The line isn’t moving. Doyle doesn’t slow, doesn’t accelerate either. They’re all of them watching, heads tilted, mouths hanging open, in idiocy or hunger. He has aimed at the children, a decision based entirely on body mass and worst-case scenarios. Neither shows any reaction.
Only at the last moment do they step aside, unhurriedly moving sideways, backward, as if possessed of some capacity he lacks. Doyle fights the urge to speed up, though it’s close to overwhelming. The woman’s face passes by, inches from his. Dark, mottled eyes regard him without emotion.
When he checks the rearview mirror, they’ve resumed walking. And he appreciates then why his mind went so eagerly to the image of a mother and her ducklings. For it’s one of the females leading them, clambering gracelessly up the bank that will return them to the wilderness.
* * *
Johnson gives it a few minutes, until the Sickers are far behind them, and then asks, “Are you okay back there?”
“Sure,” Kyle says.
He had been. He hadn’t even been afraid. The Sickers had seemed not terrifying, not monstrous, but familiar. Their presence had been much less strange than the sight of empty lanes of highway stretching without interruption.
Now, against his will, he recalls once again their journey so many months ago in the other direction. Kyle and his father, Carlita and Nando: two of them are gone, one half of that briefly formed family dead and buried. Only then does Kyle understand what he’d experienced as he saw those six Sickers spread across the blacktop, moving in awkward synchronicity. What he’d felt was jealousy.
“I didn’t get it at the time,” he says. “How close we came.” He hadn’t meant to speak. His thoughts have bypassed whatever part of his brain gets to make such decisions. He can scarcely recognize his own voice; it’s so thin and weary. Kyle hates to show Johnson this weakness, but he can find no strength in himself anywhere. “The army wouldn’t let people use the road. They were keeping everyone together. We wouldn’t have got out without the ambulance.”
“That was Carlita’s cousin’s idea?” Johnson queries.
Johnson must know. Carlita will have told him everything. Therefore, Johnson is encouraging Kyle to talk, and he should be resentful. Yet the need has built to such a point that he can no longer restrain himself. “Fernando. Yeah. It was all his idea. He saved us. My dad….” Kyle doesn’t want to finish the sentence, but the words are there, already queued up. “My dad tried something. It didn’t work out.”
Except that Johnson knows what his dad tried and failed to do. So the only person Kyle’s fooling is himself. He presses back in his seat, no longer looking at Johnson, implying by posture alone that he’s said more than he intended to.
Late in the afternoon, the city finally comes into view. They break the brow of a hill and it’s there in the bowl of ground below, a disorganized sketch of drab shapes spread with no clear objective over the landscape. Even from a distance, its outlines don’t look right. The last few months have not been kind to the city. Whole blocks, whole boroughs have been ravaged by fires, some probably begun by Sickers in the first waves of madness, but most, Kyle guesses, simply nature running its course.
As they draw nearer, he’s struck by the bizarre sensation that, moment by moment, they are moving back through time. The highway has suffered a degree of damage but, devoid of traffic for months, has weathered well for the most part. The city, in contrast, is a relic of an ancient age. Its buildings are falling into the earth, the earth all too ready to claim them. Though such patient decay can likely go on for decades, Kyle finds it hard to imagine any sign of civilization surviving another five years.
That sight, the feelings it brings, reopens the sinkhole of emptiness inside him. Here is the difference between knowing everything that was once his life is gone and seeing in irrefutable detail. He can feel his silence slipping, can feel more words rising, exactly like vomit. And staying silent seems practically disrespectful, because Kyle remembers this spot. Ahead, where the access road trails off to meet the overpass, a large arrow sign remains, hoisted on poles set into concrete. Round about are scattered temporary blinker lights mounted on plastic orange pillars, all long since tumbled over, the orange a dull brown and the lights themselves extinguished. When he looks carefully, he can make out dints and scuffmarks where the heavy military vehicle rested.
“This is where they were taking them,” he says.
Johnson slows the jeep.
