“How do you know if the diesel is good?” she whispered.
“This one was filled to the neck. It’s when they have air in the tank that algae can grow and muck it up.”
Sophie held the bucket to catch most of the fuel, though some splashed onto the floor.
More Devils came through the loading bays, and Sophie could hear their feet cross the gravel in the parking lot. Half a dozen of them howled together, like newborns.
Kurt and Sophie quit speaking.
He gestured, and she unscrewed the lid to a spare gas tank on a low wooden shelf. He set the bucket down, and spread his fingers wide, as if to say, boom. Then he pointed at all the metal parts on the shelves, and made the fly away gesture with his fingertips, before pouring the mixture into the tank.
She nodded.
He motioned for her to cut off a strip of her t-shirt. She froze. They could hear one of the Devils breathing. They pulled back behind a metal cabinet, where the air smelled of rat traps.
The Devil’s scarred, bare feet slapped the diesel on the concrete floor. It looked down, sniffed, and walked toward the cabinet. With a lurch, it reached behind the cabinet and grabbed a slender water pipe and tugged. Kurt and Sophie squatted in a recess in the wall where a water fountain had once been, two feet below.
Kurt gestured to Sophie, poking his finger into his cupped hand, then stretching out an imaginary line; the long cotton strip of her t-shirt needed to be poked into the spare gas tank, and left touching the floor where the fuel had splashed.
The Devils started pulling out the 500 kg bags, yanking boxes off of shelves, knocking over palettes. The noise brought more of them – how many, they couldn’t be sure, but at least 50. There was no way they could get back to the spare tank and push the strip of cotton in without being seen.
Sophie closed her eyes. Kurt wondered if she was praying, but she was sniffing. Even over the smell of diesel and Devils, she could smell... feces. It was on the floor, about twenty feet away. She poked her head out and looked. In the moonlight on the concrete from the open loading bays, she could see a collection of dark pellets at the bottom of one of the industrial shelving units. As one of the Devils walked through them, she saw them smear, rather than snap from dryness.
She gestured that she wanted to throw something up there.
Kurt saw the box she was nodding towards, got a spark plug from a small display case, and waiting until the nearest Devil turned the corner, hucked it. The stiff cardboard box was like a bass speaker, the terrific thump turning every Devil in the warehouse that direction, and, more important, scaring the raccoons that lived inside out of their nest.
The nearest Devil shook the storage shelf, and five raccoons shrieked and scattered, two falling to the floor, three jumping to the next shelf, and then the next.
Sophie crawled to the spare tank, tucked the long cotton rag that was the bottom half of her t-shirt into the neck, and let the other end fall to the puddle of diesel below. With one hand, she smeared the puddle in a long, thin trail back to their hiding place. Kurt could see it evaporating on the concrete. He struck the match, dropping it to where Sophie’s finger had stopped, and watched the flame sputter along the floor.
They ran through a small office, dodging vinyl chairs and defunct computers, slamming the front glass door open, and jumped down beside the steps which led up to the concrete slab. Kurt put her head down under his arms as they wedged themselves into the corner.
Nothing happened.
A Devil pushed the glass door open and looked across the moonlit field. He rested his scabrous hands on the rail, just above Kurt and Sophie. As Kurt looked up and their eyes met, a disturbingly subtle smile grew on the creature’s face, which went black as a tidal wave of brick, metal, and flame blossomed over him. The earth snapped, sending gravel into Kurt’s eyes, and Sophie’s head into his lower jaw.
They woke, coughing. Sophie helped Kurt stand. “I can barely see,” he said.
“The building is gone,” she said. “It’s morning. Eww.”
“What?”
“There’s a foot jammed into the railing above where we were hiding.”
“Is it attached to anything?”
“Nope.”
The air held the acrid smell of fertilizer and the muddy smell of decomposition. “I need water,” said Kurt.
“There’s a pond, but it doesn’t look clean.”
“Probably full of chemicals. I’ll need you to guide me, until we find some clean stuff.”
She took him by the arm. “Are you blind again?”
