Hissers II: Death March (21 page)

Improbable, yes, but possible.

He leaned his head back against Olive’s arm and smelled her sweat for the umpteenth time. It was a smell he’d come to associate with this new world. A smell that he dreamt about, even if he didn’t know what it meant.

She looked at him, took a breath and relaxed. “We’re on the road, kid. We’re moving.
This thing can hold of a lot more than a car. It’s smooth sailing from here. I hope.”

Just them Hugh called back from the driver’s seat. “Next stop, San Diego. Hang on, y’all.”

SATURDAY 11:22 AM

Flames licked skyward, spewing out black smoke that blocked out the sun. The c
louds were the color of sand. Pewter ash filled the sky like prewar film grain. Doug turned on the windshield wipers to brush away the embers that landed on the truck. He kept it moving slow down the main street of what had once been a town with strip malls, luxury hotels, and planned communities.

Cars burned along the side of the road, and bits of flaming debris—tires, clothing, even a shopping cart—rolled down the the macadam in place of tumbleweed.

“Palm Springs,” he said. “I’ve gigged here. Good vacation spot if you don’t plan on leaving your hotel room. Older crowd, which is good for me. They know the songs. Grew up with them. They go to bed early so the shows end by nine or so. And then you gotta look for the parties. Lots of swingers up here.”

“What?”

Doug looked out his window, seemingly embarrassed. “Nothing. Just talking to hear myself think. Forget it.”
“I can barely breathe,” Amanita said. She had her shirt up over her mouth and nose, her face pressed against her window as she marveled as the height of the fires. “At least I don’t see any of them things here. I remember when the plane crashed back in Castor, there was fire everywhere. And they came running out of it with flames covering them. The fire didn’t affect them, like they couldn’t even feel it. Some of my classmates who didn’t’ turn, they burned to charred meat that night.”

“W
ith this much fire, I can’t see anything surviving so I wouldn’t worry about it. See that diner? I used to eat there when I was in town. They had killer peach cobbler pie.”

“
How far away are we?”

“Four hours or so. Not far.”

Off to their right, a structure crumbled before their eyes. It was a smaller building, probably a local business office. Perhaps a real estate company or a shoe store. A plume of smoke rolled skyward as the walls fell in and Amanita shook her head. “This is weird. Where did all the people go? I understand a town being deserted at this point, but not on fire like this. Like, they set it and left.”

“F
led to greener pastures. Or died lighting it all. Who knows.”

“San Diego is near the ocean, right? It’ll be harder to light on fire?”

“Maybe. I know they get wild fires there. Summer heat and dead grass in the hills and all that. I remember seeing it on the news a few years back. Pretty crazy how fast and far it burns, even on the coastline. You’d think in such a city they’d have nothing to worry about but running out of surfboard wax.”

Out of the blue, Amanita grabbed his arm. “Stop!”

“What?”

“Just stop. Look.”

He pulled the truck over to the side of the road and squinted through the brown haze engulfing them. “That?”

“Yeah. That. That’s a camp.
Right?”

“It’s something. Looks like…school buses?”

Amanita opened her door and stepped outside. The air stank of charred wood and burning rubber. Even with her shirt over her mouth the oxygen was caustic and burned her throat. She put a hand over her eyes to block out the halo effect of the sun in the brown sky. She could see a little better now, and Doug was right. It was a daisy chain of school buses sitting outside of a dilapidated structure that had once been made of corrugated sheet metal. She scanned the site with her eyes, finally spotting a woman in a long dress pointing a rifle at her.

Instantly Amanita ducked and got back in the car. She put her head down and locked the door. “They’ve got people with guns watching us. Just go!”

“Hold up. They ain’t fired yet. I suspect the entire world is gonna be playing Wyatt Earp until this passes over. Doesn’t mean they have ill intentions.”

“No, what they have is guns. I don’t trust it.
I thought we agreed we don’t stop for anything.”

“Sit up. They aren’t shooting. They’re walking over now.”

“I don’t care. You promised, Doug. You said we wouldn’t stop.”

“That was before our road ahead became blocked with flames and a burning landscape like something out of a
Hellboy
comic.”

“Oh God. Do all guys r
ead comics and watch Star Wars and play fucking Xobx until they die?”

“Don’t play video games, and don’t like science fiction. Comics I like. Give me one vice, okay. Otherwise all I have is whiskey and the blues.”

Amanita finally rose up and stared out her window. They sat still until the two approaching people drew close, then she rolled her window down half way. A woman in flowered dress pointed her rifle at the ground. She had a dew rag wrapped around her mouth. Her hair whipped about in the hot ashen air. Next to her, a boy of about sixteen or seventeen wore sunglasses and a Green Day sweatshirt. His jeans were ripped and Amanita could tell it wasn’t a style choice. His face with dark with soot. He too wore a dew rag around his mouth.

Doug leaned over and waved. “Hi. We’re passing through. Please tell me it doesn’t’ get worse than this.” He pointed to the nearest burning building.

The woman nodded. “Can’t say. We haven’t driven too far. Between here and El Centro you’ve got naught but desert. We tried to get through the other day but there’s tons of those monsters out there.”

“How so?” Doug asked. “If there’s no towns between here an
d there.”

“Ah but there are. Plenty of them. Part of a big country called Mexico. About thirty miles south. They’ve been scrambling over the wall
s and fences like big insects, all pieced together from dead bodies.”

“Yeah, we’ve seen those things,” Amanita said. “I think we see more of them now than the single ones.”

“Well,” the woman continued, “we came back when we lost a few of our numbers. This over here was our small town gas station. Junkyard was next to it where the state dumped a lot of its old junk.”

“Like school buses, I see.”

