Epitaph Road

by David Patneaude

  “Planes!” Gunny’s voice over the talkaloud this time, excited. “Crop dusters! A whole flock of ’em! Coming in low! Trailing spray!”

  Panic raised his pitch. “Overhead! Overhead now! Shit coming down!” The high-pitched thunder of propeller aircraft poured out of the talkaloud and faded away.

  What was waiting for us outside? Elisha’s Bear thick in the air, almost for certain. And Gunny, with his orders to take no prisoners. But in here there was no safety, either. If we didn’t blow up this place, Wapner would.

  And for Tia, there was no dilemma. Her only good choice was outside, where she didn’t have to worry about Elisha. Yet.

  Just Gunny.

  We flew out of a curve. In the dim distance loomed a dirt-and-rock wall, fronted by a ladder.

  “Almost there,” Tia said. Two words, but I heard relief, hope, fear, sadness.

  I felt crowded in by those emotions, too, but shoving them all aside was this big bullying feeling of inadequacy. I was a kid. I hadn’t signed on for this junior assassin stuff. Knowing the consequences — death and destruction, never mind that the bad guys, mostly, would be the ones getting buried — how was I going to push that button?

  I tried to ignore the feelings — all of them. We kept racing along. My talkaloud stayed quiet. When we reached the ladder, Tia spotted a control box and flipped a switch. Overhead, a door slid away, revealing a tangle of evergreen boughs rising into a dusky sky. I half expected to see Gunny’s face peering over the edge, but no one was there.

  Tia started up the ladder with me nudging her along. On the way I checked Dr. Nuyen’s backpack: a couple of sealed metal containers, several data storage chips in plastic sleeves.

  And no gun.

  We reached the top of the ladder and stepped into the real world. A small clearing surrounded the exit door. I could hear aircraft not far off. Although the fresh air smelled wonderful and my lungs felt starved for oxygen, I was reluctant to take a deep breath.

  Fifteen feet away stood a thick-trunked fir tree, and mounted on it was a metal box identical to the one at the cave. We hurried over, Tia reciting the combination out loud. But it was etched in my brain. I’d seen it in headlines and epitaphs. I’d seen it in my grandfather’s. The date Elisha’s Bear first charged out of the woods.

  Heart pounding, I was about to touch in the combination on a pad of numbers when I heard a familiar voice. “Kids.”

  Gunny. He was standing on the other side of the shadowy clearing, a rifle dangling at his side, pointed at the forest floor.

  I held my breath.

  “Hurry,” he said. “You gotta nail those guys.” I breathed. I punched numbers. The door opened. Aside from a small screen displaying another selection of numbers, the only prominent feature inside the box was a green button.

  “I’ll keep my distance,” Gunny said as I pressed the combination again. “No telling who has what now.”

  I touched the last number. ARMED, the screen said. Then, ONCE BUTTON IS DEPRESSED, YOU WILL HAVE ELEVEN (11) SECONDS TO CLEAR THE AREA.

  I hesitated. I didn’t know why. I was a coward. I was a human being. I was a guy.

  I pictured the woman jogger in front of my house, carefree. I pictured a giant lake of bodies, women and girls and girl babies this time.

  I took Tia’s hand.

  Together, we pressed the button.

  A series of loud beeps began. “Run!” I shouted, and we took off, toward the trees and gloom. We sprinted all out, Tia in front, me on her heels, swerving through trees, hurdling and stumbling over undergrowth. I waited for an explosion, hoping and dreading at the same time.

  Suddenly, there was a muffled whump! The earth under our feet shook and bucked. Tia went down. I followed. We hugged the ground side by side. Pressed hard against the mossy dirt, I felt the concussion of one explosion after another. My eyes were closed, but I heard tree trunks creaking, branches rubbing overhead. Cones and twigs and needles ticked against my back and the backpack and dropped all around us.

  Finally, it stopped.

  “You okay, Tia?” I said, opening my eyes, sitting up. A haze of dust hung in the air.

  “Sunday,” she said. “She’s gone…buried.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said, finding her hand and holding on. All I could see was that little rectangle of thick wire-imbedded glass and Sunday’s brave terrified face behind it.

