“Will they?” she asked again.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I really don’t know.”
“Aren’t you the big party pooper?”
“I guess,” he said. “I feel stupid that it hadn’t crossed my mind.”
“Maybe you didn’t want it to cross your mind.”
“Maybe.”
“Well, Doctor, here’s another question.”
“Shoot.”
“Why are we still here? Why were we spared?”
“Luck. Genetics. No virus is one hundred percent fatal. Well, maybe rabies is.”
“What about God?”
This took him by surprise. It was the first time he’d even considered the theological implications of what had happened. He didn’t like the fact that he was being sloppy and careless in his thinking.
“What do you mean?”
“What if this was God’s judgment?”
He stood there, unsure of how to answer.
“You believe in God?”
When he didn’t answer, she smiled.
“Look, I know that’s probably getting a little personal, but I think we can do away with societal niceties for now, don’t you?”
She was right.
“Some doctors can reconcile their faith with science,” he said. “I never could. I’ve read the Bible. I minored in comparative religion in college. It never took. I’m sorry.”
“Why’re you sorry?”
He laughed softly.
“I don’t even know. It feels like I should be sorry about something. What about you?”
“I used to believe in God,” she said. “Once upon a time. I don’t know anymore.”
“Well, if there is a God, He spared you, right?”
“Maybe we weren’t the ones who were spared.”
He hadn’t thought of it that way. The idea she’d been left behind by her God must have been a terrifying one indeed. It was a hard thing to process, even if it was a concept he didn’t buy into himself. He didn’t think the Bible was anything more than a fairy tale, written and massaged through the centuries by history’s winners. And she had a point. Maybe they had drawn the short straw.
“Why don’t we change the subject,” she said once the silence had begun to metastasize into awkwardness.
“Good idea.”
“How far is it to St. Louis?”
She studied her map for a moment, chewing her lower lip as she did so. He watched her, and he found himself staring into her green eyes again. As he did so, his breathing slowed, and his heart decelerated.
“About six hundred more miles.”
“Jesus. It’s taken us three days just to get this far.”
“Well, we have to stop thinking like we used to,” she said. “We can’t assume we’ll always be able to drive every mile from here to St. Louis.”
“I guess you’re right,” Adam said.
“You sure you don’t want me to teach you to ride a chopper?”
“I’m sure.”
They were quiet a moment.
“You really think there’s anything in St. Louis?”
Her face darkened.
“No, probably not,” she said, her eyes cutting away from his. “But I gotta do it. Who knows? Maybe we’ll get lucky. Maybe they have roast turkey and mashed potatoes.”
“Chocolate milk?”
“Chocolate milk for you,” she said. “Icy cold chocolate milk.”
It was full dark now. Adam got up and stepped clear of the headlights’ glow, into the inky darkness of the night. As he gazed across the undulating hills, the blackness stretched on forever. He tilted his head skyward and saw a blanket of stars twinkling in the night, a handful of diamonds tossed against black velvet.
He was glad to be alive. He was glad they’d teamed up (those eyes, those green eyes!). Standing here, watching the world continue to spin on, the way it always had, made it a little easier to believe that Rachel was still alive out there, maybe looking up at the same sky. He pretended it wasn’t three hours earlier in California, where sunset was still hours away, and imagined she was looking at these same stars. Maybe she’d met up with other survivors, maybe she wasn’t alone, questioning her sanity, wondering what the hell had been the point of surviving.
An hour later, they were camped out in the gymnasium of a local elementary school, listening to the hard rain thrum the roof, deep, throaty booms of thunder rolling through the ether. He tried not to think about Sarah, over there in her own sleeping bag, about her eyes, about her calm. But he thought about her until he fell asleep.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
God, he was thirsty.
