“All Russia is gone I think, except Urals. No time to escape. Nowhere to go.”
“Do you have any theories why?”
Yuri shrugged. “Only speculation. People, I think, did it.”
“The Chinese?”
“Who knows? Perhaps they are just quickest to recover. Their country—much less underwater.”
Bobby gazed through the windshield at the low mountains making a distant, scrubby horizon. “Yuri, what’s so important about what you know that we’re risking our lives to tell the president?”
“I wonder that myself. I remember when we saw them, working away while world on its knees. John—our commander—said we must tell people. Then the Shengzhou came…”
“The what?”
“It is capsule. Like Soyuz but bigger. Chinese. Tried to board us. Mikhail and John destroyed their vessel. Tricked me so they could die heroes. I promised to tell your president. If Chinese want it hidden so much they send spacecraft to take station…”
Bobby nodded. “I understand. You made a promise to your comrades.”
“Da. But Bobby. You do not have to come. I take it from here.”
“Seriously? Do you know how to get to Denver from here?”
“I am resourceful.”
“And conspicuous. And weak. No, I’ll come along.”
“Why? You did not see what I saw.”
“Because I believe you.”
A half-truth was better than a lie, but only just. He’d just been given a way out and could have been back with his daughter in hours if he got lucky. But he had to see this through. He told himself it was because he thought Yuri’s intelligence might be vital, but part of him wondered why it was he was so keen to be playing the fugitive when he should have been with his lover and his daughter.
And besides, if the Chinese were ever going to achieve their aim of becoming the world’s superpower, they’d likely never get another opportunity like this. The US was on its knees and fractured. And one of the splinters it had shattered into appeared to be working with them. Carl’s betrayal of his comrades to the Pacific States was bad enough, but it now seemed obvious that they were allied with their country’s greatest enemy. The only person with the constitutional authority to oppose this evil alliance was the president. And so they would find her, whatever it took.
They cut across country to hit 93 going north. It may have been paranoia, but Bobby had changed his mind about the best place to get a light aircraft. Warren Duarte was a strong, brave man, but Bobby couldn’t take the risk that, under torture, Duarte would be forced to reveal his destination. Elko was suddenly not looking any safer a target than Las Vegas itself.
So, he’d pulled out the atlas looking for regional airports and settled for one at Ely, NV, just over two hundred miles north. Most of the journey would be on Route 93, and Bobby’s only concern was to find a different vehicle. The Humvee gave him a sense of security, but it also stuck out like a sore thumb.
Yuri had fallen asleep by the time they pulled off the highway at a small town called Alamo, the Humvee slipping along a side street and coming to a halt outside a Latter-day Saints church with peeling white paint and yellowing grass leading up to the dark entrance. They’d seen no more than one or two people walking the streets, and this part of town seemed entirely deserted.
“Why we are here?” Yuri yawned.
Bobby pointed ahead at a square building with a faded-out sign that said Oil and Lube. Weeds grew through cracks in the concrete that led to a pair of large doors that were joined with a rusty chain.
“We hide Humvee here?”
“That’s the idea. Then we find a car to hot-wire and be on our way.”
Yuri chuckled. “Simples.”
Bobby opened the vehicle door and climbed down, looking around for any sign of movement. He saw nothing and heard just the breeze whistling in his ears and the occasional sound of a vehicle moving along the interstate. The town itself seemed largely abandoned, as if the population had been moved, willingly or otherwise. This would do nicely.
He got back inside and eased the Humvee over the weed-choked concrete until it came to a halt outside the double doors. Then he got down, went around the back of the vehicle and pulled out the bolt-cutters. They made short work of the chain, but he winced as he pushed the doors open, squealing against rusted hinges.
Had he heard the sound of scampering feet in the darkness? He went back to the Humvee and drove it inside, its headlights illuminating an interior of rotting gray wood and ancient trash. As soon as he’d gotten it inside, he pulled one of the two doors shut again.
“How will you lock it?” Yuri asked.
