by Joe McKinney
Nate covered his face with his hands and groaned at his bad luck. He heard a faint clattering of metal, and then, before he knew what was happening, one of the white suits was slapping him into handcuffs.
Nate looked at the cuffs and then up at the suits.
“What are you going to do to me?” he said.
Neither suit answered.
“Can’t you just let me go home? Just let me go home?”
But there was no answer.
A white police van pulled up to the curb.
It had started to rain a few minutes before and Nate was soaked through to the skin. The world had turned gray and depthless. The white suits got in position beside him and with a wave of their rifles directed him to the rear of the van. Nate offered no resistance. He stood up from the curb and walked where they pointed. They opened the rear of the van and Nate was shocked to see that it already had six other people inside. They were all injured to one degree or another, and they all stared back at Nate with hollow, vacant eyes that were at once tremendously sad and deeply terrifying.
“Get in,” one of the white suits said. “Sit there.”
“I don’t wanna,” Nate said.
“Get in or get shot,” the other white suit said.
Nate took a look around. This was the neighborhood where he had grown up, where all the fucked-up decisions that were his life had played out in a pathetic tableau. It was all but deserted now, and in the gray sheets of rain that covered everything with a depthless smear, the black, huddled shapes of the houses seemed oddly inviting, as though all of this was a mistake and it wasn’t too late to start over.
“Hey, buddy. Come on. Hop up.”
The compassion in the white suit’s voice shook Nate out of his thoughts. He stared at the man.
“I’ll never see it again. Will I?”
The white suit shook his head. It was a barely perceptible gesture behind the gas mask.
Nate nodded, then climbed into the van. He sat down next to a man in a mud-stained business suit. Blood was oozing out from under the man’s legs and running in muddy rivulets down the white metal bench upon which he sat.
Nate sat down next to the man.
The man met his gaze, his eyes red-rimmed and haunted looking, and then turned away in silence.
They were on the road for a long while, but eventually the van pulled into a muddy field and stopped.
The door flew open.
Three white suits were standing there, two of them with machine guns. The suits were standing inside a narrow, muddy lane bordered by tall black fences of metal wire. Behind them was a gate made of the same metal wire, and beyond that a large fenced-in area where several hundred people milled listlessly about.
“Get down. Move it.”
“Where are we?” Nate asked.
“Get down here,” the white suit said. “Move it.”
Nate climbed down. The white suits stepped back along one of the fences and leveled their weapons at him.
“Stand there,” the man said, pointing at the opposite fence.
Nate did as he was instructed, then stood by and waited as the others were led down from the back of the van.
The white suit got out a radio and said, “Open the inner gate.”
The fence creaked as it slid open.
Nate watched it slide away, then turned back to the white suits.
“Go on,” the man said.
Nate looked inside. He saw a lot of sad, vacant faces staring back at him.
Something in him rebelled.
He turned suddenly and said, “No. No fucking way.”
He tried to run, but the only place to go was back toward the van.
Under it, he thought.
He dove into the mud and tried to scramble under the rear axle, but he wasn’t fast enough. One of the white suits grabbed him by his ankles and pulled him back out.
Nate turned over, and the last thing he saw before everything went black was the butt of a rifle speeding down toward his face.
CHAPTER 24
They took I-40 from Barstow and stayed with it all the way into Arizona. At Kingman, they turned south onto 93 and started seeing traffic fleeing north from Phoenix, a trickle of headlights going God knows where.
The news on the radio was grim. Along the East Coast, the outbreak was spreading up from Florida at a staggering rate, and people were fleeing west as fast as they could go. Out west, California was in complete chaos, and a military effort to quarantine L.A. had been abandoned when troops there were overrun. Efforts around the Bay Area were more successful, though according to CNN those troops were expected to be withdrawn within the next few hours so that efforts could be focused in defending safe areas in Colorado. He listened to the reports and shook his head. The country was sucking into itself, withdrawing into its breadbasket, abandoning its coasts.
Robin stepped through the partition and took a seat behind him.
“Hey,” he said.
She leaned forward and rested her chin on his shoulder. Despite spending the last eight hours or so on the road, she still smelled nice.
“How is he?” he asked. After Barstow, Colin had raved violently before finally regaining a measure of his composure. But with the calm would come embarrassment over the cowardice he had shown back in Barstow, which he compensated for with more violence. Several times, Jeff had been forced to pull over so he could help to restrain him. Robin had been taking care of him since then, and from what Jeff saw, she had pretty much taken charge of things on the other side of the partition. Katrina Cummz and the other two blondes seemed to be doing everything she told them without question. And there hadn’t been any more screaming from Colin in over an hour.
“He’s calm now,” Robin said. “He’s resting. He’d be better if he could get some sleep, though. How about you? You okay?”
“I’m okay,” he said.
“You sure? Driving’s not a problem?”
“I’m okay,” he assured her. “The acid’s pretty much gone now. The trick is to keep focused on the road. The trouble is, I’ll start thinking about stuff and I’ll tune out for a while.”
“You want some company?”