“The refugees. The ones that got out. There was a camp, something like that. They were herding them; they wouldn’t let them onto the highway. Not without knowing if they were infected or not.”
“A quarantine zone,” Johnson says.
“I suppose.” They’re almost upon the junction. It occurs to Kyle that, all this while, Johnson has been driving in the wrong lanes. “I’d like to see,” he says.
Johnson slows the jeep yet further, to a crawl. “You think there might still be people?” There’s evident doubt in his voice.
“No, I just…Johnson, I need to see.”
Johnson hesitates. Then he says, “No you don’t.”
“What the hell do you know? You—”
“Calm down.”
But Kyle can’t calm down. Suddenly he can barely control himself. “I need to see!” he blurts. “I need to know what happened. There were people trying to get out, hundreds and hundreds of them. Some of them were sick. Maybe the soldiers were sick. They were all trapped there together. And that…it could have been us!”
Johnson gives him a few seconds, long enough for the strangled note to leave Kyle’s breathing. “But it wasn’t.”
All the answer Kyle can manage is a shapeless mumble.
“What?”
“I said, we should do what we came here to do.”
Johnson’s response is to pick up speed once more. He keeps on until they’re on the verge of entering the city, then slows again and this time stops altogether, there in the middle of the highway. From behind, Kyle watches him curiously, distrustfully. Perhaps it’s only the tension radiating off him, but Kyle divines that whatever Johnson is doing has long been planned.
Yet when Johnson speaks, his words don’t sound premeditated. They sound, in fact, as though they’re being wrenched from out of him. “There’s something I need to talk to you about,” he says. “Before we go in there. I should have told you before we set out. You deserve to know. I should have and I didn’t. Then I convinced myself there’d come a point when you might be willing to listen. There won’t, I get that now.”
“You’re right,” Kyle says. “Nothing you tell me is going to change anything.”
“I get that. But like I said, you deserve to know. The truth is….” Johnson’s whole body tenses, shoulders bunching, fingers wringing the steering wheel. Then he sags. “Truth is, I’m dying.”
Kyle hears the words. He can make no sense of them. He stares mutely, attempting to read the logic that language has failed to provide from the sliver of Johnson’s face revealed by the rearview mirror.
“I mean,” Doyle continues, “we’re all dying. Chances are I’m just dying sooner. I’ve been getting headaches for a long time. Real bad headaches. I talked to Aaronovich; she thinks it’s a tumor. On my brain. She says, under normal circumstances, it might have been treatable. But these aren’t normal circumstances and she can’t fix me. Probably there’s no one left alive anywhere who could.”
Now Kyle understands – more than he wants to. Still, his thoughts are a lightning storm. It would be impossible to pick an emotion from that flickering delirium and claim with certainty that’s what he’s feeling. All Kyle can do is grasp for the easiest, the most obvious reaction. “What do you want from me, Johnson?” His own voice sounds thin, watered down. “You killed my dad. And you didn’t have to. Maybe if you’d done things differently you’d never have had to kill anybody.”
<
br /> “I realize that.”
“Then what? What did you think I was going to say?”
“The reason I’m telling you,” Johnson replies, “is that I don’t know what might happen. Aaronovich doesn’t know what could happen. Or when. Or how long I have. But when it gets bad, really bad, I can’t do much. So I need to be sure you can cope. And that if you get back and I don’t, you’ll take responsibility. Whatever you believe, none of this is Carlita’s fault.”
Kyle is shocked by the threat of tears in his own labored breathing. The unfairness of this is almost beyond his ability to process. He’ll have no revenge. Nature has beaten him to it. But he can feel no satisfaction at the prospect of yet another death, only a gaping sensation of loss. Prior to setting out, he’d imagined he was faced with a choice between hope and revenge. In truth, both will be denied him. The world as it is now has no place for such things.
“I’ll need to know how to drive,” he says. To his surprise, his voice is calm again, calmer, perhaps, than before. “My uncle let me drive a little. I learned the basics. I just need you to show me enough to get back on my own.”
