Hughes killed the engine, stepped out with his shotgun and retrieved the rubber siphoning hose from the back of his vehicle. When he popped the Honda’s gas cap, the front door of the ranch house opened and a wizened old man hobbled out on a cane. He just stood there a moment next to a desiccated cow skull and a cracked empty flower pot.
“You stealing my gas?” He sounded weak and looked even weaker, with eyes sunk in his head and his back hunched from a lifetime of bad posture.
“No choice,” Hughes said and shook his head. He felt bad about it and wanted to apologize, but no crime was worse than failing to get Annie to Atlanta. He could have pointed his Persuader at the man, but he didn’t have to and didn’t want to.
The man’s eyes narrowed to slits, not because he was hostile but because he was tired. He seemed to require an enormous amount of energy just to stay upright.
Hughes realized the man must be dehydrated. He wasn’t drinking the water—at least he was not drinking much—and would probably die soon. Half the town must have been in a similar condition, which further explained why the people of Lander weren’t fighting back against the infected as much as Hughes would have expected. They hardly had the energy to get out of bed.
“Tell you what,” Hughes said. “I’ll trade you the gas for a bottle of water.”
The man’s eyes opened all the way. “Clean water?”
“Clean water,” Hughes said and nodded. He set down the siphon hose, scanned the street and saw no infected. He had one empty and three full bottles on the Suburban’s front seat and could refill them as often as he needed with the filter.
“I’ll give you two bottles,” Hughes said. He grabbed them off the seat, held one in his hand and one under his arm and walked up to the man’s porch and handed them over.
The man took them and nodded.
“You alone in there?” Hughes said.
“My wife died,” the man said. He seemed more numb about it than sad.
“I’m sorry.”
“It happened last night.”
Hughes closed his eyes for a moment and took a deep breath. The woman’s body was still in there. No way did this man have the strength to move her and bury her as Hughes had when his own wife and son died in Seattle. He wanted to go inside and help, but it wasn’t part of his mission. He could spend all day assisting people in town, but it wouldn’t do very much good. Lander was doomed and he’d never find Annie if he went down these rabbit holes.
He had to leave but felt a knot in his throat.
“We shoulda gone to Texas,” the man said.
“What’s in Texas?” Hughes said.
“It’s warm.”
“The cold will kill these things off.”
“Cold will kill us off. Wouldn’t you rather die where it’s warm?”
The sun was shining in Wyoming today, but Hughes knew what he meant. “I have to go.”
“Can I go with you?”
“No one can go with me.”
“You’re using my gas.”
“I’m trading it for the water. And I could always use somebody else’s.”
“But I won’t be able to go anywhere.”
Hughes considered asking the man if he’d go somewhere if he still had gas in the tank, but decided against it. He didn’t want to know.
“Look, I’m sorry,” Hughes said.
“Okay,” the man said in the same tone of voice he’d use if he’d said whatever.
Hughes nodded, turned around and headed back toward the Suburban. Halfway down the walkway, he turned around to say something else, but the man shut the door. He’d probably never open it again.
Hughes’ eyelids felt hot as he siphoned the gas out of the Honda. He didn’t like the person he was becoming, but the world left him no options. He’d search for Annie everywhere he could outside town, then start over at the beginning. He’d drive down every single street again and again and again, and he’d keep at it until. Until he found her or until it was clear that Lander had no survivors.
Then what? That was the question.
He could not stay in Lander and wouldn’t want to if he could.
Hughes thought of his wife and child, buried now in the backyard of a Seattle that had burned to the ground in a firestorm. He could always return, see if he could find their graves and lay there with them for eternity, but he doubted he could find the place where his house once stood. The city was a lake of rainwater and rubble and scorched concrete by now.
He’d tried to think about his family as little as possible after fleeing the city. Dwelling on it would break him, and he couldn’t survive or do anything useful for anyone if he was broken. He’d hoped to find a safe place where he could dig in for a couple of weeks or months and let himself safely come apart for a while. Life breaks every one of us. None of us can be strong all the time. We can heal, though, given time and the productive use of that time, and sometimes we can even delay the break for a while. Hughes had delayed it for months now, and he couldn’t do it much longer. He wouldn’t last another day or even an hour if he gave up on Annie.
She was the only reason Hughes had been able to stall his looming crackup as long as he had. Annie wasn’t a replacement for his wife and his child, but she was a patch on a wound that might otherwise kill him.
Becoming a father had felt like living with a knife at his throat. Hughes always knew that if his son died, he would die too. At least part of him would. Annie wasn’t his daughter, and he didn’t love her like a daughter, but she was more important than himself and she’d given him a sense of duty and purpose. Without his son, and without Annie, everything would go black.
He didn’t know what he’d do without her, but he had to leave even if he couldn’t find her. He refused to die anywhere in Wyoming.
He could, however, hop in the Suburban and drive for two or three days and make it down to South Texas. He had never been there before. Never had a desire or a reason to go. He could go now, though, and he might even find something or meet someone along the way that would give him a sense of purpose again. Anything was possible. If so, he’d go on. And if not, he could lay down his burden and die with the sun on his face.
