by Frank Owen
‘Wake up, sleepyhead.’
He yanked Linus out by the back legs, the cat growling as his claws squeaked uselessly against the linoleum. Kurt held him tight under his arm while he made coffee with one hand. Linus dug his claws into Kurt’s arm in token protest, but the boy didn’t react except to watch his bright blood bead along the welting grooves.
‘That’s fair, Linus. Just let me know when you’re done.’
He collected the last of the world’s stalest donuts and went to sit himself down at a booth right against the diner window and stare out at the cars. Prime position. The cat had given up and resigned himself to being cradled. Kurt dipped a corner of his napkin into his coffee and wiped the blood away. It rose steadily to the skin’s surface, and itched. Even if Linus had some dirt underneath his claws, Kurt still thought he was safe. Immune was immune. He wondered how long the dose in the syringe was active. He’d have to get a booster shot somewhere pretty soon, just to be safe.
When breakfast was done, he went around opening all the fridge and freezer doors wide and making sure the stove plates were on, as well as the vacuum cleaner, the portable air con and the radio, for luck. The cat sat on the floor, bristling.
‘Every bit helps, old pal. It ain’t exactly going to cripple the North to lose this electricity, but you got to keep chipping away. Rome wasn’t destroyed in a day, right?’
He emptied out Norma’s tote bag and went through her things, but there was nothing there of much use. Women. At least the bag was useful.
‘It won’t be for long,’ he told Linus, lowering him into it, ‘so just hold tight and don’t make a fuss. When I’m famous, you can say you were there at the start. Ain’t you never wanted to see the world?’ He stuffed the tabby none too gently down into the tote and clicked the clips. There was enough air for the cat, and it could see out if it was so inclined. The bag bulged and spat as the cat struggled and scratched, and Kurt held it away from his body and shook it.
‘Now you just settle and count your blessings while you’re in there. I’ll be honest with you. I ain’t got no use for humans ’cept the smart ones. At least I know where we stand. And just so you know, I’ll be calling the shots. That changes, I’ll be wearing me a pair of tabby slippers come fall.’
The bag roiled and then fell still. Kurt picked Norma’s keys up from the floor and hoisted the bag over his shoulder. He gave Norma a little wave and then locked up after himself.
‘Leave it the way you want to find it, Linus.’
He crossed the parking lot and started his walk, keeping next to the highway alongside the cars. Nobody offered him a lift. Maybe they were all full up with their furniture and their kids – or maybe the blouse made him smell of crazy. Either way, it was a fair walk before he reached the suburbs of Saratoga, and Linus was getting restless.
‘Not much longer, Puss in Boots.’ He stuck a finger in the bag and tried to scratch Linus’s head, but the cat ducked away from him.
Kurt made his slow patrol of the streets in a grid, marking the families as they returned – the adults stretching their backs as they stood on the remains of their front lawns, assessing the damage. It was the first look that was the hardest. After that, you knew what you were dealing with.
As he watched, jobs were allocated. The mothers were mostly set to unpacking and herding the children while the fathers busied themselves lifting branches off porches or standing on the sidewalk opposite for a better view of the destruction in the universal stance: hands on hips, heads shaking. No one commented on his makeshift shirt, cut and tied back together in tiny knots like boils. No one even noticed him at all, it seemed to Kurt, and there was some defiant, lonely part of him that was angered.
Outside the closest house – a two-storey red-brick, like an old-time insurance advert – was a white Toyota. Kurt stared.
Strapped to the bonnet was an adult pronghorn.
He crossed the street to get a better look. Yup. There it was. Someone had done a little hunting on the way home. Waste not, want not.
He wandered up the drive and bent to examine the buck. It had been tied down with a black ratchet strap. The grille was bent in and the buck lay in the dent that it had made in the metal. As far as he could tell, it looked like a couple of legs were broken; the side of its skull was concave, and dried blood streaked the face like war paint, starting from the corner of one dull eye.
