by Shows, Greg
When she was three rungs off the floor she jumped for the door, scrabbling at the lock and turning it, and stumbling out into the parking lot behind the store.
Her vision was blurry and her eyes were burning, but she knew she’d made it. She shoved the door closed again, exhaled, then fought against the urge to gasp in a deep breath before she could yank the t-shirt off and wipe it over her eyes and forehead.
The air, still tainted with smoke from the fire, felt amazingly awesome going into her lungs as she mopped at her hair and clothes and hoped there was enough ammonia left in the shirt to get rid of any leftover chlorine.
A cough shook her chest, nearly knocked her to her knees, and she felt her lungs burn a little, but she was fairly sure it was only because she’d been holding her breath a few seconds before.
Silicosis might get her, but chlorine gas wouldn’t.
Not only would Professor Willis fail me, she thought, he’d have Homeland Security talking to me.
If there was still such a thing as Homeland Security.
Chapter 6
Pistol in her hand, Sadie scanned the skyline. The city had returned to silence. Even the smoldering building seemed taciturn and inclined to mourn the death of the city’s final inhabitants.
Sadie didn’t think she could find a human alive who was still living in Youngstown. The dogs had likely made living there impossible for the past few months, and she didn’t believe for a second that the Tall Man and his two children were residents.
She also didn’t believe they’d stuck around once they’d gotten free of the feral dogs.
People didn’t feel inclined to help strangers these days—especially strangers that had pointed guns at them.
It appeared that the dogs that got away weren’t interested in coming back, so she walked the fifty yards up the block to where the long haired guy lay. The dogs had really done a number on him. His face was gone, along with his guts and throat and right arm, though he’d managed to hang on to his matted, blood-soaked hair.
The rest of him was a horror show. His left arm was chewed down to the bone and his fingers were missing. His pants were in tatters and his calves and most of his thighs had been torn away. The only parts of him still intact and undamaged were his feet, which were laced up inside black leather boots.
Sadie’s stomach turned over. She’d seen a lot of dead bodies, but she’d never seen this kind of disfiguration. Most of the bodies she’d seen had been long dead like the guy on the roof, and most of the evidence of feasting animals had been effaced by weathering and insects.
Sadie swallowed a few times and let her stomach settle before she turned back and focused on searching the dead man. The Tall Man had turned all his pockets out and dug into his jacket, but the barking dogs had gotten him into a hurry. He forgot to check the knife holster on the dead man’s hip.
Sadie unsnapped the leather flap and pulled out short red Swiss Army knife with a ring that held a small set of keys. She pocketed the keys and knife and moved on to the pack, which the Tall Man had left beside the curb.
The pack was small. A day-hike pack at best. Not the kind of rig you’d expect if he was carrying all his worldly possessions on him and walking around what was left of America.
The first thing she found in the pasty damp dust was a black, zippered pouch. The pouch was brand new, unlike anything else she’d seen for a long time in this hellhole the long haired man had called “America.” When she unzipped it she saw what she thought was a cell phone. But then she pulled it out of the pouch and saw the gray electronic readout and three buttons.
Then came the fear.
“No,” Sadie said. “No no no no no!” She couldn’t stop staring at the word above the gray readout. It was a word she knew, and it was probably the last word she would ever want to see in her life, under the current circumstances: RADEX.
She pushed the biggest of the three buttons and the readout came on. Numbers appeared and the device began chirping at her.
“Oh no,” she said, recognizing the sound of a Geiger counter. Her grandfather had taught her all about them once, when they’d traveled to New Mexico for her tenth birthday. They’d searched for Uraninite around old mines shafts. Every so often they’d find a hot one and the counter would go wild.
“Score!” she would yell, and her grandfather would stride over to see.
She tried to keep herself calm, since the counter wasn’t showing the presence of anything more than background radiation. But he had the thing for a reason.
Had she just walked through a hot zone and gotten a big dose of death without even knowing it?
She turned off the Geiger counter and put it into its pouch. Then she dropped it into her own pack.
She wondered who the hell this guy was, talking about “saving America.” But nothing from his pack told her a thing. The package of 9-Volt batteries laying in the dust didn’t help her figure out the question, though they were strange—all silver, with Chinese characters on the sides. She put them into her pack with the Geiger counter and kept searching.
Scattered around the day-pack she found a full box of 9mm ammo, a small plastic bag with five face masks inside it, half a dozen replacement breathing cartridges for a full face respirator—the expensive kind—a dozen energy bars, six gray-pouches containing MREs, a collapsible bottle half-filled with water, a black-bladed combat knife.
“Who the hell would leave all this?” Sadie asked, and didn’t like the answer.
Someone who didn’t need any of it because they had it all already.
The cartridges got Sadie thinking that the dead man must have had a face shield respirator somewhere. So where was it?
She walked a circle around the scene of the confrontation between the two men. It didn’t take her long to find the respirator. It had tumbled end over end and landed in the gap between a pair of abandoned cars—a Toyota and a Kia.
“Awesome,” she said as she dusted it off.
