The question you have to ask yourself, she thought, is would they be capable of leaving you behind?
Capable? Yes. But would they? She didn’t think so.
They carried the guns and ammo out to the car, arranging everything along the floor in front of the backseat. Taylor stuffed the Glock between the driver and passenger seats so that only the handle was visible. Everything else was packed into the trunk.
“Is that everything?”
Tina nodded. “I think so.”
“I brought this. For emergencies,” Carl said, smiling as he showed them a bottle of Wild Turkey he had wrapped in a flannel shirt.
“Alcohol?”
“Yep. It’s probably older than the gods. It could come in handy though.”
“How?”
“As a sleep aid.”
Carl winked at her and wrapped the flannel shirt around the bottle. “That about covers it I think.”
Tina slid into the backseat, careful not to step on the rifles. A pile of sleeping bags were stacked on the other side of the seat on top of the box of supplies they had taken from her father’s house. She scooted over next to them and leaned her head against the pile. “How long does it take to get there?” she asked, closing her eyes.
“A few hours. That’s under normal conditions. It’ll take longer now.”
Carl came around to the passenger side of the car when he saw them. Coldwater. Population: 1579. At least half of them had to be coming down the road as though they were part of a marathon. It was one of those situations where time stretches out like taffy.
Taylor saw his brother frozen in the act of getting into the car and glanced into the rearview mirror. “Hey. Hey! Get in the car!”
Carl was still in slow motion, but he managed to pivot, slump down in the seat, and pull the door closed.
Taylor gunned the engine, one hand moved to the butt of the Glock and stayed there. He watched the rabid things following after them. There were several agonizing seconds as the Escort’s lethargic engine debated on whether it would continue running, that he thought the mob would overtake them, that he saw them growing closer in the mirror, but the car gave a dramatic lurch and carried them forward and away from danger.
Carl wore a startled expression. He pulled the bottle of Wild Turkey from the flannel shirt and unscrewed the lid. He raised the bottle to his nose and sniffed it. The odor made him cringe, but he took a quick swallow anyway, trying not to taste it as it lit up his insides with a fire he could feel all the way down to his stomach. He held the bottle out to Taylor.
Taylor shook his head.
“Come on. You’re not that old.”
Taylor moved his hand from the handle of the Glock and took the bottle. He let some of it settle in his mouth, allowing it to rest there, the awful taste like a bitter magic that served to lighten the heavy lids of his eyes. After the initial burn subsided, a comforting warmth spread through his body.
He could feel a tickle at the back of his throat. Not painful yet but the subtle precursor of worse things to come. His body was wearing down. He needed rest. A hot meal would help, too, but sleep was what his body required now. He took another sip from the bottle and then handed it back to Carl.
“That’s the most we’ve seen,” Carl said. “It looked like damned near the whole town.”
“Looked like it.”
“It makes you wonder what a big city would look like. Think about it. What must Denver look like?”
“I don’t know,” Taylor said. “I think Dad had the right idea. Avoid places where there are a lot of people. Hide out. It’s the smart thing to do. Doesn’t matter how many guns we’ve got, there are too many of those things to try it any other way.”
“They found us again. You realize that don’t you? I would have figured they’d find us at my place after hearing the gunshots, but they found us at Mom and Dad’s.”
“There’s something to that. I just don’t know what yet. Some kind of special sense because they couldn’t have heard us all the way out here. We need to keep that in mind.”
Carl had the shotgun angled so that it rested against the dashboard, the barrel pointing toward the car’s ceiling. He kept it braced between his knees so it wouldn’t slide around.
Taylor waited until the rabid things had disappeared from view completely before taking a left on Seymour. Out of two places in town to get gas, one was a charred ruin. He prayed the other was in working order.
The shop was two blocks east of Main Street, sandwiched between a car dealership and a beauty salon. The town’s only bank, occupying a squat brick building, sat kitty corner from the shop. He could see the shop’s twin gas pumps standing side-by-side like metal headstones a hundred yards ahead.
Carl rolled down the passenger-side window and picked up the shotgun. “I’ll keep you covered,” he said.
“Yeah, well, just don’t accidentally go blowing us up.”
“How are you going to get gas? I mean, it looks like the thing works, but nobody’s inside to give you access to it.”
Taylor paused in the act of exiting the car. He removed his wallet and plucked out a plastic card. “For emergencies. Mom gave it to me years ago.”
He came around the side of the car, unscrewed the gas cap, and inserted his keycard into the slot of a metal reader that stood next to the pump. Nothing happened. Please, God, let this work. Just one damn thing. The ratio of good to bad is really jacked up right now. How about evening it out some?
He removed the card and tried again. This time there was a brief Ding! and Taylor was able to pull down a small metal lever that activated the pump. He began filling the tank, watching the numbers roll by on the pump’s old-fashioned display.
“It’s working,” Carl said. “I can’t believe it. I didn’t think it would. Nothing else has.”
