“Everybody, just settle down,” Parker said. He didn’t want to hear any more. He had to sleep. Now. He would have slept for twelve hours if Hughes wasn’t about to discover something as dangerous as a live grenade cooking off in the truck.
11
The cold sky faded to a dark purple. A light wind shook the evergreen branches overhead and whistled faintly in the Suburban’s intake vents. The air in the truck, warmed from three living bodies, felt almost humid.
Hughes racked back the driver’s seat and stretched out his legs. His two companions were conked for the night, with Parker snoring gently in the passenger seat and Annie curled into a ball behind him in back. She could have stretched herself out lengthwise, but grief and guilt seemed to stop her.
Hughes would miss Kyle, not just for his companionship but for his navigational role. Not that Kyle was uniquely brilliant at it. Parker and Annie could read a map just as well, and Hughes was simply following Roy in the RV anyway. Even so, consulting the map had been Kyle’s job, and the fact that somebody else would now have to do it left another Kyle-sized hole in the world.
Roy would face the same problem since he did all the driving. Not once had Hughes seen Lucas behind the wheel, which meant Lucas must have done most or all of the navigating. And navigating in this part of the country was a vastly more complicated affair than what Kyle had done out West where there were far fewer roads, almost all of them empty, and no known obstacles.
Obviously, Lucas used maps. Hughes wondered if Lucas also took notes. Lucas and Roy must have turned down one hazardous path after another, far too many to keep track of in their heads.
Rather than taking notes, Lucas might have annotated his maps. That’s probably what Kyle would have done. He was a map guy. He seemed to enjoy poring over them, at times in a state of almost wonder.
If Hughes were in charge of essentially remapping an entire quarter of American territory, he’d be wary of now-outdated maps. Ideally, he’d create his own, though that, of course, wouldn’t be possible. He wasn’t a geographer. And the locations of cities, roads, and rivers weren’t suddenly up in the air. So he would take notes.
He’d almost have to. Indicating most problems with red Xs on maps wouldn’t cut it. He could cross out a blown bridge, sure, but he would not want to note the locations of militias, bandits, or hordes that way. They moved around. Didn’t stay in one place unless something was pinning them there.
Lucas, therefore, probably had some kind of a notebook. If he did, it would be in the RV, in the glove box perhaps, or on the floor beneath the passenger seat. Hughes wanted it. He wouldn’t need Roy anymore if he could make enough sense of it. He could ditch Roy pretty much anywhere. Wouldn’t be difficult.
Hughes couldn’t creep the RV without being seen, but he had Lucas’s cell phone right there in the Suburban’s glove box. Lucas had used that thing all the time. He had a portable solar charger just like Kyle did. Kyle hadn’t used his since they left Wyoming, but Lucas had whipped his out at the diner in Iowa to take photographs. Maybe he’d used his phone to take notes. Why not? Before the world broke, Hughes used his phone all the time to make shopping and to-do lists because he had it in his pocket wherever he went.
He reached over, popped open the glove box, and took Lucas’s phone out. He traced his finger gently over the cracked screen, feeling the fractures across its surface, and pressed the home button.
Nothing happened. He remembered that he’d turned the phone off after retrieving it to conserve the battery. So he pressed and held the on button until the device stirred to life.
The phone was a make and model he wasn’t familiar with, which was fine. What wasn’t fine was that the phone only had six percent of its battery left. He could fish Kyle’s solar charging kit out of the piles of supplies in the back of the truck, but it wouldn’t even start working until the morning, and the damn thing seemed to take forever to add even a bit of juice to a phone. He’d have to hurry if he wanted to find what he was looking for.
He scrutinized the icons on the screen and located a note-taking app. He opened it and found nothing inside, as if Lucas had never once taken a note about anything, at least not with that app.
So Hughes opened the map app. Nothing doing. Lucas’s phone wanted an Internet connection and wouldn’t display anything without one.
Nothing interesting in the email app either. Lucas hadn’t received a single new message since early November the previous year.