Yesterday, the thirst had started as a little gumminess of the lips, a little stickiness in the mouth, that realization that it was already afternoon and you hadn’t had a glass of water all day. Easily fixed in the old days. You just plopped your glass under the tap, and voila, thirst quenched. But it wasn’t the old days. Now Freddie’s mouth was dry, an old cotton ball. His eyes itched like hell, and his piss smelled metallic.
They’d run out of water two days ago, and they hadn’t been able to find any since. They were in the kitchen of a Taco Bell on the morning of September 6, just outside Murfreesboro, Tennessee, testing yet another kitchen faucet, befuddled by the lack of running water. This was the fourth different faucet they’d tried that day, and so far, all the taps had withheld their bounty.
Freddie held his breath as Caroline, leaning on her crutch, opened the spigot.
Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat.
The deathly rattle of dry pipes.
She shut the faucet and looked up at Freddie.
His stomach clenched with frustration.
“Dammit,” he said. “Maybe it’s because the power is out everywhere.”
“No,” Caroline said. “The electric pumps just move the water from the source to the treatment plants and then into the reservoir. But from there, it’s mostly gravity pushing the water from the tower through the pipes. So the water should be running as long as there’s water in the tower.”
“Maybe the tower is empty,” Freddie said.
Caroline rubbed a finger along a dry lip.
“Maybe,” she said. “If we could just find some bottled water.”
They’d been on their way to St. Louis when the water issue popped up, angling northwest through the Tennessee Valley, placing all their hopes into the government flier they’d found flipping through the deserted streets of Chattanooga. Caroline had latched onto the idea like a talisman. As her due date drew closer on the horizon, she was becoming increasingly desperate to see a doctor. Freddie hadn’t been crazy about St. Louis, which, at best, would be a chaotic, confusing mess, and at worst, a hot, stinking graveyard like every other town they’d passed through.
But he went along with the plan because it gave them a goal to shoot for – even if this journey wasn’t draining the emotional abscess that had formed in the wake of the plague. And besides, he thought they’d be safe because an NFL linebacker, even one who couldn’t make a roster this year, was still a terrifying physical specimen for the average person. If nothing else, any troublemakers or ne’er-do-wells would probably not want to chance it, move onto someone they could rob or murder without too much effort. Not even post-apocalyptic highwaymen wanted to deal with hassle. But he would do it for her. Besides, he didn’t relish the idea of delivering Caroline’s baby by himself.
They were still traveling in the pickup truck that Freddie had intended to die in. Occasionally, they’d hit an unplayable lie, a stretch of highway that was just too clogged with dead traffic, and they have to backtrack and find another way. But there was no choice – her broken leg didn’t leave them any other options. And the truth was, it was safer this way. As the days passed, Freddie had become increasingly conscious of the fact that while it had killed a lot of people, Medusa hadn’t killed everyone. A few days earlier, they’d come across a dead backpacker along I-24, his throat slit from ear to ear. A harsh remi
nder that he and Caroline weren’t alone in this shitty new world.
After striking out in the Taco Bell, they went back outside and set off again, bouncing from home to business to restaurant, looking for any water at all. In one law office, they found the office water cooler about one-eighth full, but a thin layer of algae had formed along the surface. They hit two grocery stores that day, but the shelves had been stripped clean of bottled water, soda, and juice.
Then they had turned their attention back toward the homes, ignoring the taps, the thirst deepening, digging down into their minds. Freddie’s panic began roiling like a pot of water forgotten on a hot stove. Caroline was right, he thought. They’d find a stash of bottled water soon enough. But a search of two dozen homes had turned up nothing. Plenty of food stocked away, enough canned goods to keep them fed for months, if not years.
But the water.
It made sense, he supposed. Once the distribution networks collapsed, there would’ve been no more deliveries here; whatever bottled water was still on the shelves probably would’ve been snapped up in a hurry. In fact, people might have drunk the bottled water even when the taps were still running.
