by Gwynn White
She chuckled a little, then slammed the cane back to the ground and started walking—slowly—away from Angie's wrecked car.
An obscure quote from one of his dad's old movies hit him as he walked away from the sad-looking car that had gotten them this far.
I'm not parking it; I'm abandoning it.
He knew they'd never be back. The car would probably rust in that spot until it blew away on the wind.
Wow. I'm a real downer.
Finally, it fell too far behind to see, and he resolved to only look to the future. At that moment, the Arch towered into view miles down the street. The safety of the port was so close, yet so far away.
After the excitement at Grandma's house, the struggle to escape Angie, getting beaten up by a criminal, and the stress of actually driving the car in the chaos, the walk toward the Arch was anticlimactic.
A small girl behind them blurted out to no one in particular, “When we get downtown, I hope they're serving hot dogs and soda, like at a baseball game!”
He was holding Grandma's arm as he walked but turned partway around to look at the child's parents. They wore tight-lipped grins as they gave her affirmation about what she would find ahead. Anything to keep the children happy. And unafraid.
Would there be any help at all downtown? After what he saw on the roads of the city, he was pretty sure of the answer to that, but still, he had hope and tried hard to listen to the conversations of his fellow travelers to see if they knew more than he did about what was ahead.
The friendly crowd of walkers continued to grow. If he didn't know where he was, he would have believed he was heading to a baseball game. He and his father didn't make a habit of it, but whenever his dad got free tickets to a game, they would go for a father-son adventure at the ballpark. The only differences between that crowd and this one were the colors—not as much Cardinal red today—and what people carried. He saw lots of coolers and bags of food, as well as firearms. Open carrying of guns was something you would never see on any typical day within the city limits of St. Louis.
He looked carefully now and saw that more than a few men and women were carrying things slung over their shoulders, covered with fabric or trash bags. Some had their rifles right out in the open, which made it even more obvious that others were hiding theirs. He didn't understand what they were trying to prove, but he wasn't going to call attention to them.
A man standing off to the side of the crowd held a cardboard sign for the walkers to see, “God did this to you. Repent!” Liam wondered what Grandma would think about such an insensitive statement, but if she saw it, she said nothing. He wasn't willing to blame God for the plague; he saw God in context with boring Sunday sermons or with high praise from family members. Never did either suggest a benevolent being could inflict something like this on the human race.
The man's sign was getting other people talking about the root cause of the catastrophe. Liam tried to overhear conversations as they walked. The first person he could hear clearly was talking about some clues he received on his shortwave radio.
“... a frequency I don't get. The guy lived in Minnesota or Wisconsin; he wasn't very forthcoming about that. He sounded like he had watched too many movies. He called the sick people zombies as if they were something real. He then said you can only kill them by destroying the head. Ha! This isn't Night of the Living Dead or whatever that movie was called. So we ignored him and went on to look for other operators. The only other one we heard with new information was farther north in Canada, and all we got out of him was that people were chewing on his livestock. He said he had no weapons to get them to stop. Nothing we could do to help him, of course.”
The guy was moving much faster than he and Grandma so that he couldn't hear much more of his conversation, but he noted the man carried a big revolver in a holster on his left side.
As more people passed, he heard several of their theories. It was now on everyone's mind, it seemed.
“I heard it was a medical experiment gone wrong.”
“A friend of a friend said she knew someone in the police department. This was a terrorist attack.” And then, speaking so quiet Liam almost didn't catch it, the person said, “It was the same guys who did nine-eleven.”
“It was our own government.” A half-dozen people had different iterations of government conspiracies.
“It was the maple-syrup-lovin' Canadians.” He heard several people talk about Canadians as if the threat was real, but he couldn't quite take them seriously. Normally he wouldn't dare insert himself, but he had to know. “Excuse me, why would the Canadians cause this plague?” The woman who spoke of it responded calmly and easily, “They want our stuff, of course.”
He determined it was best to avoid laughing. Soon the woman and her entourage had moved far ahead.
He heard a host of other theories, just in the few minutes since he'd passed that sign. “It was the Republicans. They always wanted us city people to die.” “It was the Liberals. They was foolin' around with science and unleashed this Ebola-thing on us by accident.” “It was the Snowballers.” “It was the Communists.” “It was the anarchists. They want government to go away.” And so on and so on. The crowd consumed each theory, readily adding more and more.
Several people were carrying large, hand-printed signs, with variations of the “Repent! The end is here!” motif. One said, “This is the tribulation!” He knew that had something to do with religion, but he was surprised to see the people carrying such signs appeared completely normal. Almost serene. There were no crazed-eye preachers anywhere in sight.
Holding onto Grandma, he realized they were both now floating along with the crowd, and everyone was equally clueless about why they were there. It made him feel small and helpless.
People power-walked by them, barely giving them a glance. He wondered, would he notice an old woman and a young boy if he was walking in this mess by himself? How many people in this procession were going to be dead soon? That made his stomach wobble.
