by Bobby Adair
As we drove slowly through the oil fields, passing one chalky square after another, and another, I started to see what looked like low, earthen dams built in squares and rectangles on the barren oil field tracts. From behind those earthen dams, glints of sunlight reflected off of what I first thought were pools of oil. With an anxiety knot growing in my chest, I pulled my truck off the narrow dirt road and onto a driveway toward one of the pools. Murphy started to ask questions. Grace rattled her map and protested.
At the end of the dirt driveway, the truck rolled into the square of dirt, scraped clean of plants. As I slowed the truck, I looked around and didn’t see a living thing in any direction save thorny trees and plants.
Murphy and Grace had passed the point of worry, but I'd stopped caring what it was they were saying.
I brought the truck to a stop and set the parking brake, leaving the motor running, as I got out of the pickup. I marched over to the edge of one of the gravelly berms and climbed the slope up to the top edge—maybe five or six feet up—and stopped walking.
The others stood at the bottom, concerned but not asking any more questions. They were worried. Maybe they thought I’d finally cracked. The pressure of so many months of running for my life, killing, and murdering, slaughtering on a genocidal scale, doing things that would warp the mind of any sane man, should have broken me.
I looked again across the uninteresting landscape, seeing for miles and miles. Flat, white patches spread to the horizon, each with an oil pump or tank, many with square-shaped dikes, all of those with dark pools reflecting the sky.
The pool at my feet was water. The dike I stood on was one side of a retention pond to hold the water for whatever purpose it served in drilling for oil. Whatever compounds it was retaining besides the water had settled to the bottom, leaving what looked like clear, drinkable water near the surface. I wouldn’t drink it because I had a brain and I could deduce that it was probably laden with enough exotic chemicals to give me a dozen varieties of cancer.
But a White wouldn’t have the brain capacity to worry about cancer. A White wouldn’t even know what a harmful chemical was. A thirsty White hiking across miles of desert in search of food wouldn’t think twice about drinking from one of these pools.
And with that, I realized there was nothing to keep a horde of Whites from walking from Houston all the way across Texas to El Paso, killing and eating every normal in every little town along the way, including Balmorhea. There was more water out here than I ever imagined.
My plan for West Texas salvation was a crock of shit.
The realization felt like a brass fist punching me in the chest and crushing my ribs. I fell to my knees and stared at the water.
I'd seen everybody I liked or loved die at the hands of Whites and assholes, and I'd sent the ones lucky enough to survive out to chase a West Texas dream that was a rerun of a nightmare they were trying to escape. The only thing I'd accomplished was that I gave them a different name for the place they were going to die.
Zed Zane was a guilty fuck.
Chapter 57
"Say man.” It was Murphy. He'd climbed the berm beside me. He looked at the glistening square pool of tainted water, perhaps wondering what it was that had me transfixed.
Grace was crunching her way up through the loose gravel on the slope of the dike. They were going to tag team me.
“You’re not going to strip down and run off with your machete again, are you?” Murphy added a chuckle. “You know, like you did that night before we chased the naked horde all the way to Killeen.”
I shook my head.
“What is it, then?” Grace asked with no judgment in her voice, just concern.
A despondent weight was coming down on me. “What if we don’t go to Balmorhea?” I turned and looked up at Murphy. “What if we go up in the mountains like you said. Maybe drive to New Mexico—not too far north, where the snow won’t be too bad—then work our way up the Rockies when spring comes. Maybe stop in Montana or Canada like you said.”
Grace put a gentle hand on my shoulder. I wanted to brush it away, torn between accepting the kindness of a friend and the feeling of being placated, manipulated by someone used to dealing with adolescent misfits like me. “Talk to us,” she said.
"Yeah, man,” Murphy added his weight to the request. "Whenever you get like this, some shit's about to go down, or you're gonna do something crazy.” Murphy exaggerated his look around at the flat ground and the spiky mesquites. "Unless you wanna start choppin' firewood, I don't know what's got you riled up."
