“What
happened
?” Annie said.
Hughes had to tell her something. He could hardly believe it was necessary. Annie must be the only human being in the world who didn’t know.
“Plague,” Hughes said. “Worst plague you ever saw. Amazing that you don’t remember.”
“Where’s a safe place we can go?” Annie said.
“We have a place,” Frank said. “Back behind us a couple of miles. We’ll take you.”
“I mean, how can we get away from all this? It can’t be like this everywhere.”
Hughes said nothing. Frank said nothing.
They drove on in silence for another minute or so. Hughes saw buildings ahead set back a ways from the road. Stores with parking lots out front. Buildings meant bodies. He put his thick arm out the window and leaned hard into the door. He might need to shoot again soon.
“More bodies ahead,” he said, to warn Annie.
She saw them. Five bodies, mostly just skeletons, lying in the road next to a Jeep with its doors flung open. This time she didn’t say anything. Didn’t place her hands over her mouth. Didn’t react. Just stared as they drove past.
Dozens of bodies were strewn across a parking lot in front of a feed store. They, too, were mostly just bones. Torn but now dried bloody clothing was scattered all over the place.
“This is what the plague does?” Annie said as much in amazement as horror. “Destroys the whole body? Like flesh-eating bacteria?”
They drove past the feed store and past two more skeletons in the road. Frank swerved around them.
“No,” Hughes said. “That’s not what the plague does at all.”
Hughes would wait and tell her the rest later. It was too much to take in all at once.
“There,” Frank said and pointed at a one-story building with a sign on the roof that said “Adventure Outfitters.” “That must be the place.”
They turned into the parking lot. It was empty of cars and of bodies. The front door was not boarded up. Hughes saw tents and backpacks and lanterns and boots displayed behind unbroken windows, just as Parker had said.
Frank stopped the truck in front of the door and put it in park.
“Okay,” Hughes said to Annie. “Here’s the deal. We’re going to be attacked, so we have to move fast. We run in there, grab a couple of each item, throw them into the truck, then we
move
. Stay close to me. Don’t venture off more than a couple of feet.”
He and Frank opened the Chevy doors and got out. Annie stayed put for a moment until Hughes beckoned her with a wave of his hand.
“Who do you think is going to attack us?” Annie said. She stepped onto the pavement and looked around with unease. “It doesn’t look like anyone has been here for months.”
“Sick people,” Hughes said. “The plague makes them aggressive.”
“
Really
aggressive,” Frank said.
Hughes broke through the glass door with the butt of his shotgun. He instinctively expected the screech of an alarm, but of course the power had been out for weeks, and the shattering glass was the only sound in any direction. The silence before and after was total.
He still hadn’t gotten used to such quiet in an environment built by humans. Even the forests were louder than this. At least in the forest you could hear birds, insects, streams, and falling pinecones. Here there was no sound at all, the unreality almost dreamlike.
He reached in through the glass, careful not to cut his wrist on the jagged edges, and unlocked the door.
Frank flipped on a Maglite and swept the beam across the checkout counters and into the gloom. “Looks undisturbed,” he said. “No one has been in here.”
“Those bones we saw back there …” Annie said.
“Yeah,” Hughes said.
“How long have they
been
there?”
Hughes stepped inside. “A month,” he said in a voice just over a whisper. “Maybe two months.” He scanned the store and swept the Mossberg back and forth, his finger inside the trigger guard. On the right was the clothing section. All-weather jackets, fleece pullovers, high-tech wilderness pants, gloves, hats, and wool socks.
“Then how could the bodies have decomposed so quickly?” Annie whispered. “The animals got to them already?”
“Those bones weren’t picked over by animals,” Hughes whispered.
She squinted.
“Later,” Hughes said. “We’ll explain it all back at home base. Grab some warm clothes that look like they’ll fit you. Get at least two of everything.”
Hughes led Annie to the clothing section as Frank picked up a handbasket to stuff items in. They didn’t have enough time to fill a shopping cart.
“I’m getting food,” Frank whispered. “It’s right here next to the clothing.” He grabbed packages of freeze-dried turkey tetrazzini and chili mac that could be “cooked” in the wilderness just by adding hot water. The expiration dates were years into the future.