“I won’t. I’ll make it look as though it’s locked, but if someone comes investigating, they’re going to get quite the surprise.”
“Your superiors, they will not like it if you lose Humvee.”
Bobby shrugged. “You know what, Yuri? I couldn’t care less. What matters is that you get to report to the president. I just hope she believes you.”
Yuri’s smile was intersected by the door’s shadow. “My friend,” he said, taking Bobby’s hand in his and gripping it with both of his giant paws. “She does not have to take word of Russian cosmonaut. Mikhail, he left me last message on checklist. In capsule.”
As he spoke, Sharipov reached inside his hoody and pulled at what Bobby had assumed was a necklace. Dangling from the end was a small pouch which Yuri handed to Bobby. “I am sorry. I should have told you before, but…” He made an exaggerated shrugging motion.
“You didn’t know if you could trust me.”
“Da. But now I know I can.”
“What is it?”
“SD card. Mikhail made backup and put it on second Soyuz. Photos, video, data. Proof.”
Bobby turned the SD card over in his hand, contemplating what Yuri had said. Then he gave it back. “Thank you for telling me. Now you keep it. Jeez, you’d better keep it safe. If you lost it, or it was stolen…”
Yuri shook his head. “Niet. Mikhail encrypted it. I know key. Without it, just piece of cheap plastic.”
“Made in China,” Bobby said, smiling.
“Made in China!”
It took twenty minutes or so to restore the external appearance of the old garage to how it had looked before they’d arrived. Anyone who lived here would think nothing had changed, and would pass it by without looking any closer. The longer it remained here, of course, the greater the chance it would be discovered.
Bobby heaved the pack into position again behind his shoulder. They’d been forced to limit what they took from the Humvee to the bare essentials: two spare clips for their pistols, the med kit, a few ration packs, a sleeping bag, and spare clothes. Bobby’s main concern was that they had nothing warm to wear and the weather was growing increasingly cold. If he was any judge, they’d wake up the following day to a frost.
They followed the line of the building, heading out toward the edge of town and passing a row of ranch houses, none of which looked as though it had been occupied for a while. Yuri couldn’t manage more than fifty yards at a time before he had to sit down, so it was slow going. He could handle gravity well enough when standing still, but to his legs it felt as though he’d gained a hundred pounds, so moving was difficult.
“Let’s take a rest inside,” Bobby said, indicating the first house in a new row. It was painted a light yellow—or was that where the color had faded?—and an ancient Volvo station wagon sat on the gravel driveway, weeds exploring the wheel arches and curling up the doors.
Bobby scanned left and right as he worked at the door lock. He grunted to himself as he did it, half chuckling. How would this have looked in normal times? A Chicano man breaking into a house carrying a weapon. And with a Russian sidekick. It was cliché city. He’d long ago left his past where it belonged, but he had to admit it had proven useful in this shattered world.
“Why not we just take car and go?” Yuri suggested, looking over his shoulder nervo
usly. “You can, what did you say, hot cable it?”
Bobby nodded. “Yeah, but we’ll probably find keys inside and, besides, chances are the car battery’s dead.”
“Ah. Bump start?”
“Uh-huh. And I don’t want to do that in broad daylight.” With a final heave and the crack of splintering wood, the door opened.
Yuri let out a cry. “Stinks. Something died in here, I think.”
Bobby’s stomach turned in disgust. He hoped it might be just rotten food, but in his heart he knew it wasn’t. Something, or someone, had died here. “Well, I guess that explains the car on the driveway.”
“What do we do?”
“I’m going to take a look,” Bobby said. “I want the keys. You wait here and keep a look out.”
Yuri agreed with obvious relief as Bobby took a deep breath and went inside.
He left the door open, but there was no sense of movement to the air, so he guessed that all the windows were shut. He took a pair of underpants from his pack and wrapped the white cloth around his nose and mouth, but he couldn’t keep out the sweet, heavy stench that seemed to cling to his skin as he moved forward.