“Fine,” Johnson agrees. “But out here, not in the city.”
Of everything that’s happened in the aftermath of the sickness taking hold, what follows is feasibly the strangest part. Johnson lets Abigail, who has been growing steadily more restless since the incident with the Sicker pack, out to play upon the embankment. There she scurries to and fro, her gaze rarely leaving the vehicle. Then they spend an hour trundling along the same brief stretch of road, practicing simple maneuvers, Kyle crouched intently over the wheel and Johnson reeling off instructions, with greater patience than Kyle would ever have expected from him.
It’s nowhere near enough. But Johnson must be conscious of their fuel supplies and of the dwindling daylight, and Kyle is a fast learner when he needs to be. By the end of that hour, he feels like he might have a chance of making it back alone – at least until he envisions what that would actually entail, for then his mind clamps shut and terror takes the place of all coherent thought.
When Johnson gets out and opens the rear side door, Abigail scampers up without encouragement and flops onto her side, tongue poking between her lips. Kyle scoots over, for the first time taking the front passenger seat rather than sitting in the back with Abigail.
“From now on,” Johnson tells him, as he slides in behind the wheel, “whenever we leave the jeep, you keep the keys. If anything happens to me, you get out of here. Keep yourself safe.”
“You don’t need to worry about that.” But Kyle finds that he can’t say it with the conviction he intends.
“Whatever happens. You keep safe.”
“All right.”
“Okay.”
Johnson starts the engine. He drives through the gap in another barricade, this one reinforced with two police black-and-whites, their windows long since caved in.
And just like that, they’re within the city.
Chapter Forty-Two
They sleep in shifts, as well as they can, for the night is far from quiet.
There’s much shouting, audible from the cellblock even through the intervening walls. The gunshot comes soon after dawn. Carlita is on watch, but the noise wakes Aaronovich, immediately and entirely. She gathers her bags, and Carlita her few possessions. Having carefully erased any trace that her rooms have been occupied, they go up to the roof by a narrow staircase Carlita knows of, one clearly unused in months or even years.
After the gunshot, there’s silence for a long while. It must have been Foster who fired, Aaronovich thinks: a gamble, a ringleader put down. Perhaps it will work. Perhaps order can be restored with a single bullet, at least temporarily.
They huddle in blankets, sheltering amid arches of ductwork, agreeing by mutual consent to stay in the open. The air is cold, the wind colder. Aaronovich can smell a promise of snow; it brings with it fractured memories of her childhood that never quite coalesce. They talk occasionally, in low whispers. But there’s so little to be said, and most of what there is they covered during the night. They have plans, and contingency plans. The common element of them all is surviving, until Johnson and Kyle return or, though they’ve not admitted as much, until it becomes apparent they never will.
The second gunshot comes around lunchtime. It’s followed in close succession by a third, and a minute later, three staccato bursts. After the initial shock has passed, Aaronovich decides that Foster is dead, or if not yet then soon to be. At any rate, there’s no doubt in her mind that the final rattle of gunfire was aimed at him.
From then onward, the tempo of the distant commotion changes. Whatever disagreement has been working itself out through the night, it’s done now. The new note is one of celebration, but with a manic energy, which feels to Aaronovich every bit as dangerous as the preceding conflict.
For the first hour, the revelers confine themselves to the cellblock. From the sounds she hears, they are smashing things, as if destruction is some long-withheld privilege. It’s strange, Aaronovich thinks; with a few exceptions, these aren’t violent men. The crimes that placed them here weren’t crimes of violence, for that had been an underpinning of Plan John’s ordered society. Have they always had this in them? Has Funland changed them? Or is this simply how men behave after a world has ended?
Whatever the case, when they’ve broken everything they judge needs to be broken, they move on to the stores.
