Everyone laughs. This trip sucks on so many levels—we’re missing so many, we have no home, we don’t have enough fuel or food, we have no idea what awaits us—but I’m in the Mystery Machine with what’s left of the best people on Earth, which kind of makes everything all right.
4
The bus is quiet when Peter takes over driving. Bits and Hank have crammed in with Penny and James on the VW’s bed. Midway through the night, Penny and James will drive while we sleep through dawn. I lean my head against the window and watch the taillights of the RV. It’s slightly hypnotic, and with the heat blowing I have to fight to stay awake. I’m not afraid to sleep after my nap today; I’m yearning for it.
“Let’s turn off the heat,” I say quietly. “Just for a bit.”
“I know it’s your voice,” Peter says, “so it must be you, but are you really asking to turn off the heat?”
“I was never gladder in all my life than to find out that running a car’s heat doesn’t use extra fuel, but it’s putting me to sleep.”
“Sleep, I’ll be fine. Our shift’s almost over, anyway.”
It’s tempting, but it’s against the rules. The rules that are intended to keep us alive.
“Nope, one to drive and one to watch and keep them awake.” I switch off the heat and stretch. “Are you tired?”
“I don’t know if I can sleep.”
“Yeah.”
I don’t know what else to say. We drive in silence, but it’s not uncomfortable. The spring before last, I never would’ve guessed Peter and I could do anything comfortably. Now, he’s one of the people I love most in the world. We have a special bond in Bits; everyone loves her, but I don’t know that anyone else has the drive we feel to keep her safe at any cost. The relief that she’s only feet away makes me exhale.
“What’s wrong?” Peter asks.
“Nothing. I just…Bits is back there, you know? I really didn’t think—”
I see Peter’s smile in the lights of the dash before it falls, and then I want to kick myself. Saving Bits is all jumbled up in losing Ana and Dan and John. Peter would never say it, but I’m afraid he’s angry at me for being the one to take Ana out of the world for good. Maybe I should have left her like that, but I’d sworn I wouldn’t.
“I promised her,” I whisper before I can think better of it.
“What?”
It’s cooling down quickly, although that’s not why I shiver. I clamp my knees together and slip my hands under my thighs.
“Who? What do you mean?” Peter asks again.
“Ana,” I whisper. “I promised her I’d do it if…I’m sorry.”
There’s a long silence, this one not so comfortable. I continue looking out the window and out of the corner of my eye see Peter glance over, but he doesn’t say a word.
Penny clears her throat. “Hey, it’s almost our turn.”
She perches on the folding seat with her legs by the shifter and rests her chin on my shoulder. I’m glad she heard. It saves me from having to say it twice. I pull my hands from under my legs and hold the arm she’s wrapped around my middle.
“Love you,” Penny says.
I nod because I can’t speak. They deserve to cry more than I do, and they’re not, so I don’t. I wish Peter would say something, anything. Tell me that he hates me or that it’s okay. I watch the road until the lead vehicles slow to switch drivers and gas up. The two-lane road is empty and Tony, who’s been driving the pickup, has chosen an open spot in which to stop. We leave the kids sleeping and spill out into the cool night air.
Tony has spiky, dark hair and cherubic cheeks when he smiles, which is often. He’s pulled the pickup alongside the VW, and now he unhooks the nozzle from the in-bed tank. When the VW is full, he moves to top off the RV while the rest of us watch the fields or get ready for bed.
“We’re making good time,” Zeke says from where he stands in the headlights. “If we keep this up, we’ll get there in a few days.”
“Well, now you’ve jinxed us,” Shawn says with a grin. He stands, feet apart, and stretches his beefy arms above his head. “But I’ll be asleep, finally, so just let me die and don’t wake me.”
Jamie hits his side. He drops his arms with an oof. “Don’t even joke about that, Shawn.”
“Why?”
“Because I have you trained and really don’t want to go through that again.”
