Charges

by Stephen Knight

  A few miles down, the urban features began to erode, replaced by more suburban attributes: low-lying office buildings, individual shops instead of strip malls, apartment buildings, and row houses. Trees lined the street, and shade was suddenly plentiful beneath their widespread canopies of leaves. There were fewer abandoned cars in the middle of the street, but each street corner had garbage bags stacked ten high. Flies buzzed about, and Vincenzo detected the rank odor of untreated sewage. He wondered about infection.

  Children still played in the street, though they looked dirty and a bit worse for wear. Parents and other residents sat in tight groups on lawns. No one interacted with him other than to say hello, including the children. That suited him just fine. Vincenzo acknowledged the greetings.

  The neighborhood changed again, transitioning from apartments and row houses to more stately two-story brick and wood homes. Lawns were turning brown or being slowly overrun by weeds. Some homeowners were actively fighting it, kneeling in the afternoon sun to pull weeds. One enterprising individual was actually digging up his lawn in preparation for planting crops.

  The gray-haired man noticed Vincenzo and stood up. He wore a large pistol in a holster on his hip. “Excuse me. Have you heard anything about Atlanta? Any news from there at all?”

  Vincenzo shook his head. “No, afraid not. I’m coming from New York.”

  The man’s shoulders slumped. “Thank you.” With that, he turned back to his work.

  The houses became larger, and fewer people were evident. The stink of piling garbage and human waste became less omnipresent. Every now and then, a field or vacant lot would appear. Some had evidence that they’d been used as camping grounds, while others seemed pristine and untouched. Vincenzo stopped beneath a tree and sucked cold water from his Hydro Flask. He’d refrigerated some of his water at the firehouse, and it was still cold in the high-tech vessel. The travel cooler the Ackermans had given him was full of ice, which kept a couple of bottles of water and some perishable food cool. It wouldn’t last for long, but it was probably enough to get him to Fort Indiantown Gap.

  He walked past a strip mall with a Ruby Tuesday and a Five Guys burger shop. There was some activity in the parking lot, what seemed to be citizens and some uniformed police overseeing another trading bazaar. Vincenzo inspected it from the road, trying to determine if it was worth his time to stop and take a look. Why, you got something to trade? He walked past the activity without stopping.

  By two o’clock, the majority of Allentown and its surrounding suburbs were behind him. He passed some outlying malls where not a lot was happening, and there weren’t a huge amount of people milling about. When he came to some highway overpasses, he took a knee beneath a tree and pulled out his map. He could take Route 22 to Interstate 78, which was the most convenient approach. Alternatively, he would have to get on Interstate 476 and travel north for a mile or so before turning west. He was still nervous about being on a highway, but if there was a chance that substantial aid could be had at the National Guard base Guardino had mentioned, then he had to accept the risk. The interstate would present the fastest, most direct route. Also maybe the one that could present the most trouble.

  He headed for Route 22. There was still plenty of sunlight left, and he felt pretty good, all things considered. His feet and legs didn’t hurt as much as when he’d first started his journey. His body was getting stronger, but he was losing weight. His clothes didn’t fit him as well, and he had to tighten his belt to keep his pants from sagging. Pretty soon, he might start looking like an urban thugster with his pants hanging half off his ass.

  The incline for the on-ramp was steep enough to make his thighs ache a bit, so he paused at the crest to take a look around. There was plenty of dead traffic baking away in the sun and more than a few indications that foot traffic had been high in the previous days. But for the moment, no other travelers were in sight. He turned west.

  Two hours later, he came upon a pile of wreckage that spanned both westbound lanes. A tractor trailer had slammed into halted traffic and jackknifed before rolling over and tearing away a great chunk of the concrete barrier that separated the travel lanes. The truck had been full of mattresses, and they lay scattered across the roadway. Some had been torn open, exposing their inner springs and foam cushioning. Others were virtually immaculate, still in their plastic shipping sleeves. Vincenzo could have stretched out and taken a nap right then and there, but something smelled rotten.

