“He left the Glock. There’s a 12-gauge, and another one of the Ruger’s.” He spoke directly to Tina now. “See, normally this thing’s full, which means they packed up the rest and took them with them. You asked why they would head into the mountains. My dad’s kind of a wilderness junkie. Not one of those paranoid survivalist-types or anything, but he liked to spend his free time hunting and being in the woods. He’s never lived in a big city, so it wouldn’t make sense for him to head for one now. He’s familiar with that place. Maybe for somebody else it would be the worst mistake in the world. For him, it’s probably the best place he could have picked. Loaded the van with food and guns and ammo and went on their merry way. Plus it’s isolated. If those things out there are only out to fuck up other people, they’ll stick to the places where the people are. That’ just an educated guess, but it sounds about right.”
“How big is this place?”
“Big enough to get lost in if you don’t know where you’re going. But there are quite a few trails in there. Usually you follow one of the trails and sooner or later you’ll find your way out.”
“If it’s that big, how do we find them?”
Taylor reached into the safe. He checked the magazine in the Glock, made sure it was loaded, and then tucked it into the waistband of his jeans. He handed the shotgun to Carl. Pulling out the rifle, he handed it to Tina and said, “Let’s worry about that when we get there.”
They didn’t waste a lot of time gathering supplies. Most of the non-perishables had been taken, so the selection was sparse. The important things were the guns and ammunition their father had left for them to find. They also packed anything that would provide warmth; blankets, flannel shirts, some of their father’s thermal underwear. It could get cold in the mountains.
As they packed, Carl made frequent trips to the window, checking on the car to make sure more of the rabid things didn’t show up. They sky was beginning to shift colors; soft blues and piercing oranges. Light poured through a row of apple trees that had wept piles of white blossoms onto the ground.
“How’s it looking out there?” Taylor said.
“Good so far. Seems safer with light in the sky.”
Tina sat at the kitchen table. She thought heading to the so-called “mountains” sounded like a bad idea. She had to keep reminding herself that she was the tag-a-long in this thing and couldn’t afford to be demanding. She wasn’t prone to abandonment issues, but that possibility existed now. She stole glances at the brothers as they scrambled through the house.
The question you have to ask yourself,
she thought,
is would they be capable of leaving you behind?
Capable? Yes. But would they? She didn’t think so.
They carried the guns and ammo out to the car, arranging everything along the floor in front of the backseat. Taylor stuffed the Glock between the driver and passenger seats so that only the handle was visible. Everything else was packed into the trunk.
“Is that everything?”
Tina nodded. “I think so.”
“I brought this. For emergencies,” Carl said, smiling as he showed them a bottle of Wild Turkey he had wrapped in a flannel shirt.
“Alcohol?”
“Yep. It’s probably older than the gods. It could come in handy though.”
“How?”
“As a sleep aid.”
Carl winked at her and wrapped the flannel shirt around the bottle. “That about covers it I think.”
Tina slid into the backseat, careful not to step on the rifles. A pile of sleeping bags were stacked on the other side of the seat on top of the box of supplies they had taken from her father’s house. She scooted over next to them and leaned her head against the pile. “How long does it take to get there?” she asked, closing her eyes.
“A few hours. That’s under normal conditions. It’ll take longer now.”
Carl came around to the passenger side of the car when he saw them. Coldwater. Population: 1579. At least half of them had to be coming down the road as though they were part of a marathon. It was one of those situations where time stretches out like taffy.
Taylor saw his brother frozen in the act of getting into the car and glanced into the rearview mirror. “Hey.
Hey!
Get in the car!”
Carl was still in slow motion, but he managed to pivot, slump down in the seat, and pull the door closed.
Taylor gunned the engine, one hand moved to the butt of the Glock and stayed there. He watched the rabid things following after them. There were several agonizing seconds as the Escort’s lethargic engine debated on whether it would continue running, that he thought the mob would overtake them, that he saw them growing closer in the mirror, but the car gave a dramatic lurch and carried them forward and away from danger.
Carl wore a startled expression. He pulled the bottle of Wild Turkey from the flannel shirt and unscrewed the lid. He raised the bottle to his nose and sniffed it. The odor made him cringe, but he took a quick swallow anyway, trying not to taste it as it lit up his insides with a fire he could feel all the way down to his stomach. He held the bottle out to Taylor.
Taylor shook his head.
“Come on. You’re not
that
old.”
Taylor moved his hand from the handle of the Glock and took the bottle. He let some of it settle in his mouth, allowing it to rest there, the awful taste like a bitter magic that served to lighten the heavy lids of his eyes. After the initial burn subsided, a comforting warmth spread through his body.
He could feel a tickle at the back of his throat. Not painful yet but the subtle precursor of worse things to come. His body was wearing down. He needed rest. A hot meal would help, too, but sleep was what his body required now. He took another sip from the bottle and then handed it back to Carl.
“That’s the most we’ve seen,” Carl said. “It looked like damned near the whole town.”
“Looked like it.”
“It makes you wonder what a big city would look like. Think about it. What must Denver look like?”
“I don’t know,” Taylor said. “I think Dad had the right idea. Avoid places where there are a lot of people. Hide out. It’s the smart thing to do. Doesn’t matter how many guns we’ve got, there are too many of those things to try it any other way.”
“They found us again. You realize that don’t you? I would have figured they’d find us at my place after hearing the gunshots, but they found us at Mom and Dad’s.”
“There’s something to that. I just don’t know what yet. Some kind of special sense because they couldn’t have heard us all the way out here. We need to keep that in mind.”