They found a twelve pack of Mountain Dew at one house, which they’d drunk greedily, but that was just robbing Peter to pay Paul. The soda provided a brief respite from the dry mouth, but the thirst returned within a couple of hours and in greater force. The sugar would dehydrate them even faster than before, putting the discovery of water at even more of a premium.
“How is this possible?” Freddie had blurted out as day began to soften into twilight, his anxiety rising. He was annoyed with himself. They should’ve abandoned Murfreesboro and pressed ahead; certainly they would’ve found water a little farther up the road. But now they were committed. He was exhausted, and his mind was cloudy from dehydration. Wouldn’t that be something, he thought. To die of thirst in a land obsessed with bottled water.
At dusk on September 8, they came across a gated community in the western suburbs of town. Freddie inched his way into the neighborhood, guiding the pickup around a de facto roadblock of luxury sedans and sport utility vehicles. Perhaps the residents’ last-ditch attempt to quarantine themselves from the world disintegrating around them.
He didn’t relish the idea of conducting a house-to-house search in the dark, but he couldn’t wait. Caroline was badly dehydrated, and the truck was nearly out of gas. He didn’t know how long it would take to find the keys for another gassed-up vehicle, and he wasn’t sure they had the time to spare.
A wide road bisected the subdivision, which was not unlike Wyndham, where Freddie had lived with his girls. God, he missed them terribly. If only there were an antibiotic to snuff out grief. His sleep came in fits and starts, and the same dream tormented him nightly, over and over, his daughter’s last moments in that stinking, sweat-stained, blood-soaked hospital bed.
Large colonials lined the avenue, huge sprawling homes on at least half an acre each. The once well-manicured lawns had started to unravel, reverting to their natural state. For all the time and effort and money pumped into landscaping, the average American lawn was in a goddamn big hurry to let itself go.
He stopped at the first house on his right, dark and foreboding. The moon was full tonight, thank God for that, spreading out a luminous silver blanket across the land.
“Where are we?” Caroline said, startling him. He thought she’d been asleep.
“Gonna try and find some water,” he replied. “Wait here.”
“Can’t this wait until morning?”
Her eyes were sunken and dry, which was all the answer he needed. He was unsure if she was the one who was afraid, or if she could smell the fear on him and was trying to spare him. He did want to wait until morning, he was goddamn sure about that.
“You need water,” he said. “It can’t wait any longer.”
A full-body shiver rippled through her, despite the late-evening heat.
“Wait here,” he said again. “If you need help, honk the horn.”
“OK,” she replied softly.
He smiled at her in the dark and stepped out of the car.
#
The windows were dark, the blinds shut tight. At the top of the porch steps, he paused and held his breath, listening for something, anything. Nothing. The doorknob held fast when he jiggled it, so he used the flashlight to break the decorative window flanking the side of the door. After clearing the stubborn shards of glass clinging to the window frame, he reached inside the gaping darkness and unlocked the door.
The house was warm, stifling, and a sour smell permeated the air. Before penetrating deeper into the house, he propped the door open to let in some fresh air. He swept the flashlight in a semi-circle around him, the white cylinder of light washing across the relics of a life once lived here.
His breath caught as the beam landed on a figure lying prone on a settee, an antique, high-backed thing in the formal living room. The figure, a woman, did not move as he drew closer. Just another plague victim. The body was bloated, her face swollen and clotted with dried blood. Freddie muttered a small prayer for this poor woman, who’d died on this couch, this really uncomfortable looking couch, and kept moving.
Two more bodies in the family room – an adult male in a recliner, a teenaged girl on the sofa. The man was still holding the remote control in his hand. Onto the kitchen, where Freddie found himself mesmerized by the family corkboard, mounted on the expensive stainless steel refrigerator. A reminder card for Steven’s dentist appointment on September 14. Two tickets to the Titans-Steelers game the last Sunday in September. A picture of the family with a puppy; the photo had been date-stamped July 28, shortly before the virus had introduced itself to everyone. Freddie found himself priming his ears for the sounds or whimpers of a hungry puppy, but he heard nothing. Tears welled up in Freddie’s eyes; somehow, these vestiges of the old world were harder to look at than the bodies dotting the wasted American landscape. This was what they had lost. The different threads of every different human fiber, from every race and ethnicity and creed that wove together to make the American quilt.
