Devil’s Wake (16 page)

Kendra wished she couldn’t imagine those final horrific moments, but she could.

Kendra was thankful that there were no bodies.

But there was plenty of gas. By the time the siphoning was done, Terry said he would have enough to fill the hundred-gallon tank.

“What happens if you can’t find fuel?” Kendra asked Terry while she watched him fit the gas can’s nozzle into the huge tank. She was close enough to smell the morning’s perspiration from his neck, not an unpleasant smell, considering.

“Then the party’s over,” Terry said. “We’re on foot. It’ll happen one day.”

Kendra cringed at the thought.

They had to stop three more times to clear the road, and once made good use of the snowplow’s blade when a Buick had no gas and the brakes were locked. The big black car groaned, its tires smearing dark skid marks across the asphalt.

“Let’s hit the Barracks!” Terry said once they were back on the bus.

Kendra rediscovered her notebook. Everything in life moved so quickly, she was afraid she would misplace all the details. If she survived, she might one day make sense of it all—or at least have something to leave behind.

I made some new friends,
she wrote.
We have a plan.

Writing it down made it feel real.

Kendra’s Notebook

T
oday,
we drove through a street so bare that no cars were in sight. Not trashed—empty. No garbage or burned cars. No bodies.

But we saw one person standing at the fork in the road.

She was a little girl, maybe twelve years old, standing with her arms at her side, almost like a soldier at attention. She had blond hair in pigtails, and she was wearing a dress she might have worn to a sixth-grade dance.

She didn’t look right, standing alone in the road like that.

Look, there’s a freak, somebody said.

Bets started flying about whether she’d be fast or slow, or if the bus could beat her in a race. On the bus, they laugh about everything, especially when they’re nervous. But I didn’t think she was a freak. I thought she could have been someone like me who needed rescuing.

And I was right. Sort of.

As the bus slowed, we saw the bite.

Before the freaks came, I would have thought she’d been bitten on the cheek and jaw by a pit bull like the Dog-Lady’s. But we all knew she hadn’t been bitten by a dog. And she hadn’t changed yet, because her face looked like a regular little girl’s except for her bite.

Was she in shock? Was she waiting for someone to stop?

By the time the bus drove past her, everyone was huddled at the windows, watching her. She never moved or looked anywhere except straight ahead. Had I looked the same way to them when they first saw me?

This time, Terry kept driving. Darius made a lame joke about an Amber alert, but no one laughed—not even Darius. Everybody got quiet.

I jumped when I heard the
crack
of a gunshot echoing against the empty buildings, but I shouldn’t have been surprised. Dean was leaning out of a rear window with a rifle. After one shot, Dean took his seat again. Darius patted his shoulder. Then Sonia. Then Piranha.

Dean’s eyes reminded me of the girl in the road.

The bad feeling didn’t seize Kendra until after the I-5 split just
above a town called Salmon Creek, and the bus took the right-hand fork. The sensation was like waking from a dream… or slipping back into a nightmare. Kendra remembered these roads from her trip in to the hospital… when? How long ago had that been? It seemed like years, and yet the journey was as familiar as yesterday.

This is not a good idea,
she thought.

All Grandpa Joe had drummed into her head was how she should keep far away from the cities. Now it seemed like a miracle that their bus had been able to travel as far as it had without meeting an impassable barrier or an overwhelming attack. With every creeping mile, Kendra’s belly contracted into a tighter knot.

Vancouver, Washington, was at first a residential stretch and then
a downtown district, all broken windows and deserted buildings. She hoped so, anyway. She vaguely remembered hearing about an orderly evacuation of Vancouver, back when she and Mom had monitored the radio together. Once or twice she thought she saw a face pressing against a glass window, watching them, perhaps wondering who it was who still drove, however slowly, along these haunted roads. They left the freeway at Exit 1D, wound past stalled cars onto Fourth Plain, then turned left onto a narrow street called Neals, lined with abandoned cars and broken windows.

The closer they drove to the Barracks, the more Kendra felt the temperature rising in the bus, the heat of combined adrenaline. Kendra caught herself holding her breath as she stared out the window, waiting.

