by Shows, Greg
“Yeah,” Sadie yelled, and grinned as she got low on the bike and turned the throttle. The Honda shot forward, and Callie leaned down so that her cheek was against the rifle scope tied to Sadie’s pack.
Three blocks later the road made a long, sweeping turn to the east, and Sadie had to slow down to keep from spilling them onto the asphalt.
“Turn right!” Callie yelled once they came out of the curve, and Sadie slowed further, looking for a gap in the row of abandoned cars.
The two Harleys gained on them, and when Sadie blasted through the gap between a pickup and a giant SUV, Bryce’s sons sprayed bullets at them.
Dust leapt up from the road around them and a slug slammed into Sadie’s backpack. She felt as if someone had punched her hard in the back. A second later whatever had stopped the bullet from killing her began transferring the heat from the bullet to her skin.
“Jesus!” she yelled, unable to do anything about the hot lead burning into her back.
She cranked the throttle back almost as far as it would go. The Honda hesitated only an instant before blasting forward onto the new street—a street with a cul-de-sac at the end.
“That way,” Callie yelled, and she pointed over Sadie’s shoulder. Behind them, the Harley riders gained quickly.
A bullet whizzed by Sadie’s ear, and `she cranked the throttle to the max. The bike raced up the street, hit the end of a driveway, and angled off across the dust-laden yard between two McMansions.
Sadie zinged over a narrow alley and between another pair of houses. The Harleys roared after them, but Callie kept them back with several shots.
They emerged from between the houses a second later, and Callie pointed Sadie toward another road, this one a four lane thoroughfare with cars jammed in both directions.
The road rose steeply to the top of a hill and then curved around toward the center of town.
Sadie raced along the center line, dangerously fast and horribly close to the abandoned cars, but soon they crested the hill and zoomed toward the heart of the town—the square—and the wall of double-wide trailers surrounding it.
Dread filled her guts when she looked at the rows of offset cars at the bottom of the hill. She would have to slow to a crawl if she didn’t want to slam herself into one of the cars like a bug on a windshield. They’d be easy prey for the maniacs on the Harley’s then.
“Whoooo!” Callie yelled as Sadie cranked the throttle and the bike leapt ahead.
Sadie glanced at the speedometer.
Her head began to feel light as she realized she was moving at over ninety on a sheet of dust and ash. If she didn’t slow soon, she wouldn’t be able to stop. She’d have to lay down the bike and slide over dusty asphalt with no helmet or leathers.
Callie fired again, and almost immediately someone on top of a building or trailer down in the square fired too.
The shot took out the rider of first bike. Sadie saw him slump sideways in her mirror, and the bike went sideways with him. The boy behind him was flung up and over a car parked on the side of the road. He seemed to hang in the air forever, arcing down and skidding over the dust that coated a parking lot next to the street.
The driver wasn’t so lucky. He went head first into the back of an abandoned car, and was crushed as the motorcycle followed him into the bumper.
For a second Sadie thought it was Bryce who’d gone down, but then she saw him. His younger son was firing over his shoulder. Callie fired again, and Bryce flinched as a bullet whizzed by him.
Then another rifle opened up from the top of the trailer house wall they’d surrounded their square with.
Bryce fell behind Sadie, and she saw him turn his bike and head back to where his son had been thrown off the bike.
Sadie let go of the throttle.
It was a good thing.
She was only thirty yards away from the offset cars blocking the entrance to the square.
The Honda slowed quickly, and Sadie clamped the brakes hard. The Honda stopped less than six feet from the side of the first car.
“Hands up!” someone yelled, and Sadie put her feet down and raised her arms.
“Don’t shoot!” Callie yelled, “It’s me!”
She stepped off the back of the bike with her hands raised, the pistol pointed into the air.
“Callie” someone shouted, and rushed out through the zigzag path of cars.
“Professor!” Callie yelled, and then there were half a dozen people around them, pointing guns at Sadie and hugging Callie like she was their long lost kin.
Two hundred yards away, Bryce stood astride his bike screaming curses and threats as his youngest son helped his older brother limp to the Harley.
“Should we go get them?” someone asked, but the man who’d run out to embrace Callie shook his head.
“No,” he said.
“But he’s vulnerable,” someone else said.
“Which means he might be more dangerous than usual,” the professor said. “We can’t act without information. He could have an ambush set up out there.”
“He doesn’t,” Sadie said.
No one listened to her.
“The professor’s right, in this case,” a woman said.
She wore a blue cop uniform exactly like the man who’d attacked her that morning. Fear hit her in the chest and she reached for her pistol. She wanted to run. But then she asked herself exactly where she’d run to.
She realized the cop didn’t have a gun out, and didn’t look crazed, or sound like she wanted to rape or kill or eat anyone.
“Let’s see who we got behind the respirator,” the cop said, and nodded at Sadie.
Sadie lowered her arms and pulled down the respirator.
“Everyone,” Callie said. “Meet Sadie.”
Chapter 11
The fire inside the courthouse was small and contained, burning in a fire bowl at the center of the building, beneath the domed roof. The fire bowl was surrounded by stacks of bricks on three sides. Heat radiated from the bricks, and smoke rose up into a galvanized funnel eight feet across.
