They’d been on the road since first light. Riding shotgun while Sarah drove, sipping three-day-old coffee, he studied his maps, a Sharpie in hand. A chilly rain was falling. They were still holed up in the Cadillac Inn, trying to ignore the fact the days had gotten progressively cooler and the nights were much, much colder. They’d taken to stripping the empty rooms of their bedding and loading up with blankets and quilts and towels to stay warm at night.
That would do for now, but they were approaching a come-to-Jesus moment in a couple of areas. A few more weeks, and freezing to death would become a legitimate possibility. If they didn’t find Rachel by November the first, they’d probably have to pull up and head south for the winter, like a flock of Canadian geese. Second, motorized transportation was becoming increasingly hit-or-miss; a bad load of gasoline had grounded the Outback, and since then, they’d resorted to peeling vehicles off the Big Jam like fruit from an automotive tree. Some ran; others didn’t.
He spent as much time as he could searching for the camp. Some days he had company; others he traveled alone. Today, Sarah had come along, and for that he was glad. As they banged around the back roads of the empty Midwest, sometimes they talked, mostly about the world gone by, and sometimes they said nothing. This afternoon, he’d been quiet, feeling particularly morose about their quest. Now darkness was setting in, earlier and earlier with each passing day. He checked his watch; it was a hair before seven o’clock. As he shaded in a map section they’d searched that afternoon, he felt the vehicle decelerate sharply.
“What is it?” he asked, looking over at Sarah.
“That light,” Sarah said, slowing to a stop on the shoulder. They were up in the panhandle of Oklahoma, a couple hundred miles from their little home base in South Haven.
He followed her gaze toward a soft glow to the northwest, at his ten o’clock. The rain had pushed off to the east late in the afternoon, taking the cloud cover with it and leaving behind a dark, moonless night, very dark. This effervescence was a lighthouse in an ocean of darkness. Adam’s pulse quickened.
“What do you think it is?” she asked.
“Hopefully a steakhouse.”
She laughed.
“That would be good.”
“We should check it out,” he said. “While we can use the light as a beacon. If we wait until daylight, we might not be able to find it again.”
“Agreed.”
She went to shift into gear and then paused.
“Look,” she said, touching Adam on the arm.
A small herd of deer crossed the road in front of them, emerging ghostlike from the tall prairie grasses at the side of the road. A large doe paused and turned her head toward the windshield, her eyes glinting in the shine of the headlights. Her head, a creamy light brown and speckled with white spots as though she were a careless painter, twitched once, and then she followed her herdmates into the prairie on the other side.
“Hunting season would be coming up soon,” she said.
“Probably going to be a good one for the deer.”
She laughed as she guided the truck back on the road, the glow in the distance their only guide.
“Be interesting to see what nature does without us in the way,” she said.
“I’ve been thinking about that,” Adam said. “The virus didn’t seem to have much impact on animals, at least that I’ve seen. But nature is going to roar back in a hurry, I can promise you that. Think how fast grass and weeds grew even when we were staying right on top of it. The wild animal population, the ones usually culled by hunting, will probably explode, until the food chain stabilizes again. Oceans and rivers will start to cleanse themselves. I suppose overfishing will be a thing of the past, at least for the next few centuries.”
“Think our society will ever re-form?”
“Hard to say,” Adam said. “We’ve probably seen the last of the good ol’ U.S. of A., much as it pains me to say. I could see a bunch of little communities popping up all over the place, particularly in the south, in the rural areas, where the temperatures are warmer and where there probably aren’t as many bodies to deal with. Assuming that some of the babies survive, and the communities begin to sustain themselves with food, water, shelter, they’ll begin to interact. Possibly violently at first.”
“Violently.”
“I hope not, but that’s what I’m afraid of. Some of these communities, they may be headed by dictatorial types. Remember, the people who survived – they weren’t selected for their ability to survive in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. They were selected for their ability to survive exposure to the Medusa virus. And that’s it. All over the world, there were infants and quadriplegics and Alzheimer’s patients who were immune but died within a few days because there was no one there to care for them. So you’re going to have people who won the genetic lottery but who have no idea how to survive on their own. They may be more than happy to let someone else run the show. And those are the kinds of people who scare me. There’s going to be a huge push to get the power turned back on, or at least some facsimile of it. People are going to start stockpiling things like weapons. In fact, we should be doing that ourselves. Even if we don’t need them right away.”
He paused and considered all the challenges that lay ahead and it began to make his head spin.
“And if the babies aren’t immune?” Sarah asked.
“Then we turn the lights out before we leave.”
The mood in the car soured. His back ached, and he wanted nothing more than to climb into his big king bed back home, in a world where none of this had happened, where he could sit in front of the TV with some old DVDs, slurping down spicy chicken tortilla soup.
“How are we on gas?” he asked, deciding to change the subject.
“Not great,” she said after checking the gauge. “We can either keep going and possibly run out of gas before we find this place, or turn back and possibly run out before we get home.”
“Super.”
He chewed on a fingernail, trying to push emotion aside and focus on the logical choice.
“I’m up for it if you are,” she said. “You’re right. It may be hard to find again.”
