by Amy Briant
But the next one made me feel even worse.
“Shit!” I cursed loudly. I couldn’t help myself. East clutched my arm in alarm.
“What?” she said in an undertone. “I thought you said we had to be quiet.”
“We do,” I said, getting control of myself. “But it’s just—” I gestured wordlessly at the third sign, on the far side of what had been the street, directing long-gone drivers toward the highway. Highway 101 North, with a big white arrow.
“What does that mean?” East said impatiently, tugging on my arm. I turned to face her.
“We missed the V,” I told her. “We’re on the 101, headed for San Francisco. We’re on the wrong side of the bay.”
San Francisco. Even just hearing me say the words made her flinch. She let go of my arm and took a step back. San Francisco—city of the dead.
“How close?” she whispered. “Are we…there?”
“No,” I said in a low, but more normal tone of voice, trying to sound reassuring. “We’re still a good thirty miles south, I’d say. And we’re not going any nearer, so don’t worry.”
“But the radiation…” she said, still in that hoarse whisper.
Now it was me clutching her arm.
“Listen to me, East. We’re not that close. We’ll just find some food here and then head back south. We’ll find the V today or tomorrow, I’m sure.”
Actually, I was thinking how in the world had we missed it, but it wasn’t the time to share that with her. San Francisco had become a horror story, a tale to scare bad children with. I could tell East had heard it too many times. Personally, I was a lot less worried about ten-year-old radiation from Frisco than I was about three-day-old radiation—albeit on a much smaller scale—coming over the hill from San Tomas. Although, who was to say it had been a dirty bomb? I suspected any kind of explosion big enough to blow up the Settlement would create a mushroom-looking cloud. I mentally shrugged—whatever had happened had happened. The only thing that mattered now was finding the V.
East was still staring at the 101 sign, her eyes wide, her breathing shallow.
“Come on,” I told her.
I hated the idea of backtracking and all the wasted time and energy that entailed, but there was no choice. San Francisco was literally a dead end and it wasn’t like we had a boat to sail across to the other side. Hoofing it was our only option and that meant curving back south and east around the bottom of the Bay. I kicked myself for being such a dimwit. How could I have missed the junction?
“So where’s the food?” East asked. She took a step toward the gas station building and I pulled her back. I shook my head at her. I’d been with my sister many times in downtown San Tomas—we did not want to go in the buildings.
“Not there. This way.”
I led her up the street, which was choked with weeds and scrub brush. The trampled plants beneath our boots gave off a pungent but not unpleasant scent. We were headed west now, up a slight incline with the coastal ridge maybe five miles in front of us. The afternoon fog had spilled over the top and was tumbling down toward us ever so slowly, stretching out long fingers of grayish white mist through the densely forested hillside. Although we were tromping through weeds, the cracked concrete pad of the gas station had been remarkably free of vegetation. I thought about that as we slowly walked up the hill.
The street was quiet. Just the wind in the trees—lots of pines, eucalyptus, palms and others I couldn’t name. I could hear the buzzing of insects and an occasional cry from a bird. Once in a while, there’d be a rustle in the undergrowth or the snap of a twig behind us, but that could have been any number of small, harmless creatures. And if it wasn’t, I had the gun. It was heavy in my hand, but a comforting heaviness. I kept my head on a swivel, alert with every sense for both the food we sought and any sign of a predator.
Our target was a residential neighborhood, but this area had clearly been a commercial district. A few buildings were still more or less intact, but the majority had collapsed or burned. Sometimes there was a faded sign or some other indication as to the nature of the business. I figured that, like the layout in San Tomas, the shops and offices would have lined the freeway with the houses further up the hill. But not too much farther, I hoped.
To our left was the remains of an enormous parking lot, with several multi-story buildings either still shakily standing around it, or imploded into immense piles of rubble. HOSPITAL, read a sign dangling from a rusted chain. Or H SPI AL, rather, but I’d always been good at word games. Instructions in dull red paint on the side of one building, bleached by the sun from its former vividness, pointed us toward the emergency room. Well, we were in a bit of an emergency, no doubt, but there’d been no one to help us in Deadwood for quite some time. The wreckage of a crashed helicopter punctuated the weed-filled driveway of the ER.