Don't panic, Liam.
“Panic is the real killer in many emergencies,” his dad's voice said with reassuring calmness from a memory.
He kept those words in mind as he steadied his breathing.
He craned his neck to look around the crowd, which over the last several minutes, had started to thin out. Everyone moved along the sidewalks on both sides of the street, as well as on the grass-covered median. He guessed they'd been walking along for an hour, which would put them about halfway there. Grandma was puttering along, but she was slowing down, stopping to rest more than he liked.
He knew she needed her rest, but an odd feeling had been growing in the pit of his stomach—a sense it wouldn't be wise to fall too far behind the main crowd. He was disturbed to see fewer people behind him than ahead. It wasn't empty by any stretch of the imagination, but things were thinning out.
“Grandma, I know you're tired, but we have to keep moving.”
“I know, Liam. I'm so tired, though. I must sit down.” She remained standing—there was no place to sit other than the curb of the street, and Grandma would have to squat on the ground to sit there.
Gunshots cracked from somewhere behind. Not close, but not as far as he'd like either.
He gave her a drink of water and a grain bar, hoping to give her a quick boost. He knew enough about the 104-year-old set to know there was no word for “boost” in their lexicon.
He didn't want to scare her, but he wasn't going to lollygag either. Once she had taken a drink and pulled down a few bites, he practically pushed her.
“OK, up and at 'em.”
Grandma didn't fight him but didn't pick up the pace as he'd hoped. Even a fury of gunshots and some nearby screaming didn't get her moving.
I refuse to panic!
He looked over his shoulder, afraid of what he'd see.
While dragging her along, a middle-aged woman in a business suit, sans the jacket, came ambling along. She seemed distracted until she spotted Grandma.
“I think she's bushed. Thank you so much for helping her.”
“Anytime,” was her only response. She was looking ahead and into the traffic jam as if searching for someone. He assumed she had lost a friend.
After fifteen minutes or so the woman abruptly stopped and told him to wait against a bridge abutment just as they went underneath it.
This gave him a chance to look behind again; he was horrified to see almost no one. There were a few stragglers, mostly elderly walking without helpers. Some people had just stopped to sit or lie down, perhaps giving up. And, far down the street, he thought he could see a few of the really sick. Still, there had to be a whole city of people south of him. He couldn't imagine where they'd all gone.
He felt like the lone gazelle dropping behind the herd. Ahead of him, he could see the last of the main group walking away. They were very close now to the park that surrounds the Arch. Maybe a quarter mile. Gunfire was coming from that direction, though a few shots were echoing down side streets almost all the time now.
He didn't see the mystery lady. Not ahead. Not behind. Not even in the nearby cars, which were sprawled everywhere on the street and in every available parking area in sight.
Oh, crap! We're in for it now.
He looked at Grandma and considered his options once more. She appeared to be totally out of hit points. Could he force her to push on? Should he try?
A deep, dark voice advised him to sit her down under this bridge and then just walk away.
Another voice argued she was his responsibility no matter how difficult things became.
Where did his obligation to save her outweigh his obligation to save himself? Wasn't his life—at fifteen years old—more valuable to save than hers?
Why would that thought even cross my mind?
“Grandma, I'm not going to leave you here. We have to keep moving. Can you walk a little farther?”
“Oh, Liam. I think I'm a goner. My head is spinning, and it's very hard to see.” She was hunched over even more than normal, holding herself up with a combination of her cane and the concrete bridge pylon. “I don't think I can go another step without falling over.”
“Well, then, I'll carry you!”
Bent over and gasping for air, she cocked her head so she could look up at her tall grandson and give him a look he knew very well. It said, “Liam, you are one crazy boy, but I love you anyway. And no, we aren't doing that.”
He debated pulling a stunt he saw in a movie—just grabbing the small woman, tossing her over his shoulder, and carrying her, no matter what her protests were. He knew he could lift her and carry her but couldn't assure himself that he wouldn't break her ribs.
As he argued with himself, the mystery woman returned, running around cars inside the traffic jam, as if she were trying to find a suitable path through the obstacles. She was pushing something.
A half minute later, she was close enough he could see she had a huge wheelchair in front of her, and she brought it right up onto the sidewalk where Grandma was swaying.
“Did someone order a ride?”
He stood incredulous while the woman moved behind Grandma and helped her fall backward, gently, into the chair. The seat itself was immense, apparently designed for a client of considerable girth, and Grandma's pixie size made her look like a child sitting there.
But she was sitting.
“Where did you find this?”
“I've been looking for this since I first saw you. It was on one of those lifts that stick out the back of a trailer hitch. I work with nurses, and travel to hospitals, so this type of thing jumps out when I see it. You have to hurry. She looks like she needs some medical care.”
The woman looked over her shoulder at the few people wandering about on the route they just traveled. Some were lying down, but some of those on the ground were being set upon by others who weren't … normal.
