“So … they put a bullet in her brain—” Charlie drew in a deep breath and powered up his window.
“Hell you doing?”
“What if it’s airborne?”
“Then we’re already infected.”
“You sure?”
Shaking his head, Duncan said, “She damn near gave us both a spit bath back there. Roll your window back down. It smells like a bucket of assholes in here.” He sniffed his armpit. “And it ain’t me.”
Chapter 23
Half a block down 47th where the street began to level off there was a break in the barriers allowing access to a drive leading into some of the staff parking for Providence Hospital.
While the Traffic Division building and its acres of parking pretty much owned the southwest corner of East Burnside at 47th, Providence Hospital proved to be a goliath, its campus sprawling north and east for several blocks in each direction. The main building fronted 47th and cast a shadow on everything around it, most notably I-84, which snaked through the gully once known as Sullivan’s Gulch.
In the passenger seat Charlie was scrubbing at his face with the front of his shirt. White gut exposed and jiggling like a bowl of Jell-O, he said through the thin fabric, “You really think we can get the infection from spit and sweat?
“No idea,” Duncan replied truthfully. He slowed the truck to a crawl, leaned over the wheel to peer past Charlie, and saw at least six deep and static on the drive, the ambulances that had blazed by them a few blocks back. There were paramedics scurrying about unloading patients, some on gurneys, most ambulatory. Soldiers were milling about. Nothing about the way they held their weapons and kept their heads constantly moving said things were under control on the premises. That the discharged patient loading area was being used as a makeshift ER in-processing site only added to Duncan’s unease. He swung his gaze forward and sized up the soldiers at the looming roadblock. “I wonder what the trauma offload area looks like.”
Charlie lowered the shirt long enough to say, “No doubt as full as the pickup area.”
Preparing to stop for the roadblock identical to the one behind them, Duncan shifted his body to the right a bit and glanced down to see if any part of the shotgun was visible. Good to go. Charlie’s boot heels were abutting the pump and keeping it out of sight.
Back at it with the shirt, Charlie asked, “You have a plan B?”
Duncan remained tight-lipped. Mainly because he didn’t really know. He had a dead body in the loadbed. There was a shotgun, its legality debatable, underneath the seat. And as a cherry on the sundae he had a .45 caliber Colt Model 1911 perched on his hip and in plain view on account of his losing his shirt two blocks back.
“That’s a helluva plan B, buddy. Thanks for letting me in on it.”
Ignoring the quip, Duncan said, “We’re going back to your place so I can think this through.”
“And Tilly?”
“If the soldiers don’t detain us … I don’t know,” Duncan replied, the Dodge’s brakes grating as they rolled up to the roadblock.
In the distance the Portland police set up on the overpass to guard the north approach made the obligatory effort of turning their heads, then quickly returned their attention to turning their queue of vehicles away from the hospital.
The guard soldiers didn’t appear to be concerned. Their rifles remained aimed at the ground. Only one of them, a woman in full battle rattle, met Duncan’s gaze.
Feeling one-hundred-percent redneck, naked from the waist up, tiny old man boobs on display, he offered a tentative greeting, lifting one hand off the wheel while forcing a smile. In his head he was chanting don’t look in the back, all while Charlie was fidgeting and all but holding up a sign begging the rest of the soldiers to pay them closer scrutiny.
As the concrete barriers closed in, Duncan prepared for the worst. Which he imagined would include the female soldier seeing Tilly’s corpse, leading to him and Charlie being thrown in jail until the forensics people could get to the house and verify their innocence. Then his gut clenched when he recalled the recent shooting and realized the two check points were most assuredly in radio contact with each other. He couldn’t help but think that if the fully infected got the bullet, then those in contact with the infected most likely warranted a long period of quarantine crammed in with other infected. Suddenly a stint in jail didn’t seem so bad.
“We’re fucked,” he said through clenched teeth.
