Freddie trudged back to his locker, stepping ever so gingerly, the way a man might when he’s been kicked in the nuts. He could feel the stares and he wondered if there were other freshmen meeting with other nameless, faceless graduate assistants in tiny supply closets and learning of a similar fate. They stared at him as he emptied out his locker, which still smelled like the air freshener mounted on the back, so brief had his membership on the squad been.
He made his way for the door, his gear stuffed this way and that in his equipment bag, and had his hand on the handle, the metal cold and sharp, when they burst out laughing at him. He stood there frozen, looking for the will to march out that door with his head high because they could kiss his ass, until he felt the tap on his shoulder. When he turned around, he saw “graduate assistant Coach Bush,” who in reality was third-string wide receiver Ricky Bush, a senior who had never seen a single minute of action, had never even dressed for a game, and boy they had gotten him good.
Freddie lifted Bush like he was a sack of potatoes and slammed him against the wall, extinguishing the laughter like he’d yanked a plug from the wall, and he could see the sudden fear in his eyes, and that was when Briggs had known he was stronger and faster than everyone in the room.
And then he’d kissed Bush on the cheek, a loud, juicy one, and the team had roared its approval. That was the last prank he was the target of, but he’d been the engineer of many over the course of the next four years.
Goddamn, those had been some good times.
He wished he could keep his eyes closed forever and live it all over again, from that first game to the national championship the Tigers had won his sophomore year to the defensive player of the year award he’d won his senior year. Instead, he supposed, Coach Billy Hyatt, the AP Coach of the Year, and Ricky Bush, and all the rest were now dead.
His eyes opened, and he was back at the library again.
Ten days on the road. Ten days since he’d buried his girls, three abreast in the backyard, in Susan’s flower garden, which she had loved so much. He’d tamped down the last of the dirt on Heather’s grave and left Smyrna forever. He would never go home again. It was a dead place. Even Chewie, the guinea pig, had died, probably of thirst.
He had a general sense he was moving west-by-northwest, tracking the sun’s path as it crossed the sky. It seemed larger and larger with each passing day, the sunsets growing ever more spectacular, exploding across the sky with oranges and reds. Maybe it was because the air was clearer now, devoid of the exhaust and smoke and pollution of a hundred million cars and smokestacks belching their byproducts into the air. Or maybe it was because of how small and alone he felt in this giant emptiness, which felt bigger with each passing minute.
At first, he’d hoped this walk he’d been on would somehow make it more bearable. That it would somehow drain away the awful reality of what had come to pass. But the pain and the grief continued to stab at him every hour, every minute, every second, like twisting, crippling arthritis.
The decision had been easier than he expected. It had left him skittish with anticipation, which, he decided, was a good sign that he’d made peace with his choice. Wherever his girls were, they were together now. And in just a few minutes, he’d be joining them. He hoped.
He finished his breakfast and, instead of leaving it on the steps, tossed the wrapper in the metal trashcan at the base of the steps. His daughter Heather would have liked that very much. He stood up and dusted off his pants. With a fifty-foot garden hose, tightly spooled, hanging from his beefy shoulder, he crossed the tarmac toward the pickup truck that would be the instrument of his plan. The truck, a shiny red Ford F-150 he’d found abandoned near the library, was parked in a spot by the front door, its keys dangling from the ignition. He opened the door and slid in. He took a deep breath and turned the key over; the pickup’s engine roared to life. In the quiet, it sounded like a jet engine.
It was a warm day, but not terribly humid, one of the nicer ones Freddie had seen since he’d left Smyrna. The sky burned a fierce blue, the sky so clear he could see the edge of it blur into the outer ridges of the troposphere. So fragile, this shell separating us from the cold vastness of space, he thought. And how fragile the world had been, far more delicate than any of them had ever thought. The shell separating them from order and chaos, life and death, creation and destruction, had been far thinner than any of them had ever imagined.
