“You said you turn everyone away on this road. How many people have come from the other direction? From Idaho?”
“Nobody comes from the direction of Idaho,” Ed said.
2
As they took the old highway around the dot on the map called Rome, Annie wondered why on earth no one had come from the direction of Idaho. She doubted everything was fine in the direction of Idaho.
Hughes drove the Suburban past fallow fields that must have been irrigated in summer, across a small metal bridge over a sad little river, and back onto the main highway not ten minutes later. The scrubby wasteland resumed. The road ahead was empty and clear.
“Stop the car,” Parker said.
Annie noticed that both of his hands shook uncontrollably. He was going to crack.
“What now?” Kyle said.
“Stop the car, I need to get out!” Parker shouted.
Hughes stopped the truck. He didn’t bother pulling onto the shoulder. Nobody would hit them. There was no other traffic.
Parker flung open his door and ran into the desert.
“Jesus Christ,” Kyle said. “I told you we should have left him back on that island.”
Annie let herself out.
“Just let him be,” Hughes said.
“Seriously, guys, we should just leave him,” Kyle said.
Annie ran after Parker, dodging sage brush and the occasional rock. “Parker!” she shouted.
He stopped next to a boulder a few hundred feet up ahead and placed his hands on his knees while he panted.
Annie slowed to a jog until she reached him. “You okay?”
He was still panting, though not from running. He was hyperventilating. His hands were still shaking. His eyes darted in every direction as though someone were shooting at him and he needed to figure out which direction the fire was coming from.
“Talk to me,” Annie said.
He sat on the boulder, put his head in his hands, rocked forward and backward and moaned.
“Parker, what’s going on?” she said.
He looked at her and opened his mouth as if he wanted to say something, but couldn’t.
Good grief, she thought. He’s having a panic attack.
“What are you thinking right now?” she said.
He stood up and spun around as if something had startled him from behind. He was in full fight-or-flight mode, but he had nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. Nor did he have anything to hide from except whatever was going on in his head.
“You’re having a panic attack,” Annie said. She’d never had one herself, but her sister Jenny used to have them in college. Annie spotted the symptoms the way other people spotted skyscrapers.
At least his panic didn’t put him in fight mode, she thought.
“Sit down,” she said, “and breathe slowly.”
He sat on the rock, still hyperventilating and unable to speak.
“You’re not in danger,” she said. “If you slow down your breathing, it will slow down your mind.”
He slowed down his breathing, but his hands still shook.
“Can you talk?” she said.
He shook his head. Then he gasped, nodded, and said, “I think so.” He was coming out of it now.
“What’s going on?” she said.
“I’m a monster,” he said.
“You aren’t a monster,” she said.
“I can’t get these thoughts out of my head!” he said. He put his elbows on his knees and held his head in his hands.
“What thoughts?” she said. She knew, though, exactly which thoughts he was talking about.
“Oh God,” he said.
Thoughts of biting people. Killing people. Flashing images of ripping out throats. But they were just thoughts. Mental images. Leftover fragments of the infection, soft-wired into her head and his. They weren’t impulses. They were memories of impulses. Parker didn’t want to bite people or kill them any more than she did. Otherwise, he’d do it instead of freak out about it.
“You’re not going to hurt anybody,” she said.
She wondered why he was having such a hard time dismissing the harmless images in his mind, but he reminded her as if on cue.
“I tried to kill Kyle,” he said.
She flinched. He had bigger problems than she did. Much bigger problems. In addition to PTSD, or whatever it was, he had real trouble with aggression and anger—a dangerous combination.
“I’m going out of my mind,” he said.
“You’re having an anxiety attack,” she said. “You don’t want to kill anybody and you’re not going crazy. Just breathe slowly.”
He took a deep breath and exhaled it slowly.
She gave him a couple of moments and he seemed to settle down a bit more.
“Better?” she said.
He nodded cautiously. “A little, I guess,” he said.
Annie knew it would take a while before his body and mind fully calmed down. A few more minutes at least and possibly hours.
“My sister used to have panic attacks,” she said.
“Is that was this is?” he said.
“I’m pretty sure,” she said. “You’ve never had one before?”
He shook his head.
“Perfectly understandable,” she said, “after what you’ve been through.”
“I can’t get these thoughts out of my head,” he said.
“I have them too,” she said. “But they’re just thoughts. Ignore them and they’ll fade.”
“You turned me into a monster.”
“And you recovered.”
“This is recovery?”
“This is anxiety,” she said. “Look at me. Listen.”
He looked at her and seemed to be a little afraid of her.
“You know what kind of people don’t feel anxiety?” she said.
He shook his head, terrified.
“Psychopaths,” she said.
Kyle sat in the back seat and huffed as Annie and Parker walked out of the desert and back toward the vehicle. Too bad the bastard hadn’t kept running, he thought. Then they could have left him.
Annie gestured with her hands as she spoke to Parker, but Kyle couldn’t hear what she said through the rolled-up window and the sound of the idling engine.
Parker nodded as Annie spoke. She placed her hand on his shoulder and he closed his eyes, seeming to melt.
