by Bobby Adair
I didn’t want to tell them because I knew in my heart I was right. Now, I was right about what to expect when we arrived.
Either way, they'd insist on finishing the journey. They'd say, "We've come this far. We can't know for sure. Let's just go and find out."
I stared at the water and saw through the clear layer to the settled murk at the bottom as it oozed in unnatural, transfixing colors that didn't mean anything. For a moment they were just distracting me from my fear. And my fear was certain, and it was painful. I didn't want to see another dead friend.
Somewhere along the road I’d been ticking through a quota of murders and a quota of dead friends without knowing it, without knowing it existed, until that moment as the idea of seeing one more person die felt too painful to face. I’d seen enough. I’d killed my share.
The Ogre and the Harpy in all their attempts to forge a remorseless malcontent, a pale-faced demigod, a haunting demon, a heartless destroyer to thrive in the aftermath of humanity's fall, had failed. Their nasty words, their shitty apathy, their brutal fists, their leather belts, and their hard hearts had done nothing but make a man who could still see one too many broken bodies. There was nothing special about Zed Zane. I was as fragile as everybody else, and I was afraid to put a voice to the confession because speaking the words would cement my mediocrity into reality.
Null Spot the Destroyer was dead. He died of a daunted heart in an introspective moment when nobody was looking.
“We need to get going,” said Grace. “Maybe you should sit in the back for a while. I’ll drive. You want to get back in the truck?”
“We’re safe here.” It was a deflection. I looked around the dead landscape. “Not a White for miles. There’s no hurry.”
“If we want to get there by dark,” Grace countered, “we need to go.”
I dropped to the ground and sat in the dirt, still facing the pond. Grace and Murphy shared some silent glances, trying to figure things out. Eve came over to the bottom of the dike, and Grace urged her to give us some room while hinting that she take the opportunity to top off the gas tanks with the full cans in the rear of the truck. Then, Grace sat down beside me.
Murphy huffed and sat down too.
“We can stay a while if you want,” she said. “It’s pretty here in a desolate sort of way.”
Murphy laughed. “It’s fuckin’ ugly. It’s like the Devil’s butthole or something.”
That took me by surprise, and I couldn't help but laugh. "It is fuckin' ugly out here."
“I bet we’ll have pretty sunsets.” Grace pointed west. “No buildings to block the view. Nothing really.”
Murphy added, “Not until you get to the mountains.”
“The Davis Mountains,” Grace confirmed.
I took a deep breath. “I know you guys think I’m half crazy half the time.”
“More than half on both counts,” Murphy told me.
I looked over at Murphy. "Back in College Station after we got off the helicopter that first day. You were in a weird mood, and you've been different ever since. I was thinking at the time maybe you'd had your fill. You were done with the killing and running. Is that true?"
Murphy looked at me for a long time, but he wasn't looking at me as much as he was looking into his own heart, maybe deciding what he was going to say, maybe deciding if I was speaking the truth.
“People can only take so much,” said Grace. “It’s natural.”
“So much death?” I asked.
“It’s all emotional trauma,” she told me. “Everybody’s got their limit. Murphy has his. You have yours. Everybody does. Is that what this is? Do you think you’ve hit yours?”
I glanced over at Murphy, who was still wending through the maze of his thoughts. I looked back at Grace, and I wanted to wrap my bullshit in another lie, but I nodded. I said, "Yeah. I think maybe so."
Murphy smiled in the heartbreaking way he does sometimes when his eyes are stuck with the depth of all the sadness he's trying to work through. "I think I've been cooked for a while.” He shook his head in answer to an unasked question and wrapped his arm over my shoulder. "But you're my brother, man. We've been through the shit, and we get more shit every day. I can't let you down. Seemed like you had some crazy you needed to work out of your system and if I didn't come along to watch your back, you'd have got yourself killed."
I wanted to insist that I'd have been okay on my own, but I knew it was a lie.
