The rest were dead, too. Their jeeps and Humvees left behind. Few bodies rested in the grass. When taken by the Panhandler, most victims had just enough strength to crawl to a bed to cough away the last of their lives.
Shawn kicked one of the fallen troops. “Cocksuckers.”
“You’ve got one of their yellow stickers right on the back of your truck.”
“Which they shot. Hence the cocksucking.”
Ness knelt beside the dead man. The skin had pulled from his cheek, revealing brown sludge on white bone. “I have my doubts all these men were gay.”
“You don’t got to be gay to be a cocksucker.”
“I wonder if they were following orders—if shooting everyone in town was meant to contain it—or if they were acting on their own. To keep themselves safe. Or to take over.”
Shawn tugged his shirt over his nose to dampen the smell. “Who cares?”
“If there are any of us left in two hundred years, and they tell stories about what we did, that’s going to define how they see themselves.”
“Sounds like their problem. Now let’s go take some shit.”
Food preservation would be their biggest long-term challenge. Their scavenging runs brought in more canned and dry food than they consumed, but this would run out or spoil eventually. Ness found canning equipment at the Rogers’ and bottled wild blueberries. Shawn shot a couple of pheasants and Ness took what they didn’t eat that night and experimented with smoking it over fires of differing heat and wood. Winter wheat grew wild in the fields. He found books on bread-baking at the university and ground his own grain. It was simple enough to bake dough in a pan. It cooked into flatbread, very plain. Their next trip into town, he took all the salt he could find. If they ever ran out, they might have to drive to the salt flats of Utah, or take the highway to the Washington coast and spend days boiling sea water away from the minerals within it. Were there mines somewhere closer? He had no idea. So much knowledge was lost already.
He was by the stream contemplating the best way to irrigate a plot of wheat when the grass stirred behind him. He turned, reaching for his shotgun. Something orange romped from the grass and leapt for his shoulder. He fell into the grass and the cat nibbled his ear and purred.
“Volt!”
Her fur was matted, dirty. One of her ears had been split at the tip. Ness hugged her in one arm and jogged back to the cabin, sweating in the swelter of high summer.
“Look who came back!”
“Told you I didn’t kill her,” Shawn said. He glared over the top of his textbook. “But if she pees on my bed again, there will be no mercy.”
Shawn wanted to build the cabin roof from nothing but items they could find and manufacture themselves—planks and woven branches, in other words—but Ness talked him into tar and shingles with the promise they’d go au naturale on the shack they planned to build beside their home. He fed Volt scraps of trout and pigeon smoked over wet wood. There were flies everywhere.
He spent the hot afternoons reading in the shade. He wanted to learn to tan leather before Shawn started hunting deer. He gathered wheat. The Rogers’ truck battery was dead, so they hiked over the mountain to the jeep and went back to the Ace for brick and mortar, which they lugged in wheelbarrows up the mountain, their shirts tucked in their waistbands, sweat swamping their skin. It was simple enough to build a fireplace inside the shack. Construction was just the process of securing one thing to another thing. People used to hire professionals because they didn’t have time to learn for themselves, but when you had nothing but time and no one else to do it for you, there was nothing you couldn’t learn.
One day in August, a jet engine crackled across the sky. They grabbed their binoculars—they both had a pair now—and walked down to the clearing. Volt padded at Ness’ heels. The jet was squat, black, triangular. It banked, cutting a low circle above the mountains.
“That’s one weird-ass plane,” Shawn said. “Got to be Japanese or something. They just got to be different.”
The ship banked again, bleeding elevation. Ness couldn’t say for certain when he knew; the knowledge came from somewhere deep down, a chthonic eureka that had been brewing for months. But he felt no surprise as the jet circled and slowed and circled and slowed, descending, at last, vertically into the Rogers’ fields.
“Got to be a Harrier,” Shawn said. He grunted. “Tell me, Brain. What’s a Harrier doing touching down onto Mimi Rogers’ lawn?”
