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by Kevin A. Muñoz


  Almost too hopeful, I climb into the apparatus on the passenger side. Kloves examines the dash and driver panels, not making heads or tails of most of it, I’m sure. “Keyless ignition,” I say, pointing to the round black button just above the gear selector.

  Kloves pushes it. There is a momentary squeal, then a sputter, and the HRV rumbles to life, loud in the enclosed space.

  “Shit,” Kloves says. “Can you drive it?”

  “I can try.” We must both be thinking the same thing: an apparatus this big and heavy isn’t going to be impeded by a horde of hollow-heads. We could drive right through them without worrying about getting an axle caught. “The fuel tank is at a quarter. I’m not sure how far we’ll get. And the diesel we brought with us will probably take this beast twenty miles.”

  “Then let’s be quick,” Barkov calls from the ground. “Transfer everything to the truck.” Kloves jumps down and goes to help him.

  “Can’t we tow the car?” Marilyn asks.

  I slide into the driver’s seat. “Not easily,” I answer. “She’d shimmy all over the place. The only way we can keep the car is if someone drives her out right up against the bumper of the truck.”

  “I’ll do it,” Kloves announces.

  I reject the idea out of hand. “It’s too dangerous. The HRV is big, with high windows. We’ll all be safer in the cab.”

  “The fuel won’t take us far enough,” he says. “We’re going to need the Volvo.”

  I shut my eyes and take a strained breath, the choice and its consequences like a weight on my chest. But he’s right: we’re going to need the Volvo to get back home.

  “We should try,” Barkov says, “but get everything onto the truck just in case.”

  I feel our luck changing when I open the first compartment on the driver side of the HRV. I drag out a diesel-powered portable AC generator and fill it from one of our barrels, then hunt through the rest of the compartment for power cables.

  Barkov is watching me with suspicion. “Things just got a lot easier,” I explain as I attach the cables to the garage door control panel on the wall. “We can power the door opener. It’ll take seconds instead of minutes to lift it.”

  The commotion within the garage has started attracting the attention of the hollow-heads. I can hear them banging more loudly and in greater numbers. No doubt most of them wandered off while we were asleep, but they’ve returned in force.

  After finishing with the control panel, I cut off the engine and help with the transfer from the Volvo. The HRV compartments are still full of assorted rescue equipment: small tools, first aid and paramedic kits, a rotary saw. A treasure trove, under other circumstances. I pull everything out as quickly as I can to give Barkov space to load our fuel barrels. Flashlights bounce and sweep across the back of the garage like searchlights.

  It takes us less than an hour to make everything ready, but by now the horde has fully re-formed outside. I can almost feel the weight of their numbers through the garage doors, which shudder and bulge with the pressure.

  When we are finished, Marilyn faces the banging door and says, “Maybe we should wait. They could wander off.”

  “That might take hours,” Barkov points out. “And we don’t have that kind of time,” I add. “We’ve already wasted so much. And there’s no guarantee that more won’t come. We don’t know how many of them are in this area.”

  But I have to admit: I still want another option. Some way to avoid the danger that I’m putting my friend in. “Augustus. You can still change your mind.”

  He answers by way of getting into the driver’s seat of the Volvo. “As soon as you start to pull out, I’ll swing the car into the truck’s bay and come up on your bumper.”

  I start the HRV’s engine. Marilyn and Barkov come into the cabin. Barkov stows our spare weapons on the floor.

  “Are we ready?” I call out to Kloves. He responds affirmatively. I hop out of the driver’s seat and punch the button to open the panel door, then hurry back to my spot. I shut the driver door as the first twilight spreads into the garage, revealing all of the dust and grime we kicked up while we were here.

  Hollow-heads begin crawling under the door, then ducking under it. We wait. They spill into the garage, and we wait. Marilyn clutches my arm. I can’t pull forward until I’m certain the panel door is above the level of the apparatus or I’m liable to jam it in place.