But apparently Lady Luck wasn’t through with them for the day. Instead of the anticipated request to come to a full stop, the female soldier, helmet snugged down tight, flicked her narrowed eyes from Charlie to Duncan and then raised a gloved hand and motioned to her right. Considering she was brandishing an M4 carbine, who was Duncan to argue?
So he cut his left blinker on, out of habit, mostly, and let his foot off the brake, slow rolling the ninety-degree left turn. And as the truck swung around broadside to the grim-faced soldiers, he saw in his wing mirror the entry road he guessed meandered away to the back of the hospital where trucks rolled in to deliver food, medical supplies, and whatever else a hospital required to run efficiently. Near the entrance to this feeder road was a shiny red garbage truck. Painted on its side in large white letters were the words: ROSE CITY SANITARY. Hinged up in back of the big rig was a rectangular metal hatch the size of its entire squared-off back end. And stacked to the top of the truck’s garbage ram plate were scores of shiny black body bags identical to the one the cyclist had been stuffed inside of.
Leaving the soldiers behind, he flicked his gaze from the macabre sight that had just sent a warning tingle crawling up his spine and was instantly distracted by two more things that interested him greatly. The first was a glimpse of Interstate 84 compliments of Charlie’s oversized side mirror. There was no traffic moving on it whatsoever. Last time he had seen it empty like that was when one president or another had visited and shut down 205 and 84 between the airport and downtown to all traffic.
The street they had been directed to follow was no wider than those in Ladd’s Edition and ran parallel to Interstate 84 for a short distance to another roadblock, where more soldiers wearing stern looks directed them away from the hospital and thankfully whatever battle was currently being waged there between man and microbe.
Covering his mouth with his forearm, Duncan stopped the truck long enough to ask the soldiers why the roadblocks were springing up so suddenly around town.
The soldiers said nothing.
So Duncan asked them what they knew about D.C.
Still, they remained quiet, stoic.
A small two-door import formed up on their bumper and honked. Three sharp blasts. All business. Duncan flicked his eyes to the side mirror and saw the woman driver’s arms and gums flapping. Though the reflection of overhead wires criss-crossed the windshield, he clearly made out the words: Move that piece of shit, asshole.
Duncan smiled coyly at the woman’s reflection in the mirror. Then, as the horn went silent, he swung his gaze back to the soldiers standing at ease.
“Throw us a bone,” he pleaded. “Please?”
Remaining tight-lipped, gloved hands clutching their black carbines, nearly in unison the soldiers motioned him onward with shallow sweeps of their barrels.
Incredulous, Duncan said, “You can’t tell us anything?”
Slow wags of their heads now accompanied the movement of their rifles. Duncan locked eyes with each of them for a split-second. And that was all he needed to discern the severity of the unfolding situation they were all embroiled in. The younger of the two was definitely scared. However, the eyes of the one wearing the sergeant’s stripes hid nothing. They were narrowed to slits. His compact muscled body was fully opened up to the Dodge. A ghost of a smile curled one corner of his lip. Everything about the redhead twenty-something screamed I want to get some. And Duncan couldn’t really blame the lad. Having been young and stateside when the war in Southeast Asia started, he had wanted nothing more than to hit t
hat seventeenth birthday so he could enlist and serve his country as so many in the Winters’s family had done before him. Never was a Winters boy that needed a poster with Uncle Sam pointing a finger and making an obvious proclamation to get the patriotic juices flowing.
The horn blared several more times. No order to the ragged reports this time. There was panic building in the car’s driver, of that Duncan was certain.
So in full understanding, knowing the troops had orders and a job to do and all that, he nodded and moved on. However, in doing so, he raised his left arm off the window sill and gave the woman in the little car behind him the finger. He turned around and saw Charlie snickering.
“What?”
“Just staring at your moobs. That’s all.”
This time it was Charlie who got the bird.
Duncan smiled.
Progress, not perfection.
Chapter 24
Overcome by a feeling of helplessness the likes of which he hadn’t experienced since the Viet Cong made their big move on the South more than four decades ago, Duncan drove them home in silence, taking back roads and steering clear of 39th Avenue and the numerous National Guard roadblocks that had sprouted up all along its length.