He was in a small hallway, with doors on either side and another ahead of him. He tried the door to his left, holding his underpants in one hand and pushing with the barrel of the pistol with the other.
A quaint, old-fashioned living room revealed itself as the door swung back, dust blooming in the late afternoon sunlight. On three sides, faded pink- and gray-striped wallpaper formed the backdrop to several bookcases, one with a small plasma TV perched on top. To one side of the TV, a photo of a middle-aged man in a cream sweater beside a similarly aged woman. A pretty young girl with long blonde hair stood between them. The color had that over-saturated look of a cheap 1980s fixed-focus camera. And, even though he spent only an instant looking at it, Bobby thought he saw terror in the woman’s eyes as they stared out at him from above a wide, fixed smile.
He took all of this in quickly, and then turned to go when he caught something red and green in his peripheral vision. Behind the door, he found a dome-shaped bird cage and, inside, the desiccated remains of a macaw lying with its beak wrapped around the bars as if, in its final desperation, it had tried to gnaw its way out.
Grimacing, he pulled the door shut. The smell was much stronger out here and he almost exited to join Yuri in the fresh air outside. But he needed those keys. They weren’t in the hallway, and when he opened the door to his right, he found nothing but a dusty storage closet containing an ancient—and probably quite valuable—vacuum cleaner and brush.
So, he moved along the hallway and, heart thumping, opened the final door. It opened into a small kitchen, the door scraping as he pushed something back. The little room was piled high with food packaging and filth. It stank of decay and human excrement, but Bobby couldn’t leave this place without seeing what was inside.
The kitchen opened out into a small sitting room that looked out over the yard through grimy windows. The sun was on the other side of the house, so Bobby waited for his eyes to acclimatize to the gloom, not daring to move until he knew what he’d be stepping on.
As with the front room, the decoration was straight out of the 1980s, though this time it was somber, all navy blue and dark green. He could barely make out the carpet beneath a deep layer of discarded boxes, cans and bottles. And there, in the middle of the room, facing away from him with a view into the darkening yard, sat a figure.
Bobby knew the person was dead, and had been for some time. The stench rose to its peak here, in this room and around that old padded chair with its view outside.
He edged closer until he was, perhaps, just a couple of yards from the chair. He noted the light gray cardigan on the arms that were folded together, head bowed as if saying grace. And Bobby finally reached the limit of his…what was it? Curiosity? Obsession? His need to unravel a mystery? Or was it simply ghoulishness? Whatever it was, nothing would make him get any closer to the dead body in the chair.
He turned to go, determined to check the kitchen for the keys and, if he couldn’t find them, hot-wire the car. He’d walk to Denver rather than spend another minute here.
He tripped over something, sprawling face down among the garbage. Not daring to move too quickly for fear of stepping in something hideous, he got onto hands and knees and looked into the dead eyes of another corpse as it lay on the floor.
He shrieked and shuffled back. The body was smaller and, judging by the long blonde hair, had belonged to a much younger person. Straining to see in the gathering gloom, he saw the chain around one leg that attached it to the radiator beside the dead man’s chair.
It was the girl in the photo. In the chair sat the mummified body of her father. Her torture began long before the flood, her story ending in a slow agonizing death beside his rotting body, bound by a long iron chain and, in all likelihood, household rules that had trapped and doomed her since the moment she’d been born.
And of the woman—the mother—there was no sign.
Footsteps on the hallway carpet and he looked up to see Yuri’s hand reaching down to him, the other one clamped over the Russian’s face.
He grasped it and, as he sucked in fresh air and spat out the putrefaction, he sobbed until he could cry no longer.
#
Bobby rolled over, then suddenly snapped out of the nightmare and back into reality.
Next to him, Yuri was gently snoring, but, though he tried to go back to sleep, Bobby eventually gave up. They’d left the house of horrors and walked two blocks along before, as darkness fell, Bobby opened up a random house and, having sniffed the air to check for decay, found the bedroom and fallen asleep on the double bed.
