He let them run for a bit and then used his hands to calm them down, a conductor in his finest performance. The room was silent but for the continued weeping, as the women imagined what might have been. Children, husbands, sisters, brothers, all cut down when a simple shot in the arm might have saved them.
“There was a vaccine,” he said. “Our government knew what this disease was.”
“Why didn’t they start mass vaccinations?” asked the unidentified white woman.
“They did,” he lied. “On the east coast. Vaccinations had begun in New York and Boston, but the virus moved too quickly. I don’t think they realized how quickly the disease would spread or how deadly it would be.”
“How did you have the vaccine?” she asked.
“We have a number of vaccines here,” Chadwick said, eyeing the woman carefully. “As I said, this installation was designed to be self-sufficient.”
“How did you know to use that particular vaccine?” she asked. She was a pretty girl, a little heavyset perhaps. She wore glasses and kept her long brown hair tied in a ponytail.
“We did get lucky in that respect,” he said, smiling at the question. “My medical director had some close friends at the Centers for Disease Control. They told him what was going on, that they knew they wouldn’t be able to vaccinate enough people in time. That was in the middle of the first week of the outbreak. We began vaccinating everyone immediately and we simply had to hope the vaccine would take. We’re in the middle of nowhere, no one coming in or out, so that bought us a little time. We circled the wagons, pulled up the drawbridge, and hoped for the best. Ten days later, our blood tests showed we all had antibodies to Medusa, and no one got sick. Just like you, the people here lost all their families, all their friends back home.”
“Lucky you,” the girl said, one eyebrow raised. Chadwick felt naked, exposed, as the girl looked at him, looked through him. He felt goosebumps erupt along his arms, but he held her gaze, intent on not being the first one to look away.
“No, my dear,” Chadwick replied after she broke her gaze. “Lucky you. All of you. Immune to the greatest scourge that mankind has ever seen. All of you are miracles of evolution. Nature chose you to represent our species going forward.”
“What do you want with us?” she asked, seemingly unimpressed with his praise of her DNA.
“Quite simply, we’re trying to rebuild,” he said. “This thing, it all but wiped us out. We’ve decided we need to start sooner than later if we don’t want mankind to just fade away. It means working together, joining forces. It’s a big world out there. If we leave it to chance, we may never get our old way of life back. People will start to forget that we were once a great society, a great country.”
“What if we want to leave?” Latasha Gilman asked.
“That’s not going to be an option right now,” he said as gently, as paternally, but as firmly as he could. There could be no misunderstanding about this. “Besides, you’re much safer here than you are in the outside world.”
The room fell silent for a moment. A chair creaked as one of the women shifted in her seat. He looked upon each woman in turn, holding each gaze like he was turning a key in a lock. Faces fell, jaws tightened, even more tears were shed, but this was quieter, more whimpering than weeping.
“Make no mistake, you will be cared for here,” he said. “You have no idea how important you are.”
He became acutely aware of the bespectacled girl eyeing him. Again, sweat trailed down the sides of his body. His voice began to crack.
“Thank you ladies. We’ll be seeing a lot more of each other very soon. In the meantime, please enjoy your stay.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Adam spotted the UPS truck by the side of the road shortly before noon on September 18. They’d been walking along I-70 for nearly five days, taking turns pushing Caroline in the wheelchair. Out in the plains, farther and farther from the concentrated population centers, finding motorized transportation was becoming increasingly difficult, and with Caroline in her condition, bicycles were no longer an option. But that morning, just west of Topeka, Kansas, they’d found a big Ford Expedition, the keys in the ignition but its gas gauge tickling E, and a long stretch of empty road ahead. Adam cursed their luck. This big honker, with its seven seats, could make for some easy sledding out here, if they could only find some goddamn gas. So when he saw the boxy brown truck on the side of the road, a spike of relief shot through him.
“We’ll siphon the gas out,” Freddie had said after they’d pulled up behind the UPS truck.
“With what?”
“I’ve got a hose,” he said.
