***
The fuel gauge fell to a quarter of a tank just about four miles before they hit the interstate. They were making good time, but when Brooke pulled the cruiser onto Seventy-Seventh Street, which would take her right to the interstate, her foot found the brake and slowly pressed down.
The kids looked up from playing games on their phones, and the three of them saw the line of cars gridlocked on the interstate ahead, most of which were being turned back. Brooke rolled her window down, flagging a truck returning from the roadblock.
“What's going on up there?” Brooke asked.
The gentleman behind the wheel of the rusty truck had a greasy face and wore a baseball cap tilted low over his forehead. He kept one hand on the wheel as he leaned out his window.
“Police blocked it off. They're not letting anyone out of the city. They just told us to go home and that help would be coming soon,” he said.
“Thanks.”
Brooke rolled up her window, and the truck continued on its way.
“Should we just go home?” John asked. “Maybe help really is coming.”
Brooke knew that was a lie. All of it was just talk filled with empty promises to give the government time to do whatever it was planning on doing.
“Hand me the map out of the glove box, John,” Brooke said.
She unfolded the map onto the dash. If I-8 was blocked, then it was safe to assume that all other major highways were going to be blocked as well. That meant there were only two other ways out. The first was to fly, which wasn't an available alternative, and the other was to chance the desert.
Brooke ran her finger along the Mojave Desert. There were some old solar cell fields just before the desert began. Her company kept a relay station there for any repairs that needed to be done. Before it had been shut down, she knew it had had a fuel station and other emergency supplies in case anything ever happened when someone was working out there.
If the authorities were blocking traffic, then they were also going to be watching the gas stations. Brooke would bet her last gallon of water that they weren’t going to let anyone fuel up without special permission.
She checked her fuel gauge one more time. The cruiser would get about thirteen MPG on desert terrain. There were probably five to six gallons left, giving her between sixty-five and seventy-eight miles to make the eighty-mile trek to the station.
It was risky. There was no guarantee they'd make it, and even if they did, someone else might have already picked over the supplies at the station. The place had been abandoned for months.
But she knew her cruiser could handle terrain that most other vehicles couldn't, and she knew the police wouldn't waste resources stationing officers in the middle of the desert.
Brooke put the cruiser in reverse and turned around. She switched to four-wheel drive and rolled onto the desert sand.