A few more blocks up the hill, the neighborhood turned residential. Small houses, or the charred remains of small houses, or sometimes just the concrete pad the small house had sat on, appeared at regular intervals. I slowed our pace even more, my head turning from side to side as I looked for what we needed.
“What are we looking for?” East whispered in my ear, her breath tickling my neck.
“Roses,” I breathed back.
“Roses?”
“Yeah. They’re not native, so if we see roses growing wild, we’ll know we’ve found somebody’s old garden.”
“Like those?” A tangle of pink and white roses was growing in the yard to our right. I looked at her. She grinned. “Beginner’s luck.”
Part of the house was still standing, though the roof had fallen in long ago and all the doors and windows were boarded up. The houses on either side were burnt-out hulks. There goes the neighborhood. Broad concrete steps led up to a wraparound porch. We were standing in what had been the front yard. I tried to imagine what the house had looked like Before. Like a picture from one of the books back at the Settlement. Maybe it had been a cute little white wooden house, with pink and white roses in the green grassy yard. Maybe a swing on the porch. Maybe a bomb shelter in the basement.
We cut around to the back and were rewarded with the sight of an orange tree and walnut tree, both bearing fruit, so to speak. Thank you, global warming. While East gathered nuts and oranges, I scoped out the ground level. If we were really lucky, we’d score some vegetables too. A potato would be nice. I stuck the gun in the back of my pants and bent down. I found a few strawberries and put them in my pocket. I was down on my hands and knees looking for more when I heard the growl. I looked up to meet the gaze of a surly-looking dog about twenty feet away. It was bigger than average, a yellowish brown with a ruff of fur standing up all along his back. Three more dogs slunk out of the bushes behind him as I slowly rose to my feet.
“East,” I said in a low, but urgent, voice. I pointed my gun at the dogs, who seemed to recognize it as a weapon. Who had taught them that? They watched me with intelligence and caution, ears pricked, tails up, as I carefully backed toward the house.
East was picking oranges off the tree by the back steps of the house.
“Oh, crap,” she said when she saw the dogs.
“Yeah,” I replied. “Move slowly, but get up on the porch.”
When dogs hunt in packs, one or more of them will circle around behind the prey so you’re trapped between them. We needed something against our backs, in this case the house. There was no way we could outrun them. Four dogs, six bullets. Probably not enough.
The floorboards of the porch were old and rotten, creaking ominously beneath our feet. There was already one big hole in the wooden steps, where it looked like someone’s boot had gone through in times long past.
“Gimme an orange,” I said out of the side of my mouth to East. Our eyes were pinned on the four dogs, who had now been joined by a fifth mangy cur. I yelled as loud as I could, startling East, and hurled the orange at the lead dog, the first one I had seen. I missed him but nailed one of his cohorts on the nose,
causing him to yelp and turn tail. East screamed something and threw an orange that went high and wide. The remaining dogs had spread out in a semicircle and were starting to slink toward us. What we needed here was less citrus and more bullets. I brought the gun up at arm’s length, holding it with both hands and carefully sighted down the barrel. Just the way Gran taught me.
Several things happened so close to one another I hardly knew which came first. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a man come around the side of the house. He lifted something like a long, skinny tube to his lips. There was a small, quick sound somewhere between a “pffftt” and “snick.” A dog yelped. I refocused on the pack and saw that the yellowish brown leader was now drunkenly staggering sideways across the yard. Something was sticking out of his neck—a tiny dart. Small feathers with a brilliant hint of green where the sun struck them adorned the shaft. The dog stumbled, then one of his forelegs suddenly collapsed beneath him. His chest on the ground, back legs still upright, he pitifully fought to regain all four feet. His eyes were bulging, the whites showing crazily. His chest heaving, his jaws opened and closed, snapping shut on nothing but air. As the other dogs barked and milled about in confusion, one of them slunk in and bit the leader, as if to snap him out of his bizarre behavior. As the lead dog went down in a twitching heap, a second “pffftt snick” shot out of the skinny tube, unerringly finding the neck of the other dog. When it too collapsed, the rest of the dogs seemed to lose heart and ran away, snapping and snarling at each other irritably.