“It’s risky,” he said. “I want to find Rachel more than anyone, but I don’t want you to do something you don’t need to do.”
“Fuck it,” she said. “What was it the kids were saying before the virus hit? YOLO?”
“Yolo?”
“You only live once.”
“Oh, YOLO.”
“The kids, Doctor. The kids.”
They spent the next ninety minutes zipping along back roads, cutting through fields and then back onto state highways, the ever-present glow drawing closer on the northwest horizon. Sarah forded an overgrown farm, the bodies of half a dozen horses dotting the landscape in the sweep of the headlights, dead of thirst, if Adam had to guess. At the farm’s gated entrance, Sarah turned west onto Route 815, the glow dead ahead. Just then, the truck sputtered and hitched, the final warning that they were riding on fumes.
“Kill the headlights,” he said.
Sarah flicked the lights off, leaving them cocooned in darkness.
“You think this is her camp?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t see any walls.”
“Well, either way, we’re committed now.”
He was sort of glad there was no turning back. The glow was hypnotic, drawing him in. Something different about this place. Why it felt different than the others, he didn’t know. Maybe this was a destination rather than a way station. He thought often of Sarah’s query about what he would do after he found Rachel. There would have to be something to make life worth living; otherwise, they could all be headed for a dark place indeed.
The problems were piling up quickly. His feelings for Sarah at the top of the pyramid, not because it was the most pressing, but it was the most familiar type of problem. Unrequited love, that was a road he’d been down before. Beneath that, Freddie’s state
of mind. OK, not your everyday problem, but still in the range of human experience. He was still worried about the guy. Of course, Rachel.
And the last one, of course, the foundation of all the other problems they were facing, the one that vexed him, had been baby Stephen’s death. Of course, it looked like he had died of Medusa, but had his body put up any fight at all? Had he inherited any resistance from his mother? If Medusa resistance required a complete copy of the gene, meaning a baby needed to be born to two immune parents, or worse, if it wasn’t hereditary at all, then they were all in a lot of trouble indeed. Even if it was hereditary, the survivors were so scattered he didn’t know how enough of them would re-connect to rebuild the species. Conceivably, not enough women would become pregnant, and going forward, each successive generation would be smaller than the last, until it was too late, until the population dipped below the point of no return, and that would be that.
The engine finally quit, and the SUV rolled to a stop as Sarah guided it to the shoulder. They slipped out of the truck, grabbed their guns, and zipped up their jackets against the night’s chill. A cold wind blew in off the prairie, frosting the back of Adam’s neck.
They walked for another ninety minutes along Route 815, a two-lane groove slicing through the flatlands. About five miles west of where they abandoned the SUV, a sign rose up from the darkness. It read Welcome to Evergreen, America’s Greenest City!
Just beyond the sign, the city of Evergreen rose up like the pages inside a child’s pop-up book. Bright and sprawling, slapped down in the middle of the wide, empty prairie. As they drew closer, the soft white glow sharpened into the thousands of twinkling lights illuminating the town. Adam felt dizzy, sort of the way he’d felt the day he’d gone for that fateful run along the oceanfront at Holden Beach, when he’d found the beach empty and deserted. Outside normal limits.
Nothing moved.
They crept along the sidewalk at city’s edge, keeping close, their weapons at the ready. A low-slung white brick building, the name NorthStar stenciled along the side, fronted this block. Across the street, a post office and an ice cream shop called Ericka’s.
“How can all the lights still be on?”
Adam shook his head.
He checked his watch; it was nearly eleven p.m. They were hours overdue, but there wasn’t anything they could do about that. He hated to think about them worrying, knowing there was nothing they could do but sit and wait and wonder how long they should wait before deciding Adam and Sarah weren’t coming back.
They moved street by street, block by block. The streets were virginal, as though they’d just been poured. Bright streetlights poured warm, inviting light across the town square. At one intersection, which bracketed the west side of the town square, they found a park starting to go to seed. At its center was a lake, its surface shimmery and still and dark. It had been a lovely park, ringed by young saplings, their leaves in full Technicolor now. Shiny late-model cars and small SUVs dotted the town.
“Notice anything about the cars?” Adam asked. Something about the place had been nagging him as they’d made their way into the town proper, and it had finally clicked.
Sarah shrugged.
“They’re all electric.”
A flicker of movement ahead of them, on the east side of the park. A small figure, perhaps a child or teenager, waving frantically at them.
“Help!” the figure called out. “We need help!”
“Let’s go!” Sarah hissed, breaking into a run.
“Wait!”
Adam bolted across the park after her, his gun up at the ready. His legs swished against the tall grass as he knifed toward her. But she was fast, quickly widening the distance between them as she zeroed in on her target. Just ahead, just as Sarah had started to gain on her quarry, the figure slipped through the park gate, across the street toward a residential area, and around a corner.
“This way!”
“Sarah!” he yelled. He had no idea what she was thinking, what would possess her to take such a risk. He barreled through the gate and across the street (pausing to look both ways because some habits were damn hard to break) and around the same corner.
