by McBain, Tim
“Hurry up,” she said.
“I’m trying. Jesus, Lorraine. Stop pressuring me.”
There. She heard it. The stream of urine slapped the blacktop at his feet.
He put a palm on the bricks in front of him for balance and scooted his legs out and back, bending partially at the waist. The position made her chuckle, though after a second she realized he must be attempting to keep the piss off his shoes.
The thing lurched out of the dumpster before either of them could react. She thought it was a dog at first, a dog lunging up from among the garbage bags to tear out his jugular. Almost like a dog draped in fabric.
It clung to his shoulders, and the face part attached to his neck. It almost looked like a baby sloth climbing on its mother.
He screamed. He screamed like a woman. There was no other way to describe it.
He turned away from the brick wall, and the thing came into view. It wasn’t a dog. It was a girl in a black hoodie. She was dead, or she should have been. The right side of her face was all chewed off, revealing the skeletal view of her cheek bone and temple and teeth. The remaining flesh on the opposite side of her face was yellowed and shiny like sweaty cheese. Her eyes didn’t seem to recognize anything going on around her, but her mouth never stopped reaching out for meat like a baby bird’s gaping beak.
He teetered, hands ripping at the thing, screaming whenever the head nuzzled into him, whenever the teeth ripped at his skin. He stumbled backward a few paces, and then over-corrected, lurching forward, knees skidding down in the piss puddle.
And then the thing tore away a pretty good sized neck chunk, and the blood sprayed like the spigot next to her garden. He gurgled three times, throaty sounds like that suction tube at the dentist removing saliva from the back of the mouth, and he was gone, lying still while the thing ate him.
A rabid dead girl. That was how her husband, Greg, died earlier that afternoon. With his cock out in an alley.
She woke. Back in the dark. Back in the Grand Cherokee. Back with the swearing preacher, a human being more like a lizard than a man. More like a snake. He hung up his phone right away as she opened her eyes, his movements rushed. Suspicious, she thought.
She watched him lick his lips as he drove, his big orange face lit up by the dashboard lights. Why did it work this way? Why did a lizard person, con artist get to live while Greg died a horrific death?
She dug in her purse for one more pill.
Ray
Rural Texas
2 days before
The headlights pierced the dark, but the black still seemed to close in on them, pressing against the windows all around. They drove into the dead of night, no one else around, the Grand Cherokee barreling north on backroads neither of them had ever heard of. The signs on the side of the road mentioned tiny towns that were equally unfamiliar.
She slept off and on, her neck going limp to lean her head down onto her shoulder, a single dribble of drool spilling onto the seat. When she was out, he felt like he was navigating some bigger vehicle as it pressed into the void, a ship of some kind hurtling into the black nothing. It almost felt like driving a house.
Sometime after 3 AM, she woke. She rifled through her purse, pulled out an orange container of prescription pills. Her hands moved to twist its head off, but Ray intervened, snatching the pill bottle away.
“What is this?” he said.
The pills rattled in the bottle, and he felt the muscles in his face tense, his brow crease, his jaw flex.
Her mouth hung open, and he thought she wasn’t going to say anything, but after a second she did.
“It’s my medication.”
This was a tone he hadn’t heard from her to this point. The indignance of the entitled rich woman. A housewife, he would guess. The kind of housewife who was very important with little to do, always planning dinner parties and brunches and get-togethers, an endless stream of meaningless interactions all meticulously plotted out and fussed over.
He tilted the bottle toward the light spilling out of the dash indicators. First he saw her name. Lorraine. Lorraine Murray. Huh. Not a D name after all. He scanned farther. Xanax. A powerful anti-anxiety medicine. One of the most addictive and one of the most dangerous, from what he had learned the hard way.
He caught his reflection in the driver’s side window out of the corner of his eye, saw the scowl on his mouth, the furrow of his brow, and then something in him softened. Why was he so angry? Why was his instinct to intervene here, to tell a stranger how to behave?
He tossed the pills to her.
“Gotta be careful with that stuff,” he said. “Those sedative hypnotics will mess you up bad if you get hooked.”
She gripped the pill bottle as though to open it but stopped and put them away instead.
“Your body gets so addicted that it crosses wires in your brain. When you try to quit, you can go into a coma. Happened to my boy. He didn’t make it.”
He licked his lips.
“But that was a long time ago.”
She didn’t say anything, and a quiet came over the car, a tension. The black pressed even harder at the windows, trying to get inside and swallow them up.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know what came over me. I guess with what happened earlier...”
Her head turned, and their eyes met for the first time in a while.
“Don’t worry about it,” she said, and she put her hand on his arm.
“They’re going to bomb it,” he said, his voice just above a whisper.
“Bomb what?”
“Houston. The government is giving up on beating the plague. Killing some so others might live. Probably lots of cities in the South are going down.”
She didn’t say anything, but her grip on his arm tightened.
Erin
Presto, Pennsylvania
48 days after
An explosive crack echoed across the valley to the north.
Erin reached for the edge of the pool and stopped paddling. She held still, waiting.
