Of course, she was dead. Live people didn’t have skin that color. Live people breathed. Live people moved.
Lola wasn’t breathing. Lola wasn’t moving.
Lola was dead.
But still, confronted with undeniable evidence, Harr couldn’t force his mind into acceptance. He stood dumbly, at a loss.
The doctor said impatiently, “She’s dead, John. Her body is riddled with bacteria. It’s got to be disposed of in a safe way.”
Harr couldn’t believe his ears. “And what do you mean by safe?”
“We’re burning them.” Compassion flickered briefly in the doctor’s eyes. “There’s a lot of dead people now. We don’t have mortuary services capable of handling so many bodies.”
“You’re not burning her in some mass grave.”
The doctor squared his shoulders. “It’s not your choice, John. It’s by government order.”
“I don’t care.” Harr bent to lift Lola’s lifeless form.
“Leave her here,” Fisk ordered.
Harr carried Lola back to the truck and laid her inside.
“You’re going to kill yourself!”
Harr heard the doctor’s warning, but he wasn’t worried about that. He climbed in the cab and looked at Lola’s lifeless face.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered.
He turned on the engine and drove away.
Fifty
The freeway was a no-go. Susan realized this as soon as they hit La Cañada Flintridge, not five miles onto the 210.
“My god, where did all these cars come from?” she muttered.
Vehicles moved in a slow train, skirting abandoned and broken down automobiles, merging inch by painful inch into other lanes, so that the dotted white lines on the pavement disappeared beneath a random sea of steel.
Etta silently surveyed the scene from the passenger seat. They had been in the car for over an hour.
“We need to get off the freeway,” Etta said.
Susan glanced uneasily at the gas gauge. Although they had started with a full tank, the slow crawl was eating up precious gasoline. She was also running the air conditioner because she was afraid the suffocating midday heat would kill Etta. At the rate they were going, by nightfall, they’d be out of gas and still trapped within the LA Basin.
“We could take Highway 2 over the mountains,” Susan suggested. She thought they were close to the exit, but it was hard to tell. The arid landscape had always been fly-by scenery, a barely-registered blur of houses and dry hills that she’d passed at seventy miles an hour. Now, with visibility cut off at a hundred feet and no immediate signage to guide her, she wasn’t certain where they were.
“I don’t think that’s wise,” said Etta. “No one knows about the Ridge Route, but everyone knows about Highway 2.” Etta pointed a veiny hand at the windshield. “Imagine this kind of traffic on a two-lane highway up in the mountains. There are no alternate routes around Highway 2 if it’s blocked.”
Etta was right. Highway 2, also known as the Angeles Crest Highway, was a twisting road that traversed the steep, chaparral-covered Angeles National Forest. It only had a few offshoot roads along its entire fifty-mile length.
A horn blared. The nose of an enormous, jacked-up pickup nudged into the Oldsmobile’s lane. Before Susan could react, the driver blasted the horn again.
Susan gasped, astounded that pickup meant to push its way through. She resolutely stood her ground, unwilling to yield. Not that she could, anyway. To her right, two lanes of stationary traffic blocked any movement.
The horn blared again, the truck’s headlights pulling perilously close to Susan’s door.
“Let him in,” Etta said quietly.
Susan looked for the pickup’s driver, but he was up too high. She could only see a fraction of the passenger-side window. “Where?” she cried. “We haven’t moved at all.”
“We’ll move again. Let him in.”
The pickup rammed the Oldsmobile’s front end.
Susan screamed.
“Let him in!” Etta shouted.
“I can’t!” Susan felt the car moved helplessly under her as she jammed on the brakes, desperately trying to avoid sliding into the car next to her. The horrible sound of crunching metal filled the air.
And then, as abruptly as it had begun, the Oldsmobile stopped moving. The truck had created a gap between Susan’s car and the SUV in front. She watched in astonishment as the cars in the adjacent two lanes swiftly made room for the big truck.
