“At least I thought to check on her,” Freddie said.
“I’d given her a sleeping pill,” Adam said. “I’m her doctor. Not you!”
Freddie’s head rocked backward, like a championship boxer taking an unexpected right cross from a lightly regarded challenger. Sarah herself felt her insides drop when she heard this.
“Maybe it was an accident,” Sarah offered.
“I specifically told her not to take any other painkillers for this very reason,” Adam said.
He stood in the center of the tent with his hands on his hips, shaking his head. Sarah exhaled, sadness rushing in to replace the fear and terror that had gripped her when she’d first heard the scream. She slung her rifle over her shoulder and stared at the sweet woman who now lay dead before her. It had been a shitty couple of months for everyone, but Caroline’s surviving Medusa only to watch her first-born perish had seemed particularly cruel.
Death. Death. Death.
It had been a routine part of her adult life, swirling around her like fog. From the first time she’d seen a fellow soldier die in battle, to her first confirmed kill, an insurgent hiding in a house who’d gotten the drop on her only to see his rifle jam, and then blooming into many fellow soldiers and many confirmed kills. She’d expected to die somewhere along the line, not because she was cloaked with an extra-strength dose of bravery in volunteering for the most dangerous missions but because how much better it would have been to die in battle than to be slowly squeezed by Huntington’s.
Suicide had never been an option. She could never abandon her troops. As long as she could serve, she couldn’t bear the thought of one of her soldiers dying because she hadn’t been there for him or her. Even if that meant denying herself an early exit from the scourge that awaited her, the Grim Reaper, his bony arms crossed against his skeletal chest, tapping his foot impatiently. She’d always thought suicide the coward’s way out, and even here, she found herself thinking that a little bit about the late Caroline Braddock; she felt bad about thinking it, but that didn’t mean she didn’t think it.
“I think she left a note,” Adam said, derailing Sarah’s train of thought.
“It’s got your name on it,” he said.
Sarah took the page, which had been folded neatly into a square. Sarah’s name was etched in big block letters on the outside. She unfolded it and read silently.
Dear Sarah,
I’m sorry for what I’ve done.
But this world fucking sucks. I don’t want any part of it. I don’t want to live without Stephen. I don’t and I won’t.
Good luck.
Love,
Caroline
“What did she say?” Freddie asked.
She tucked the note into her pocket and glanced at Freddie. His eyes were wide with anticipation, and she could see how much it mattered to him to know he’d helped Caroline. She looked at Adam and saw something different, his face blank, his eyes looking somewhere else.
“She said she was sorry. And thank you.”
Adam covered Caroline’s body with a blanket and extinguished the lantern.
“We can bury her in the morning,” he said softly. “It’s too dark to do anything now.”
They wrapped her body in a blanket, and at first light, Freddie dug a second grave next to Stephen’s. Sarah, Nadia and Max watched as Freddie and Adam lowered Caroline into it. They refilled the hole in silence. Sarah was thankful for this; she didn’t think she had it in her to hear a rote recitation of platitudes. She’d heard enough eulogies to last ten lifetimes, and at the end of the day, dead was still dead. She had a terrible fear that someone would suggest exhuming Stephen’s body so they could bury him with his mother, but mercifully, no one did.
When it was over, they all began packing. No one had to say anything; everyone just seemed to understand it was time to hit the road. They’d been here for nearly two weeks, the longest any of them had spent in one place since the epidemic, but what had once borne the stirrings of home now felt dead and cold. Sarah packed quickly and then helped Max with his things. The baby’s death had rattled him badly, and he was morose.
They consulted their maps before pushing out.
“We should head south out of Salina,” Adam said, tapping a finger in the center of Kansas. “If we stay on I-70, we could hit snow in the Rockies. We can pick up I-40 in Oklahoma City and turn west there. That will take us south of the mountains.”