39
The prison was a charnel house, with nauseating piles of mutilated flesh, bones and guts strewn in a spreading crimson lake across the floor. The common area looked as if an entire building full of humans had been fed into an industrial-sized garbage disposal.
Hunched figures squatted over the ruins of bodies. They fed muscle, fat and other parts into their mouths with their fingers. The noises they made sounded like the moans of demons in a twisted Hieronymus Bosch painting depicting the underworld.
The smell was incredible: rotten berries and apples, molten copper, vomit and shit. Parker knew it would only get worse when putrefaction and insects got going in earnest.
It was late afternoon now and would be night soon. This time, Parker welcomed the incoming darkness. It would obscure the nightmarish scene mere feet from him. For now, the sunlight seeping into the cellblock reflected off the pool of blood on the floor and cast a faint red glow on the walls.
“Someone will eventually find us.”
That was his new cellmate, Tawnie. She was in her mid-thirties with green eyes, long red hair and chipped nails, pretty in a massage-therapist-who-lives-down-the-street sort of way, though she’d worked as a receptionist at City Hall before Steele’s men tossed her in here to die.
“And when somebody does,” she whispered, “they’ll know how it ended. They’ll find our bones in this cell.”
Parker still read shock on her face. She couldn’t believe what she was looking at on the other side of that cell door. Parker couldn’t either. He’d spent months moving from one appalling scene of death and destruction to another, almost halfway across a destroyed country, but he’d never even imagined anything like this.
Parker and Tawnie weren’t the only ones who had locked themselves in before the tsunami of infected chewe
d the cellblock population to pieces. Earlier, some survivors initiated a rollcall. Prisoners announced their names and location. It drove the infected mad and sent them careening against the bars, but people seemed to feel it was worth it so they’d know there weren’t alone.
Parker didn’t recognize a single survivor’s name. He wasn’t sure how many there were—he didn’t count—but if he had to guess he’d say two dozen. Perhaps there were twice as many, the silent half too stunned and terrified to move or even breathe let alone talk.
He and Tawnie whispered to each other when they spoke. They didn’t strictly have to, but it kept the infected away from the bars.
“I keep thinking about gasmasks,” she said.
“Wouldn’t help,” Parker said. “The virus isn’t airborne.”
“It would look right, though, wouldn’t it?”
You’d need a hazmat suit just to walk out of here, Parker thought, even if someone came in and shot every last infected right through the head.
Outside was a disasterscape too. Everyone left alive could hear what was happening on the other side of the walls. Screams, gunshots, squealing tires and the occasional explosion told the story in sound effects. A long time could pass before anyone set foot in the prison again. A very long time. It might never happen. No one might ever know from the distribution of skeletons on different sides of the cell doors how Parker and Tawnie and the others spent their last days.
Parker dreaded the new and even worse stench that would fill the cellblock, probably within hours, but he took comfort in the fact that the infected would die before he did. He could at least drink the tap water. They didn’t know how to operate a sink. They didn’t know how to operate anything.
“Thirsty?” he said to Tawnie.
She stole a fearful glance at the tap, then another toward the common area. “Not enough,” she said and shook her head.
Her lips looked like rubber scoured with a cheese grater. Her face was tight, the skin on the back of her hands cracked and bleeding. Parker wanted water too, but he’d drank some more recently than she had.
“Drink some,” he said. “You’ll be okay. I did the math. The virus only hits one-in-twenty. You could starve before you turn.”
Tawnie said nothing. She just stared at the sink. Parker wondered if she really wanted to live. Worse was coming if the water didn’t kill her.
“We have to stay alive,” he said. “In case someone shows up.”
“They won’t come soon enough,” she said.
“You don’t know that,” he said.
“Who would come here?”
“Anybody could come here.”
Parker had friends out there. Surely Tawnie did too. Not everybody was dead on the outside, not yet.
He knew how he could convince her to drink.
“Well, I’m thirsty,” he said.
Her body tensed. Parker wouldn’t turn, but she didn’t know that.
“I give you permission to strangle me,” he said. “Just wait until I pass out.”
“I can’t.”
“You can.”
She shook her head vigorously.
“You’re a good person, Tawnie,” he said, and she was, but even a pacifist will fight back if someone is holding their head underwater. “But you’ll do it. I’d want you to do it. Nobody wants to turn into one of those things. But you won’t have to. I promise.”
“You can’t promise.”
Actually, he could.
“You’ll see,” he said and stepped up to the sink.
“Please don’t,” she said.
He turned on the faucet, filled a glass three-quarters full—slowly so he wouldn’t make too much noise and summon those things to the bars again—and downed it one go. It tasted like life.
Then he sat and looked at her.
“I feel better already,” he said and exhaled deeply. They weren’t whispering anymore, but they spoke in low voices. The infected were consumed with their meals.
She turned her head 45 degrees and looked at him with side eyes.