“I don’t think so. I can see light when I open, but it hurts, and I can feel the dirt under my lids. I don’t want to blink and scratch my corneas.”
“Where should we go?”
“Back towards the bikes. There’s a medical kit, if they didn’t destroy it.”
Before they walked very far, Kurt paused and sniffed. “How many did we get?”
“Wait here,” she said. He squatted to keep his balance until she came back.
“There’s nothing left but a concrete slab and a water pipe. I can see some body parts scattered a hundred yards away... man, I dunno. Twenty? Twenty-five?”
Kurt smiled. “Thanks, Bane,” he said. “That was what they call an ANFO bomb. Ammonium Nitrate and Fuel Oil. Bane told me how he’d done it once, with just a couple of ounces in a Coke bottle. It’s what they blew up the Federal Building in Oklahoma with, in my dad’s time.”
“Too bad we don’t have more of it, and a Coke bottle,” she said. Sophie led him through the field of metal and brick, back to the woods, back to the highway. He felt her warm exposed torso against his forearm, and thought about what a strong woman she was becoming. The sky was sunny, the air was still, and the only sound was the conversation of crows.
Chapter 12: Forever Hers
After washing out his eyes with a full bottle of water, Kurt said only one thing as they hopped on their bikes.
“Ride ‘em like we stole ‘em.”
Whether the Polunsky Devils let them pass, or they simply got fast and lucky, Kurt and Sophie didn’t know. They strained their senses for the first hour of their ride, turning at every sound, imagining smells of burned flesh, waiting to be ambushed by howling, scarred madmen. They peddled smoothly and fiercely through the tall pines of Huntsville State Park until their thighs burned. Finally, Sophie's legs wore out, and Kurt had to take some Advil to deal with his headache. They had made it to New Waverly, 15 miles south of Huntsville.
Sophie and Kurt had some of Bane’s equipment, but not the heavy stuff. They had water in small travel bags on their handlebars, and in small bags tied to the backs of their seats they had snacks, a few tools, and first aid stuff. They left the tents behind.
Sophie cranked the radio and pressed the soft red power button.
“This is the USS Fort Worth at Coast Guard Station Galveston. We have room for 9 survivors. We will update the count as we accept new passengers. Message repeats.”
Kurt tapped his bike computer. “108 miles to Galveston. Our pace is faster...” He frowned. “I’m sorry, Bane,” he said to the sky. “Our pace is faster now, Sophie. Looking at our morning sprint, I think you and I can keep a pace of 19 miles per hour, which would get us there in six hours, if we can stick to short breaks. How are your legs?”
“I feel... fine, actually. Huh.”
He kicked out his bike’s stand and walked to her. Holding her face, he pushed down with his thumbs, tugging her lower eyelids down. Her irises were huge and amber, but otherwise normal. Unless she opened her eyes wide, it was hard to tell her eyes were not normal.
“What is it?”
“I’ve noticed this for the last couple of days, but we’ve been so busy I just haven’t talked about it. Here, look.” He took a chrome tool and held a flat side out, as a mirror.
“My eyes changed from blue to green when I was your age. But they didn’t get bigger irises and completely change color in two days. Something is hap
pening to you, but so far I can’t see anything bad in it. Maybe it’s related to our healing powers. Do my eyes look normal?”
She held his face, and tugged down with her thumbs. “You look the same.” He took off his shirt, had her look at his back. “Nothing.” He checked her back and legs. Except for her eyes, she was the same. With that epicanthic fold from her mom’s side of the family, it was hard to tell.
They were in a diamond-shaped clearing where a small highway crossed over 45 South. It gave their minds space to think.
“Whatever happens,” said Kurt, “I’m glad I got to take this journey with you.”
“Me, too.” She drank some water. “Dad, are we going to die?”
“Yeah.”
“Wait. What?”
“Death makes you uncomfortable?”
“I could have had a normal dad, but no.”
