by Bobby Adair
Don’t think that way.
Breathe slow. Solve the problem.
Don’t panic.
The kids are already tense.
Don’t make it worse on them.
The wife is bitching in the front seat about how you should have gone the other way, taken that shortcut that her friend Elva told her about, because Elva and her husband—number three, was it?—are already out of town. Yeah, that was her on the phone a moment ago. The wife just said so. And the kids are whining in the back seat because the girl needs to piss, and that little fucker of a son won’t stop agitating her.
And the virus is coming.
The radio is spewing fear like it's on a half-price Labor Day sale with a mattress thrown in and the wife is ratcheting up her crazy-ass coulda-shoulda’s like there’s one per-fuckity thing you can do about it now.
And still, the fear.
Every time you see somebody in the rearview mirror who’s not in a car, you think, that’s THEM.
That’s one of THEM.
But it’s not. Not yet.
Still, people are outside, loitering, acting like idiots, spewing their anger on anyone stupid enough to come within range of their shouty voices and balled fists.
Things aren’t right.
Understatement.
The traffic isn't moving, and your biggest fear is that you're fucked—not just you, but the kids in the back seat, the whiner, and the agitator. No matter how much they’re pissing you right the fuck off, you know you love them more than anything else in this whole traffic-jammed town, in this whole God-fucked world, and you reach over and grab your wife and bury your face in her shoulder, even while her bitching is burning your ears, because you don’t want her to hear you cry.
And you do cry, because you know all the way down to your balls that they’re going to die—your wife and your kids—because you fucked up.
You picked the route.
You drove the car up on the highway entrance ramp.
You watched the traffic back up, slow, and then stop altogether.
At so many points along the way, you could have made a different choice. You could have listened to her. You could have lost your temper and rammed your way between the assholes in the next lane and gotten away across the median five miles back, maybe.
Maybe.
But not now.
Now you’re stuck.
And the wife is stuck.
And the kids are stuck, and they don't even know what's going on, except that the smell of fear is in the car. It’s running up their nostrils and slamming their brains full of primordial get-the-fuck-out-of-here. But moving their feet is pointless because they’re seat belted into the upholstery tight enough to pillow it out around their spindly torsos. The taste of panic is in their mouths, and they’re spinning off so much frenetic movement, you have to keep looking to make sure the belts are still buckled.
Then the girl pisses her pants.
The boy shrieks a laugh because he’s half hysterical with new emotions that his little suburban-cocooned ass never knew existed. And because he’s just a little prick sometimes.
And what the fuck are you gonna do about all of it?
Nothing.
Nothing.
Just fucking nothing, except wait while the engine idles, the wife screams at the boy, and the gas gauge creeps ominously closer to E.
And you beat the steering wheel with your fist and you curse all the dumbasses in front of you, because you’re just sure that some accident by some idiot up there is the reason the traffic isn’t moving, and you want to jump out of the car, run up there, find the dipshit that caused this mess and punch him in the nuts.
But you don’t.
You can’t.
You can’t leave your kids. Not in this chaos.
Something changes.
The sounds are different.
Keening. Malicious. Hungry.
You turn the radio down, hoping it’s not a squealing belt in the engine, while you pray to God and your eyes plead with the apathetic clouds above that it is only that.
It’s not.
Then THEY come.
Fritz said, “Just drive across the bridge.”
I turned away from a Subaru with broken out windows, streaky stains of sunbaked blood on the hood, and the dark shapes of flesh-scavenged corpses inside. For some reason, that one, of all those packed on the highway below in a similar state, captured my attention and caught me up in imagining what had happened to its occupants.
I looked at Fritz, his words having woken me to the realization that I’d been staring and letting my imagination drag my mood down to an ugly depth. I turned toward the gaps between the burned wrecks on the bridge over the highway, exaggerating a nod as if I’d been going through a silent, evaluative process on whether to cross the highway at just that spot.
