Grants Pass

by Cherie Priest

  But her options had dwindled somewhat. Lanzarote was an island less than 900 kilometers in area. Much of the north was lost to old volcano fields and a barren lunar landscape too inhospitable to afford safe refuge, and the capital to the east had been on fire too many weeks. A stagnant air — now bereft of the north-east trade winds that had cooled the equatorial heat from the south — had hung great clouds of smoke and debris over Arrecife and the island’s only airport, choking any lingering idea of escape. In the end, she had been forced to take to the hills high above Puerto Del Carmen.

  Louise turned away from the dark beyond the picture window. The heat was an oppressive cerement that made her feel claustrophobic, clinging to her back and chest, and chasing away her fear. She no longer opened the windows at night. The arid island had previously suffered only mosquitoes and the occasional cockroach. Now insects, often the size of her fist, invaded the resort every sundown — even this high in the hills — battering their grotesque bodies and thrumming wings against the opaque walls of her lit prison.

  That was all she now allowed herself. Light in the dark.

  Her new sanctuary was far more luxurious a villa than her own had been: an abandoned mansión complete with generator, wrought-iron gates and a walled enclosure. All she needed to do was sit this out — whatever this was — and when it was safe again, she could go back down and find help.

  There was still plenty of food in the freezer, but this comforted as much as the false solace that there would ever again be help to be found. The generator was still working, humming away in the sloped subterranean garage under her feet, but even with the air-conditioning turned off, there was no denying that it was fast running out of juice.

  And there was an even more immediate concern. There was less than half a water bottle left. Despite always adhering to such prohibition before, she was more than prepared to drink water from the taps, but what was still in the cisterns likely wouldn’t last very long. There were no rivers on Lanzarote, no natural supply of water anywhere on this Land of a Thousand Volcanoes. Severe drought had been the norm even before the world had fallen apart.

  But she would not go down. Not while her courage still failed her. Not while fires still raged; while madmen doubtless still prowled the streets with knives and clubs — and grins so terrorized that they were beyond reason or fear; while barricades distorted the familiar, creating a patchwork of hasty and oft-disputed territory that stretched as far west as the harbor and as far east as the still-burning capital. Nor while bloated bodies stacked up alongside the promenades and restaurant bars like rank, slack-mouthed sentinels.

  ****

  Louise returned to the window and sipped her tepid water, and tried not to think. She eyed the blank television with something between resentment and longing. It hadn’t worked for weeks. The last storm had torn down the roof aerial, although the screen had been showing only static by then. The phones had gone out long before that. In a way she had been glad. The internet had been screaming and unrestrained, and yet she had come back to it again and again, picking over its dire portents and accounts of mayhem and disease like a scab.

  She reached into her shorts pocket and felt the reassuring square of paper there. Kayley. A sudden spike of lightning danced across the sky, exposing the desolate landscape in horrible silver relief. She swallowed a scream, bringing out the folded paper and pressing it hard against her mouth.

  The following thunder was too loud, too close. It trembled the tiles under her feet and put out the lights. She sank onto the couch with a sob, feeling around the coffee table with desperate fingers. The dark was a monster — a plague all of its own — and one that threatened her more than any other had done before it.

  In the days before all stations had been lost to the same static as the TV, the radio had shrieked muerte and peste and then Apocalipsis. On the last day, a frightened Spanish voice had muttered over and over the numbers already dead: a mortanada so huge it was hardly comprehensible. The only one that she now remembered was two million. That had been Madrid.

  Finally she found the lighter, sparking it close — but not too close — to the now opened sheet of paper. She had found it tacked to the bedroom wall of whoever had fled the villa: a teenager’s bedroom papered over by white-toothed boys with floppy hair and tattoos. The journal entry had evidently been printed off an internet site. Of the many posts (there had been dozens more tacked behind it), Louise had only noticed this one, had only read it, because its third sentence had been highlighted in an untidy neon slash.

  When the end of the world comes, meet me in Grants Pass, Oregon.

  It mattered little that the post was more than two years old; nor either that it was likely only adolescent fantasy. Pretense. Kayley’s voice (and Louise had instantly imagined her a fresh-faced all-American cheerleader) was childish — even mawkish, while managing to still sound blasé. An exercise born out of boredom, perhaps even a school project. Most probably little else.

  But still. There was the neon slash. And even if that meant nothing either, Kayley spoke to Louise when no-one else had done for weeks. Even from another time and another world; across reaches of terror and despair — and ever stoic denial — Kayley had whispered in Louise’s ear. Had whispered kindness, possibility. Hope.

  Now, in the dark and the storm that bellowed but taunted with no rain, and the monstrous insects that yet banged against the windows in angry, mindless thumps, Louise read Kayley’s message again. She knew it almost by heart anyway, but to see it, to touch it — to breathe it — was the greater comfort. Before the internet had hung up for good, she had Googled Grants Pass. Just to look.

  As far as the Pacific Northwest was from those Spanish islands less than 150 miles off the coast of Africa, Louise had still been able to seek solace in Grants Pass’ parks and green spaces, its evergreens and pines, its summer night concerts and Boatnik Parade, its historic downtown lined with animal statues and Christmas murals, its antique shops, carnivals and firework displays. It reminded her of lazy Saturday afternoon films on Channel 5. It comforted where nothing else could.