  Reaching beneath his shirt and gripping the butt of the pistol, he walked around the shattered cab of the truck. A car had been practically annihilated by the impact. It was nothing more than a flattened mass of metal and shattered fiberglass, and the shadows of long-dried liquids discolored the asphalt. At first, Vincenzo thought the stink of death came from inside that, or one of the other vehicles that had been caught up in the collision. A Nissan had been catapulted tail-first into the concrete barrier. Its windshield faced him, and through the cracked glass, he saw a man slumped over the steering wheel, his face hidden by the pale ribbon of an air bag.

  When Vincenzo rounded the last set of crushed cars, he found he had been mistaken about the source of the stench. Black birds exploded into the sky with angry caws, causing him to stumble backward and let out a startled yelp. The reek of death suddenly intensified as the birds took flight and disappeared into the trees along the side of the highway. Three women lay on the road in various stages of undress. One had apparently been strangled with her own nylons and sodomized with a bottle that remained where her attacker had left it. Her flabby thighs were blotched with spots of decay, the flesh torn by the birds. Another woman, likely younger due to the size of the body, was face down in a dried puddle of blood, her bare buttocks likewise savaged by carrion birds and any other animal that might have been hungry. The third was definitely a child, and her body had been hacked at with a sharp knife. The only blood visible was on the thighs, so the cutting might have happened after she was already dead.

  Vincenzo’s stomach roiled, and he lurched away from the scene with a cry. He broke into a sprint, winding his way around stalled cars and trucks, his feet kicking up garbage and refuse. He was dimly aware of the flock of crows flapping their way back to the corpses, their wings tearing at the air as they raced each other to the feeding trough. Vincenzo kept running until his lungs burned and his legs began to cramp, the sweat pouring off him. When he couldn’t go any farther, he stopped and leaned against a dirty white panel van that had been pulled off to the side of the road. Its doors were open, and it looked as if travelers had been using it as a place to sleep. He slid until he sat on its rear bumper, facing the direction he had come from. The jackknifed truck was almost a fifth of a mile away, and he couldn’t see the corpses at all.

  Damn, haven’t run that far since high school. Bile burned the back of his throat, and he spit into the dust on the side of the road. With trembling hands, he reached for the Hydro Flask. The walking stick fell and clattered to the road. He ignored it and opened the flask, pausing for a moment to make sure he was under control before he drank. His stomach felt fluttery, but his throat was raw and dry. He didn’t feel great, but he didn’t feel as though he was going to vomit all over his boots, either. He took a pull of cool water, a small one at first, then followed it with a larger one, washing away the burning acid.

  “Fuck me,” he said, gasping. “Fucking goddamn this shit to hell.”

  It happened over a week ago, probably even longer. They were caught on the highway during the event. A mother, maybe, and her daughters. And someone or a group caught them in the open, raped them, killed them, and dumped their bodies at the accident site. He wondered if it was possible the women had been traveling with the dead man in the Nissan. Had an entire family been wiped out? But there were no occupants in the other cars, as far as he could tell.

  He knew he was only a half mile or so from the forty-seven mile marker. If he could find a policeman or a soldier and tell them where they could fin
d the bodies. Maybe the murderer or murderers could be caught and tried.

  You’re kidding yourself, paisan, a small voice told him. No one’s going to give a shit about three dead women on a country highway, not anymore. People are running out of water, food, everything. The world’s a different place, and people are going to start taking care of themselves and their own, and that’s it. You’d better just stick to getting yourself to where you need to be. Don’t go making any trouble.

  He shook his head. Fuck, when did I suddenly become a guy who stopped caring?

  Sorry? You actually think you care about other people, fuckface? the voice responded. You? The guy who just couldn’t wait to stop thinking about your dead kid?

  Vincenzo snorted as he put away the Hydro Flask. He bent over to reclaim his walking stick. The muscles in his legs were twitching uncomfortably, telling him he’d probably pushed them too hard by running with so much weight on his back. He checked his watch. It was almost six o’clock. The sun was much lower in the sky, but he still had a couple of hours of daylight left. He would press on for another hour then start looking for a camp site.