  The two shriekers sound their alert unnecessarily, but the noise unnerves me enough to make my foot twitch over the accelerator. My fingers grip the steering wheel until my knuckles turn white. Bodies fill the space around us, scratching and scrambling at the sides of the HRV. Despite the weight of the apparatus, it shudders under their constant writhing.

  I can see Walnut Grove now. The two gas stations, the houses down the street. The intersection.

  “Shit,” I hear Kloves calling out. In the right-side mirror, I see hollow-heads already swarming around the easier target. I can barely see Kloves through the windshield. “Get moving!” he shouts, and I can barely hear him.

  I put the truck in gear. The hollow-heads I can see through the front windshield seem to pause at the sound of the gearbox. The crowd is five deep. I won’t be able to ease the HRV out slowly. I’ll need as much force as I can throw at them.

  “Go, go, go,” Marilyn mutters.

  I jam my foot down on the accelerator and the apparatus bucks beneath me. We jerk forward and the front of the truck pushes hollow-heads out of the way, then down. The truck’s massive tires roll over them like they were pillows. Instinctively I squeeze my eyes shut for a moment, hating the sound and sensation, but there’s nothing else to be done. This is necessary. Everything hinges on the Volvo being able to drive over the carpet of flattened bodies.

  The truck growls out of the garage. Kloves swings the Volvo around until it’s partially obscured by the HRV’s shadow, and otherwise invisible behind the truck.

  I pull a hard left and scrape hollow-heads off the apparatus with the side of the building. I hear the scratch and whine of paint transfer. Now I can see the Volvo again out of my mirrors. Kloves miscalculates and crunches the fender against the load-bearing pillar between the two panel doors.

  The Volvo is stuck, its front end snagged on the pillar. Hollow-heads swarm over the car and the tires jam up against a few writhing bodies. I halt the HRV, waiting for Kloves to back up and try again, knowing that any sizable gap between us is going to trap him just as firmly.

  Arms reach up to scrabble at my side window. More shrieking. I have almost no visibility behind me and begin to feel claustrophobic.

  “We’re going to lose the car,” Barkov says, not stating the harder truth.

  Another pair of shrieks. And then it gets worse. A second horde appears from the same direction as the first, moving quickly to join the hunt, though not yet at an all-out run. They haven’t yet seen the frenzy of the hollow-heads around us, who have reacted typically to the crushing deaths of their companions.

  Kloves pulls the Volvo into reverse and forces it back against the far wall of the bay. The gap fills.

  I feel helpless. I need to do something. I go for my door, but Marilyn yanks me back, and Barkov shouts, “No sense in both of you risking your lives.”

  I reverse as well and try to push my way back to connect with the Volvo’s fender. Now it’s my turn to miscalculate, and I travel too far, too fast. The rear of the HRV parts the hollow-heads like a cigar boat through surf and slams into the front of the white station wagon. The hood goes up. I hear glass breaking.

  I can’t see what’s happening. The Volvo is now in my blind spot. But I have to do more; this was my plan. My error. Ignoring the protests, ignoring the danger, I shove open my door, pushing away the few hollow-heads that still attack the truck. I move to drop down to the pavement, then catch sight of Kloves crawling out of the Volvo through the broken windshield.

  “Boss!” he shouts, waving me back into the cabin.
He climbs onto the roof of the station wagon. “Go,” he says, as the horde around him floods over the top of the Volvo.

  I close the driver door. I pound the wheel, then grip it hard. I jam my foot down, and the apparatus bucks again. I want to stop, turn around. But looking into my mirror I know it’s already too late. I plow the truck through the second horde as it enters the intersection. I keep my foot down, wanting to slaughter every last one, but content enough to splatter a dozen brains on the asphalt.

  The three of us do not speak a word until we’ve reached Monroe and turned onto Highway 78, heading for Athens. When words do come, they come from Marilyn.

  “I’ve changed my mind. I want to be there, Sam. I’m going to be there when it’s done.”

  DAY FIFTEEN, 6:00 A.M.