He couldn’t get the scene in the other house out of his mind. His mind constructed a version of the woman’s face from the photo and then imagined her desperation as she slowly died of dehydration in what, at the time, would have been a hot house.
What had happened to the mother? He guessed the macaw had been hers, as had the front room. The man—he couldn’t call him a father—occupied the back room with his slave.
Try as he might, he couldn’t stop his mind slipping down the black hole of imagination and empathy as he lay there beside Yuri. So, he slipped his legs over the side of the bed and got to his feet.
The room smelled a little stale—though he didn’t know how much of that was coming from the two of them—but it felt as though it, and the house, had been shut up by someone expecting to return one day. Maybe they would. He hoped so. The world was better off without the monster in the first house, but he had to hope that humanity as a whole was worth saving. And, of course, the encounter with the dead daughter reminded him of Maria, and he wondered whether he was guilty of cruelty by volunteering for the mission that had led to him sleeping here with a cosmonaut hundreds of miles from her. He wasn’t a monster, but was Maria fretting over his absence? Was she praying every night for his return? Suffering took many forms, after all.
And, why was he running from her and Eve? Perhaps that was too strong. He wasn’t running, he was…procrastinating. And it was Eve he was avoiding. He loved her—he was sure of that, at least—and he knew that she wanted them to build a life together as a family. He told himself this was what he wanted also and, to a large degree it was true. But he couldn’t tell whether his prevarication was because he wanted to do something to secure a better future for all of them—which was his favorite explanation because it made him sound like a self-sacrificing hero—or whether by committing to Eve he was abandoning all hope of reuniting with Ellie.
He wandered over to the window and pushed the net curtain aside, gazing into the darkness. What an idiot. Ellie and he had no relationship. She’d run out on him and Maria years ago, saying she couldn’t live with a man she didn’t trust. He’d had minor relationships since then, but Ellie had stood over them like a specter and he’d found little satisfaction. Eve was different. He loved her. And, after all, the
chances of Ellie still being alive were beyond remote.
It was time to move on.
He would deliver Yuri, then return to Ragtown and propose to Eve. He would ask Maria first, but he knew what she would say. She loved Eve far more than her own mother, and with good reason. Deliver Yuri and he could finally do the right thing, giving all three of them a little security.
When he got home, he would ask her to marry him.
That decided, he felt his way around the bedroom until he emerged in the hallway and spent the next hour ransacking everything that was both useful and portable. And planning his wedding.
Chapter 16
Return to Skull Island
Three days after their first, abortive, attempt to explore Skull Island, as it was now called, they returned. Buzz would have liked longer to get over their ordeal—in fact he’d have liked nothing more than to leave it to Tom and Dom, but he knew his place was with the boat.
This time, however, they came better prepared. Tom had replaced Ted and Dom, who were taking longer to recover than Buzz, and they had added an extra layer of clothes as well as more supplies. And behind them, they pulled an ATV on a makeshift raft of wood and lashed-together car tires.
Tom and Buzz would drive into Branson and explore. All the adults had met the previous night and Buzz had laid the situation before them. Winter was here and there was no knowing when, or if, it would end. Any chance that they would be able to sustain themselves had blown away with the northerly gale that had brought the thick coating of snow.
Buzz sat in the front of the inflatable with Tom steering and the two of them used the noise of the outboard as an excuse not to talk to each other. Buzz would have chosen anyone but Tom to accompany him. It wasn’t that he disliked him for any logical reason. Indeed, he was sure that most people would find his easygoing manner charming. And Buzz also knew that his dislike of the man was due, at least in part, to childish jealousy. Tom seemed to understand people effortlessly, whereas Buzz found them a mystery he felt he’d never be able to solve. Take Jo, for example. He’d seemed to be getting all the right signals from her, and yet there had been an undeniable distance between them since he’d asked her to marry him. A tiny distance, to be sure, but unmistakable.
Ice: Deluge Book 4: (A Thrilling Post-Apocalyptic Survival Story) Page 13