Nearly halfway home, a few blocks south of the Woodstock neighborhood, they were struck by how clear the roads were. No longer were random vehicles blazing down side streets and blowing lights. It was now so quiet it seemed to Duncan that he and Charlie had been dropped into a Twilight Zone episode.
It was pushing ninety degrees outside, the leaves were still green, albeit brown at the edges from the recent stretch of similarly hot days, yet the stores and bars were shuttered and dark as if it was Christmas Day—about the only day of the year anymore there was a commerce shutdown of this magnitude. There were no cars in the lots. No people in a mad dash to stock up before the perceived coming apocalypse. No people bending elbows in the bars behind glowing neon.
Finally, seemingly reading Duncan’s mind, Charlie said, “Did someone declare Martial Law?”
“I didn’t get the memo,” Duncan quipped.
Realizing they’d been cutting south by east across the city with the radio off since he’d silenced it in front of Providence Hospital, Duncan reached for the volume knob.
“Sure you want to know what that was all about back there?” Charlie asked, an ominous tone to his voice. “Because if Martial Law has been declared, there’s going to be many more like her—”
Slowly stroking his silver mustache, Duncan looked sidelong at Charlie. “What do you mean by that last part?”
Momentarily at a loss for words, Charlie pinched the bridge of his nose and drew a deep breath.
Seeing a police cruiser crawl by in the opposite direction a block west, Duncan leaned heavily on the gas pedal and took a quick left followed by a right and then another tire-squealing left at the next block.
Checking over his shoulder for the cop, Charlie finally answered, “That chickie … she wasn’t right. And those eyes. Sure they were moving around in her skull. Trying to fix on my face.” He shivered and swallowed hard. “But they were clouded over, Duncan. Like somehow cataracts had formed between the time we left Tilly’s and arrived at the hospital.”
“I saw ‘em,” Duncan conceded. “And she had a smell about her.” He upped the volume on the radio, signaling an end to the conversation.
The speakers emitted nothing but soft static as they slid through 72nd. The sign on the pole in front of the mom and pop grocery there was dark. The declaration Open 365 24/7 spelled out with removable letters on the reader board was partially true. Because though the signage and interior lighting lent a contrary position, the door was propped open and a teen and a man Duncan recognized and guessed was the owner were busy loading stock from the store into a panel van parked sideways across the entry.
“Should be the other way around,” Charlie observed. “Open 24/7, 365.”
“Least of his worries,” Duncan said. With no sign of the patrol car in his rearview, he doubled back the handful of blocks, ignored the blinking red, and turned left to continue east on Flavel. Growing tired of the incessant hiss, he leaned forward and thumbed the Seek button on the stereo head unit, starting the tuner automatically cycling down the dial. Flicking his eyes back to the road, he said, “Maybe there’ll be something on here that—”
At 82nd, Duncan hung a right and saw the cruiser he had been trying to avoid stopped at a red light a block distant. Though he had been lucky on a couple of occasions today, his timing on this particular light hadn’t been touched by it.
As the radio tuner locked on a channel playing a prerecorded loop put out by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Duncan slowed the truck and began craning out the window as if he were lost. In doing so he noticed how things had changed since he’d passed by here last. On the east side of 82nd, the blocks and blocks of establishments with signs offering Private Lap Dances, Authentic Tamales and Burritos, Liquor, and everything in between were darkened, their OPEN signs flipped to CLOSED. On the corner opposite the Chinese Take Out place the windowless pawn shop no longer had an armed guard standing underneath the now extinguished neon sign still promising Cash for Guns, Gold, and Jewelry. A few blocks south on 82nd Avenue it was obvious the storefronts with signs offering all kinds of financial transactions were shut down as well.
Like semaphore on a ghost ship, colorful banners and flags strung above the used car lots popped and wagged in the brisk afternoon breeze.
