by Tarah Benner
“It’s not Shep,” he whispered.
“Who is it, though?” asked Lark.
Axel wheeled around to snatch the radio out of Simjay’s hands. Simjay was too shocked to put up a fight, but then the man signed off. The report was over.
The sound of static filled the truck, and Lark settled back in her seat. She was racking her brain to think who might have escaped. The only Asian who came to mind was Portia, and as far as she knew, Portia was in no shape to escape San Judas.
Lark’s spiraling thoughts were interrupted by Soren slamming on the brakes. She threw out a hand to stop herself from smashing into the back of Axel’s seat, and Denali slid onto the floor.
“What the —” Simjay began.
Lark leaned around Axel to see why Soren had slowed, and her breath caught in her throat.
A hundred yards up the highway, she could see two blurry figures ambling down the road. Both of them were stooped as if they were carrying extremely heavy loads, but they were too far away to make out any details.
“Should I turn around?” Soren asked.
“Keep goin’,” said Axel, chambering a round in Wayne’s handgun and staring out the window.
Lark’s chest constricted. She didn’t know what to think. Part of her was glad to know that they weren’t the last humans left on earth. The other part of her was terrified.
They approached the strangers at a crawl, all four of them holding their breath.
When they heard the truck approaching, both strangers looked around, and Lark was relieved to see that they definitely weren’t the police.
One was a man in his late twenties sporting ratty dreadlocks and a dirty white tank top. The other was a girl with dyed orange hair who looked as though she were wearing every article of clothing she owned. They were carrying enormous army rucksacks, and as the truck approached, they both stopped in their tracks and held out their thumbs.
“Don’t stop,” said Axel.
Nobody said a word. Picking up two hitchhikers was the last thing on anyone’s mind. They just stared at the strangers, and the strangers stared back.
Lark felt a pang of guilt as she always did when she walked past a panhandler without giving any money. She knew it was too risky to stop and pick up the hitchhikers, but she couldn’t help but feel as though she were losing her humanity.
The young couple disappeared in the rearview mirror almost as quickly as they’d appeared, but ten minutes later, they passed somebody else — a bearded man in his late sixties leading a white terrier on a rope. He too looked as though he were carrying everything he owned, and Lark had the undeniable urge to stop.
“Can we —” Lark began.
“No,” said Axel, cutting her off.
“I don’t think we should,” said Soren. His tone was more sympathetic than Axel’s had been, but his meaning was clear: They didn’t know whom they could trust, and it wasn’t worth the risk.
Lark fell into a miserable silence, watching the old man trudge along with a tin saucepan swinging from his backpack.
“They must be heading to the Red Cross camp,” said Simjay after a few minutes of strained silence.
They passed several more clusters of hitchhikers walking along the road. Most of them were men on their own, but there were also a few couples and what looked like an entire family: a man and a woman in their late sixties along with their adult children and three young grandchildren.
Simjay broke down a little at the sight of the kids and pleaded with Soren to stop, but Soren kept his gaze fixed on the road and kept driving.
“Oh, shit,” said Axel, his eyes darkening as he scanned the side of the road.
Lark followed his gaze to another Red Cross sign sticking out of the weeds. The message was nearly identical to the first, but there was another line of text under the main message: “10 MILES AHEAD.”
But instead of the gang graffiti, someone had spray-painted a skull and crossbones over the text.
“I think we should go back,” said Simjay, sounding unreasonably panicked.
“What the fuck?” said Axel.
Lark squinted up ahead. A long line of orange traffic cones and a low concrete median had materialized in front of them. The road slanted sharply to the right, and they slowed to fifty-five as the lanes merged into one.
Lark didn’t say anything. She didn’t know what to think, and nor apparently did Soren. He was still driving, but his knuckles had turned white on the steering wheel.
They passed a digital construction sign, but with no power flowing to it, they had no idea what it might have said.
“Shit,” Soren breathed.
