Devil’s Wake

by Steven Barnes

  Then none of them felt like talking anymore.

  Kendra nearly jumped when Sonia unexpectedly gave her a hug. “You poor thing,” she said. “Can’t believe you were out there by yourself.”

  “It’s not just me,” Kendra said, not wanting them to think she felt sorry for herself. “Something bad happened to everybody.” Sonia’s hug lingered, and Kendra wanted to pull away before she started crying. But she didn’t.

  “Once you’re on our bus, you’re not just ‘everybody,’ ” Sonia said.

  Kendra noticed Terry staring at them, almost as if he wanted to hug her too.

  But cuddle time was over.

  “Freak,” Darius called in a low, calm voice from the parking lot.

  Kendra wasn’t sure she’d heard him right, until the others instantly dropped their plates, came to attention, and formed a circle around her. Their circle shifted to a horseshoe as they all scanned the parking lot, assessing the danger.

  A single freak limped toward them. Grandpa had listened to every rumor or radio report, studying freak evolution like a zoologist. As a result, she knew that freaks started out fast—the runners, the most dangerous kind—but slowed down as days and weeks passed. This one might have been a couple of months old, lurching like a gauze-wrapped mummy. Its clothes were a shambles, but once upon a time they might have been overalls and a white checkered shirt. His head was big, and it looked as if birds had pecked on his right ear, now hanging halfway down his cheek. One eye socket was empty, but the other glared brightly.

  “Coming straight for us,” Darius said.

  “Mine,” Dean said, and leveled his rifle.

  He was an excellent shot. The freak’s head snapped back, and its feet went out from under him it as if it had slipped on ice. Brains sprayed around its head in a brownish-red nimbus. It kicked its feet a few times, and then was still. The Twins high-fived each other, cackling as if he’d bull’s-eyed at the county fair.

  “Let’s not celebrate yet,” Piranha said.

  Terry agreed, dousing out the fire with a waiting bucket. “Where there’s one…”

  “… there’s a gaggle,” Sonia finished. Despite her tough-girl act, Kendra noticed that Sonia never seemed to stray far from Piranha’s shadow.

  “What now?” Kendra said, her heart racing. She expected to see an army of freaks come charging from the woods.

  Terry spread a road map on the ground, tracing it with his finger. “Let’s see… We’re here, twenty miles north of Vancouver. And we’re heading… here. On Northwest Eleventh Avenue.”

  “How do we get there?” Darius said. Kendra realized that even when the Twins talked, they never stopped scanning their surroundings. Sonia and Piranha were gathering supplies to cart back into the bus. They all knew their jobs.

  “Down the Five to what looks like the Columbia River,” Terry said. “We’ll cross into Oregon. I hope. Then another… I don’t know. Five miles? And from there to maybe Southwest Alder Street.”

  A loud squeal and squawk from the bus startled Kendra. Someone fiddling with the radio, she realized. Keep it calm, girl. They’ve got it handled.

  “Anything?” Terry called to the bus.

  “Still static, mostly,” Sonia said. “That crazy preacher. Not much else.”

  “Looks clear,” Piranha said in a basso voice, and the group laughed with an inside joke Kendra didn’t understand. Terry explained that Piranha liked to imitate Vin Diesel from the movie Pitch Black; Diesel had said everything “looked clear” right before all hell broke loose. The explanation didn’t help Kendra feel like laughing.

  “The rest of breakfast is to go,” Terry said.

  “No thanks,” Kendra said. “I just lost my appetite.”

  “Hey, don’t miss my chef’s special,” Terry said, grinning as he folded up his map. “Scrambled brains. With lead on the side.”

  More laughter. The Twins high-fived again.

  Kendra felt herself trying to smile, but she fought it. How could she smile when her knees still felt weak from the sight of the shambling freak?

  “You need serious help,” Kendra told Terry.

  Terry started to climb into the bus, then turned and looked at her over his shoulder. “That’s the same thing my shrink said,” he told her, sounding shocked. Then he winked.

  The wink did it. Kendra smiled at Terry after all.

  But she didn’t smile for long. As the twins were unhooking their bikes, they heard the distant sound of a motorcycle engine with a bad muffler.