He looked up at the sky until his neck began to ache and then returned his attention to the task at hand. One end of the hose went into the Ford’s tailpipe, as far as it would go, until he felt resistance. Then he sealed off the gaps in the exhaust pipe with a length of duct tape. The other end of the hose he ran along the side of the truck, through the window, and into the driver’s seat. Then he sealed up the gap left by the cracked window with more tape. A quick tug on the hose to confirm that it was well-seated in the pipe, fitted to funnel as much carbon monoxide into the truck as possible.
He felt his excitement growing, like a healthy plant getting the requisite amount of sunshine and water, fed by the fertile thoughts of extinguishing his crippling pain, of leaving behind this terrible world, of maybe, just maybe, being reunited with Susan, Caroline and Heather.
He thought he would be more afraid. But it was being here, in this world, that frightened him and chewed away at his sanity. It was a living nightmare, a twenty-four-hour-a-day hellscape that had begun the moment he’d received that first call from his daughter telling him that Susan was sick. Each successive link in the chain of events had been worse than the previous one. The panic had left him constantly shivering, as though he could never warm up.
The idea had been nagging at him, a splinter in his brain. Try as he might, he couldn’t dislodge the splinter, namely because he liked the way it felt. Yeah. That was the fucked-up thing.
He liked the way it felt.
Just another fucked-up thing in a fucked-up world.
He had prayed for God to deliver him wisdom. For an answer. For a plan.
But God hadn’t been there to answer. God had abandoned him in this world of the dead.
But then he had seen something that had opened that drawer in his mind, the one housing the soul’s self-destruct button. He didn’t think he had it in him. Oh, but he did. It was just a matter of the mind receiving the proper authentication codes, the way a submarine commander would wait for an order to launch his ICBMs. It was just a matter of God showing him what he needed to see.
Two nights ago, he’d stopped to make camp at an abandoned peach orchard in west-central Georgia, just near the state line. The sun had been low over the Great Smoky Mountains to the northwest, its rays colliding with the ever-present blue haze circling the peaks like a trendy silk scarf. As his Spaghettios heated up on the small fire, he had scoured the perimeter. Darkness was falling as he finished his sweep, a little faster than he’d expected, a reminder that he was on the back end of summer now. On the east side of the farm, he’d come across a shallow trench, muddy and sloppy on the edges. That little voice in his head had told him to turn tail and scamper back to camp. But he hadn’t. He’d shone the trembling flashlight at the center of the pit.
And he so wished he hadn’t.
Staring back at him in the full darkness were the lifeless eyes and pasty faces of dozens of plague victims, maybe a hundred total, all of them children. Against the harsh white light of the MagLite, the faces of the lost children floated in time and space, their paleness made ever starker by the dried blood around their noses and mouths. Babies and toddlers and school-aged kids packed together, their bodies lined up neatly. The thing that had haunted him since was that each had been lovingly set down in this mass grave, the only burial they would ever get, with some beloved childhood item tucked under an arm. A tattered Elmo doll here. A Barbie doll there. An over-sized stuffed dog, one possibly won at the county fair, curled up next to the body of an angelic-looking little girl about five years old.
He’d stumble
d backwards, tripping over his own feet, dropping the flashlight. His body racked with sobs, he had fled the orchard, leaving behind his tent, his supplies, his dinner still cooking over the little fire. All night he had run as if Satan himself had crawled out of that trench. He finally had slept in a city park, with no tent and no dinner, and dreamt all night about dead children.
When he’d woken up the next morning, his body covered in dew, his mind felt sour, rotten, turned, like curdled milk. There was no sense of relief that the dream was just a dream because he knew there were shallow graves holding the bodies of dead children just like there were houses and churches and hospitals and morgues full of dead children and women and men, young and old.
That was when the idea had first came to him.