“Anyone healthy behind us must have gone to other streets. Nothing but sick back there,” she said.
“Will you come with us? We can make good time if we both push her.”
“No. You'll be fine. I'm going that way,” she said, pointing west.
“Hurry,” she insisted.
Without a further comment, she dove back into the traffic jam.
“Thank you!” he shouted as she was nearly across the street.
She lifted her hand but kept moving.
“Can you believe our luck?”
He tossed Grandma’s cane across the arms of the chair, then began pushing her, nearly running when the sidewalk wasn't too bumpy, and never once looked back.
A blood-freezing scream told him every detail about the sharks in pursuit.
8
Victoria
The Gateway Arch grounds were chaos, thousands of people crammed into the greenspace under the 630-foot monument. The Gateway to the West was now the Gateway to the East for these people—a gateway to safety over in Illinois. But there were so many people, and they didn't look like they were moving.
“Grandma, are you ready to dive into all this? That's where we need to go.” He was glad to be off the streets, crowd or not.
“I'll go where you push me, Liam. I'm too tired to arm wrestle you over it.”
They caught up with the many other new arrivals queuing up, and soon entered the perimeter of the park. There was a row of armed citizens and police officers on the outside rim of the greenspace, each holding their weapons toward the ground, at the low ready position. A handful of officers and civilians on horseback also wandered around. Where they found horses downtown was another of the mysteries of the day.
He remembered reading somewhere that the Arch’s park is “a patch of greenery next to the concrete jungle of the urban center of St. Louis, about a mile long and a quarter of a mile across.” Outside the park, dead bodies littered the streets. Any schoolchild could piece together what happened. People like Angie attacked the police and were put down like rabid dogs. Seeing that many corpses—and their blood—in the light of day was unsettling, but he gripped the wheelchair handles with determination and pushed through.
The police presence reassured him, but not because they had weapons—lots of people he'd seen today had weapons, including him. These men and women represented authority, a hope that society was holding it together despite all the chaos. He gave the nearest officer a wave and got a nod in return. He felt as if he had returned to humanity with that little acknowledgment.
His faith didn't last long. Once inside the outer ring of armed order the interior of the park was anarchy. People huddled in small groups all along the path and well out into the grass on each side. Kids played in the reflecting ponds, something forbidden under normal conditions. He remembered being yanked out of one and scolded during one of his visits as a child.
They rolled up to a little parking lot filled with police cars and trucks, as well as several civilian vehicles. A large box truck sat almost directly in the path ahead. The back door was open, and a man stood back there, yelling at the crowd, “Guns! Ammo! On loan! We need you armed!”
It was perhaps the most unusual thing he had seen today, and that was saying a lot. The thought of police allowing this man to toss guns out the back of his truck—it just wasn't done. Ever. And yet—
“Grandma, let's check this out.” She didn't reply, so he took that as an affirmative.
It carried the logo of a local sporting goods store. Lots of police and civilians congregated near the back, and the man worked with a partner to take down some information from each person and then hand them a rifle or shotgun. No money changed hands. There were stacks of ammo and a cornucopia of firearms in the cargo area. If he were in a cartoon, his eyes would be swirling with longing and desire. He moved the chair so he could dr
ift into the line.
It can't hurt to try.
In a few minutes, it was his turn with the man holding the guns.
“Can I get a rifle? I want to protect my Grandma.” It was completely true, but boy, did he want a gun.
The man wore a black button-down shirt from his store. He looked down and took a few seconds to size him up. Liam knew at that moment what he was going to say. His own eyes flashed behind the man, spotting a large—no, huge—tan rifle sitting on its end, up against the wall of the truck. He doubted he could even lift the thing ...
“Look, kid, I appreciate your situation, but we need men on this line. Police. Ex-military. You and your grandma don't belong anywhere near guns. You need to be inside the park staying safe.”
And there it was. He was “just a kid.”
His emotions welled up inside as the man moved to another customer. An older woman got a gun after giving her name and address. No other questions asked. So much for needing men, he thought.
He wanted to stay and argue but knew it was useless. He tried to move out of the line while avoiding the concerned looks of the men and women still there. Soon he was lost in the crowd, moving ever deeper into the park. Anonymity brought relief.
He tried to keep the wheelchair on the straight and narrow of the path, but couldn't help looking from side to side at the many strange people who had washed up in this tidal basin of humanity. A large black family sat to one side; it looked like multiple generations made it here together. Old ladies. Several middle-aged men and women. A playground's worth of children. Many appeared very scared. He couldn't understand the fear here amongst all the armed police. To his left, among the hundreds of people, he spotted a young boy much like himself—only he was with his mother and father. Liam felt a little jealous because he'd found his family. He tried to be happy for him, but his heart wasn't really in it.
He rolled Grandma past an old cathedral, though it was clear the place was full and not taking in new tenants. Hundreds of people gathered around the front doors, hoping to get in. He kept moving toward the Arch itself.
