by Riley Flynn
Signs for unfamiliar towns flew past every few minutes. Seneca. Clarion. Alex didn’t know them. They were just distractions, keeping him from his destination. Temptations on the road to salvation. For the first time in days or weeks–hell, even in years–he felt good. In control. Master of his fate. Captain of his whole road.
With every mile that passed by under the tires, every half-read road sign that sat on the roadside, Alex felt his heart rate slow. For the last three hours, ever since he’d first heard the Cadillacs rolling into Rockton, every beat had been booming, trying to break out through his ribs. Finally, the rhythm started to slow. At the same time, the car slowed down.
As he eased off the gas pedal, the knots of cars and trucks and other vehicles became tighter. More frequent. Harder to dodge. At a slower speed, it was easier. The noise inside the car died down at the same time.
“Alex?” Joan placed a hand on his shoulder. “Is everything okay?”
The worst question. It ran laps around Alex’s mind, turning into all sorts of shapes and transforming into all sorts of answers. Is everything okay? No. Nothing was okay. Not really. Not when looking at it from high up in the air, or even right up close. Plague. Chaos. People trying to kill them. No answers for anything. Nothing was okay. And these two people, arguing over the best campsites in Ohio, didn’t know the half of it. He shook his head.
“Who were those people?” she said, stroking the dog’s ears as it slept.
“Gang,” Timmy announced, pumped full of self-assurance. “A cartel maybe. I’ve read about them. MS-13. Netas. They had a jail up here in Toledo, probably broke out and went on a rampage. We got ‘em though. Joanie with the crack shot. Dead eye.”
He mimicked a pistol with his fingers, pointed it out the rear of the car, and fired. And again, making a gunshot sound by blowing air between his lips.
“It doesn’t matter who they are.” It was the first thing Alex had said in half an hour, and his mouth was dry. “It’s the other ones. They’re the danger.”
“Weren’t they just chasing down the criminals? I saw those men looting everything in town, and I assumed someone had sent the police. We don’t have many gangs in Rockton.”
“Who sent them? Who’s left?” Alex asked her, turning in his seat. “I don’t think there’s anybody left to call the police.”
“So who are they?” Timmy chimed in. “Mercenaries? If the whole world’s gone, then there’s probably a killing to be made in real estate right now. Lot of property on the market, I bet. Might is right.”
“No, I think Joan is right. I think they’re government. American. But I don’t know who. That’s the problem. Those gang idiots are just idiots, whatever. But the other guys? There’s something deeper there.”
The idea had been preying on his mind ever since one of their number had set up a small satellite dish in the middle of the street. They were prepared. They were well-equipped. There was something else happening here and it went deeper than just escaped prisoners stealing booze. Alex remembered the items he’d stuffed into his pocket earlier. He hadn’t had time to check them.
“Here,” he told the others, picking out the pieces. “I pulled this off one of the government guys back in town. Take a look.”
To Timmy, he handed the earpiece and the device that was attached via a curled wire. To Joan, he handed a folded plastic wallet stuffed with papers. Turning his eyes back to the road, he noticed how much more he was having to avoid the other cars. This stretch of highway must have been the busiest in America. Everyone wants to get to Cleveland, he thought to himself. But not us.
Already, Timmy was turning the device over and over in his hands. It was a smooth plastic, totally black and about the size of a cigarette packet. But thinner. Much thinner. It had sat in the man’s chest pocket and weighed nothing at all. Alex could see his friend fiddling with the switches and buttons, placing the earpiece to his head.
“There’s something here,” Timmy announced. “I can hear things. Let me try this.”
Without warning, Timmy reached down to the car dash and began to press every button available. It was an old car, still fitted with a radio from back before the trade wars. Searching for a cord or an outlet, he found nothing. Taking the façade off the tuner, pulling out a wire and a knife from his pocket, he went to work. Focusing on the road, all Alex could see was a flurry of exposed wires and the sound of snipping. Then, through the dash, the sound of static.