Strange, Duncan thought, even the hookers seem to have taken the rest of the day off, as if they got rolled up with the sidewalks.
Just when Duncan thought they were going to be forced to interact with the officer at the red light, the cruiser’s light bar exploded with sound and color and the Charger sped away south.
Duncan exhaled as his light turned green. Then, seeing the cruiser turn right a number of blocks ahead, said, “Thank you, Lady Luck.”
***
The sound the big Dodge made crunching up the gravel drive set the neighbor’s dog to barking. Duncan parked on the pad and stilled the engine, which, thankfully, reduced the dog’s mournful braying to a series of inquisitive growls.
“You need to put a shirt on. Before you do, I recommend running some deodorant over those pits.”
Duncan raised an arm and sniffed. Shaking his head, he said, “Still not me.” He hooked a thumb at the sliding window. It was open a hand’s width, with Tilly’s bloated corpse visible by the tailgate.
Charlie scrunched up his nose.
Duncan added, “She’s been dead a day and a half. It’s to be expected. Bicycle Girl … not so much. How do you explain the smell comin’ outta her piehole before the soldier popped her?”
“For the hundredth time,” Charlie said, forcefully. "I don’t care what you think the CDC scientists meant by the gobbledy gook they’re spewing on the radio loop … that girl was not dead. Not in the real sense of the word.”
“Well Tilly is,” Duncan said. “And we can’t leave her out here for the bugs and animals to get to.”
Fearing Duncan was going to advocate moving the stiffening corpse into the house, Charlie swallowed hard and said, “What are we going to do with her?”
“We can’t bring her in the house.”
Charlie visibly relaxed. Then, having an idea of where Duncan was going to go next with this, wagged his head side-to-side and said, “Let’s at least try calling the coroner or a mortuary before doing that.”
Duncan looked at his phone. “I’ve got zero bars. You got a better idea?”
Charlie said nothing. He stepped from the truck and slammed his door, starting the canine barking again.
Duncan closed his door quietly and walked to the rear of the truck. Head down with both hands clutching the tailgate, he pictured Tilly on her deathbed, a peaceful and serene look on her face as if she hadn’t a care in the world.
However, as he let the tailgate clang open, what he
saw lying there would stay with him forever. After being subjected to the spin cycle that was their roundabout trip from Ladd’s Edition to Providence and back to Charlie’s, the old girl looked as if she had gone twelve rounds in the ring with Muhammad Ali. Her nose was broken in the shape of a lightning bolt. And it was evident her left arm was dislocated by the way it seemed to be waving at him from underneath her body.
Charlie whistled, then uttered a couple of expletives. “Look what your Duke Boys’ driving did to her.”
“She’s dead, Charlie,” Duncan drawled, gesturing at the corpse. “Unlike Bicycle Girl, Matilda didn’t feel any of what caused this.”
Charlie plucked the comforter and sheet from the truck bed and tossed them by the fence, setting off another round of angry barking. He said, “The cyclist was dead, too. You heard what the CDC Director was saying on the radio.”
“How could I not have? Thing kept looping the same information.”
“Then you heard him ticking off the same rules that I did.”
“I’m done rehashing that,” Duncan scoffed. He grabbed ahold of one of Tilly’s plump ankles, the exposed skin there cool and strangely elastic-like. “You going to help me or not?”
After a fair amount of tugging and nudging they got the corpse out of the truck bed and onto the cement parking pad.
Duncan stood beside the prostrate corpse and massaged his lower back.
Without saying where he was going or what he had in mind, Charlie disappeared into the house.
Grumbling and still shirtless, Duncan worked his way around the side of the house. Swatting away thorny grabbing branches on some sort of overgrown bushes, he finally located the Rubbermaid shed containing Charlie’s garden tools.
The shed was locked, so Duncan trudged back to the truck to the tune of more barking. He moved the shotgun aside and rummaged under the seat blindly until his hand brushed the cool smooth vinyl of the truck’s tool kit.
ocalypse (Book 10): Drawl (Duncan's Story) Page 13