Shawn and the others laugh, but Jamie’s mouth is tight. I pull on one of her curls when she passes. “I’m just tired,” she says. “And I hate when Shawn says stupid shit like that.”
She shrugs and climbs into the RV. Peter and I ready ourselves for bed while James drives. I’m glad it’s dark, that Peter can’t see how distressed I am that he still hasn’t spoken. I pull back the covers to find Bits practically on top of Hank. This may be bad for Hank, but it gives us more space. I lie on my side, Peter’s warmth on my back, and have just closed my eyes when I feel his shoulders shake. I hesitate before I flip to place my hand on his chest. He may not want me to hear, but I can’t ignore his crying now that I have.
Peter’s hand covers mine. “I’m glad you promised.”
I can’t see his expression, but the softness in his voice and touch ease my anxiety. His arm moves under me and I rest my head on his shoulder. It’s a comfort to hold on to something, and I know he feels it by the way his heart slows. I wait for its beating to return to normal before I allow myself to sleep.
5
I jump awake at Penny’s frightened yelp in time to see a Lexer bounce off the left corner of the VW. Shadows move on the side of the road just outside the reach of our headlights. A flashlight points from the pickup’s side window, illuminating hundreds of Lexers on the south side of the road heading straight for us.
“Keep going, keep going,” a voice yells from the radio. “They’re behind us, too.”
Peter laces up his boots and sits at the ready, his machete glinting in the lights of the dash. I find my gloves and boots in the dark and grip my axe. I don’t dare turn on the interior lights in case it attracts more. James accelerates to avoid the onslaught, but the VW is hit by a mass of bodies hard enough to throw us to the right. I slam against Peter and the kids land in a pile on the floor. James curses and yanks the wheel straight. We could have hit a huge pod—one of the pods we think are moving north—and if it’s them, we’re fucked. I press a flashlight to the window. It’s smeared with juices from decaying bodies, but the beam carries far enough to see an end to the sea of white faces.
It’s good news, but it doesn’t mean we’re safe. James fights his way down the clogged road, finding the open spaces so he can push them out of the way without creating a hill of bodies. Out of all our vehicles, the VW is the weakest and lowest to the ground. It would be best to follow in the RV’s wake, but we can’t speed up to get close.
I order the kids to get on their shoes and coats, and then slip our backpacks on our shoulders. A Lexer slams into James’s side window hard enough to crack it with a sound like a gunshot. James curses, but he’s calmer than I could ever hope to be. James is always calm.
I hold Bits and clench my teeth so as not to scream the way she does each time the VW swerves. I imagine the worst—that we’ll be pushed over or off the road and have to fight our way through to the others—and tell myself that we can do it again, as many times as we have to. We’ve done it before and we’ll do it again.
Another window cracks. I shove Bits into Peter’s lap, where he grips her, prepared to run. I raise Hank’s hand to my cheek to be sure he’s put on his gloves and then hold his gloved hand tight in mine.
Rotten faces appear in the headlights, hit the windshield and fall away. One struggles to stay upright, its hands wrapped around the windshield wiper, before it goes down and takes the wiper with it. A head hits the glass and explodes like a rotten jack-o’-lantern, leaving a starburst in the glass and a flood of whatever filled its brain cavity. James tries the wipers, but the wiper on his side is somew
here on the asphalt and Penny’s side becomes only marginally cleaner.
Penny peers through the murky windshield and directs him through the throng in a surprisingly steady voice, until the hailstorm of hands lessens to a gentle patter before it ceases completely. A few miles later, we pull over and exit on shaky legs. I can make out more than just shadows now that the sky is lightening, but I can’t see the full extent of the damage until Zeke turns on his flashlight and lets out a low whistle. Miss Vera is destroyed. Windows are cracked and the beautiful paint job that the previous owner must have waxed weekly is marred by Lexer sludge and dents.
“I’m so glad I wasn’t driving,” Penny says, hand to her mouth.
James puts an arm around her and grimaces. “I wouldn’t have gotten out of that without you.”