That motherfucker. Annie hadn’t touched Kyle once since the incident on the island, but she was supposed to be his.
Nobody spoke as they drove across the state line into Idaho just south of Boise, and Hughes heaved a sigh of relief. Another state cleared, first Washington and then Oregon. Getting to and crossing the Cascade Mountains had been a bitch and a half, but everything since then could not have been easier.
Aside from the men outside the small town of Rome, they hadn’t seen anyone, infected or not. Hughes doubted many infected could still be alive anyway, at least not in this part of the country. Not in December. Daytime temperatures were warming above 30 degrees Fahrenheit, but at night they dropped into the teens.
The landscape looked like a wrinkled, dun-colored sheet emptied of everything but the defunct relics of a dead civilization. Telephone poles and wires for landlines that no longer worked. Electrical pylons no longer pulsing with power. The occasional house out in the desert, dark and silent and seemingly empty. Gas stations with broken windows. Looted convenience stores.
No apparent survivors.
There had to be some, though. Most of the inland American West was so sparsely populated that the virus could not have spread everywhere. That dot on the map back in Oregon could not be the exception. Hughes needed to make damn sure they avoided as many big dots as possible. Survivors were almost as dangerous these days as the infected, and he had to get Annie safely to the CDC in Atlanta.
They weren’t going to save the world. The world was already gone. But they might be able to save a tiny scrap of what’s left of it.
The
plague had started in Russia, and Seattle was North America’s viral insertion point, its ground zero. Atlanta was on the opposite end of the continent. No city was farther away except Miami. Maybe—maybe—cities in the eastern part of the country held on a little bit better since they knew what was coming before it could get there. The virus must have taken weeks, if not months, to spread from Seattle to the east coast after air traffic was grounded. There might have been enough time for the government to build a ring of steel around the CDC complex. For all Hughes knew, the virus hadn’t yet reached the east coast, but there was no real chance of that. Not after spreading to Seattle from Moscow.
“Parker,” Hughes said. “How far are we from the turnoff to Mountain Home?”
Parker shuffled the map and scrutinized it.
Hughes wanted Parker to be navigating, not because Parker was better at it than anyone else, but because the man needed to think about anything than whatever was driving him crazy.
“Should be just a couple miles ahead,” Parker said. “Maybe five minutes. We’ll turn right and go straight for a mile or so, then make a right onto 78.”
They had to skirt Boise. Hughes had never been to Boise and wasn’t sure how large it was. He knew, though, that it was large enough to be in horrendous condition regardless.
From Mountain Home they could take Route 20 almost all the way to Wyoming without passing through a single town inhabited by more than a few hundred people.
Hughes loved their ride—a dark blue 2015 Suburban. Impeccable condition aside from the blood-stained dent in the fender. 355 horsepower and 383 pounds of torque. 130-inch wheelbase. Rearview camera and parking sensors. Room for seven passengers, which left plenty in back for their gear. And they had plenty of that. Food. Water bottles and hand-pumped filters so fine they could suck water out of a drainage ditch if they had to. Winter clothes. Sleeping bags. Blankets. Four-season tents. Enough of an arsenal to take out hundreds of infected. Night vision monocles, maps, two compasses, four flashlights, crowbars and hammers for hand-to-hand combat, first-aid supplies including anti-biotics and pain-killers, and a rubber hose to siphon gas from parked cars.
Annie napped in the back while Kyle played some kind of a game on his phone. He powered it with a small fold-out solar panel charger they’d taken from an outdoor store back in Washington.
“What are you going to do when that thing finally breaks?” Parker said.
“There are thousands of brand-new phones in unopened boxes all over America,” Kyle said. “The solar charger might not ever break down, and even if it does, I’ll find another one.”
True enough, Hughes thought, but Kyle wouldn’t be able to download any new music or games from the Internet. Kyle was stuck with the music and game collection he had.
“I thought you wanted to live simply,” Parker said. “Wasn’t that your big dream? Simple living and farming on some remote island?”
“Simple living,” Kyle said, “does not mean living without any music. People have been listening to music for thousands of years.”
At least their conversation was civilized, if a bit testy. Hughes thought the hatred between the two just might gradually dissipate. A little bit. Maybe.
They’d have plenty of time to either work things out or kill each other eventually. Plan was to get to the Missouri River in Eastern Iowa before heavy snowfall made travel impossible, then set up winter quarters and ride it out until the ice thawed. Then they could travel downriver on a boat, Huck Finn-style, to the Gulf of Mexico and approach whatever’s left of the state of Georgia by sea. Once they established winter quarters in Iowa, Parker and Kyle would either resolve their differences or tear each other apart.
In the meantime, they didn’t talk much, which suited Hughes just fine. And since Annie was asleep, Hughes felt ensconced in a bubble of silence where he could think his own thoughts for a while.
It wasn’t an entirely unpleasant experience. Parker’s mind was spinning out of control, but Hughes was becoming more ruthlessly pragmatic and logical by the day. He had to. His survival depended on it.
His wife Sheila had basically killed herself. She’d been morbidly depressed for years before the infection came, too depressed some days to even get out of bed, and she gave up entirely when those things ravaged Seattle. She let them have her. She all but invited them into the house by opening the curtains in the living room window and standing there like bait, beckoning them to come inside and put her out of her misery.