“We’re too far from the source, so it’s choppy, but you can make out those words, right?”
Alex listened. His friend was right. Chopped up words and phrases, dribbling through between the white noise. Straining the ears, it was almost possible to hear certain fragments repeated again and again: Block. Back up. Help. Too much. Needed. Clear. I-80. Satellite. Sweep. Clear. Infected. Sick. Survivors. None.
Trying to assemble the scattered scraps into a cohesive whole felt like trying to complete a jigsaw puzzle with only a few of the pieces and no idea what the final image looked like. All jagged corners and edges which didn’t fit together. But it was hypnotic, if only to hear the sound of a human voice over the radio once again.
Even if it sounded like another language, a communication from another world, it brought back memories of driving between cities. Arriving in a new state and fiddling with the dial, there’d be a country station or a rock station in an entirely new position. That old analog crawl through the noise. Only now, the voices on the other end didn’t just have a different accent; they had a different purpose.
“I think some of that’s Chinese,” Timmy ventured. “It damn sure ain’t English.”
Enthralled by the voices, the sirens calling through the radio, no one had paid attention to Joan. Quietly, she’d sat with the papers, searching through the plastic wallet while the car picked its way between the deserted vehicles on the freeway. There were so many of them now. They must be approaching a turn off or a city. Joan spoke up, tearing Alex’s attention away from the road.
“Er, guys,” she ventured. “What’s this?”
In the space between the two front seats, she held up a piece of plastic about half the size of a human thumb. Flicking a switch, a short metal protrusion emerged, gold plated for computer connectivity. A flash drive.
“I mean, I know what it is,” she continued, “but why was it tucked in among all these papers?”
Alex had no answers. The device must have been tucked up inside the plastic wallet, hidden from view.
“What can you see? Is there anything written on it? Or on the papers?”
Timmy had been staring intently at the drive.
“I can see this little logo,” he muttered, squinting, “painted in red. I think it’s a biohazard sign.”
“Exactly,” Joan agreed. “But there’s nothing else in these papers. They’re all in some sort of code. I’d need to sit down and look at it properly.”
In his seat, hands feeling the jittery steering wheel, Alex turned to take a look at the drive. There it was. The blood red logo. They were right. Biohazard. Recognizable all over the world. A triumph of branding. An advertiser’s dream. They all knew exactly what it meant.
With his eyes fixed on the drive, his mind strayed into the far reaches of the world of possibilities, the urge to know exactly what was contained in the recovered documents. Billions of ones and zeroes that might hold the answer. An answer. Any answer. Any information which might make sense of this twisted world.
“Alex,” Timmy shouted. “Watch out, man!”
Snapping back to the world, Alex saw the row of cars sitting in the middle of the rows ahead. He braked. It was too late.
38
The stiff strengthened steel of the bull bars crunched into the empty car. Alex felt the bit of the seatbelt chewing into his shoulder, squeezing the flesh tight. The sound of the engine cut out. It was quiet, for a second, and then the hurt started to catch. All three people in the car took to rubbing their shoulders, cradling their chests.<
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“Ah, man. Click it or ticket.”
Alex couldn’t help himself: he started laughing. It wasn’t funny. It didn’t matter. So utterly absurd, so utterly dangerous, but he couldn’t bring himself to stop. Soon, the others were joining in. The entire car began to rock, the laughter catching like a disease and infecting one another. Even Finn seemed happy, trying to lick the smile off Joan’s face.
Wresting control back, Alex wiped a tear from the corner of his eye. In the moment, it occurred to him how little he laughed. The last time anything had swept him up like Timmy’s joke, he must have been back in Virginia. Probably on Sammy’s porch, possibly at the family dinner table. A different time. A different life. The memory was enough to jerk him back to the real world. It hurt.
Looking up over the dash, he tried to see what they’d hit. It was a car, turned sideways across the road. A beaten-up sedan, from the nineties or some time back. No one inside. Unlike every other vehicle they’d passed, it wasn’t sitting right on the road. It had been turned at a right angle, forming a barrier. And it wasn’t alone.