Before the pickup merged into the newly-created gap, it idled briefly in front of the Oldsmobile’s hood, the tinted passenger-side window rolling down just enough to allow the passage of a woman’s arm.
“What do they want now?” Susan asked angrily.
The disembodied arm flipped her the bird, and then the pickup backed up and pulled into the gap.
Somehow, Alan managed to get Brooke’s body onto the bed. He collapsed next to her, his hand clutching his side, his breath coming in gasps. Beneath the gauze, he felt the warm ooze of blood again.
I won’t leave you on the floor, he thought.
He dragged a comforter over her body, hiding the stiff limbs and the dark bullet hole, and tucked it around her chin. He knew she was rotting, because the smell was hideous, and this time, he knew it wasn’t him.
He touched her face once, briefly, trying to recapture what she’d looked like when they were young, but he couldn’t remember. He could only see the streaks of gray that sprouted from her scalp, before they were snuffed out by the expensive black dye job that had been her signature look.
He stood up and said softly, “I’m sorry, Brooke.”
The silence of the house crushed him. He was teetering on the abyss again. He had to go. He hefted a backpack onto his good shoulder, testing its weight against his body. When his wound didn’t rip open again, he drank two more cups of toilet water and walked out the door.
Unlike Brooke, Alan’s neighbors had put up a fight.
A dead man lay sprawled in their driveway, his face half blown away, chunks of brain splattered on the pavers. Alan didn’t recognize him. He tried to guess how long the corpse had lain there and put it at more than a day, because the blood on the driveway looked dark and dried, and the smell of death was beginning to blossom.
The hair on Alan’s body stood on end. He held his hands in the air, approached the front door, and called out, “It’s Alan Wheeler. Don’t shoot!”
No one answered. He pushed open the front door and stuck his head into the entryway.
The stench hit him like a wall. “Jesus,” he gasped.
His neighbor lay sprawled in the entryway, his track suit riddled with so many bullet holes that Alan wondered how he’d gotten a shot off at all. Alan guessed by the pockmarked wall that some sort of close-range gun battle had occurred. His neighbors had taken the worst of it, but the looters hadn’t done much better, if the dead one in the driveway was any indication. In the hallway behind the staircase lay another body.
Hootan, their cocky twenty-year-old son, as dead as his father.
Alan pried the bloody gun from his neighbor’s stiff hands and ejected the cartridge. There were two bullets left.
He glanced at his watch. Three pm. Only two hours to get to Castaic.
He reinserted the cartridge, shoved the gun in his backpack, and headed for the garage.
“How bad is it?” Etta hobbled back from peeing again.
Susan looked from the car to the old woman. The diuretic might be saving Etta’s life, but it was killing them time-wise.
“It’ll keep going, I think,” said Susan, rising from a crouch. The driver’s side door panel was crushed beyond any hope of repair, and it no longer fit securely within its frame—but the door still latched, albeit tenuously.
The two women stood somewhere on Foothill Boulevard, a four-lane thoroughfare that roughly paralleled the interstate. Periodically, a car raced by.
“Do you know where we are?” Susan fire
d up the Oldsmobile. The engine rattled reassuringly, the air conditioner spewing smelly but cool air into the interior.
Etta scanned their surroundings intently. “I think so. I used to drive this stretch to avoid driving on the freeway, but I haven’t done much driving in the past couple of years.”
More than a couple of years, thought Susan. The ancient car’s odometer read 48,673 miles. She doubted it had been out of the garage in a decade.
The few cars on Foothill Boulevard made Susan uneasy. She had expected others to abandon the freeway as she and Etta had done, but the farther they drove, the fewer people she saw. It reminded her of the eerily empty streets of Pasadena. The hard-hitting first wave of DRYP must have wiped out the foothill towns just as lethally.
“We should be crossing back under the freeway somewhere up ahead,” Etta said.
Susan glanced at her watch. Three pm. Four and a half hours of daylight left. “How far to the Ridge Route once we get to the freeway?”
Etta peered out the window, squinting into the smoggy horizon. “I’d guess fifteen, twenty miles.”
