Chapter 10
North of Dayton, Ohio
Elijah kept thinking, with each step, he was getting closer to finding out something about Rene and Matt. Something that he might not want to know.
First they had to get around Dayton. Or through it. All Elijah could think of was the words of Trevor C. Banks, who wandered into Crawfordton from Dayton maybe a year ago. He remembered Trevor saying, "People down there would eat the bark off of this here tree. They would eat this here grass. They eat road kill, and rats. They eat each other. They eat their own children or swap their children with somebody else to eat. They sell human meat for water. I don't know how Cincinnati is, Chicago is, Columbus is, man I used to love Dayton, but I ain't gonna lie to you, Dayton is some kinda hell on this earth up in there. I thought about doing it, eatin' the dead. . . but I didn't. I caught a damn buzzard. I ate some glue." Not the most encouraging of recollections.
Elijah's travel mates helped him keep up a decent pace. Traffic on the road was nil. Elijah thought that there was not much to feed off of in downtown Dayton. That equation left only cannibals in the city. Pretty much like Trevor C. Banks said.
"Dale," Elijah said, "You sure you want to take your wife and daughter down there? It is plenty scary for us, let alone for unarmed women."
"That's what I tried to tell her! You think she would listen?"
Pam said, "Dale, I didn't want our family to separate. Is that so bad?"
Elijah said, "No, it's not bad." He thought of Aliyah back in Crawfordton. Was he a bad husband? Was Dale a bad husband? Maybe his thinking was becoming cloudy because of malnutrition. He thought back over the span of the day. He was on autopilot, plodding forward without much caloric intake. "What about hiding the women here?"
Terri said, "No Mom!"
Pam said, "Elijah, we'd just as soon go with Dale. He could use our help. If we go down, I would rather go down together."
Dale said, "Me 'n Elijah got weapons. We can make it."
Elijah said, "The hand guns don't mean nothin'. We gotta travel at night so no one with a rifle can scope us out. I think there are the worst kind in the City there who will jump at the chance to shoot us.
"We're wasting time," Dale said.
Elijah said, "We got to play it smart, Dale. It don't do no good to hurry up and get shot."
"You listen to Elijah, Dale. He knows about this stuff." You're just a chicken farmer.
"Chicken farmer?" Elijah asked. "In my book, chickens are vital. Let's go find somewhere we can get out of this wind and take a nap until nightfall. You can tell me all about how you raise chickens. It won't be but a couple more hours of daylight this time of year anyhow."
They went off of the highway. After hopping a fence they came across an old building that stored an old tractor. They were getting ready to go into the building.
Pam said, "Hey Dale! Look. Wild parsnips."
"Sure enough," Dale said. "Let's dig them up. They are good the year round."
"Nice work, Pam," Elijah said. "I would have never, ever seen that."
"Thanks, city boy."
Elijah remembered how much he absolutely hated parsnips. There were a lot of them growing there. Wild ones certainly wouldn't be any better than the garden variety.
They each got their knives out and got some dug up. Dale went and washed them in a ditch by swishing the bunch back and forth really fast. They looked as clean as the ones from the grocery store. At least the dirty water had to be a lot better than the chunks of dirt that were on the white root vegetables.
"Mmm. . .yummy. These taste just like. . .kerosene carrots," Elijah said. He found himself missing the iconic Crawfordton soybean soup.
"Yea," Dale said. "They ain't real bad. Wanna hear about chicken farming now, Elijah?"
"Of course," Elijah said.
"Well, we got forty thousand head. Well, we did anyhow, but we had to take them all out of the cages."
"You took forty thousand chickens out of cages?" Elijah found this incredible, but he was too tired to think about any of it and fell asleep while Dale told him how his farm went down the tubes."
It seemed like only minutes until Dale woke Elijah up and told him it was dark out. So they went back up on the highway and started heading south again. It was very dark and quiet.
Dale said, "We gotta remember where we got those parsnips for on the way back."
Elijah was grateful for the meal, but was not going to commit too much of his gray matter to recalling the exact location of the nasty things. "Okay," Elijah said, "we've got to be as quiet as possible."
It took what seemed to be over an hour from where they started to get to the downtown part of Dayton. It was an eerie feeling, walking on the interstate in the dark among the tall buildings. There was no lighting, but they could still make out the silhouettes of the massive buildings of downtown Dayton against the sky. It was a feeling of smallness and vulnerability. Yet, if it were daytime, this walk would be dangerous to the point of being foolhardy.
"Elijah," Terri whispered. There's another road over here.
"What?"
"Yea, look. Which way is the exit?" It was so dark that they could not tell which lanes were the thru lanes and which ones were the exit. Normally, the exits were on the right, but not always.
Pam said, "We have to walk across and see which direction has the most lanes and follow it." Typically, the exit was one or two lanes while the main path was at least four lanes.
"Good idea," Elijah said.
This extra measure took extra time, but they definitely did not want to get off of I-75. That could mean a very long amount of extra walking and many added miles to the trip by going the wrong way.
"Listen," Dale whispered.
"Yea," Terri whispered. "Sounds like shooting. This is suckish."
Elijah said in a hushed tone, "I think we're going to be okay."
Within a couple of more hours of walking they found the correct path south on I-75 and had managed to avoid any problems. Elijah would definitely remember to go through Dayton only at night on the way back.
Elijah kept thinking, It would be a very long walk back if it was bad news in Fairfield, where Rene and Matt lived.