by Barry Napier
The only time she was not able to keep her eyes away from the stream of cars on the road was when she came to a large pickup truck that had apparently not seen the point in waiting in traffic. The driver had attempted to cut to the side of the road, pushing past two cars. One of the back ends of the cars had been crushed all the way down to the back glass. The truck had not made it around the cars and the driver had apparently decided to get out and try to do something about it. In the end, he had apparently died several cars away, leaving his driver’s side door open, the interior light glowing.
Katherine stopped at the truck and climbed up inside. The driver had apparently been the only one inside, as the cab was empty. The truck wasn’t too old—maybe ten years at most if she had to guess. It had a basic stereo system, one of the models with the clearly defined crevices to take a CD. She realized that the radio was on, just turned down to a low volume. She turned the volume up and heard only static. This was no big surprise, but it did not stop her from scanning the dial. All the way down the dial on the FM band, she got static and the drone of a few emergency broadcast signals.
She then switched over to the AM band and it was more of the same, only there were a few of those peculiar almost sci-fi sounding squelches and pings that often came in the obscure waves of AM static. She scanned as slowly as she could and as she came near the end of the scan, she heard a voice. It was distant and choppy, but it was there. She turned the volume up and listened. The choppiness in the voice was the result of faint static and a weak signal. It was terrible reception, but at least it was something.
She sat there for five minutes and listened. Sometimes she’d lose the station for about ten seconds at a time and more often than not, every tenth word or so was drowned out. It was like listening to one of those lousy recordings from a ghost hunting show where if you listened really hard, you sorta kinda could hear a voice. But Katherine had no problems hearing the voice and despite the terrible reception, she got a fairly accurate portrait of current events.
The first thing she realized was that the voice was from a pre-taped recording that was being looped. From what she could tell, it had been aired for the first time three or four hours ago and had been looping the same seven minute broadcast ever since. A man’s weary southern-tinged voice reported on some things she already knew and others she didn’t know. And with every new bit she heard, Katherine unknowingly sat back into the truck seat, her legs slowly coming up to her chest until she was hugging her knees tightly to her body in a lazy fetal position, rocking herself as a means of comfort.
The man told of a New York City that had been pretty much wiped out in just over twenty-four hours. It was believed to have started from an explosion off the coast—a belief that was thought to be nothing more than a conspiracy until another bomb had gone off in a small town in Texas and the Blood Fire Virus had then shown up in the area less than an hour later. What this meant for the nation was that there were now two disparate paths the virus was taking: one that had started in New York and had spread quickly further south and deeper north, and another that started in Texas and was slowly merging to the east to catch up with the other stream, while also pushing outward. So far, confirmed cases of the virus had reached as far as Louisiana and Arkansas. Currently, the border into Mexico was being heavily guarded by both American and Mexican military forces; no one gets in, no one gets out. There was a similar situation with Canada and there had been reports of massive skirmishes trying to prevent illegal border crossings from Vermont and New Hampshire.
He also spoke about the nuclear explosion in Richmond. By this time, Katherine was in a tight little ball and her brain could simply not handle it. There were no answers, no reasons given, and no one overseas had yet claimed credit for the attacks. Katherine was on the verge of simply breaking down and crying, finally allowing herself to dip into that pool of defeat and let herself go. She may have very well done that if she had not heard about the nuclear blast that had occurred in Louisville, Kentucky. It had detonated exactly six hours after the blast in Richmond, roughly three hours before this little looped broadcast had been put on the air.
He went on to say that there was no point in giving an estimate in terms of the dead because it was changing so dramatically so quickly. He broke into sobs as he indicated that even an uneducated guess would put the total in the tens of millions. After that, the now-drained reporter recited the Lord’s prayer, breaking into a crying fit by the end. After that, there was about eight seconds of silence and the report started all over again, giving the narrative of New York City’s end.
Katherine reached out with a trembling hand and killed the radio. She continued to rock herself, doing whatever she could to find comfort. She knew she had a gun, she knew she had somehow managed to survive not only a terrible car accident but a virus that killed with incredible speed. But none of those seemed like blessings. All she could think of as she flirted with the line between logical thought and a total mental shutdown was how her mother had looked and spoken in her final days. She’s spoken about people she’d never met, talked about choirs of angels singing in the cellar and about men in engineer boots that walked around the house at night.
I love you, Mom, she thought by the waning glow of the truck’s interior light, but I can’t go out like that. I can’t…
But she could feel the abyss of something very much like insanity. The breeze from it was soft, the pull of it like a lover’s gaze. She closed her eyes, rocked herself against a stranger’s truck seat, and wept. She was still rocking when the truck’s battery died and when the natural darkness settled in around her, she somehow relaxed even more and without even trying, fell asleep.
***
When Katherine woke up, she nearly screamed. It took her brain a few seconds to remember why she was in an unfamiliar truck and why there was an endless line of traffic ahead of her, clogging up the westbound lanes of US 360. It was still dark outside, but she could see the light smudges of pinks and purples of the dawn creeping in along the horizon.