‘Big one, isn’t he, Blondie?’ came a woman’s croaky voice from the house. Kurt looked up and saw a dyed orange head leaning out of an upstairs window. She wanted to talk, the relief of surviving loosening her tongue. ‘Hit it in the night on the way back from my sister’s place. Came out of nowhere. We didn’t know what to do, so my husband tied the thing on the bonnet, like we seen in movies. He’s on the phone now to ask what to do with it.’
‘Oh,’ said Kurt. Then, ‘I know what to do with it.’
‘You do? What?’
‘Eat it.’
The woman laughed. ‘I’m sure that’s against the law. He’s on the phone right now, Derrick – that’s my husband – so we’ll figure it out. Should be some kind of ranger service? Where they take these things away? We couldn’t just leave it there.’
Why the fuck not? Kurt wanted to say. It could have been you, lady. Don’t you know this is a war?
He held his tongue and the ginger woman craned her neck, watching him walk around her car with the wild animal strapped to it like a satyr, some wartime hybrid of steel and flesh. He reached out and felt the buck’s horns, like leather. Linus started his wriggling again; the smell of blood was making him antsy. Kurt squeezed the bag hard. The struggle intensified and then the cat flopped back, panting.
‘You know where Des Moines is? Or how to get there from here?’ Kurt called back to the window.
‘There’s a map book in the car. Give me a second and I’ll come get it for you.’
While he waited, he ran his fingers over the pronghorn’s hair, then felt under the ribs for the organs. You could tell a lot about an animal by its interior. Most critters down South had swollen livers: that was something the body did in response to the airborne viruses, trying to get rid of toxins like alcoholics’ insides fought the liquor. This buck, old as he was, seemed fine. If it hadn’t been for the grille of the Toyota, he’d have been alive for another five years, Kurt guessed. Long road ahead of him, and then – pow – nothing. There was some kind of lesson there.
‘Carpe diem, motherfucker,’ he whispered, low in the buck’s ear.
The woman had hurried out of the house in a pink toweling dressing gown, clutching it closed against the wind, the keys held up in her hand as if she was going into battle.
‘Excuse me?’
‘Just saying a little prayer for Bambi over here.’
‘Oh. That’s sweet of you. We never even thought about that – just drove home before the kids woke up and got scared. Do animals get last rites?’
Kurt shrugged. ‘They deserve ’em more than a lot of humans I could name.’
The red-haired woman tittered. ‘Well. You’re a nice young man.’
She unlocked the car door and swiveled her knees to sit so that she could reach inside the glovebox. She took a dog-eared map book out and then wriggled out again in reverse, still clutching her gown at the throat.
‘Now let’s see how to get you home.’ She opened the map book on the hood beside the pronghorn’s blood-rimmed mouth and began to search the pages, yakking all the while.
‘Des Moines, Des Moines. It scared the you-know-what out of me when we hit it. The buck, I mean. Jeepers creepers! I was driving too, which made it worse. Just a flash in the headlights and bang, right on the grille. Could’ve come through the windscreen! That would have been all she wrote for me and Derrick, and this old pronghorn too. Just shows that you never know when your time is up. Ah, Des Moines,’ she said, holding her finger to a spot on the page.
Kurt peered at the paper roads and arteries, but he needed to get closer.
She blinked at him, and then gawped in merriment. ‘A cat!’
‘Sure. He’s no bother. Just here in the bag. Will you hold onto him for a sec? You’re not allergic or anything, are you?’
She took Norma’s tote and Linus thumped to the other side of it. The ginger woman held her eye against the opening.
‘Don’t get too close now.’
‘Oh, he’s darling! I used to have a tabby when I was a little girl. Don’t you love that M mark they all have on their foreheads? Like they’re solving the world’s problems. If only they could speak!’
‘Uh-huh.’ Kurt studied the map.
‘Kit-kit-kit!’ said the woman. ‘Mister Whiskers! You got a pen? Can’t hurt to write down the directions. I know how muddled I get with all the 430s and 750s and 680s. You know what? You can use a page from the back. There’s empty ones for notes that we’re never going to use. Derrick is a pretty good navigator. Here, kitty, kitty!’