All of this happened in mere seconds. East had screamed when the man appeared, bumping into me hard and knocking the gun out of my hands. It skittered across the floor of the porch and fell into the hole in the steps. Instinctively, I dived for it, but it was out of my reach. I looked up from my hands and knees (again) as the man came around the corner with a hunched and shambling gait to face us.
And a strange-looking man he was. He was old, maybe fifty, with a thatch of matted dark hair and beard gone gray and growing every which way. He was stringy and stooped, but still considerably taller than I. In his hand was the tube, which I now saw was a thin metal pipe. His clothes were dirty and tattered and he stank, but he had undeniably saved our bacon.
I was awkwardly sprawled on the steps. Before I could get up, before I could even open my mouth to thank him, he reached down and grabbed me by the collar of my shirt, yanking me to my feet. In a flash, he had me pinned up against him, his scrawny arm around my neck, half-strangling me.
“Don’t fight me, boy,” he rasped as I struggled. “I can make this easy or hard on you.”
“Hey!” East shouted. She wisely stayed out of reach up on the porch. I was doing my damnedest to send her a psychic message with my eyes to get the gun out of the hole in the steps, but she didn’t seem to be picking up on it.
“No worries, Pretty,” he said to her nastily. “I got plans for you too. This boy here won’t make more than a morsel, though…”
East seemed to be thinking about beaning him with an orange but then decided on diplomacy.
“Look,” she said, still loudly, but in an attempt at calm. She held out her hands, palms down, in a non-threatening gesture. She took a deep breath. I could see her struggling to not freak. “We can work this out, right? Let’s start over, okay? My name’s Elinor. What’s yours?”
I didn’t think making friends with the crazy bastard was going to be a successful technique, but at least she was buying us some time. I couldn’t see his face, but something about the way he was breathing told me he was considering her words.
“You can call me…Matteo,” he said, with a burbling, phlegmy laugh that was truly a horror. I didn’t get the joke. I was continuing to struggle, doing my best to wriggle away from him. His rank body odor being just one of my motivations.
“Boy, you better quit,” he said to me, shaking me hard enough to make my teeth rattle. I couldn’t get away, but in that shake, I caught a glimpse of his face—filthy, with only a few blackened stumps of teeth and one milky, wandering eye. I also caught the metallic gleam of the gun in its hiding place under the porch. And Matteo’s dirty feet in some kind of homemade sandals with rope straps.
If I could just get away from him, I thought desperately. Early on, Gabriel had taught me how to defend myself. Sad to say, I’d had plenty of practice over the years against schoolyard bullies, most of them bigger than I was. Gabriel had equipped me with a whole toolbox of dirty tricks that I was itching to try out on this guy. I was embarrassed he had caught me unawares. The whole thing had just happened so fast.
East was still trying to talk to him as if he were a sane person. I shot her a look and mouthed the word “gun” at her, but she merely stared back at me in puzzlement.
And then something really awful happened.
He sneezed on me.
His involuntary paroxysm resulted in his grip on me loosening, just for a second. And that was all the time I needed. In that moment of slackness, I wrenched myself out from under his arm and stomped on his exposed foot as hard as I could with my work boot. He screamed, then doubled over as I’d hoped and expected. Which meant his descending jaw met my ascending fist at high velocity. He went down like a ton of bricks. I then kicked him in the crotch for good measure.
“That’s for sneezing on me, asshole,” I told his prone and unconscious form.
I snatched the gun from under the porch and held a hand out to East, who still stood there gaping.
“RUN!” I yelled at her.
We ran.
Chapter Thirteen
The Three-Legged Race
We ran back down the weed-choked street toward the highway. The uncertain footing and our backpacks slowed us more than I liked. East was huffing and puffing beside me.