“It’s not a Harrier,” Ness said.
“Like hell. It just landed like it was dangling from a string.”
“Watch.”
Shawn snugged his binoculars back atop his nose. Dust whirled around the craft, raking the front of the Rogers’ house. A door swung up from the jet’s side.
Ness smiled. “Try not to shit your pants.”
In the yellow August sunlight, spindly legs spiked from the ship. Tentacles wavered. Alien flesh touched dry earth.
II:
LANDFALL
12
“A new world?” Laura said. “Have you been building a rocket while I wasn’t looking?”
Tristan spread her hands, indicating the city outside the dark house. “Somewhere else. Somewhere that isn’t overrun by a gang of jackals who were writing memos and playing fantasy football six months ago.”
“Like I said. Another planet.”
“San Francisco.”
“Same thing. You think it will be better in San Francisco?”
“I know someone there with a boat. We’re going to Hawaii.”
“I’m sure it’s a real paradise.” Laura reached out and knocked on Tristan’s forehead. “You think it’s going to be any different? You think the bug didn’t hit it, too? The whole world’s gone.”
“What’s the alternative, Laura? Wait for the Empty Skulls to die in a backyard wrestling accident? I’ve spent months waiting. For help. From anybody. Well, nobody’s left. If they are, they’re off saving themselves. We need to start doing the same. That means we fight back—which I’m not going to risk—or we move.”
Laura took a step back, frowning. “Well, sailing off the edge of the world in a boat sounds crazy.”
“Then you don’t have to come.”
“What does Alden think?”
Tristan cocked her head. “Don’t you bring him into this.”
“Lord. I’m just asking.”
Tristan turned to Alden, who watched them in silence from the other side of the kitchen. He frowned. “What do I think? I think this house sucks. It’s too hot and there are bugs everywhere. And I don’t know if you guys know this, but the back yard smells like shit.”
“I don’t think he likes it,” Tristan said.
“So here’s the plan, as I’m hearing it,” Laura said. “Drive to San Francisco, a city that, for all we know, may be overrun by radioactive cannibals. Then steal a boat that may no longer be there and use our nonexistent piratical skills to sail thousands of miles to an island that’s probably even worse off than the mainland.”
“Do you have a better idea?”
“Thousands of them!”
“Well, this one is mine.” Tristan went to the fridge; out of habit, they’d kept the beer there even after the power died. She grabbed a lukewarm bottle and screwed off the cap. “Could be it’s hell there, too. But the virus can’t have wiped out everything. I want to find where it hasn’t.”
Laura shook her head and grabbed a beer for herself. “I’m going to need time to think about this.”
“Take all the time you need. We’re leaving in two days.”
Tristan took a candle to the living room. Alden followed her in. “Are we really going to Hawaii?”
“We’re going to try.”
“So you can check out surf-dudes?”
“Because it has a year-round growing season and it’s very isolated.” She rifled the desk for paper and a pen. “Also the surf-dudes.”
She devised her list based on what she’d need for
a really long camping trip. Food. Water. Clothes. Gasoline. Medicine. Toiletries. A tent. Sleeping bags. Binoculars. Candles. Lighters. Flashlights. Batteries. Pistols. Knives. A few tools and eating utensils and a radio. In the morning, she steeped tea from sun-warmed water, a process that took forever and resulted in a thinly-brewed fluid tragically low on both taste and caffeine, and started packing.
“You’re serious?” Laura said.
“About not dying in the winter?” Tristan said. “Pretty serious, yeah.”
“I thought maybe your head was all stirred up. Like, ‘Wow, I went to the river and almost got shot. Better run to Hawaii, where that can never ever happen.’“
“Nope.”
Laura paused. “Is everything okay?”
Tristan didn’t look up from rolling up her socks and bras. “Yeah. I’m mad.”
“At me?”