“Is that why you don’t want to go to Balmorhea?” Grace asked. “You’re afraid of what you might find there?”
I chuckled through the briefest of seconds as I looked back up at Grace. “You’re insightful. I’ll give you that.”
“People aren’t as hard to read as they think they are,” she said.
I shrugged. Maybe she was right.
“Why the change of heart?” asked Murphy. “You were optimistic about it. I mean, optimistic for you.” He added a pained laugh. “What’s different today?”
I pointed out at the arid landscape. “That’s how I remember this part of Texas. I didn’t think a White could ever cross the distance to get all the way out here, not from Austin, hell, not even from Fort Stockton.” I pointed at the water. “But they could. I wouldn’t drink this shit but Whites will. There’s nothing to stop them.”
“It’s still a long, long way,” said Grace. “Like we talked about, there aren’t that many people out here. So no matter what else is a factor, the chances are better for somebody out here than back in Austin or College Station, let alone Dallas and Houston.”
“And in Easy Town,” said Murphy, hope in his voice. “What if most of the Whites out here are the docile ones? What if most everybody died from the virus and never turned into a White.”
“He’s right,” said Grace. “Maybe things aren’t as bad in Balmorhea as you think they’ll be.”
“Maybe,” I allowed. “Maybe.”
Murphy said, "Look, man if you want to wait out here in the desert or whatever the fuck this dry ass place is, and sit here watching the stinky water, I'll sit here with you. If that's what you want. But I need to go to Balmorhea. It doesn't have to be today. It can be tomorrow or the next day. You don't have to come if you don't want, but I have to go. I'll take a truck and go by myself if I need to. No big deal. I need to know if Rachel is okay."
And that was a fear I didn’t want to face. If she was dead, it was my fault. “What if she’s not?”
Murphy pursed his lips, and the pain showed deep in his eyes again. He shook his head slowly, and a few tears rolled down his cheek. "She's my sister.” His voice cracked, and he cleared his throat. "It's a fucked up world. I understand what might be there. I just need to know."
“I’ll come with you.” I took a deep breath. “We’ll deal with it together.”
Chapter 58
West of Fort Stockton we wound up on Interstate Highway 10, the main artery for traffic crossing through Texas from Houston to El Paso. It was two lanes in each direction with a barren median a hundred feet wide and right-of-way bordered by thin barbed wire fences thirty or forty feet from the shoulders. When we did see abandoned cars, they were off the roadway and where the passengers had gone was anybody's guess. The desert, dotted with scrubby brush, stretched flat all the way from a row of smooth mountains far in the south to the horizon in the north.
We made good time driving west on the highway, as there was no reason to slow. The road was clear and flat for miles.
Grace, who'd been driving the lead vehicle since my pit stop in the oil fields, took the exit off Highway 10 to Balmorhea, and that put us on a two-lane road heading toward the foothills of the mountains in the south.
Grace slowed the truck to thirty. It was time for caution.
Houses, barns, and dilapidated buildings with no apparent purpose dotted the lots along the road. They gave the impression we were nearing a ghost town. When we passed a green sign that marked the city limits, Balmorhea looked like any of the dozen
s of dead little towns I'd seen on the trip—abandoned cars, houses with broken windows and open doors. One thing was missing, though, the remains of the dead.
My sense of normalcy had altered since the virus came. The dead were supposed to be in the streets. Their absence felt creepy.
Alternatively, the missing dead were signs of hope. Somebody had disposed of the bodies.
Grace turned left when we reached a yellowish-tan brick building the size of a small house, the post office. We drove through a grid of streets maybe eight blocks long and eight blocks wide that made up the whole town. We saw no sign of life.
“Which way?” Grace asked, stopping the truck in an intersection no different from most of the others.
Murphy shook his head, silently.
I nudged Javendra as I looked through his side window. “You see anything out that side?”
“No.”
