Dead Highways: Origins (6 page)

The deal was simple. In exchange for a few boxes of food and water, I would take my grandma’s car and drop Naima off at her house. That way she could find out what happened to her father, which I suspected wasn’t good news. She said her house was no more than fifteen minutes away. Fair trade for thirty minutes of driving, I thought, even if some of the food was expired.

We found some empty wine boxes in the back, and she said I could fill four of them. Not just with food, with anything I wanted, so as long as I didn’t
ever ever ever
tell her father.

“What are you crazy?” I said. “I don’t think he likes me very much as it is.”

Naima smiled. The first smile I’d seen out of her that morning. “He’s not so bad. A little protective, but at least he’s not trying to arrange a marriage.”

“There’s always that.”

I stuffed the four boxes with as much junk as I could, three with food and water, and one with other stuff like ibuprofen, batteries, and assorted first aid supplies. I even grabbed a pack of cigarettes for Peaches. That’ll make her love me.

We carried the boxes outside and then she locked up the store. Naima agreed to help carry the stuff over to my place and then I’d take her to her house. Peaches watched us from the window the entire way across the street and then met us downstairs at the door.

“We got some stuff,” I said.

“Great,” Peaches said. She looked over at Naima. “Hi there.”

I introduced them, and then told Peaches the deal. She didn’t look too happy about staying there with my grandma while I ran off escorting Naima around. But what was she going to say? I got us food and water.

Peaches took one of the boxes, and we all went upstairs. We set the boxes down in the kitchen and then Peaches began to sort through them to see what I had picked out.

“Hold on,” I said to Naima. “I’ve got to tell my grandma that I’m gonna take the car. She won’t mind.”

I hadn’t even thought about what time it was, but it had to be pushing eight a.m.

I knocked on her door.

Then again.

Peaches looked over, concerned. I met her gaze and could tell immediately what she was thinking.

Terrible thoughts.

I pushed them away and entered grandma’s room. She was curled up in bed, on her side facing me, eyes closed, looking solemn. She wore a nightcap to bed that gave her an innocent, childlike quality.

I lightly nudged her shoulder, but she didn’t move.

I nudged her again. “Grandma, wake up.”

I could feel Peaches and Naima standing behind me in the doorway, looking on quietly.

I knelt down beside her. “No,” I whispered, continuing to lightly shake her. “No, no, no. Grandma, please, please wake up.”

I started to cry.

“Don’t leave me.”

I took her hand in mine, and as the tears ran down my face, I could feel the pulse of her heartbeat still going strong even after eighty years. But nothing I could say or do would wake her up.

How long was I in the bathroom?

Five minutes?

Ten?

I was hiding out. Hiding and crying. Crying because my grandmother, the woman who practically raised me all my life, had become infected with the unexplainable plague—the virus that had crossed the planet in record time, oceans and all, and left the majority of people on earth in a coma.

The television was first to tell me the story, but it wasn’t real. The news reports showed video of abandoned cities, looted cities, destroyed cities, usually from the vantage point of a helicopter. Cities with hundreds of thousands, millions of people even, normally bursting with economic activity, brought to a standstill—brought down in an instant, now lying quiet. Like giant ghost towns.

But it wasn’t real.

I saw only a small part of the plague firsthand outside my home, soldiers in a humvee, asleep at the wheel. Not dead. Not really alive.

But it
still
wasn’t real.

Not until the ugly plague reached home was any of it real. It took my grandma going into a coma to wake me up. Then it got my attention. I responded by hiding in the bathroom like a small child.

Hey, crying wasn’t something I did often, and certainly not in front of other people. I think the last time I had cried was when I heard Simon Cowell wouldn’t be returning as a judge on
American Idol
. Not that I thought Peaches and Naima wouldn’t understand my pain. It was likely Naima’s mother, and perhaps even her father, Aamod, had fallen victim to the same fate as my grandma. Peaches had family back in Kentucky, and while she didn’t seem very close to them, it was possible she may never know their fate, not with such few lines of communication open. And not knowing was probably worse than knowing.

They would understand perfectly. They were in the same sinking ship as me, after all. So I had no reason to be ashamed of crying, but still I stayed hidden. Regrouping in the bathroom. Letting my emotions go wild until I was sure I could control them.