She returned to the day pack, tucked the respirator and cartridges down into her own pack, and finished her search.
In the day-pack’s side pouch she found a compass and a small notebook and a map. The map had been folded so that Youngstown was in the middle, and a penciled note next to the town read, “5:00 PM, corner of Matilda and Burk Place, Find the 7-Eleven. Meet at the McDonalds.”
Instantly, her stomach clenched and a chill raced up her back to raise the fine black hair on the back of her neck. She looked at her watch. It read, 12:52.
“Jesus,” she muttered, and walked around the long haired guy’s remains. She kept her eyes roving, scanning the closest buildings, looking for movement in the darkened holes behind the smashed in windows and doors. She didn’t know what was going on here, but she was beginning to have suspicions—suspicions that made her not want to be here at 5:00 o’clock. But she was frozen in place, trapped by fear and confusion about what to do next.
Should she hide?
Should she run?
Should she climb to the top of a nearby building and sight down with her rifle?
Whoever was coming here at 5:00 would likely be coming in a vehicle of some kind. Otherwise, how would they know they could get here on time? Walking presented too many hazardous variables. You couldn’t get in a hurry just to keep to a schedule. That would get you killed.
Ten minutes later she was still beside the body, and she didn’t know any more than she had, except that she was out of time.
“Think,” she told herself, and once more went through the dead guy’s stuff. This time she flipped through his little notebook and found a few entries on the center pages of the book, all of them in a complicated code she didn’t recognize and couldn’t read.
The fear she’d felt came back.
She tossed the notebook down beside the body, along with the compass and the combat knife. She already had those items, and she wanted the people who found the body to think whoever killed him had only been after his food and water and respira
tor.
She was about to toss his Swiss Army knife and keys on the ground when she saw the stylized wing logo on the black plastic tab end of one key.
It was a Honda logo.
The long haired man had driven a bike here.
Sadie hadn’t heard an engine coming or going, and the Tall Man, with his two kids, wouldn’t be interested in a motorcycle.
She looked around, but saw no sign of a bike. Everything had been covered in dust for a long time, and the only things that had disturbed it were animal tracks and human footprints.
Sadie slipped her pack over her shoulders and grabbed her rifle. She jogged a straight line to the east for a few hundred yards, and when she saw no signs of fresh tire tracks, she returned to the body and jogged another few hundred yards to the west.
Nothing.
Since she would have noticed fresh tracks the way she’d come into town, she turned south and began to jog again. Sure, jogging was breaking the rules, but if she didn’t get the hell out of Youngstown fast, she’d be breaking an even bigger rule: don’t get caught out in the open with nowhere to hide, not enough provisions to wait out an adversary, and not enough firepower to hold that adversary off.
She’d made a calculated risk, and now she was acting as she thought best: the Interstate was to the south, so that was the likely direction the long haired man had come into Youngstown. If she searched in that direction, she could find his bike.
So she hoped.
She’d gone six blocks, and was beginning to question the wisdom of searching for the bike when she found its tracks. The wheels had bitten through the dust and gotten down to the asphalt. A black ribbon had been left exposed in the one-inch blanket of gray.
The ribbon ran north and south, like she’d expected, but then turned east at the place she’d found it—right out in the middle of an intersection, on a street that was choked with abandoned cars.
Sadie followed the tire tracks east until they disappeared—right in the middle of the road. The long haired man had chosen a strange place to get stealthy, but she doubted he could carry a motorcycle in his arms. It was much more likely he’d hidden it somewhere and camouflaged it, then had dragged something over his tire marks. That he would go to such lengths made her even more suspicious about who he might be.
Sadie began to sweep the area, walking a grid-like pattern, first one way and then the other, widening her search as she sought in vain to find his footsteps. She checked her watch again and found it was 3:07.
She nearly panicked then, completely stunned that she’d been searching for over two hours without even realizing it.
What if the people he was meeting came early?
What if she was being watched right now?
She couldn’t make herself stop feeling like she was being watched.
Sadie pulled off her pack to take a drink and a quick rest.
She should probably just take off now, or get to shelter and hide and hope that whoever came looking for the long haired man would miss her. If she could get into one of the abandoned businesses around here and go out the back, dragging a broom or weighted tarp or a flattened cardboard box over her footprints as she went, she could likely escape. Effacing your tracks in dust wasn’t that hard. The long-haired man had proven that. She couldn’t even find a three hundred pound motorcycle in it.
But if they came with a good tracker, that was another story.
Sadie scanned the buildings, looking up toward the sky. Lightning was flickering off toward the west, and it looked like there could be a dust storm coming in. If she got caught out in that she’d be dead for sure.
She re-slung her pack, getting ready to head south on foot, bitter anger and disappointment rising in her chest.
It wasn’t the first time she’d felt that bitter anger since everything had gone wrong, and it wouldn’t be the last. Leaving her car behind had made her feel like she was losing one of her limbs.
But knowing that fact didn’t make her feel one bit better.
The best choice of all the businesses and buildings surrounding her seemed like the thrift store on the corner of the block ahead. It was a short walk, and she would likely find an old coat or dress inside she could rig up with weights to drag along behind her to hide her tracks—or at least disguise them and make them more difficult to follow.