“You all right?” Fritz asked, not bothering to hide with some tact his concern that I might be slipping a little too far from reality.
“Yeah.” Of course, I said ‘yeah.’ That's the only answer to that question, when what somebody is really asking is the rhetorical, "What the fuck is wrong with you?"
I put my foot to the accelerator and the electric Mustang rolled over the bridge above the highway, crossing from West Austin to East Austin. Along the access road on the other side of the interstate, rummaging through the lines of burned hulks of cars that four months ago had been waiting their chance to get into the unmoving line on I-35, white skinned monsters—formerly normal people—glowed in the moonlight.
They didn’t notice the silent Mustang. None had since I drove away from the old power plant down by the river. We’d passed hundreds on our rat-maze race through Austin’s gentrified warehouse district and into the high-rise condos and bank buildings closer to the Capitol. Along the way, as I caught glimpses of the statehouse, I saw that the fires I'd started in the subterranean Capitol Annex were still burning in the hundred-fifty-year-old domed building. Now, beneath the red granite dome, the building’s windows flickered orange and dribbled rivulets of acrid ash into the black sky, hiding the stars behind smoky ribbons of our ruin.
The Whites did notice the rattling diesel engine and the noisy off-road tires on the Humvee Murphy was driving at a distance a few blocks behind. His vehicle loudly announced the coming of a meal and the Whites reacted accordingly, waking up, chasing into the street to catch him and his passengers, pouncing on the armored Humvee from the sides.
It was all a futile effort on the Whites’ part. They weren’t fast enough to catch it from behind. They didn’t get out in front of it in sufficient numbers to do anything but die as Murphy ran them down. The ones that did get on top didn’t stay, as Murphy bounced them off by running over curbs or whatever lumps he might find in the road.
With the bridge behind us, the Mustang glided silently through the ashen remnants of neighborhoods. The fire that burned most of East Austin back in August had left little intact. The pattern of the streets was deducible only from the ragged lines of rusty orange and brown car skeletons, each having had all non-metal components long since blazed away.
Blackened brick chimneys stood as grave markers for each house that had smoldered to cinder around it. Trunks of trees still stood, some holding the thickest of their limbs to the sky. All of the storm drains along the curbs had clogged with ash and fire debris when the storms came. What was left when the rain clouds blew away and the flood waters receded was an even blanket of blackened gray over everything not tall enough to reach above it.
That was what the Mustang rolled through, six-inches deep. I ran over brittle bone, which I’d come to know from the peculiar feel of the crunch it made under our wheels. Of the other metallic remnants of the East Austin disaster, I only hoped none hiding in the ash on the road in front of me were sharp enough to puncture my tires.
Behind the Mustang, a cloud of fine ash thrown up by the tires hid the Humvee from sight. I knew that made it hard for Murphy to see, but i
t made it impossible for him to lose me. What's more, with East Austin burned nearly flat, any White who happened to be wandering through wouldn't be able to see the Humvee. They'd hear the noisy diesel, but they'd only see the big, gray cloud, instead of a rolling vehicle.
Eventually, the ashen desolation turned to rolling hills, blanketed by farms. The fields were separated by barbed wire fences, draped in bramble and sprouting wind-tormented trees trying to birth hedgerows. Interspersed with the fields were homestead parcels, boasting anything from a decaying trailer to a plantation-style mansion. As often as not, something, or a whole host of somethings—old cars, obsolete farm equipment, and kitchen appliances—stood in tall weeds, rusting their way into the black clay.
Within ten or twenty miles of Austin’s outskirts, oddly shaped plots of land that used to be farms had long since been sold to developers with a penchant for laying out little subdivisions with names like Green Hills, Vista Norte, or Sunny Shitboxes, probably on a landfill mound, all built from low-grade yellow pine and the cheapest Chinese siding the builder could import and staple together. Over the sub-standard constructs, built outside the city limits and beyond the reach of restrictive building codes, the builders slapped on one of six colors of fresh paint, all inspired by some shade of dried curb mud and cockroach turds.