He was staring down the highway at a large “Road Closed” sign. Orange-and-white barricades stretched across the length of the road, and a square “Detour” sign posted near the exit was directing them off the highway.
“What the fuck is this?” grumbled Axel. “We can’t even get through there.”
He was right. Behind the flimsy orange sawhorses stood two solid concrete barricades. They couldn’t quite see what lay beyond, but it looked as though the detour was their only option.
Soren pulled off at the exit, following the corkscrew interchange under an overpass and through a maze of highways branching off in different directions. Nearly all the roads seemed to be blocked, including the I-10 detour they needed to get to Kingsville.
“See any signs for thirty-seven?” Soren asked hopelessly.
Lark didn’t. As far as she could tell, the mess of construction had led them to the outskirts of San Antonio, only to spit them back out on 410 without ever going through the city.
They were driving through an urban wasteland crowded with towering three-star hotels, chain restaurants, and a sad-looking outlet mall that had been run out of existence.
“Shit,” said Soren, leaning over the steering wheel. “Any ideas?”
Lark was frantically skimming the map for a route that might help them get back on track. But then they whipped under another overpass, and Soren slammed on the brakes.
Lark’s seatbelt cut into her neck, and she grabbed Denali to prevent him from flying through the windshield. She looked up in time to see a man staggering to his feet. He must have been hovering under the overpass, and they’d nearly run him over. But that wasn’t the worst part.
The truck was idling in the middle of the largest crowd of people Lark had ever seen.
“Reverse!” yelled Axel, rolling up the window.
But it was too late. The detour had led them into the Red Cross camp — right into an enormous mob. The people were dirty and disheveled and had the half-starved look of models who’d taken their looks too far. Some of them were shirtless or dressed in tattered rags, and they were all staring at the truck.
As the man they’d almost hit stumbled around the thick concrete wall, several people nearby yelled and pointed at the truck. Soren looked behind him to put the truck in reverse, but more people were already spilling out from the other side of the overpass, blocking their path.
People were shuffling angrily toward the truck, and one man came up to the door and jiggled the handle.
Lark let out an involuntary gasp, and Axel put the gun up to the window. “Just try it, motherfucker,” he yelled.
The man outside broke into a lopsided grin, and a loud bang! on the other side of the truck told Lark that someone was trying to climb into the bed.
“Fuck,” mumbled Soren, tapping the gas so that the truck inched forward.
But he’d seen what lay ahead, and it didn’t look good. Twenty yards in front of them, the bodies formed an immovable wall of people, and there was nowhere to go but through.
nineteen
Soren
As the mob inched closer, the truck seemed to fold in around Soren. His breathing became fast and shallow, and all the blood rushed to his muscles — priming his body for a fight.
The leering crowd pressed in on all sides, their eyes narrowed in aggression. There had to be at le
ast two hundred of them around the truck — two hundred desperate people who were out of their minds with hunger. They were moving toward the truck like a herd of zombies, and every instinct in Soren’s body was screaming at him to punch the gas.
But as he glanced around, several faces leapt out at him from the crowd: a sandy-haired mom holding two crying girls, an older couple being buffeted to the side, and a skinny boy no older than twelve wearing a ragged orange hoodie. These people weren’t monsters. They were only trying to survive.
Behind the crowd, a jagged outline of a camp rose up in the distance — a mishmash of institutional-looking white tents and a choppy patchwork of tarps, cardboard boxes, and bits of sheet metal lashed together. Black smoke billowed from trashcans in the distance, and Soren caught the putrid stench of raw sewage, burnt tires, and human decay.
As he stared, everything around him took on a bizarre smoky quality: the dirt-blackened faces, the eerie broken windows, and the clumps of garbage and filth caked in the gutter. He wondered how long it had been since the camp had run out of food, leaving thousands of people stranded and desperate.
A light breeze from the back seat ruffled Soren’s hair, and Lark’s yell yanked him back to reality. She was diving over the center console, trying to wrestle the gun out of Axel’s hands. “You can’t just start shooting into a crowd of innocent people!”