She’d already taken a dozen steps toward it when the flash of blue caught her eye. She turned to look and saw a little blue triangle sticking up out of the gray dust. It was next to a dust-covered Hyundai parked on the side of the street next to a parking meter. Fresh dog tracks surrounded the car.
Sadie ran over to the half-buried car, feeling the excitement growing in her chest, somehow knowing what the triangle signified.
Sure enough, the little blue triangle was the edge of a plastic tarp someone had partially buried in dust to hide it. She gave it a tug, and a thin layer of gray grit cascaded off it, showing her that it was old and faded and full of holes. Shiny metal gleamed through the holes.
Sadie pulled hard at the tarp, and it slid forward, spilling the rest of the dust off and revealing the motorcycle beneath.
The bike was a Honda.
A Nighthawk 750 with saddlebags.
Strapped to the back was a red plastic gas can, half full. The tank was full.
She pulled the key out of her pocket and stared at it.
Moment of truth.
When she shoved the key into the ignition and turned it a quarter turn, the display lights lit up.
“Score!” she said softly, and without much enthusiasm. She was happy she’d actually found the thing, but now a warning voice in her head began to tell her to leave the bike and run.
Gasoline started going bad months ago.
She noticed the change as she’d travelled, finding the gasoline she’d scrounged to be darker and harder to ignite as she’d moved west. If someone was rolling with fresh gas in their tank, they were probably connected to people she didn’t want to make angry.
Then there was the whole problem of all the attention she’d attract to herself with the bike.
Everyone would want it, and they’d try to take it. But the idea of travelling a hundred or more miles a day, getting all the way to Texas in two weeks or less...it was too much temptation. Despite her grandfather’s admonition to take things slow, she put the bike in neutral and rolled it forward, away from the abandoned Hyundai.
When she got the bike out to the middle of the street she put the kickstand down. She took off her pack again and pulled out one of the long haired man’s masks. It slipped over her head easily, and didn’t feel too bad against her face. Next she replaced the cartridges on the respirator and strapped it over her face.
As her breath huffed in and out in ominous wheezes, she tied her rifle to her pack with paracord and slipped it back onto her shoulders so that she could climb onto the bike.
She felt bulky and uncomfortable when she threw a leg over the bike and stood straddling it. But she knew she’d get used to the feeling, probably long before she’d put fifty miles between herself and this hellhole town.
When she pushed the ignition button the engine roared and rumbled. The vibration between her legs when she sat down was far from unpleasant, and she smiled.
When was the last time she’d felt anything like that?
The image of her useless bohemian boyfriend popped into her head.
“Well, he wasn’t completely useless,” she admitted as she revved the engine.
She hadn’t been on a bike in years, so she wasn’t surprised when she stalled it out the first time she tried to get it into gear.
“Crap,” she said, at the precise moment the little geyser of dust puffed up next to her right foot. The soft “fwoosht” sound came to her a second later—nothing like what suppressed gunfire sounded like on old television shows.
She turned to look behind her and saw the Tall Man. He was on foot four blocks back, but he coming hard, his arms swinging as he spri
nted over the dusty street. His children weren’t in sight, but several men in gray camouflage were.
They were aiming rifles.
“Uh-oh,” Sadie said.
The next bullet bounced off the street in front of her, throwing up another dust geyser.
Sadie pushed the ignition button again, and this time she throttled up the engine so high that when she tapped the gear shifter and let out the clutch, her front tire came off the ground and she nearly went over backwards. More gunshots came, some not suppressed, and she heard shouting.
Then she was rolling down the middle of the street, zipping between cars as bullets clanged off them.
The buildings flashed by on both sides of her, and despite the recklessness of putting on speed with so little room for maneuvering or braking, she raced onward.
Soon the bullets stopped coming. She didn’t slow down, though. The wind in her hair felt good, and now that she was out of danger, she felt—happy. It had been so long since she felt like she was feeling now, and she didn’t want to let it go.
After putting another ten blocks between herself and the Tall Man, she slowed and downshifted and turned right. She worked her way through downtown, climbing up onto sidewalks when necessary, walking the bike through hazards that blocked the road, or backtracking to find an open path.
Twenty minutes later she was on the bridge, crossing the Mahoning River, getting ready to make some real time. She weaved between cars and trucks and was soon into south Youngstown.
Within half an hour of finding the long haired man’s bike, she was out of the city, on her way to Columbus, making the kind of time she could have only dreamed about the day before.
Chapter 7
Three hours later, Sadie was a hundred and seven miles out of Youngstown. Night had fallen an hour earlier, but she’d pushed on, moving at ten miles an hour, her headlight stabbing out into the absolute darkness ahead.
She had to be careful cruising down the middle of the highway. Some of the abandoned their cars were nearly on the center stripe, less than two feet from the cars heading the other direction. Then she had walk the bike between the front and rear bumpers of the abandoned cars and proceed down the shoulder until another gap opened and she could get back to the center.