Susan tried to keep her voice even. “That’s a long way on the freeway.”
“The freeway might not be so crowded this far out.”
Susan didn’t believe it. She glanced at the passing strip malls and trailer parks, trying to decide whether to spend the night on Foothill Boulevard or attempt the interstate now, which could mean winding up on the freeway when night fell. It wasn’t much of a choice. If they were going to spend the night somewhere on Foothill, they would have to find a safe place to stay, and they’d be stretching out their escape, which meant they’d run out of water.
But Susan also knew the freeway would be packed with people desperate to escape, people needing water and food and gasoline. If Susan and Etta got caught on the freeway when night fell, the Oldsmobile, with its mostly full gas tank and provisions inside, would be powerfully tempting prey.
“Where do we get on the Ridge Route?” Susan asked.
“Castaic. The road runs from Castaic, over the mountains, to the town of Grapevine.”
Susan had never heard of it. “Why doesn’t anyone know about the Ridge Route?”
Etta shrugged lightly. “It was built a hundred years ago. People take the interstate because it’s a lot faster.”
A freeway overcrossing materialized in the smog. Susan slowed the Oldsmobile, looking uncomfortably at the motionless river of cars.
“The on-ramp is over there,” said Etta.
“The cars aren’t moving.”
“Yes, they are. Take the on-ramp.”
Susan brought the Oldsmobile to a stop. “Etta, they’re not moving.”
“Susan, we have to take the freeway to get to the Ridge Route.”
“You don’t need to yell at me.”
“I’m not yelling at you.”
Yes, you are, thought Susan. She looked again at the freeway. There had to be side roads she could take if the freeway became unpassable, but she’d never know for sure unless she drove. With no map or GPS to guide them, she was relying on an eighty-something-year-old woman’s memory, and she wasn’t sure how good that was.
If they could just get to Castaic before nightfall. She’d drive the Ridge Route all night if it really was as deserted as Etta said. As long as it got them both out of Los Angeles.
She glanced briefly at the old woman, who sat tense and irritable in the seat next to her. Etta refused to meet her eyes.
Susan pushed the old lady from her thoughts. She looked again at the endless line of cars that seemed to be moving nowhere and tried to come up with a plan. If she remembered correctly, the interstate to Castaic was lined with developments—amusement parks and newer housing subdivisions, miles and miles of big houses on small lots, and strip mall shopping centers filled with Petcos and Bed, Bath, and Beyonds. With so much development, there had to be lots of side roads. They’d hardly have to ride on the freeway at all. They could get to Castaic before nightfall. Susan was certain.
It took Alan thirty minutes to break into the garage, and when he finally managed to get inside, he thought he was having a heart attack. His chest felt as though an elephant sat on it, and his heart was running along at marathoner’s pace.
Alan paused in the doorway, caught his breath, and waited for it to pass. Before him, an impressive collection of vintage Bentleys, Ferraris and a coal black Humvee glinted in the dim light.
In the back of Alan’s mind, a timer ticked away, counting the minutes to five o’clock, to the escape that would be denied him if he didn’t reach Castaic. But then again, if he keeled over from a heart attack, any rescue mission would be futile anyway. So, he plodded carefully, his world boiled down to an hour and a half, which was all the time he had left to get across the city and into the foothills, past the quarantine roadblock, and to the helipad at Castaic.
He bypassed the Ferraris and headed for the Humvee. He found the keys in the ignition and turned the engine over, waiting for the catch, anxiously checking the gas gauge. A full tank! No wonder his neighbors had fought so valiantly. The gasoline was worth more than the vehicle itself.
He put the Hummer in drive and pushed the gas pedal all the way to the floor. The SUV crashed through the closed garage door, momentarily blinding Alan in an explosion of debris.
Alan turned off the engine, looked regretfully at the badly damaged SUV, and climbed out with his backpack. He walked back through the enormous hole in the garage door to the vehicle he really wanted, which was parked in the corner. It glinted faintly in the dull light.
