by Barry Napier
“What is it?” Luis asked.
“They found a bomb in Atlanta. They think it might be the same sort that detonated near Fort Worth.” She gave him the other details and as she did, the absolute horror of the moment started to dawn on her. New York, then Fort Worth—two locations so far apart that they seemed totally unconnected. But now throw Atlanta in there and it almost seemed to make sense that there was no real order or structure to any of it. It was starting to seem that bombs had been set up at random and that was somehow scarier. With no clear links between the areas where the bombs had been, that meant there was a high chance that there were many more, scattered over the rest of the country.
“Did he say if he thinks the bombs are directly related to this George Kettle guy?” Luis asked.
“No. He was, like always, a little rushed and to the point.”
“So what happens if we get out to this place of Kettle’s and it’s just as vacant as Crowder’s place?”
“I don’t know,” Katherine said, trying not to get too frustrated with Luis’s pessimism. She looked out to the road, the four-lane currently stretching over the James River and leading out of the city. “All I know is that for some reason, Rollins chose us to go looking for a guy that he thinks might somehow be involved in the hell currently taking place all over the country.”
“Did he choose us or was the manpower stretched so thin that he had no choice?”
“I don’t know, Luis. I—”
Her phone rang again and when she saw Rollins’ name so soon after his last call, she felt a sharp and digging worry claw at her heart. She answered it anyway, sounding as solid as possible.
“This is Fowl—”
“Where are you?” Rollins interrupted.
“On the parkway, headed out to Brandermill. Why?”
“There were explosions,” he said, his voice panicky. “We had a few agents find a—”
He was interrupted by a sound that made no sense to Katherine. It was a low rumbling, but in a pulsing sort of way. For a moment, she thought they’d blown a tire. But the rumbling started to get louder and it seemed to be accompanied by a noise that was very much like wind. This all mixed and morphed into a sound that she suddenly did recognize. It was an explosion, only somehow far away and right on top of them all at once.
This recognition had no time to settle into her brain, though. In the space of roughly two seconds between Luis’s interrupted question and Katherine’s realization, the world seemed to catch fire. There was a white glow and then a sort of push that she felt all around them. She opened her mouth to scream but it felt as if the wind had been sucked right out of her lungs.
The white glow became a soft orange that tilted and twirled as the car was lifted from the road and tossed end over end. She had the distinct feeling of being airborne and heard the car crashing into several unseen objects. She did not feel the impact of the crashing, though. All she felt was the same sense of being pushed hard to the side and lifted as the world flipped and burned all around the car.
Chapter 4
Olivia was surprised at just how interested Joyce had been in the map. Olivia had been able to come up with a route to Minnesota within several minutes. She’d even found a pencil in the truck’s glove compartment and allowed Joyce to trace it. They then worked together to find a secondary route because Olivia assumed there would be many roads that would be blocked along the way. But even with the two routes mapped out and traced in pencil, Joyce continued to flip through the pages. Every now and then she would ask what a symbol meant and soon became enamored with finding rivers and tracing their banks with her finger.
It took them quite a while to get back down the mountain, mainly because they had to stop twice so that Paul could move more vehicles out of the way. Olivia asked to help both times, but he insisted that she stay in the car with Joyce. When the ground leveled out and they finally started to leave the mountain behind them, they had to cross about thirty miles of the same ground they’d covered in order to reach Roosevelt’s cabin. In passing through the area, Olivia noticed at once that everything looked different. Where there had been very few cars on the road the day before, there were many more blocking the lanes now.
Fortunately, it was not as packed as the New York City traffic or the clogs in New Jersey, allowing Paul to weave his way in and out of stalled cars and small accidents. About an hour after coming down from the mountain, just outside of Glenville, they passed by a small and failed army barricade. It consisted of four army trucks and a few police cars. From what Olivia could tell, a few civilian vehicles had been pulled to the side of the road. She saw one middle-aged woman lying on the thin strip of grass along the asphalt, her dead eyes looking forever at her back tires. Over by the army trucks, she saw at least eight men in army fatigues fallen to the ground; two of them were essentially heaped over one another, both with guns drawn.
When Paul pulled the truck over to the side of the road, she tensed up and put a protective arm around Joyce.
“It’s okay,” Paul said. “I’m just going to look for anything we can use.”
She nodded as he got out and kept her eyes on him the entire time. Joyce did, too, though she seemed more curious that worried. They watched as Paul looked inside the military vehicles. At one point, he pulled out what looked to be some sort of small portable radio. But after tinkering with it for a bit, he tossed it to the ground.
He came back to the truck about three minutes later with a defeated look on his face. “There were a few guns, but no extra ammunition. There was also a digital radio of some kind that I’d never seen before, but it wasn’t working, anyway. It was partially destroyed.”
He said all of this with the resigned disappointment of a man that had already accepted the hand he had been dealt. He looked to Joyce and offered a smile which the girl returned as best she could. He then shifted the truck into gear and pulled back out onto the road.
The road carried them on and, as she feared, the stalled cars and trucks eventually caused them to stop their progress. On a two-lane road about twenty minutes past the sad little barricade, they came to a place in the road where traffic had backed up several yards behind a traffic light that was just as dead as the rest of the town.