Lucas had liked to take pictures, though. Hughes knew that much about the man and his phone. So, he opened the camera roll.
The first photo disturbed him. Lucas had taken a shot, in low light, of the Suburban parked in the Mark Twain National Forest back in Missouri. Hughes saw the dark outlines of two sleeping figures in the front seat of the truck, himself and Parker. What on earth had Lucas been thinking when he snapped that?
The battery charge was down to four percent now.
Hughes swiped the phone’s screen with his finger and scrolled backwards through Lucas’s camera roll.
He knew the next picture already. It was the one Lucas had taken in the Iowa diner. A terrible shot. Annie was front and center, her face a blur as she actively turned away from the camera. Parker was sitting in his chair and looking up at the ceiling. Hughes saw himself with his arms crossed and glowering off to the side. He remembered that moment, remembered deliberately sabotaging the photo because the whole thing weirded him out. Only Kyle was looking at the camera, though he wasn’t smiling.
Hughes felt an ache in his throat. This awkward photograph, on Lucas’s cracked phone, was the only picture of Kyle that Hughes would ever see. And there were no possibilities to take another now that Kyle was gone.
Perhaps not, though, now that he thought about it. Kyle probably had a few selfies on his own phone, and Hughes could recharge it. Annie would want those pictures. Hughes made a mental note to himself to make that happen when he had the chance.
Lucas’s battery had only two percent left now. Hughes had to stop fucking around if he wanted to find anything useful. He scrolled backward through the camera roll and nearly vomited when he saw the next picture.
Hughes had experienced more horror and violence during the past couple of months than even most combat veterans. His entire home city of Seattle had been wiped from the earth, its people by the infection, its buildings and houses by fire. Not since World War II had soldiers anywhere in the world experienced more mass carnage and mayhem than he and his friends had. He’d become inured to it all as much as a human being could. The emotional switch in his mind wasn’t off, exactly, but he no longer had the same capacity to be shocked and appalled.
He discovered, though, when he saw the contents of Lucas’s camera role, that he could still be shocked and appalled. He’d been seeing everything wrong. This brutality, this hell, inflicted on the world by the hordes of infected wasn’t at all like a massacre in a war, not even a nuclear war. It had more in common with mass casualties from an earthquake, a volcanic eruption, or an asteroid strike. The infected weren’t evil. They had no agency and no culpability. They were a force of nature, not human wickedness.
Lucas’s cell phone, on the other hand, was a chronicle of human psychopathy.
The first photo—a selfie of sorts—showed a grinning Lucas in the foreground crouching over the body of a young woman bound hand and foot, her throat slit from ear to ear, with a rat shoved headfirst into her mouth, the rodent’s feet and tail protruding from her grimacing lips. Roy stood in the background with blood dripping from his sword. Lucas and Roy wore all-black contact lenses that made them look like demons visiting from another dimension to torment the living.
Next up in the camera roll wasn’t a selfie. It wasn’t even a photograph.
It was a video.
Bilious dread bloomed in Hughes’s chest as he pressed the play button. He saw the dead woman still alive, tied on the floor and cowering as Roy loomed over her. Lucas was there, too, with a s
quirming rat in his hand. Hughes heard it squealing as its legs thrashed between Lucas’s fingers. He fiddled with the phone and found the down button on the volume controls but not before the woman on the video screamed.
Annie stirred in the back. Parker sat bolt upright in the passenger seat. Hughes killed the video.
Parker swung his head from side to side, trying to figure out if they were under attack.
“What’s going on?” Annie said. “Are you watching a video?” Bewilderment in her voice.
Hughes powered the phone down. Just before the screen went dark, he saw that only one percent of the battery charge remained.
“Whose phone is that?” Parker said.