And he hadn’t been lying. A tightly spooled green coil of garden hose in his pack. For what, Adam had no earthly idea. But he had it, and maybe they could siphon the gas out of this UPS truck, if there was any to be had. It wasn’t like they had any other options. If this didn’t work, the Expedition would run dry, and they’d be walking along I-70, this big, empty gorgeous stretch of road, with no wheels.
Water, water, everywhere, not a drop to drink.
As Adam stepped down to the pavement, he felt a cool breeze rustle his shirt. The rain they’d awoken to had pushed off, leaving behind a clear, sunsplashed afternoon. Fall. That first taste of it right at summer’s end. Just a little taste. It was hard to picture the seasons changing with so much of his subconscious still occupied by those hot, hellish, plague-ridden days of August. But ended they had, just like summer would. The world was going to keep right on spinning, with or without them.
Adam and Sarah scouted out the UPS truck, but all they found was the desiccated corpse of the driver in the front seat, still wearing the familiar brown uniform. Here was a case study in Medusa. Guy wakes up, feeling a little off, heads off to work anyway. Delivers packages and death. A few hours later, the virus ravaging him now, he pulls off the road for a quick nap. Closes his eyes and that was that.
“Clear,” Sarah called out, and Freddie got to work on the gasoline.
“How long has it been since the outbreak?” Sarah asked as she watched Freddie feed the tank of the SUV.
Adam checked his watch.
“Today’s September 18,” he said. “Five, six weeks.”
“So call it a month since everything broke down?”
“Sounds about right,” Adam said. “Why do you ask?”
“The gasoline. It’s going to go over soon.”
“What?” Freddie asked, looking back over his shoulder.
Adam blew out a noisy sigh.
“She’s right,” Adam said. “Gasoline goes bad. The stuff with ethanol, that’s got a shelf life of about three months or four months.”
“Jesus H. Christ,” Freddie said. “Ain’t we ever gonna catch a break?”
Adam rubbed his eyes and chuckled to himself.
“We’ll figure something out,” he said.
“Hey, check this out!” Max called out, his exuberance cutting through the sudden frost like hot steel.
Sarah followed Max’s voice to the back of the UPS truck, where she found the kid climbing into the open cargo bay. She peeked around him and saw dozens of packages still in the truck.
“It’s like Christmas!” Max shouted as he began digging through the boxes.
Although it seemed a bit morbid, Sarah couldn’t help but smile a little as the boy pawed through the packages.
“Go on and bring them out here,” Adam said. “We’ll load them up and go through them when we make camp tonight.”
Max jumped on his new assignment, quickly clearing the truck of sixty-five boxes and envelopes. He created three piles: small, medium and large.
“Can I open them now?” Max asked when he’d finished.
Adam checked his watch, his eyes narrowing. Sarah could tell he wanted to go, go, go, narrow the gap between him and his daughter.
“OK,” he said. “We’ll take an hour to go through them. It’s one-twenty now. I want to be back on the road by two-thirty.�
�
Max’s face lit up.
“You open,” Adam said, “and I’ll keep a list. Deal?”
Sarah felt her stomach flip with excitement as Max nodded.
They found a notepad and pen in the glove compartment, and Max set to work tearing open the packages and envelopes. Before opening each one, he read the name and address of the package’s intended recipient. It felt weird and awkward at the beginning, but after half a dozen or so, Sarah was glad Max was doing it. In some small way, it felt like a memorial service for these sixty-five people they’d never met, who almost certainly lay dead in a hospital or bedroom or in a shallow grave and would otherwise have been lost to history.
The names flowed through them like a dark, deep river, rich with hidden meaning and import, but rushing by too quickly to impart any truth.
“Natalie Sears. 543 Michigan Avenue. Yukon, Pennsylvania.”
A prom dress.
“Russell Yang. 3231 Godfrey Street. Salem, Oregon.”
A case of printer paper.