I didn’t want to tell them because I knew in my heart I was right. Now, I was right about what to expect when we arrived.
Either way, they'd insist on finishing the journey. They'd say, "We've come this far. We can't know for sure. Let's just go and find out."
I stared at the water and saw through the clear layer to the settled murk at the bottom as it oozed in unnatural, transfixing colors that didn't mean anything. For a moment they were just distracting me from my fear. And my fear was certain, and it was painful. I didn't want to see another dead friend.
Somewhere along the road I’d been ticking through a quota of murders and a quota of dead friends without knowing it, without knowing it existed, until that moment as the idea of seeing one more person die felt too painful to face. I’d seen enough. I’d killed my share.
The Ogre and the Harpy in all their attempts to forge a remorseless malcontent, a pale-faced demigod, a haunting demon, a heartless destroyer to thrive in the aftermath of humanity's fall, had failed. Their nasty words, their shitty apathy, their brutal fists, their leather belts, and their hard hearts had done nothing but make a man who could still see one too many broken bodies. There was nothing special about Zed Zane. I was as fragile as everybody else, and I was afraid to put a voice to the confession because speaking the words would cement my mediocrity into reality.
Null Spot the Destroyer was dead. He died of a daunted heart in an introspective moment when nobody was looking.
“We need to get going,” said Grace. “Maybe you should sit in the back for a while. I’ll drive. You want to get back in the truck?”
“We’re safe here.” It was a deflection. I looked around the dead landscape. “Not a White for miles. There’s no hurry.”
“If we want to get there by dark,” Grace countered, “we need to go.”
I dropped to the ground and sat in the dirt, still facing the pond. Grace and Murphy shared some silent glances, trying to figure things out. Eve came over to the bottom of the dike, and Grace urged her to give us some room while hinting that she take the opportunity to top off the gas tanks with the full cans in the rear of the truck. Then, Grace sat down beside me.
Murphy huffed and sat down too.
“We can stay a while if you want,” she said. “It’s pretty here in a desolate sort of way.”
Murphy laughed. “It’s fuckin’ ugly. It’s like the Devil’s butthole or something.”
That took me by surprise, and I couldn't help but laugh. "It is fuckin' ugly out here."
“I bet we’ll have pretty sunsets.” Grace pointed west. “No buildings to block the view. Nothing really.”
Murphy added, “Not until you get to the mountains.”
“The Davis Mountains,” Grace confirmed.
I took a deep breath. “I know you guys think I’m half crazy half the time.”
“More than half on both counts,” Murphy told me.
I looked over at Murphy. "Back in College Station after we got off the helicopter that first day. You were in a weird mood, and you've been different ever since. I was thinking at the time maybe you'd had your fill. You were done with the killing and running. Is that true?"
Murphy looked at me for a long time, but he wasn't looking at me as much as he was looking into his own heart, maybe deciding what he was going to say, maybe deciding if I was speaking the truth.
“People can only take so much,” said Grace. “It’s natura
l.”
“So much death?” I asked.
“It’s all emotional trauma,” she told me. “Everybody’s got their limit. Murphy has his. You have yours. Everybody does. Is that what this is? Do you think you’ve hit yours?”
I glanced over at Murphy, who was still wending through the maze of his thoughts. I looked back at Grace, and I wanted to wrap my bullshit in another lie, but I nodded. I said, "Yeah. I think maybe so."
Murphy smiled in the heartbreaking way he does sometimes when his eyes are stuck with the depth of all the sadness he's trying to work through. "I think I've been cooked for a while.” He shook his head in answer to an unasked question and wrapped his arm over my shoulder. "But you're my brother, man. We've been through the shit, and we get more shit every day. I can't let you down. Seemed like you had some crazy you needed to work out of your system and if I didn't come along to watch your back, you'd have got yourself killed."
I wanted to insist that I'd have been okay on my own, but I knew it was a lie.
“Is that why you don’t want to go to Balmorhea?” Grace asked. “You’re afraid of what you might find there?”