Aaronovich has already discussed with Carlita the possibility of warning Contreras. Carlita argued in favor of it, yet in the end, Aaronovich’s reasoning had won out. Securing Tito Contreras’s safety would compromise their own. If the convicts don’t find him where they expect him, they’ll go looking. She and Carlita can’t hide long from a sustained search. Perhaps it will come anyway, when they investigate Aaronovich’s offices, but even then they’ll focus their efforts on the administrative wing, at least at first.
As they listen to the tumult of the stores being overturned and to Contreras’s brief, muted cries, Carlita won’t meet Aaronovich’s eye. Afterward, Aaronovich listens to them moving out the supplies and carrying them into the cellblock. It takes a little over an hour. They laugh and joke throughout, and she wonders if Contreras is alive. Can men who’ve just killed without reason laugh like that? Probably they can.
After that, there comes quiet, broken only occasionally by the drift of raised voices. When she’s sure there’s no one below, Aaronovich gets up to stretch cramping muscles and walks a huddled circuit of the roof. Then, though her appetite has all but vanished, she opens a can of fruit from the supplies she’s brought and shares the contents with Carlita. Still they don’t talk. She can’t ascertain if Carlita is angry with her about Contreras or merely exhausted. Maybe all Aaronovich senses is her own desire of silence reflected, for she feels she’s passed the point where conversation can serve any useful function.
Is this what happens to the infected? Have they crossed some internal Rubicon that renders their old existence obsolete, that makes words futile and necessity plain to see? And she thinks of Abigail, of where she might be, of whether or not she’s safe. Aaronovich considers these questions for the first time without sadness or guilt, because wherever Abigail is, it’s likely safer right now than Funland.
When night has fallen completely, Aaronovich gets to her feet once more.
Carlita, who had appeared to be drowsing, opens her eyes and looks up. “What are you doing?” she asks, her manner almost accusatory.
“I’m going to check if Contreras is alive,” Aaronovich tells her. “And if he is, I’m going to help him.”
Chapter Forty-Three
It looks to Doyle as if a war has taken place. Probably one has. Two buildings at the opening junction show gaping holes on their upper floors, as though somebody has conducted clumsy surgery to display their insides. No window anywhere is unbroken
. Half a dozen overturned cars lie like fumigated insects. There’s rubble piled along both sides of the street, in scabbed heaps already turning green with grass and weeds.
When the Sickers begin to reveal themselves, it’s like a trick of the eye. For each one Doyle sees, another appears. At first, there’s a couple in a window far up the street, gazing out at this intruder that has ruptured the stillness of their home. Even as he registers those, a flicker of movement drags his attention to a gang on the opposite side, four – no, five – gathering around a torn-out double doorway. And there are more sidling from the darkness.
“Hang on,” Doyle says.
He urges the jeep forward, and for a moment it seems the Sickers will be content to stand watching. Then Doyle catches a flash of movement in the side mirror. The creature coming after them looks too old to be running as fast as he is. His spittle-flecked mouth is the only feature visible through a mane of vile gray hair. Doyle actually finds himself believing that the old man might be able to catch them, though they’re doing fifty and still accelerating. But at last the man trips and goes down in a cyclone of flailing limbs. He hasn’t got up again by the time Doyle turns from the road.
“Can you navigate?” Doyle barks.
“I guess,” Kyle mumbles back. He sounds shaken.
“There’s a map in the glove compartment.” Doyle turns left at the next junction. Far ahead, a Sicker sprints across their path, hardly sparing them a glance.
Not taking his eyes from the road, Doyle hears Kyle click open the catch, draw out the map, and unfold it over the dash. Doyle already knows what Kyle is currently realizing. There’s plenty of city between them and the circle of red ink that marks their destination.
“All right,” Kyle says, “I think I’ve got it.”
Farther ahead, another Sicker makes three quick steps into the street and turns to glare at them, a woman with dark skin and deeply black hair, scrawny and off-kilter as a scarecrow. She raises her arms, as though she’ll be able to stop them. From the rear, Abigail chatters anxiously. Doyle can feel her motion through his seat, as she scampers back and forth, clawing at the side windows like an animal in a moving cage.
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