  “She was dying,” Tia said. I knew she was trying to reassure both of us, but I wasn’t reassured, and I doubted that she was, either. I should have pushed the button by myself, kept her out of it.

  Silently praying that the holding cells were sealed tight, I nodded. “Already dead, maybe.” I studied Tia’s face for some sign of illness. How quickly did Formula T do its work? When had they given it to Sunday? Not long ago. Not long.

  But I decided it was too early to tell. If we’d been exposed to Elisha’s Bears, it had been within the last five minutes or so.

  I took a deep breath, testing my lungs. I couldn’t help myself, but I clung to the idea that I was okay for now. The Bear was fast, but not that fast.

  There was no chatter coming from my talkaloud. Good sign? Bad sign? I pushed the talk button. “Dad?”

  No response.

  “Dad?”

  Why didn’t he answer?

  We got to our feet and retraced our footsteps. There was no more aircraft noise. Birds were beginning to chirp their quiet evening songs.

  A deep depression in the ground marked the middle of the clearing and headed off into the woods. Trees in the cave-in’s path were toppled or leaning. The ladderway had collapsed.

  I lifted my talkaloud for one more try. “Gunny?”

  “Over here,” Gunny said. But it wasn’t the talkaloud Gunny, it was the in-person Gunny. I stared in the direction of his voice until I saw him, standing in tree shadows and twilight. “The talkalouds won’t work now,” he said. “You’ve disabled the base.” I could see what I thought was a look of approval. “Good job.”

  “Dad’s wouldn’t work, either?”

  “Nope.”

  I felt my spirits rise like warm air.

  “But let’s go find him,” Gunny said. “I’ve got a flashlight in my hand and a compass in my head. Stay well behind me, but follow the light.”

  Gunny headed off through the trees. We trailed the dancing beam at a distance. Every few minutes, he stopped and pointed the flashlight in our direction to make sure we were coming. Tia walked in front of me, sniffling back tears. I watched the dim outline of her shoulders rise and fall. I wanted to take her hand, but there wasn’t room to walk side by side. Even single file, we were constantly squeezing past tree trunks and low branches and bushes.

  I imagined her back on her bicycle built for two, alone, head down, pedaling.

  Finally, we came to a familiar clearing. There was more light here, and it was easier to see where the ground had imploded. The trench headed away from the trees, ending in a smoking pile of crushed rock and concrete rubble where giant chunks of the explosive-charged cliff had rained down on the building. What used to be the building.

  Gunny was standing next to it. “I’m gonna head toward the cave,” he half shouted. “I’m guessing that’s about where he was when the shit hit the fan.”

  He walked along the transformed face of the rock wall and around the corner with us following. I was tempted to yell for Dad, but I was put off by the thought of someone else in the woods. Wapner and his loonies. Women from PAC.

  Once we got to the outcropping’s cleft, Gunny saved me the trouble. “Charlie!” he shouted. “Charlie Winters!” His voice echoed off the cliffs and died.

  “Here.” A voice. Dad’s voice, coming from the direction of the cave. The voice was distant, or weak.

  “Dad!” I shouted as Gunny trained his flashlight beam on the black fissure in the rock.

  “Kellen.”

  The voice sounded closer. Tia took my hand. We waited, everyone holding their positions. And after
a long moment, Dad tottered into the beam and stopped, keeping his distance. A gash angled down above his left eyebrow, and a thick trickle of blood skirted the bridge of his nose, detoured around his mouth, and ducked under his chin. He carried his rifle in his right hand, but his left arm hung straight down, limp.

  He squinted into the flashlight beam, and Gunny moved it slightly off him. “Kellen?” Dad said.

  “Gunny here.” He swept the beam onto Tia and me. “Here’s your boy. We’re traveling separately until we find out who’s hot and who’s not.”

  “You’re okay, Kellen?” Dad said. “Tia?”

  “We’re okay,” I said.

  “Sunday’s really…?” Dad studied our faces across the murky expanse. “I’m beyond sorry. Way beyond.”