“Yes, you dirty bitch.” She swung up her head and laughed. “No, I’m not mad at you. I’m mad at this thing for happening. I’m mad at myself for sitting around for so long, waiting like a princess in a castle for President Mario to swing by with a cure and the National Guard. I’m mad at my parents for not being immune. I’m mad at whoever caused this, if someone did, and if nobody’s to blame, then I’m mad that something like this can just happen.”
Laura laughed. “That’s a lot of mad.”
“Do you think I’m being stupid?”
“How the hell should I know? I can’t start a fire without gasoline and a flamethrower. I don’t know what we should do.”
Just hearing Laura admit she didn’t know any better helped set Tristan’s mind at rest. Or if not at rest, then at a less-anxious pitch. It was hard not to worry, as she loaded the car with their gear, that she was making a terrible mistake. One that could easily get all three of them killed. She knew staying in Redding would be a mistake of its own—and in its way, a worse one, since the only reason to stay in a place where you couldn’t get your own water without being menaced by gunmen was one of sheer inertia. The fear of traveling into the unknown. The fear that, as bad as things were now, if they went somewhere else, it could get even worse.
But they needed to find a place where civilization endured or where there were no people at all. No bandits and madmen making this new life even harder. She hadn’t been raised by Inuits or Highlanders or Bedouins. If she was going to learn to live off the land, she wanted to do it someplace where the land was her friend. Not in these savage mountains where one bad winter could literally bury them.
Still, she doubted. And she knew that, no matter what she did or where she went, she’d have to second-guess all of her decisions for a long time to come.
They readied the car. Did a second sweep of the house for anything they didn’t want to leave behind. She didn’t try to take all the food or water; if disaster struck, she wanted a safe haven to return to. Late that afternoon, Laura hauled open the garage and Tristan backed into the street. Laura pulled the door back down and jogged to the car.
“Road trip!” she said. “Boat trip?”
Tristan accelerated down the street. “Multivehicular voyage.”
“Congratulations, nerd-girl, you have just ruined all the fun.”
Grass yellowed in the hard sun. Dust mottled dead cars. A body lay in its yard, a genderless knot of desiccated skin and stained bones. Tristan took the back roads from the subdivision and turned onto 273 to parallel the freeway. At the merger to I-5, a wall of torched cars had been dragged across the road, blocking it. A red skull had been sprayed over the charred paint.
“Fuck,” Laura said. “Double-fuck.”
Tristan idled. They had the windows down against the heat. Back in town, an engine roared across the silence.
Laura twisted in her seat. “Turn around and go home. Before they get here.”
Tristan’s pulse roared. All that time spent waiting, and now that she’d finally got in motion, the way forward was blocked. She punched the roof. “Joyful Cooter.”
“What?”
She swung the car around and accelerated back the way they’d come. “Happy Valley Road. Remember high school?”
She peeled left onto a serpentine side road. Scruffy pines and empty brown fields blurred past the windows. She turned onto Happy Valley, tires squealing. In the rushing wind, she could no longer hear the other engine. Single lots lurked behind tree-lined drives, separated by stretches of sun-dead weeds.
“Joyful Cooter!” Laura hooted. “I always knew we’d get murdered on this road.”
“Can we not be murdered?” Alden said.
“That’s my current thinking,” Tristan said. “Let me know if you change your mind.”
The road straightened. Tristan juked around an abandoned van, pushing the car to 60 MPH. Her arms were locked tight against the wheel and her triceps quivered. She watched her rearview all the way to the turn that would link them back to the freeway.
She willed the onramp to be clear. Hot air thrummed through the windows. The road ahead was empty, baking. Her heart gentled.
The wind plastered Alden’s hair into his eyes. “Why would they want to stop us from getting out?”
“For our own good, obviously,” Laura said. “I mean, who would want to leave Redding?”
“Do you think they’re eating people?”
“No way,” Tristan said. “There are far too many cans of Campbell’s in the world.”
Alden palmed his hair from his face. “They’re probably taking sex slaves.”
“What the hell, Alden?”
“Well, it’s true.”