I chuckled through the briefest of seconds as I looked back up at Grace. “You’re insightful. I’ll give you that.”
“People aren’t as hard to read as they think they are,” she said.
I shrugged. Maybe she was right.
“Why the change of heart?” asked Murphy. “You were optimistic about it. I mean, optimistic for you.” He added a pained laugh. “What’s different today?”
I pointed out at the arid landscape. “That’s how I remember this part of Texas. I didn’t think a White could ever cross the distance to get all the way out here, not from Austin, hell, not even from Fort Stockton.” I pointed at the water. “But they could. I wouldn’t drink this shit but Whites will. There’s nothing to stop them.”
“It’s still a long, long way,” said Grace. “Like we talked about, there aren’t that many people out here. So no matter what else is a factor, the chances are better for somebody out here than back in Austin or College Station, let alone Dallas and Houston.”
“And in Easy Town,” said Murphy, hope in his voice. “What if most of the Whites out here are the docile ones? What if most everybody died from the virus and never turned into a White.”
“He’s right,” said Grace. “Maybe things aren’t as bad in Balmorhea as you think they’ll be.”
“Maybe,” I allowed. “Maybe.”
Murphy said, "Look, man if you want to wait out here in the desert or whatever the fuck this dry ass place is, and sit here watching the stinky water, I'll sit here with you. If that's what you want. But I need to go to Balmorhea. It doesn't have to be today. It can be tomorrow or the next day. You don't have to come if you don't want, but I have to go. I'll take a truck and go by myself if I need to. No big deal. I need to know if Rachel is okay."
And that was a fear I didn’t want to face. If she was dead, it was my fault. “What if she’s not?”
Murphy pursed his lips, and the pain showed deep in his eyes again. He shook his head slowly, and a few tears rolled down his cheek. "She's my sister.” His voice cracked, and he cleared his throat. "It's a fucked up world. I understand what might be there. I just need to know."
“I’ll come with you.” I took a deep breath. “We’ll deal with it together.”
Chapter 58
West of Fort Stockton we wound up on Interstate Highway 10, the main artery for traffic crossing through Texas from Houston to El Paso. It was two lanes in each direction with a barren median a hundred feet wide and right-of-way bordered by thin barbed wire fences thirty or forty feet from the shoulders. When we did see abandoned cars, they were off the roadway and where the passengers had gone was anybody's guess. The desert, dotted with scrubby brush, stretched flat all the way from a row of smooth mountains far in the south to the horizon in the north.
We made good time driving west on the highway, as there was no reason to slow. The road was clear and flat for miles.
Grace, who'd been driving the lead vehicle since my pit stop in the oil fields, took the exit off Highway 10 to Balmorhea, and that put us on a two-lane road heading toward the foothills of the mountains in the south.
Grace slowed the truck to thirty. It was time for caution.
Houses, barns, and dilapidated buildings with no apparent purpose dotted the lots along the road. They gave the impression we were nearing a ghost town. When we passed a green sign that marked the city limits, Balmorhea looked like any of the dozens of dead little towns I'd seen on the trip—abandoned cars, houses with broken windows and open doors. One thing was missing, though, the remains of the dead.
My sense of normalcy had altered since the virus came. The dead were supposed to be in the streets. Their absence felt creepy.
Alternatively, the missing dead were signs of hope. Somebody had disposed of the bodies.
Grace turned left when we reached a yellowish-tan brick building the size of a small house, the post office. We drove through a grid of streets maybe eight blocks long and eight blocks wide that made up the whole town. We saw no sign of life.
“Which way?” Grace asked, stopping the truck in an intersection no different from most of the others.
Murphy shook his head, silently.
I nudged Javendra as I looked through his side window. “You see anything out that side?”
“No.”
I didn't see anything either, at least, nothing like what I was looking for—one of the Humvees, one of the pickups, Sergeant Dalhover, and Rachel. But no Whites either. Not one.
