Storytime Blog Hop: Ridesharing

“This is worse than I thought,” Nat admitted. She stood ahead of me at what used to be a crosswalk, close enough to the endless stream of empty cars to make me nervous. They’d hit plenty of pedestrians back when the city was occupied, even before the law made it the pedestrians’ fault.

“Told you we’re not getting in.” No way through the cars, even if there was anything left worth salvaging.

Nat frowned back at me. “But people used to walk here. There has to be a way across.”

I shrugged and joined her at the crosswalk, half a step back. Only a twisted stump of a pole marked where a walk signal had been, and the one remaining stoplight at the corner hung dark and dead. I pointed them out to her.

“The cars only listened to the light signals,” I said. “No more signals–no controlling them. All the servers are long gone. And no one’s cracked the encryption yet to ping the cars directly.”

The cars in question still rumbled steadily by us, four lanes thick and impenetrable. Like a rushing river–they could still talk to each other, so the flow was uninterrupted, even through intersections. And between the solar panels atop the cars and the handful of streets still electrified beneath them, they’d keep going for years more, until the batteries gave up. It was starting–the only hiccups in the flow were where a car had finally broken down and the rest had to go around it. Once there were enough to block the road, then we could get into the city and recover whatever wonders it once held.

Nat frowned at the relentless traffic. “This is such a waste.”

“Yep.” You gotta wonder what the people who made these cars were thinking–sending them wandering around the city instead of just parking them somewhere until they were needed.

She shot me a furtive look. “D’you think we could–ride one? Get into town that way?”

I shook my head. “Like I said, the servers are gone. All the rideshare apps are dead. We can’t get them to–”

“No, I mean, like, on them. Like trainhoppers way back when.” Nat grinned and pointed across the street at a pickup truck. “Like on that. If it slowed down enough, we could do it. Get in the back, see where it takes us.”

I watched the truck pass us, two lanes removed from where we stood. Sure–plenty of room in the empty truck bed, assuming we could get to it. And back out.

“Even if that wasn’t stupidly dangerous…”

“We won’t be stuck that long,” Nat interrupted, hefting her backpack. “We can hitch a second ride wherever we slow down enough to get off the first. That’s our exit strategy. Besides, it’s not that big a city, and we’ve got at least a day’s worth of snacks and water.”

She knew me too well. But I wasn’t gonna give in that easy. “Still–we don’t know that there’s anything in there worth the risk.”

Admittedly, there might be. Most people left the cities in a hurry, and looters would’ve faced the same trouble we had now. On the other hand, a lot of buildings were complete wrecks thanks to the various disasters that scared everyone off in the first place. I’d bet there was rubble slowing down the traffic, too, deeper in.

“We won’t know if we don’t look,” Nat said, tugging on my arm. “Come on, if there’s nothing in there, then we only have to do this once.”

Dammit. It was a bad idea, but I wanted to know. “Fine,” I said reluctantly, and let her drag me down the block and around the corner, to a sedan that had broken down in the right-hand lane. She climbed atop it and squinted up the road at the coming traffic.

“Get up here, I see one,” she said, so I did. The cracked solar panel of its roof sagged under our combined weight, but held. And the truck approached, slowing as other cars were forced to merge ahead of it.

“Three,” Nat said. The truck was next in line. “Two.” The cab rolled up beside us. “One!”

We leapt and hit the truck bed–the suspension catapulted me back up a few inches into the air before it settled. The car behind us honked, once. But the truck kept going. Wherever this river led, we were riding it now.

“See?” said Nat, over the pounding of my heart. “Now let’s find out what the city holds.”