by Glenn Cooper
Loaded onto the buses, they departed Camp Edison and made for the center of town. Turning onto Main Street, Edison suddenly braked, causing Joe, trailing in the school bus, to brake even harder to prevent a rear-ender. Militiamen lurched forward and a few yelled out in surprise.
“What the holy hell?” Edison said.
Word had spread. Window to window, door to door.
Some of the healthy Dillingham men who hadn’t yet been visited by Edison’s grim-reapers, decided to mount a collective defense. A dozen of them had a few cars parked across the road and had taken positions behind them, waiting for this moment.
They were about a hundred feet away, close enough for Edison to see what kind of firepower they had—pistols mainly and a few rifles. He knew these men—all except a couple had foregone masks by this point. Some of them bought meat from him. One attended his church. From what he knew of them, none were much of a threat, but survival was a good motivator. He leaned his bullhorn out the window.
“It don’t have to go this way,” he boomed. “You can’t win this. Go back to your homes. Make no mistake, I’m coming through.”
One of the men shouted back, “Get the hell out of here, Blair, and don’t come back!”
Edison put his hailer down and faced the militiamen piled into his bus. Many of them were older men, but to him, they were all his boys.
“Father loves you boys. We got bad men out there. What do we do to bad men?”
Some of them remembered the late-night lesson; some had forgotten.
“Kill them!”
“That’s good. Get ready.”
He had one of Villa’s walkie-talkies and got Joe to answer.
“Bring ’em out,” he said. “They’ve mostly got handguns, so it’ll take a lucky shot from this range. Watch out for rifle fire.”
The men at the barricade peeked over the cars and watched the militiamen stream out of the buses armed with hunting rifles and AR-15s. One guy lost his nerve and turned tail, but the rest stuck it out.
Edison lined up his soldiers on either side of the lead bus and had Joe space them out.
No one at the barricade opened fire. Two were soybean farmers, one was a plumber, one did tax accounting, one drove an Uber, taking people from Clarkson to the Pittsburgh airport mainly. They weren’t fighters. They had never shot at a man.
Edison was already an accomplished killer and he had no hesitation.
He shouted, “Father loves you boys! Those are bad men. Father wants you to kill the bad men! Fire!”
Jacob Snider was, as usual, the first boy to shoot. The others followed and three men at the barricade fell wounded.
The return fire was scattershot and mostly ineffective, but one of Edison’s boys was hit in the lower leg and began screaming his head off.
The sound of his screams enflamed Edison. He had claimed one of Villa’s most expensive assault rifles for his own, a Belgian SCAR-Heavy, and he began shouting, “Follow Father! Kill the bad men!” as he poured armor-piercing rounds downrange, through car metal, through flesh.
His militia followed, firing at will, and the few survivors of the fresh assault began running away. One of the new recruits seemed to be an accomplished shooter because he used his rifle scope to nail each of them, the last from a hundred yards.
Edison found Joe and embraced him, then went man-to-man, kissing cheeks, slapping backs, and passing out candy bars. Jacob got two.
“You are all good boys, the best boys! The bad men are dead! Father loves you very much. Jesus loves you very much!”
He told Joe, “Let’s clean out any pockets of resistance, then we’ll set up our own roadblock. We gotta protect what’s ours now. This is only the start. Now get ’em all on the buses.”
Joe came back to tell him the militia was loaded. “What’s next, Pa?”
“We gotta move on Clarkson next then keep on growing. We can’t be the only ones who’ve figured out how to prosper in the new order. We need to be the fastest and the best. I want a hundred boys, then a thousand, then ten thousand boys to do our bidding. Our time has arrived, son. We raised good beef on the hoof and gave our customers a top product. But this is our real calling. This here is our destiny. The Lord has chosen us.”
“For what, Pa?”
“The time for all the half-ass measures of all the panty-waist politicians is over. The Lord has chosen us to make America truly the greatest, once and for all.”
On his father’s orders, Joe left their militiaman with a shattered leg where he lay. He had been quiet for a while, but he started to moan loudly again. Edison didn’t know his name, but he thought the fellow worked in the Home Depot in Clarkson. He had seen him in the hardware aisles. He patted him on the head, gave him a piece of chocolate, then walked behind and shot him in the back of the head.
33
They were all asleep except for Jamie. The gas gauge was making him anxious. As he passed Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania on I-80, the arrow crossed below one-quarter full. He needed a plan, but he wasn’t keen on waking up Linda just yet. He was trying to pretend she wasn’t even there.
It was just past nine at night. If everything had gone smoothly, they would be only five hours from Indianapolis, but their complications had buggered the timeline. As it stood, with some kind of diversion to find gas, and a bathroom break or two, they wouldn’t be getting there until well after dawn. Mandy would probably be worried about now, but not frantic.
It was overcast and the moon was blotted out. It seemed like the darkest, loneliest highway he’d ever traveled on. Maybe once or twice an hour he saw headlights coming at him from the west or zooming up from behind and passing at speed, sometimes twenty or thirty miles per hour faster than his own quick pace. People were acting like they didn’t want to be on the road after dark, him included.