The streets were now so narrow and twisty, they seemed to have been designed to thwart terrorists driving trucks loaded with fertilizer bombs. Expansive green lawns had gone shaggy, covered with trash and a few sprawled corpses. Nothing alive and human could be seen amid the cluster of beige and pale gray bungalows and two-story barracks buildings. A freak or two could be glimpsed in the wavering distance. One of them turned toward the bus and took a step or two in their direction before the Blue Beauty wove out of sight. One of the Twins zipped past them on his motorcycle, pulling into a graveled road walled by portable cyclone fence. There was lots of that fencing, a ragged maze. Someone had attempted to set up aisles or sections, perhaps for different categories of refugees.

The grass was high and wild, without the telltale footprints that might have indicated frequent visitors.

The bus was quiet. What had they expected? Cheering throngs? Laughing children? Whatever they had expected, this wasn’t it.

The bus pulled up behind the Twins, along a graveled path into a trash-strewn parking lot. There were four cars, a blue Chevy pickup, and an RV, all deserted. A brownish-red smear marred the pickup’s
passenger door.

The Blue Beauty sighed to a stop.

It looked as if they had stumbled onto an aged liberal arts campus, perhaps the day after homecoming, headaches and hangovers keeping the coeds tucked in their beds.

Directly to their left was a two-story barracks building, the windows shattered like those in Vancouver. The Twins’ bikes were already parked. Dean had pulled his jacket up to cover his nose and mouth. Neither of the Twins waved the all-clear sign. Instead, Darius only exaggerated a hell-if-I-know shrug.

“Really helpful, thanks,” Terry muttered, his face grimmer than Kendra had seen. Angry. If he’d looked that way when they first met, she might have been afraid of him.

As soon as the bus’s door opened, the smell hit them. The air was heavy with a garbage-pail scent. Rotting meat.

“Stay close,” Terry said. “Nobody get lost, in case we haul out in a hurry.”

“You
will
be left behind,” Piranha said, mostly to himself, although Terry was sure he was talking to the new girl, Kendra. Piranha had confided to him that he wasn’t willing to risk himself for a stranger—even a
sister,
as he’d called Kendra.
Last in, first out,
the big guy had said. Terry had hoped to avoid that test, but they might be facing it now.

He’d tried to be realistic. Without radio broadcasts, he hadn’t expected the Barracks to provide soldiers or protection. But it already looked and smelled a hell of a lot worse than he’d expected.

“You ready?” Piranha’s eyes were tight and scared, just like his own.

Terry nodded, although he wasn’t ready. This might be their worst day in a long time. Hell, it might be their
last.

Ravens concealed behind abandoned cars and Porta Potties burst into the air only a few yards from where he parked the bus. They circled, then settled back down. Dozens of huge, overfed black birds began pecking as if someone had scattered handfuls of seed or bread crumbs. But the stench told Terry a different story. Hipshot scratched at the ground and whined.

Human bodies in various stages of decomposition lay everywhere—on the main building’s steps, in the parking lot, crumpled in the grass. One of his teachers had taught them about Jonestown back in the 1970s, and the sight reminded Terry of that mass suicide in Guyana.

But he couldn’t stare at the bodies long. Hipshot barked sharply, and Terry’s head whipped up.

The barefoot man in olive drab military fatigues fooled Terry for half a second, speeding his heart with hope… until Terry noticed his odd limp. This was a
slow
freak, thank God. He was thirty yards back, close to the shadow of the headquarters, but a runner would have been on them already.

“Limper,” Terry said in a low voice, just as Sonia chambered a round into her shotgun.

“I’ve got this one,” Sonia said in a low, flat voice, and let fly with the Mossberg. The report was loud and vicious, but she missed. A few shots dimpled the ravaged face, but most spattered into the beige building behind him, scattering flecks of wood and paint. The freak ignored the shot and continued toward them.

“Damn, girl,” Piranha said. “That all you got?”

Sonia snorted, and reshouldered the shotgun.

“Don’t jerk the trigger,” Piranha said. “Squeeze. Aim for center of mass.”

“Why?” Kendra asked, huddling close. “I thought it had to be head shots.”