  Everyone crowded the bus windows, watching the driveway from the interstate.

  The engine grew closer and closer… and then faded away. Relief passed among them.

  In five minutes, they were on the road.

  SEVENTEEN

  Cold December rain droplets spattered against the windshield, fogging their vision. They passed farmland, a dairy perhaps, and fields filled with weeds and dead crops. Nowhere was there a human being to be seen, although occasionally a freak listed in a field, like a drunk leaning into a high wind. Not moving, perhaps conserving energy. When they drove past, occasionally the things turned to watch.

  Darius and Dean rode their motorcycles around and around the bus, scanning for trouble but also amusing themselves by weaving between stalled cars, making Kendra’s heart jump every time they nearly collided. After a particularly harrowing near miss, they reached across the road to slap gloved palms.

  Kendra sat near the front of the bus, near Terry, and she noticed that the gas tank was alarmingly low: a quarter of a tank! How had they traveled from upstate without any working gas stations? Memories of the gas pumps at Mike’s made her shiver.

  They had only been on the road fifteen minutes when Terry stopped at a clutch of abandoned cars blocking the lanes. The Twins had beaten them, circling the knot of cars. They waved to Terry. Kendra hoped that meant there were no freaks. And no pirates. The big bus squealed as it lurched to stillness, almost in protest. For a moment, no one moved or spoke.

  “Gas ’n’ go,” Terry finally said. “Road also needs clearing. Careful, everybody. Let’s not hang out here all day.” The guy who’d joked about scrambled brains was gone.

  Instructions given, Terry opened the bus doors.

  Outside, Terry cradled the shotgun as the Twins examined the cars. Piranha stepped down too, revolver tight in his grip. Sonia carried the rifle. Kendra felt small and useless beside her outside the bus, as good as naked.

  While Kendra watched, the others pried open gas tanks, hoses ready to siphon into red gas cans. Half the cars had stopped because they had run out of gas—the other half, who knew?

  Two cars looked as if they had simply smacked together, and Kendra approached them slowly. The driver’s side of the white Toyota was splashed with dried blood crawling with flies.

  But the cars were empty.

  What had happened here? Had one or both drivers been infected?

  “Keys!” Darius called, and tried to start the engine of an SUV blocking their passage. A grinding protest, followed by clicks. “Battery’s dead,” he said.

  “Can you get the brake off?” Piranha said.

  “Yeah, but we flip,” Darius said. “Heads, you push. Tails, I steer.”

  Kendra felt the mood easing now that they were in the road and hadn’t been ambushed. Not yet, anyway. But Kendra kept her eyes on the tree line, watching for anything that stirred. More than once, she was fooled by wind massaging the leaves.

  At least one of them was always holding a gun on watch while the others pushed cars off the road. Kendra gathered enough nerve to open the door of a black PT Cruiser and look inside; the car reminded her of a miniature hearse.

  Inside, she found children’s clothes, a little red shirt, and blue striped pants. A sippy cup with a red conical cap, festooned with tiny tooth marks. “What happened here?” she asked again, aloud this time. Had Junior been bitten at the mall by a weird kid, and maybe fallen asleep in the backseat before they could get him to th
e doctor? Had he clawed his way out of his safety seat and attacked Mommy as she chatted on the cell phone, or Daddy as he drove? Was the family still wandering the roadway together?

  Kendra wished she couldn’t imagine those final horrific moments, but she could.

  Kendra was thankful that there were no bodies.

  But there was plenty of gas. By the time the siphoning was done, Terry said he would have enough to fill the hundred-gallon tank.

  “What happens if you can’t find fuel?” Kendra asked Terry while she watched him fit the gas can’s nozzle into the huge tank. She was close enough to smell the morning’s perspiration from his neck, not an unpleasant smell, considering.

  “Then the party’s over,” Terry said. “We’re on foot. It’ll happen one day.”

  Kendra cringed at the thought.

  They had to stop three more times to clear the road, and once made good use of the snowplow’s blade when a Buick had no gas and the brakes were locked. The big black car groaned, its tires smearing dark skid marks across the asphalt.