“Get off!”
“No!”
Axel threw out an elbow that caught Lark hard in the ribs, but she didn’t let go.
“Stop it!” Soren yelled, his head pounding as the mob pressed in around them. He felt as though he were breathing through a straw.
He touched the gas, and the truck inched toward the overpass, which seemed low enough to skim the hair off the tops of their heads. Even the sky seemed to be suffocating them as Soren navigated through the crowd of people.
Someone on the other side of his window screamed as he ran over their toes, and a fresh wave of people descended on the truck.
Soren depressed the brake, looking around desperately, but he was out of options.
“Go!” yelled Axel, who’d thrust Lark back into her seat.
But Soren couldn’t move. There were too many people. Even if he ran them over, the sheer number of them would stop the truck. They were hemmed in on the left by the concrete overpass, and there wasn’t enough space to make a U-turn.
Before Soren had made up his mind, he heard — or rather felt — a loud thud! from the back. Simjay yelped as two more men jumped from the overpass into the bed of the pickup.
This time, Soren didn’t think. He threw the truck in reverse and hit the gas. As he did, the sound of breaking glass rattled his nerves so badly that his sweaty hands slipped on the wheel. They skidded off the road, and it was as though somebody had kicked the dial on the stereo — turning the volume up to full blast.
The mob’s yells were inside the truck. Then Soren realized they’d broken the back window, and every curse and shout was reverberating inside the tiny cab. Denali barked ferociously, and Lark screamed as two pairs of filthy hands reached into the back seat.
Soren hit the gas again, but they were stuck. The engine groaned in protest, and he felt the wheels spinning uselessly in the mud.
Lark screamed. Somebody had grabbed her by the hair and was dragging her out the back window. A gun went off inside the truck, shattering Soren’s eardrums.
After that, everything took on the eerie ringing quality of a silent film. Soren took his foot off the gas and dove into the back seat. He pulled back his arm and decked the man who’d grabbed her, but the stranger just slid out of the window like a rubber mannequin.
He was dead.
Lark’s face was frozen in horror, staring at the gun in Axel’s hands. Soren was sure that she must be screaming, but he couldn’t hear a thing. Lark’s face was covered in blood, and several small chunks of human flesh were clinging to her hair.
Soren turned his head just in time and vomited between the driver’s seat and the door. People were pounding on the windshield and the sides of the truck, but he couldn’t hear anything except the persistent ringing in his ears.
Somebody kicked the back of his seat. Soren turned and nearly caught a foot to the face. Simjay was screaming and flailing as two sets of arms attempted to drag him out of the vehicle. Lark clung on to him, and Axel dove into the back seat.
This time, he didn’t shoot. Simjay was half outside the truck, still struggling to escape, and two men were climbing onto the hood of the vehicle. One of them swung a baseball bat down onto the windshield, and a long crack appeared in the glass.
Retching and choking, Soren climbed back into the driver’s seat and slammed his foot down on the gas. The engine groaned as the truck lurched into the ditch. One of the men slid off the hood, but the other slammed the bat into the windshield again.
Soren threw the truck into drive and flew forward so fast that the man toppled over the cab. The truck bumped over something large and horrible, but Soren never heard a scream or a crunch of bones as the truck rolled over a human speed bump.
People scattered as Soren blazed through the mob, and he saw Simjay’s head reappear. Lark was crying and Axel was yelling, but Soren still couldn’t hear a thing.
Names of stores flashed bold and cheerful in Soren’s peripheral vision. He sped up the exit going the wrong way, reentered the highway, and turned off on the first no-name road he reached. The sun blazing in his rearview mirror told him that he was headed east, but he had no idea what road they were on or where it would end.
Gradually his hearing started to return. He could discern voices — Lark’s and Axel’s — but they sounded hysterical and very far away. Lark’s voice was high and thin, and Axel sounded furious. Denali was clambering over bodies in the back seat, a deranged suitcase-sized mass of fur adding chaos to the storm.
