“Keep going,” Zeke’s voice comes over the radio. “Go on through.”
Whatever’s kept them focused on the lake and woods is not as appealing as us. We zip by and watch them spill onto the road in our wake. I tighten my arms around Bits when twenty or so appear around a bend. The last thing we need is a kid going through a windshield. I slide off the seat with her in my lap. “Hank, get in the seat and buckle.”
I’ve given up on trying to keep myself and them buckled in, especially in this older RV, but the chance of an accident has just multiplied. Hank’s up and belted in immediately. He’ll make a good patroller one day, although I pray we have no need for patrols. Small isn’t an issue—as long as he’s strong and fast and as quick-witted as he is now.
“Where do we turn?” Zeke’s voice breaks through the silence. James flips pages and curses without answering.
“We need that west road,” Zeke’s voice comes again.
“There is no fucking west road!” James yells. “We passed it at the lake. There’s another up ahead.”
I relay his response into the radio sans cursing and brace myself for a collision. Just when I think we’re out of the woods and regular breathing has resumed, the RV slows.
“Jesus,” Peter breathes. “James, you’re sure there’s not another road?”
James peers out the windshield. “That is the other road.”
I stand and snap up the binoculars. The crossroads ahead is filled with Lexers that feed from the west onto the Alaska Highway. They’re hundreds of feet deep and who knows how many more are waiting to make the turn. Of course they’d follow the roads up here; it’s the path of least resistance.
Zeke reverses the pickup and hangs out the window. “Can you see how far they go? Can we get through?” I pass him the binoculars. He raises them briefly and lets them fall to his lap. “God-fucking-damn it.”
“There were houses down that incline toward the lake,” Mark says. “Let’s head there before they spot us.”
We reverse slowly to avoid drawing their attention and follow the pickup to a string of lakefront homes tucked in the trees. A three-story house with a lakeside deck and two balconies looks promising if we have to stay for the night, as it’s built into a hill and surrounded by a chain-link fence. Mark closes the gate after we’re through and Nelly busts a window to open the door. We file in silently, quickly, and I sense everyone feels the dread that’s overtaken the lingering trauma from the other night. Everyone except Sparky, that is, who naps on a windowsill in the RV.
Penny bolts the door and sinks to the white couch. The whole interior is white with turquoise accents, as if the owners had wished they lived by the sea. Hank stands at the sliding door to the balcony and watches the floating bodies that dot the lake. “I know they can’t swim, but can they still get to us?”
“We’ll see them if they do,” Mark says. The house isn’t fenced at the waterline, so we’ll have to watch in case they’re not too bloated to come ashore.
“Are those islands?” Bits asks. I follow her finger to the dark, distant masses of Lexers in the water. She realizes her mistake and shudders before I say a word.
Jamie and I distract the kids with a tour of the house while James and Mark study the maps for an escape route. We end up in a walk-out basement rec room. Bits and Hank don’t ask to play ping pong when they see the table, but Nicki practically begs.
“It’s too loud,” Jamie says. “We’re playing a fun game right now. It’s called Who Can Be the Quietest?”
“That’s the game you play when you can’t play anything,” Nicki says, lip jutted and on the verge of a tantrum. I can’t blame her as she’s four, broke her arm and almost lost her dad in the past two days. I’d have a tantrum too if I could get away with it.
“I’m going to win,” Bits says, sounding smug. “I’m really, really good at that game.”
“No, you’re not!” Nicki says, ping pong forgotten. The nice thing about four year-olds is that they’re easily distracted. “Listen to how quiet I can do this!”
She tiptoes up the stairs, and I wink at Bits and Hank when they follow. Jamie leans on the banister with her eyes on the lake. “I’ll be okay,” she says when I touch her hand. “Last year was worse. It’s just that he was all I had left.”
I think of how devastated I was after Adrian died—how I still have to work at not dwelling on how different things would be if he were here—which makes me wonder how last year was worse for her. I’m about to ask, but Nelly’s voice comes down the stairs. “Y’all had better come up here.”