“Sophie, a few years ago I had a job in an office with friends. I had a thousand restaurants to choose from, museums, concert halls, eBooks on demand, free video chat with relatives in Asia and Europe, and my own dojo. Now I’m on a bicycle in East Texas, hoping some guy on a Navy ship has some answers as to why all that just went away. Are we going to die? Yes. But not today. Today, we’re going to Galveston, we’re going to come aboard that ship, and we’re going to see something new. Today is worth living.”
She smiled. “Yeah.”
He got onto his bike and tapped the computer. “Let’s see how long we can push it. We don’t have much time.”
The asphalt hummed beneath their thin tires, and sweat stained their backs and thighs. A headwind pushed back as they approached Conroe, and kept up throughout the Houston suburbs, from the lush planned community of The Woodlands to the census-designated place of Aldine, two of the hundred moons orbiting Houston, the fourth-largest city in the US, a moist pit of poverty, exhaust fumes, and cockroaches the size of baby shoes.
Kurt tried to think of a song about Houston that was worth singing, and started humming Tom Waits’ Fannin Street. He wished he could take its advice.
They paused at the I-10 intersection, that east-west interstate forming the cross at the bull’s-eye of the city with I-45. A dozen Amtrak cars sat on the tracks, creaking in the wind. The Houston skyline started to the south, a mix of structures from 1920s castles to post-modern five-sided buildings and mirrored spires that reflected the sea-born clouds. Without the people and traffic, it felt like an open-air museum, an unnatural preserve with no mannequins to show what people once did there. It was odd to see a city built on the energies of oil, natural gas, and people like this. The h in H-Town now stood for hush.
They paused on the overpass at Memorial Drive, and had lunch in the shade of an abandoned semi-truck.
“I never went to NASA,” said Kurt as he chewed his way through a handful of pecans.
“What?”
“NASA. The space place. Where we used to launch rockets, here in Houston. “
“We launched rockets out of Houston?”
“Back in my grandfather’s day, that’s where we launched the first manned mission to the Moon. You didn’t learn that in school? Hard to believe that was our peak. We made a space shuttle that never had anywhere to shuttle people to, so it shuttled experiments and satellites, until two of them blew up, and we gave up.”
“Sounds like they were dangerous.”
“Everything worth doing is dangerous. Falling in love. Having kids. Riding bikes. Going to Mars. We lost our courage as a people. Sure, some people still had it, but as a people, as a group where we all had to commit resources to a common good, we were too scared and petty and divided to do anything worth remembering. Maybe that’s what happened. Maybe we were too stuck for too long, and some invisible force said, ‘That’s it. You can’t sit on your ass and eat bamboo all day, like a bunch of picky pandas. Time to give the real estate to something more ambitious.’”
They watched two seagulls fight over a dead frog, one dropping, the other catching, and closed their eyes. They only intended to rest for ten minutes. When they woke, the sun was setting.
Kurt cursed. “Hey! Wake up.”
Sophie looked around.
“Check the radio.”
She fumbled with the zipper on her bike’s rear bag, cranked the handle, and turned up the volume.
“This is the USS Fort Worth at Coast Guard Station Galveston. We have room for two survivors. We will update the count as we accept new passengers. Message repeats.”
They poured the rest of their water bottles on their heads and got on their bikes.
Pushing hard through the slopes and broad hills, they careened past abandoned cars and startled deer. The smells of Pasadena blanketed them from the east, giving further motivation to push, climb, and time their breathing. They were steady pumping machines, antelope of the highways, so sleek and fast that even hungry predators would just sit on their haunches and watch.
Or so they hoped.
The wind was their persistent enemy. It shifted from shoulder-facing shoves to glancing, stinking blows from the east.
Back when supplies could be counted on, the main weekend activity in Pasadena was crystal meth and racing cars down East Avenue. Big Oil may have kept its pot of black gold boiling near the Houston ship channel, but that didn’t mean the execs of Marathon or Exxon-Mobil ever came within smell range. They were in River Oaks, stinking up the place with $200 Arturo Fuentes and single-grain scotch, grousing about lib’ruls and the gub’mint while dock workers drag raced their rice burners for pink slips, and hookers booty-bumped crystal meth in gas station restrooms before singing their siren song for the quick and the dead.