As he cleared the turn onto a narrow dead-end side street, finding an array of guns trained on Sarah, he realized how big a mistake they’d made.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
If there was one lesson Adam was learning in this post-apocalyptic wasteland, one nugget of knowledge he was really taking to heart, it was that everyone had a gun. And people thought it had been easy to get a gun before the plague!
Ba-dum, crash-cymbals!
He was staring at the business end of four firearms. A tightly grouped bunch, two women and two men, their faces tight and drawn, plus the rail-thin teenaged girl that had initially drawn their attention. Sarah had her gun up as well, and wasn’t this just a hell of a scene?
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” he yelled out casually, like he were warning a driver about to back into a shopping cart.
“Step back, Adam,” Sarah hissed.
“Everybody calm down,” he said as calmly as he could, holding up his palms.
“Put your guns down!” a voice squeaked. Adam cut his eyes toward the sound and saw its owner, a heavier-set bespectacled man of about fifty.
“Look, let’s all be real careful here,” Adam said. He hoped his voice sounded calm. “If we put our guns down, will you promise not to shoot us?”
As a show of good faith, Adam slowly rotated his gun in his hand, taking it by the barrel, and laid it on the ground.
“Put it down, and we’ll see what’s what,” the teenaged girl said. She had a husky voice, coated with the smoke of illicit cigarettes. She was older than Adam had initially thought, probably closer to eighteen or nineteen.
“Sarah,” Adam said. “Put the gun down.”
She gave him a stare that might as well have been lined with battery acid, but she relented. Holding one palm up, she lowered the heavy gun and dropped it on the ground. It clattered ominously on the asphalt, and just like that, both of them were unarmed.
“See,” Adam said, “we’re not here to hurt you.”
“Who are you people?” the man asked.
“We saw the lights.”
“Are you with them? Are you?”
“With who?”
“Don’t lie to me!”
“We’re not with anyone, I swear! My name is Adam. This is Sarah.”
“Let’s just shoot them!” one of the women said.
“I don’t want to shoot anyone,” the man said, his shoulders sagging. His eyes were baggy with exhaustion. “We don’t even know if they’re with them. They haven’t been back in weeks. Let’s take them down to the cells. We’ll let the mayor sort this out.”
“Jeff, we don’t even know if mayor is-”
“Shut up!”
The group fell silent, and their captors marched them down the main drag, named Main Street, back the way Sarah and Adam had come. They passed a diner, a law office, a dry cleaner, and a few other staples of a downtown area. There was a small-town feel to it, sure, but there was something about the place Adam couldn’t quite put his finger on. One thing he was sure of: this was not Nadia’s mysterious camp.
The town hall, back near the lake, was a modern looking brick building with a wide, utilitarian staircase. Adam and Sarah followed inside, where they felt the warmth of the heat blowing through the vents, which felt indescribably good. Jeff led them downstairs to a trio of jail cells. After confiscating their personal items, they put Adam in the cell on the far end and Sarah into the one closest to the door, leaving the middle one empty. Jeff had started sliding the cell door shut when the frantic footsteps of someone descending the stairs filled the air.
“Jeff!” a woman called out.
Adam craned his neck for a better view; a middle-aged woman emerged from the shadows. Her forehead was shiny with sweat and she looked to be in tears.
“What is it?” Jeff asked.
Adam shivered with dread. Medusa?
“Hey, I’m a doctor,” Adam said. “Let me help.”
Jeff and the woman looked up at Adam.
“I swear!” Adam said. “There’s ID in my wallet.”
Jeff didn’t seem to be interested in the identification.
“Are you really a doctor?”
“Yes, I was an OB/GYN.”
“All the doctors and nurses here died or left town,” the woman said. “Will you look at Gwen?”
“If you agree to let us out.”
Jeff grunted, a noise suggesting he’d known this ultimatum was coming.
“Jeff, come on, we can’t let her die.”
“She might die anyway,” he said.
“Please, Jeff.”
He sighed.
“Fine.”
He opened up the cells and said, “Follow me. If you try to run, I will shoot you.”
“Any idea what’s wrong with her?”
“Lemme think. Today’s Saturday. Friday morning, we were at breakfast. Anyway, she complained she was tired and dizzy. And hot! She said she was hot, tired and dizzy. Then she fainted.”
Adam set his mind to work, running a differential diagnosis as best he could, drawing on all his medical knowledge, from medical school textbooks, through the continuing education courses, through every random ailment his patients had experienced in his sixteen years in practice.
“Go on,” he said. “Every detail matters, no matter how minor you may think it is.”
They went up a stairwell to the second floor, Jeff narrating the entire way. Trailing behind was the young woman they’d initially spotted coming into Evergreen. Her name was Charlotte Spencer.
“We had to wake her up for dinner that night,” Charlotte said, cutting in. “She ate a little, but she was still out of it. Kind of a mess, actually.”
“Fever?”
“Not that I could tell.”
They moved into a large room at the end of the corridor, where they found Gwen Townsend on a couch, wrapped in blankets, sleeping. It was an ornate office, one wall lined with bookshelves. Another wall consisted entirely of glass and looked out toward the center of town. A middle-aged woman was sitting with her. The mayor was sweating, her hair matted to her face, but her forehead was cool to the touch. Her pulse was flying.
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