No, he wasn’t afraid. This thing he was planning, that was the ticket out of all this. He didn’t know or care why he’d been spared, for all the good it had done him. Susan and the girls, they’d been given a gift. Called home to God together. The punishment hadn’t been dying of the plague. It had been surviving it. Left behind to make his way in this dead world, that was the punishment.
A terrifying thought gripped him.
What if God had forsaken him?
What if God had looked into Freddie’s heart and decided that he wasn’t worthy, and he thought back to all those times he didn’t want to go to church, and, in the Great Faith Ledger of Freddie Briggs’ life, he had ended up just a bit in the red.
Stop it. God forgives all. He’ll forgive your sorry ass for this.
He waited as the muffler pumped the deadly gas into the car. He wanted the colorless gas to be freely flowing in the cab, filling the passenger compartment, before he got in; it would decrease the likelihood he’d chicken out before it had a chance to carry him away. As the engine purred, he tugged on the hose to make sure it was secure.
He strolled around to the passenger side and sat down on the curb to wait. As good a time as any to pray. The church of his youth, the Smyrna Baptist Church, seemed so far away, in time and space, but it was there he looked for comfort and solace and a reminder that although what he was about to do was a sin, God would forgive him. Truth be told, he didn’t think God would be all that surprised to see him.
He found himself wondering if this whole thing had been God’s judgment upon man. If so, it had been a hell of a tough one. Guess we really let you down there, eh, big fella?
So this was it. He’d thought about death often, particularly during those last few minutes in the locker room on Sunday afternoons, when he’d wonder if he’d be the first NFL player to die during a game, whether he’d draw the short stick and suffer some catastrophic spinal injury and just die there on the field in front of Susan and Heather and Caroline and millions of Americans watching on television, drinking their Bud Lights and eating spicy chicken wings.
Well, football hadn’t been the death of him, and neither had Medusa.
He stood up, his heart pounding, and opened the passenger-side door. The cabin exhaled a puff of warm air, the whisper of a dangerous lover. He had to act quickly, before the carbon monoxide drifted free of its enclosure and dissipated in the morning air. He stepped up on the running board, planted one foot on the floor mat and dropped his girth into the leather seat. As he leaned over to swing the door shut, entombing himself in this metal coffin for all time, he heard a noise.
This froze him. He sat there, his hand on the handle, wondering if he’d imagined it or if he was just wishing he’d imagined it.
Again — a muted, wailing sound, coming from everywhere and nowhere at the same time. A child or a woman. The sound was mournful and pathetic and beautiful at the same time, and he hated it. He wanted it to stop, he wanted it to be erased from his memory banks so he could get back to the business at hand.
Then, a voice to go with the wailing.
“Is someone there?”
Definitely a woman, the voice bearing a timbre of maturity absent from a child’s. He tried to pinpoint the location of the voice, but the way acoustics had changed in the last two weeks, it could have been coming from anywhere.
“I’m hurt,” the voice said. “Please. I can hear you out there.”
“Dammit,” he whispered, slamming a massive fist into his thigh. He held the handle tight, fully intent on slamming the door shut on that pathetic voice and this pathetic life and getting on with dying in peace. His brain had its orders, its mandate to constrict the muscles in his massive right arm authenticated. But the treasonous arm refused to budge. It would not close the door.
“Please,” she said. “My name’s Caroline.”
Hearing his late daughter’s name aloud launched him from the car like an ejector seat. Behind him, the car continued to idle, and the pent-up carbon monoxide dissipated into the atmosphere. He felt his knees go weak beneath him, and he crumpled to the ground in a puddle. The shakes were back and he felt cold, so cold.
“Where are you?” he called out, his voice booming in the morning air.
“Behind a little restaurant,” Caroline called back. Her voice was everywhere, echoing against buildings, across fields and down narrow streets. “I can’t move. I think my leg’s broken.”
“I’ll find you,” he said. “Just keep talking.”