Five of them burst through the window.
They also killed their son Tyler.
Hughes couldn’t understand. Not at the time. Sheila had crawled into a howling black place and stayed there. It was as if the darkness tempted her with the promise of relief and salvation. All she had to do was keep crawling deeper and deeper, and it would finally, mercifully, lead her to oblivion.
Hughes understood now. The blackness called to him too. In his mind’s eye, he saw a dark portal. All he had to do was crawl in. The pain was out here in the world. It would only follow him into that portal so far before he could leave it behind and let the blackness envelope him like warm womb. The pain of losing his wife and his child, the pain of Seattle burning so thoroughly to the ground that he wasn’t sure he’d be able to find where his house used to be, the pain of a future so bleak that he could only comprehend it in horrifying brief flashes—he could leave all that behind and dwell forever in a place where none of it mattered.
Unlike Sheila, Hughes had the strength to resist. The dark portal was not in his face. It was off to the side. He’d have to travel a ways to get to it. On good days, the dark portal was on the other side of the horizon. He’d have to walk a long way to get there. He might even have to drive to get there.
On bad days, it was closer.
He would not go there. As long as he stayed clear of it, he wouldn’t feel anything. No happiness, but not too much pain either. Just flatness and logic and single-minded determination. Get Annie to Atlanta. Right now.
Annie woke and stirred in the back seat. “Where are we?” she said.
“Idaho,” Kyle said.
“Amazing,” she said.
“Why’s that?” Parker said.
“Just two days ago,” she said, “we hadn’t even made it to Oregon yet.”
“I have to admit,” Kyle said, “that since crossing the mountains, this has been easier than I expected.”
“Plenty more mountains ahead,” Hughes said.
“I can’t believe how empty this part of America is,” Annie said. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Home is nothing like this. Nowhere in the South is like this.”
“We could hit Wyoming as soon as tomorrow,” Kyle said. “And Nebraska a day or two after that.”
“That’s the middle of the country!” Annie said.
“Don’t get cocky, kids,” Hughes said. “We’re not there yet.”
Hughes took the Suburban onto Route 20 at the seemingly empty town of Mountain Home, Idaho, bypassing Interstate 80 entirely. Bandits and other predatory sorts could be on the freeway. They could be on any road, really, but they would more likely roam interstates than backcountry byways, and besides, Interstate 5, which ran up and down the West Coast from Seattle to San Diego, had been so clogged with abandoned cars that it was impassable. Idaho was far less populated than the urban corridor between Seattle and Portland, but still. Hughes saw no upside to taking the interstate. Route 20 crossed Idaho just as efficiently, and it did so through such a sparsely populated area they’d be practically sneaking across.
The next state over—Wyoming—was the least populous in the entire country. They could probably walk across the damn thing without running into anybody or anything.
The road pulled up from the valley floor and took them into scrub-covered mountains that looked like potatoes halved lengthwise, set down on their sides, and dusted with powdered sugar. Snow only coated the tops, and even there it did so thinly. This part of Idaho, like the Oregon desert the
y had just been through, was chalk dry. A land that receives little rain also receives little snow, even in December.
“Gonna be dark soon,” Hughes said.
“It’s only three o’clock,” Kyle said. “We still have an hour and a half before sunset.”
“It’s four o’clock,” Hughes said. “We crossed into Mountain Time and lost an hour.”
“Shit,” Kyle said.
“We’re making amazing progress,” Annie said.
“With no infected or jammed-up roads slowing us down,” Hughes said, “we’re driving as fast and as far as we would on a road trip when everything was still normal. Back then we could cross a state a day, easy.”
A gas station appeared ahead along with a couple of small, run-down houses. Hughes eased off the accelerator, though he saw no movement in any direction. No one stood in the road with rifles. No infected ran toward the Suburban. Town seemed to have no name, if it was even really a town.
“Stopping for gas,” Hughes said and pulled up next to a parked Chevy Nova on the side of the building. The pumps wouldn’t work—no electricity—so he’d have to siphon whatever gas was left in the Nova. It was a classic model from the ’70s, but beat to shit. God only knew when was the last time somebody drove it.
He turned off the engine. He and Parker stepped out, Hughes with his Mossberg pump-action Persuader and Parker with his Glock. They looked at each and scanned the area, listening for the sound of any movement, even sounds made by an animal. Hughes heard nothing. No sound at all. Not even wind.
The mountains of Idaho were much colder than the Oregon desert, and the Oregon desert had been cold enough. Hughes’ exposed skin burned. His lungs protested the air, his eyes stung and his ears hurt.
Parker was sweating as if he was in Miami in August rather than the frigid north in December. He pointed his weapon at everything—including the Nova, some bushes around back, and even the gas pumps as if they might be threatening—with his finger inside the trigger guard.
“All clear,” Hughes said. “You can relax now.”
Parker didn’t relax. If a squirrel startled him, he’d probably shoot it. The guy was set to pop if an acorn fell out of a tree.
Resurrection (Book 2): Into the Wasteland Page 2