“What city is this?” Paul asked, glancing over to the map resting between Joyce and Olivia.
“Not sure,” Olivia said, reaching for the map. She opened the page to the portion with West Virginia and trailed her finger along the map. “Looks like this is Somersdale,” she said.
“How much farther until we turn off on the Interstate?”
“Maybe fifty miles, give or take,” Olivia said. “Sorry. I’m not the best with gauging distance on a map.”
“I don’t know about you,” Paul said, staring ahead at the line of traffic, “but I don’t feel like riding a bike today.”
Olivia nodded her agreement, having nearly forgotten about the bikes and Joyce’s little trailer in the back of the truck. “I don’t either. But is there honestly any other way to get around it?”
Paul was already opening the truck door and looking ahead. “I can go up ahead a bit, see how far this line goes. Hopefully there’s something up near the front that we can use. A truck would be preferable because of the bikes, but we may just have to take what we can get.”
“Okay,” Olivia said. “We’ll sit here.”
Paul took a moment, seemed to think deeply about something, and then retrieved his gun from under the seat. Olivia noticed Joyce looking at it and then quickly looking away. It almost seemed like the girl was either afraid of it or thought it was something she knew she was not supposed to see.
“We gonna have to leave the truck?” Joyce asked.
“Looks that way,” Paul said, closing the door and starting to walk forward.
Olivia watched him go, Joyce also staring ahead. “Hey, ‘Livia?” Joyce said. “Why does Mr. Paul seem so sad? Is it cuz of Mr. Roosie-velt?”
“I think so. And al
so, the world is just…well, it’s a sad place right now.”
“Is that why we left? Is that why we’re on an adventure?”
“Pretty much,” Olivia said.
It wasn’t much of an answer, but it seemed to pacify Joyce. She went quiet again, looking ahead as Paul grew smaller and smaller alongside the stalled line of traffic. He walked slowly, the gun held at his side and scanning the area. Olivia had noticed that about him recently—that even when he was walking from Point A to Point B, Paul seemed to always have some sort of radar running, looking for any potential threats. It was one of the reasons she continued to feel safe with him, even though he was clearly shaken by the loss of Roosevelt.
“Everything is quiet,” Joyce said in a whisper that would have been cute in any other situation.
“You’re right,” Olivia said. “It’s very quiet.”
“What happened?”
It was odd that this was the first direct question she’d asked, outside of what had happened to her mother. Olivia thought about the best answer to give and decided on the simplest truth she could come up with.
“Everyone got sick,” she said. “And no one knew it was coming, so no one could prepare.”
“Oh.”
Joyce sat back slowly, as if deeply pondering what she’d just been told. Olivia looked back out to the stalled traffic. She could no longer see Paul and assumed he’d stopped to investigate a truck or something else of interest. A minute passed, then two minutes, and then another. Olivia was not quite starting to get worried, but unease was starting to creep in.
That unease became something much sharper and more urgent when she saw the man on the side of the street. He came stumbling around the corner, holding himself up by the edge of a building. He was wearing a tee shirt that was stained with blood and something black. His hair was mostly white and sticking up in wild tufts. There was also blood on his face, though Olivia could not tell if it was his own or not.
She was slightly ashamed that her first reaction was to slip down into the seat, curling her body mostly down toward the floorboards. Based on the few other survivors they had spotted along their journey, she had no reason to believe that this man would be any different.
“Joyce, can you duck down with me for a minute?”
The little girl looked down to Olivia and smiled thinly. “You big silly,” she said. “What’re you doing?”
“Just hiding. Playing hide and seek, sort of.”
“From who? From that man, right there?” She actually pointed out of the window and smiled. Her smile then faltered, as if she realized there might be something wrong with the strange man on the other side of the street.
“Yes. We don’t know him and—”
“But he already saw me,” Joyce said. “He’s coming.”
Olivia panicked and once again felt the shame of assuming the man had ill intentions. And now with their location given away, she had no choice but to sit up. She thought briefly about honking the horn to alert Paul. As she sat up, she reached over to do exactly that, but the sight by the passenger side window froze her.
The man was already there. He was looking into the truck, his tired eyes like murky water in hollow pits. A lazy smile was on his face as he peered in, his teeth looking almost too white in contrast to the blood—both wet and dried—that covered the right side of his face.
“Hey there,” the man said, playfully tapping his fingers against the glass. He let out a little chuckle that sounded far too childlike to go along with features that made him look to be about fifty or so. Of course, all of the blood made it hard to tell for certain.
Joyce cringed and pressed herself against Olivia. Olivia reached out and pressed the Lock button on the side of the door. The man apparently took all of this in stride. His smile turned into a playful frown. He took a single step back but still leaned towards the truck. “I’m not sick,” he said. “I swear. Y’all are the first living people I’ve seen in two days.” He paused, considered something briefly, and then added: “Y’all sick?”
“No,” Olivia said. “The man we’re travelling with will be back soon. Maybe then we can help you.”