He threw a leg over the motorcycle’s seat, sat himself down firmly, and felt for the ignition key. He turned it and listened to the engine’s deep, grumbling roar. A second later, he kicked the kickstand and pulled the massive bike through the breach in the garage door.
The wind whistled in his ears and plastered his sweaty hair against his scalp. He knew he should wear a helmet, but there didn’t seem much point. Besides, he thought as he accelerated down the winding hillside road, Harley riders don’t like brain buckets anyway.
Harr threw the shovel into the back of the pickup and rubbed his sleeve against his forehead. Warm, dry gusts whipped in from the north, blowing the branches of the cemetery’s tall trees to and fro in a rhythmic swishing. Just beyond him, the groomed grass ended, and the sagebrush began, demarcating town from high desert.
The cemetery was empty, despite the fact that there were so many people dying. Where were they burning the bodies? South of the city, downwind?
Harr emptied a cardboard box of PVC pipe fittings onto the bed of his truck, grabbed a Sharpie out of the glovebox, and went back to the small mound of dirt he’d just turned over.
He scrawled “LOLA” and the date on the cardboard in large block letters. He felt ashamed that he couldn’t remember her birth date, but he’d figure that out later, when things settled down and he could get her a proper grave marker. He took an old, dried-up pot of flowers from an adjacent grave and placed it over the cardboard. The corners lifted and flapped forlornly in the breeze.
He tried to find something solid in his head, but his thoughts drifted about, loose and regretful, as inadequate for Lola in death as they had been in life.
He stood there until the sweat dried off his back and his shirt snapped in the wind. He stood there as the sun crossed the sky and the shadows grew long across the cemetery grass. Finally, as the colors deepened and the desert landscape reached the height of its beauty, he made himself leave. He was surprised by how difficult it was to tear himself away.
There’s no use staying in a cemetery all night, he told himself. There were things for him to do.
Only he couldn’t think of any of them as he walked to his bullet-ridden pickup truck. He could only think about how lonely the wind sounded and wonder why no one had come to the cemetery all day.
Fifty-One
Tyrone Hayden made his last broadcast at four pm on a Tuesday. He sat in KIRP Radio’
s sound booth and recited what he had been reading every two hours for the last twenty-four hours. “This is Tyrone Hayden, reporting from ground zero of the plague epidemic: Reno, Nevada.”
He tried to add something new, to freshen up his story, but the fatigue was getting to him. He could barely get out of his chair.
“The Emergency Services Department is advising all Reno residents to continue to shelter-in-place pending further notification. At this time, it is unknown when water and power services will resume, and all citizens are advised to preserve the food and water that they have on hand.”
He wondered if he could make the next broadcast two hours from now, when the station would fire up its back-up generators to make its scheduled broadcast. But then he began to cough, and the answer became clear to him. He pressed the mute button while he doubled over in his chair, deep pain wracking his chest.
When the coughing subsided, he sat there for a moment, catching his breath and letting the water clear from his eyes. No, there’d be no more reporting from Tyrone Hayden. A crushing sorrow overtook him.
He pressed the broadcast button and forced himself to read the page. “The Public Health Department is advising the continued use of personal protective equipment, including gloves and masks, for all persons. Residents should also avoid contact with sick people, if possible.”
He paused, took a deep breath, and tried to steady his shaking voice. “If your family members have died, the Public Health Department encourages you to place their bodies in the street at curbside, where disposal crews will collect them. Each body should be labeled with the dead person’s name, sex, birth date, and social security number, as well as home address and phone number. Under no circumstances are citizens to handle bodies without proper personal protective equipment.”
He looked through the sound booth’s window at the station’s empty hallways. No more workers. The big story had become the end story. No national reporting awards for him. No Emmys for the station. Just a few die-hards left in the building, hanging on to public responsibility, even when all that remained was the dismal recitation of health advisories.
DRYP Trilogy | Book 1 | DRYP [The Final Pandemic] Page 36