Her face was serenely calm, though the red rimming her eyes told a different story. Looking into her face, he got a sense that this woman had her act together, and he was a bit ashamed at himself for being surprised by that. He’d always resented Colin and his friends for their arrogance, the sense of entitlement that came with their money and guaranteed futures. It made him feel like a charity case, like every handshake and introduction was a patronizing pat on the head. He winced inwardly now with the realization that he had looked on Robin in much the same way that Colin and his friends had treated him.
“Jeff?” she said.
“Yeah,” he said, and shook himself. “Yeah, some company would be great.”
She pointed out the windshield. “The road.”
The bus shook as the tires drifted onto the rumble strips.
“Got it,” Jeff said. “I’m on it.” He got the bus back on the road and put both hands on the wheel and gave her a wink in the rearview mirror. “Got it,” he said.
She chuckled. “Great.”
She moved over to the edge of the seat so he could see her without having to look in the mirror. The road rolled on beneath them. An occasional headlight beam would light up her face, then slowly slide away, leaving her in darkness again.
She said, “So what does Mr. Jeff Stavers think about while he’s up here all alone, drifting off the road?”
“Hmmm?”
“You said you start thinking about stuff and you drift off. I want to know what that stuff is. What goes on in Jeff Stavers’s brain?”
“Not much of anything,” he said.
“That sounds like a cop-out to me,” she said. “Tell me the truth.”
He watched the road in the pool of light from the headlamps and he was tempted to tell her that it was complicated. That there was so much it was hard to p
ut into words. But that wasn’t the truth. He knew that. What he was thinking was pretty simple.
“I’ve got this feeling like we’ve crossed some kind of threshold,” he said. “There’s the world like it was, and then there’s the world like it is now. Or like it’s going to be. It’s still changing, still evolving. I know that. But I’ve got this sense that…that—”
“That we’ve been cut free of our pasts.”
The frustration he had felt at not being able to find the right words cleared from his face, and he looked at her with renewed surprise.
“Yeah,” he said. “That’s it exactly.”
She smiled at him.
“Why don’t you find a place to pull over?” she said. “You could use some sleep. We both could.”
CHAPTER 25
Ed Moore rose at dawn and walked out of the tent he shared with the other men from the Springfield Adult Living Village and stretched. He was looking for Billy Kline. All around him, spread out over a five-acre grassy field south of the Marine Corps Logistics Base outside Albany, Georgia, were more than two thousand military-issued tents. They were packed in like bees in a hive. There was trash everywhere. The pathways between the tents were crisscrossed with laundry wires. The ground was worn into muddy troughs after the previous morning’s rainstorms, and you couldn’t walk more than a few feet from your tent without getting stained with mud up to midcalf. Though it was only a few minutes past sunrise, and much of the landscape was still shrouded in early-morning shadows and haze, the hive was already bustling with refugees trying to get a head start on the crowds that would soon be gathering around the mess halls and the commissary and the medic stations.
Ed frowned at the commotion. This was not at all what he had expected, and he was feeling the vague, unfocused anger of the disillusioned. True, the military had made good on its promise to feed them, clothe them, get them into shelter, but he was appalled at how haphazardly things were being run. Art Waller had yet to receive anything more than a cursory examination by a Marine Corps medic. He was inside the tent now, running a high fever. He’d kept Ed up most of the night with his coughing. There were generators and heaters inside the tents, but no fuel to run them. There were no showers. The only bathrooms in the camp consisted of a row of twenty port-o-pottys that had become disgusting messes by the end of the first day. It was useless to bag your garbage. Field mice and raccoons and feral cats made nightly forays into the camp, and by morning, the bags were gutted and the refuse left to rot all afternoon in the sweltering sun. Everywhere he turned, he saw a reflection of his own frustrated anger staring back at him from other residents of the camp.
They had been here for over a week now. The camp’s official military designation was the Pecan City Temporary Relocation Facility, though the residents simply called it the camp.
Ed thought it would be better to call it the sty.
The first day, he’d witnessed the total collapse of military organization, and by that night, the security forces assigned to watch the camp had backed out of the area entirely, letting the residents work out their own law and order.
Ed watched their retreat with bitterness and resentment—but at the same time, he supposed he couldn’t blame them. There’d been only a handful of them, none of them older than thirty, and those boys with fully automatic weapons had suddenly found themselves confronted with thousands of screaming, complaining, desperate refugees, every one of them demanding more than an entire division of soldiers and Red Cross volunteers could have possibly delivered.
Their retreat left a leadership vacuum in the camp, and things went downhill rapidly. No provision was made for traffic out on Highway 133, the main road that led along the western edge of the camp, and throughout that first day and well into the night, a steady stream of vehicles poured into the area. The road choked with pedestrians and vehicles till it was impassable. A red, cloying dust hung in the air and made breathing difficult. The new arrivals were uncertain where to go, and nobody seemed to know what they needed or how to get it. People loitered around the camp’s facilities, further choking the area.
