by Riley Flynn
But what other option was there? Time had not just slowed down, it had almost stopped. There wasn’t really a notion of time anymore. Before, Alex had arranged his life based on his work or other people’s plans. There was none of that any more. The entire way he thought about the hours in a day had changed overnight. Changed for the better. Now, as he stood inside the atom of a moment and watched it turn from the inside out, time meant nothing. He had to act.
To get the gun from his hip, Alex needed time. Time to move, time to act. He needed Joan. He had to remind her of what to do, how to help. But first, he needed Roque’s attention.
“Roque, you know, I think I met a friend of yours?”
“Oh yeah?” the man grumbled, uninterested. “What was his name?”
“See, that’s the thing. There we were in the drug store. I’d met this swell girl there. What she did to me that day, boy, I wish I could show you right now.”
Roque wasn’t watching. His eyes were trained on the cars, inspecting those which seemed most able to drive, still. Thinking about escape.
“Yeah. I wish she could show you herself. Anyway, I met a guy there. Saul.”
The name caught Roque’s attention. He tried to hide it. But it showed.
“I don’t know no Saul,” he muttered. Not looking at the cars anymore. Only looking at Alex.
“Met him in the drug store. He didn’t like me. Reminded me of you. We had a fight. He’s still down at the bottom of the basement steps. Wonder if the rats have got to him yet?”
“Why, you son of a b-”
The anger boiled up in Roque like the screech of a steam whistle. Joan stamped down on his foot. Alex’s hand already had the holster unbuckled, brought the Glock up to eye level, looking down the barrel.
Roque shouted in agony. Turning back to Alex, he threw Joan to the ground, running forward with the knife. One shot. The trigger clicked. The hammer dropped. The firing pin hit into the primer. The powder caught. Everything inside burned. The pressure shot up. The bullet found itself riding the wave of an explosion, spinning and hurtling through the barrel, out of the muzzle, and slicing through the air.
It hit cloth, then flesh, then bone and buried itself in the chest of the charging man. Alex stood still, arm raised, gun smoking, and the breeze caught between the last remaining leaves of the fall tress. The grass rustled. The dog whimpered. Roque writhed around on the ground like a worm caught beneath a baking sun.
Alex ran to Joan first. She was bundled on the ground, her knees up as far as they could muster against her belly, her arms locked round in a protective loop. Finn sniffed at her hair and licked her ear.
“Joan? Joan? Are you okay, is everything fine?”
She looked up. A thin trickle of blood was drooling down her neck. The knife had caught her. Joan waved her hands, pointing to Roque.
“Don’t worry about me, get him, stop him!”
The black clothes were stained with a deep brown blood. The color spread across Roque’s chest as he tried to prop himself up from the clearing floor. Handfuls of dirt and nothing else. Alex stood over the man, holding the gun.
“Help me,” Roque muttered, dying. “You got to help me.”
“Tell me who you work for. Tell me who sent you. Tell me everything.”
As Roque laughed, blood seeped up and between his teeth.
“No time. No time for that.”
And he laughed again, each sound softer and softer until, at last, silence arrived back in the clearing. Not even the bird sang. The breeze didn’t dare to blow. Just Alex and the world, quiet together.
41
Alex Early felt the weight of the gun in his hand, felt the weight of the arm hanging in the air, and felt the weight of the heavy sky as day turned to night. He searched around the clearing, but no man moved to hurt him or his friends.
Safe.
Free.
As the last of the light left over the horizon, he left the body lying on the ground. Nothing more to be gained from asking questions to a dead man. The dead don’t have a way with words, he thought, and now we’ve got more dead men than we know what to do with. Best to let them lie.
Holstering the handgun, he went to check on Joan. She was standing, picking with a finger at the fine line of blood scratched across her neck. A ring of crimson pearls. Nothing too deep. As he helped her steady, helped her breathe again, she left her arm hanging over his shoulders. Support.
With her, the dog seemed pleased. The tail swept from side to side, taking the hips with it. Finn with his fine nose could ignore the deluge of sweat and smoke and bodies that drowned out every sense. Alex had no such luck.
