by Scott Mackay
Darkness was her world, and her car was her life.
At last they reached Georgia. Glenda couldn’t believe how long it was taking them to travel the four hundred miles from Raleigh to Marblehill. She was anxious because her charge was getting lower and lower, and Hanna’s coughing was getting worse and worse. They were well up in the mountains and, luckily, there hadn’t been any more road washouts or landslides. The rain had stopped, and the hills were holding. What bothered her were the immense fog banks—fog so thick it was like cheese, with a stench like rotten algae.
She took 441 south through Clayton, Tallulah Falls, and Turnerville, glad to reach Turnerville because the hills and valleys weren’t so big, and the road didn’t wind so much. Also, there was some farmland, not the chilling and grotesque dead forest all the time, which was really starting to frazzle her. But she was also unnerved to reach Turnerville because Turnerville was where they really had to start looking out for Buzz.
Though it was ten o’clock in the morning, the sky was black. The only light came from her headlights.
They pierced the misty gloom like twin swords.
Ten miles later, they came to Clarkesville. She veered onto 17. The charge needle was on empty. Yet Clarkesville was a heady milestone to Glenda, the last town they passed before they reached Marblehill.
She remembered the road now, and didn’t need Gerry’s old map. Seventeen twisted north to 75, at which point she turned left on 75 and headed west again on an old blacktop highway that looked as if it had been abandoned by road crews years ago.
She was no more than a mile along 75 when a cloud of flies enveloped the car. She slowed right down because she couldn’t see through the flies. They landed on her windshield and didn’t blow off. This made seeing difficult. She turned on her windshield wipers and brushed them away. But too late. She bashed into something, and the car lurched to a halt. Her kids jerked forward in their seat belts. The pressure of
Hanna’s seat belt against the girl’s chest made her cough again, and it was a miserable, exhausted cough.
“Jake, give me the handgun,” said Glenda.
“What’d we hit?”
“I don’t know. I can’t see a thing. These damn flies.”
Jake handed the gun to her, and she got out of the car.
She shut the door so the flies wouldn’t get in, and walked around to the front. The flies immediately got in her hair, eyes, and ears. She brushed them away as best she could, but there were so many that she made only a halfhearted effort, and then resigned herself to suffering through them.
She shone the flashlight on the road and saw that she had run into a dead horse. The horse looked as if it had been shot through the head. Who would shoot a horse through the head? The animal was horribly emaciated, and starting to putrefy.
Shining her flashlight further up the road, she saw three other dead horses blocking the way at various distances. At last, far ahead, she saw a truck with a horse trailer, the trailer jackknifed across the road.
She cast her flashlight along the shoulder and wasn’t sure if she would have enough room to get by.
She approached the truck slowly, walking through this bizarre scene of equine mayhem with an overwhelming sense of apprehension. The other three horses looked as if they had also been pulled out of the trailer and shot. The flies got thicker, and the stench was horrendous. This was what she hated about her new world, how every so often a scene from Hell would arise, and there would never be any emergency crews to clear it away, only the terrifying effects of nature on dead flesh. She lifted the handgun and walked closer to the cab.
As she rounded the front of the horse trailer and came to the pickup truck, she peered in through the driver’s door and saw a man slumped forward against the steering wheel, a bloodstain shaped like a spider tattooing the side of his head. The dashboard lights were on, and the computer screen was telling her that while the engine might be off, the electrical was still on, and draining the charge at a rate of two percent per hour. Glenda had a wild hope that they might use this truck to get the rest of the way to Marblehill. Her hopes were further bolstered when she leaned over and looked at the charge gauge—it was a quarter full. Here, at the scene of this odd horse slaughter, they might find salvation.
But then she heard a noise from down the road. Her head swung in the direction of the sound. For a few seconds the noise disappeared, but then it came back stronger. Buzz. Like a hurricane coming in from the Atlantic, bound to get here sooner or later. Why couldn’t she be lucky every now and again, the way Neil and Louise were? Why couldn’t things go her way just once?
