He stopped in his tracks. “Ella,” he said quietly.
She looked up from the other side of the pile. “What is it?”
“It’s…God. It’s a kid.”
“What? Do you mean like a teenager?” He could tell she was hoping that was what he meant.
“No,” he said. “I mean a kid. Like maybe four years old. There’s no way this kid was part of any fight. He looks like he was barely out of diapers.”
“Why would anyone want to hurt a child?” Ella asked, her voice sounding thick. “What could he have done to deserve it?”
Adam felt hollow inside. “There’s nothing a kid this small could do to deserve this,” he said. “This wasn’t a battle, Ella. There was no fight.” His initial impression had been correct, he realized. “These people were slaughtered. Maybe not by a single aggressor—maybe they were shot down by a group of people. But they were innocent victims.” He saw a few more youthful bodies and decided not to call her attention to them. Ella was looking a bit green. He could understand. He wasn’t feeling very well himself.
“Adam, look over here,” Ella said. “I think it’s another graffito.”
He came to her side. The markings, painted on a wall by the side of the road, were partially obscured by a growth of tall weeds. Adam pulled the weeds back to reveal the words.
“No More Sanctuaries.”
“What does that mean?” he asked.
Ella didn’t answer. She scratched at the paint, but it didn’t flake away from the wall. “How long do you think this has been here?” she asked.
“It’s too much of a coincidence to thing that this has nothing to do with the bodies,” Adam said. “I think both were put here at the same time.”
“Even though there are weeds blocking the wall?” Ella said. “You don’t think that means the words were painted before the weeds grew?”
He shrugged. “Weeds grow pretty fast,” he said. “We don’t know what those are. They might not have been there even a couple of days ago. No, I think whoever painted those words was the same person who stacked the bodies in the road.”
“But who could that have been?” Ella stepped closer to Adam, pressing her shoulder up against his. She was drawing comfort from him, he knew, and he felt comforted by her closeness too.
Who could it have been?
To kill all these people would have required a group, Adam thought, and they were probably organized. They had probably planned this attack and arranged to get the drop on these people. Adam couldn’t imagine what their motive might have been—why would they need to include small children in their massacre? What harm were children to anybody? But he did know one thing—whoever they were, they were armed.
They had guns.
He had felt reassured by the fact that he and Ella were carrying guns. But what good were two pistols against what was almost certainly a militia? They would never be able to fight off the people who had done this.
And then there were those haunting words. No More Sanctuaries. What did that mean? Sanctuaries were places of safety. Could whoever had painted the words have meant them literally?
Were there no safe places left in the world?
Adam had been worried when they’d first come ashore that most, if not all, of humanity had been killed by the nanovirus and the competition for resources that would have inevitably come after. But now he was forced to accept that he had been wrong. There were definitely people left alive. And those people were definitely dangerous.
He would have thought, just a few days ago, that it would make him happy to learn that there were other survivors out there. He would have expected to find clusters of people grouped together and helping each other, welcoming in any newcomers they encountered, trying to rebuild.
But that had been a foolish expectation. Hadn’t experience shown him over and over again that once people grouped up, they protected their own at the expense of everyone else? He had found that out to his cost when he’d been shipwrecked on the island and discovered by Langley and Rhett Birkin—they had been on the verge of shooting him then and there.
And it wasn’t just cruel and violent people like the Birkins, either—Adam himself had left a couple adrift in a rowboat in the water, knowing they would probably starve, rather than taking them aboard the tender boat and back to Cody’s yacht. The risk involved in exposing himself to new people had simply been too high.
Of course the survivors here on the mainland weren’t going to welcome strangers into their midst. Of course they were defensive and violent. If they saw Adam and Ella, they were likely to shoot first and ask questions later.
“Come on,” he said, looking around for signs of life. There was nothing, but that didn’t mean they were safe here. “We’d better not linger here.”
Ella nodded and joined him as he resumed the trek up the road, leaving the macabre scene behind. The overpowering stench continued to follow them, but Adam did not look back, and neither did Ella. He had no desire to see that again.
Neither of them spoke until the scent had finally faded away.
“That was awful,” Ella said with a little shudder.
Adam nodded. “I never expected it to be like this. I guess I was being unrealistic though—of course there was bound to be competition for supplies.”
“Competition isn’t the same as…as whatever this was,” Ella said. “Mass murder. I just can’t believe it. Those were people who survived the virus. I thought Rhett and the rest of the Birkins were the unusual ones, not the norm. I would have thought twice about running away from the island if I’d known it was going to be like this.”
“That’s the second time you’ve said something like that,” Adam said. “Are you really having second thoughts about it?”
“How could I not?” she asked. “The Birkins were insane and violent, but if everyone else is too, then better the devil you know, right?”
“I don’t know,” Adam said. “The fact is, we don’t know what events led to that…that pile of bodies.”
“Adam. Come on.”