#
It took twenty minutes, but Freddie finally found the woman sitting on the stoop behind Pastrami Dan’s, tucked away from the sun under a large black awning. A dozen bottles of water lay strewn at the bottom of the stairs. Her eyes were glassy, and she looked exhausted. Her long red hair was tied back in a ponytail, revealing the fatigue in her ivory face, virtually irradiated with sunburn.
She looked about forty years old. Her light-colored blouse was matted against her torso. Her lower left leg was swollen, a dusky shade of yellow and purple. Freddie had broken enough bones in his day to know her leg was fractured. The good news was that it looked to be a simple fracture. Anything worse, she’d already be dead. But the thing that drew nearly all of Freddie’s focus was the noticeable swell in the woman’s belly.
Pregnant.
“Please tell me you’re real,” she said. “Please.”
“I’m Freddie,” he said, as gently as he could, unable to pull his eyes away from her very large abdomen. A pregnant woman. Until this moment, it had not occurred to him that life would, of course, at least try to go on.
“Caroline Braddock,” she said. “Would you mind handing me one of those bottles?”
Freddie grabbed two, warm from the sun, and climbed the steps to the porch, where he handed them to the injured woman. She twisted off the cap and drank down the first in one swoop. After draining it, she sighed contentedly.
“Thank you,” she said, the effects of the water replenishment immediately evident on her face.
“What happened?” he asked.
She nodded toward the back door of the deli.
“Found this place a couple days ago,” she said, leaning her head back against the railing and twisting the cap loose from the second bottle. “It smells horrible, but there’s a ton of bottled water inside. I was pretty pleased with myself, right up until the moment I tripped down these stairs here.”
“Did you say this happened a couple days ago?”
She nodded. “Yeah, I’ve seen two sunrises.”
Freddie whistled softly, trying not to think about the dark places Caroline Braddock must have gone as she sat here, crippled, unable to move, forsaken.
“I spent the first day down where you are,” she continued, “but it got so hot, I pulled myself up the steps to get some shade. It’s a little cooler, but not by much. I was able to carry two bottles of water up with me. That ran out last night.”
She patted her belly gently. “This little guy, he’s a thirsty one. Anyway, I guess I’d been asleep, and I heard your car start up or something. My lucky day, I guess.”
Freddie felt shame coloring his cheeks. Here he’d been, ready to cash it all in, and this woman was fighting and clawing to
stay alive. He couldn’t imagine the pain she’d felt crawling up those steps, dragging her shattered leg behind her. He suddenly realized that his girls would have been profoundly disappointed in him if he’d sidled up next to them in the afterlife, not by way of the virus, but by his own hand. He felt as stupid as he’d ever felt in his entire life.
“Relax,” she said, patting her belly. “I’m not having this baby today.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “It just never occurred to me…”
“Well, here we are,” she replied.
“When are you due?”
“About a month,” she said. “Maybe less. I’ve kind of lost track.”
“So how’s that leg?”
She looked down at it.
“Fine, as long as I don’t move it,” she replied. “I scraped it up good coming down the steps, but I think it’s healing.”
“Where were you headed?” Freddie asked.
She laughed out loud.
“Headed?” she repeated. “I’m not headed anywhere. I live about ten miles from here.”
“I’ve got a truck up the road a piece,” he said. “If you’d like a ride.”
Freddie felt her studying him, her green eyes cutting into him like lasers. He had a pretty good idea what she was thinking about. That it had come down to this. To putting her life in the hands of a very large man she did not know versus taking her chances here on the back stoop of Pastrami Dan’s. Her whole life turned on this decision. He could see her working it out in her mind, deciding that anything would be better than dying here of thirst or starvation, or perhaps by way of a hungry animal that was getting used to the idea of the places full of rotting food, the people mysteriously absent.
At that moment, he realized how badly he wanted her to say yes, that she did want a ride. He wanted to break down in front of her and tell her that she’d be saving his life, that she already had saved his life, that he was the one owing her the gigantic favor and not the other way around.
The Immune Box Set [Books 1-5] Page 16