He waited patiently with his hands on his knees for his stunt to work on her mind. He’d have to sit there for at least a half hour without showing symptoms before she’d trust that he was okay and consider drinking herself, but she’d probably start feeling better in a couple of minutes.
And she did. Her body relaxed slightly. She turned toward him again, glanced at the floor, then made eye contact. Parker’s confidence was contagious. She’d have a drink. Her body’s need to survive would demand it even if it might kill her.
It really might, too. The odds that she was immune like Annie were one-in-a-million, and the infection ravaged even Annie for a couple of days before her immune system obliterated the virus. If Tawnie turned, Parker would have to kill her.
It would be the hardest kill of his life. So far he had never killed one of those things that had once been a woman who’d hugged him.
He wanted to hug her again, and she was so scared that she would almost certainly welcome it, but he wasn’t sure he could do what he’d have to do if he did.
Rather than restraining himself from killing a person with Betty the therapist’s power of free won’t, he’d have to force himself to do it using an inner power he was not sure he had.
Tawnie closed her eyes and exhaled, then opened them again.
“Okay,” she said. “Gimme that glass.”
Kyle was ready in the motel room when night fell. His greasy unwashed hair felt matted to his scalp, and he wanted a shower, but he only needed five things: his blood-stained crowbar, the Remington shotgun from Max’s office, a Maglite, a bottle of water and the keys to Andy’s van.
Andy wasn’t going anywhere, and he repeatedly warned Kyle not to leave even though he’d tossed him the keys.
“It’s a suicide mission,” Andy said as Kyle wrapped the Maglite to the shotgun barrel with a roll of duct tape. “The guards won’t let him out, and if you walk in there like that they’ll just shoot you.”
“Depends on how many are in there,” Kyle said. “I can take out four of them at once with this thing.”
In full darkness with the Maglite attached, Kyle could destroy anything he saw in an instant.
Andy shook his head. “Just don’t forget to leave the keys in the van.”
That’s all Andy cared about. Getting his van back after Kyle got himself killed.
Kyle parted the curtains and swept the Maglite beam—and therefore also the shotgun barrel—across the parking lot. He saw nothing and no one outside. Of course, he might have attracted some infected just now with the light, but there was nothing to be done about that. He wasn’t going to walk out there without checking.
“I’ll see you,” he said to Andy and opened the door.
“You won’t,” Andy said as Kyle left and shut the door behind him.
Useless asshole.
The night had appeared total from inside the motel room, but now that Kyle was outside in the parking lot, he saw the faint glow of late dusk in the sky toward the mountains. And he smelled wood smoke. At least one house, somewhere in Lander, was burning.
Kyle killed the light, stood stock still and listened. Lander was almost quiet, but not quite. The near silence was punctuated with sounds every couple of moments. A man hollered. Someone or something knocked over or kicked over a trashcan. A door slammed. Nothing too ominous.
He sensed movement, though, just below the level of identifiable sound. Nothing and no one moved anywhere near him, but he had almost a sixth sense that the city was alive with people and things moving beyond his perimeter, as if he were standing in the dark next to eight-foot high anthill.
Hundreds of infected prowled Lander now, so he got in the van. The moment he started the engine and turned on the lights, every one of them within a three- or four-block radius would swarm him. He could end up leading a whole trail of them to the prison and would have almost no time at all from the moment he arrived until he’d have to get insi
de and face the guards.
Kyle didn’t even know what the outside of the prison looked like. He’d have to drive past it at least once on a quick recon mission and give himself at least an idea of what he’d be dealing with before going in the front door.
He started the engine, flipped on the headlights and stepped on the gas, his socks moist and sickly warm against his feet. The moment he pulled out of the parking lot onto Main, his headlights lit up one of those things.
She stood in the middle of the street at a 45-degree angle to the van and snapped her head sideways. Kyle knew she couldn’t see his face with the headlights in her eyes, but she seemed to make eye contact with him anyway, as if some part of her still knew, despite her diseased state, where the van’s driver sat.
She didn’t flinch, though, or even try to move out of the way as a healthy person would. Instead she just stood there and let her mouth go slack as Kyle swerved around her.
He checked the rearview mirror and saw that was shuffling after him now. She hadn’t screamed, at least not yet, perhaps because she hadn’t actually seen him.
Kyle could have driven right over the top of her without any problem and wondered at what point, at what speed, hitting an infected human with a vehicle was as dangerous as hitting a deer on the road in the mountains. He didn’t know and didn’t want to find out.
He cruised Main at a cautious speed, past the insurance office, past the bank, and past the closed beer and billiards place.
Two more infected appeared ahead in the street—both men, one of whom wore bloody camo fatigues—and they were walking straight toward him.
Kyle though about running over them. He could take both off the board in a matter of seconds just by stepping on the gas and holding the wheel steady. But what if one of them flew onto the hood and smashed into his windshield?
Instead he swerved around them and his adrenaline kicked up a notch. A moment later, they were in his rearview mirror and still coming toward him. They weren’t running, though, as if they weren’t quite sure if they’d found prey or not.
Resurrection (Book 2): Into the Wasteland Page 38