The newer of the subdivisions looked squeaky-plain and tidy, with their ten-foot, two-leaf twigs of trees staked into the center of the cut-sod front lawns. None of the siding on those houses had yet warped. None of the paint had oxidized and washed away. Few of the shingles were yet blown off in the Texas wind.
The older subdivisions, those built a decade or more in the past, looked like slums more than suburbs. Hard-working, middle-class folk who couldn’t afford the obscene real estate prices closer to town bought those houses on adjustable rate mortgages, thinking they could afford growing future payments, because they’d long ago been infected by the blinding disease of optimism that convinced them that despite the evidence of all their dismal yesterdays, their tomorrows would be dipped in gold.
Fucked by the fine print, they were.
The promo periods on their mortgages came to an end. Monthly installments bounced happily higher—for the banks—at pretty much the same time that gasoline prices rocketed to a new record. Suddenly that twenty-mile commute into Austin, manageable a year before, ballooned into unaffordability along with their house payments. They missed a payment on a credit card and general default rules kicked in, doubling the interest rate and monthly payments on all of their revolving debt.
Stagnating wages couldn’t cover the difference. House repairs were skipped. Watering the lawn, a luxury in drought-parched Texas in those days, ceased. The twiggy trees died. The new sod turned to dirt. The house foundations, sitting on that porous, parched clay, shifted and cracked. Quarter-inch cracks zig-zagged down brick walls. Roofs opened at the seams.
On the occasions when it did rain, water leaked in. Mold followed, because even in the fucking Texas heat, the thick humidity makes sure that things never completely dry out. Because the insurance companies stopped covering mold damage a decade before, the houses turned unlivable and worthless.
For the hard working folk who hadn’t figured it out by then, they learned how ‘fucked’ was spelled, what it tasted like, what it smelled like. They knew it with all the intimacy of a herpes-infected lover. They loaded their shit into U-Haul vans, dropped their house keys into brown envelopes, and jingle-mailed their dreams away to the mortgage companies.
A cancer of bleak despair wormed its way across the face of America in those years, creating open sores of pre-apocalyptic rot for the virus to settle in.
Now it was hard to tell which houses had been abandoned for years and which held the recently deceased.
The farther we drove from Austin, the more my mood turned to shit, the more the whole shitty world looked like something tormented by a biblical plague and forgotten by God. And the more I felt like I was running away, though the promise of fledgling hope lived in College Station, our destination a hundred miles to the east.
Chapter 2
Fritz studied the map that was unfolded across his lap, running up the door panel and overhanging the console. Yeah, with the passing of the smartphone into history's long list of lost technological marvels, paper maps were back in fashion. Using a tiny flashlight, one of those with a single LED, designed for hanging on key chains he said, “Turn left up at this next corner.”
“I think that sign back there said 1704.” I looked at the trees lining the road and craned my neck as though that would help me see around the corner we’d just passed.
“That’s the one,” confirmed Fritz.
“You guys mapped this out on your way here?” I asked as I drove the car through another turn.
“Yeah.” Fritz dragged his finger through the spot of light left on the paper by his tiny LED. “It took us four tries to find open roads all the way to Austin.”
“The roads are that bad out here?” I asked.
“Some of them are,” said Fritz. “In some places the bridges are blocked. I guess the farmers figured if they barricaded the bridges, they’d protect themselves.”
I made no attempt to hide the bitterness in my laugh. “Most of these bridges run over dry creeks.”
“They were worried about people driving into their area, however they defined it, and bringing the infection with them,” said Fritz. “They didn’t think about all the infected coming on foot.”
“It’s hard to think of everything,” I allowed. I’d been through plenty of mistakes where the thing or things I’d missed nearly cost me my life. That led directly to thoughts of all the lives my mistakes did cost. That, of course, led directly to thoughts of Steph and even Amber.