Looking up over the scratched sedan’s roof, Alex could see other cars in the same crumpled condition. They’d been littered across the freeway, forming an obstacle course which would slow anyone down. The farther down the road he looked, the thicker the tangle of cars. About a quarter mile ahead, they were even stacked on top of one another.
Between the two sides of the freeway, the once-grassy space was now nothing but dirt. Dry dirt. On either side, the barriers which usually kept cars within the asphalt confines had been ripped up and laid across the road as obstacles. The tree line beyond was naked, almost encroaching on the road.
The key turned in the ignition, catching on the second attempt. Slipping the car into reverse, Alex began to back out of the wrecked sedan. The bull bars had done their job. Everything seemed to be working. Joan was scrabbling around on the floor of the car, hindered by her condition.
“Timmy,” she asked, “can you help me? I dropped it when the car hit.”
Turning in his seat, Timmy loosened his seatbelt. Before he could join the search, he tapped Alex on the shoulder.
“Man, look up. What’s that?”
He motioned with his chin, and Alex followed his gaze. A hundred feet behind them, there were people in the road. They emerged from the tree line, walking toward the car. One of them raised a hand. A flash of light. A window in a nearby abandoned truck shattered.
“Crap. Crap, crap, crap. Get out of here, man.”
Alex didn’t need to be told twice. He was already trying to get the car away. But reversing meant getting closer to the attackers. The road ahead was just a maze of twisted metal. Picking a route through with the car might be possible but it would be slow and it would take time. Time they didn’t have.
Another muzzle flash and another bullet whirring past. Time they didn’t have. Eyes scanning the road, Alex spotted a space between the trees.
“Hold tight. Hold real tight.”
The car reversed. In the back seat, Joan bent double, struggling to search around the floor of the car. The dog barked, catching sight of the men swarming towards them. Alex saw them too. The same outfits as the gang members back in Rockton. Bald skulls and white shirts, almost glowing in the sunset. They grew bigger and bigger as the car sped up.
The brakes screeched as Alex stopped. The gears clunked and groaned. The car began to crawl forward. Another gun shot, closer this time. On the roof of a distant truck, two men were setting up a large gun with a belt of bullets and two spindly legs. Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear. The mantra. He hit the gas, hard.
The smoke from the tires wrapped them in a cloud. The car lurched forward, heading for a space between two burned-out Hondas. It wasn’t big enough. Alex smashed through anyway. When the front tires hit the grass, the whole car jumped, and again when the rear tires followed.
“I’ve nearly got it, nearly got it,” Joan shouted from the floor.
The big gun was waking up. Checking his mirrors, Alex saw the first burst from the barrel, saw a chunk of turf explode to his right. They had to get to the trees. These were fall tress, shorn of their leaves.
Unwelcoming, grey and brown, they stretched away across the countryside. A wall of nature, hiding everything beyond. Get in there and they could hide. Or run. Or do something. Better than being sitting ducks, exposed in the road.
Riding over the rough ground was hard. Shaken like ragdolls, the passengers clung on tightly. All except Joan, still obsessed with snatching the drive up off the car floor. But it kept her flat, away from the shooting. They were fifty yards from the trees and the machine gun was warming up.
To the side, Alex could see the bullets eating up the ground. They chewed an arc from the road, following the car in a long loop, leaving only craters the size of buckets. Alex heaved the wheel to his left, lurching away from the swooping arc, and watched it follow. Away from the gap he was aiming for.
As the tracing curve almost caught up with the car, Alex flung the wheel back to the right, skipping ahead of the line and repositioning the car to sneak between the trees. A bullet caught on the bumper, sending shockwaves through the entire vehicle. But it worked. Ahead of the arc, just ten feet from the trees and travelling, they headed into the forest.