He was on an arrow-straight stretch when he thought fatigue might be getting to him. He blinked a few times, and when that didn’t extinguish the image, he literally rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand. The faint, vaguely moving yellow light persisted. It was low down, at the level of the road, at least a mile away. Getting closer, the light seemed to take on a defining characteristic. It moved a few feet in one direction and then a few feet in the other in a purposeful arc. It had to be someone waving a flashlight. He took his foot off the gas and the deceleration woke Linda as surely as if he’d poked her forehead.
“What?” she said, dully.
“There’s something ahead. I think someone may be looking for help.”
She raised her seat from its incline and squinted into the night.
“I think someone’s signaling us,” he said.
She brought her rifle up. “Well keep going,” she said. “Speed up.”
He knew she was right. They had already been preyed upon once today, but what kind of world was it going to be if people stopped helping people?
He did the opposite.
“What the fuck, Jamie? You’re not stopping, are you?”
“I’m just going slow enough to see what’s going on.”
He hit the signaler with high beams about an eighth of a mile away, and the picture came into focus. There was a man standing on the highway verge, waving a flashlight evermore urgently. The butt-end of a car was part-way in the woods, angled up, suggesting it had gone down an incline. He was wearing a long, tan raincoat, like a Burberry. The closer Jamie got, the more he had the sense that this was an ordinary guy in trouble.
“I’m sorry, Linda, I’m pulling over.”
“No! It’s not just up to you.”
“What are you going to do, shoot me?”
He rolled to a stop a few car lengths from the wreck.
“I swear, Jamie, I’m going to shoot this motherfucker if one hair is out of place.”
Kyra awoke and announced that she had to pee. Emma chimed in. The girls were synchronized.
Jamie turned to the back seat and held his palm up. They understood what that meant but he said, “Wait. Not
now.”
When he climbed out of the car, Linda followed suit, her rifle low but ready.
The man didn’t seem to notice her. He shouted to Jamie, “Please help me! I need to get her to a doctor!”
“Who?”
“My wife. She’s in the car.”
“What happened?”
“We hit a deer. It ran across. I didn’t even know what happened. Please, she needs a doctor.”
“I’m a doctor.”
Jamie was convinced it wasn’t a trap. He had seen enough people in shock to know that the guy wasn’t acting. He had short, gray hair and a trim moustache. His shirt was a white button-down. Everything about him said, corporate type.
“It’s okay, Linda,” Jamie said. “I’m going to take a look.”
That’s when the man saw her.
“Why’s she got a gun?”
“Don’t worry,” Jamie said. “It’s for protection. We’ve got our daughters in the car.”
“You don’t have a mask on,” the man said. “We’re supposed to wear masks. I left mine in the car.”
“We’re immune,” Jamie said, “but our girls are sick.”
The man lit the bank with his flashlight. The front end of the sedan was caved-in on the passenger side and a large brown beast was lodged in the windshield, hindquarters out. Jamie took the light from him and climbed through the driver’s-side door. There was blood everywhere—animal blood, presumably. It was hard to see where the deer ended, and the woman began. The impact had turned them into a chimera. In the harshly white, LED illumination, he tried to figure out where the woman’s head was. He only found it by identifying some strands of human hair, a few shades lighter than the deer’s, and using his free hand he probed upwards. He found her jaw and her neck that way, and when he got his orientation, he palpated for a carotid pulse. He wanted to be sure before he said anything, but he already knew. She was dead, likely killed on impact from head trauma, possibly a high-cervical fracture.
He pulled his bloody hand away and wiped it on the car seat.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
The man dropped so precipitously to the ground that for a moment, Jamie feared Linda had shot him. But it was grief that felled him. Jamie picked him part-way up and propped him against the front tire. He wailed, invoking God and his wife’s name. It was Jane.
Linda called down from the verge, “Is she dead?”
“I’m afraid so,” Jamie said.
“Well, I’m going to let the girls have a pee then we’re going to take off, okay?”
The man said loudly, “You can’t go. You’ve got to help me get her out of there.”
Jamie used his best bedside manner to tell the man that this was a tragic accident and he wasn’t to blame. “If it’s any comfort,” he said, “I’m certain she died instantly. But that deer’s got to weigh a few hundred pounds and it’s wedged in there. You’d need a truck with a heavy winch to pull it out. We’re going to have to leave Jane there.”
“No! We can’t! How can I leave her?”
“I’m sorry. You’ve got to be realistic. What’s your name?”
“William. Bill.”
“Where were you heading, Bill?”
“To Chicago.”
“What’s in Chicago?”
“Our daughter and our grandkids.”
“Listen, Bill. We’re heading to Indianapolis. We’ll give you a ride that far. The offer’s good for a few minutes then we’ve got to go.”
Linda peered down. “The kids are all set. How much gas has he got?”
He repeated the question to the man.
He answered in a dazed monotone. “Almost a full tank.”
“Did you just get on the road?”
“No, we started in New York low, but we couldn’t find any along the way. I had to leave the highway an hour back. I knocked on someone’s door because I saw a light. I was scared, but what could I do? I had my mask on. A fellow said he’d sell me gas from his car because he wasn’t going anywhere. He wanted all the cash I had, almost a thousand dollars, plus my watch, plus my camera. What could I do?”