Hughes just sat there, nauseated and shaking. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and willed his guts not to heave. No use. He opened the door and vomited onto the dirt. It was a full body experience. Every muscle from his toes to the top of his head contracted to expel the contents of his stomach. He took a breath and felt dizzy and disgusting and only partly relieved. His stomach wasn’t finished with him yet, and he vomited up whatever was left. A wave of blackness washed through him.
“What on earth did you just watch?” Parker said. “Is that Lucas’s phone?”
Hughes couldn’t speak. He just nodded and struggled to hold himself up.
“Let me see that,” Annie said. Fear in her voice this time.
Hughes shook his head, sat back upright, and placed the phone in his pants pocket. Then he stepped out of the truck, careful to avoid the puddle at his feet, and stumbled in the dark toward the trees, away from the Suburban and away from the RV and Roy. He heard, but did not see, Parker and Annie exit the truck and follow him. One of them brought a flashlight, and its beam created jagged fragments of light and shadows ahead in the trees.
“Hey,” Annie said.
Hughes staggered away, his stomach calmed but his mind still reeling. He knew what he’d find if he continued scrolling through Lucas’s camera roll. He’d find a picture of that woman alive and well, posing with the men who knew they were going to kill her.
“Hughes!” Annie said.
“Hey, man,” Parker said.
Hughes turned around. It was Parker who carried the flashlight. He aimed it low at Hughes’s feet.
Lucas had a picture of Annie on that phone.
“What’s going on?” Annie said. “You need to tell us.”
“Lucas did something,” Parker said. “Didn’t he.”
Hughes nodded. He couldn’t speak.
“Lucas and Roy?” Parker said.
Hughes nodded again.
“What?” Annie said. “What did they do? They took a video of it on their phone?”
Poor Annie. She thought the two men wanted to rape her.
“We need to know,” Annie said again. “And you need to tell us.”
“Let us see, man,” Parker said.
Hughes shook his head and forced himself to speak even though he wasn’t getting enough air. “You don’t want to see. The battery is dead anyway.”
“Give it to me,” Parker said.
Hughes couldn’t keep this from them. They had to know, but he had to process it first. He couldn’t even say the words in his head without processing it first. He also wanted at least a minute to figure out what the fuck they were supposed to do now.
Roy could never come back from this. He and Lucas were worse than the infected. Much, much worse. The infected’s minds were wiped, but they were redeemable. The proof was right there in front of him. Both Annie and Parker had been infected, yet there they were. Alive and healthy. Morally intact.
“Hughes!” Parker said. “You need to talk to us.”
Hughes saw Roy’s half-baked philosophy about the universe committing suicide differently now. It was a justification, a license, since everyone’s lives were forfeit anyway and everyone secretly yearned to die anyway.
Yet Lucas and Roy wanted immunity. They’d apparently rather have that than an additional handful of victims. God, Hughes thought. That’s what the two of them had been talking about outside the diner when they’d heard Annie was immune. They’d been out there in the parking lot scrambling their plans, shelving their plot to brutally dispatch four strangers.
“They raped somebody,” Annie said. “Didn’t they.”
Hughes had to tell her. He did not want to tell her.
He shook his head.
“Killed somebody?” Parker said.
Hughes loudly exhaled. His way of saying yes without saying yes.
“You need to tell us what’s going on,” Annie said.
The RV door banged open.
“Shh,” Hughes said.
Roy was coming out. “Everything okay out here?”
“No!” Annie shouted.
“We’re fine,” Hughes said, surprised at how normal he managed to sound.
“Anything I can do?” Roy said.
“Go back to bed,” Hughes said.
Annie narrowed her eyes at Hughes.
“Just hang on,” Hughes said, his stomach twisting into a knot again. He needed to get Annie away from Roy. “Let’s take a walk.”
“A walk?” Annie said. “In the woods at night? Are you kidding?”
They weren’t armed. They’d need to be, though, if they were going anywhere.
“Hang on,” he said. “Wait here a sec.”