How long would it take?

Another five minutes?

Ten?

I don’t know. Peaches didn’t let me get that far.

She knocked on the door. “Jimmy, are you okay?”

She was trying to be nice, caring, considerate, even if it was a question she already knew the answer to. If I were okay, I wouldn’t be sitting on the edge of the tub staring at the toilet crying my face off.

I didn’t respond, so she knocked again. A little louder.

“Jimmy . . .”

“I’m fine,” I finally said.

“Okay, good. I was just getting worried. I thought maybe . . . well, you know.”

“No, I’m still awake, if that’s what you were wondering. I’ll be out in a minute.”

“Take your time.”

I took another minute and then finally left the bathroom. I stood in the hallway for a moment glancing at my grandma lying solemnly in her bed, and then shut the door to her room. Peaches was sitting on the edge of my bed when I walked back into my room. Naima was looking out the still open window.

Peaches gave me a soft smile. Her eyes were red like she’d been crying too. “Hi.”

I nodded.

Naima turned from the window. “I’m sorry.”

I continued nodding.

“Has your dad got back yet?” I asked.

“No, not yet.”

“Then I’m sorry too.”

Naima looked back out the window. “What has happened to this world?”

“It’s gone to hell. The best we can hope for is that it’s only temporary.”

“What do you mean?” Peaches asked.

“I mean that maybe whatever is causing so many people to go into a coma will wear off eventually. At least before it’s too late.”

“How long can someone survive like that?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. With the right care, I’ve heard of people living for a long time in a coma, if you want to call that living. Of course, that’s under the care of doctors and nurses in a hospital or some other medically equipped environment. Here we have no way of feeding her or giving her life support. And at her age . . .” I took a deep breath, trying to drown my pain in oxygen. “I’d give her no more than a few days.”

“I’m so sorry, Jimmy,” Peaches said.

I sat down next to her on the bed. “It’s going to happen to all of us eventually. May as well get used to it, huh.”

“Well, I don’t want to just wait around for my turn. There’s got to be something we can do.”

“I’m gonna go drop Naima off at her house like I promised. After that, I’ll scout around. See how bad it is.”

“I want to go with you,” Peaches said.

“I know you do, but I need you to stay here with my grandma. What if she wakes up?”

“And what if she doesn’t . . . and then you don’t return? Then what?”

“Then you’re on your own.”

Naima left the window and sat down at my desk. “You really think she’s gonna come out of it so soon?”

I shook my head. “No, but I’d like to stay positive about it.”

“Okay, I’ll stay and keep an eye on her,” Peaches said. “But you better return.”

“I’ll be back.”

I went downstairs and pulled my grandma’s Buick around to the front of the store. I put Sally, my one and only, between the seat and the center console. Naima was waiting by the curb when I pulled up. I popped open the passenger door, and she got in.

“Nice car. It’s big.” She pressed down on the seats with her hands. “Comfy.”

“It sucks actually, but thanks.”

Peaches stood inside the bookstore and waved us off. The disappointment of being left alone again was evident on her face.

I made it halfway down the block before I turned around and went back.

Peaches was still standing where we’d left her. I rolled down the car windows.

She came outside and asked, “What is it?”

It
was a bad feeling that came on suddenly as I had pulled away. That’s what
it
was. And the message was clear.
Whatever you do, don’t let her out of your sight. Don’t leave her behind. I’m the awful disfigured creature in your brain that produces terrible thoughts.
And I’m telling you, if you leave her behind, you’ll never see her again. Muhahaha.

But of course, I wouldn’t tell
her
that.

All I told her was, “I changed my mind.”

I gave her the keys to lock up the bookstore and then she hopped in the backseat. I restarted the car and then pulled back onto the road.

Halfway down the block, she asked, “Why did you change your mind?”

I said nothing and kept driving.

We were the only moving car on the road.

“Now would be the time when you tell me where you live?”

The question was for Naima. I knew where Peaches lived, or used to live before the shit hit the fan. Shady Villas trailer park. I hadn’t forgotten what Officer Robinson had said.
That Shady Villas is a shady place.
Uh-huh. And the last thing I wanted was to chance running into Bad Moses again, if he wasn’t already incapacitated.