  We stopped a few miles short of Clarke County, just after nine o’clock, once the darkness had wrapped around us. In Monroe, Barkov and I brought the truck’s tank to half full with the barrels taken from the Volvo, and by the time we stopped for the night, the tank was already below a quarter full again. As I’d suspected, we weren’t going to make it back to the Little Five in the HRV unless we happened across some more biodiesel.

  We have all lost loved ones to violence before. Parents, husbands, wives, children—worse losses than dear friends. There is no one in the Little Five over the age of fifteen who doesn’t remember someone who never made it this far. Most of the world didn’t make it this far.

  It doesn’t make the loss of Augustus Kloves any less painful.

  We stir ourselves awake at dawn when the sun shines through the large windshield of the HRV cabin. I climb out of the cabin to check the area for hollow-heads, and when I see none nearby I gesture to Barkov and Marilyn that it’s safe to step down. We relieve ourselves in the high, overgrown grass at the side of Highway 78.

  A family of deer moves skittishly across the road a hundred yards away. In my youth, growing up in the urban northeast, this would have awed me. But it’s too familiar a sight now to receive much of my attention. At most it tells me that there aren’t any hollow-heads hiding among the trees up the road.

  At last, Barkov speaks. “I have never been to the Clarke County community. Do you know where we will find them?”

  I shake my head, rubbing the sleep from my eyes. “I visited Athens before the collapse, but not since. I know there was a group holed up in one of the UGA dorms, but the university was a big agriculture school, so they may have moved nearer to where they grow food. There’d be enough research buildings around that they could set up a decent community.”

  “We can’t drive through Athens in this,” Marilyn says, knocking on the side of the HRV. “Unless we want to be obvious.”

  “They may not know we’re coming,” I say, “or they might have been expecting us to show up yesterday, or the day before. But we can’t assume any of that. If we go the rest of the way on foot, it could be another day before we find anything. There’s a loop around the town that I think we should take in the truck, and if we see anything promising, we hide the truck and go the rest of the way on foot. Take what we think we’ll need.”

  We agree to this plan, having no other to replace it, and get back in the cabin. I continue driving east until we come to a large gas station on the outskirts of the city where there are still a few buildings, most of them single story. The area is covered in grass and trees, with rusting cars shoved to the grassy median. Ahead, there is a turnoff toward the loop, and farther beyond that is what looks like the very edge of Athens proper. I confirm again that Barkov and Marilyn are on board with what I’ve proposed, then take the turn.

  Phoebe is close. She has to be. We can’t go much farther: we don’t have the diesel. If we don’t find her here, I don’t know what’s next.

  The approach to the southern arc of the loop around Athens is devoid of human presence. There is only a divided four-lane highway surrounded on both sides by trees and overgrowth so thick that we’d need a machete to pass through. Then another turn, and we are on the loop proper. We pass an enormous hardware store sign, orange and gray against the green of the trees—and then nothing again.

  More deer, and clans of possum and armadillo. A sign informs us that we have entered Athens-Clarke County. But even the overpasses, which give us a slightly broader view, don’t provide any evidence of human life. Even life that once lived here. We don’t seem to be any closer to Athens than we were last night.

  That changes quickly. Exit seven, the University of Georgia, overlooks a portion of the campus with parking lots overflowing with abandoned cars. A last stop for the doomed, most likely, seeking safe harbor with their last few drops of unaffected gasoline. Next, on our left, sprawls an empty parking lot with solar power poles scattered throughout like solitary trees in a grove.

  As we come up along the eastern side of the loop, I am forced to maneuver the HRV around enormous abandoned construction vehicles, strewn across a work site where the county must have been renovating the roads just before the crisis began. Ten years later and still no one has tried to move them out of the way.

  The loop is pinched off like a twist tie in the northeast corner, and I have to navigate off the highway for a few minutes before we can continue west along the northern arc. The rest of the loop is just as unpromising, and by the time we have come full circle it is midmorning.