Kurt felt in his pocket for a pen, but his hand found the multi-tool instead.
And why the fuck not?
He drew it like a pistol and in one movement sank the blade into the woman’s neck. He got the angle right this time, and she dropped to the ground without shrieking. The blood only started jetting when he pulled the blade back and wiped it on Norma’s zombie blouse.
He grabbed the tote and flung it onto the passenger seat of the Toyota, ignoring the growl and squeal that came from it.
‘The pen is mightier than the sword, Linus, but today it’s every man for himself.’
He slid slickly into the seat and started the engine: what his uncle had taught him about cars had stuck.
As he rolled out of the drive, a skinny man emerged and stood on the porch, scratching his head dumbly. When he saw his wife’s crumpled body, he shouted and broke into a run, but by then it was too late.
‘Sayonara, Derrick.’ Kurt banged the toe. ‘Don’t stop till we hit Des Moines, pardner. Yeehaw!’ He swung the car onto the highway, only clipping the sidewalk an inch or so. ‘And guess what? We got ourselves a packed lunch for a week.’ He waved a hand at the pronghorn, whose cloudy dead eye locked on his. In the bag, Linus was quiet.
On the way out, they passed by the diner and its dead freight again. This time there was smoke rising from the building. Kurt didn’t notice. He was driving! Not a Mustang or anything, but still. A real car! Take that, motherfuckers! Yeehaw!
16
Somewhere in the gloaming of old Nebraska, Adams pulled the De Luxe to the side of the road. The absence of movement was what woke Felix from his old man’s doze.
Adams nudged him, the stale air recycled through the damaged passages of his nose. ‘Your turn, partner. You know how to drive, right?’
Now that Felix had woken from his black, dreamless sleep, he saw a deeper blackness, lit only by a single weak headlight pointing down at the cracked asphalt in front of the car. He rubbed his scratchy eyes, unsure whether he’d opened them at all.
Adams persisted. ‘You do remember how to drive, right?’
‘Is it like riding a bicycle?’ Felix said, and when Adams shot him a look, he answered himself. ‘Sure. I can drive.’
Adams pulled the latch on his door and it popped open a crack.
‘Ready? Got to be quick switching seats. Can’t be sure what prowls the forgotten highways.’ He’d made his voice horror-movie deep, but Felix knew he wasn’t joking.
‘Yup.’
Felix felt for the latch on his own door and opened it. The two men crossed in front of the lone headlight and then sat back down in the body-warmed seats, each prepared by the other.
‘What do you reckon is out there?’ Felix asked. He felt with his foot for the accelerator.
‘You hear stories.’
Felix ran his hand down between the seats and found the cold metal of the handbrake lever. He dropped it and checked the highway, then turned back onto the road.
‘You don’t have to watch for traffic here,’ commented Adams, already curling up against the passenger door.
Felix tried the brake, then pulled the car over to the side again.
‘What’s up?’ Adams asked.
‘Been waiting for a chance to get rid of that damn scented basketball ever since Saratoga. You reckon you can reach it back there?’
Adams twisted around and leant into the back, feeling for the ball in the dark. When he had it, he opened his window and tossed it out. It bounced a few times in the wake of the De Luxe as Felix pulled off.
‘Any directions?’ Felix asked.
‘Keep on this road. I’ll be awake before we get to the end of it.’
Felix let the De Luxe climb its slow gears and then held it steady, staring out at the circle of light that lit the way as Adams drifted off. The broken white lines flew under him like bullets, all aimed too low. For the first time since he’d woken on the banks of the North Platte, he thought about his exercise bike and the darkness held back by a machine – but only just. He was grateful that he didn’t have to do any pedaling now. He felt with one hand across the central console of the car, searching for the open mouth of a tape deck. There wasn’t one. Besides, his tapes were far away and probably lost to the floodwaters, along with everything else. But it was only the tapes that mattered to him at this moment. Felix tested himself, cuing the first one up in his mind and recalling the sound of his own rusty voice.
Felix, I hope you’ve still got the balls to have that gun on the table. Okay. Here we go. My name is Felix Callahan, but you know that, don’t you? I was born in Norman, Oklahoma, back when it was still a place.