“I think we’ve learned a valuable lesson,” Mark, a compact older man with a trim beard, says. He still acts like the history teacher he was before Bornavirus hit. “Driving at night does not seem to be a viable option. Our lights can be seen for miles. A pod that might have missed us in the day will surely race for us at night. We’ll never see them coming.”
I know we’d all been thinking the same thing, but it’s such a demoralizing thought that I was reluctant to bring it up.
“It’ll take us double the time,” Mike says. His long face looks as if it’s lengthened by a couple of inches. His twenty year-old son, Rohan, nods. “I know we don’t have a choice, but we don’t have enough food.”
The RV that arrived from Whitefield hadn’t been a part of their bug out plan, just a place where kids would gather to watch the occasional movie. We have enough food to feed ten people for a week on portions that aren’t generous. It was going to be tight feeding twenty for four or five days. Nine or ten days will be even tighter.
“We do have a choice,” Mark says. “But prudence pays, especially with the monsters.”
The best thing to do is play it safe unless we have a good reason not to. There’s the fear that we’ll run into a giant pod of Lexers if we travel slowly, but it’s close to a certainty that we’ll run into a smaller pod at night; they’re a dime a dozen.
The sun has risen by the time we’ve emptied the VW and moved it off the road. Miss Vera has become one of the cars you see by the roadside—abandoned, dented and bloody. A mystery that only we have the answer to. But I don’t feel as sad as I expected at her loss: We’re still alive, and for all her beauty she is, after all, just an artfully arranged collection of wood and metal.
“Thanks, Miss V,” I say to her. I snap a picture with Adrian’s phone and put my arms around the kids. “Guess you’re gonna get some TV.”
6
“We need better maps,” James says from the table in the RV. “There are tons of back roads, but they’re not on the map. What we really need is a road atlas.”
We’ve been checking cars and a few houses we’ve passed, but all we’ve found are folding maps that show only main roads.
“If we can find a phone book, we can find a bookstore. That’s—” I stop. That’s what Ana and I did when we saved Nelly from his infection. “It’s probably the best way.”
James nods. “We’re coming up on Thunder Bay. There should be a bookstore there.”
“And a new car, maybe,” Tony says from the front.
It’s tight in the camper. Five adults in the pickup leaves fifteen in here. Even minus the four kids in the bedroom watching a movie and Penny in the bed over the cab, we’re cramped. But no one’s sold on the idea of using more gas than we need.
I sit with Maureen. Her brown bob is limp, but her cheeks have gone back to plump from where they’d fallen at the news of John’s death. She’s the caretaking type, and we give her something to do. She’s fed us pasta and cleaned up, and now her arm is around me on the couch. I snuggle in and am reminded of Hank on my lap. I wonder at what age you stop wanting your parents when things are rough. Maybe you never do.
“A van,” Nelly says. “That way we can all fit if we had to.”
“And you can ride with us,” I say.
“What makes you think I want to ride with you?”
“My delightful odor?”
Everyone laughs, although it’s true. The RV is full of potable water that shouldn’t be wasted; otherwise I’d even take a cold shower. I’ve changed into a spare outfit because the one I wore when we left Kingdom Come was disgusting enough that I left it in Quebec, and I have one more change of clothes after this. Ana’s bag is here, but I don’t think I can bring myself to wear her clothes. Besides, it’s probably leather pants, which are warm when it’s cold but sweaty when it’s not. It’s sunny and in the fifties; I thought September would be colder up here.
“Turn’s coming up,” James says to Mike, our driver.
“Here goes nothing,” Mike mutters. He turns off the highway and slows at two houses with only trees for neighbors. “What do you think?”
It looks safe enough. I follow Peter and Nelly to the blue house, whose door is easily kicked open by one strike of Zeke’s heavy boot. Inexpensive but nice furniture and a huge television make up most of the living room’s decor. It smells fine, but we call out to be sure nothing’s lurking before we step in.
“If you were a phone book, where would you be?” Nelly asks.
