Luck

Cass grinned and leaned forward, cool wind whipping tendrils of hair back from her face as she picked up speed. The ancient motorcycle was the only sound as she flew down the highway, watching for debris and scattered lumps of useless metal and glass that used to be useful transport.

It had been one hundred days since the lights went out, one hundred days since reliable water came pouring from pipes on demand. One hundred days since reliable, instant medical care became archaic and obsolete.

One hundred days since anyone had last seen or heard a moving vehicle, had seen air traffic plunging through the sky. One hundred days since food riots began, idiots starving while surrounded by edible plants that grew in sidewalk cracks and weedy front lawns, plantain and dandelion everywhere if you only knew to look.

One hundred days since she’d lost hope of ever reconnecting with her family, of seeing the farm again. Home, nearly fifteen hundred miles away.

It was a stroke of sheer luck that she’d made it out of the city before most people realized the apocalypse had come for them all, that help wasn’t coming.

A rabbit’s foot to have scrounged the right supplies from the back of a crashed pickup, from a driver who no longer cared who used his camping gear and dehydrated eggs. A windfall to score boots bought on credit she’d never see the bill for, store dark and empty with half-filled shelves, a lone clerk scrupulously writing down card numbers, unsure and confused when his technology no longer worked.

More good fortune to have made it through the desert, blinding and dry. A truck filled with filtered water discovered halfway through, abandoned and alone, door hanging open, footprints leading into the sand.

The hand of fate to have found the bike in yesterday’s dying light, old enough to work after an EMP strike, fully fueled and lovingly maintained. The skeleton nearby held emaciated hands against where its heart used to be, desiccated tendons the last threads holding interlaced bones in a gruesome weave of phalanges.

The favor of the gods to feed on a chicken pecking around the shed that contained the same motorcycle her father had taught her to ride. She’d stuffed her face after roasting the bird, a luxurious waste when soup could have gone much farther, its eggs boiled and stored in her backpack.

Petals off a four-leaf clover, luck blowing in the wind against her face. Cass closed her eyes and wondered if she’d make it back home after all.

She opened them in time to see a black cat dart across the road, freezing to hiss at the bike’s roar. With a thump, Cass was airborne, flying against gravity, stars of fate tossed into the skies and spun like a prophet’s emphatic hand gesture.

She smashed down into the road, benediction gone with the last mechanized wheel still spinning, ribs crushed along her right side and the pain so sharp she thought she’d split herself in two.

Cass wheezed a laugh, blood flecking over her face and pouring down her chin, a road vampire who’d run out of time.

It was the one hundredth day, after all. She should have known the apocalypse would eventually come to claim its due.