The attackers followed. There they were, riding in those same torn up SUVs. Jeeps which had been gutted and turned to dark intent. They had been pulling up along the freeway even as Alex had escaped and now chased him down into the depths of the forest.
“They’re laughing, man,” Timmy shouted. “Who the hell are these guys?”
He struggled to be heard over the sound of the car hurtling through the trees. They headed down a dirt path, barely flat and riddled with rocks and holes. Every time they hit a stone or a bump, Alex whispered a prayer for his welding. That suspension, he thought, was it tight enough? Every single turn of the wrench came back to him, each a possible fault that could ruin their chances of escape.
At the time, Alex had looked at the roll cage and the bull bars and every other change Timmy had made and wondered what the hell it was all for. He assumed that Timmy’s mind was just chasing a pipe dream, lofty ambitions of creating the ultimate survival machine while struck down with sickness. They hadn’t even managed to finish.
Right now, Alex could kiss his friend. He’d driven the car back before the changes. Like steering jello across an oily surface, barely fit to ferry kids back and forth to school. Now, everything was tighter, more controlled. Able to hold up to a thrashing. At least, as long as every weld held firm, as long as every nut and bolt stayed strong.
They headed down the hill. Not even a path, this must have been an old river bed. Nothing manmade could have been this uneven. This wasn’t a world for vehicles. But the people chasing, they seemed to find it fun. Alex could see them, just like Timmy had said. Laughing, smiling. They had guns but they weren’t firing. Enjoying the chase.
At least the path was straight. No steering, just keeping the car on an even keel. It wasn’t easy. Every time they hit a bump, the wheel tried to whirl away, testing the wrists. Alex was fighting against the car, against gravity, against losing control. Hold it together, hold it together, he told himself.
“I’ve got it!”
Joan held up the flash drive, thrusting the prize up in the air, pushing her glasses back up on the bridge of her nose. Finn barked. Joan turned and saw the people giving chase.
“Who the hell are these people?” she yelled, trying to make herself heard over the clattering.
“Not people you want to meet,” Timmy told her. “Just hold on.”
The path had given way. Not even clear anymore, Alex saw plants and bushes and trees vanish under the bull bars and the hood. The car flattened everything in its path. To the sides, the thick trunks of the ancient trees blurred into a single brown smear. Hit one of those and they were dead. It was as simple as that.
Still, the ripped-
up SUVs and the laughing faces chased them through the forest. This wasn’t driving like Steve McQueen. This was being Steve McQueen. Alex tried to channel the old movies he’d seen, the way the characters effortlessly flicked the wheel this way and that, driving themselves out of danger.
There was a bend ahead. Alex steeled himself. Get a hold of the nerves. Time to shine. He tapped the brakes.
Nothing happened.
With the constant bouncing of the car, they were in the air. Too much momentum. He tried again. A little effect. They slowed slightly. Just enough to take the corner with any confidence.
A waiting game. Perfect timing required. Get this wrong and they would hurtle headfirst into the trees, ready to be picked off by whatever gang members were following behind. Careful. Careful. Alex tapped the brakes again, just the tiniest touch. And then, at the last possible second, he turned the wheel.
The car careened around the corner. The rear swung out but the front turned. The hood faced around the corner while the trunk struggled to catch up. They drifted sideways, the wooden wall rising up on their side. Hit the gas. Now.
Alex’s foot stamped down. The wheels spun. Caught. The car pulled out of the drift, sending gravel and dirt flinging up behind them. Something for the chasers to deal with, swarming through a cloud of dust. The road straightened. And stopped.
39
The brakes shrieked. The car halted. The road had stopped and became a clearing, a river cut through the ground with huge boulders either side. Nowhere to go. Nowhere to run. Alex reversed, trying to find a new gap between the trees. Nothing. The only way out was back up the way they had just come.
From behind, the chasing pack stormed through the cloud of dust. The sound of laughter cut through the air. They didn’t see the river. They didn’t see the rocks. They didn’t see the other car. Not until it was too late.