by Shows, Greg
Yet everything in her told her to run from this little town—from the rising line of white smoke she was seeing on its far side, to the faint smell of decomposing bodies mixed with the sweet scent of cooking meat that was now wafting into her nostrils on the storm wind.
There had been another Farm to Market road two miles back—one that would allow her to skirt Shanksborough and head west into the Egypt Valley Wildlife Area—a place almost guaranteed to be free of people. But she didn’t think she’d survive out in the storm—not even if she could get under the trees in some low area less prone to lightning strikes. If the wind was blowing hard at all the tent she’d rigged up the night before would get carried away like a straw in a tornado. She’d be suffocated or electrocuted.
Sadie’s hair flapped across her respirator shield as she unslung her pack and untied the paracord securing her rifle. She’d made up her mind now, and there was nothing to do but go ahead with the plan she’d formed in the last few seconds.
Lightning flashed overhead, and the constant rumble of thunder was overwhelmed by a sudden boom that then faded slowly to leave the rumble in place behind it.
According to the road signs she’d stopped and wiped clean in the past several miles, Shanksborough was the home of Blaine Technical College.
Sadie had never heard of Blaine Technical College—or Shanksborough. But she needed to stop there. And not just for shelter.
Big box stores and drugstores and convenience stores were probably all looted, and if they weren’t they were likely dangerous traps. But one place survivors might not have raided for useful supplies was a college science department.
She’d already played out the possibilities for how things might have gone differently if she’d gone to Youngstown State.
She might not have witnessed a murder, or become a murderer herself.
She might not have needed to gas a pack of dogs, or have discovered the Honda motorcycle.
She wasn’t going to miss out on another opportunity to get the supplies she needed.
Besides. She might find what she needed to make Tylenol, or at least find some iodine to purify water with. Maybe she’d find something to put into her laboratory when she got to Texas.
If she got to Texas.
Sadie pulled down her respirator and scanned the entire little town through her rifle scope, noting the heavily travelled sidewalks around some of the buildings at the center.
Like many American small towns, Shanksborough had been built around a public square with a courthouse and jail at its center.
But this public square looked different than most she’d seen on this journey. Several trailer homes had been parked across the roads leading into the square, effectively shutting down access to the square on all sides but one—the side opposite her.
The one road that did lead to the square was a long straight descent sloping downward from a hill slightly lower than the one she was spotting from. Anyone coming down that road would be wide open to gunfire from the people in the courthouse or on the roofs of the surrounding buildings.
These people, whoever they were, had turned their town square into a fortress. Only a narrow opening at the bottom of the hill allowed for access, and there were cars parked in a staggered offset pattern—to force any vehicle short of a tank to slow down and zig-zag in.
Who are they trying to keep out?
For a moment Sadie reconsidered her plan. But then she scanned the back “wall” of the square again, moving her scope to study the street and the buildings outside the fortress.
She saw the sniper—someone in a gray camo uniform concealed beneath the trailer, lying on their belly right in the middle of the road. Several sandbags had been stacked in front of the sniper, and their rifle was resting on one of them.
Sadie was too shocked to move at first, especially when it registered that the sniper had a rifle pointing right at her and was watching her through its scope.
With a sick feeling in her guts, Sadie lifted a hand and waved. Then a dozen or more narrow lightning bolts struck the trees along the road leading into the town square, and a massive bolt as big around as a jumbo jet body hit the top of the courthouse. It lit up the entire area as bright as a sunny day.
When the lightning went out Sadie’s retinas were singed. Purple spots danced before her, and took at least a full minute to go away completely. Then another bolt shot down and hit the courthouse.
When no fire resulted from the strikes, Sadie assumed the building had been well grounded.
The same could not be said of some of the businesses and houses in the neighborhoods off the square. Several homes had caught fire and were beginning to burn with smoldering flames, despite the heavy cloud of dust and the falling mud.
As she continued scanning the town through her scope she saw a dust-covered sign on a street next to a long canopy covering several gas pumps. The rectangular building set back from the canopy was the unmistakable size and shape of a 7-Eleven.
Half a mile or more beyond the 7-Eleven was the white smoke she’d seen rising on the far side of the town. It was coming from behind a three-story brick building that stood among a collection of other big brick and buildings.
The buildings were separated from the rest of the town by what had once been soccer fields and wide roads.
The smoke worried her, but she shoved aside her worry, telling herself she was going to have to take risks.
She cursed the cop who’d attacked her, then reminded herself that wishing to change the past couldn’t change the past, but could fatally delay you.
She would likely be able to travel without anyone hearing the Honda over the constant thunder, and if she had any kind of luck at all, she could be holed up safe and secure inside an empty college building within five minutes.
She’d be ready to ride out the storm.
Of course, it was also possible that by the time the trip was over the motorcycle’s air filter would be too clogged for her to run the engine.
Or worse—the dust would have gotten into the engine and turned to glass.