The unboxing revealed a dizzying array of treasures, from gourmet coffee to a real estate sales contract, a Polaroid camera to a purple vibrator (and hadn’t that been a fun one to explain to Max), a cashmere scarf to a collection of dog toys. Cans of Campbell soup and a traffic cone. A set of car keys attached to a University of Missouri keychain. A jar of gourmet peanuts. A portable video game system. A hardcover novel. A sheaf of multi-colored construction paper bearing finger-paints of little hands and glued-on pipe cleaners. X-rays. DVDs of old movies. Deeper they dug into the scores of dead letters and deeper ran the fissures in Sarah’s heart, until it was on the verge of breaking. America. This was America they were opening, one piece at a time, an America that had disappeared around them like a mirage.
It was well past two-thirty when they finally finished, but no one seemed to care that they’d missed their self-imposed deadline. As she wiped tears from her face, Sarah looked up to see Freddie doing the same thing. And after all that, only a handful of boxes contained anything worth taking. The soup. The garlic peanuts. A carton of cigarettes. A novel called The Poacher’s Son that Max wanted to take.
God damn, this was hard, she thought. God damn.
Maybe they’d needed this. Her last memories of the old world were of it sick, dying and panicky, caught in a humiliating pose. The looting and the riots and the fear. The Bronx. She combed her memory banks for something before the plague. An early outbreak of flu, she’d heard on the news.
Before that, though, Wells, before that. Something before that.
St. Croix, back in March. She and two of her girlfriends, Keri Williams and Dawn Vann, officers like she’d been, now dead like she wasn’t, had bugged out to St. Croix for three days, drank and flirted and she hooked up with one guy, an architect from San Diego, if she remembered right. A quickie in the hallway outside her room, and thank God she’d had a condom with her because she was going to bang him whether she’d had one or not. It had been a fun trip, the last fun thing she remembered doing because then she was working a lot, getting ready to ship out in September. She supposed she felt a little better and, as she looked around at the other faces, she suspected her friends might have been engaging in similar trips down memory lane.
They tossed the white elephants back in the truck and shut the cargo doors. As Sarah stepped on to the running board to slip behind the wheel of the Expedition, she caught movement in the corner of her eye. She turned toward it, toward the dead cornfields to the north, and saw a lone figure staggering toward them.
Sarah and Adam raised their weapons as the figure approached, but the straggler either didn’t see them or didn’t care, and collapsed at the edge of the cornfield. With Adam covering her, Sarah approached the figure, a woman, she could see now. She was olive-skinned, her eyes a fierce green color but clouded with confusion and fatigue. She was ranting, her words coming in a machine-gun spray of English and Arabic.
“My God,” Caroline said to no one.
She was filthy, barefoot and dressed in tattered blue coveralls. Her arms and feet had been scratched and scraped to hell, and she was woefully thin. Her cheeks were sunken in, and her eyes were glassy. When Adam knelt to examine her, she recoiled away from him, violently, and toward Sarah. He backed away from her, his hands up in surrender. She seemed to relax, if only a hair, as Sarah tried to soothe her.
“Hey there, you’re gonna be OK,” Sarah said. “You’re gonna be OK.”
She repeated it over and over.
“Get me some water for her,” Sarah ordered.
Max brought two bottles and a hunk of bread to Sarah, who handed them over to the woman. Even Max seemed to understand that Sarah would be this woman’s intermediary for the time being. She guzzled both bottles of water and ate the food so quickly that Adam worried she might choke on it.
When she was done, Sarah took the woman’s hand in her own.
“Sarah, look at her arm,” Adam said.
Sarah gently turned the woman’s wrist and gasped. Burned into the underside of her wrist was a tattoo. It was the same phoenix rising from the ashes they’d seen spray-painted on the tent earlier. The woman looked at her, the panic bubbling on her face like a pot of water left unattended.
“It’s okay,” Sarah said. “You’re safe now. We’re all together.”
The woman swung her head toward Adam and then back to Sarah, as though she were trying to decide whether to believe them.
“Sarah, a word?” Adam said.
They stepped away from the group.
“She’s been hurt bad,” he said to Sarah. “Possibly raped. Make sure she knows it’s her decision.”
“What if she says no?” Sarah replied. “I won’t leave her alone.”