We crowd around the table while James shows us the lake on the map. “Here’s where we are.” He points to spots at the north and south ends of the water. “Here are the pods.”
There’s not a single road west. To our east is lake. We’re well and truly trapped. The only thing to be thankful for is that we didn’t hit them at night. We would have been eaten, not trapped, had we not seen them in time.
“If we were on the east side of the lake we could drive around.” He traces a line that heads north and circles to the Alaska Highway. “We’d hit the Alcan forty miles north of here.”
“What about crossing the lake in boats and finding some cars?” Kyle asks with eyes closed due to his pounding headache. His only concession to Jamie’s badgering was that he agreed to sit in an overstuffed chair instead of lying in a bed like she ordered. He might be worse than Nelly.
“If we’re going to do it, we have to move now,” Mark says. “We have, at best, thirty-five hours to meet up with the highway before the monsters get there, if they haven’t already.”
“Are there any other roads in case we’re cut off again?” Peter asks.
“There’s one,” James says, and flips to a new page that’s almost unmarked by roads except for a few lonely lines. “This would put us 150 miles farther north on the highway, but even if we beat them, we’d be out of gas long before Whitehorse.”
“How long is that route?” Zeke asks.
“A thousand miles,” Mark says. There’s a collective moan—that’s all the gas we have. “We could head north to Yellowknife, but no one’s heard from them since last year.”
James blows out a breath. “So, our choices are either we cross the lake and find something that’ll take us to Whitehorse or stay here for the winter.”
38
There’s a third choice, too—the death wish choice of trying to drive our way through a pod of Lexers. We’ve all seen how that goes, so we settle on hunting down boats. Zeke, Peter, Nelly and I walk down to the lake’s edge and find a rowboat under a tarp. It’s an easy climb to the next yard and the next, where we find a canoe.
“See that boathouse?” Zeke asks, pointing to where the shore bends out. A sprawling house is set back on an overgrown lawn with a tiny version of itself suspended over the water at the shore. “People store their boats full of gas and disconnect the battery for the winter. We could do with a motorboat, noise be damned—I don’t see how we’ll get our gear across without one. Those fuel tanks are heavy.”
At the fourth house, we find another rowboat and an electric motor in the shed. It works for thirty seconds before it dies. “We’ll use the battery in the RV,” Zeke says. “How ‘bout a ride to the house down the way?”
With four of us, three of them good-sized men, the boat sits low in the water. “You want to row, sugar?” Zeke pulls at the oars and winks.
“Biggest one rows. That’s the rule. I’m not dragging you giant people around.”
“That’s not a rule,” Nelly says.
“Well, it should be,” I say. “So it is. Therefore, I’m going in a boat with one of the three of you every time.”
It’s quiet on the lake. I sit in the stern with Peter and watch Zeke pull the oars through the water like he was born rowing. He’s got a bit of a belly from all the good eating at Whitefield once the summer crops were in, but underneath is all muscle.
“You’re good at this,” I say. “I
’m in your boat.”
Zeke chuckles. “Spent a lot of time out on lakes as a kid. There wasn’t much quiet in my head, except when I was on the water. It’s peaceful.”
“It is.” I watch the Lexer islands bob a half mile away. “Or it could be.”
The two Lexers we pass are bloated, but not as bloated as I think they should be according to the absolute nothing I know about the subject. One does the dead man’s float and the other lifts an arm as we go past. It spins face first into the water, where it flounders for a moment before going still.
“Well, they can’t swim worth a damn,” Zeke says. “If we can get between those islands we’ll be good.”
A few minutes later, Nelly ties the frayed rope to the dock at the boathouse. The structure is silent but for the sound of water lapping at its posts and has a door that’s quietly jimmied open by Zeke. “Another thing I was good at,” he says.
“You’re a mysterious man, Zeke,” I say. “Dentist, boater, felon. One day you’ll have to tell me your story.”
“One day I will.” Inside, Zeke pulls the cover off a glossy white motorboat that’s suspended in midair by a pulley system. “Let’s get her down.”