  Louise carefully folded up the paper and let go of the lighter’s lever. Her thumb grazed its hot spark wheel. She curled up on the couch, the heat an oppressive blanket above her; the storm moving off towards the mountainous north in dry and angry flashes.

  Tomorrow. She would go back down to the resort tomorrow, and no longer dwell upon the reasons why she shouldn’t. As she drifted towards sleep, she thought only of green and trees and rivers and cool. And Kayley. Blond-haired, freckle-faced Kayley. Who waited for her there.

  ****

  The next day it was hotter still. Grabbing hold of brittle flora, clambering past clusters of date palms, dragon trees and cacti, the sun beat down upon her through an ugly haze of sand and hot breath. It took even longer to get down from the hills than it had done to climb them — which was disheartening enough before she reached what was left of Puerto Del Carmen.

  As she stepped out of the barren wilderness of the north and onto the incongruent paving stones of Calle Lapa, she longed for the return of boisterous noise: the chinking of glasses, the fractious screams of too-hot children, the better humored squeals of women — a job-lot of paperbacks, cocktails and psychedelic knock-off kaftans — thrown into kidney-shaped pools courtesy of boyfriends and husbands who were drunk by lunchtime, and who bellowed at each other from tiny balconies less than twenty feet apart.

  Instead there was only silence. Horrible, empty, windless silence. And a smell so dreadful that not even the briny taste of the Atlantic could disguise it.

  The white-walled apartments on the other side of the street were still deserted. She remembered finding her first dead body there in the days before she had fled. In the days before she had believed in the plague or in the end of the world, or in the terrible things that people could do in the face of either. It had been lying on a sun-lounger. A grey-skinned figure painted patchy red by the sun.

  She
had approached that body despite the whispered Run away at her back. She had approached it despite the incredible stench that came from it; despite knowing what she would likely find. Her fear had been a dazed anger that clutched hard at her chest. But still she had looked.

  He had already begun to rot. Whether that was down to the heat or his terrible affliction hardly mattered. Huge dark lumps inside his armpits had splayed out his arms; more of the same protruded from the leg holes of his bloodied trunks. His face was the bloated dark purple of thunderclouds. Black viscous fluid had pooled and congealed beneath his eyes, while his mouth — a bloody and crusty mess — let escape a grey and flaccid tongue, leaving space for whistling breath.

  It had taken that for her to believe. Not the sirens, the screams, the pall of smoke over the capital. Not Breaking News! alerts and grainy satellite pictures, or an endless dial tone whenever she tried the British Consulate or the Cabildo Insular. Her denial had demanded better proof than any of that — and a rotting, still-alive body had been it.

  The day after that she had gotten sick. She had locked her doors and stayed in bed along with everyone else. When she had ventured out again: a gnawing hunger sending her back down towards the supermercado, she had not even glanced once towards the neighboring apartments or their pool.

  ****

  Now heading again for that same supermercado, she looked only straight ahead, a memory of that bewildered anger tormenting her again. She ignored it. As she walked down the street towards the beach and promenade, her legs jarring against the unfamiliar paving stones, a sudden sound came to her. In the otherwise silence, it was an approaching wall of noise — though no more recognizable for that.

  When the biting-hot wind suddenly found her, the hackles rose higher on the nape of her neck and she gripped a lamppost in trembling fingers. The sound moaned ever closer. Now she cursed the return of all that was familiar. Only once before had she felt that peculiar searing wind; heard that singing approach. A Christmas Eve more than ten years ago, when she and Patrick had first bought their island villa; when they had still sought each other’s companionship. Each other’s welcome company.

  Eyes now filled with gritty sand, Louise backed up a little, determined to continue down to the beach despite what she now suspected was coming up from it.

  “It’s the wrong time of year,” she whispered to the empty street and its frantically waving palm trees, to the cracks between paving stones. A Gallotia lizard scuttled past her on squat, frantic legs, and the moan that escaped her was too brittle.

  The Sirocco wind roared around the corner of Calle Lapa, bringing with it the floating, blinding dust that the islanders called Calima. The sandstorm had originated in the Sahara; had travelled over one hundred kilometers of ocean to block out the island’s sun in a violent haze. But that was not the worst of it. The Sirocco carried with it a cargo so dreadful that the warning of its approach was akin to that of the worst kind of hurricane: prompting boarded windows, nailed shutters and breathless empty streets.

  There was no such warning afforded to Louise now. All she could do was follow the lead of the disappeared lizard. Turning on her heel, she sped for her old villa, fishing the keys from her pocket as she ran. The folded square of journal suddenly flew from the same pocket. Buffeted by the rising hot air, it danced out of her reach.

  Sanctuary forgotten, a reedy scream escaped her lips, and she careered towards the apartments and their awful stench, the sobs stinging her throat as hot sand rushed in.

  “Don’t leave me! Kayley, no! Come back!”