  Somewhere far from the highway.

  Vincenzo crossed an open field to a stand of tall trees about six hundred yards from the highway. There were no trails leading through the grass, so he felt it was reasonably safe to presume no one was already there, but just the same, he approached the trees with as much caution as he could muster. His Rolex told him it was just after seven, and the trees were in a fair amount of shadow thanks to the slight rise to their west. He reached their boundary and almost immediately stepped right into a thorn bush, catching a barb right in the balls. He yelped and backtracked until he found a way around the thorny bushes.

  He found a good spot to make camp, shielded by heavy thorn bushes on one side and trees on the other with some brush filling in the gaps between them. In the fading light, he spread out the tarp then his sleeping bag. He pulled out his map and checked his route. Even though he was on the interstate, he was basically paralleling his previously plotted path, which meant heading to Fort Indiantown Gap wasn’t really taking him out of his way. If Guardino was right, he should be able to make it to the National Guard base by the next evening. Vincenzo wasn’t certain a lot of good would come from it, but if the government was offering aid, then he’d be better served by checking it out than ignoring it. The government—whatever parts of it were still functioning—stood a better chance of getting him to California faster than his boots ever could.

  He ate a small meal and refilled his Hydro Flask with one of the bottled waters from the hiking cooler. The cooler was full of melting ice, which while disappointing, at least gave him another water source. He took some Tylenol then brushed his teeth and dug a small cat hole for his waste.

  It was full-on dusk by the time he stretched out on the sleeping bag. He could see patches of sky overhead, a shadowy blue populated with high-altitude cirrus clouds. He thought about the Ackermans again, and he hoped they’d made it to Cincinnati. He decided that, once things were finally back to normal, he would definitely make a trip to Ohio to see how they were doing.

  He was just drifting off when he heard screams. At first, he thought they were the product of a dream, but they sounded again: a man and a woman, both screaming, followed by a burst of rough laughter from several different male voices. What the fuck? Vincenzo sat up and drew the Beretta.

  The man screamed again, and his screeching intensified in pitch and frequency before dying off into a gurgle. Then the woman’s cries started up, accompanied by men’s jeering voices. He couldn’t make out the words, but it sounded as though they were shouting some sort of encouragement.

  Vincenzo looked down at the pistol in his hand. His thumb rested on the safety, and his index finger stretched out along the cool metal of its frame, right above the trigger guard. Don’t get involved.

  The woman’s shrieks continued, and the men laughed and cheered. In the distance, he heard dogs barking.

  Don’t get involved.

  After an hour or so, the woman’s hoarse screams trailed off into muted gasps and whimpering. Vincenzo caught a whiff of cooking food, but the darkness was complete. He could see nothing, not even his own hand when he held it up in front of his face. Voices muttered, and in counterpoint to the woman’s moaning cries, they sounded cheerful and boisterous. Congratulatory. There was laughter, a lot of it. The woman continued moaning and sobbing.

  Don’t get involved.

  Her cries ended sometime during the night, and the men grew quiet as well.

  Vincenzo finally slept, the Beretta in his hand.

  20

  Vincenzo awoke before dawn. In the inky pre-dawn gloom, he relieved himself in the cat hole then covered up his mess. After hitting his hands with a dose of sanitizer gel, he made a light breakfast and chased it down with Tylenol and water. He could no longer smell cooking food, but he knew he wasn’t alone. There were predators on the interstate, and he didn’t know what to do about them. He crouched in the darkness, listening. He heard nothing, but he had no doubt they were still there, camped out on the road. He figured his best bet was to push off before they roused themselves, and put some distance between them.