“You did what you had to do,” Jamie said. “We’re going to siphon it.”
They had a five-gallon can and some garden hose they’d taken from the musicians’ house. Linda filled the can three times and got the Volvo topped up with a few gallons to spare.
The man had been sitting on the grass, staring at his dress shoes the whole time.
“What do you want to do, Bill?” Jamie asked.
“Let me say goodbye. Then I’ll come with you.”
Jamie waited on the verge while the man sat for a while in the driver’s seat, then collected a suitcase from the trunk.
“Your mask,” Jamie said. “You’ll be next to the girls.”
He got that too and Jamie gave him a hand up the slope.
It was clear enough that Linda’s veins weren’t exactly coursing with Christian charity. She was sullen about sharing the car with a stranger and she refused to give the fellow any sympathy. He sat behind Linda, forcing Kyra to scoot over to the middle. The girls seemed spooked by his presence and held each other’s hands. The last time they did that was after Romulus died.
After a few miles, Jamie asked him if they lived in New York.
“Part time. We’ve got a company apartment, but we’re from Chicago.”
“What do you do?”
“I’m the CEO of a commodity trading company.”
“I don’t even know what that is,” Jamie said.
“It doesn’t matter. I don’t think it exists anymore. I don’t think anything like that exists anymore.”
“It might come back,” Jamie said. “Things could get back to where they were.”
“Jane won’t come back.”
Jamie waited a minute then said, “So you were stuck in New York.”
“We couldn’t get a flight. First everything was booked, then everything was canceled. I tried to charter a flight, but even for crazy money it wasn’t possible. Then we couldn’t get through to our daughter. The phones went down a few days ago. We heard on the news that the Midwest was having power failures. When the electricity went out in New York City the day before yesterday, we decided to drive. One of my New York employees gave me his car. And here we are—I mean here I am.”
Jamie told him that when they got to Indianapolis, they’d probably be able to let him have the Volvo. “I’m sure my friend has a car.”
“That’s kind of you,” Bill said. “I’m not sure how I can pay you.”
“We don’t want money.”
“Where are you coming from?”
“Boston.”
“Can I ask why you’re going to Indianapolis?”
“I’ve got a colleague there, a fellow researcher. We’re hoping to work on a cure.”
“God, really? That would be amazing. I’ll pray for your success.”
“Prayers couldn’t hurt,” Jamie said.
Earlier, Jamie had introduced Linda as a friend. Although she hadn’t said a word, the man seemed obliged to engage with her. He asked if she was from Boston too.
She tossed an unfriendly, curt response back and he left her alone.
“Your girls seem so healthy,” he said. “It’s hard to believe they’re ill.”
It was probably the fatigue, but a stupid quip popped into Jamie’s head—it’s all in their minds—but he had the good sense to keep it there. “It’s the nature of the syndrome,” he said instead.
The man turned to Kyra and said, “Hello, my name is Bill.”
Jamie had drilled the girls in “my name is.”
Kyra responded, “My name is Kyra. I love you.”
Linda got angry and lashed out, “Stop it! You don’t love him! You don’t even know him!”
Kyra began to cry, and no one talked again for miles.
*
It was 2 a.m. when Jamie saw a sign that said they were seventy-five miles from Ohio. Bill had fallen aslee
p on Kyra’s shoulder, but the girl did not seem to mind. Linda had told Jamie to let her know when he wanted to change drivers. He admitted he was ready for a nap.
The high beams reflected in the rearview mirror hurt his eyes.
He hadn’t noticed the car before and all of a sudden, it was less than half a mile away. It must have been doing a hundred-ten. Jamie pulled into the right lane to let it pass with a wide berth, but it changed lanes too.
He swore quietly.
Linda looked behind and said, “What the fuck’s he doing?”
“I don’t know, but I can’t outrace him.”
She clicked off her safety and put her window down. The rushing air woke the man up.
Their car was bathed in the other vehicle’s oscillating headlights now.
“He’s flashing me,” Jamie said.
“Speed up,” Linda said.
The trailing car had to slow as not to ram them.
Jamie gave the Volvo some more gas to try to achieve some separation, but the pursuing car swerved into the left lane. From the side-view mirror he saw a couple of young men hanging out the windows, waving pistols.
“They’ve got guns,” Jamie said.
“Oh my God,” Bill said.
Linda calmly told Jamie to put down his window and stay way back in his seat.
The car pulled alongside, and the young men shouted things Jamie couldn’t make out.
Linda pointed her rifle and when one of the men saw it, he shouted something to the driver who braked, allowing Jamie to widen the gap.
He was amazed how calm Linda always was in a crisis, but if he would have had the time to reflect on it, he was cool and measured during medical crises. It was all a matter of training.
She told him, “While you have a chance, I want you to get over to the left lane and stay there. If they come back, I want them on our right.”
“What do they want?” Bill asked.
“I don’t know, but they picked the wrong car to fuck with,” Linda said.
