was honking and shouting, people got angry, babies were crying, and guns were shooting. Cars were rammed by mini-vans, which were rammed by removal vans, which were rammed by trucks. Everyone was pushing everyone out of the way, trying to get a bit further or closer to somewhere that wasn’t here… or there.

In desperation, I drove off the road and down a verge but went straight onto another car park of violent frustration. My son was in his child seat, staring at me, laughing as we bounced around. It was beautiful to see. We hadn’t laughed much since he was born because we hadn’t had much to laugh about. Turns out grief isn’t funny.

I clipped the curb and banged my head on the window, the sensors screaming that everything was too close and I was too far from the road. I thought I had an edge with the Prius. Electric cars don’t need oil; I’d be fine. They had nuclear and solar to run the grid… we could keep driving, they said. But you need a road to drive on. The roads closed when the cars died.

I drove back up the dry grass, but the soil turned to dust under the wheels, and we slip slided through a fence and over an award-winning community garden to end with my front wheels submerged in an ex-pond slime hole. Once I’d cracked the ornate cement flamingo in half with my door and pulled the child seat through the front windscreen, I tossed the useless keys to a hazy crowd of stoners who had made camp on a dead traffic cop’s Hummer. They invited us to stay, but back then, I believed there was somewhere worth going to, so we went.

I tried carrying the car seat, but that didn’t make any sense. Car seats are for cars. I parked it on the roof of a 1968 Cadillac and rescued a genuine 1998 Walmart shopping cart from a storm drain. I found a bored mechanic, Keith, who did a bang-up repair job on the twitchy, bent front wheels in exchange for two tins of beans. He threw in a spare wheel he wrenched off a rusted trolley where he kept leaking car batteries. I had no idea how I would fit it if I needed to, but it was an act of kindness, and I was happy to take any of those I could get. We were lucky; we only had seventy miles to walk, and we had a cart, a good one, too. I was a king out here, but that also made us a target.

On day three, after a hot, hard push up the interstate, weaving endlessly around millions of dollars of dead metal hubris, we came across a spun-out Airstream blocking two lanes. I had always dreamed of crossing America with an Airstream in tow, and right now, this was as close to a dream come true as I was gonna get. My son was all shook up like a soda bottle, ready to burst after fifteen miles of hot, broken highway. We needed somewhere cool and quiet to rest for a day or two.

I didn’t know we had been followed until the sun went down, and I was rocking my boy to sleep on the front step. I heard them before I saw them. Three kids, no more than fifteen years old, carrying big bags full of fuck knows what hunkered down behind a wrecked and rolled security van. They whispered plans to steal our cart as loud as hungry hyenas. Salivating over its wheels, the capacity, the flip-down baby seat! They had dreams of light shoulders on their long journey and didn’t care what they had to do to make their dreams come true. They must have forgotten how hard a parent will fight for their own, or perhaps they weren’t lucky enough to know.

They now know.

My homemade BBQ flamethrower conversion issued a swift, fiery education before they leapt, smoking off the flyover into the river below. I made a mental note to teach my boy how important “Look before you leap” can be. That river had been dry for years, they all have.

I locked our precious wheels in the back of the security van and settled us in for a couple of nights well-earned R&R. We welcomed a steady stream of weary walkers for shared lunches and dinners. They were good times, quiet times. With the constant thrum of the motorway, a distant memory, suddenly I could hear talking instead of shouting, campfires instead of gunfire, birds instead of beeps. When the car stereos ran out of juice, people found guitars and banged sticks on doors for drums. The one-thousand-mile, six-lane car park took on a festival vibe, and I felt it was safe for us to move on.

I stocked the cart with everything we could take from the Airstream and repurposed some memory foam to transform the plastic seat into a plush bunk for one. I found a pink golf umbrella and cable-tied it to the frame, giving us some much-needed shade. A can of WD40 turned our squeaking shake monster into a ninja stealth trolly, and we slipped unnoticed around the car park campsites.

As the days drew on, people started to move the cars around. Making useful shapes from useless lumps. At first, corrals, then avenues, cul-de-sacs, and even a high rise…, although I didn’t hold much hope for the elderly lady they had convinced to live in the penthouse Stationwagon come hurricane season. But she was happy. Everyone seemed happy. I was happy, and my boy, well, he hadn’t cried for days.

And then… journeys end.

I stood at the top of the off-ramp leading to my parent’s suburban reservation—penned in old folks with movement as limited as their minds. They had built a wall out of trucks and a giant cross out of telegraph poles. In the centre of the barrier was a sky-blue Ice Cream van, the window open.

Inside, standing guard, were my parents.

“A ninety-nine cone and a mini-milk for the kid,” I smiled, lifting him out of his chariot to greet them.

He stared back at me, eyes glazed with a reinforced version of the fear he beat me with for so many years.

“This place is for true believers,” snapped my Father coldly.

“This is your grandson.” I held him up, everything I had left of my old life, everything I had left of her. My son put out his arms instinctively, ready to be loved.

“I have no son.” The window slammed shut, and my Father turned away. My Mother, a shadow in the background, chose not to fight again.

I breathed a sigh of relief. Our promise was fulfilled, our quest was complete, and we could move on. Everyone had played their part. Not all fairytales end with a happy reunion. I pushed the cart back up the ramp as the sun set, lighting the sky gold and magenta.

I gazed at the new, evolving civilisation around me. The world of the interstate car park: free accommodation, recycling, repurposing, free-thinking born from ruination. I glanced at my son, swatting flies with an old Buick wiper blade he had adopted as his new favourite toy, and I knew…

This cart was made for walking… and that’s just what we gonna do.

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