His heart slowing, his friend standing by herself, he began to notice the thick, dank fug which settled over the forest clearing. His stomach revolted, churning up a thin gruel which he coughed up onto the grass. All bile and adrenaline and memories. Not the start of a sickness, he hoped.
They found Timmy still unconscious in the car. Out cold, as diagnosed by the nurse, but more a result of the heady cocktail of medicines and viruses he’d endured over the past weeks. They dragged him into the fresh air, laid him comfortably down, and brought him back to the cruelty of the world.
“I had plenty of dreams,” he admitted. “I can’t believe I missed all the fun again.”
There was nothing left to do but laugh. Pure hysteria, a breakdown in the thought process, the reveries of the world offering nothing else but the utmost absurdity. They told Timmy what had happened, covered every movement and action in the most minute of details and then understood where they were, once more.
Surrounded by the dead. The mysterious dead. Once Timmy could stand and walk, perhaps half an hour later, they began to search through the belongings of the gang members. They began with the cars, the stripped-out SUVs, the Jeeps which had chased them down and through the forest.
Guns and ammo, very little else. Some money, in various currencies, and plenty of questions. Anyone still breathing was knocked out with medicine and tied up together. They’d be untied when the time came.
Tucked inside the pockets of Roque, however, Alex found plenty to keep his mind racing. A government ID, not just a drivers license. A chipped strip of plastic which should grant him access to electronic doors and locks. Not that there were many of those around.
Whereas the other gang members had held small amounts of cash, Roque’s pockets were packed with stacks of notes. Cold, hard currency. Not just dollars, but Yen and Renminbi, spread out across a palette of colors, fixed with the faces of other people’s heroes. More than Alex could ever hope to spend.
But tucked away in the sole of his shoe, only found when Finn began to pick and chew at the dead man’s foot, was a hidden device. A small black plastic drive. Flash memory, the very same as had been plucked from the pocket of the professional. Joan compared them: identical in every way.
It only meant more questions. Every find, every scrap of information, only put more space between them and the eventful truth. Each individual piece felt like the outline of a map, providing hints at the shoreline or the way the rivers ran without ever teaching them about the finer details, be it the tides, the winds, or the people who lived inside. Only raw information, devoid of context or explanation.
As the darkness fell down hard on the world, they decided to leave. The car, replete with the improvements Timmy had suggested, had survived. The roll cages and the bull bars had seen better days, but the wider shape of the vehicle and the machinery inside still worked perfectly. Once they flipped it over, set it on its wheels, they were good to go.
Driving up the hill was hard. The tires spun, the loose shingle of the surface often gave way. They’d fallen down the slope more than they’d driven down it before; the ascent was far more testing. Added to that, they had no idea what they would find at the other end of the path.
If the entire gang had given chase, they were now dead. There might be a crowd waiting beside the freeway. But the road was empty. Once at the
top, Alex ran back down and freed the unconscious men. They’d wake up to a strange new world.
Back on the open road, the car ran perfectly. On the bikes, they’d stopped every night and made camp. On this night, they drove on and on. No time to stop. No quarter given to the hour. They needed distance between themselves and everything else. Distance can be the best medicine, for the soul and for the psyche.
Soon, however, Alex was alone. The others slept, their faces pressed up against the windows. Even the dog was curled and nestled into the side of a sleeping Joan. Hands on the wheel, eyes on the road, Alex would check on them occasionally. But they didn’t move. Sleeping peaceful dreams. Sleeping, at least.
Alex felt his own eyes grow heavy. The constant drone of the rubber on the asphalt was hypnotic. The chips and damages in the tires gave the noise a pattern, a rhythm, which was repeated every second. It changed and evolved as the rubber was worn away. Eventually, with enough time, everything wears down to a single flat surface. For now, Alex enjoyed the noise. Quiet enough and calm.
The lights of the car picked through the dusk, lighting up the markings on the freeway. Soon, they’d switch to back roads, away from prying eyes. But, tonight, they just wanted to drive. Occasional cars perched on the side of the freeway, some stopping in the middle of a lane entirely.