Taylor pointed to the row of cars lined up neatly side-by-side in front of the glass display of the car dealership. “If that had been the case, we could have siphoned some off from those. It would have been a lot more time consuming though.”
When the tank was full, Taylor hung the nozzle back in its cradle. He looked to the west and saw some them rounding the corner, still moving en masse, participants in a parade for crazy fuckers. “Time to hit the road,” he said and got into the car.
“You realize how many of those people we know?” Carl asked. “I could name off most of them.”
Taylor nodded. He focused on the road ahead, watching the needle of the speedometer jump to sixty. He recognized most of them, too. He was thankful that the three Coldwater residents that were the most important to him had had the sense to head for the mountains. Whether they had made it or not was another matter. He shoved those dark thoughts deep down; there wasn’t room for them now. The trick, he thought, was to set small goals and work on completing them one by one. You didn’t disregard any possibilities, but you let them sit along the side of the road like mile markers; signs you glanced at only occasionally because there were larger signs to follow.
Taylor glanced into the rearview mirror. “How you doing back there?”
Tina’s eyes fluttered open. She surveyed the world outside the confines of the Escort and said, “Okay, I guess. We’re going the same way we came?”
“Yeah, we’re kind of backtracking. The place we’re going is a about an hour and a half into Wyoming. Going seventy-five, it’s probably a four hour trip. Like I said, that’s optimum conditions. Most likely it’ll take longer than that.”
The morning fog was thick. Taylor was glad for it. It was like having a security blanket; a cocoon that obscured anything dangerous that lay outside its confines. He could see the road twenty yards ahead and then it was swallowed up by the haze.
“You just let me know when you need me to drive,” Carl said. “I’m not feeling too bad.”
“I must have hit my second wind because I’m not doing too bad at the moment. But I’ll let you know.”
Carl switched on the radio, toying wi
th the dial. “Still nothing.”
“I don’t get how it spread so fast. If it’s a disease. That means it started somewhere. A monkey in Africa or something. Right? So how does the whole world go to shit overnight? Wouldn’t we have seen something about it on TV or read about it in the paper? People getting sick?”
“Not if you were where the original outbreak took place,” Tina said. She yawned into her hand and leaned forward. “We know about it ahead of time when it happens someplace else first.”
Carl said, “So you’re saying you think it started here?”
Tina shrugged. “Maybe.”
“That still doesn’t explain much. Like what’s here? What’s the scale? Our town. Your town. It was happening in both of those. So is it happening in just a few surrounding counties or just this state or the entire country?” Taylor slowed the car abruptly to swerve around a truck that was angled on the shoulder, its front end sticking out into the road. “One town, I could see it. But it’s not. At least two towns that we know of and they were talking about it on the radio before we broke down. People did know about it, but not very far in advance. It happened fast. Maybe the question is how does it spread?”
“Or how it originated,” Tina said. “Anything that affects so many people that rapidly has got to be airborne.”
“Maybe it was a meteor.” Carl twisted around in the seat so he could look at Tina, both hands holding onto the barrel of the shotgun. “Crashed and gave off some kind of alien radiation.”
“You said you heard about it on the radio. Was it a local station?”
“Denver.”
“Well…if it was radiation than it had a pretty big radius. I think we would have heard about the impact.”
“I was joking.”
“Oh.”
Taylor met her eyes in the rearview mirror. “He does that.”
“So it’s happening in the States, maybe the whole world. It almost has to be spread through the air. And it spreads fast. Fast enough to infect everyone in about…” She opened her cell phone and checked the time. “Sixteen hours. God, is that all it’s been? I feel like we’ve been going like this for close to forever. It’s funny how quickly we adapt. One of my first classes in college covered adaptation by species. How animals have evolved over millions of years to survive a changing environment. Yesterday morning, I was driving my car on a normal road in a normal world, heading home from college to see my dad. Now look at things. Some people think nature does it on purpose. Like this natural cleansing. Only the strong adapt and survive.”
“Sixteen hours,” Taylor said. He glanced in the rearview mirror again, this time seeing past Tina and out the back window. He could see the sun low in the sky, a hazy orb whose brightness was muted by the fog.
Carl said, “Does it sound like rabies?”
“Going only off the symptoms, they mimic a lot of those found with rabies,” Tina said. “But nothing else really fits. Being airborne, the rapidity of the infection, traveling in packs. I guess it doesn’t have to add up. This is something different. Normally, a disease or virus doesn’t mutate that fast. It almost makes me think…”
“What?” Carl asked. “Finish what you were gonna say.”
“Well, it just makes me think that maybe it was manmade.”
“Terrorists?”
“Could be. People have been worried about something like that for years. But it could just as easily have been an accident. That’s not as rare as you might think. It doesn’t matter how many precautions you take to prevent them, people still make mistakes. I’m just glad they’re afraid of water.”
“The place we’re headed has lakes. Two small ones and a bigger one.”
“Do your parents have a boat?”
“Yeah. It’s just a small fishing boat. Can seat five or six tops. I didn’t think to check to see if they took it with them or not,” Carl said.