The sunlight in the great northern valley looked like something out of Field of Dreams. There had been so much green when she last drove to Berkeley. In the weeks without power, the valley fields had gone a monochrome yellow. Browned grape vines hung crucified from trellises. All that was left living were the trees, gnarled things that clung to the dirt like a nonagenarian’s hands.
They reached the Bay by sunset. Cool winds swirled through the windows. The Bay Bridge hung intact, its plain white pillars rising from the sea. Part of her had expected to see a charred hole where downtown San Francisco once stood, but the skyscrapers remained, windows shining orange in the sunset. Cars gobbed the freeway on the approach to the marina. Tristan detoured east, then dropped down into Berkeley.
Laura gazed behind them. “You do know boats tend to be found on water, right?”
“We’re going to my friend McKenzie’s.” Tristan slowed at an intersection clogged by a wrecked bus. She climbed the curb, car tilting as she threaded through the gap. “Her dad owns the boat.”
“Have you talked to her?”
“Not since leaving school.”
“Then how do you know she’s..?”
Lush pines enfolded the winding roads north of campus. “She’s not. I know she’s not. But on the one percent chance she is, she can make our lives a hundred times simpler.”
A pack of dogs trotted through the twilight, gazing at the car, noses low. Tristan parked in front of the brick home. The white picket fence was still closed. Behind it, purple, pinecone-shaped blossoms spurted from an aster-leafed bush. The front yard smelled like damp needles and the green onions growing in the box beside the door. No one answered Tristan’s knock. Laura and Alden stood behind her on the brick path, watching the street.
The door was unlocked, but Tristan had to shove hard to get inside. The remains of a golden retriever were wedged against the door. Dried blood stained the carpet beneath its paws. The inside of the door was raked with claw-ruts. Bones scattered the living room. McKenzie rested on the floor beside her bed, blond hair clinging to her cleaned skull. Her ribs and pelvis remained, but her limbs had been taken.
“What now?” Laura said softly.
“We go to the marina. Find a boat.”
“Won’t we need a key?”
Tristan closed the door behind them. “Since when were sails motor-powered?”
Smoke rose somewhere up the hill; a moto
rcycle whined in the distance. They saw no one on their way to the marina. Cars sat silent in the lot. Tristan took her pistol from the glove box. The dock thumped hollowly beneath her. Boats creaked in the minor tide. The pier they were on was dominated by sailboats, small white sloops twenty and thirty feet long, their sides dull in the fading light. It smelled of salt and mussels and algae.
“So we can just take whichever one we want?” Alden said. “That’s so cool.”
“I don’t think it’s wrong anymore, is it?” Tristan said. “I mean, it’s like picking up a shell from the beach. Nobody owns it.”
Laura thumped the side of a sloop. “It’s totally cool. Worst thing that happens to us is some rich-ass zombies come stumbling after us for their yacht.”
Tristan gazed between the bobbing boats. She thought they would need one of the larger ones to cross half the Pacific, but beyond that, she had no idea how to choose their vessel. For a moment, she was paralyzed—this whole idea was so stupid, she wouldn’t be able to navigate one of these things out of the marina, let alone across thousands of miles of open ocean—but she squashed that thought before it could sweep her under the waves. It didn’t matter. They could figure it out. All they had to do was try.
She pointed to the nearest of the larger boats. “That one. We’ll check it out, then grab our stuff from the car.”
Alden and Laura followed her lead. Tristan climbed the metal ladder up the side. The cabin was dark, empty. It smelled of seawater. There were no bodies. Space was tight; they wouldn’t have much privacy. Alden would be embarrassed. Well, he’d live.
They lugged bags and boxes from the car, piling them up inside the musty cabin. On their third trip, a man stood on the pier in front of the boat, water dripping from his wetsuit. A speargun rested on his shoulder. Tristan froze, dropping a bag of assorted pasta and reaching for the pistol in her jacket.
The Last Days: Six Post-Apocalyptic Thrillers Page 118