“Kitchen,” I say. “Maybe office. There were no smartphones when you were growing up. Don’t you remember looking things up the old-fashioned way?”
Nelly grunts and moves left to the kitchen, where he drops his machete on the table and searches the cabinets. I poke around in a guest bedroom-slash-office down the hall. There’s no phone book in the drawers or closet, but I grab the ream of paper that sits next to the printer and every writing implement I can find. I’m shoving it all into a pillowcase when Peter appears at the doorway.
He sets down a litter box, which he must have emptied, a box of litter, and a bin that he opens to reveal dry cat food. “We won’t have to feed Sparky and Barnaby our food.”
“Or walk Sparky, thank God.” It’s not the walking of the cat that’s so bad, since she has the harness I made, but she plants her butt on the ground or pounces on waving grass instead of doing her business. “What happened to the cat that was here?”
“You don’t want to know.”
All the people who’ve died is a bigger tragedy, but that doesn’t stop me from feeling terrible about the animals who must have starved or died of thirst waiting for their owners to return. If they weren’t eaten by them.
“Look at all this paper and stuff,” I say, rather than think about the cat that’s probably curled up in a corner somewhere, desiccated and pathetic. “Bits and Hank can start on their next comic.”
“Good thinking. They’ll be excited.”
Peter takes the pillowcase and throws it on the bin, then leaves for the RV. I look around in the living room for something to read, but these people preferred electronic entertainment.
Zeke stands at the front door, his beard just brushing the arms he’s folded over his chest while he keeps watch. “What, no books, sugar?”
“Not a one.”
“We’ll find you something to read.” He points to the coffee table’s lower shelf. “Looks like a magazine under there.”
I pull out the celebrity magazine. The first few pages inform me that celebrities are just like me—They take out the garbage! They walk down the street!—and I drop it to the floor in disgust. “I’d rather read can labels. Although the thought of all those people becoming zombies is somewhat heartening.”
Zeke’s laugh follows me into the kitchen, where I find Nelly fighting to open a large drawer. Batteries, scissors, screwdrivers, instruction manuals, and other assorted things leap to the floor.
“It’s like your kitchen,” he says to me.
“Quiet, you,” I say. “Every kitchen needs a junk drawer.”
“Except you had junk drawers, plural, and junk cabinets and junk—”
I push him out of the way to retrie
ve the batteries and open the upper cabinets to find plenty of dishes but no food. Nelly checks the cabinet under the drawer and holds up two phone books in triumph. I trace my name in the film of dust on the microwave. Nelly adds his name and then writes were here underneath, and I giggle just as Peter comes up behind us.
“How old are you guys?” he asks.
I write his name, too. “We have to leave our marks. That way, one day people will remember us.”
“Our names will be known far and wide,” Nelly says. “By all seven people still alive. Ready to check the fridge?”
I make a face. There’s never anything except the smell of death inside. But it’s unwise not to check, especially since we’re low on food. I hold my nose and pull open the door. The stench fills the kitchen even though I slam it after the few seconds it takes to register exploded containers and a colony of mold.
Peter leans into the living room for fresh air. “That’s never once been a good idea.”
We trail him to the RV, where James locates a bookstore and a car dealership in town. The houses go from woodsy to houses and apartment complexes. There’s plenty of overgrown lawn on which to drive until we hit a length of road that’s been dug into rock. Even at a few feet tall, the walls are high enough to prevent skirting around the pileup that blocks the way. The RV won’t be able to navigate through the cleared spaces like the pickup can.
Shawn stops alongside in the pickup and leans out the window. “Now what?”
“Some of us take the pickup and meet back here,” Kyle says. “I’ll go.”
I tilt my head to where Nicki stands, thumb in her mouth and eyes wide. Kyle’s jaw twitches, but he stays quiet.
“I have to go, we might need my superior mechanical skills,” Shawn says.
Jamie sighs from the back of the pickup. “I’ll go, if only to volunteer you as bait so we can escape.”
Until the End of the World Box Set Page 79