Then Soren became aware of someone saying his name — a frantic call from another time.
“Soren — Soren!” It was Lark.
“He’s — fucking out of it.”
“— stop the bleeding?”
“I — No.”
Then a low, painful moan wafted up from the back seat. Soren wheeled around and saw that it belonged to Simjay. He was lying with his legs sprawled over Axel and his head crammed uncomfortably against the passenger-side door. He was as white as a sheet.
Lark had folded herself onto the floorboard and was peeling back Simjay’s shirt with shaking bloody hands.
“What happened?” Soren asked, shocked by the hoarse, bland quality of his voice.
“— got stabbed,” growled Axel, not taking his eyes off of Simjay.
Soren swerved dangerously as he twisted around to examine the wound, but all he could see was a bubbling pool of blood spreading from Simjay’s abdomen. Somebody’s sweatshirt was balled in Lark’s hand, and she was pressing it against Simjay’s stomach to staunch the bleeding.
Until then, Soren had been watching the horrible scene unfold with the numb detachment of a passive observer, but seeing Simjay pale and bleeding seemed to lift a plug somewhere inside him, and everything he was feeling came flooding out at once: a horrible wave of disgust, confusion, and a blinding, choking fear.
Thinking fast, Soren skidded off along the side of the road and threw the truck into park. By now his hearing had almost returned, and he could pick up Lark’s incoherent stream of thoughts as she pressed the sweatshirt into Simjay’s abdomen.
“We need a credit card!” yelled Soren, thinking back to a cop show he’d seen years ago when he’d had the flu.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Axel bellowed.
“I need a credit card!” Soren shouted. “Do either of you have a credit card?”
“The wallet,” Lark stammered.
Seconds ticked by as she groped around on the floorboard. She produced a wallet and a shiny new Visa with the name “Wayne Gibson” printed along the bottom in crisp silver letters.
Squeezing himself
over the center console, Soren lifted the wad of cotton soaking up the blood and slapped the credit card over the two-inch slice in Simjay’s gut. He yelled for tape, plastic — anything — and somebody tossed him a roll of duct tape from the floorboard.
Within minutes, he’d secured a shredded sweatshirt sleeve and a piece of bubble wrap over the credit card. Blood was no longer spilling over Simjay’s sides, but his face was pallid, and the back seat was soaked with blood.
“We have to get him to a doctor,” Lark stammered.
“Can’t,” said Axel bitterly. “All the hospitals will be overrun.”
“He needs surgery!” screamed Lark. “He needs a doctor and antibiotics and —”
“We don’t have any of that!” Axel bellowed, his face red with fury.
“Maybe we can find a pharmacy,” said Soren, slowly returning to his senses. “Get some dressing and antibiotics or —”
“It’s no use,” said Axel. “They’ll be cleaned out.”
Lark looked as though she wanted to strangle Axel, but she just sat there with tears quivering in her eyes, refusing to blink. She didn’t know what to do. None of them did.
“We can’t stay here,” said Soren, straightening up in the seat and starting the truck up again. He didn’t know how they were going to find Simjay medical help, but he knew they couldn’t withstand another ambush like the one at the Red Cross camp.
He pulled back onto the highway and started to drive aimlessly without consulting the map. It hardly mattered where they were going — only that they were unlikely to get Simjay to a doctor in time.
They passed what looked like a hospital along the road, but the lower windows were broken, and the parking lot was blocked off by a tall chain-link fence.
As Soren racked his brain for a place they could go, the city seemed to disintegrate around them. Soon the tall buildings were nothing more than a postcard in the rearview mirror, and empty fields stretched out in front of them — not a pharmacy or a clinic in sight.
At one point they reached an area with dense clusters of trees creeping up along the highway. Here the road was littered with downed branches and other debris, as though a massive windstorm had shaken all the trees until they cracked. Innumerable fast-food bags, plastic bottles, and scraps of paper fluttered from the sagging fence running along one side, and Soren was just about to turn around when Lark’s frantic voice reached his ears.