Peter examines the control box. “I don’t see a hand crank.”
Zeke sighs. “Christ on a crutch, is nothing ever simple?”
Cutting through the steel cables that suspend the boat isn’t an option—the boat won’t fall evenly and the crash would destroy it. I move to the edge of the floor that runs the perimeter of the room and back away when a white, almost featureless, face rises from the water. There are many horror movie moments these days, but this thing, with its wide, dark mouth and white expanse of swollen flesh, might be the creepiest thing I’ve ever seen.
Nelly kneels across from me and looks up with a grimace. “That thing must die,” he says. We can’t reach it, though, and we watch it wade under the boat in fascination. “It can’t see us with no eyes. And the lack of a nose isn’t helping any. My hypothesis is that it hears us.” He knocks on the wood floor and the thing turns. “Yup, hears us.”
“I think I found something,” Peter says. We look up from Nelly’s science project. “I need an allen wrench.”
He pulls out toolbox drawers until he finds a few, then fits one into the back of the motor and cranks. “Keep going,” Zeke says. “It’s working.”
Every turn brings the boat down a centimeter. An electric drill would speed things along, but that’d be asking for the moon. Peter spins until the boat is halfway down and then shakes out his hand when Nelly takes over.
“Look at you, figuring it out,” I say to Peter.
“Is that so surprising?”
“I guess all your yachting experience paid off. Aren’t those what you richies use for your regattas?”
Zeke chuckles and Peter lifts a boot to kick me in the rear. I hop away and teeter on the edge of the boathouse floor. Thankfully, the boat’s now low enough to catch myself before I visit our horror movie friend underneath.
Peter points a finger. “That’s what you get for ridiculing my enormous wealth.”
“I almost died right here and you make jokes. Nice, Petey.”
“You’re rubbing off on me.”
“It’s about freaking time,” I say.
We may be standing in a boathouse on a lake full of zombies, clock counting down the hours until we’re stuck for the winter, but I can’t stop smiling. It occurs to me that I do know why I don’t give up: Bits and Hank and Peter and everyone else. I don’t want to leave them, even if it is hard and discouraging. I want to see the kind of life we build when we make it to the end of this mess. The lines on Peter’s face smooth away when he beams back. I have an urge to throw myself at him for a hug but restrain myself with a punch to his arm.
“What’s that for?” he asks.
“It’s a love punch.”
He chucks me under the chin. “Right back atcha.”
I stifle my laugh, but only because we have to be quiet. I’m happy and I’m not going to talk myself out of it. No more saving things for later.
We startle at the sound of Nelly clearing his throat. “Grab those batteries, y’all. We’re down.”
The boat starts without a hitch—something is actually simple, for once. Nelly stabs the bloated Lexer as we pull out of the boathouse towing the rowboat. A few Lexers wade into the water and the floaters wave as we pass, but the trip is short enough that it doesn’t gather a pod.
At the house, Hank’s amassed himself a real estate empire in the game of Monopoly the kids play with James and Penny. When I say I’m impressed, he says, “I have a system. But I can’t tell you what it is.”
“My favorite’s Baltic Avenue,” I say.
He tucks his money under the edge of the board. “Baltic’s a waste of time. I’ll teach you one day. But only you.”
“I’m honored.”
“So, I’ll go across to look for vehicles,” Zeke says. “Let’s say three of us?”
“I’ll join you,” Mark says. “I can get an arrow into anything on shore before we reach it.”
Nelly agrees to be third and leaves to tell Adam. I wander over to where Mark fits his arrows into his quiver.
“Thanks for teaching me to use a bow,” I say. “You saved my life the other night.”
“I might have given you the skills, but that, my dear, was all you. I had my bow up once we were close enough, but you beat me to it.” His eyes twinkle like the elf he resembles. “Were you aiming for somewhere else or did you hit your target?”
I laugh, and somewhere I think I should feel bad we’re joking about killing another human, but I don’t. “Bull’s-eye.”
“Excellent.”