  She tripped over a body — this one spread-eagled upon the tiled surround of the apartment pool: stained khaki shorts below a pitted grey-white back half trailing in stagnant water — and picked herself up with another scream. She lunged for the fluttering paper even as the locusts found her in their swarming, clacking hundreds, dropping her to the ground. Her fingers closed around the sharp edges of the paper, and she drew it tight to her chest in reflex.

  She crawled back to the villa — now unable to breathe much less scream or sob. It took too long. By the time she made it back to the gate, the locusts had swarmed over her back and legs, and had tangled in her hair. Their beating hind wings were the amplified thrum of Mediterranean cicadas and crickets; their sharp legs scratched and pulled at her in mindless, endless hunger.

  There was no time to make it inside the villa. Sprinting around the pool, Louise stumbled down the steps of the pump room, batting insects from her face and hair in frenzied shrieks.

  The dark was cool and quiet and empty. She crouched within it, rocking herself too quickly; now paying little attention to the frantic insects that still tangled in her hair and beat against her clammy flesh. She thought of green and trees and river and cool. As the Sirocco roared overhead, its cargo thrumming hard against the roof, the tiles, and the plastic covering over the swimming pool in horrible mimicry of torrential rain, Louise thought of green and trees and river and cool. And Kayley.

  ****

  By the time she awoke, all was silent again. Louise stood on too shaky legs, brushing dead and dying insects from her body with revived and disgusted slaps. She mounted the steps back into the world above quickly, terrified that night might have already taken hold — she had intended to be back in the hills far above the resort well before nightfall — but she had evidently not been asleep as long as her aching body suggested. The relentless sun probed long fingers inside the upper reaches of the passageway, so much so that Louise had to shield her eyes before she had even made it as far as the top steps.

  The pool area was covered in a twitching pale carpet. Swallowing bile, Louise picked her way through the Sirocco’s debris: the sound of dry, cracking limbs and wings swiftly assuming the same connotation as that of twigs snapping deep in a creeping forest. As she drew closer to the stone arch that led back into the road, she winced at every too loud footstep, the pads of her fingers stabbing at the hard edges of the rescued square of paper in her pocket over and over. Long after they grew numb.

  But the street was still deserted. By the time she made it out of her cul-de-sac and onto the main road that climbed down into the resort proper, Louise had almost gotten used to the prickly carpet under her feet; the hideous crunching noise that every footstep precipitated; the otherwise utterly breathless silence. And the emptiness: the total absence of any life at all, except the flies and bluebottles collected in ugly restless patterns inside passing apartment windows and screen doors.

  Somewhere during her hundred yard descent into the Terrazza complex ahead of the promenade and beach, the cool urge to flee returned to whisper at her neck. And this time within it there was something — some horrible little niggle inside her brain — whose warning she couldn’t quite yet catch. That niggle was like waking up from a bad dream unable to remember, yet still suffering the hangover of its dread.

  The long faceless rear of the supermercado heralded the beginning of the complex. Louise crunched her way past grey brick and thick chained emergency exits. The goods entrance, where the Spanish kids — most often the children of the supermercado’s employees — had always played tag or musical statues before growing bored and terrorizing sunburnt drunken tourists, was empty except for scattered litter and discarded cardboard boxes.

  When Louise turned the corner into a car park still full of cars, she saw that the front of the shop was in a far worse state than before. Its entire Plexiglas face had been knocked out, the displays inside overturned and ripped apart, bright cut-price banners hanging limply in the stagnant air. Louise only fleetingly thought about venturing inside. Its cavernous shadows were far from inviting, and she was too readily discouraged by the reminder of her last visit.

  Then, the Terrazza had been far from empty or quiet. The Avenida de las Playas had been alive with angry horns and whining mopeds: the daily grind of holiday rentals and beleaguered white taxis replaced by a panicked mass exodus east, towards Arrecife and its closed airport.

  The f
ighting had already begun, although at that stage it had been confined to squabbles over rights of way and the spoils of looting. The violence had been at its worst inside the supermercado. Louise had made only as far as the first checkout before losing her nerve and turning back.

  She had not returned. Locking every steel gate and shutter in her villa, Louise had stayed indoors, enduring day after day of noise and rattle and fury, until those days had grown quiet and empty. Until the snatched view from her balcony had become only merciless sun and fiery savage nights; the stench of the dead carried inland. Until she had, quite literally, run for the hills.

  ****

  As she ventured further westwards through the Terrazza complex, she tried to forget by remembering happier days spent there with Patrick. Close to Paddy’s Karaoke Bar within the main courtyard, she glimpsed the old tapas bar that had played live Jota and Mariachi every night in high season. Under the shade thrown by the metal stairways leading up to a now battered and graffiti-scored Moonlight Lounge, various narrow shops stood shuttered and silent. Their wooden stands — before weighed heavy with inflated lilos, fringed T-shirts, sarongs, imitation watches, belts and handbags — now stood empty. Where they still stood at all.

  Perhaps that accounted for the still enduring niggle. And the dread crawling inside her belly. It was too quiet. Too empty. The lack of wind she had gotten used to. Even the desertion of the gulls and gannets that had plagued seafront restaurants and bars no longer struck her as unusual. Or frightening.

  It was something else. Something that was somehow far worse.