Sarah found herself nodding in agreement. She sensed a decisiveness in Adam’s voice, one that hadn’t been there before. She sensed the same thing in the commanding officers she’d looked up to in her career, the ones who’d earned their ranks.
They hit the road in a cool drizzle, and wasn’t that the most symbolic thing ever, she thought as the wipers squeaked back and forth across the thick glass. They took I-135 south out of Salina and set a course for Wichita, where they could slingshot around the city onto I-35 and chart a westerly course.
No one spoke.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
It was the hardest stretch on the road yet. Ninety miles from Salina to Wichita and they’d be walking nearly all of it through an astonishing automobile graveyard. It seemed that as the world had come tumbling down, the residents of each of those cities had concluded that the grass was much greener and healthier in the other. And so into their cars they’d climbed, sick, blind with panic, and in their cars they had died, along that stretch of interstate highway.
A few miles of clear road and then nothing but gridlock. Worse, the traffic jam appeared to be as wide as it was long, spreading off-road into the plains, into the grasslands, creating a sea of steel. Hundreds of thousands of vehicles glinted in the morning light, the shimmer of windshields stretching away to all horizons. They’d tried going around the jam, taking advantage of the big SUV’s four-wheel drive, but after a few miles bouncing through thick grasses with no end in sight, they’d abandoned the truck on October 1. But for a short dogleg about halfway between the two cities, the highway ran straight as an arrow. And it was along that long ribbon of asphalt that Adam and the others trekked for those ten days in October.
They averaged eight to ten miles a day through the Big Jam, as they’d taken to calling it. The cars were jammed together like sardines, leaving the narrowest of openings to negotiate. In some places, they’d had to walk topside, skittering from trunk to roof to hood and then back to trunk. And in almost every car, a sad story. A body or three or six. Families. Children. Mommies and Daddies and Nanas and Papas, entombed for all eternity. The bodies dried up and brown.
They made camp early on the seventh day, agreeing that they could use some extra rest, some extra time just doing nothing. As had been their habit, they scoured the vehicles for supplies first and then pitched their tents wherever they could find enough room. The cars were treasure troves of supplies. People had packed well for their final road trips - protein bars and bottled water and medicines, as though any of that could’ve stopped Medusa’s relentless march across the globe.
When they were settled in, Freddie walked the perimeter while the others sat around the campfire. It would be a chilly night, and Adam made a note they’d need to stop for more cold-weather gear when they made it to Wichita. God knew how long they’d be walking. Just a few feet clear of the fire’s reach and the night cold gripped hard. Amazing, he thought, the logistics involved in this trek. How their forefathers had done it, without SUVs and Gore-Tex and reliable guns, he’d never know. Just cut from different cloth, he suspected. Tougher cloth.
Max sat across from Adam, the boy’s face blank as he scarfed down his dinner. Adam smiled as he watched the boy eat; Max was possessed of a teenage appetite that would not be denied, apocalypse or not. Throw in the long hike they were on, and his stomach was basically a bottomless pit. He was doing reasonably well, Adam thought, given the circumstances. He’d taken a shine to Freddie, that was for sure. Freddie was big, larger than life. Adam still didn’t know what the man had done for
a living, but it no longer seemed appropriate to ask. That was all in the Time Before, when things like that might have mattered. But now they were all the same.
Sarah was making decent progress with Nadia. She was originally from Stillwater and had just turned forty-one a few weeks before the outbreak. Her husband and three teenaged sons had died on four consecutive days in August. That was as far as they’d gotten, but Adam was still impressed. Nadia slept close to Sarah, almost like a frightened child curled up with her mother, and she rarely, if ever, let her out of her sight.
But tonight, she’d had a bit of a breakthrough.