Margaret and James empty the hot water heater while the rest of us pack the essentials we’ll take across the lake. I sit in the RV’s bedroom with my two bags that must be winnowed down to one and realize I haven’t seen Adrian’s phone since checking the time when Boss showed up. I can’t remember if I left it on the table or returned it to my coat pocket—the coat that’s drenched with blood in the back of a pickup.
I paw through my stuff. There are plenty of phones in the world that could be charged, but only one has pictures of everyone who’s gone. Adrian’s in there, Ana, John and Dan, too. But that’s not all—I have pictures of Henry for Hank, of all the other people at Kingdom Come, the farmhouse, the garden in full bloom, the lake in Quebec. It’s every song I’ve ever loved, ever listened to with Adrian. It’s a piece of everything and everybody.
I dump out my bags, hoping that someone stuck it in without telling me. The box Dan carved hits the rumpled blankets and the unicorn inside rattles. I put the tiny figurine in my pocket. Dan had started on a unicorn family for Bits’s birthday that she’ll never get. I’ll give her mine. I can stand losing the box if I have to, but not the unicorn. I stare at the pile as if the phone will appear out of thin air and can’t even cry when it doesn’t. It’s the dog shit icing on the fucked up cake of this week.
Peter grabs his pack and sits on the bed across from me. “My God, that’s a mess.”
“My phone is gone.” I separate my stuff into two piles and finally remember how I slipped it into my coat pocket.
“I have it. It’s broken, but we can fix it.” He pulls it from a compartment of his bag. The front has been taped so that the gazillion pieces of cracked screen stay where they should. I turn it on and can just barely make out the icons.
“James is almost positive everything is still in there,” Peter says. “He can switch out the screens when we find a new one. I wanted to do it before you noticed.” He shrugs. “I cleaned it as well as I could.”
Blood has settled into a few of the cracks beneath the tape, but the rest is spotless. I think about Peter going through the mess of the truck to find this for me. Scrubbing off the blood until almost no trace remained, even in the cracks. It must have taken forever. The whole time I thought he was mad at me he was doing this. He might ha
ve been an idiot, but he was a thoughtful idiot.
“Don’t cry,” Peter says when I sniffle. He pats my knee awkwardly. “I know how much it means to you. We’ll fix it.”
“It’s not that. I’m crying because you cleaned it.”
“I’m sorry. I had to—”
I burst out laughing. Peter looks around for someone to save him from the crazy laughing-crying person on the bed, and my laughter wins out. “Really? I’m such a slob that I’d be mad you cleaned blood off my phone?”
A corner of his mouth rises. “You never know.”
“Thank you. I was trying to say thank you.”
“That would have been much clearer. I thought you weren’t going to cry until we got there.”
“You were right, it was a stupid plan. I don’t want to deny myself things and then kick myself when it’s too late. Not that crying is so spectacular, but I don’t want to miss out on anything, you know?”
“I do.”
I grab him by the shoulders and draw him close enough that our noses almost touch. “So let’s not save anything! Let’s eat all the food. You and me, right now.”
“I should’ve known it was an excuse to eat.” I let him go with a cackle. He goes back to his bag, removes the mini espresso maker and throws it to the side.
“You brought it?” I ask.
“It was so small, and I didn’t think I’d find another any time soon. Dumb, huh?”
“Not at all. You should keep it.”
I want him to have something that’s impractical, that makes him happy, but he shakes his head. “There’s no decent coffee. Or milk. What’s the point?”
“Because there might be? Because you like it? Because I really want a latte?”
He smiles but leaves it on the bed. I can tell it’s a lost cause. I zip the phone in my bag, and when he’s not looking I take the leather pants, baby dress and earrings from Ana’s bag. I leave her big bottle of fancy conditioner, although she would’ve deemed it necessary, give her bag a goodbye pat and pack the stuff with Dan’s box and the phone. My small pack holds useful things—ammo, poncho, dental care supplies, et cetera—but it’s quite possibly the least useful assortment of survival items ever. But that’s only if you’re thinking about food, water and zombies instead of people.
Until the End of the World Box Set Page 96