Was that how it went? He couldn’t be sure. Maybe he was even now lying on the leeward slope of the hill behind his shack, slowly losing his mind to whatever contagion was in Stringbeard’s blood and mucus. Surely that was more likely than this: driving a real-life working car across the giraffe-infested North, aiming for the defunct heart of Renard’s America – the old Capitol Building.
Des Moines.
It was like talking about Mars. For a moment he wondered whether steering the De Luxe off the road into some deep-rooted tree or a ten-ton rock would jolt him awake, the Llama Danton heavy in his hand, ready to pull the trigger and end it all. His way, at least.
‘My way,’ he told himself. ‘My way or the highway, mother-fuckers.’
Even as he spoke, part of him stood outside himself; eating those mushrooms back in Horse Head had made him healthy, but one of their side effects was a terrible clarity. Felix knew that he couldn’t escape his here and now.
A sign appeared in the gloom and grew bigger until it whooshed past and into the darkness behind, white slashes on green like an olden-day lawn.
He turned his thoughts to Adams, who slept restlessly and breathed mostly through his mouth, held upright only by his seat belt. Why had he left him to deal with that butch policewoman at the rest stop? It was deliberate, Felix was pretty sure. Maybe it was safer to let a Southerner deal with a cop, rather than a member of the Resistance.
Or maybe Adams was a wanted man. But why not explain it after the fact? Why not come back to the car and say, ‘Sorry, Gramps, but they know I’m Resistance’?
Felix glanced at Adams again. That craggy face, with its fissures and repairs.
Unless he was wanted for something else. The kind of thing you don’t mention to a man you’ve just met.
Felix shook his head to clear his thoughts. Concentrate, asshole. He focused on the lines zipping past beneath the De Luxe. After a minute, he cued up the imaginary tape again and searched the faded rooms of his mind for the good words.
I had older brothers, once upon a time, and a mother and a father, the way it ought to be. I was the youngest by far. Not remembering it much probably means it was pretty smooth. There was milkshake vomit in footwells – that I remember – and broken arms from trampolines, and crackers in turds. The usual.
He’d made it all the way to h
is memory of Concession by the time Adams took over the driving duties for the last stretch into Des Moines. They were avoiding the populated suburbs, aiming the De Luxe in a roundabout way for the domes of the Capitol Building. There were makeshift blockades that looked deliberate – rubble in the middle of the road, or overturned cars. Adams noticed him looking.
‘One way in; one way out.’
Felix couldn’t quite believe his eyes as he stared out at the city, overlaying what he was seeing onto the blueprint of his ramshackle memories. A lot had changed. Des Moines, when he was last here, was the administrative capital of the North. Now all the infrastructure and development that had been injected into it lay unused or half finished, like Roman ruins. Renard must have been quick to leave the city. There was abandoned scaffolding on almost every structure – and cranes too, rusting away, all stopped like a clock.
It was, Felix thought, just a little too much like the broken cities of the South – the way they’d seized up as their inhabitants grew sicker. He’d stayed clear, mostly, but after a year being holed up in his shack, he’d taken a long trek out to see Denver. Most of his weather instruments had come from the university there, the kitty headphones for his tape deck from an electronics shop on South Pearl Street. If Denver was gone, it was all real.
In the event, the city was empty. On the road in there was an open manhole with orange cones in a ring around it, a last warning to the dazed and desperate few who might be walking the streets at night, searching for lost relatives. It was a simple civilian house that had made Felix understand how truly fucked everything was – nothing fancy, just completely and hopelessly final. The walls were half painted over a white base, but now they were flaking in sheets like sunburnt skin. A building jack held a door frame up while some long-dead soul planned to extend the lintel in perpetuity: the space for it had been cut into the bricks, and the concrete beam lay on the sidewalk, ready to be lifted into place. But Felix knew that the house was the wartime effort of a woman and her children – maybe a man too, exempt from fighting due to some disorder – the optimistic work of citizens convinced that they would win. This was the mighty South.