Genesis Plague (28 page)

T
he drive out of Helena was noticeably quiet. There were no
barking dogs, no playing children. The only kid I had seen since the whole
thing started was sleeping soundly in the back seat. For all I knew, she was
unaware she was being spirited away from her home. I dreaded the moment she
woke up. I dreaded having to tell her why she wasn’t back home.

Interstate 15 runs
south from Helena, and it would take us over one hundred miles out of the way,
but it avoided Townsend on Route 12, as the Mayor suggested. I figured an extra
two hours on the road wasn’t worth a permanent delay, if what he said was true.

The highway was mostly
empty, save for the occasional broken-down vehicle. The Tacoma’s high-beams were
much brighter than the Chevy’s, so I didn’t mind picking up the pace since I
could actually see what was ahead.

There was a downside to
not having to avoid any obstacles: my eyelids were having a hard time staying
open. My breathing deepened as my vision blurred. My hand slipped down the
wheel and bumped against the horn.

I jumped in my seat and
my eyes popped open. Close one. Have to be more careful. I wished Conny were in
the front with me, so I would have someone to talk to. I wished Cassidy were
here, just so she could be here. I wished—

I wished for a lot of
things.

My stomach rumbled loudly.
Good. Eating something would keep me awake. I grabbed one of the ready-made
meals from Jake and ripped open the tin-foil packaging with my teeth. There was
a white label on the pouch that I couldn’t read because the cab was too dark,
but it smelled like some kind of salsa. My stomach roared when I caught a
whiff, so I upended the pouch and took a big bite of…whatever it was. Salsa and
cubed meat that could be chicken – or steak, or ham.

I was too hungry to
stop chewing long enough to care.

Soon the bag was empty
and I reached for another. I looked into the rearview mirror to check on Conny
and Marco. The little girl was sitting upright in the back seat, staring at me.
Her blonde hair was matted on one side where she had slept on it. She wasn’t
screaming or fighting or crying. She was doing none of the things I expected.
Instead, she simply watched me.

I tore open the food
package and offered it to her. She took it slowly, eyes on me the whole time,
then set the bag in her lap and looked inside.

“I’m Paul,” I said as
she took her first bite.

She looked up into the
rearview mirror.

“And you’re Emma,
right?”

I tried talking to her
the way I talked to my niece, by asking her easy questions and stating things
as simply as I could.

“We’re going to South
Dakota,” I said.

She seemed to have
stopped listening, instead content to lightly pick at the contents of her meal.

“Conny and Marco are in
the back,” I continued, finding it cathartic to speak out loud, even if no one
was really listening. “Conny’s a doctor from Atlanta, but I met her in Seattle,
which is in Washington. Marco is from Catalonia, which is in Spain. I don’t
know what he’s doing in Montana. Maybe he likes the mountains, though I’m sure
they have those where he comes from. Where are
you
from? Were you born
in Helena?”

Still nothing.

“I was born in Miami,
but I moved away when I was very young. I live in San Francisco now.”
At
least I thought I still did.

Emma sighed and
crumpled her empty meal pouch.

“Would you like another
one?” I asked, offering her a full bag.

She looked at it
briefly, then sank lower into her seat. I considered it permission to dig in,
so I started my second course: bone-dry refried beans mixed with the same
mystery meat as the first pouch. Yum.

“There’s another woman
you haven’t met,” I said between chews. “Her name’s Cassidy. We’re going to
find her in Rapid City.” The droning hum of the tires on the highway helped me
enter what I call a memory trance. You’re probably familiar with the
phenomenon: your eyes widen and you don’t blink. You stare off into nothingness
until something snaps you back to the present.

“We rent an apartment
in San Francisco,” I continued, my eyes staring ahead without truly seeing.
“Houses around there are too expensive, and we don’t want to stay in an
apartment forever, so we had been talking about moving somewhere else. Maybe
Tennessee or North Carolina. We both love the mountains but she hates humidity,
so we could never agree on where to go.” My fingers touched the silver chain
around my neck and followed the outline under my shirt to the small diamond
ring that hung over my chest. “I almost proposed to her, but she told me to
wait. I should have asked anyway, but I thought there would be more time.”

We rode in silence
until the truck hit a pothole. I breathed in sharply as I snapped back to the
present.

“Well, if you want to
talk,” I said, rubbing my eyes, “I’m a great listener. I went to school for it
and everything.”

I watched the mirror
for a smile. Nada. Maybe it wasn’t a joke after all. Guess I was out of practice.
Haven’t had much opportunity over the past few days. Come to think about it, I
wasn’t around kids that often in the first place, except for the occasional
visit to see my brother and his family.

“You want to come sit
up front?” I asked. “There’s a radio. Do you like music?”

She leaned forward
slightly, peering past the two front seats.

“Come on up here,” I
said encouragingly. “Gotta wear a seatbelt, though. Your Uncle didn’t think to
give us a car seat.”

Emma stood up and
crawled over the center console. She wore dirty blue jeans, a plain white
shirt, and little pink sneakers.

“There you go,” I said
as she buckled her seat belt. “Thank you, Emma. The radio’s all yours.”