Alex didn’t look inside. He knew what was in there. The road was a census of people who had tried to do what had to be done, to head out away from the towns and cities and make it somewhere safer. The people in those abandoned cars had failed. For what it was worth, Alex realized, he was one of the lucky few. God only knew how many others there were wandering the country. But at least he was breathing.
In truth, he didn’t need the lights. So full was the moon, hanging low, and so bright were the stars, without the electric lights to drown them out, that the night sky lit up the world ahead. In the distance, over the trees and the hills, the entire world stretched out. All under the same heavy sky.
It was the same world it had always been. The same combinations of minerals and chemical reactions, of different types of dirt being moved about by upstart slabs of oxygenated carbon. The same world now as it had been six months ago, six years ago, or the day Alex had been born. Maybe some of the stars had blinked out, switched off, or cooled down. But there were enough left that the effect stayed the same.
The same stars. Shining down on Detroit and Virginia both. They weren’t even at the farm. What had been a simple journey in the minds of two men dreamt up in a desperate basement had become their one driving objective. Almost overnight, it had become the most important thing in the world. And they weren’t even there yet.
That same Virginia under the same stars. Only time would tell whether it was a wise decision. Alex looked around the car, glancing at Joan, Timmy, and Finn. Not one of them knew what was waiting for them on the farm. They didn’t know about Sammy, about Alex’s parents, or about the ghosts he’d left behind in that house. It wasn’t fair to inflict those ghosts upon them. Not yet. They’d find out eventually.
Even as his hands gripped the wheel, raising only to wipe the sleep from his eyes, Alex appreciated how little he’d thought about Virginia in the last few days. Even the ring lay untouched in his pocket. Back in Detroit, he’d grown used to tuning out, to filtering out the information he didn’t want to hear. A comforting kind of numbness. It hadn’t been necessary these last few days.
The devil was in the details. Details about the house they were driving toward and the people they’d find there. If there even was anyone waiting for them. At one time, Alex had been scared of his memories, scared of the emotions that could be dragged to the surface. Now he was curious. He’d taken on far worse, he now knew, and he’d survived.
The past and the future were colliding together, heading inexorably in the same direction, destined to crash. Inevitability had a reassurance all its own. Not just the people he’d left behind but the people he was taking with him. There were so many questions that were going to have to contend with so many memories.
How were they even going to look after a baby? No one had mentioned it to Joan but the problem was going to be very real, very soon. And the flash drives. And the documents. And all that money. And the gangs. And the government agents. And the virus. And the dead people. And the entire country, collapsing in on itself in an inescapable death spiral. They would need to contact the outside world, eventually, to find out what the hell had happened.
It was all too real, while at the same time seeming far too strange. Like living inside a book in the process of being written, the very idea of truth and reality turned infinitely over and over until nothing was the same and nothing was believable. But it was all too tangible. It was happening. This was all happening.
The night rumbled on and took the car with it, deeper into the unknown. Alex blinked his eyes as an abandoned truck appeared on the road ahead. As they passed, he could see inside. The dead were still sitting there, seatbelts working to hold them up straight. The virus had spread. The grey skin and bloody eyes were all too obvious. These dear and departed, they wouldn’t be the last on the long road to Virginia.
A fire burned in the distance. A wrecked Chevy on the side of the road, no one at the wheel. Someone was setting fires. Someone was crashing cars. Someone, somewhere, knew something. The fire was drawing closer, the road heading in that same direction. The nearer it was, the fewer stars stood out in the sky.
But this was the only way forward, the only one they’d chosen. Driving toward the light, they could turn away later. Tired as hell and a slave to the wheel, Alex Early had no choice but to drive farther into the night. All he could do was drive.
A sign flew by. VRIGINIA, it called, along with a long list of states, 200 MILES. Gripping the wheel, gritting his teeth, Alex settled into his seat. No time to get comfortable. Plenty of road ahead. So near and yet so far, so much still to come.
Thank you from the Author
Thanks so much for getting this far! I hope that means you enjoyed the book! I love talking to readers, so if you ever want to say hello, drop me a line at [email protected].
It might take a while if I’m busy writing, but I’ll get back to you as soon as I can!
Riley