When Adam had served her the canned spaghetti, warmed over the fire, she smiled demurely and said thank you. Those were the first words she had spoken to anyone other than Sarah. It was a small victory, almost nothing, but it had made Adam feel good, an emotion in increasingly short supply. Man, he was beat. It was getting to the point he couldn’t remember a world before the epidemic, a world in which he wasn’t on this westward quest, his own personal manifest destiny. Sometimes he felt like he’d been on this journey his whole life, that it had no beginning, that it would have no end. A hamster on a wheel.
He reached into his pack for the photograph of Rachel he’d snatched from his bedside stand before leaving Richmond. At first, he’d felt silly taking it. But he was glad he did; he looked at it every night before retiring and every morning before setting off to remind him what was at stake, to keep his eyes on the prize. She was out there somewhere. She had to be. She had to be. He traced the outline of her face with his finger, then along the thick mane of her perpetually messy brown hair. Her eyes were deep brown, like pools of dark chocolate.
He looked up and saw Nadia staring at him, another smile on her face.
“Your family?” she asked. Her voice had a hint of a Texas twang, buried just under the still pronounced Middle Eastern accent.
“I’m sorry?” he said.
“The photograph,” she said, nodding toward the picture in Adam’s hand.
“Oh,” he said. “Yes. My daughter. It’s possible she survived.”
Nadia’s eyes widened at this.
“Really? That would be very unusual, no?”
“Yes. Very. And I’m not one hundred percent certain she’s alive. But I have to be sure.”
“Of course,” Nadia said. “May I?”
Adam proudly handed over the photograph of his daughter, excited to introduce her to someone else. It was times like these he wished he hadn’t missed so much of Rachel’s childhood, missed the chance to brag about her.
Nadia looked at the photograph and gasped, her hand clapping hard against her mouth. She mumbled something unintelligible, possibly in Arabic. Sarah, who’d been reading by the campfire, looked up, alarm evident on her face.
“Nadia, what’s wrong?”
“Ya Allah, ya Allah, ya Allah,” she said over and over, staring at the photograph, as though she’d seen a ghost.
“What did you say?” Sarah barked at Adam.
“Nothing! She asked to look at the picture.”
“Nadia, what is it?” Sarah said, grabbing Nadia’s chin with her hand. Nadia reared back and looked up at Adam, her eyes boring directly into his.
“I know her,” Nadia said, pointing at the photograph.
Adam felt his insides drop.
“What do you mean you know her?” Sarah asked.
“She was there. She was there. Rachel.”
“Yes, yes!” Adam shouted. “Her name is Rachel.”
Adam got up and stumbled around the camp, feeling light-headed, dizzy, almost drunk.
“She’s alive?” he said to no one, his hands clasped together behind his head.
Nadia nodded and shifted away from Adam. Maybe he’d freaked her out a little. But Adam didn’t care. Tears stung his eyes.
Rachel was alive. Rachel was alive. His daughter was alive.
“YEAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!” he howled, his bellow echoing across the empty plains like a sonic wave.
Part III
Evergreen
We always pay dearly for chasing after what is cheap.
-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Stupidity.
Sheer, unvarnished, in-the-raw stupidity. Free-range, organic stupidity.
That’s what had gotten her in this mess.
Rattled by the horror that had unfolded before her, she had made decisions she never would have made in ordinary circumstances, and that’s what really pissed her off - with her back against the wall, she’d failed to make the right decisions at the moments they’d mattered most. You’d never have busted Rachel Fisher for something asinine like going to the grocery store on an empty stomach, but, no, no, when the apocalypse hits, she’d run around like a goddamn fool. She’d done what other people did, people who let their emotions get the best of them, heat-of-passion decisions. Perhaps it could be excused, and maybe someone else would’ve been quicker to forgive herself.
But not Rachel Fisher.
And now here she was, stirring her bubbling pot of regret like a thick soup in winter.
