Devil’s Wake (9 page)

Grandpa grunted in happy surprise, grinning. “Devil’s Wake! Your dad’s aunt Stella runs the library there, ’less she retired. She nabbed me a Paul Laurence Dunbar original edition, 1903. Bet Devil’s Wake made out fine, an island like that.”

“As long as you stay away from the large urban centers, there are dozens of pockets where people are safe and life is going on.”

“Oh, yes,”
the woman said.
“Of course there are.”

“There’s a learning curve. That’s what people don’t understand.”

“Absolutely.”
The woman sounded medicated.

“Amen!” Grandpa Joe slapped his steering wheel. “Devil’s Wake! That’s somewhere we could go, Kendra. If we stored enough gas…”

Kendra didn’t like the idea of going anywhere, island or not. Why should they move, when they never heard fingers scrabbling against their windows at night and there was a trading station an easy drive away?

“Everybody keeps harping on Longview”
—the man on the radio said “Longview” as if it were a normal, everyday place; Kendra’s stomach tightened—
“but that’s become another encouraging story. Contrary to rumors, there is a National Guard presence. There’ve been three airdrops of food and medicine. There’s a gated community in the hills housing over four hundred. Remember safety in numbers. Any man, woman, or teenager who’s willing to enlist is guaranteed safe lodging. Fences are going up, roads barricaded. We’re getting this under control. That’s a far cry from what we were hearing even five, six weeks ago.”

“Night and day,”
the cheerful woman said. Her voice quavered with joy.

Grandpa Joe reached over to rub Kendra’s head. “See there?” he said. Kendra nodded, but she wasn’t happy to imagine a stranger sleeping in her bed. Maybe it was another family with a teenage girl. Or twins. But probably not. Dog-Girl said the National Guard was long gone and nobody knew where to find them.
Bunch of useless bloody sods,
she’d said, the first time Kendra had heard the little round woman cuss. Actually, she hadn’t even known what
sod
meant until she looked it up, then felt a certain degree of admiration. Dog-Lady’s accent made cussing sound exotic.

If she was right, dogs might be roaming through her house too, looking for something to eat.

“There’s talk that a Bay Area power plant is up again. It’s still an unconfirmed rumor, and I’m not trying to wave some magic wand here, but I’m just making the point, and I’ve tried to make it before, that life probably felt a lot like this at Hiroshima.”

“Yes,”
the woman said.

Kendra vaguely remembered studying Hiroshima in her history
class, back when she was going to school. Would there be schools again too?

“Call it apples and oranges, but put yourself in the place of an earthquake victim in Haiti. Or a Jew at Auschwitz. There had to be some days that felt exactly the way we feel when we hear these stories from Seattle and Portland, and when we’ve talked to the survivors…”

Just ahead, along the middle of the road, a man was walking south.

K
endra
sat straight up when she saw the man by the side of the road. She wadded up the tissue in her pocket so tightly that her fingernails bit into her skin. The walking man was tall and broad-shouldered, wearing a brick-red backpack. He lurched along unsteadily. From the way he bent forward, as if bracing into a wind, Kendra guessed the backpack was heavy. It was the first time in weeks she’d seen anyone walking on this road. Her neck snapped back as Grandpa Joe sped up his truck.

“Don’t you worry,” Grandpa Joe said. “We ain’t stoppin’.”

The man let out a mournful cry as they passed, waving a cardboard sign. He had a long, bushy beard, and as they passed his eyes looked wide and wild. Kendra craned her head to read the sign, which the man held high in the air. STILL HERE, the sign said. “He’ll be all right,” Grandpa Joe said, but Kendra didn’t think so. No one was supposed to go on the roads alone, especially without a car. Maybe the man had a gun, and maybe they would need another man with a gun. Maybe the man had been trying to warn them something bad was waiting ahead. But the way he walked…

Kendra kept watching while the man retreated behind them. She had to stop watching when she felt her stomach knot. She’d been holding her breath without knowing it. Her face was cold and sweating,
both at once. “Was that one?” Kendra whispered. She hadn’t known she was going to say that either, just like when she asked for a Coke. Instead, she’d been thinking about the man’s sign.
Still here.

“Don’t know,” Grandpa Joe said. “It’s hard to tell. That’s why you never stop.” They listened to the radio, neither of them speaking again for the rest of the ride.