Hughes watched over Annie as she grabbed two fleece pullovers and two pairs of pants off the rack. “Get five pairs of socks,” he whispered, “or your feet are going to rot. And grab some strong boots.”
He heard nothing in the store but himself, Annie, and Frank. If one of those things was in there, they’d know by now. The only quiet way in was through the front door. He lowered the shotgun, took his finger out of the trigger guard, and beckoned Annie to follow him toward a large glass counter displaying the expensive items the store owners didn’t want to be shoplifted.
“Frank,” he whispered. “Over here.”
Frank sidled up behind Hughes and shined his Maglite through the glass. Hughes saw exactly what he was hoping to find. Hunting knives, GPS systems, and one-eyed night-vision devices.
“Sweet,” Frank said.
“Grab those night-vision monocles,” Hughes said. “Grab several. We won’t be able to recharge the batteries.”
“Sure, we will,” Annie said. She held something in her hand. “It’s a portable solar panel. Says it’s for charging cell phones and iPads while camping.”
Hughes lit up. “Get as many of those as you can carry.”
“There must be some first-aid packs in here somewhere,” Frank said. Hughes saw that Frank had placed five night-vision monocles in his basket.
“Go find some,” Hughes said. “Get the biggest packs you can find. One minute.”
Hughes grabbed a water filter, a small camp stove, a compass, and navigation maps of Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia. He collected six small emergency blankets made of reflective Mylar, two hunting knives, two more portable solar panels from where Annie had found hers, a handheld GPS that looked like it might plug into the panels, two winter jackets, two sleeping bags, seven candles, packs of waterproof matches, fistfuls of fleece hats. He stuffed everything into the biggest backpack he could find. He slung the weighted-down backpack over one of his shoulders and grabbed a second empty one for good measure, then hustled toward the front door.
“Time to move,” he said. “Frank. Annie. Let’s go. We can’t push our luck.”
Hughes tossed his items into the Chevy’s truck bed. Frank and Annie followed him out and set their items next to his.
“Shh,” he said and held up his hand. Everyone cocked their heads and stopped breathing for a moment.
“I don’t hear anything,” Annie whispered. She shuddered at the implications. The poor girl still didn’t know what was happening.
“I don’t either,” Frank said, though unlike Annie, he looked relieved.
Hughes thought for a moment.
“If anything heard us pull in here,” he said, “they’d be here by now.”
Frank nodded.
Annie said nothing.
“Nothing is coming,” Hughes said.
“How do you know?” Annie said.
“If something was coming,” Hughes said, “believe me, we’d know.”
“But how?” Annie said. “How would you know if someone is coming?”
“You’ll find out when it happens,” Hughes said.
The last thing Annie remembered was visiting her older sister Jenny in Olympia. She had no idea how much time had passed since then and when all—this—happened.
She had driven down for the day from Seattle. Both she and Jenny moved to Washington State from South Carolina—Jenny because she got a job working for a congressman and Annie because she had broken up with her live-in boyfriend of two years and felt the need to start over. Jenny told Annie the Northwest was a fabulous place to live, and Annie figured that made it as good a place as any to reboot her life. Seattle was as far from South Carolina as a person could get in the United States without moving to Alaska or Hawaii, and since her sister was out there, she would not be alone.
She lived near the University of Washington campus just north of downtown Seattle. She clearly remembered hopping in her Saturn and driving down I-5 to Olympia. She and Jenny picked up some lattes at the Starbucks downtown near the state capitol building and drank them across the street on a park bench. It was a warm late-summer day. She remembered thinking the moderate dry heat of summer would soon be replaced with the cool musty air of October. There was no plague, nor talk of any plague.
The next thing she knew, she was waking up on the forest floor aching and dehydrated and covered in blood and gore. She reeked something awful and her mouth tasted like a rat had died in it. She got up, stumbled around for a few moments, and heard Hughes and Frank’s truck on the road just a few dozen yards away. And now she was in the truck heading to what Hughes said was their home base inside a grocery store.
A grocery store? They lived in a grocery store?