The man nodded and said, “Yeah, I get it. I look like hell. It’s been…well, it’s been a rough few days. I lost everyone. I had to do things in the last couple of days that I don’t…that I don’t think I’ll ever forget.”
Olivia felt her heart softening for the man but still found herself hesitant to trust him. Something about his gaze unnerved her. She wondered what things he’d done lately that he would not be able to forget. She wondered where all of that blood came from. She wondered if he—
Without warning, he reclaimed the step back towards the truck. When he did, he threw his right fist hard against the glass. Joyce shrieked at the suddenness of it. As for Olivia, she felt her stomach grow tight at the sound of this man’s hand slamming against the glass. Surely he’d broken it. He had not held back, and a small crack appeared along the edge of the glass.
“What do you want?” Olivia asked.
“Someone to stay here with me,” he said. He said it in a timid voice that clued Olivia in to what had happened. She was sure he had lost everyone and everything he’d ever known. And somewhere along the way, over the last few days or however long it had been since the Blood Fire Virus came through here, he’d slowly started to detach himself from reality. He might not be losing his mind, but he certainly did not have it firmly in his grasp.
“We have to go,” Olivia said. “We’re just passing through.”
For a moment, Olivia was sure the man was going to punch at the glass again. A very brief look of anger washed across his face and was then gone in an instant. He took a deep breath and reached to his shoulder. It was the first time Olivia noticed he was wearing a backpack. He lifted the strap from his shoulder and spun the pack around to his chest. As he fumbled for the zipper along the top portion of it, those sleepy, hollow eyes looked back through the glass. This time, they landed on only Joyce, bringing the smile back to his face.
“Got something for you,” the man said.
“No, that’s okay,” Olivia said, hating how scared she sounded. “Please, just leave us alone. We can—”
She saw movement from the front of the truck, through the glass. Paul had quietly approached and was now weaving his way between the front of the truck and the bumper of the car ahead of them. His gun was raised, pointed directly at the blood-splattered man. His face was a blank sheet of concentration, his jaw firmly set and his eyes unblinking.
“Step away from the truck, sir,” Paul said.
The man’s attention shifted entirely to Paul, though he kept his hands on the bookbag. His right hand had found the zipper and was slowly pulling it open. He did as Paul asked, though, taking two steps away from the truck.
“Hands away from the pack,” Paul said.
The man did not obey this as quickly as the first command. Olivia watched the stand-off through the glass, wanting to look away but unable to do so. Paul’s voice reached her ears as if from underwater because of the glass and the palpable tension between them.
“I just wanted to give them something…the little girl…”
“Hands away from the pack, mister,” Paul said. “You will not get another warning.”
The man chuckled in that childlike way again and Olivia now wondered if maybe he was slightly insane. “Gonna shoot me?” he asked Paul. He lowered the zipper more and his hand went into the top pocket of the backpack. “Gonna shoot me over this?”
“Hands in the air now!” Paul screamed.
But the man began to pull his arm out of the bag. Olivia could only barely see what he held. Something black, slightly cylindrical in shape.
The sound of Paul’s gun brought a stifled cry out of Olivia’s throat. She just barely caught sight of the effects, and for that, she was grateful. Yet, as she just barely saw the man’s head rock back, spraying red against the side of the truck, Olivia saw that Joyce was
watching it straight-on.
Joyce shrieked. Her hands went to her face as if to cover her eyes, but stopped at her cheeks. Olivia held her close and the girl sagged against her, screaming and wailing. Olivia hugged her and looked through the glass to Paul. He was standing in the same spot, slowly lowering the Glock. He was staring at the place where the man had fallen, no more than two feet away from the truck.
After a few moments, the sound of Joyce’s screaming must have snapped him out of whatever fugue he’d nearly slipped into. He looked at them through the windshield and Olivia finally saw emotion slipping into his features. From what she could tell, he might be on the verge of either crying or screaming. He turned his attention back to the fallen man and walked over to him. Olivia watched him through the passenger window, choosing to ignore the few splatters of fresh blood on the glass. Joyce still clung to her side. She was no longer screaming but was making little moaning noises, almost like a kid that was tired of crying but wanted their parent to know something was still definitely wrong.
Olivia was relieved that the man had fallen in a way that hid his face away from her line of vision through the window. She could only see him from below the shoulders. She watched as Paul knelt beside him. Her heart ached a bit as she watched him lift the man’s arm and routinely check his pulse. Finding nothing there, Paul lowered the man’s wrist and opened up the bookbag.
He let out a curse at the exact same moment Olivia saw what was in the bag. He had not been reaching for a gun at all, but a handful of partially melted chocolate bars.
Paul cursed again, louder this time, and threw the candy bars to the road. He got to his feet and paced for a moment, his head lowered. Olivia felt awful for him but had no idea what to say or how to respond. She let him have his moment, some time to adjust to what he’d just been forced to do.
It took about two minutes. In that same amount of time, Joyce had stopped moaning and relaxed her grip around Olivia. Paul stopped pacing back and forth around the truck and finally came to the passenger side door. When he opened it, Olivia was surprised at just how calm and soothing his voice sounded.