Time was, Joseph Earl Davis III, now forever known simply as
Grandpa Joe, never would have driven past anyone on the road without giving them a chance to hop into the truck bed and ride out a few miles closer to wherever they were going. Heck, couple of months back he’d picked up a group of six college-age kids and driven them to Centralia when most folks were running over strangers without even honking their horns.

But Joe hadn’t liked the look of that hitcher. Something about his walk. Or maybe times were just different. Christ as his witness, if Kendra hadn’t been in the car, Joe might have run that poor wanderer down where he walked. A stitch in time was worth a pound of cure. That was what it had come to in Joe Davis’s mind. Drastic measures, just like the president had said in his first Apocalypse Address. The president hadn’t said it plainly, but his meaning had been clear as the summer sky.

,
the backward letters of the man’s sign said in the mirror, receding into a tiny, indistinct blur.
Yeah, I’m still here too,
Joe thought. And not picking up hitchhikers was one way he intended to
stay
here, thanks a bunch for asking.

Freaks clustered in the cities, but there were plenty of them wandering through the countryside nowadays, actual packs. Thousands. Tens of thousands. Millions. He didn’t know. No one really did. Joe had seen his first three months ago, coming into Longview to rescue his granddaughter. His first, his fifth, and his tenth. He’d done what he had to do to save the girl and shut the memories away where only their tiniest tendrils could sneak into his dreams. Then he’d drunk enough to make the dreams blurry. A week later, he’d seen one closer to home, not three miles beyond the gated road—not three miles from the cabin! Its face was bloated blue-gray, and flies buzzed around the open sores clotted with that dark red scabby stuff growing under their skin. The thing could barely walk, but it had smelled him, swiveling in his direction like a weather vane. Joe still dreamed about that one every night. That one had
chosen
him. Joe left the freaks alone unless one came at him—that was safest if you were by yourself.

He’d seen a poor guy shoot one down in a field, and then be slaughtered by a swarm attracted by the sound of the shot. Some of those biters could walk pretty fast. The new ones could still run, and they weren’t stupid, by God. But Joe had killed that one, the pivoting one that had chosen him. He’d kill it a dozen times again if he had the chance; it was a favor to both of them. That shambling mess had been somebody’s son, somebody’s husband, somebody’s father. People said freaks weren’t really dead—they didn’t climb out of graves like movie monsters—but they were as close to walking dead as Joe ever wanted to see. The red fungus was eating them from the inside out, and if they bit you, the freak stuff would start eating you too. You fell asleep, and you woke up different. The movies had that part right, anyway.

As for the rest, nobody knew much. Most folks who met freaks up close and personal didn’t live long enough to carry tales. Whatever they were, freaks weren’t just a city problem anymore. They were everybody’s problem.

Can you hold on, Dad? My neighbor’s knocking on the window.
That’s what Cass had said the last time they’d spoken, then he hadn’t heard any more from his daughter for ten agonizing minutes. The next time he’d heard her voice, he’d barely recognized it, so calm it could be nothing but a mask over mortal terror.
DADDY? Don’t talk, just listen. I’m so sorry. For everything. No time to say it all. They’re here. You need to come and get Kendra. Use the danger word. Do you hear me, Daddy? And… bring guns. Shoot anyone suspicious. I mean
anyone,
Daddy.

Daddy, she’d called him. She hadn’t called him that since hell was a hatchet, and it was sure as hell a broadax now. That day, he’d woken up with alarm twisting his gut for no particular reason. That was why he’d raised Cassidy on the shortwave two hours earlier than he usually did, and she’d sounded irritated that he’d called before she was up.
My neighbor’s knocking on the window.

Joe had prayed he wouldn’t find what he knew would be waiting in Longview. He’d known what might happen to Cass and Kendra as soon as Devon had freaked out. That’s what they called the change: “Freaking out.” Dammit, he should have dragged her out of that town right then. Then he’d found her letting the neighbors use the shortwave and drink her water like she’d been elected to the Rescue Committee. One time, she couldn’t even name
one of the women in her house. That was Cass for you. Acting like a naive fool, and he’d told her as much.