Where the hell had she been living these last couple of months?
“What’s the date today?” she said.
“Dunno,” Hughes said. “Must be early November by now, I guess.”
“It feels like a whole year has passed since this happened,” Frank said. “But I guess it has only been a couple of months.”
Early November. It was, what, early September when she was at her sister’s? So she was missing a solid two months of memory.
“How far are we from Olympia?” she said.
“You don’t know where we are?” Hughes said.
“It looks like the same general area,” she said, “but no, I don’t know where we are.”
“Olympia is fifteen miles north of here,” Hughes said. “Portland is an hour and a half to the south. At least it would be if the roads weren’t so bad. It would take a week to get there in these conditions. The freeway is impassable. We’d have to walk.”
She looked through the windshield in amazement. Both sides of the road were jammed with stopped cars. They spilled out of their lanes and onto the shoulder. Some of the doors were left open. What on earth had happened to everybody? Were all of them struck down by the virus? Even while out in their cars? Where did they go? Was there a refugee center somewhere? She swallowed hard, not sure she wanted to know the answer just yet.
“How does the virus spread?” she said.
“Bodily fluids,” Hughes said. “It’s not airborne, thank God. We wouldn’t be alive if it were. Don’t touch anything that’s dead. Don’t touch anything if it looked like something dead touched it. If you get blood or fluid of any kind on your hand, you scrub that bitch down. I can’t believe you’re not sick with all that blood on your shirt and on your face. I’d tell you to keep your fingers the hell out of your mouth, but if that virus was on you somewhere, you’d be infected by now. That’s for damn sure.”
“What are the first symptoms?” she said. She saw the five skeletons next to the Jeep they’d passed earlier.
“Sore throat,” Hughes said.
Annie had a sore throat.
“Coughing.”
But that was probably because she was dehydrated.
“A fever like you wouldn’t believe. Then coma. It only takes a couple of hours. Some people go down within minutes.”
She caught herself rubbing her throat and stopped. She didn’t want them to think she was getting sick.
“Water?” Hughes said. He’d noticed her rubbing her throat. She wasn’t surprised. Hughes didn’t look like the type of guy who let much get past him.
“Thanks,” she said as he reached under the seat and handed the bottle to her again.
There was something else Hughes wasn’t telling her. Frank had said the virus makes people aggressive. Like rabies? Does that happen before or after the coma? How could it happen after?
Pine needles and leaves covered the road ahead. The cars were covered too. Off to the right she saw the burned-out husk of what was once a Volkswagen Bug. They passed a boarded-up mom-and-pop gas station on the left side. She wondered what happened to mom and pop.
“How many people do you suppose have been killed?” she said.
Hughes and Frank looked at each other.
“Pretty much everybody,” Frank said and rubbed his mustache.
She sank in her seat. Pretty much everybody? How was that possible? Not even the Black Death killed pretty much everybody.
But somehow that felt right. It didn’t sound right, but it felt right.
She didn’t remember any of this, but the weird thing was that she almost remembered. She felt as if she were watching a movie that she had seen a long time ago as a kid. She had no idea what was going to happen next, but she sort of remembered things as they happened. She didn’t know what Hughes and Frank were going to say when she asked them a question, but everything they did say seemed right, like some part of her knew. Her mind was throwing up walls, leaving her stranded somewhere between amnesia and denial.
Frank swerved around a tight knot of cars in the road and had to drive most of the way to the tree line to get past them. Annie felt Hughes tense up as they neared the edge of the forest. He had that gun of his pointed out the window and was ready to pull the trigger. He looked like he
wanted
to pull the trigger.
Frank swerved back toward the asphalt after clearing the pileup. “Bogie at eleven o’clock. Hold onto something.”
Annie glanced left. A man came charging out of the trees on the other side of the road. He was covered in blood and screaming like he was terrified or enraged.
“Watch out!” Annie said. “There’s a—”
But Frank swerved into the man’s path and swiped him with the side of the Chevy. The impact sounded like someone threw a sack of potatoes at the driver’s-side door. The man bounced off the vehicle and flopped onto the shoulder. Frank kept going and checked the mirror.