He opened the refrigerator, which expelled a warm puff of sour air, the breath of a ghost. Rotten vegetables and moldy cheese. Stale bread. A half-drunk bottle of wine, missing its cork. But no water. There was a staircase at the edge of the house. As he made his way downstairs, the flashlight slipped in his hands, and he caught it, just barely. He paused to wipe his sweaty palms on his pants. All of a sudden, he could feel his heart pounding in his ribs, the blood rushing in his ears. He was terrified of everything, all at once, of the dark, of not finding any water, of Caroline dying on his watch, of wandering the God-forsaken hellscape America had become for months or years with each second ticking by like an eternity.
He carefully negotiated the basement, spotlighting each step he took. The cone of light bounced across a water heater, a high-efficiency washer and dryer, a foosball table, items that would never be used again. The place was a wreck, looked like a bomb had gone off. A sweep of the flashlight revealed blood spatter everywhere. Filthy clothes reeking of human waste sat in haphazard piles.
Then: victory. Atop a workbench, a case of bottled water. He burst into tears upon seeing it, weeping as he brushed his fingers against the still-intact shrink wrap. The plastic crackled under his thumb. He hoisted the case onto his shoulder and made his way back to the stairs.
He was halfway up the steps when he heard the truck’s horn blow.
No, not just blow.
Blast.
He raced up the stairs and burst out into the dark front yard without a plan or a thought in his head other than a singular focus on protecting Caroline. A puddle of shattered glass pooled on the asphalt. The passenger door of their truck hung open limply like the broken wing of a bird; the car’s interior light glowed with a sickly yellow hue, revealing its terrible secret.
Caroline was gone.
#
Freddie stood unmoving, no
t breathing, trying to process the scene in front of him. A sound to his right. A scritch-scratch sound, perhaps of something being dragged, and he recognized it as Caroline’s pack on the ground, a sound he’d learned in their time on the road together. Her leg was still weeks from healing. Someone was carrying her into the night, her pack dragging behind her.
He set the case of water on the front seat and eased into the darkness, cursing it and thankful for it at the same time, nimbly carrying his massive bulk down the street, the way that had been praised and watched slack-jawed during all those Sundays on the gridiron. His eyes darted from point to point, target to target, looking for any clue as to Caroline’s whereabouts. Whoever had snatched her couldn’t have gotten more than a thirty-second head start and now bore the burden of carrying an injured prisoner.
Stay calm, he told himself. Stay calm.
The roar of an engine shattered the silence, and ahead, maybe thirty yards, he saw a large vehicle, lit up like a Christmas tree, its headlights shining brightly in Freddie’s face. Silhouetted against the stark white cylinders of light was a figure, stumbling along, the outline of a body slung over his shoulder. Freddie could just make out Caroline’s pack dragging along the street.
If they got to the car, he’d lose her. He broke into a run, a full-throated sprint, chewing up the distance between him and his target like a lion closing in on an injured zebra. But it wasn’t exactly like that, not really. The kidnapper held all the cards. And as if Caroline’s captor had read his mind, he stopped and slowly swung around to face a rapidly closing Freddie.
“Take another step, and I’ll kill her,” the man called out. He said it matter-of-factly, without a hint of emotion or bravado, with a coolness that told Freddie that he would do exactly as he promised.
Freddie stopped on a dime, his knee aching. He was drenched in sweat, and his shirt clinging to him uncomfortably in the Tennessee night. Standing in the harsh blast of the car’s high beams, how terribly exposed he was.
The Immune Box Set [Books 1-5] Page 20