Ain't Talkin'

The caravan drove hard the remainder of the day. The 80 West disappeared beneath tires and hooves and bootheels, a hundred miles cut away like reaping grass.

There at the end of the world, across the bay, was New San Fran. The bay had gone to gray water, graveyards of military boats and passenger vessels, their prows lancing at the sky.

Roche hopped off Lucky and stood at the edge of the water, his boots in the mud.

The Bay Bridge leading into New San Fran was a skyward expanse of metal from where Roche stood. Of the many, many suspension bridges that had once spanned great expanses of waters, this was one of the few that still stood. It was four massive towers of formed steel and a central spar of concrete and metal that drove down into the bay, all supporting a wide lane of asphalt. It showed it’s disrepair in some places, bits and angles of road missing, steel cables snapped off halfway. bright brown patches of corrosion and salt-poisoning along the metal. But, this was a bridge meant to support many thousands of tons. . .it would allow for the passage of the Resistance convoy.

And there was the bay, and beyond the bay there was the sea. The world beside the ocean smelled different, it smelled still alive. In the Mojave, in the central parts of the wasteland where the dust and the sand and the fire burned across the vastness of continents and squeezed the last iotic bits of life from the soil, but by the ocean there was still hope.

It smelled like brine and rotting things, like dead plants and shit and change. Somewhere in the depths of the gray-blue there were still organisms evolving and changing, adapting to a world that had been burned by nuclear winters and the sun’s radiation and mankind’s ignorance. But even after everything that had happened, the sea would persist. . .endure.

Gulls screamed from the hulls of ruined boats beneath the bridge, and Roche swigged from his handled bottle.

The caravan was still on the road, coming down the 80 from the north where the road bent along the edges of the bay. A half-dozen outriders on synthetic horses, along with Thomas and Leon Wellam had moved ahead of the caravan to see that the way to the bridge was clear. It was. Besides a dozen wastelanders in makeshift armor with taped-together weapons who’d gone about their own way and stayed a safe distance, the shorelines were empty.

It was the bridge that would be the problem.