“She won’t say no,” Adam said, although he really had no idea what the woman would do.
Sarah and Caroline went back and sat next to the woman on the ground; Adam motioned for the men, and the three of them drifted down the highway to give the women some privacy. They stood awkwardly, shifting their weight from foot to foot. Max, who was short for his age, looked up at them like a child caught between warring parents.
He watched Sarah console the woman, who’d burst into tears once she was with Caroline and Sarah. She buried her face into Sarah’s shoulder and wailed, the sound almost painful to hear. It was as though all the grief that had accumulated since the outbreak was flooding out in one fell swoop, as though she’d never had a chance to deal with what had happened. Sarah and Caroline sat with her, holding her hand as the woman slowly regained her bearings. Her voice softened, her herky-jerky movements slowed down. As they waited, he found himself hoping very much that the woman would come with them. Sure, he wanted the woman to be safe. If she could find comfort in their ragtag group, so be it. But that wasn’t the whole story. He stole glances at Sarah’s face, at the angled cheekbone, at the eyes that glimmered in the light. He liked the way her t-shirt fit her body, the slender sheath of muscle in each of her arms.
The kiss they’d shared hadn’t been far from his mind. There had been something there, he was sure of it. They hadn’t discussed it, but in the past week, he’d caught her staring at him the way she’d caught him eyeing her. But she had remained silent. And, he supposed, maybe there just wasn’t any room on their plate for that kind of nonsense right now.
“I hope your daughter is still alive,” Freddie said, jarring Adam from his daydream.
“Oh,” Adam replied. “Thanks. I’m not kidding myself. I know it’s a long shot.”
“I’ll be honest with you,” Freddie said, his voice dropping to a whisper. “I saw both my girls die, and I don’t know what’s worse. Knowing they’re gone forever or not knowing at all.”
Adam couldn’t imagine anything worse than knowing Rachel was dead, but in a perverse sort of way, he understood what Freddie meant. What if he were just setting himself up for crushing disappointment? What if he never found her? Wouldn’t that be worse than just knowing that
she was dead? These questions spun through his head like a hamster on a wheel, haunting him as Sarah and Caroline counseled the woman. He tried to think of something else, anything else, but out here, in the big nowhere, there was nothing else to think about.
“I’m very sorry about your family,” Adam said.
“What can you do?” Freddie replied. “Some of us just draw the shitty hand.”
Adam didn’t know how to reply. He wasn’t sure if Freddie was just firing off platitudes or if that last comment had been a dig aimed at him.
“It’s a terrible thing,” Adam said.
An hour later, Sarah and Caroline approached Adam, Freddie, and Max, the newcomer hanging well behind them.
“Guys, this is Nadia,” Sarah said.
“Nadia, this is Adam, Freddie and Max.”
Adam and Freddie nodded.
“Hi,” Max said.
Nadia nodded toward Max, but she didn’t make eye contact with Freddie or Adam.
“Nadia has agreed to join us,” she said.
Nadia nodded again.
Caroline took Nadia’s hand in her own and squeezed it. Nadia placed her hand against Caroline’s swollen belly and smiled. They loaded up the Expedition, and ten minutes later, they were westbound again.
What if?
What if?
What if?
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
“Adam.”
He whimpered softly.
“Adam,” Freddie repeated again, this time shaking his shoulder. “Wake up, man.”
He didn’t want to. His head throbbed and, along with the dry, gummed-up mouth, foretold the hangover that awaited him. And being shaken awake wasn’t helping. Whatever it was would have to wait. But then Freddie said the one thing that made him forget about the hangover, about the headache, the one thing that terrified him above all else.
“Baby’s sick.”
Adam sat up like a shot, sending his systems into massive revolt. His head swam, conspiring with his stomach to magnify the nausea tenfold, and then there was nothing he could do to stop it. He scampered out of his sleeping bag as far as he could before his insides erupted. On his hands and knees, gripping the dirt for dear life, he waited as his body violently flushed out the remains of the previous day’s festivities, Freddie’s terrible message pinging away in his brain.
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