Albuquerque as Jack had known it no longer existed. The only thing left was the blackened stumps of buildings and charred earth as far as he could see. Ash and drifts of fine dust clung to every surface, turning the environment a muted, monochromatic gray. The pervasive stench of death blotted out the once fragrant scent of the high desert. Even the Sandia Mountains hadn’t escaped the devastation. Every tree on the west-facing slope had been burned away, allowing the late-summer rains to scour the denuded hillside, sloughing millions of tons of dirt and rock into the city below. Zombies ruled the countryside. They were everywhere, preserved for all eternity by the great clouds of radiation roiling in the atmosphere.
It was colder than usual, probably ten or fifteen degrees below normal. This was because of the bombs; the dust they had kicked up was blocking the sun’s rays from reaching the earth, cooling the northern hemisphere in a vicious feedback loop that Jack knew wouldn’t end until all of the dust settled. And that could be years.
So they headed south.
It was the only way to survive. He had no idea how far he would have to go to reach a warmer climate, or if the radiation would get them first. He worried about poisonous clouds from southern California and Arizona sweeping over them, but there was little he could do. They had to go south, or they would die.
The terrifying truth was that with civilization gone, Jack and Becka were going to have to learn how to produce their own food. Scavenging would only take them so far; canned goods would last a few years at best, maybe more, but they weren’t the answer to long-term survival. No, to really make it, they had to become modern-day farmers, and the New Mexico high country wasn’t the place for that. not anymore.
He had to laugh at the irony of it all. Before the world collapsed, there had been whole magazines—hell, whole industries—devoted to the idealized notion of getting back to nature, of being self-sufficient. He knew this because he had a stack of those very magazines, complete with glossy full page advertisements for fancy micro-tractors and do-it-yourself solar water heaters, in his bathroom back in Taos.
Jack wiped his brow with his sleeve, scrubbing away a thick rivulet of sweat before it ran into his eyes.
“Are we there yet?” Ellie called out from the rear seat of their ancient Volkswagen camper. “Can we stop for nuggets soon?” Jack opened his mouth to answer, but found he couldn’t make the words come out. A tear leaked from his eye. He wiped it away. Ellie’s question had struck a chord deep inside of him, triggering a flood of memories of better times.
Becka came to his rescue. “No, honey. Not yet.”
Their vehicle was remarkably well-preserved considering it was over a half-century old. There wasn’t a spot of rust on the body, and the engine, clattering and pinging like a sewing machine on steroids, ran like a champ. Finding the pre-electronic-ignition camper on the side of I-25 north of Albuquerque had been a stroke of unbelievable luck, for while he and Becka could walk for days, Ellie was another story. She could only put in six or seven miles on a good day, not nearly enough to get them to their destination, wherever that was. White with broad maroon racing stripes on each side, the camper was immaculate except for a large, dried bloodstain saturating the driver’s seat. Jack had no idea if the blood was infectious, and he wasn’t taking any chances. A blue tarp, liberated from a storage compartment in the rear, solved this problem in short order. Now he just had to deal with the constant crinkling as he shifted around. The sound drove him crazy.
They were running along at fifty miles per hour, having just cleared the southern edge of Albuquerque, when things turned to shit. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a yellow and black sign announcing they were entering open-range country. That meant the cattle were not behind fences; they were free to move across the road at any time of day or night.
He recalled a trip many years earlier, before Maddie and Ellie were born. He and Becka had been on their way to Denver to visit some college friends. It was early in the morning, just after sunrise, and they had been driving all night, pushing north through a late-spring snowstorm. Becka had spotted it first, as they crested a sharp rise about a hundred miles south of the Colorado border. “What’s that?” she asked, pointing at the road ahead. Jack leaned forward and squinted through the snow, trying to make sense of what he was seeing. It looked like a load of trash had escaped the bed of a pickup truck, but worse. Both northbound lanes were littered with snow-covered obstructions. He lifted his foot from the gas, allowing the car to slow on its own.
Becka’s eyes grew wide. “Oh, my God, Jack! That’s an accident!”
They had come to a stop a few feet away from the remains of a horrific collision between some sort of livestock, probably a cow, and a small car. The car appeared to be a Honda Civic or Toyota Tercel, but they couldn’t tell for sure. Whatever it had been, no amount of repairs would ever make it whole again.
There was nothing left of the driver larger than a child’s lunch box.
“Call 911,” Jack whispered.
Becka had retrieved her phone from her purse and punched in the numbers. A moment later, she frowned and held it out to him. “No signal.”
Jack cursed. That was in the days before the mobile phone companies finished expanding their networks, when it was still possible to get lost in the great empty spaces between the cities of the mountain west. It had taken them over an hour to reach an area with enough cellular reception to report the accident.
The tragedy had been covered in the Denver Post the next morning. The driver, a man of about Jack’s age, had been on his way back from a family reunion in Las Vegas, New Mexico, when he fell asleep at the wheel and encountered a stray cow shortly after midnight.
Jack swallowed the memory away. If that happened now, if we were to hit an animal or if we were to hit anything, there would be no one to call for help… He let out a nervous laugh. It’s just a sign, he told himself. It doesn’t mean anything anymore.
Something moved on the side of the road.
“Hold on!” He tensed up. He didn’t have time to put his hand out to stabilize Becka before the creature darted into their path. It was a runner, one of the irradiated ones from Albuquerque, and it was moving fast, almost sprinting.
A man. One arm. No skin on the side of his head. These images were burned into Jack’s mind as the creature plunged into the scrub on the opposite side of the road. He feathered the brake. The undead never traveled alone. He was right. A second creature appeared as if summoned, and raced into his lane. Jack swerved, but not enough.
The second zombie plowed into the right front corner of the bus, causing its body to explode into a greasy mist of gore. The old VW shuddered and jumped left a few inches as the steering wheel was torn from his grasp. He gripped the wheel and tried to bring it back to straighten the bus. Bang! They slewed violently to the right. Tire!
Jack put every ounce of strength he possessed into straightening the van, but the top-heavy vehicle had its own plans. Time slowed. He felt the tires on the left side of the bus lose contact with the road. They went airborne. A second later, the earth reached up and yanked them back in a vicious embrace. Glass exploded around him in a million glittering fragments. Twisting metal screamed in his ears. Hot sparks peppered his face, minute pinpricks of heat that felt oddly comforting.
And then everything went black.
Fire: The Collapse Page 22