I didn't see anything either, at least, nothing like what I was looking for—one of the Humvees, one of the pickups, Sergeant Dalhover, and Rachel. But no Whites either. Not one.
“The place isn’t that big,” said Grace. “We can check every street.” She looked at Murphy. “It’ll take us what, fifteen minutes?”
Murphy nodded.
Grace looked over her shoulder at Javendra. “Jump out and go tell Fritz what we’re doing so he won’t think I’m going nuts.”
“Okay.” Javendra reached for his door handle.
I flung my door open and said, “I got it.” I jumped out of the truck, not wanting to risk humanity’s hope with such a trivial task. I let Fritz know the plan, went back to sit behind Grace, and we drove.
Indeed, it took all of fifteen minutes to go up and down every street in town, passing the cars and houses, seeing no signs of life. We found ourselves back on the two-lane road we’d exited onto from Highway 10. Our pickups stopped in the middle of the road with engines idling and we were all out, standing, drinking water or warm soda, taking our necessary breaks, and sharing a box of stale crackers.
“I don’t want to be the one to say it,” said Grace, “but if they’d driven those Humvees here, we’d have seen them. Town’s not that big.”
“Do you think there’s a place they could have stopped on the way?” Fritz asked Murphy and me. “Maybe a better place.”
Murphy and I shared a look. We understood Fritz was trying to make us feel better with the suggestion, but neither of us was inclined to believe it. We’d seen too many hopes dashed. Murphy’s face turned hard. He was accepting the same thing I was accepting. Dalhover, Rachel, and the others had never made it. They’d been ambushed somewhere along the way, or were overrun by Whites, or broke down and been killed one by one as they tried to scavenge and survive, one of a thousand stories we’d heard or seen. There wasn’t a lot of room in the post-virus world for hope.
It was time to stop pretending and focus on practicalities. It was late in the day. We had a few more hours of sun. I told the others, “We should probably find a place to stay tonight.”
“Where’s this spring you told us about?” Jazz asked. “I mean, that’s the whole reason for coming here, right? An unending supply of clean water to drink and irrigate the fields. Where is it?”
I looked around to get my bearings, then pointed down the two-lane highway. "A mile or two down that way. It's a state park."
“A state park?” Grace asked. “So they’ve probably got a few buildings for the rangers or something?”
“Something like that.” I’d been to the park once, years ago. “Some cabins too.”
Fritz stepped away from the group and looked down the highway as though the room around him would help him to see better. “Remote?”
I looked around at the empty landscape outside of town. “Even more remote than this.”
“Maybe we stay there tonight,” offered Grace. “Should be safe.” She looked around at each of us. Silent consensus. We loaded up in the trucks.
It took all of a minute to pass the city limits sign on the way out of town. Houses grew sparse again and the bleached land stretched into nothingness in the north. In the southwest, the direction we were heading, the bald, brown mountains grew taller with our approach.
I watched through the windshield, looking across the plain at an irregularity far down the road. It grew larger and slowly clarified until I was able to make out a flat, white building with a red tile roof just off the highway on the left—the park's visitor cabins.
They weren’t cabins, not as anyone would think of a cabin. Lodge might be a better word, though it resembled one of those roadside motels from the 1950s. The lodge was made up of two L-shaped buildings, five small apartments each, laid out in roughly the configuration of a horseshoe with a narrow gap at the top, opposite the open end. At the open end, there was a driveway a few cars wide, which provided access to a central courtyard for parking between the buildings.
The layout gave the feeling of an old Spanish mission laid out a bit like a fort to defend from the Apaches in the area. To enhance the impression, canals drained water away from the spring and down to a lake that lay southeast of the city. The canals looped around the horseshoe fortress adding an extra defense for anyone inside. As Grace had guessed, it would be a relatively safe place to stay.