The noise came again, twice. It was a sound that used to mean hunting season. Or target practice. Not anymore.
Her heart raced. Gunshots meant people. And people were bad enough. People with guns… she didn’t want to think about it.
Izzy popped up from under the water.
“How long did I hold it that time?”
“Get out of the pool.”
Erin was already lifting herself out. Water dribbled from her hair and clothes onto the ground.
“What?”
“Just do it.”
She reached out and pulled Izzy from the pool. Four more shots rang out.
“What was that?”
Erin was too busy scanning the horizon to answer.
“Was that a gun?”
“Put your shoes on.”
They wove back through the path in the cornfield. When the house came in to view, Erin crouched down, creeping to the edge. Watching for movement.
She didn’t know where they were or who they were, but their presence in their neighborhood felt like a violation. The house had come to feel like a safe place. Maybe the only safe place in the world. And now Erin feared to go inside because she was worried they’d be trapped there if someone came looking.
Almost as bad, the house held all of their supplies. All of their food. She’d completely taken for granted the possibility that someone could come take it. And there would be nothing they could do but sit out here in the dried up corn husks and shiver in their wet clothes.
“It sounded like it was coming from up by the house where we got the generator. That’s close.”
Erin shushed her. She continued scanning the area, eyes flicking from left to right and back again.
“If we snuck up through the woods,” Izzy whispered, “we could get a closer look.”
“No, we should stay here.”
Izzy let out a little grunt of impatience.
“For how long? I’m hungry.�
��
“Until we’re sure they’re gone.”
Erin thought back to the day they’d heard the engine, and they’d run into the woods to hide. The time she’d left Izzy behind.
They’d been ill-prepared then, and they were ill-prepared now. What if the worst case scenario came true, and they did have to run? If someone rode up the drive right now, they’d have to. And they’d be without food or water. No blankets. No dry clothes. Screwed.
Just like they’d needed to get serious about gathering food, they needed to get serious about security. It was life and death out here. No police or parents were around to protect them. Not anymore.
Every time she thought she was making progress, finally figuring things out, the world stuck out a leg and tripped her as she ran by.
Pain shot threw Erin’s jaw. She’d been grinding her molars together in frustration.
She unclenched her teeth and opened her mouth to stretch her jaw muscles out.
Izzy was being uncharacteristically quiet. Erin swiveled around and found herself alone in the field. An electric current of fear jolted through her and made her shoulders jerk. Her mind leapt to the most dramatic possibility first: they had taken Izzy.
OK, no. That was silly. There had to be a rational explanation. Maybe… Maybe she scooted off to pee or something.
“Izzy?”
It came out in a throaty hiss. Not quite a whisper, but not a full projection of her voice either.
The only answer was the scrape of dry cornstalks shifting in the breeze.
She tried to keep from panicking, but her brain fought her for that right, insisting that this was an absolutely appropriate moment to panic.
Again her thoughts went to the time she left Izzy behind. Had she done it again? The events were all jumbled in her head, like a deck of cards someone threw to the ground. Some landed face up, some face down. They were all out of order.
She started at the beginning.
They were swimming in the pool. Izzy was underwater, holding her breath. Erin was supposed to be counting. She heard the first gunshot and froze. It wasn’t until the second shot that she knew for sure. She climbed out and told Izzy to get out of the pool. There were more gunshots. How many more? Three or four, she couldn’t remember. They slid their shoes on over wet feet. No socks. They made their way through the corn, stopping when the house came in view. And then they squatted there. They. Or had she just assumed Izzy was there the whole time? She imagined Izzy trying to peel the flippers off so she could get her shoes on. Maybe she took too long and Erin rushed off without her. But no. She’d said something while they waited in the field. She was hungry.
Something rankled in her memory. There was something she was missing. Something else Izzy said. Erin closed her eyes, tried to let it come to her. When it did, her eyes snapped open.
A closer look.
That’s what Izzy had said.
“We could get a closer look.”
Mitch
Bethel Park, Pennsylvania
41 days before
He watched his sons eat in silence, their eyes still puffy with sleep. It was early for them, and in a way he hated to wake them, but he didn’t have a lot of time, something he thought Kevin understood, at least.
Matt’s blanket draped around his shoulders at his seat at the kitchen table. The blue bedspread wrinkled when he reached out for his glass of orange juice. It almost looked like a cape flapping behind him in the wind.
“Either of you ever driven a car before?” Mitch said, his voice sounding thick and sleepy even to himself.
Wrinkles creased both of the foreheads sitting across from him as all four eyebrows raised. All of the attention quickly turned away from the food. Kevin shook his head, and Matt followed his lead a beat later.
“I figured not. I thought maybe we’d head out to the backroads when you’re done eating, and you could give it a shot.”
He shrugged and added:
“Might come in handy sooner than later, I suspect.”
“Driving lessons? Me too?” Matt said.
“Yeah, why not? You may as well give it a try.”