  He packed up his camp and holstered the Beretta. After hoisting the hiking pack onto his shoulders, he picked up the walking stick and pushed his way through the brush that surrounded his campsite. He stuck to the treeline for as long as he could, but as he mounted the hillock to the west, it began to peter out. There was a trailer park there, so he pulled his binoculars from his knapsack. The park had been surrounded by dead cars and trucks, making a crude and probably ineffective wall. Several men and women moved about in the gloom, many carrying long guns. He also spotted some dogs, which explained the barking he’d heard the night before. Vincenzo observed the trailer park for a few minutes, trying to figure out the best way past. Making contact was out of the question. If the residents had heard the screams last night, then they would probably shoot first and ask questions later if he emerged from the trees and walked up on them. And he couldn’t blame them. If someone headed his way after that, he’d likely open up on them himself.

  Vincenzo backtracked a hundred yards or so until he felt he could leave the treeline and not be seen. Danger wasn’t far enough away for him to be complacent, so he drew the Beretta and clicked off the safety. The eastern horizon was still brightening, and the sun was perhaps half an hour from rising; still, there was more than enough light to see by. And enough light to be seen by.

  He marched through the tall grass that separated him from the interstate. All was quiet on that stilled artery. Abandoned vehicles loomed in the murk, but there was no movement and no sound other than that made by a few waking birds and his own footfalls as he pressed through the grass that was damp with dew.

  He made it to the interstate and knelt on the shoulder of the eastbound lanes, taking a moment to survey the territory. All seemed quiet, so he mounted the interstate, drifting toward the concrete barrier that separated the travel lanes. He didn’t know exactly where the predators he had heard last night were, but he suspected they were behind him. The screaming had come from the east, and he was headed west. He would eventually come within sight of the trailer park, as it overlooked the interstate, but if he hurried, he hoped to be past it before the sun came up.

  It was difficult to move quickly and maintain any degree of stealth. Vincenzo darted from vehicle to vehicle, using them as cover. There weren’t a lot of cars along that stretch of highway, so he had to hustle across several open gaps. He hugged the concrete barrier then eventually crossed over it, putting it between him and the upcoming trailer park. At the same time, he kept checking behind him for any signs of pursuit.

  As he neared the trailer park, the open spaces became more numerous. He had to expose himself for extended periods of time as he jogged from one car to another, the sweat pouring off his body as the eastern horizon continued to brighten. His attent
ion was mostly fixed on the trailer park. When he came abreast of it, he could see the barrier of cars.

  And looming above those, the silhouettes of several humans.

  And the rifles they pointed at him.

  Vincenzo ran to the next car and flattened himself against it, heart hammering. Cautiously, he peered around it, gasping for air from his run and the fright that coursed through him like an electric shock. His eyes burned as perspiration ran into them, and he paused to swipe at them. He had spotted scopes on some of the rifles, and he was deep into hunting territory, so several of the people sighting down on him were likely experienced shots. The Acura SUV he crouched behind wasn’t going to give him much protection against a real hunting round like a .308 or .30-06. And even a hundred boxes of nine-millimeter weren’t going to help him. A pistol was no match against several attackers armed with high-powered, precision weaponry.

  One of the people crouched behind the wall of cars stood up straight. He waved his left hand over his head, holding his rifle in the other. Vincenzo stared, unsure of what to do. Was the man trying to get his attention?

  The man stopped waving, pointed directly at Vincenzo then motioned to the west. He followed that by pointing to the east and holding up four fingers. Vincenzo thought the man might be telling him to keep going, but he had no idea what the four fingers meant.

  Down the highway, he heard the distinctive sound of a bottle rolling across the asphalt. He crouched lower and looked back to the east. After a moment, he saw four heavily armed men walking around an immobile truck. Three of them paused to give the truck the once-over, peering inside before pulling open its doors. The fourth man stood security, his rifle—a nasty-looking weapon with military styling—held at the ready. They all wore jeans or camouflage hunting gear, hiking boots or athletic shoes, and sported heavy beards. The man standing watch was totally bald, his scalp gleaming slightly in the brightening morning. Vincenzo realized that they were the men he had heard the night before. They didn’t know he was ahead of them, but it wouldn’t be long before they found him. Oh, fuck.