  Next to me, Tia swallowed a sob. “What about you?” I asked.

  “Mostly fine. I was in the cave, making sure Wapner didn’t get out of the tunnel. Some rocks shook down on me, did a little damage.”

  “You were in there when the helicopters came?” I said.

  “Not quite. By the time the crop dusters got here, though.”

  “Nobody got out?” I said.

  “The door started to open, then all hell broke loose. Nobody got out. You two did that?”

  “We had to.”

  “How’d you get into the box?”

  “Dr. Nuyen.” Tia and I gave him and Gunny a short explanation of the doctor’s role in this, what happened with her and Formula T and Sunday.

  “Sunday was already failing when we saw her,” I said. “The stuff they cooked up must’ve been potent.”

  “Don’t worry,” Dad said. “The cockroaches are gone. They’re buried under tons of rubble. Them and their plague.”

  “For now,” Tia said.

  “The truck’s a ten-minute walk down the trail,” Gunny said. “I suggest we go there and take whatever we need for the next day or two at least. By then we should know more.”

  Yesterday I found your car keys in a dark cubby of my dusty desk,

  even though I’d sworn to you I hadn’t touched them,

  the morning you grabbed the spares, annoyed,

  and ran out the door on your way to an appointment,

  on your way to meet up with a monster.

  I wish I could hear you say I told you so.

  — EPITAPH FOR CHASE LANGLEY

  (NOVEMBER 23, 2035–AUGUST 6, 2067),

  BY CHLOE MALDIN, HIS WIFE,

  DECEMBER 19, 2068

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  We should know more.

  That’s all Gunny said, but we all realized what he meant. We should know more about who was going to live or die, who would need food and supplies in another day or two.

  Who wouldn’t.

  “You can walk, Dad?” I said.

  “My legs are fine.”

  Gunny led us to the dirt road and down it. Except for Tia and me, we must have looked like a short procession of antisocial strangers — loners — carefully pacing themselves to avoid contact with one another.

  Once near the truck, which Gunny had driven well off the road and into the woods, he stepped a distance away and told Tia and me to help ourselves first, since we were the least likely to be infected. I hadn’t been out in the air when the stuff fell, and Tia of course was a girl.

  But so was Sunday.

  Under the tarp we found food and water, flashlights, lanterns, batteries, blankets. Tia and I took what we needed and moved away, farther into the forest. We located a small flat clearing within shouting distance of the pickup, turned on the lantern, gathered cedar boughs for a mattress, and laid down our blankets. While we were busy, flashlight beams danced away from the truck in turns. A lantern winked on fifty yards away through the trees; a second one came to life fifty yards in the opposite direction.

  “Dad!” I shouted.

  “Here!” he answered, and I identified which light belonged to him.

  “Gunny!” Tia called. We all knew where he was setting up camp now, but I was glad Tia had thought to include him in our little roll call.

  His response confirmed his whereabouts, his health. It traveled back to us from the direction of the other light. “That’s me!”

  We dimmed our lanterns. Full dark fell all around us. The night had grown chilly.

  The hollow clap-clap-clap of a helicopter — distant, for a time — disturbed the quiet. The sound got louder, closer. I doused our lantern. Dad’s and Gunny’s went dark, too. A searchlight probed the trees a quarter mile away, then nearer, as the chopper hovered and moved, hovered and moved, and we scrambled into darker tree shadows and undergrowth.

  The copter drifted away. The light disappeared. The noise faded and died.

  From somewhere far off came the low growl of an engine, something big and ponderous creeping along the road. I pictured PAC’s armored vehicle — the one the sentry, Miller, probably, had described over the talkaloud — coming to assess the damage and do more if necessary.

  A minute later there was a shockingly louder noise, startling and explosive, thundering through the forest, echoing off the surrounding hills.

  Then it was quiet again — so quiet it felt as if a giant blanket had dropped over us. The engine sound was gone.

  “A mine,” Tia said. “More killing.”

  I pictured body parts — flesh and metal — scattered across a narrow dirt road, blasted against trees, hanging from branches. Tia took my hand. We sat, close and silent, on a fallen log. While we downed water, cheese and crackers, dried fruit, and chocolate, I couldn’t help wondering if this was my last supper. I tried to lighten that dark thought with a couple of questions: Shouldn’t we have some wine? And a few apostles?