Matt’s eyes were wide open now, early morning or not. He sliced a big wedge of pancake with the side of his fork, smeared it in syrup and chewed it as fast as possible before going back to slice off another chunk.
Kevin rolled his eyes, and Mitch smiled.
“Slow down, Matthew. You’ll choke.”
The sun reflected off of the gray surface of the asphalt, the rock and tar combination worn smooth by the endless rub of car tires. Mitch put it in park, and the car idled in the middle of the vacant road. He slid over to the passenger seat.
“You ready?” he said, looking at Kevin.
His older son pressed his lips together, but he quit doing it as soon as he knew Mitch was looking. Nervous and trying to hide it, Mitch thought. Better to be a little nervous than fearless, as far as he was concerned. Kevin slid out the back door and banged it shut behind him, a whoosh of the morning air rushing in with the door’s movement, still thick with humidity.
Mitch checked the mirror and glanced around as Kevin climbed behind the wheel and buckled himself in. Nobody around for as far as he could see.
“Ready?” he said.
“Yeah, I think so.”
“Did you adjust the seat so you’re comfortable getting to the pedals?”
Kevin reached down by his ankles and slid the seat forward a couple of clicks.
“OK. Put it in drive and let’s do this.”
He had Kevin start with his foot off of the accelerator, letting the car crawl forward, so he could get a handle for the controls without the added pressure of speed. The boy panicked a little, jerking them to seatbelt-tugging stops four times in the first 30 seconds.
“Relax,” Mitch said. “Just relax. You’re in control.”
Kevin took a deep breath and let it out slow. He released the brake, and they rolled on. Over the next couple of minutes, something clicked. He seemed to pick up the nuances of the way the brake and the wheel gave him control over the car, that they were tools to be used subtly, not violently.
He loosened his death grip on the wheel and acquired a feel for how the vehicle moved, how it handled. Mitch had him speed up to 25 miles per hour, and they drove a while past fields of soy beans and corn, taking a right turn and two left turns. Mitch directed Kevin to build up speed little by little until they were flying along at the speed limit like it was normal.
“Look how quickly you figured that out. Experience is the only way to learn,” Mitch said. “What do you think?”
“I don’t know. It’s pretty fun.”
“Easier than you thought it’d be, isn’t it?”
Kevin nodded.
“I want to do it,” Matt said. “I’m supposed to get a turn!”
Mitch laughed.
“You will, you will. In just a minute.”
He looked into the back seat to see Matt clinging to the door, knuckles white. Apparently he wasn’t so comfortable with Kevin’s driving, which seemed funny.
They drove on. Mitch had Kevin pull into someone’s dirt driveway and back out for a little practice moving in reverse. That seemed to make the new driver uncomfortable. He slammed on the brakes again, giving them all a good shake. Things smoothed out when they got back on the road.
He made eye contact with Kevin at a stop sign, and he clapped a hand on his shoulder and smiled at his son. Even though his eyes hurt, and his head hurt, and the heat rolled off of his skull in waves, and the blackness inside spread until it would break and end him, he smiled so his boy would know he was proud of him.
“Put it in park,” he said. “We better give Matt a turn.”
Kevin put it in park, a skeptical smirk on his lips. Mitch gave him a look, a tilt of the head and a wry smile.
Matt released his vice grip from the door handle, and the boys exchanged seats. Matt looked so small behind the driver’s seat. Tiny.
“How much do you weigh? Do you know?” Mitch said as Matt buckled himself in.
“53 pounds.”
“And that’s all muscle, right?”
“Pretty much. Well, I guess some of it would be bone, too.”
He scratched his cheek.
“How much of it do you think would be bone, Dad?”
“I have no idea. But hey, you can reach the pedals and still see over the wheel, right?”
Matt’s feet kicked out toward the pedals, but they came up short. Even in this position, he could barely see over the wheel. When he slid himself down far enough to get a toe on the brake, he was almost laying down on the seat.
“Maybe not,” he said.
“Well, that’s OK. How about I work the pedals for you, and you can steer?”
“We can do that?”
“Yeah, you’ll just sit on my lap.”
“Will I really be steering, though?”
“Of course.”
Baghead
Rural Arkansas
9 years, 126 days after
The day fell to dusk fell to night, the dark deepening around them until it achieved full blackness. The headlights cut wedges of light out of the gloom, but they were no help inside the car.
If the Delta 88 ever had dash lights, they must have burned out long ago. Probably well before everyone got sick and died, Bags thought. This feature, or lack thereof, made him uneasy. When Delfino talked, it was a disembodied voice speaking from the shadows, and somewhere in the back a rabid girl still slept, but he was unable to check on her visually. The darkness imprisoned him. All he could do was stare straight ahead where the lights lit up the next section of road that they’d hurtle down.
Would she be confused when she woke up in the dark? Would she look out at the headlights and remember the car and the food and the guy with the bag on his head?
“You thought about a name?” Delfino said, startling Baghead from his thoughts.
“What?”
“Let’s say the rabid child back there don’t talk. Like, ever. Have you thought about what you might name her?”