She took one more longing glance at the charge gauge in the truck, then ran back to her car. There was no time to make the switch.
Jake was up on his knees on the backseat, peering out the rear window. Hanna coughed and coughed, so miserable that she was in tears. Glenda handed the gun to Jake.
“I can’t see him yet, Mom.”
“He’s back there. The road climbs and dips.”
She got in, put the car in gear, and the dashboard immediately flashed a warning telling her she’d better charge up now or risk getting stranded. She had no choice but to ignore it. She leaned forward so she could get a better view through the windshield, eased her foot off the brake, backed up a bit, and maneuvered first around the dead horses, then the trailer, and finally the truck. Once past the truck she accelerated.
She looked in her rearview mirror and saw Buzz braking at the horse massacre site. He came to a stop, got out of his truck, and went to investigate the animals. He left his headlights on and was silhouetted in their glow.
He must have seen them because he lifted his rifle and shot toward them. The back window smashed.
“Jake, get down!
Jake was already down, but he lifted the gun and fired blindly a few times out the smashed back window. She glanced in the rearview mirror again and saw Buzz running back to his truck for shelter.
Then she just concentrated on getting as far ahead of him as she could.
As the road dipped down into a gully, she saw a track leading through a fence off to her left. With her charge light blinking, she knew she didn’t have more than a mile or two left. She swung left onto the track, where she saw a stand of dead trees up ahead, her headlights illuminating their gray trunks. She felt like she was in an airplane, and that the engine had just given out and she was now gliding. She wanted to turn her headlights off because she was sure Buzz would see them in the dark; at the same time, she was afraid she might crash into a tree if she turned them off. So she kept them on…until they failed all on their own.
She swung off the track and crashed into the dead bushes, hoping to hide the car with this last desperate maneuver before her final charge ran out. Junker that it was, the car behaved abysmally, and she found herself in a small creek once the twenty-second ordeal was at an end.
“Get out of the car!” she cried.
“Where are we going?” asked Hanna.
“As far away from here as we can.”
“She’s spent?” said Jake.
“She’s spent.”
He peered over at the dashboard as if he didn’t believe her, but finally nodded in a way that was far too grown-up.
They got out of the car and she was immediately surprised by how slippery the ground was, how it seemed to seethe underfoot with a rottenness all its own, and how it sent up a smell, not quite like a dead rat festering behind a baseboard but still carrying the sweetness of putrefaction.
They struggled down the creek bank. At last they reached the edge and waded into the water—the creek seemed to be the clearest path anywhere. The sound of Buzz’s pickup got closer and closer.
She started to cry. Who was meant to take this? One of Satan’s agents was following her through Armageddon. That was more than any housewife and part-time nursing-home attendant should be expected to take. She didn’t even have her car anymore.
“Keep going straight up,
” she said.
“Mom, the bottom’s slippery,” said Hanna.
“Just stay along the side.”
She glanced back toward the road and saw Buzz’s truck coming along the crumbling blacktop, bumping and rattling as it took the potholes, pink haloes forming around his headlights in the mist rising from the ground. As he reached the track, he slowed down.
She turned around. “I can’t see a thing.”
“Mom, let’s climb up here,” said Jake.
She peered into the blackness and perceived some dead brambles in the stray glow coming from Buzz’s headlights.
“Okay.”
“Mom, I’m going to shoot him.”
“You can’t shoot long-range with a handgun.”
“If he gets anywhere close, I’m going to shoot him.”
“And what will you to do if you miss? He’s got a rifle. A rifle’s more accurate than a handgun. Hanna, are you all right?”
“I can’t breathe.”
“Come up here. There’s some logs we can hide behind.”
They all climbed up onto the bank. She reached the logs. They looked like lengths of cow fence that had never been used and, to her surprise, they were dry. After all the rain, things were drying out again in the intense heat.
“Let’s get behind here.”
She got behind the logs. Jake settled in beside her. Glenda took Hanna’s arm and guided her. Hanna started coughing again.