It was much more modern
than the one in the Chevy. The entire screen was buttonless, and it lit up
under Emma’s touch to reveal a grid of digital controls. She pushed every
button until smooth jazz played softly, then she settled back into her seat and
looked outside.

Maybe later I would
tell her I wasn’t a fan of the saxophone. Or maybe I would just learn to like
it before there was no more radio at all. Couldn’t afford to be picky when the
world was ending, right?

I jumped at a sharp
crack of gunfire and accidentally jerked the wheel. The truck lurched to the
side. Marco cursed loudly in Spanish from the back. Then there was another
gunshot, a shattering of glass, and the sound of a car running off the road,
headlong into the trees that lined the highway.

I never saw a thing.

Marco pounded the roof.
“It’s okay,” he said loudly. He smiled and gave me a thumbs-up when I looked
back.

Conny was huddled down
against the cab in the bed, looking at me with wide eyes. Then her gaze drifted
past me and she pointed at the road ahead. The truck’s headlights illuminated a
barrier of cars stretching from one side of the highway to the other. I slammed
on the brakes and turned the wheel, hoping Marco was holding on to the roll bar
in the back.

The Tacoma skidded to a
stop parallel with the barrier. The cars were stacked five high, across all
four lanes. At each end of the barrier was a pile of debris twice as high as
the stacked cars. The piles overflowed into the dense trees on both sides,
making the highway impassable beyond this point.

“Better go back,”
shouted Marco. “They’ll catch us easier if we’re not moving.”

Who’s ‘them’?
I
wanted to ask, but there was no time for an explanation. Instead, I cranked the
wheel and accelerated in the direction of Helena.

Ahead, two men walked
onto the highway from the shadows. They each carried a bottle and a lighter. As
I sped up to pass them, they used the lighters to ignite the white rags
sticking out of the bottles.

“Get down!” I shouted
to Conny and Marco.

As we drove past, the
men threw the bottles.

F
ire erupted from the side of the truck as the Molotov cocktails
shattered on impact. Conny screamed as flames licked over the top of the bed.
Marco pushed her down and shielded her body, putting his back to the flames.

I eased off the
accelerator, thinking we should douse the flames with water.

“Don’t stop,” said
Marco. “There might be more of them.”

The only other option
was to go fast enough so that the wind pushed the flames back behind the bed.
The Tacoma looked like it had shot straight out of Hell as I accelerated down
the highway, side panel blazing like a jet engine.

The accelerant in the
bottles eventually burned up, and the flames died.

It was hard for me to
imagine what those men could have wanted. Maybe they were scouts for the woman
in Townsend that the Mayor told us to avoid. Or maybe they just didn’t have
anyone stopping them from doing the terrible things they had always longed to
do.

Either way, it meant
driving past Townsend. The only other option took us too far out of the way.

I looked over at Emma.
She sat upright, her eyes wide, white knuckles bunching the fabric of her
jeans.

“Emma, it’s okay,” I
said in the best soothing voice I could manage. “It’s over now. No one’s going
to hurt you.”

Her hands relaxed a
little and she settled back into her seat. Then she started crying. It came quickly,
as if she had flipped a switch somewhere inside of her. Tears flowed freely
down her cheeks, and her small body shook as she sobbed. She leaned forward
with her head between her knees. I rubbed her back and kept telling her it was
going to be okay. Emma shook her head
no
as I said it, but I didn’t
stop.

After a few minutes,
her sobbing turned to sniffling, and she sat back up. Her eyes were puffed and
red.

“Feel better?” I asked.

She nodded.

“Good.”

Getting back on Route
12 meant driving I-15 almost all the way back to Helena. Should have taken a
chance and gone past Townsend to begin with. Hindsight was twenty-twenty, and
all that.

Moving at a good clip,
it took just under thirty minutes to reach the intersection. It would be about an
hour south until the road met with Route 287, and another forty minutes until
we hit I-90. After that, it should be smooth sailing all the way to Rapid City.

Unless someone
barricaded that road with a stack of cars, too,
I thought.

There were more empty
cars on the east side of Helena than the west. In the few miles after we turned
off I-15, we passed a vehicle on the side of the road every thirty seconds.
Then it was every twenty. After ten minutes of driving, it looked more like
street parking for a populated neighborhood than a stretch of highway between
two cities.

Looking up at the night
sky, I saw no stars, and no moon. The only light came from the truck’s
headlamps, illuminating a dark highway.

Up ahead, a man stood
on the side of the road. His hands were empty, so my abrupt panic faded a
little. He wore a long white robe. He had smeared a large red cross on the
front of the robe. The sleeves extended past his hands so that as the man
spreads his arms, it gave the impression he had been crucified.

He had a dark beard and
short black hair. He held his arms wide and nodded as if he knew me. There was
a hand-painted sign leaning against a car behind him. It read
SINNERS
in
dripping red paint. Or maybe it wasn’t paint.

I covered Emma’s eyes
when I saw what was inside the car. A man and a woman sat in the front seats,
their heads tilted back. Their dead eyes stared up at nothing. Something red
and wet bulged from each of their mouths, something that had been stuffed
inside.

Emma pushed my hand
away as I accelerated. The man in white stared at me in the rearview mirror as
we drive away. Soon he disappeared into the night, but it still felt like he was
watching.