He walked back to the Suburban, the sour taste of bile in his mouth, and retrieved Parker’s hammer. He wanted the shotgun, but they were out of ammunition. Restocking would be the first order of business tomorrow. Shouldn’t be hard. They were in Kentucky, after all, where guns and ammo were widely available.
Hughes returned with the hammer and another flashlight in hand.
“Let’s go,” Hughes said.
“Just one hammer?” Parker said. “Man—”
“Just walk with me,” Hughes said. He didn’t want either Parker or Annie to be armed when he told them what he had to tell them. “We’re not going far.”
“Why are we going anywhere?” Annie said.
“To get away from Roy,” Hughes said.
Annie stared hard at him for a moment. “Fine.”
Hughes took them into the trees, far enough away that Roy wouldn’t be able to hear anything anyone said.
“Spit it out,” Annie said. “Or show us.”
The phone still had a one percent battery charge. Hughes could show them but wouldn’t. They had a right to see it, no question, but he didn’t want them getting emotional yet. They had to keep their heads until they figured out what to do.
“Roy and Lucas murdered a woman,” Hughes said. He expected some kind of reaction—a gasp from Annie or a curse from Parker—but nothing came. They’d already figured it out. What else would Hughes be making such a big deal out of?
“They photographed her body,” Parker said.
“They did,” Hughes said and nodded. “And they videotaped themselves doing it.”
“Jesus Christ,” Annie said.
“Looked like they’d done it before,” Hughes said. “And in case there’s any doubt, no, they weren’t executing her for committing some kind of crime. They shoved a live rat in her mouth before slitting her throat.”
A long silence followed as Annie and Parker processed what they’d just heard.
“So, they’re serial killers,” Parker finally said.
“Seems so,” Hughes said.
12
Annie could no longer stand. She first tottered on her feet and then eased herself onto the ground. Her insides went cold, and her head swam with dizziness.
Roy and Lucas were serial killers? She shook her head. No. That could not be. She’d gotten a creep vibe off them from the very beginning, but serial killers?
“The fuck do we do?” Parker said.
“I don’t know yet,” Hughes said.
No way could they continue to Atlanta with Roy, Annie thought. She stood up, unsteady on her feet. “We have to go back
there.”
“And do what?” Hughes said.
“What do you think?” Annie said. She turned her head toward camp and saw nothing but blackness beyond the edge of the flashlight beam. She didn’t have a light of her own.
“We need him,” Hughes said.
“We don’t need him that bad,” Parker said.
“We don’t need him at all,” Annie said.
“He knows the way,” Hughes said.
“He got Kyle killed!” Annie said.
“We might not have gotten this far without him,” Hughes said.
“Bullshit,” Annie said.
“Roy found his way on these roads,” Parker said. “We can too.”
“You want to chance it?”
“Damn straight,” Parker said.
Thank God, Annie thought. She wasn’t alone. “Me too.”
Hughes huffed.
Annie couldn’t believe it. What the hell was wrong with Hughes? They could just get into the Suburban and go. They had maps. They didn’t need Roy. On the contrary. The world needed Roy gone.
“He’s not going to kill us,” Hughes said.
Annie blew out her breath.
“We’re already halfway to Atlanta from Iowa,” Hughes said. “If he and Lucas wanted to kill us, they would have done it back there. And now that it’s three against one, Roy is even less likely to try anything. Especially if he wants to get vaccinated.”
Annie shook her head. Hughes failed to see what was right in front of his nose. “He doesn’t believe we’re really immune,” Annie said. “That’s why he let Lucas get bit. And that’s why Kyle is dead.”
There. She actually said it. Kyle is dead. Another guardrail down.
“No,” Hughes said. “You’re wrong. He’s a serial killer, right? And he found himself a buddy. He’s not getting another one of those, and it’s way too dangerous to be wandering around out here by himself. He wouldn’t have let Lucas get bit if he actually thought Lucas would die. What is it that folks used to say? Trust but verify? Roy trusted us when he told us to follow him. Letting Lucas get bit was verification.”
The Last City Page 13