Kurt took in the smells and sights, and knew racing to the ocean was not crazy. If he could, he would have raced to the Moon.
The air cleared when they got to League City. Kurt’s bike computer read 29 miles. Then, the world turned, the highway lifting to smash his head, his bike floating away as if made of air. It took 50 feet for his body to stop. Sophie saw what had happened, and leaned left, going off-road into the gravel and grass.
From the right shoulder, a man had thrown a long, straight stick – maybe a broom handle – straight into Kurt’s front spokes, the wood locking against the fork and turning the bike into a man-launching machine. Stunned, he tried to stand, but fell again, bleeding from his left forearm, which had a yellow bone sticking out below the elbow.
Sophie struggled to control her bike as the ground shifted from gravel to weed patches, bouncing the tires free from any useful traction. She fell off the bike in a more controlled manner than her father, and rolled across her back with a sound like luggage thrown from the back of a truck.
Kurt could hear nothing but a whine in his ears, as if he’d been shooting without earplugs. He couldn’t stand, but he could see the man coming towards him with an aluminum bat held to the side like a matador’s cape.
He had practiced this a thousand times. Never with a broken arm, and never while unable to stand, but he had practiced it enough that it came to him now through his fogged mind, the chilled comfort that said I know what to do.
The man approached warily, testing the weight of his bat before deciding to take it in both hands and swing in wide arc, counter-clockwise, to strike Kurt’s head.
Kurt waited. He had heard this was true, but he had not experienced it before, and in his shock there was a pleasant detachment to the experience. Knowing what his enemy was going to do, and being prepared for it, the motion seemed to take minutes. He waited. The man pulled back to swing with his full force, and in that moment Kurt leaned towards him, raising his good right hand and catching the attacker’s clenched hands like a baseball, and making a practiced arc towards his own hips. The man swung with such force that he was airborne halfway through the arc, his center of gravity so far past his feet that it looked like he’d been flung from a moving vehicle. The bat slid gracefully into Kurt’s hand as the man slammed into the asphalt, first by shoulder, then by skull.
Kurt got to his feet and staggered two steps towards him, raised the bat high, and dropped his hips sharply, slamming its tip into his skull. With one sharp crack, the man’s skull split, dislocating his jaw on the opposite end. His eyes looked at nothing, and he let out his last breath.
The other man appeared now, looking at Kurt in shock, and raced his bike ahead of them to the south.
Sophie cursed, scrambled to her bike, and pumped after him.
Her bike swayed left and right, like the tip of an ax trying to wedge its way out of the pavement. In a moment she was on him, and without a thought she crashed her bike into his, reaching out with both hands to wrap around his torso, tugging him off the bike and rolling onto the pavement. When the road and sky stopped spinning, she was on top of him, punching with both fists, over and over until he coughed bloody teeth and threw her off, cursing.
He pulled a knife, and Sophie drew her stomach back, extending her arms. He swiped, and she jumped back. He swiped again, and she jumped forward, keeping the outside of his the elbow in one of her palms while sliding her other hand up to his shoulder. Shifting her hips forward, she torqued him down, using his shoulder as a fulcrum, bouncing the knife and his face off of the pavement together. As he got to his knees, rubbing his bloody nose with his hand, she picked up the knife and looked to her father. He held his broken arm, but only watched. It would be her decision.
She grabbed his left ear and some hair and yanked, and as he turned his head to relieve the pain, she pulled the knife across the right side of his neck. Blood leapt to the road, and he clutched his throat, and rolled on his back. They looked at each other as he bled out, Sophie silent, the man gurgling. His heels scraped against the asphalt, and then he was still.
A radio played from the dead man’s bike bag.
“This is the USS Fort Worth at Coast Guard Station Galveston. We have room for two survivors. We will update the count as we accept new passengers. Message repeats.”
300 Miles to Galveston Page 9