  There seems only one route to take. Exit seven, to the university. I take the HRV across the southern part of the loop again and slow down to a crawl as we come to the exit offramp.

  “I guess we walk from here,” I say, shutting off the engine after pulling the truck onto the grass along the left shoulder, hiding it partially behind the overgrown trees and bushes.

  Barkov suggests that we move all of our equipment into the trees themselves, in case someone notices the apparatus and comes to strip it down. We will have to travel lightly. Marilyn takes only her medical bag. Barkov slings the Remington over one shoulder.

  We walk down the rest of the way to College Station Road and observe at last the first sign of modern life: a chain link fence spread across the street beneath the loop overpass. There is a second fence a few yards behind it, forming a double gate. I’m confident this is their main entrance, at least for the larger vehicles that come to the Little Five for trade.

  We stay hidden behind a few bushes. Two men, ostensibly guards, play a game of cards on a portable table near the inner gate.

  “We should just walk up there,” Marilyn says.

  “We don’t know enough about this community,” I reply.

  “It’s Clarke County. They’ve been trading with us for years.” Marilyn lifts a hand to stop my objection. “Yes, I know this is where those two men came from. But that doesn’t mean anyone else here knows anything. Or if some do, not everyone, surely. Mikhail, you said the men who took Phoebe were enforcers.”

  “Yes, that is what the fat man told us.”

  “Couldn’t they have just been along for the ride?” Marilyn asks. When Barkov and I look at her with stupid expressions she adds, “I was just offering a suggestion. Look, we don’t even know if they’re here. If we go slinking around and sneaking our way in, we could get in trouble that has nothing to do with Phoebe and the enforcers.”

  I understand the point she is trying to make and part of why she is trying to make it. She’s not used to thinking in clandestine terms. For Barkov this must be second nature, and for me—well, I’m getting used to a lot of things I’ve never done before.

  “Like you said, we don’t have enough information,” she continues. “We don’t know where to look. It’s not like Athens is a small town. We’re going to have to talk to somebody eventually.” She throws a sour glance at Barkov. “Sam, don’t let Mikhail talk you into doing something extremely stupid twice in one trip. Conyers was more than enough.”

  For some reason Barkov looks to me to make a decision, though he says nothing, even to object to Marilyn’s insult.

/>   I think back to what we know. Randall and Banderas are enforcers for the trafficking network, run by someone named Ravana. They arrived in the Little Five in trucks operated by the Clarke County trading group. Norm Ithering knew them and treated them like members of his operation. He and Mayor Weeks discussed leaving the two men in the Little Five for a few extra days, to help Braithwaite and Vargas. That turned out to be a cover for their real task, but again, Ithering need not have known.

  Those details could send us in either direction. Either Randall and Banderas are a central part of Clarke County’s operation—in which case the whole of Athens stinks of trafficking—or they are agents hidden in plain sight. Ithering and Clarke County as a whole might not be aware of their true roles.

  “But wait—” I begin, talking more to myself than to Marilyn or Barkov. “It was a couple days they were supposed to stay in the Little Five. Randall and Banderas. That’s what the mayor said: Ithering was leaving them for a couple of days. How were they going to get back?”

  “The trucks took Randall from Inman Park after we evacuated,” Barkov says. “That is obvious.”

  “It’s obvious, yes, but at the time, that wasn’t necessarily the plan, and it definitely wasn’t what we expected. It was an above board, routine sort of thing. So how were they going to get back? Were they going to take one of the Volvos? Did Ithering tell Weeks they were going to pick up the two men later?”

  “You talked to him, not me,” Marilyn says.

  I can’t remember, and at the time, it wouldn’t have occurred to me to ask. It wasn’t important. Now, the information would make my decision for me. Either they had alternative transportation, or Ithering and his trading group know all about the trafficking.

  “Marilyn’s right,” I admit. “We should go in clean.” Before Barkov complains I add, “But just the two of you. I’ll find another way in.”

 

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