Then she’d be stuck here in this town, facing whatever horror her unconscious mind had been warning her to avoid.
Once again the Honda started up with no complaints.
If only my body was as durable.
After re-slinging her rifle and backpack Sadie descended the rise slowly, weaving among the short line of stalled and abandoned cars that choked the highway. She’d already covered a quarter of a mile when she realized what was bothering her: the tire tracks.
In all the miles she’d traveled since she left Youngstown, the only motorcycle tracks on the roads had been the cop’s. Those had disappeared down some side road, and if there had been others she hadn’t noticed.
She was noticing them now, though.
They were fresh.
Or fresh enough to worry her.
She slowed and studied the tracks in front of her. A dozen narrow grooves had been cut in the dust recently, as if several motorcycles had come up the hill one after another, or one motorcycle had come up and gone down again, or gone down and come up again. The possibilities were finite, but the implications were widely varied.
Sadie allowed the Honda to roll forward again. A gas station on her right was dust-covered and dark. The roof had collapsed, and the canopy over the pumps was sagging, ready to let go as soon as a strong enough wind blew in.
Across the street, a mechanic shop sat abandoned and looted, its garage doors wide open, its corrugated roof collapsed.
Inside were mounds of dust—so much dust that the garage’s walls were bulging outward from the weight. Seams in the corrugated aluminum had opened and spilled dust outside.
Straight ahead, the road curved around toward the courthouse square. To her right was a residential street lined with old simple houses of modest size.
“Old people houses,” her boyfriend would have called them.
They were simple wood-frame structures built atop pier
and beam foundations back in the forties, and if this neighborhood was like the one she’d lived in on the outskirts of Boston, the houses had mostly been inhabited by elderly residents on fixed incomes.
Or college kids.
Sadie pulled her compass out and studied the needle. Then she turned and proceeded slowly along the road.
There was no traffic jam.
Cars sat in driveways or parked next to curbs. If they hadn’t been covered in dust, you could almost imagine someone lived here.
If you could also ignored the collapsed roofs, smashed windows, and open, dark doorways.
Sadie was relieved to see no motorcycle tracks. She did see footprints criss-crossing the street, but they didn’t look recent. Dust had filled them in and softened their edges.
She rolled forward slowly, watching the middle distance.
When the street came to another four-way intersection, Sadie stopped. She wasn’t sure of the best way to go, so she looked at her compass and turned west, away from the courthouse and jail.
Rain began to fall.
If you could call blobs of black mud rain.
The mud splattered the road and coated her respirator shield and slapped into her arms and shoulders and head. She slowed, rolling forward at only a little more than a walking pace.
She scanned the road and the yards on both sides of it as best she could, despite the low visibility and constant flickering bolts of lightning striking to her left.
“Hey!” someone shouted at her.
Instantly, she revved the throttle and shot forward, not bothering to look for the source of the shout.
She raced down the street, peering ahead for any sudden blockage, bumping along the dust-covered asphalt, afraid to go any faster. If she wiped out now she didn’t think she’d be able to get back on the bike.
Sadie saw a small gray hump in the center of the street, and she slowed to circle around it, noting the shape of a bicycle beneath a thick layer of gray dust.
“That would’ve been bad,” she said, imagining what would’ve happened if she had hit it at high speed.
Seconds later she reached another intersection and turned without consulting her compass. The road curved, and the houses changed from old wood frames to more modern, brick and stone houses, with multiple stories and wider lots. She didn’t focus on the details of these houses. She was too busy trying to distance herself from the “hey-shouter” somewhere behind her.
She turned south. Rolled past a darkened grocery store and a block of various-sized buildings that had once been shops and stores.
Less than thirty seconds later the 7-Eleven she’d seen appeared ahead and to her right.
“Oh, thank heaven!” she mumbled, remembering some silly TV commercial she’d once seen on Youtube.
It reminded her how much she missed the internet.
But she didn’t have long to pine for it. For the first time since she’d started the Honda the day before it began to show signs of trouble. The air filter was clogging and the engine had begun to hesitate. It would run fine for a five or six seconds, then lose power for a second or two, then run again.
When she reached the entrance to the college, she turned in.
Almost immediately she passed a brick-bordered sign whose stone-veneer letters spelled out “Blaine Technical College.”
Off to the left were dust-covered soccer fields. The soccer goals had become fuzzy mounds at either end of each field.
Overhead, lightning was flashing constantly, as if the world had become a dance club with one kind of lighting effect—strobe lights.
Thunder boomed overhead, a constant loud rumble now, and she could barely hear her own engine.
The dust-enveloped road reached a three-pronged fork and Sadie stopped.
She put her feet down in the soft ashy dust. The road to the right was well-travelled. Dozens of tire tracks lead off toward two six-story tall buildings. The road crossed a bridge, then curved away and disappeared behind a stand of dead trees and a cluster of buildings.