“Why,” she huffed, “didn’t…you…shoot…him?”
I was a little shocked to hear that coming from her. Bloodthirsty much? It hadn’t even occurred to me to shoot him once I had disabled him. Temporarily disabled him. I cast a quick uneasy glance over my shoulder. Nothing and nobody back there that I could see. Good.
I probably should have at least grabbed his metal pipe thingy. Or…something.
I shrugged, both mentally and physically. It’s always easy to second guess after the fact. If I started doubting myself out there, I would never stop. All I could do was keep trusting my instincts—instincts that had kept us alive so far.
Probably should’ve shot him, though. Well, maybe I could shoot the next crazy bastard we ran into. We were abreast of the gas station, our pace already slowed to a jog, our packs uncomfortably lurching up and down with each step, when East put a foot in a gopher hole and went down hard.
“Aw, fuck,” she said between gasps for air. She lay still for a moment, face down, trying to catch her breath. I ran back to give her a hand.
“Are you okay?”
She pushed herself up to balance on her hands and one knee, the other one obviously hurting. Her face twisted in pain as she tried moving her right leg.
“I think I sprained it,” she said.
“Disaster” was the word that immediately formed in my mind. Well, at least it wasn’t broken.
“Can you stand?” I asked, scanning around us and up the hill for any signs of danger. All clear for the moment. I was ready for us to be out of Redwood/Deadwood ASAP. Our sojourn there just kept getting worse. I bent down and put my hands under her arms to haul her back to her feet. She winced as she put her right foot on the ground, holding on to me for balance. The knee was not allowing her to put any weight on it.
“We need to keep moving, East,” I told her in as stress-free of a voice as I could muster. I had a bad feeling about the gas station. My gut told me it might be the home of our new friend Matteo. And by home I meant den. Lair. Hole.
“Just give me a minute,” she said peevishly, the pain stoking her ire, which I well understood.
We paused there for about thirty seconds while she took deep breaths, trying to marshal her res
ources while I thought of all the perils we were exposed to by standing still in the open. The Crazy Bastard being Number One. If we stood there long enough, we were bound to attract other predators: dogs, snakes, cougars, bears. We really needed to get a move on. I took a deep breath of my own and draped her arm over my shoulders.
“We can do this.” I put my arm around her waist. “Let’s at least find a place to hide.”
She nodded, the tense set of her jaw an indicator of the pain level. Cursing softly under her breath with every step, we limped slowly up the off-ramp and back onto the freeway. The wrong freeway. 101. We still had miles to go to get back down south to find the V. I fervently hoped East’s knee was only mildly sprained and she’d be better soon. Like any minute.
There was little cover on the freeway. Despite my firm intention to head south and not north—not one foot nearer to San Francisco—a clump of cars about a hundred feet to the north caught my eye. My innate preference was for the woods, but being on the pavement did have two distinct advantages: we could travel more quickly on it than we could through the brush and we could easily see anyone or anything approaching us for quite some distance. Of course, they could see us too. For a quick, temporary hiding place, however, the cars would have to do. I spoke words of encouragement in her ear as we gimped toward them, telling her that was our destination.
We had seen other cars on the highway, of course, earlier in our trip. Rusted-out skeleton cars. It was best not to look inside as you passed. Not long after the Bad Times began in earnest, there weren’t too many functioning cars left or drivers to drive them. Most people who could leave had already left the state by that point. And of the remaining vehicles not physically destroyed, something in the attacks seemed to have fried their electronics.
There had been plenty of warning signs of the impending catastrophes for those paying attention, both from Mother Nature and the federal government. The state government, however, had been desperately trying to hold things together. State employees—including the faculty at UCST—were told to stay at their posts, especially if they wanted to keep their jobs and benefits and retirement pensions. Some did, out of loyalty or fear or misplaced optimism. Thus our Settlement was born—a bunch of loyal, fearful, foolish optimists. And a few others, oddballs like Gran. Latecomers like East’s family.