“Hanna, just try to keep them down for the next little while.”
“Mom, I can’t…” She couldn’t finish her sentence because she started coughing again.
Jake gave his mother a glance.
Glenda shrugged. “Sweetie, just try.”
Jake took off his T-shirt, scrunched it up, and handed it to his sister. “Cough into this, Hanna. See if you can muffle them a bit.”
Hanna nodded woefully, took her brother’s T-shirt, and pressed it to her face. She struggled valiantly, managing to keep the explosions to a minimum, stopping the ragged, barking coughs that had plagued her ever since her medicine had run out, but Glenda wondered if it would be enough, especially in the dead quiet of the countryside. At least they were by a creek, and the current made a bit of noise—maybe enough to cover the sound of Hanna coughing.
Buzz turned off the road and came along the track, driving slowly, no more than two or three miles per hour. As he approached, he shone a flashlight out the driver’s-side window. Its beam was powerful, fully charged, and cut through the misty air with silvery precision, catching like bright flecks the flies that spun and whirled above the dead grass. Glenda wondered how Buzz was keeping his engine charged, but then remembered that his vehicle had a gasoline backup system. At last, his flashlight beam found her tire tracks, then the back of her car. It was funny yet awful to see the family car half in the creek like that.
Buzz turned off the track and drove toward her car through the field. Hanna coughed and coughed into Jake’s T-shirt, muting the noise. Glenda rubbed her back, trying to comfort her.
Jake peered over the logs, then started reloading the handgun.
Glenda tried to get her crying under control, but she was scared and her heart was filled with a great sorrow, not only for herself and her children, but for the man who was trying to hunt them down. How Buzz must have loved his brother. She regretted killing Maynard. Never wanted to. But what choice had he given her?
Buzz drove about halfway to the car and stopped. He got out of his truck and crouched behind the front fender for a long time, his rifle poised over the vehicle. Jake finished reloading the gun.
At last Buzz called out. “Glenda?” He obviously thought they were still in the car.
Jake’s hand tightened around the gun. Glenda reached over and rested her hand on his arm. Hanna continued her muffled coughing.
“Kids?” said Buzz.
Buzz waited another minute before he finally ran crouched over to the creek and took a position on his stomach ten yards upstream from her car. He crawled into a small hollow and disappeared from view for the next minute.
Hanna continued to cough, muffling it well. Still, could Buzz hear that? And just where the hell was he?
She couldn’t see him anywhere.
But then he sprang up on one knee, reminding her of a gopher coming out of its hole, and shot at her car, expertly pulling the bolt back after each round, expelling the spent cartridge, loading another one into the chamber, and squeezing the trigger so that he got off a shot every second or so—seven in all, emptying his magazine into the vehicle. He shot with vengeful intensity, his heated emotion guiding his actions. Each muzzle flash was a tongue of white flame. The reports echoed in the hills, and the sound of bullets clanking into her poor old car dried up Glenda’s tears immediately.
Her fear was now as cold and numbing as an anesthetic. Six simple words drifted through her mind: This guy wants to kill us. They were obvious words, and framed a fact she already knew, but until now they had been something only her mind had acknowledged, not her body. Now they filled her every blood vessel, every sinew, every bone with fear. Her physiological terror made her break into a sweat. She wanted to run, but checked the urge because to run now would only alert Buzz to their location. She swallowed and swallowed, but there seemed to be a hard clot of dryness in her throat that stopped her from swallowing with any degree of success. Hanna ceased coughing, as if the coughs had been scared right out of her. Jake was still on his knees with the gun poised over the pile of old logs.
Buzz meanwhile went back to the ground, and in the peripheral glow of his truck’s headlights, Glenda saw him reloading, thumbing one cartridge after another into his magazine.
At last he got back up.
“Glenda?” he called.
He stared at the car a moment more, then scanned the surrounding countryside. Now even Buzz looked scared.