The funnel hung suspended from the ceiling, ten feet above the fire, and it constricted down to a chimney tube a foot wide. The tube made a ninety degree turn and ascended in a low-angled spiral that carried the smoke and heat once around the entire room before it made another turn and exited through a hole in the wall.
Rich Landry, the man who’d owned the hardware store a block off the square, had built the thing, along with a wind turbine and solar array on top of the jailhouse and several other stores.
The solar array didn’t bring much power in with all the dust in the air, they’d told her. But it brought in a little, and with the wind they were able to build a grow room for fresh tomatoes.
Sadie noted the six glowing LED lights strung around the room and for the first time in a long time began to wonder if humanity might be able to avoid extinction.
Sadie sat in a chair six feet away from the fire bowl, and listened to the courthouse residents. An hour earlier she’d eaten the first full meal she’d had in weeks, and followed it up with three Ibuprofin tablets and a double shot of moonshine some innovative genius had made out of potato peels a month into the crisis.
The mood in the courthouse was light. All the cans Callie had carried away from the college had been opened and turned into what amounted to a feast for the thirty-one residents surviving at the heart of Shanksborough, Ohio.
While they’d eaten they’d listened to Sadie’s story, and had thanked her profusely for rescuing Callie from the cannibals—and for killing several of their enemies.
Sadie asked questions about the little community, and was told the professor and the woman in the cop uniform—May—had gotten together the day of the eruption and made plans to turn the courthouse and jail into a fortress.
“Professor Davidson was a history professor,” May told Sadie. “He convinced me we’d need to do something drastic. And since I was the chief of police, I was in a po
sition to do it. Turned out he was right.”
“A bunch of townspeople tried to leave,” the professor said. “They packed up their cars and headed out. I expect they’re mostly all dead.”
Sadie nodded, and told them what she’d seen on the road between Boston and Shanksborough—the gridlocked freeways and farm-to-market roads, the dead bodies, the burned farmhouses and bombed out and shot up villages. She told them about skirting their fortress that morning.
“We heard you,” May said. “Thought you was one of them.”
“You might’ve got shot if you’d come down, even though you did wave,” Rich said. “The only reason we didn’t shoot you this afternoon was all the gunfire. I was watching through my scope. I knew you weren’t with them.”
“How’d y’all do this?” Sadie asked. “No one else I’ve seen did this.”
“Luck,” the professor said. “The right people in the right place at the right time, like so much of human history.”
“May appropriated these trailers and moved them in the day after the eruption,” Rich said. “You should’ve heard the townspeople howling about it. But May did it anyway. Told the townspeople to fire her next election. When everything went to shit a week later, the ones that griped the most were the ones who came begging for shelter.”
“What’d you do?”
“They let us in,” Rich said with a smile. “A lot of us are still here.”
“That was forgiving of them,” Sadie said.
“People are human capital,” the professor said. “They represent potential. Not food.”
Soon the discussion turned toward their enemies.
“We should attack them immediately,” May said. It was a claim nearly identical to the one she’d made after their meal was over. “We’ve got the numbers, and thanks to Sadie, they’ve got to be reeling and in shock.”
“We should wait until we know more,” the professor said. “All we know right now is they lost Big Jim and his mother, and whoever that was Rich shot off the bike. Sadie and Callie blew up six of their motorcycles, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have cars or trucks to send at us.”
“Or more bikes,” Rich said.
“That’s why we should hit them now…,” said a guy wearing a green John Deere cap. Sadie had met the man but didn’t remember his name. “Sadie and Callie both said they think those animals are holding more people prisoner. While we sit around eating, innocent people could be dying.”
“We could wait a week,” another man said. He was an old guy with a severe crew cut that screamed “ex-military.” “That’ll give us time to see what they throw at us. And once they’ve relaxed again, we could send in three or four of us to hit them again. See if we can’t take out more of their command and control ability. I could train some folks.”
The argument, which had never once gotten heated, went on and on, with most of the people living in the fortress at the center of town in attendance. Few of them spoke, but they were all listening, as if this was the best entertainment they’d had in weeks.
Sadie wondered about the food they’d eaten, and if these people were going to have enough to make it. Was the old meth-head cannibal right? Were they all going to succumb to savagery? Would they all eat the Black Feast eventually?
Sadie yawned and stretched, only slightly pained by the massive bruising that had developed across her back. She grew bored with the argument quickly. Her head was buzzing and she was ready to sleep. When the yawn was over and she dropped her hands to her sides someone took her by the elbow.
“Come on,” Callie whispered, and pulled her out of the chair.
“What?” Sadie whispered back.
“They’ll be at this for hours,” she said. “You should sleep.”
Sadie stood and grabbed her backpack and followed Callie. They moved quietly through the chairs and couches that had been arranged around the fire bowl. Cots and sleeping bags were lined the walls of the building, in the gaps between the padded bench seats that had once been part of the courthouse proceedings but were now for sleeping on.
Callie took Sadie to where a single mattress lay on the floor directly below the judge’s bench.