“Oh, sorry,” Naima said. “I was distracted.”

“Just let me know when and where to turn.”

I couldn’t blame Naima for being distracted. The farther we got down the road, the more fucked-up things began to look. It reminded me of
War of the Worlds
, where everything just shut down, only this time it was mostly just the people that stopped working. The street had become one big parking lot where everyone decided to stop and take a nap, suddenly for some, evident by the number of accidents, and the utter cacophony of screaming car alarms. Many of the cars were still running, others had either run out of gas or shut down after colliding with the car in front of them. Thankfully, it wasn’t hard to maneuver through the crowd. The soldiers in the humvees had successfully coerced enough people to stay indoors. Still I drove slow, gliding along at twenty miles per hour, taking it all in.

“The lights aren’t working,” said Peaches.

She was very observant, even from the backseat. “No power. No lights,” I said, and drove through traffic light after traffic light without stopping, but not without looking out for other moving cars. The last thing I needed was to be sideswiped by some other moron out cruising our little ghost town. I did, however, spot some people who didn’t have their head on the steering wheel or face down on the sidewalk. Some people like us. Still moving. Still
aware.
Wondering what was going on. They poked their heads out of windows, just as I had. They hid in the shadowy alleyways between buildings. They peered down from rooftops. They stared at us as we drove by, and we stared back with the same confused look on our faces.

I reached the end of the road and Naima instructed me to turn right onto Highway 520. The good news was we were heading further from the center of town. The bad news was it seemed everyone else had the same idea, at least before they went into a coma. The highway was jam-packed with cars.

“Look at this mess,” I said. “Everyone must have panicked. Tried to flee the city.” I looked over at Naima. “I’d keep an eye out for your dad. It’s possible he never made it home.”

“I am. And don’t say that.”

Many of the cars cluttering up the highway were large trucks, military, or police vehicles. I had to drive partially on the median just to get through. Unfortunately, that all ended a half mile down the road.

“Do you guys see this?”

“Oh, my God,” Peaches whispered. “That’s . . . that’s awful.”

An eighteen-wheeler lay across the median, turned onto its side, blocking the way forward. Smoke lightly billowed out from under the hood. Two cars had followed the truck into the trench, both upside down with their tires to the sky.

As we rolled closer, I saw someone lying face down in the grass, near one of the overturned cars.

I stopped the Buick and put it in park. Looked around. I didn’t want to go back the way we came. There had to be a way forward.

“What do we do now?” Naima asked.

“Stay here,” I said, and exited the car.

The air outside still carried an undercurrent of electricity. It looked like storm clouds might be moving in from the west. The occasional gusts of cool wind concurred.

I slowly walked up to the body lying in the grass. It was a man. Short, dark hair. Brown skin. I prayed it wasn’t Aamod, for Naima’s sake. I leaned down and turned him over.

Whew.

Not Aamod. Not even Indian. A white guy, middle-aged, with a fabulously dark tan. Probably spent half his life wasting away at the beach, growing reptile skin. There was blood from his chin to his chest, soaking his shirt. Fresh blood. The accident couldn’t have happened that long ago. Maybe overnight. But he was still breathing. He had crawled out from under one of the flipped cars and made it this far before the infection beat him, before his world went dark.

I recalled the early symptoms.

Fatigue.

Loss of motor control.

Blurred vision.

Not good things to experience when behind the wheel. This guy was lucky he wasn’t crushed, even if one of his knees seemed to be bent the wrong direction.

I stood up, feeling helpless. I looked back over at the Buick. Peaches and Naima were now standing outside the car.

“He’s alive,” I shouted. “But like the others.”

“Is there anything we can do?” Peaches shouted back.

“Not for him, no.” I scanned the mess of twisted metal encircling me. “We’re gonna have to turn around and go back. Find another way through.”

And so we did.

I backed the car up until I could safely turn around. Although it didn’t matter anymore, I was still extra careful not to get a ding on my grandma’s Buick. She loved the car as much as I hated it.

I was able to turn right at the first intersection we came upon. So I did.

“We’re gonna have to stick to the roads less travelled. I have a feeling all the highways will be like that one.”