Painful, festering shit.
We passed a cluster of a dozen houses centered on an antique shop and a convenience store with signs out front advertising shelled pecans and gooey nut-filled candies. I asked, “What’s the story with all the little towns out this way? Are they road-blocked?”
“Nope. Not all of them.” Fritz didn't look up from his map. "We'll have to go through Lexington. It's not that big, but we saw a bunch of the infected when we passed through on the way here. That could be trouble. In Dime Box, the locals tried to block the road but did a pretty bad job. Getting through was easier than it looked like it would be. Caldwell might be a problem.”
I nodded knowingly. Caldwell was one of the largest of the small towns between Austin and College Station. Bigger town, more infected. Simple logic.
With apologies hiding in the tone of his voice, Fritz said, “We couldn’t find a way without going through at least some towns. We tried.”
We crested a rolling hill that had a view of the paved road running over the terrain and across a bridge over a creek at the bottom. Past the creek, the road climbed back up to the crest of the next hill. Just ahead, a herd of cattle charged across, stampeding through the shrubs, weeds, and fencing.
Without even thinking that I was wearing night vision goggles, I asked, “You seeing this?”
Fritz looked up, raising his pistol as he tried to make out shapes in the darkness ahead.
The light coming off the thin sliver of moon was okay, but not great.
I pointed as I took my foot off the accelerator. “Way up there. The cows.”
“I see something moving across the road,” said Fritz. “It’s hard to tell.”
“It’s like a thousand cows on a stampede or something.”
“Stampeding?” he asked.
The slower the car rolled, the more the beat of those hooves hitting the ground vibrated up through the tires. I laid a hand on the dashboard. “You can feel it.”
Fritz put a palm on the dash and cocked his head. “I feel it. I hear ‘em, too.”
Looking to my left, across fields stretched over hills that rolled all the way to the black horizon, I said, "I don't know if you can make them out, but there are thousands o
f them—and I do mean thousands—already out there." I was hoping Fritz could make out the black silhouettes of individuals, separated from the herd, standing out against the tan-colored field.
“Yeah,” he said.
I looked back ahead at the cattle still crossing the road. “We can’t get through that.”
Fritz shook his head to agree, then looked out through the Mustang’s rear window.
I looked at the rearview mirror. Murphy was slowing the Humvee, matching my speed and maintaining the gap between us.
“You wanna check the map?” I asked. “Or you wanna wing it?”
I looked over my shoulder as I braked, preparing to turn around. That’s when something really important, something that I’d overlooked, became blazingly obvious.
The trees and shrubs growing up the fence on the right side of the road were glowing red.
The damned brake lights.
Why didn’t I think to take out those fucking brake light bulbs?
Maybe a better question was why it’d taken so long to notice. Was the virus cooking my brain into a new kind of dementia immune even to introspection? And what about Murphy? Why didn't he signal me about the brake lights much earlier? Or maybe he did, and I didn't notice.
The sound of a bad tuba player reaching for octaves outside his range startled me. I jerked my head to my right. Dozens, maybe hundreds, of small and large branches snapped.
Twigs, grass, and leaves exploded through the fence ahead of us from the right side of the road. A massive Hereford burst out of the flying debris, trailing strands of barbed wire and spewing a bloody froth. Other cattle broke through between the trees. Some got tangled in the barbed wire and wailed.
Whites shrieked and poured through the holes in the fence, grasping at the big Hereford now in the center of the road.
One of the Whites pounced at the beast and in the slow-motion, liquid time of surprise, the White flew through the air like a Neanderthal Superman with a knife in hand, trying to catch his prehistoric supper.
As that image worked its way through my overindulgent imagination, I realized all of the Whites coming through the fence were naked and bald. Many of those closest to the cattle slashed and stabbed with kitchen knives, hunting knives, barbecue forks, and fireplace pokers.