The road ahead lead to what looked like an administrative building. It wasn’t as well-travelled as the road on the right, but enough tire tracks were grooved into its dust to make her wary of it.
The road to the left showed little sign of traffic. It curved around behind three brown-bricked buildings, squat and rectangular and from the fifties—most likely residential halls.
Beyond the buildings the road continued toward the back of the campus, where a baseball stadium stood. The stadium was surrounded by a gray belt of dead trees covered in light-blocking dust.
Sadie scanned the entire campus, sniffing the air.
The smell of cooking meat was strong now, making her mouth water. The column of white smoke she’d seen was several hundred yards away, on the other side of several buildings. If she wanted to know what was causing it, all she had to do was look.
She wasn’t sure she wanted to know what was causing it.
She was trying hard to ignore the dread in her stomach.
There was nowhere to hide here, and she was out in the open, way too exposed.
If someone was sighting on her, she could be killed before she even knew a bullet had hit her.
“Maybe that’d be better,” she mumbled, though she instantly told herself to shut up. She wasn’t just going to lie down and die. Her grandfather would never forgive her.
Not that he’d know. It wasn’t like he’d believed he would get to sit up in a cosmic skybox somewhere and watch his loved ones struggle through their lives.
“Do something,” her mind told her with her grandfather’s voice, so following some intuitive feeling, she turned her bike around and headed back to the street in front of the college.
She went slowly, giving anyone who might’ve been watching time to follow.
No one did.
When she looked back the campus looked as quiet as it had before—except for the white smoke.
Sadie cruised slowly, watching the dusty soccer fields fall behind her and give way to a gray tree line. She assumed this tree line had once marked the edge of the campus and provided separation between it and the now-looted shopping center next door.
Several parts of the shopping center had collapsed under the weight of the dust. The front windows had been blown out at some point.
Beyond the shopping center was another road, and when Sadie reached it she turned right.
She drove along the side of the shopping center, weaving in and out of abandoned cars, and looking at damage to the residential area next to the campus.
Dozens of nice houses sat back from the road on both sides, with heavy gray dust coating them. Windows were shattered in most of them. A few had been burned to the ground. Others had imploded.
Three hundred yards down the road Sadie found what she’d expected: a bridge.
She stopped next to the curb and eased the Honda up onto the sidewalk.
Once again, the constant rumble of thunder replaced the sound of the engine, along with periodic booms and pops and crackling lightning strikes that lit up everything around her.
Sadie clicked the bike into neutral and got off, then rolled it across the dusty front yard of some long-dead or departed resident.
A chain link fence separated the yard from a stair-stepped retaining wall keep that had kept the land from washing out and the house from collapsing into the creek below.
In an attempt to keep the retaining wall from looking industrial, they’d mortared a stone veneer onto it.
Sadie took the bike to the edge of the yard and parked it next to the fence, facing up toward the street. She slipped off her pack, opened it, and pulled out the tarp she’d used to make a tent her night before.
The tent fell loosely over the bike, and she used her toes to push its edges down into the dust.
Her back and arm were now screaming at her, but she wasn’t ready to stop. The black rain was coming in again, splattering her hair and face shield with mud. Lightning stru
ck repeatedly less than half a mile away—based on the count she kept after the flashes.
Sadie untied her rifle from the pack and slid it under the tarp. She hated to leave the 30.06 behind, but she didn’t want have a choice. The hike she was about to take was as dangerous as anything she’d done in the last nine months and if anything went wrong she needed to be able to run like hell.
Before leaving, Sadie scooped up handfuls of dust and tossed them all over the tarp, repeating the process until it looked as if it had been sitting there since the Crisis began.
She found a few river rocks in the flower beds near the abandoned house and carried them back to weigh down the tarp.
Grinding her teeth against the pain in her back and arm and legs, Sadie climbed the chain link fence, dropped onto the stair-stepped retaining wall, and climbed down the stone veneer until she was next to the black sludgy water in the creek.
She wasn’t sure how long of a hike she had. All she knew was the storm was here, and the lightning was striking the land around her with the rapidity of a machine gun, and she was about to wade through a creek of gray sludgy water.
“Just go,” she told herself, imagining her grandfather’s voice, and before she could talk herself out of going, she went.
Chapter 5
Ten minutes later, Sadie was on the campus of Blaine Technical College, hiding under a bridge that spanned the sludgy little creek running through the campus.
Her pants were soaked and stained with black sludge up to the knees, and she was shivering in the cold wind.
This was the second bridge Sadie had hidden under since she began her approach to the college—the first having been part of the barely travelled road she’d seen earlier. Now she was beneath the bridge that spanned the middle road—the road that would take her to the fire if she wanted to go there.
She didn’t want to go there.
Because of the bodies.
She’d come across dozens in the creek: corpses missing heads and arms and legs, gnawed feet and hands and ribcages, bones picked clean of meat.
Her heart was racing now, and her teeth were chattering, and she was so scared it took all her will to not turn and run back to her bike.