“You got it. Lucky for us they were all arranged in some cockamamie square so we threw some wood and metal over top and have been sitting it out for a few days like this. Waiting to hear if things are getting better or worse.”

“Clearly worse,” Doug said. “Say, can we come take a breather. I think I may need to rethink our game
plan.”

“You’re more than welcome. Follow us.”

Doug steered the truck off the road onto the dirt and followed the woman and the teen over to the buses. He and Amanita got out and said hello to the other four men, two women and five children. Amanita forgot all their names almost instantly, except for Nathan, the boy with the ripped jeans. Under all the soot, his green eyes stared back at her, and she found herself looking at his muscular arms.

“Used to be a drummer,” he said in passing. “
My kick and snare burned to nothing when all the fires started. Still have the cymbals but they just piss people off. ”

“Now the fires spread away from us,” the woman said, bringing them each a bottle of water.
She’d already told them her name was Marlene, and that she was Nathan’s mother. There was no mention of a father. “We figure they’ll keep burning outward and we’ll be okay in a few days. At least from the flames. For now, we hope it’ll keep the undead out of here.”

“It won’t,” Amanita said, regretting it almost instantly. What was the use in destroying their hope. But it was too late, her words were out “Sorry, it’s just that I’ve seen them on fire and it doesn’t seem to bother them.”

Marlene hung her head for a moment, then raised it proudly. “Well, the smoke is at least a screen for us. Hard to smell anything but charcoal and soot.”

“What started the fires?” Doug asked, gulping down the water.

“Planes,” Nathan said. “German planes. They bombed us without even thinking twice.”

“Like Castor,” Am said, fighting back a scream as she once again realized how badly the governments were handling this.

“They shot missiles into the town,” Nathan continued, “into a mob of those things. They didn’t realize our gas lines run under the ground. Everything went up in a big explosion in minutes. If it wasn’t my home it would have been cool. But it was my home. Fuckers.”

Marlene ran a hand through his hair. “My boy, the fragile artist, now becoming Rambo. And to think before I hated that his passion was screaming punk rock music.”

“Ma!”

“Why don’t you take Amanita here and feed the dogs. They’re probably getting hungry and they bark when they are. Can’t have that.”

“C’mon,” Nathan said to Amanita, “that’s my mom’s cue to let the adults talk.”

“It’s fine,” Amanita replied, secretly happy to get a chance to talk more with him. At least they seemed to like the same bands. That was something. No more of this Johnny Cash
depressing stuff, even if she did secretly like it. “What kind of dogs do you have?”

“Retrievers. Two of
’em. Still happy fellas. I envy them.”

SATURDAY, 11:41 AM

Marlene moved throughout the makeshift fort and checked on the other members. Most of them were fatigued and coughing, even the children, who amused themselves with old action figures near a small camp fire. A hole was cut in the slatted roof to allow the smoke out, and Doug couldn’t help but feel that more fire was overkill. But he supposed they needed to see in the dark somehow.

She stoppe
d besides a grey-haired man with a mustache. “Hi, Ron, this is Doug. He’s stopping through. I thought you could tell him your story.”

Ron sat on a leather
car seat that had been pillaged from the junkyard. He sipped from a brown beer bottle that’s label had been peeled off.  “Well shit,” he said, “why not. Sit down, Doug. You want a drink?”

Doug sat on an overturned plastic bucket. “Does a bear shit on the pope?”

“Boy, that joke’s been twisted into nonsense over time.” Ron handed over a beer and waited for Doug to pop the top off and drink.

“So Marlene says you’re heading out through the desert to Saint Diego, huh?”

“We’re kind of on a mission, sir.”

Ron laughed. “Sir. Son, I’m not that much older’n you. You call me Ron. Though I appreciate the respectful sentiment. What’s your mission? Because you mi
ght not know you’re on a suicide mission.”

“No, Ron. Me and Am, we’re looking for someone. Someone we’re hoping to meet in La Jolla.”

“And Am is the little girl you came in with, I presume? I heard a few choice words muttered under her breath.”

“Yeah, she’s a firecracker. Can’t say I wasn’t the same at her age. Kids are kids right?”

“These days they think they’re adults. So who’s the person you’re trying to meet. Someone you’re in contact with?”

“Unfortunately no.
A friend of Am’s.”

“Hope there’ a good reason you need to meet this friend. Because I gotta tell you, I was out there on the road through the desert. We were headed to the coast to talk to some real officials, get a sense of things, get supplies and find out if what we’d heard on the news was real.  Didn’t make it, though. Me and Henero there were the only ones who made it back. That’s Henero over there.” He pointed to a Mexican man in a San Francisco Giants ball cap. “There were twenty-two of us us that went out. Made it about halfway to
El Centro before they swarmed us. Just came out of the hills like something wild, something on the hunt. Big ones, small ones, ones all fused together. I could see the faces in our headlights. The Mexicans had come over the fence and they were dead and hungry.”

“How di
d it get to Mexico so fast?”

“My guess? Coyotes.
You know, the guys that smuggle illegals across the border. Maybe someone got into one of the trucks. Or maybe just someone trying to climb across the fence got bit, ran back into Mexico before he turned, bit a guard. Who knows. Bottom line is it got across and it spread fast. Over there, you see, they don’t have houses like us. They got guns, sure, but they don’t have good places to hide. It’s all thin drywall or just clapboard if anything. Some of those dwellings are just leaned-up scrap metal, look like this makeshift base here. Those towns on the border, they’re jammed packed with people too poor to move. By now it’s probably spread down to Central America.”

“So what happened? They sur
prised you? What if we go during the day, so we can see them?”

“You’re missing my point,
Douglas…there is nowhere to hide out there. It’s just sand dunes. And they haven’t come this way yet, which means they’re still out there. Thousands and thousands of them.”