“I’m not saying there might have been a good reason for it,” Adam said. “Of course there wasn’t. There could never be a good enough reason to murder a child. I’m just saying that we know what drove Rhett Birkin to kill. We know how shallow and insufficient his reasons were. What happened here might have been much more complex. It might have been based on a misunderstanding. The people who did the killing might not have known what they were doing.”
“Then why would they tag the wall the way they did?” Ella asked. “No. You’re daydreaming, Adam. That’s wishful thinking, and you know it.”
Adam sighed. “You’re right. But we actually don’t know who else is out there. There could still be good people around. People we can put our trust in.”
“Everyone we’ve seen, or seen evidence of, so far has been dangerous,” she said. “We have no reason to think there’s anyone kind or welcoming left.”
“I know,” Adam said. “But really, we’ve only seen John and the evidence these people left behind. We don’t know. There could be safety out there. Maybe we’ll find it in Napa Bay.”
“A sanctuary?” Ella glanced at him askance.
“Maybe,” he said, knowing how long the odds were. But he had to believe. “Maybe that’s just what we’ll find. You never know.”
Chapter 11
Several miles disappeared beneath their weary feet without incident. Adam struggled to keep his mind in the present moment, as he knew Artem would have suggested. But it was difficult. Images of the things he’d seen kept swimming up in his mind, playing in his memory like a horror film. The look on John’s face as he’d ranted madly about Adam stealing his daughter away. The feel of the gun going off in his hand. The pile of bodies in the road. The children with blood on their clothes and bullet holes in their heads…
“Look at that,” Ella said, snapping Adam out of his reverie.
It took a moment for the shapes clustered in the
dusty clearing by the side of the road to make sense. They were familiar, but they were so disconnected from the life Adam was living now that he couldn’t seem to place them. Finally, the gears in his mind clunked to life. “That’s a fairground,” he said.
It had all the standard features. Rickety rides—a Ferris wheel, a pirate ship that would swing back and forth in a pendulum arc, a plastic-looking merry-go-round. There were rows of booths featuring the kinds of games that were designed to swindle the gullible or the carefree out of their money. Here and there, a few carts advertised Hot Dogs! and Popcorn! and Deep Fried Pickles!
“You don’t suppose those carts still have food, do you?” Ella asked.
“Any food they might have had would have gone bad a long time ago,” Adam said. “Especially after the EMP. No refrigeration.”
“Not necessarily,” Ella said. “There could be bottles of soda or bags of chips. I’d take anything with calories in it.”
“But our bags are full,” Adam pointed out. “We can’t get rid of the cans of beans in favor of bags of chips.”
“No,” Ella agreed. “But we could eat chips for dinner tonight and save the beans. It’d buy us one extra day.”
“Good point,” Adam said. “Might as well check it out. And maybe we can find a secluded place to sleep in there. It’d be better than being out in the open.”
They turned off the highway and into the fairground. The place was as devoid of life as everything else they’d come across, and yet it somehow felt much creepier than an empty highway or convenience store. A fair, Adam thought, was a place that was supposed to be full of life and noise and laughter. It wasn’t supposed to be this wasteland.
He paused beside the bumper cars. They were scattered about, looking every bit as though twenty little drivers had just climbed out, screaming with delight. Surely ride operators lined the cars up at the edge of the ride surface when they were closing up for the night? He thought he remembered seeing that done before. But whoever had been responsible for shutting down this ride had just left it.
Maybe it was running when the EMP went off? No, that didn’t make sense. That was well after the virus had begun claiming lives by the hundreds. Nobody would have been visiting a fair by the time the EMP went off.
“You know how to make a fire, right?” Ella asked.
“Of course,” Adam said, even though he wasn’t completely certain about his fire-making abilities. He had done it a couple of times before, back on the island, but he had always had the help of someone else. It would be humiliating to realize, here in front of Ella, that he couldn’t do it after all.
Still, he thought, he might as well make the effort. If he didn’t know how to do it, he would just have to learn. There were too few of them now to depend on the skills of other people. If he couldn’t manage to build a fire, better to find that out now than when the circumstances were more dire.
“All right,” Ella said. “You get the fire going, then, and I’ll get us some food.”
“Okay,” Adam agreed.
Ella ran off toward one of the food carts. Adam dropped the duffel bag and began gathering dry leaves and sticks to use as kindling. There wasn’t much to be had—the fairground had been cleared of debris before the fair had set up, that was obvious. He was going to need more than what was lying around to get this fire going, especially if he wanted it to last long enough to warm them through the night.
He went over to one of the booths. It had once been a game that required players to fling darts at balloons to win prizes, but the balloons were all limp and deflated. After a moment’s deliberation, he tucked the darts into his pocket. They might come in handy at some point.
He thought about pulling down the stuffed animals to use as kindling, but he wasn’t confident about how the synthetic fabrics would burn. The smoke might even be toxic. Instead he pulled at the wooden boards of the booth. To his surprise, he was able to separate several long planks rather easily. He stepped on one of them and pulled the end up, causing it to break. Repeating this action several more times left him with a stack of boards about a foot in length apiece.
Perfect.