  “Let’s hit the Barracks!” Terry said once they were back on the bus.

  Kendra rediscovered her notebook. Everything in life moved so quickly, she was afraid she would misplace all the details. If she survived, she might one day make sense of it all—or at least have something to leave behind.

  I made some new friends, she wrote. We have a plan.

  Writing it down made it feel real.

  EIGHTEEN

  Kendra’s Notebook

  Today, we drove through a street so bare that no cars were in sight. Not trashed—empty. No garbage or burned cars. No bodies.

  But we saw one person standing at the fork in the road.

  She was a little girl, maybe twelve years old, standing with her arms at her side, almost like a soldier at attention. She had blond hair in pigtails, and she was wearing a dress she might have worn to a sixth-grade dance.

  She didn’t look right, standing alone in the road like that.

  Look, there’s a freak, somebody said.

  Bets started flying about whether she’d be fast or slow, or if the bus could beat her in a race. On the bus, they laugh about everything, especially when they’re nervous. But I didn’t think she was a freak. I thought she could have been someone like me who needed rescuing.

  And I was right. Sort of.

  As the bus slowed, we saw the bite.

  Before the freaks came, I would have thought she’d been bitten on the cheek and jaw by a pit bull like the Dog-Lady’s. But we all knew she hadn’t been bitten by a dog. And she hadn’t changed yet, because her face looked like a regular little girl’s except for her bite.

  Was she in shock? Was she waiting for someone to stop?

  By the time the bus drove past her, everyone was huddled at the windows, watching her. She never moved or looked anywhere except straight ahead. Had I looked the same way to them when they first saw me?

  This time, Terry kept driving. Darius made a lame joke about an Amber alert, but no one laughed—not even Darius. Everybody got quiet.

  I jumped when I heard the crack of a gunshot echoing against the empty buildings, but I shouldn’t have been surprised. Dean was leaning out of a rear window with a rifle. After one shot, Dean took his seat again. Darius patted his shoulder. Then Sonia. Then Piranha.

  Dean’s eyes reminded me of the girl in the road.

  The bad feeling didn’t seize Kendra until after the I-5 split just above a town called Salmon Creek, and the bus took the right-hand fork. The sensation was like waking from a dream… or slipping back into a nightmare. Kendra remembered these roads from her trip in to the hospital… when? How long ago had that been? It seemed like years, and yet the journey was as familiar as yesterday.

  This is not a good idea, she thought.

  All Grandpa Joe had drummed into her head was how she should keep far away from the cities. Now it seemed like a miracle that their bus had been able to travel as far as it had without meeting an impassable barrier or an overwhelming attack. With every creeping mile, Kendra’s belly contracted into a tighter knot.

  Vancouver, Washington, was at first a residential stretch and then a downtown district, all broken windows and deserted buildings. She hoped so, anyway. She vaguely remembered hearing about an orderly evacuation of Vancouver, back when she and Mom had monitored the radio together. Once or twice she thought she saw a face pressing against a glass window, watching them, perhaps wondering who it was who still drove, however slowly, along these haunted roads. They left the freeway at Exit 1D, wound past stalled cars onto Fourth Plain, then turned left onto a narrow street called Neals, lined with abandoned cars and broken windows.

  The closer they drove to the Barracks, the more Kendra felt the temperature rising in the bus, the heat of combined adrenaline. Kendra caught herself holding her breath as she stared out the window, waiting.

  The streets were now so narrow and twisty, they seemed to have been designed to thwart terrorists driving trucks loaded with fertilizer bombs. Expansive green lawns had gone shaggy, covered with trash and a few sprawled corpses. Nothing alive and human could be seen amid the cluster of beige and pale gray bungalows and two-story barracks buildings. A freak or two could be glimpsed in the wavering distance. One of them turned toward the bus and took a step or two in their direction before the Blue Beauty wove out of sight. One of the Twins zipped past them on his motorcycle, pulling into a graveled road walled by portable cyclone fence. There was lots of that fencing, a ragged maze. Someone had attempted to set up aisles or sections, perhaps for different categories of refugees.

  The grass was high and wild, without the telltale footprints that might have indicated frequent visitors.