Few tents were set up at that point, and Ed and the others settled into a sort of temporary encampment a little ways off the road while they waited for somebody to assert some control over the situation. But as the morning wore on and the day grew hotter, the crowd’s agitation mounted, and soon it became obvious that order would not be restored anytime soon.
“Atlanta’s gone,” Ed heard a passerby say.
“Macon, too,” answered another man.
All through the day, news filtered in from refugees from the surrounding states, and with every new flood of stunned, staring faces came more dire news.
“We passed through Charlotte two days ago,” a woman said. She was with a man, the two of them carrying their few possessions on what looked like the door to a trailer, the door held between them like a stretcher. “Wasn’t nobody but dead bodies left in the whole damn town. Every street was deserted.”
“What about Knoxville? I have family there.”
“Gone, too. Sorry.”
“Montgomery? Anybody heard news from Montgomery?”
“They’re all gone.”
“Columbus?”
“All dead.”
A man in a dirty business suit walked by them. His face was vacant, his eyes open but unseeing. He was babbling, clutching at his hair with one hand while he swatted the air with the other. “It’s all over,” he said. “Fucking gone. Everything’s fucking gone.”
Streams of people on foot filled the road. Others drove their vehicles, honking to clear the road, leaning out their windows, screaming obscenities while shaking their fists.
“Get out of the fucking way,” Ed heard the driver of a battered red Ford pickup shout.
He was answered by vacant stares and pedestrians so dead on their feet they simply showed him their backs and marched on.
Enraged, the man in the truck revved his engine. “Get your asses out of my fucking way,” the man shouted again.
Suddenly, the man hit the gas and the truck lurched forward. He tried to leave the road and skirt the knots of people there, but in his haste he lost control and hit a man who was lugging a heavy rucksack along behind him. The man screamed, then fell under the truck. The rear of the truck bounced over the man and threw him some five feet away into the grass. Ed managed to reach the scene in time to see a child, a girl of five or six, staring wide-eyed and stricken at the mangled pile of twisted limbs that lay at her feet. Inevitably, there were infected among the refugees. Shots were fired. People were trampled.
Sometime around eleven that night, reinforcements arrived and the military moved back into the camp to try to assert some kind of order. But the soldiers were so few in number, and the confusion was so great, that they quickly became exhausted and angry. They ended up causing as many beatings as they stopped.
It was only around the morning of the second day that some sort of order settled over the camp. The dead were cleared out, their bodies dumped into military trucks and carted away. Soldiers with bullhorns moved through the camp. They passed out colored cards with numbers on them, lottery cards, and announced times when you could take your lottery card to the scant facilities the camp offered. It was a reasonable system, and might have worked under reasonable conditions. But it didn’t work now. There were fights, and stolen cards, and double dipping, and every manner of graft.
But somehow, despite all the fighting and the riots and the confusion, Ed managed to make a niche for his people. They had tents. They had food. They had water and new clothes. They had the basics, thanks to him. He was proud of himself for getting them that much. Looking around, he could see it was more than most had.
But now he needed to find Billy Kline. He had a list of supplies they needed, but he wouldn’t be able to carry them alone.
Ed found him a short distance away, coming back to the tents from the toilets. He was dressed in jeans and a red Marine Corps T-
shirt that was tight in the sleeves. He hadn’t shaved in three, maybe four days, Ed guessed, and his face was dark with patchy stubble.
“I need you to come with me,” he said. “We got some stuff to do this morning.”
“Fuck off,” Billy said.
“Boy, I told you I don’t like you cussing at me.”
“Seriously? Are you for fucking real? What the fuck do you care if I cuss or not? I’m a grown man.”
Billy ducked his head and tried to push his way past Ed. “Get the fuck out of my way.”
Ed pushed him back. “Not so fast. I need your help getting supplies.”
“I told you to fuck off.”
“And I told you to watch your mouth.”
“Whatever.”
Billy tried to shove Ed out of the way but found his hands deflected. He rocked backward, off balance, and fell onto his butt. Billy looked up at Ed, uncertain how he had ended up on his ass.
He climbed to his feet. “You stepped in some shit now, old man.”
“Really?” Ed said. “Does it have to be like this? Why can’t we just do what we gotta do?”
Billy dusted off the seat of his pants, then raised his fists.
Ed let out a weary sigh. “Well, come on then. Give it your best shot.”
Billy charged forward and swung a huge, wide-opened right cross at Ed, who sidestepped it easily. Off balance again, Billy spun around on Ed, only to catch a left jab in his mouth. He rocked back, and for a second his legs wobbled beneath him.
Stunned, he touched his fingers to his lips. They came away bloody.
He charged Ed again with another right cross. Ed ducked it, and Billy’s punch only managed to knock Ed’s cowboy hat from his head. Ed moved back a half step and fired three quick left jabs into Billy’s face, following with a quick upper cut to the younger man’s solar plexus.
Billy fell to his knees, coughing, gasping, a rope of bloody spit hanging from his busted lips. When he looked up at Ed, Billy’s head was swaying on his shoulders like he’d just been hit by a brick.