She sat up, her back a wall of agony from the way she’d slept in the truck’s seat. She looked ahead to the line of traffic and then opened up her stolen bookbag. She took a quick inventory of what she had. When she was done, she took out a banana, a honeybun, and one of the bottles of water. She ate slowly, trying to come up with a plan of attack.
She had a vague idea of where Hoop Spring was, only because she could still recall the little mapped out route Google Maps had given her right after leaving Terrence Crowder’s Richmond residence. She knew the basic direction she needed to go but once she got to the mountains, she was going to be lost. That meant she’d have to pick up a map somewhere along the way. Of course, to even start her trek, she needed to face the hard facts that it was not going to be easy. If she had a car and the roads were perfectly fine (which they most certainly were not) she could make it to Hoop Spring in about two and a half hours. But looking at the clogged road ahead of her, she figured she’d be lucky to get there by sunset.
That left just one other string of questions, and they were ones she did not want to face just yet. If she dwelled too much on it, she would end up the way she’d been last night before falling asleep. She’d start losing her mind, start losing any sense of hope or responsibility. So she kept that line of questions tucked neatly in the darker corners of her mind after giving it just one moment of her attention. The question was: And what will you do if you get to Hoop Spring and there’s no sign of George Kettle? What if you get there and he’s no longer there, like Crowder back at the townhouse in Richmond? Or what if you get there and the virus has killed him. What will you do then? It’s not like you can turn around and head back home.
Before even the echo of those questions could torment her, Katherine got out of the truck. She hefted the bookbag on her back, adjusted the holster for her service Glock and started walking forward.
It was pretty impossible to believe that yesterday morning, about an hour from t
he current time, she had been brushing her teeth and getting ready to rush into an emergency meeting called by Rollins. She rolled her tongue around in her mouth at the thought of not having brushed her teeth, grimacing. Feeling the backs of her teeth with her tongue, it made her again wonder how much longer she’d have before radiation sickness might sink in. She knew nothing about it, only what she’d seen in movies. Would her teeth fall out? What about her hair? Would her skin get red and flaky? Would she end up puking her insides up just like the people who had died from the virus?
As she walked forward, she continued to check ahead for any sign to an end of the traffic congestion. About two miles down the road she started to see little breaks and open spaces in the traffic. Nearing what she hoped would be open road, she saw little still scenes on the road and along the medians and ditches. She saw two men who had apparently gotten into a gunfight from their vehicles. One man in a small truck was splayed out with his back against his driver’s side front wheel. There were three bullet holes in his chest and one high in his shoulder. He was holding a hunting rifle limply in one of his dead hands. Two vehicles over, an overweight man was partially collapsed out of his passenger side window with two neat and tidy holes in his head. The pistol he’d been holding was on the pavement, pointed more or less in the other man’s direction.
Not too far away from that she came to a young woman of about twenty or so. She was lying on the side of the road, one leg pinned under a bicycle. Katherine could tell from the helmet and the stylish athletic bag with its drinking straw built in that she was a cyclist and not just trying to escape by a much smarter means. She’d apparently attempted to escape on her bike and died roughly six or so miles outside of Brandermill.
Katherine looked at the bike and then to the woman. She looked almost peaceful, her eyes mostly closed and her arms in a sort of resting gesture that nearly cushioned her head from the ground. The bike looked to be in okay shape at first and Katherine felt slightly ashamed for what she was about to do.
“You understand, right?” Katherine asked the dead woman.
She reached down and pulled the bike up by its handlebars. She nudged at the woman’s leg with her foot to get it all the way up. As she looked it over and rolled it forward experimentally, she realized that her conscience was going to get a break after all. In the fall, the metal tube that ran down alongside the front tire and held it in place had bent. When she pushed the bike forward, the tube grated against the wheel. It wasn’t anything drastic but even in pushing it, she had to give it quite a bit of force.
Both relieved and frustrated, Katherine lay the bike back down gently by its owner. She then looked ahead again, eyeing the little breaks in the traffic. She kept reminding herself that there would be less traffic the further southwest she headed. The road would almost certainly be passable before long. Sure, she’d have to steal a car to get her job done, but she was fine with that.
Dimly, she also found herself hoping that maybe she’d eventually reach a place where the virus had not yet touched. She knew it was a meager hope because she’d been briefed and told by the news just how fast and vicious this thing was. Still, she would not eliminate the idea of keeping her eyes peeled for living, breathing people along her route. Besides, if she had survived it, certainly there were others. There had to be others…right? If the world had come to an end and she was the only one left…
“Nope,” she said to the multitude of cars on the road. “We’re not going there. Not today, no sir.”
You’re talking to yourself, some distant part of her said. You really are trying to channel your mother to get through this, aren’t you?
Katherine rolled her eyes and shook her head. She walked along the edge of the road, her hand hovering instinctively over her Glock. Thinking of her mother, she thought the woman might actually do well in this sort of situation. Given everything she’d seen since that boat blew up off the coast of New York, she thought it might take a little insanity to make it through alive.