Still, even though he’d tried to make himself expect the worst, he couldn’t, really. If he ever dwelled on that day, he might lose his mind… and then what would happen to Kendra? Any time Joe brought up that day, the kid’s eyes whiffed out like a dead pilot light.
It had taken Kendra hours to finally open that reinforced door and let him in, even though Joe had used the danger word again and again. And Kendra had spoken hardly a word since.

The Little Soldier was doing all right today. Good. She’d need to get tougher, and fast. The kid had regressed from nearly sixteen to six, just when Joe needed her to be as old as she could get. As Joe drove beyond the old tree farms, the countryside opened up on either side; fields on his left, a range of hills on his right. There’d been a cattle farm out here once, but the cattle were gone. Wasn’t much else out here, and there never had been. Except for Mike’s. Nowadays, Mike’s was the only thing left anyone recognized.

Mike’s was a gas station off Exit 46 with Porta Potties out back and a few shelves inside crammed with things people wanted: flour, canned foods, cereal, powdered milk, lanterns, flashlights, batteries, first-aid supplies, and bottled water. And gas, of course. How he kept getting this stuff, Joe had no idea.
If I told you that, you’d tell two friends, and they’d tell two friends, and pretty soon I’d be out of business, bro,
Mike had told him when Joe asked, barking a laugh at him.

Last time he’d driven out here, Joe had asked Mike why he’d stayed behind when so many others were gone. Why not move somewhere less isolated? Even then, almost a full month ago, folks had been clumping up in Longview, barricading the school, the jail, and the three-story hospital. Had to be safer, if you could buy your way in. Mike wasn’t quite as old as Joe—sixty-three to Joe’s seventy-one—but Joe thought he was foolhardy to keep the place open. Sure, all the stockpiling and bartering had made Mike a rich man, but was gasoline and Rice-A-Roni worth the risk?

I don’t run, Joe. Guess I’m hardheaded.
That was all he’d said. Mike had always been one of his few friends around here. Now he was the only one. Joe didn’t know whether to hope his friend would still be there or to pray he was gone.
Better for him to be gone,
Joe thought. One day, he and the kid would have to move on too, plain and simple.
That day was coming soon, and had probably come and gone twice over.

Joe saw a glint of the aluminum fencing posted around Mike’s as he came around the bend, the end of the S in the road. Although it looked more like a prison camp, Mike’s was an oasis, a tiny squat store and a row of gas pumps surrounded by a wire fence a man and a half tall. The fence was electrified at night: Joe had seen at least one barbecued body to prove it, pulled off the wire but tacked on a post as warning. Everyone had walked around the corpse as if it wasn’t there. With gas getting scarcer, Mike tended to trust the razor wire more, using the generator less these days.

Mike’s three boys, who’d never proved to be much good at anything else, had come in handy for keeping order. They’d had two or three gunfights, Mike had said, because strangers with guns thought they could go anywhere they pleased and take anything they wanted. Today, the gate was hanging open. He’d never come to Mike’s when there wasn’t someone standing at the gate. All three of Mike’s boys were usually there with their greasy hair and fleshy tattooed bellies bulging through their too-tight T-shirts. No one today. Something was wrong.

“Damn,” Joe said aloud, before he remembered he didn’t want to scare the kid. He pinched Kendra’s chin between his forefinger and thumb. His granddaughter peered up at him, resigned, the expression she always wore. “Let’s just sit here a minute, okay?” Little Soldier nodded. She was a good kid. Joe hoped she wouldn’t have to add rape to her litany of life’s horrors, but how long could he protect her?

Joe coasted the truck to a stop outside the gate. While it idled, he tried to see what he could. The pumps stood silent and still on their concrete islands, like two men with their fingers in their ears. There was a light on inside, a super-white fluorescent glow through the picture windows painted with the words “gas” and “food” in red. He could make out a few shelves from where he was parked, but he
didn’t see anyone inside. The air pulsed with the steady
burr
of Mike’s generator, still working.

At least it didn’t look like anyone had rammed or cut the gate. The chain looked intact, so it had been unlocked. If there’d been trouble here, it had come with an invitation. Nothing would have made those boys open that gate otherwise. Maybe Mike and his kids had believed all that happy-crappy radio chatter, ditched their place, and moved to Longview. The idea made Joe feel so relieved that he forgot the ache in his knee.
And leave the generator on?