  The lame attempt at gallows humor didn’t work. My mind instantly boomeranged back to other questions, life-or-death ones: The three males in our little group were supposedly inoculated against Elisha, but how many of us were, really? Was the vaccine any good? Had it had time to be effective? It didn’t take a genius to realize that one or more of us might not get out of this.

  As if she was listening in on my thoughts, Tia shivered, head to toe. “It’s cold,” she said.

  We slipped off our shoes and stretched out between the blankets. I should have felt awkward, maybe, but I was too tired to feel awkward, and by now Tia seemed as if she belonged next to me, her ankle resting lightly on mine. I stared up at the stars, brilliant in the thin clean air, and listened to her breathe, judging the efficiency of her ins and outs. I took a deep breath, then another, evaluating mine.

  She laid her fingers, then the soft inner surface of her wrist, on my forehead. She kept it there, which made me nervous for at least a couple of reasons. “Feel okay?” she asked, faking offhandedness.

  For a moment I thought about asking her to tell me how I felt. But I decided I’d rather not know how the temperature of my forehead measured up against the impartial no-nonsense warmth of her wrist. “Fine,” I said.

  My eyes closed. I felt Tia turn on her side, away from me. I heard her try to stifle a sob, to keep it to herself, and I put my arm around her and pulled her close. She squirmed nearer, her shoulders to my chest, my lips an inch from her neck. I breathed her in and held on tight, experiencing the jerky rhythms of her quiet weeping. I tried not to cry myself.

  Despite all that had happened, being this close to her felt vaguely sexy, and I allowed myself to enjoy the sensation for a long moment. The last thing I remembered before I drifted away was touching her cheek, and the heartbreaking feel of her warm tears on my fingertips.

  I pray you’ve stayed far away,

  hiked to the highest reaches of what passes for heaven these days,

  because although unimaginable evil has arrived here

  on a mission from hell,

  your absence, the thought that all of you are isolated and safe,

  has kept me going (for as long as I could go)

  in the middle of this purgatory —

  that and a failin
g heart that still beats with everlasting love for you.

  — NOTE FOUND IN THE BOTTOM OF A ONE-OARED ROWBOAT BEACHED

  NEAR KINGSTON, ON WASHINGTON’S OLYMPIC PENINSULA, ALONG

  WITH THE BODY OF JOSHUA WINTERS,

  AUGUST 14, 2067

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  A cough startled me awake.

  Not mine. Not Tia’s.

  Somewhere off in the cold dark woods.

  Which direction? I sat up. I waited.

  More coughing. Then a rapid-fire series of rough, wracking, chest-deep eruptions. And this time there was no doubt about who was responsible.

  Gunny.

  Tia stirred. She got up on an elbow. “What?”

  “Coughing. Gunny.”

  “No.”

  Off in the trees, a lantern came on. I finger-nudged Tia’s chin in that direction — Gunny’s direction.

  More coughing. Not mine, but I felt it deep in my chest.

  “Gunny!” Dad was awake, too.

  No answer.

  The lantern moved up, then side to side, as if it was waving.

  Then in one more or less steady direction.

  It disappeared, appeared again, disappeared, as Gunny walked among the trees.

  Gradually, the intermittent lantern glow faded, the coughing quieted. Gradually, I realized what he was doing. He was leaving. Going off to die, like a wounded animal.

  The lantern light disappeared. Minutes passed. I felt empty. First Sunday, then Dr. Nuyen. Now Gunny. Tia wept. She should have been out of tears by now. I put my arm around her and looked up into the blackness of the moonless night.

  Ursa Major, the Great Bear, looked down on us. The sky was so clear that I felt myself staring past that constellation to other stars, wondering if this nightmare would be as endless as the universe.

  “Kellen?” Dad called.

  “We’re here,” I said. “We’re okay.”

  “Say a prayer,” he said. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

  We watched for you, every breath a prayer,

  while days became shorter and nights became colder