“The place isn’t that big,” said Grace. “We can check every street.” She looked at Murphy. “It’ll take us what, fifteen minutes?”
Murphy nodded.
Grace looked over her shoulder at Javendra. “Jump out and go tell Fritz what we’re doing so he won’t think I’m going nuts.”
“Okay.” Javendra reached for his door handle.
I flung my door open and said, “I got it.” I jumped out of the truck, not wanting to risk humanity’s hope with such a trivial task. I let Fritz know the plan, went back to sit behind Grace, and we drove.
Indeed, it took all of fifteen minutes to go up and down every street in town, passing the cars and houses, seeing no signs of life. We found ourselves back on the two-lane road we’d exited onto from Highway 10. Our pickups stopped in the middle of the road with engines idling and we were all out, standing, drinking water or warm soda, taking our necessary breaks, and sharing a box of stale crackers.
“I don’t want to be the one to say it,” said Grace, “but if they’d driven those Humvees here, we’d have seen them. Town’s not that big.”
“Do you think there’s a place they could have stopped on the way?” Fritz asked Murphy and me. “Maybe a better place.”
Murphy and I shared a look. We understood Fritz was trying to make us feel better with the suggestion, but neither of us was inclined to believe it. We’d seen too many hopes dashed. Murphy’s face turned hard. He was accepting the same thing I was accepting. Dalhover, Rachel, and the others had never made it. They’d been ambushed somewhere along the way, or were overrun by Whites, or broke down and been killed one by one as they tried to scavenge and survive, one of a thousand stories we’d heard or seen. There wasn’t a lot of room in the post-virus world for hope.
It was time to stop pretending and focus on practicalities. It was late in the day. We had a few more hours of sun. I told the others, “We should probably find a place to stay tonight.”
“Where’s this spring you told us about?” Jazz asked. “I mean, that’s the whole reason for coming here, right? An unending supply of clean water to drink and irrigate the fields. Where is it?”
I looked around to get my bearings, then pointed down the two-lane highway. "A mile or two down that way. It's a state park."
“A state park?” Grace asked. “So they’ve probably got a few buildings for the rang
ers or something?”
“Something like that.” I’d been to the park once, years ago. “Some cabins too.”
Fritz stepped away from the group and looked down the highway as though the room around him would help him to see better. “Remote?”
I looked around at the empty landscape outside of town. “Even more remote than this.”
“Maybe we stay there tonight,” offered Grace. “Should be safe.” She looked around at each of us. Silent consensus. We loaded up in the trucks.
It took all of a minute to pass the city limits sign on the way out of town. Houses grew sparse again and the bleached land stretched into nothingness in the north. In the southwest, the direction we were heading, the bald, brown mountains grew taller with our approach.
I watched through the windshield, looking across the plain at an irregularity far down the road. It grew larger and slowly clarified until I was able to make out a flat, white building with a red tile roof just off the highway on the left—the park's visitor cabins.
They weren’t cabins, not as anyone would think of a cabin. Lodge might be a better word, though it resembled one of those roadside motels from the 1950s. The lodge was made up of two L-shaped buildings, five small apartments each, laid out in roughly the configuration of a horseshoe with a narrow gap at the top, opposite the open end. At the open end, there was a driveway a few cars wide, which provided access to a central courtyard for parking between the buildings.
The layout gave the feeling of an old Spanish mission laid out a bit like a fort to defend from the Apaches in the area. To enhance the impression, canals drained water away from the spring and down to a lake that lay southeast of the city. The canals looped around the horseshoe fortress adding an extra defense for anyone inside. As Grace had guessed, it would be a relatively safe place to stay.
After a few more minutes of slowly driving, we passed a sign for the park and Grace slowed the truck to make the turn into the entrance. We drove right by the ranger’s booth. Nobody there to charge us an entry fee. What a surprise. Off to our left, the driveway led to the mouth of the courtyard between the two main buildings and Murphy said, “Holy shit, Zed! You see this?”