When Piranha didn’t answer, Terry spoke low to Kendra’s ear. “Those are harder. Sonia needs the target practice.”

Another shot. The freak spun around, staggered, went down to one knee, then came on again, only a dozen or so paces from Darius, who was watching with great interest, idling his engine. Sonia’s next shot burst its head like a rotten watermelon. It dropped, quivered, and then was still.

Darius applauded sardonically. “Nice, but help the environment and conserve rounds next time! Swap you,” he said. He buckled a sheathed machete to his belt and exchanged his rifle for her shotgun. “We is goin’ indoors, and the Mossberg is the
perfect
home defense weapon.”

“This ain’t home,” Dean said.

“Not to
us,
maybe.”

He hopped off the bike. “Yoo-hoo! Trick or treat!”

The nearest building’s exit doors were chipped, its glass broken
like that of so many windows. Still, Terry propped the door open with a large stone so they could get out fast. An escape route. Terry glanced at Darius, who nodded. He’d stay outside as a lookout. Hipshot thrust his nose inside, made a deep growling sound, but took a couple of halting steps.

“Hello! Anyone here?” Terry stuck his head through the open doorway. For some reason it smelled better inside than outside. “Let’s go.”

The halls within were cluttered with trash, flyers, and chunks of colored cardboard. Terry picked up one of the flyers, which said:
Eyes
open!!! The disease transmits through blood and possibly other body fluids!!! If you are bitten or scratched, immediately seek medical assistance!!!

Piranha leaned the tip of his machete against the wall and read over Terry’s shoulder. “Yeah, as if there was a vaccine. Can you imagine the morons who turned themselves in? ‘Hey, is this where ya’ll go for the vitamins?’ ” His backwoods twang even goosed a snicker out of Kendra. Damn. He’d thought that well had run dry.

“Yeah, good luck with that,” Terry said.

Kendra stopped and stared up at a poster of an attractive but severe-looking black woman in gray-white camos saying
“Military OneSource is an excellent pool of information for our soldiers and families. Use it—I did!”

She had no idea what a “Military OneSource” might be, but wondered if it had, on Freak Day, actually turned out to be an excellent source of information for this woman’s family. She sure hoped so.

Dean was ignoring them, watching Hipshot nosing about the paper- and glass-strewn floor.

“Wonder what the hell happened here,” Dean said. He flipped his hair out of his eyes with his left hand, keeping his rifle close with the other.

“That smell again,” Sonia said, wrinkling her nose. “Not close by. But…”

“Yeah, try that morgue in the parking lot,” Piranha said.

Sonia shook her head. “Not behind us. Ahead of us.”

Terry caught the sour odor then. There were definitely more corpses nearby. “Kendra… stay close.”

Kendra nodded, walking practically hip to hip. She wouldn’t wander off, and she’d sworn she knew how to handle her .38. Time would tell.

Hipshot led the way, sniffing as he went. The tile beneath their feet was dark brown, the doors lining the halls marked with papers reading
HAVE YOU SIGNED UP FOR FOOTBALL? And bonuses still available for overseas duty. And the buddy system: sign together, serve together. It was all so strange. If not for the deserted, trash-strewn halls, this might have been any ordinary day.

“Hold up.” Piranha raised his hand. Hipshot had stopped, cocking his narrow head sideways. “I heard something.”

“Close?” Terry said.

“Not sure.”

The late afternoon’s sunlight washed through the halls, giving them a wan, faded impression, almost like a watercolor. They walked slowly, pausing while one or another checked each door, and Hippy waited for them, whining softly. They didn’t want any surprises from behind. One of the doors was locked. The rest were offices with overturned chairs and desks, papers in disarray.

Someone had moved out in one hell of a rush. Together, they climbed a narrow flight of badly painted stairs. At the first landing more patriotic posters were plastered on the wall. One called the Army Reserve
“The Essential Provider for Training and Support Operations, Engaged Worldwide with Ready Units and Soldiers.”

Yeah, well… Army Strong or not, they hadn’t been ready for
this
.

Just at the top of the stairs, Sonia stopped, pointed at the tile. “Here,” she said, pointing at the floor. “Blood.”