“Pray they did. I wish I knew where my dad went. We could find him and bring him with us.”
Taylor felt a stab of guilt again. It was another opportunity to lay the truth on her, but he remained silent again. He couldn’t bring himself to do it. The more he thought about it, the more telling her seemed like the right thing to do. From what he had gathered in a short amount of time, Tina was about as level-headed as you could get, but telling her that her father was one of them was heavy news for anybody to have to hear. If she went off the deep end they could be in trouble. She could do something stupid and endanger herself or, worse yet, all of them. And when weighing it out based solely on what was best for their survival as a whole, his instincts told him to keep that knowledge to himself. Sometimes morals had to take a backseat.
He said, “Maybe he’ll find a way to contact you,” and, despite his good intentions, he still felt like a total slimeball.
You’re going to hell for lying to her like that, he thought, which was immediately followed by another: Oh wait, we’re already there.
“Look!”
Carl shouted this so loud and so suddenly that Taylor nearly lost control of the car, instantly wide awake. “What?”
I-80 was visible from the highway. Carl pointed to it and said, “Right there. Don’t you see them?”
Taylor squinted in the direction of the Interstate. “How can you see anything through the…”
But then he did see. He took his foot off the accelerator and the car slowed to a crawl.
“You see them now, huh?”
He answered with the briefest of nods. His foot touched the brake and gently brought the Escort to a halt, and he shifted into park. Opening the door, he exited the car and stepped onto the road.
Tina said, “What are you doing? Are you insane?”
Carl opened his door. “They’re a ways away. Far enough that we could take off before they ever got close to us.”
After some hesitation, she got out of the car and joined them.
The highway was on higher ground than the Interstate. They watched from a small hill, looking downward at the mass. It was impossible to know how many of them there were. Carl thought it was as many people gathered in one place as he had ever seen before. Taylor had taken him to a Def Leppard concert years ago when Carl was still in high school, and he had been awestruck by all the people packed into the stadium. This was worse.
“Do you think they’re normal?” Tina asked. “The way they’re walking, I can’t tell.”
“No. They’re not normal.”
“How can you tell?”
“Trust me. They’re not.”
“Where do you think they came from?”
“I don’t know. But I’d like to know where they’re going,” Taylor said. “They have to be heading somewhere.”
“So many of them.”
“Hundreds?”
“Thousands.”
“None of them with homes anymore,” Taylor said. He almost sympathized with them, but it merely a transient emotion. “All of them homeless.”
After that, there wasn’t much else to say.
“Do you think they know where they’re going? Like they have a destination in mind,” Carl said. He had taken over driving duty when they had gotten back into the car.
“If I hadn’t just seen that with my own eyes, I wouldn’t have given them credit for it. They could be walking without knowing where they’re going. That’s possible.”
“Why would they head east? There’s nothing in that direction for forever,” Tina said. “Nothing but small towns until you get to North Platte. And that‘s not that big.”
“Omaha?” Carl said.
“I doubt it.”
“Just a thought.”
Forty-five miles later, the fog had dispersed. The sky was overcast with thick gray clouds.
“We’re coming up on Cheyenne,” Carl said. “Do you want to stay on the highway? It takes us straight downtown.”
Taylor looked at the I-80. Abandoned vehicles formed a labyrinth of metal and glass across four lanes and the median. In some
places it looked as though it would be impossible to squeeze the Escort through some of the more congested spaces. “The interstate isn’t any good. I don’t see any other choice but to stick to the highway. Just be on the lookout.”
“After what we saw a little while ago, I doubt there’s anyone left in the city. That many people came from somewhere.”
“It’s like a traveling caravan. A group starts off and more join along the way. Almost like they’re collecting together for something.”
“Now I remember!” Tina scooted forward on the backseat. “I thought of this earlier when we were having our discussion about what could have caused this to happen, but I forgot about it. Why weren’t we infected? What did we do different?”
Carl said, “Maybe we have a natural immunity. Isn’t that how they work it in the movies? Certain people are magically unaffected.”
“Yeah, but in reality it’s not as plausible. Not to say that it isn’t possible,” Tina said, “but that would be a big coincidence. You said you heard about it on the radio. So when it happened, you were driving?”
“I guess so.”
“I was driving, too. I didn’t hear about it on the radio. I saw it happening when I got into town. Then I hid in my dad’s store.”
“You think we didn’t become like those things because we were driving? That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.”
“It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense that the power went out in so many places around the same time either,” Taylor said. “Some of the things I’ve noticed make me think whatever is going on isn’t exactly random. Didn’t happen out of the blue like nature’s wrath or something.”
“You were heading east to get back home. I was heading west. None of us got whatever’s going around.”
“Like it’s a cold,” Carl said and smiled.
“One fucked up cold.”
“But look at all the cars on the road. Plenty of people would have been driving. How did it miss us but get them?”
“Maybe it did miss them. Maybe they were stranded out there with no place to go.”
Taylor gave Tina a look that said he wasn’t convinced.
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