Now that she was here, she was trying to keep her wits about her. Focus. Study. Learn. The others were panicky, weepy. But Rachel didn’t want to be like the others. She wanted to know more about this place, find out what the hell was going on. They’d started to look to her, these women that were ten or fifteen years her senior, looking to her for answers, for reassurance, for help. She didn’t know why. She’d never been particularly good at making friends, and she really hadn’t had many in her life. It wasn’t that she didn’t want friends, it was just that she seemed to be missing some key piece of equipment that let people connect with one another in some meaningful way.
She was lying on her side, dressed in the sky-blue jumpsuit that was their standard uniform. She studied her arm, the small π etched on the inside of her left wrist. It was weird to look at the tat now, this thing she’d carried with her from the old world; in fact, it was the only thing she had left from before. Never had she thought she’d have a tattoo, but it was math, and she was a programmer, and that made it seem okay. On the opposite wrist, of course, was the tattoo these monsters had tagged her with, but she didn’t bother looking at that one anymore.
The room was small and getting smaller each day, a noose tightening around her, threatening to choke off her sanity. A cot. A small banker’s box, in which she kept her three jumpsuits and the few personal effects the captives were allowed. She got up and crossed over to the window, a perk of the room for which she was ever grateful. The prairie stretched on interminably, stark and endless. She thought they were in Kansas or Nebraska, but she wasn’t entirely sure about that. The last few days had been relatively uneventful. No testing, no speeches or ridiculous orientation sessions. Just three relatively square meals and an hour of free time in the yard with her fellow captives.
Rachel didn’t know who these people were, but there was something very off about them. Granted, she’d been a loner most of her life, happiest in the soft glow of a computer screen or with a problem set. She wasn’t good at small talk, and she was even worse at big talk, and so as she’d gotten older, she’d become more and more comfortable with herself and less comfortable with the world outside her door. But when she thought about the dead world around her, the panic would rise up like a rapidly inflating balloon, taking her breath away. These people, however, seemed to have taken the end of the world in stride.
Just because she didn’t play nicely with others didn’t mean she’d welcomed mankind’s extermination, and she would think about math and programming and remind herself that unchecked emotion wasn’t going to help anything, certainly not how to solve the mess she was in. And now she thought back to her life, and how she’d spent most of her years avoiding other people. One evening, a couple of weeks before the outbreak, she’d been at a Starbucks with her laptop; a nice guy wearing those tight jeans had started chatting with her, and she h
ad just ignored him, trying to disappear into the glow of her MacBook. Why did she do things like that? And now, she supposed, that nice guy was almost certainly dead.
Jesus, what a cluster-fuck the end of the world had turned out to be.
She’d been getting ready to head back to CalTech when the virus hit Southern California like a meteor. By August 15, commercial air travel had been shut down, the buses and trains had stopped running, hell, all interstate travel had been banned, and it hadn’t made a lick of difference. Medusa still got in, the most uninvited guest of all time, and burned through the population like a brushfire.
Her stepdad Jerry had gone totally ape-shit when things started to get bad. He’d barricaded them in the house, filled the tub with water, rationed out the food. She’d argued with him, telling him he was blowing things out of proportion (and if she was being honest with herself now, she was worried he’d mess up her upcoming move back to Pasadena). He didn’t sleep, spent every waking minute in front of the television, his iPad and iPhone close by, Twitter feeds monitored. Internet access became spotty around August 15, but by then, it was spitting out the same old shit hour after hour after hour.
None of them got sick until the sixteenth, when her mom woke up with it, crying. Jerry had quarantined her in her bedroom, leaving food and water at the door, and that hadn’t gone over particularly well, especially after Jerry came down with it. At first, and she was ashamed to admit it to herself, even now, two months after it had happened, she’d been fascinated by the outbreak, to be alive for such a paradigm shift. But then her mom had died on August 17, and Jerry was dead by the eighteenth. Although she hadn’t been that close to her mom and Jerry was kind of an idiot, watching them die had been pretty goddamn horrible because she saw how she would die. But then a day would go by, then another, and then another, and it began to dawn on her that she wasn’t going to catch it.
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