  The bus was quiet. What had they expected? Cheering throngs? Laughing children? Whatever they had expected, this wasn’t it.

  The bus pulled up behind the Twins, along a graveled path into a trash-strewn parking lot. There were four cars, a blue Chevy pickup, and an RV, all deserted. A brownish-red smear marred the pickup’s passenger door.

  The Blue Beauty sighed to a stop.

  It looked as if they had stumbled onto an aged liberal arts campus, perhaps the day after homecoming, headaches and hangovers keeping the coeds tucked in their beds.

  Directly to their left was a two-story barracks building, the windows shattered like those in Vancouver. The Twins’ bikes were already parked. Dean had pulled his jacket up to cover his nose and mouth. Neither of the Twins waved the all-clear sign. Instead, Darius only exaggerated a hell-if-I-know shrug.

  “Really helpful, thanks,” Terry muttered, his face grimmer than Kendra had seen. Angry. If he’d looked that way when they first met, she might have been afraid of him.

  As soon as the bus’s door opened, the smell hit them. The air was heavy with a garbage-pail scent. Rotting meat.

  “Stay close,” Terry said. “Nobody get lost, in case we haul out in a hurry.”

  “You will be left behind,” Piranha said, mostly to himself, although Terry was sure he was talking to the new girl, Kendra. Piranha had confided to him that he wasn’t willing to risk himself for a stranger—even a sister, as he’d called Kendra. Last in, first out, the big guy had said. Terry had hoped to avoid that test, but they might be facing it now.

  He’d tried to be realistic. Without radio broadcasts, he hadn’t expected the Barracks to provide soldiers or protection. But it already looked and smelled a hell of a lot worse than he’d expected.

  “You ready?” Piranha’s eyes were tight and scared, just like his own.

  Terry nodded, although he wasn’t ready. This might be their worst day in a long time. Hell, it might be their last.

  Ravens concealed behind abandoned cars and Porta Potties burst into the air only a few yards from where he parked the bus. They circled, then settled back down. Dozens of huge, overfed black birds began pecking as if someone had scattered handfuls of seed or bread crumbs. But the stench told Terry a different story. Hipshot s
cratched at the ground and whined.

  Human bodies in various stages of decomposition lay everywhere—on the main building’s steps, in the parking lot, crumpled in the grass. One of his teachers had taught them about Jonestown back in the 1970s, and the sight reminded Terry of that mass suicide in Guyana.

  But he couldn’t stare at the bodies long. Hipshot barked sharply, and Terry’s head whipped up.

  The barefoot man in olive drab military fatigues fooled Terry for half a second, speeding his heart with hope… until Terry noticed his odd limp. This was a slow freak, thank God. He was thirty yards back, close to the shadow of the headquarters, but a runner would have been on them already.

  “Limper,” Terry said in a low voice, just as Sonia chambered a round into her shotgun.

  “I’ve got this one,” Sonia said in a low, flat voice, and let fly with the Mossberg. The report was loud and vicious, but she missed. A few shots dimpled the ravaged face, but most spattered into the beige building behind him, scattering flecks of wood and paint. The freak ignored the shot and continued toward them.

  “Damn, girl,” Piranha said. “That all you got?”

  Sonia snorted, and reshouldered the shotgun.

  “Don’t jerk the trigger,” Piranha said. “Squeeze. Aim for center of mass.”

  “Why?” Kendra asked, huddling close. “I thought it had to be head shots.”

  When Piranha didn’t answer, Terry spoke low to Kendra’s ear. “Those are harder. Sonia needs the target practice.”

  Another shot. The freak spun around, staggered, went down to one knee, then came on again, only a dozen or so paces from Darius, who was watching with great interest, idling his engine. Sonia’s next shot burst its head like a rotten watermelon. It dropped, quivered, and then was still.

  Darius applauded sardonically. “Nice, but help the environment and conserve rounds next time! Swap you,” he said. He buckled a sheathed machete to his belt and exchanged his rifle for her shotgun. “We is goin’ indoors, and the Mossberg is the perfect home defense weapon.”

  “This ain’t home,” Dean said.