After a few more minutes of slowly driving, we passed a sign for the park and Grace slowed the truck to make the turn into the entrance. We drove right by the ranger’s booth. Nobody there to charge us an entry fee. What a surprise. Off to our left, the driveway led to the mouth of the courtyard between the two main buildings and Murphy said, “Holy shit, Zed! You see this?”
Just inside the mouth of the horseshoe, hidden from the road, sat two Humvees with fifty-caliber machine guns mounted on top. Behind each gun, the figure of a person stood, training the weapons on us.
“Stop the truck!” Murphy told Grace. “Stop!” He jumped out while the truck was still rolling, letting the door swing open behind him.
Seeing Murphy go, I followed quickly.
Murphy ran ahead and slowed to a walk, as I came up beside him. We were still twenty or thirty yards from the Humvees and several people were moving around behind them, armed, not ready to show themselves. I couldn’t tell if they were our friends or some bunch of hostile assholes with the same idea I’d had.
Come to Balmorhea. Be safe.
Three figures walked out from between the two Humvees—a tall, older woman, an athletic black woman, and an unimpressive older man with bad posture.
“Holy shit,” I muttered. It was Gretchen, Dalhover, and Rachel.
They’d made it. They were fucking alive and they’d made it all the way across Texas.
Rachel shrieked and the tears flowed as she ran to Murphy, who grabbed her in his arms, hugged her, and cried as well.
“Figured you were dead,” Dalhover rasped as he drew close, his hand extended to shake mine. Gretchen trailed behind, a smile on her face as well. Others stepped out from behind their cover.
“It’s—” My voice cracked as I grasped Dalhover’s hand.
In a very unlikely move, he reached an arm around my back to give me a hug. “Never thought I’d say I was glad to see you, but I am.”
We separated. I wiped some creeping moisture out of my eyes and was immediately engulfed in a big hug from Gretchen.
“Didn’t think we’d ever see you again,” said Dalhover shaking his head and looking back toward the Humvees. “Guess you don’t know.”
Gretchen let me go, grasped my shoulders and held me still to look me up and down. "I'm not sure if you look better or worse but it's good to see you, really good."
"It's good to see you guys too,” I told them. It was better than good. It was fantastic. It was the refutation of all my irrational dread. It was a genuine reason to be happy. Wait. I looked at Dalhover, guessing immediately some of them hadn't made it. Some of them were dead. "What don't I know?"
Dalhover looked toward the Humvees again, drawing my eyes in that direction.
Walking toward us, with pale skin, green eyes, flaming red hair blowing in the breeze, looking bewildered, was Steph.
I think my heart stopped beating for a second, maybe a minute. The world stood still around me. Everything went silent. I thought I might explode from a mix of confused feelings.
Reaching her arms around me to pull me tightly to her, close enough for me to feel her breath blow across my ear, she said, "Wow, you're still alive.” She started to cry.
A rush of confusion slapped me in the face. A mountain of guilt poured over me. I’d abandoned her on the shore all those months ago. I thought she was dead. I fucked up. I so fucked up.
“Wow,” my mouth said, running on autopilot, as my arms tried to remember how to hold a woman like I never wanted to let her go again. “You’re still alive.”
Chapter 59
Murphy was so goddamned happy, his happiness seemed to wash over everyone in range of his big voice. People were smiling all around us, introducing themselves, asking questions and trading answers.
Not Steph and I. It was like they were all outside a bubble, the center of which stood me with her, separate from them. Looking at her face, seeing a ragged scar on her forehead running up into her hair, another on her cheek below her left eye, I felt a stab of pain at what she’d gone through. But the scars didn’t make her ugly. They made her real. They made her on the outside what she was on the inside—tough and beautiful.
The wind blew her hair across her face and when she brushed it away, I saw the marks where teeth had torn at her forearm, and across the top of her hand. They’d healed, too. I recalled all the cuts, the bites, the bullet hole, the bruises, and the scrapes that left marks all over me I’d carry until the day I died. In that way, she and I were a match, damaged survivors, still standing when so many others had fallen.