“Glenda, why don’t you just give up? You know I’m going to get you sooner or later. I know you’re on your way to Marblehill. If you come out now, I’ll spare your children.”
Hanna started coughing again, but she once more muffled it with Jake’s T-shirt, forcing herself to halt the loud, barking explosions and making do with smaller, less percussive ones.
Buzz bolted for the car, dropping to his knees as he reached the driver’s door, then looked all around the countryside again. After another minute, he stood up and looked inside the car. He shone his flashlight in through the windows, first in the front, then in the back. At last he got to his feet and kicked the car as if he were angry at it, then kicked it again, and finally swore.
He opened the back door and started going through their stuff.
“Mom, I think I can get him,” whispered Jake.
“Jake, not from this distance. Not with a handgun. And what’s he wearing? Looks like some kind of…flak jacket.”
It was hard to tell from this distance, in the dark and from behind all these bushes, but the more she looked, the more she grew convinced that he was wearing a bullet-resistant vest. It would make sense, his brother being a cop and all.
Buzz rummaged through the back, dimly illuminated by his truck’s headlights, pulled out Hanna’s clothes bag, and tossed it into the creek. He found the map, folded it, and tucked it into one of his vest pockets.
Then he stood up and looked over the roof. He seemed to stare right at them.
Jake squirmed. “Mom?”
“No, Jake,” she whispered.
Hanna coughed and coughed, and it built and built, and finally she had one of her loud, racking coughs.
Buzz immediately lifted his rifle and fired in the direction of the cough. The three Thorndikes sank right to
the ground. Hanna continued to cough, struggling and struggling, but she simply couldn’t keep them down.
“I hear you,” called Buzz. “Why don’t you just come out and get it over with? You got to pay for what you did, Glenda. So why prolong the agony? Why make your kids suffer like this?”
And before she could stop him, Jake was standing up and blasting away with the handgun. She grabbed his pant leg and tugged him, but he continued to blast away, and she hoped—God, how she hoped—that he would get Buzz with a good head shot that would take him down once and for all.
She gripped the top log and pulled herself up. Buzz ran wildly back to his vehicle, so spooked by Jake’s fusillade of bullets that he didn’t have the good sense to take cover behind her own car, but bolted toward his junky old truck like a deer in hunting season instead. Jake fired and fired, but he was just wasting bullets. At last the gun was empty, and he ducked back down and fumbled in his pocket for more rounds.
“We’re going this way,” said Glenda, and grabbed them both by their sleeves.
They headed away from the logs and felt their way over the rough, uneven land. She kept glancing behind to see if Buzz would follow them, or fire at them, but all she saw was his truck now, with its headlights piercing the gloom. She had the flashlight, but she didn’t dare turn it on. The land rose through trees that were no more than a few feet taller than she was, Christmas trees, only all the needles had fallen off. A ridge curved upward to the right. She glanced over her shoulder again and saw Buzz emerge from behind his truck. He leveled his rifle across the front of his truck and shot in the direction of the logs.
“Just keep going,” she said. “Climb the ridge. We’ll circle back to the road in a little while.”
“Mom… we’ve got to figure out some way to ambush him,” said Jake.
“Let’s just make for Marblehill. Once we get to Marblehill, we’ll be safe.”
This was her credo now. Get to Marblehill. Only she wasn’t sure she believed it anymore. Was anywhere safe? Could she and her family trust the airmen there? And what about the Tarsalans?
Wouldn’t some of them be landing in Chattahoochee once the TMS was destroyed? Maybe the TMS
was already destroyed. We’ll be safe, we’ll be safe, we’ll be safe. But was that possible? Tears came back to her eyes.
As she finally reached the top of the ridge, she looked down at her car. Buzz now poured gasoline into its interior. In a moment, there was light. Lots of it. Her whole car was engulfed. She stared at the light, even as her feet trudged forward. It was indeed the second Stone Age, she decided. Because, like a cavewoman, she found any fire, even the one that was taking her car away from her, mesmerizing.