He returned to his fire site, swept the dirt with his shoe to ensure that the area was clear, and arranged some of the leaves and twigs he’d found in a neat structure. Then he took two sticks, each a little slimmer than his forearm.
He hesitated. Would this really work? He had seen it done on TV, but even the Birkins and the McTerrells had always used matches. He knew enough to know that it was possible to start a fire this way—but could he do it?
He had to try. Carefully, he balanced the tip of one of the sticks in the dirt, propping it against his knees, and began to rub the other stick up and down the length of it with as much force and vigor as he could.
He was stunned when smoke began to rise from the wood in his hands. Quickly, he held a leaf to the smoking stick, and thought he might fall over with shock when the flame actually caught. He transferred it to the pile he had made and watched in wonder as the flame began to grow.
He was just adding the first of his salvaged boards when Ella came back.
“Nice work,” she said. “I’m impressed.”
“I’m impressed!” he admitted. “I didn’t actually know I could do that!”
“Well, it’s good to know you can,” she said, smiling a little. “I got us quite a haul. Check it out.” She spilled out the contents of her arms onto the ground.
Adam picked up a candy bar and admired it. “My favorite kind.”
“Mine, too,” she grinned. “And a whole unopened bag of nachos.” She gave the bag a little shake. It was industrial-sized and probably could have fed a family of four. Even though Adam’s stomach was gnawing with hunger, he highly doubted he would be able to finish this.
He picked up one of the many bottles of soda she’d brought back and twisted off the lid. He took a long drink and felt a buzz go through his body. “Processed sugar,” he said admiringly. “There’s no other drug like it.”
“Speaking of which,” Ella said, tearing open the bag of nachos and pulling out a handful, “I think it’s your turn to tell your story.”
“My story?” Adam blinked. “What do you mean? Everyone knows my story. It was in all the tabloids. That was the first thing that came up when Rhett and Langley brought me up the beach to meet the families. Olivia McTerrell had read about me in the tabloids.”
“Yeah, well, that’s Olivia,” Ella said. “I didn’t exactly read a lot of celebrity gossip mags when I was growing up.”
“Right,” Adam said. “I guess you wouldn’t have.”
“And I never picked up the habit as an adult, either,” she said. “So yeah, I have a vague idea of who you are—I know you were on that television show, and then you got older and had the requisite teenage Hollywood meltdown—”
“That’s the gist of it,” Adam agreed. He had actually never heard his fall from grace downplayed like this. Reporters always blew it up, tried to make more of it than it was, and even his NA group had always insisted on dissecting every element of it. It was kind of nice to hear someone talk about it like it didn’t really matter, like it was just a thing that had happened and was now over. It was refreshing.
“So?” Ella said, handing him the bag of chips and peeling the wrapper off of one of the candy bars. “Tell me your story, Adam Parkhead. I told you mine.”
“You really want to hear it?” he asked. “It’s honestly kind of boring.”
“Well, it’s the end of the world, and I’m here with only a disgraced former celebrity for company,” she said. “I bet you have enough in your past to keep me interested.”
“I was never even really a celebrity,” he said. “Being a child star is different. You have to be kind of insanely famous for adults to know who you are, or to be a household name. It wasn’t like that for me. I had a preteen fan base, and I showed up on the covers of teen magazines a few times, you know—stuff like that.”
&
nbsp; “Was there a fan club?” Ella asked. “I bet there was a fan club.”
“There was, actually,” he said with a little laugh, remembering. “I think it was something like six eleven-year-old girls. I didn’t really engage with them—my agent handled them. Every now and then he’d have me sign some head shots or a cast photo from the show and send it off to them. They managed some kind of website dedicated to me, but I never looked at it.”
“I don’t think I’d be able to keep myself from reading a website dedicated to me,” Ella said.
“Well, you learn pretty quick,” Adam said. “The thing is that not even the nicest fans out there ever understand who you are as a person. They get things wrong about you all the time. And if you lurk around online where people are talking about you, it’s easy to fall into the trap of wanting to correct the things they’ve gotten wrong. But that’s an awful look on a famous person. You don’t want to get drawn into arguments with your fans, and you definitely don’t want to come across as defensive. It’s much better to be distant.”
Ella nodded. “That makes sense.”
“It’s weird,” Adam went on. “You’d think a kid with his own fan club wouldn’t have to worry about being popular at school, but I only had one real friend, Cody—you remember, he’s the one who owned the yacht. The irony of it all is that he was the one who introduced me to drugs, and the same friend who would eventually steer me into rehab. And it was my drug use, not my age, that eventually got me fired for showing up high to set and causing a scene. After that I guess I kind of spiraled. I spent more and more time alone in my house, getting high, ignoring people. I was high all the time, and when I came down, I was crushingly depressed. I couldn’t do anything. I didn’t even want to.”
“Wow,” Ella said quietly. “I saw my parents get high so many times. It’s strange to think about it from the other end. About what it must have been like to be stuck in that loop.” She shook her head. “You deserve a lot of credit for breaking yourself out of that, you know.”
Escape The Dark (Book 3): Into The Ruins Page 9