“This was where Jenna and I slept.”
“Oh,” Sadie said.
“We lost our sleeping bag to those bastards, but May loaned me a blanket and a pillow.”
“Who runs this place?” Sadie asked.
“Everyone, supposedly,” Callie said, “but really it’s the professor and May and Rich Landry, and a few others. They’re like a town council, and they decide everything by vote.”
“Sounds inefficient.”
“It is,” Callie said. “And frustrating. But most of these people have known each other their entire lives, so they trust each other.”
Callie pulled off her tennis shoes and unbuckled Sadie’s cop belt and took off the holster and shotgun and sat down on the mattress. She was wearing a clean set of clothes someone had given her, and Sadie’s MIT shirt and workout shorts had been washed and returned to her pack.
“Go ahead and ask me,” Callie said. “I’ve seen the way you’re looking at me when you don’t think I’m looking.”
Sadie winced. Then she sat down next to Callie and stared off at the fire bowl forty feet away.
“Why’d you kill her?” Sadie asked.
“She deserved it,” Callie said. “They all do.”
“Even Bryce’s kids.”
“They’re not kids,” Callie said, her voice rising. “They want to act like men, they can die like men.”
People around the fire turned to look at Callie. Earlier, May had taken Callie off and talked to her, and when they’d come back the cop had seemed so angry she wanted to kill someone on the spot. Maybe it was the reason she was arguing so vehemently for attacking the college.
Sadie knew Callie was oversimplifying things. People didn’t just choose to be evil. People were made evil by their circumstances.
Even if Bryce’s kids at had been born genetically predisposed to psychopathy, their experiences were what had made them monsters. But try explaining that to a rape victim whose girlfriend was murdered and eaten less than twenty-four hours ago.
When civilization goes away, so does nuance, complexity of thought, and progress.
Sadie was quiet for a few seconds, then said, “How come all these people stayed here? Why didn’t they try to evacuate, or go somewhere safer?”
“It’s their home. Where would they go?”
“I don’t know,” Sadie said. “East?”
“There’s nowhere safe,” Callie said. “Even with those assholes running around they’re safer here than they would be anywhere else.”
Sadie stared at Callie.
“You don’t know what’s happened, do you?”
“What’s happened to what?”
“To everything,” Callie said. “Where’ve you been?”
“Hiding,” Sadie said. “Hiking through the woods. Avoiding humans.”
“It’s a complete disaster,” Callie said. “The volcano destroyed the west, and something happened to Washington D.C. Then a bunch of nuclear plants blew up in North Carolina and Pennsylvania and the south part of New York. New York City is gone, There’s no government, and there’s no one coming to help us.”
Sadie stared at Callie in disbelief.
“The professor says the rest of the nuclear plants will eventually go up too, when the people running them finally give up and leave. That’s why Jenna and me were going to West Virginia. There aren’t any nuclear plants where my grandparents live. We just have to avoid any that have already blown up.”
“That’s why he had the Geiger counter,” Sadie said, remembering the long-haired man’s pack.
“Who?” Callie asked, but Sadie didn’t respond.
That was only yesterday.
Sadie sat still and tried to breathe. She’d known things were bad, and had suspected there’d been some nuclear problems, but she’d never though
t it would be this bad. Her head felt like it was about to float away from her body, and the sound of the discussion around the fire faded out so that all she could hear was the blood rushing through her ears.
“What will you do now?” Sadie asked, digging in her pack and pulling out stray 9mm bullets. She ejected her clip and reloaded it, then slammed it home and tucked it back into her parka pocket.
“I’m going to West Virginia,” Callie said. “My grandparents are old. They’re gonna need help. But first I’m going to Steubenville.”
Sadie tried to remember the maps she’d studied during her journey from Boston.
“That’s northeast of here, not south.”
“This guy who came through here a month ago said they’ve done better than most people. They’ve got guns for sale. And food. Seeds. We’re going to need them on my grandparent’s farm.”
Sadie felt her chest fill with dread.
“How’re you going to pay for stuff?”
Callie grinned.
“Not like you’re thinking,” she said. Then she looked around the courthouse to make sure no one was watching them. “I stole more than food from that bitch.”
Callie slipped a hand into the pocket of the pants she was now wearing. She pulled out a Ziploc baggie and held it close to her body. Inside the bag were hundreds of chunks of a crystalline substance.
“Is that—?” Sadie whispered.
Callie grinned again and stuffed the baggie into her pocket.
“It is,” she said. “And if I can get it to Steubenville I can trade it for everything I’ll need. You should come with me. It’s only fifteen miles. We could do that on your bike in a day. You could protect me. Maybe you’ll decide you want to come with me to my grandparents’ farm.”
“I can’t,” Sadie said. “I’ve got to get to Texas. My parents...my mom…”
Sadie felt like she was going to cry.
Callie slid beneath the blanket.
“You should lie down,” Callie said. “You can sleep here with me. I won’t try nothing.”
Without a word, Sadie took off her parka and boots. Then dug inside her backpack and pulled out the Geiger counter and some spare batteries. She held it out to Callie.