Chapter 20
At some point during the bedlam that occurred in the Philadelphia International Airport, a man had started singing a song that was vaguely familiar to Ray. He was pretty sure it was from the sixties. Maybe the fifties…some of the sad, sappy stuff his grandfather was sometimes playing whenever he’d gone to visit. Hearing the lyrics sung in a voice torn apart from vomiting and the throat of a man that knew he was going to die was haunting. And it was the moment Ray understood just how hopeless the situation was becoming.
“Emptiness is the place you're in; there's nothing to lose but no more to win. The sun ain't gonna shine anymore; the moon ain't gonna rise in the sky…”
In the midst of the crying, screaming, puking (and this morbidly fitting karaoke session), Ray heard more gunshots. They were no longer the experienced and calculated blasts from military rifles, but a shot here or there. Ray knew nothing about guns, so he could only guess what was happening. He supposed the single, louder shots were coming from simpler firearms, probably from police sidearms or airport security guards. When he heard the occasional report, he caught himself trying to play the scene out in his mind as if he were mapping out a scene in a book or a screenplay. People jumping behind chairs and over the belt of the baggage claim…people falling over in sprays of blood, overdone gore effects front and center.
Not too long after the singing man fell quiet, Ray started to sense the wave of horror coming to a slow crawl. There was less screaming and more crying; it all sounded like it was being pushed through a weak overhead speaker as he continued to cower behind the bar area of the little burger pub near the north end of the airport. As the noises of death and madness descended to something resembling a dull roar, he felt himself relaxing. His thoughts became more coherent, easier to track. He did not like the fact that the primary thought to pop into his head was an incredibly selfish one: Finally got that life-changing book deal I’ve been dreaming of since I was a kid and then the world ends. Hooray.
Slowly, he got to his knees and raised himself up a bit. He peered over the bar just enough to see the walkway outside of the pub. He wanted to look away at once, but his eyes were locked for a moment. There were dead bodies everywhere within his thin line of sight. He saw at least six dead people, sprawled out in different positions. One woman had apparently thought about entering the pub, too. She had fallen just shy of the entrance, her right hand reaching in. Thankfully, her head was turned away from him.
Ray ducked back down. When he settled back against the underside of the bar, he heard a tinkling noise behind him, the sound of glass. He turned and saw the racks of cleaned glasses under the bar, not sure how he’d missed them before. He then looked up and to the left, where six different kegs of beer were stationed under the bar. The taps were all connected, showing the non-existent patrons what beer offerings were available. Most of the restaurants and bars within the airport had been blocked off when the military came; the thought, Ray assumed, was that adding alcohol to the mix in an already overheated and tense situation would make things immeasurably worse. At the time, there had been a lot of grumbling but Ray thought it had been a good idea.
Now, though…well, now things were different.
Without even thinking about it, Ray plucked one of the glasses from the rack and slid over to the taps. He got back up on his knees, slid the glass under the Guinness tap, and poured.
He’d never been a big drinker. In college, when his friends had gone out drinking, Ray had stayed behind and worked on whatever short story he’d come up with that week. Before that, in high school, both his parents had essentially told him that if they caught him drinking, he could forget about any sort of social life. And now, living on his own and having nearly pocketed his lifelong dream at the relatively early age of twenty-six, that warning was still ingrained in him somehow. The only times in his life he’d had more than two drinks in one sitting was when his agent had taken him out to dinner to celebrate the start of the bidding war for the bo
ok, and when he’d holed up alone in a hotel room and got hammered for the sake of what he called “research” so he could get the description right for an alcoholic character in one of his stories.
So when he started drinking the beer behind the bar as he hid away from the last sounds of suffering in the airport, it was not because he truly believed it would help make it easier. No, he simply knew it might help him to relax. And based in the brief glimpse he’d caught when he’d poked his head over the bar, a few beers might make it easier to face what was out there. It wasn’t like he could cower behind the bar forever.
He sat behind the bar and drank, trying to make sense of what had happened. The virus that had taken out New York City had somehow made its way into the airport, despite the rigorous military security. Even before the virus had made its appearance in the airport, everyone in the building had more or less been held captive in a weird sort of quarantine. People had freaked out, some civilians had been shot, and the TVs had been shut down not long after a news report showed where a nuclear bomb had been detonated in Richmond, Virginia.
“You can’t make this stuff up,” he muttered grimly, and then chased the words down with a generous gulp of Guinness.
It made him wonder what else had happened in the two days since the explosion in Richmond. How far had the virus spread? How many more explosions had occurred? Had they been nuclear like Richmond, or smaller controlled ones like the ones in New York and Texas? Had anyone stepped forward to take responsibility? Was this some sort of precursor to World War III? Maybe it was—
He lifted the glass to his mouth and realized that at some point, it had become empty. He slid back over to the tap, refilled it and resumed his spot, not daring to take another look beyond the bar just yet.