Carl had the shotgun angled so that it rested against the dashboard, the barrel pointing toward the car’s ceiling. He kept it braced between his knees so it wouldn’t slide around.
Taylor waited until the rabid things had disappeared from view completely before taking a left on Seymour. Out of two places in town to get gas, one was a charred ruin. He prayed the other was in working order.
The shop was two blocks east of Main Street, sandwiched between a car dealership and a beauty salon. The town’s only bank, occupying a squat brick building, sat kitty corner from the shop. He could see the shop’s twin gas pumps standing side-by-side like metal headstones a hundred yards ahead.
Carl rolled down the passenger-side window and picked up the shotgun. “I’ll keep you covered,” he said.
“Yeah, well, just don’t accidentally go blowing us up.”
“How are you going to get gas? I mean, it looks like the thing works, but nobody’s inside to give you access to it.”
Taylor paused in the act of exiting the car. He removed his wallet and plucked out a plastic card. “For emergencies. Mom gave it to me years ago.”
He came around the side of the car, unscrewed the gas cap, and inserted his keycard into the slot of a metal reader that stood next to the pump. Nothing happened.
Please, God, let this work. Just one damn thing. The ratio of good to bad is really jacked up right now. How about evening it out some?
He removed the card and tried again. This time there was a brief
Ding!
and Taylor was able to pull down a small metal lever that activated the pump. He began filling the tank, watching the numbers roll by on the pump’s old-fashioned display.
“It’s working,” Carl said. “I can’t believe it. I didn’t think it would. Nothing else has.”
Taylor pointed to the row of cars lined up neatly side-by-side in front of the glass display of the car dealership. “If that had been the case, we could have siphoned some off from those. It would have been a lot more time consuming though.”
When the tank was full, Taylor hung the nozzle back in its cradle. He looked to the west and saw some them rounding the corner, still moving
en masse,
participants in a parade for crazy fuckers. “Time to hit the road,” he said and got into the car.
“You realize how many of those people we know?” Carl asked. “I could name off most of them.”
Taylor nodded. He focused on the road ahead, watching the needle of the speedometer jump to sixty. He recognized most of them, too. He was thankful that the three Coldwater residents that were the most important to him had had the sense to head for the mountains. Whether they had made it or not was another matter. He shoved those dark thoughts deep down; there wasn’t room for them now. The trick, he thought, was to set small goals and work on completing them one by one. You didn’t disregard any possibilities, but you let them sit along the side of the road like mile markers; signs you glanced at only occasionally because there were larger signs to follow.
Taylor glanced into the rearview mirror. “How you doing back there?”
Tina’s eyes fluttered open. She surveyed the world outside the confines of the Escort and said, “Okay, I guess. We’re going the same way we came?”
“Yeah, we’re kind of backtracking. The place we’re going is a about an hour and a half into Wyoming. Going seventy-five, it’s probably a four hour trip. Like I said, that’s optimum conditions. Most likely it’ll take longer than that.”
The morning fog was thick. Taylor was glad for it. It was like having a security blanket; a cocoon that obscured anything dangerous that lay outside its confines. He could see the road twenty yards ahead and then it was swallowed up by the haze.
“You just let me know when you need me to drive,” Carl said. “I’m not feeling too bad.”
“I must have hit my second wind because I’m not doing too bad at the moment. But I’ll let you know.”
Carl switched on the radio, toying with the dial. “Still nothing.”
“I don’t get how it spread so fast.
If
it’s a disease. That means it started somewhere. A monkey in Africa or something. Right? So how does the whole world go to shit overnight? Wouldn’t we have seen something about it on TV or read about it in the paper? People getting sick?”
“Not if you were where the original outbreak took place,” Tina said. She yawned into her hand and leaned forward. “We know about it ahead of time when it happens someplace else first.”
Carl said, “So you’re saying you think it started here?”
Tina shrugged. “Maybe.”
“That still doesn’t explain much. Like what’s
here?
What’s the scale? Our town. Your town. It was happening in both of those. So is it happening in just a few surrounding counties or just this state or the entire country?” Taylor slowed the car abruptly to swerve around a truck that was angled on the shoulder, its front end sticking out into the road. “One town, I could see it. But it’s not. At least two towns that we know of and they were talking about it on the radio before we broke down. People did know about it, but not very far in advance. It happened fast. Maybe the question is how does it spread?”
“Or how it originated,” Tina said. “Anything that affects so many people that rapidly has got to be airborne.”
“Maybe it was a meteor.” Carl twisted around in the seat so he could look at Tina, both hands holding onto the barrel of the shotgun. “Crashed and gave off some kind of alien radiation.”
“You said you heard about it on the radio. Was it a local station?”
“Denver.”
“Well…if it was radiation than it had a pretty big radius. I think we would have heard about the impact.”
“I was joking.”
“Oh.”
Taylor met her eyes in the rearview mirror. “He does that.”
“So it’s happening in the States, maybe the whole world. It almost has to be spread through the air. And it spreads
fast.
Fast enough to infect everyone in about…” She opened her cell phone and checked the time. “Sixteen hours. God, is that all it’s been? I feel like we’ve been going like this for close to forever. It’s funny how quickly we adapt. One of my first classes in college covered adaptation by species. How animals have evolved over millions of years to survive a changing environment. Yesterday morning, I was driving my car on a normal road in a normal world, heading home from college to see my dad. Now look at things. Some people think nature does it on purpose. Like this natural cleansing. Only the strong adapt and survive.”