Wormwood (28 page)

He might take a car or motorcycle, but would the roads be clear, or bottle-necked with frozen traffic?  Would he be able to get fuel, or spare parts?

Under his own steam, how long would it take to walk or cycle to the East Coast?  Three months?  Six?  A
year
?

He had no idea.

Each question posed ten more, each more complicated than the last.

Forget about travel for its own sake, or out of simple curiosity; instead, think about what was going to happen when May turned into November and a cold, hard winter descended?

This far north, it was going to get
cold
, it was going to snow…

Would the power be back on by then, or would he be living like a caveman, spending his days gathering food and firewood?  Foraging the ashes and ruins by himself or with a small group of others, protecting their stores and their last remaining bullets like their distant, distant ancestors had protected a single spark of fire.

Without bullets the legions of infected would get a lot closer…

Eventually, they’d have to start killing them with clubs and spears, with rocks or their bare hands.

Which, of course, would dramatically increase the chances of becoming infected oneself.

These thoughts spiraled through Shane’s head as he looked out over Brace.  At the fate of one small town that hardly merited a dot on the map.

“Well?” Larry sighed.  What do you think?  Fred Meyer?”

Shane nodded.

22

There were two ways to get to Highway 12 out of Brace.

The first was to go back the way they had come, riding east until they met up with the old highway and then turning south.  It was likely the least obstructed and the least traveled route; unfortunately, it ended at Summertides and they had no desire to repeat that experience.

The other route led directly south, putting them in the eastbound entry lane within half a mile.  Logic (and the impassable situation at Summertides) seemed to make this the obvious choice, but it was potentially slower and more dangerous as well.  Being one of 2 or 3
westward
evacuation routes from the city, it would not be unreasonable to guess that good old 12 might be something of a graveyard by now.  All it would take was one bad accident to start a chain reaction that would put traffic at a complete standstill.  Take those frightened people, all sitting in their cars with nowhere to go, add a disgruntled corpse or two, and what you got was a bloody snowball gathering mass and momentum as it rolled back into town, carrying whole families off with it as it went.

On the other hand, they might expect the lanes running east to be relatively clear, or at least passable.  No doubt some median jumping had occurred, but how many people would actually risk driving against oncoming traffic?

Most would have sat obediently in their cars, confident in the knowledge that Highway 12’s four lanes narrowed to two at Norton, a scant six miles further on, which would have been cause enough for backup and delay.

“What about Autumn Creek Road?” Shane suggested, the two of them debating their options.  “If we can make it across the river, it’ll take us right to Fred Meyer’s back parking lot.”

Larry considered it.  Autumn Creek Road was a narrow, two-lane passage sandwiched between the river and a high, muscular ridge, the steep uniformity of the later broken by twisted gullies and rocky canyons as it rose westward from the city.  There was a green belt of land running along the eroded base of the ridge, containing a few orchards and private homes, but because it was prone to flooding, it had remained sparsely populated.

“We’ll still have to take the highway for two or three miles,” Larry said, “and hope at least one of the bridges is passable… but I think it’s worth a try, depending on what we find along Highway 12.”

Shane nodded.  “Let’s do it then.”

Larry smiled and kick-started the bike.  “Aye-aye, Captain.”

They puttered past the ghostly ruins of the drive-in, searching for the road out of Brace.  They passed it once then found it circling back, searching the area where Larry last remembered it.  It appeared as a warped slab threading its way through a singed copse of cottonwoods.

A dead skunk lay just beyond the first bend, flattened down to a sunbeaten smell hovering over a flyblown matting in the pavement.  As they passed it, Larry said something he didn’t quite catch; though Shane understood his pointing finger well enough.

The shapes of several cars and trucks loomed ahead, backed up along the east and westbound entry lanes and on both shoulders as well, as if patiently waiting for a ferry.

There were slow silhouettes moving amongst the gridlock, owners reluctant to abandon their blocked vehicles, even after death.  Not many, but a few.

“Better get those guns ready,” Larry advised.

23

The man with the potbelly and the “Live Free or Die!” t-shirt was the first to take notice of their approach.  He had wedged himself into an angled space between a pickup and a camper, but when he broke free he came at them at a run.  This was nothing like the infirm and elderly shuffle they had encountered at Summertides, but something which — if he struck them — might well knock them off the motorcycle like a rhino charging a Jeep.

He didn’t look particularly damaged either, Shane noticed; more like he’d died of exposure or boredom inside his car rather than falling prey to the ravages of the masses.  There was a dark smudge of dried blood or oil at the corner of his mouth, as if he’d been eating something raw or combustible, but that was all.

Swinging the shotgun around, Shane leveled it at the stretched eagle on the man’s t-shirt, waiting until he was within fifteen yards of them before thundering off his first shot.  It struck the man across the chest in a bloodied pattern that clipped the tail feathers and the “Live Free” portion of his shirt, but as a deterrent, it was about as effective as a handful of gravel flung at a 16 pound bowling ball.

Shane raised the barrel slightly and fired again, this time from less than ten feet away.

This had the desired effect of getting the man’s head rolling in the opposite direction, but the legs and overstuffed t-shirt were still coming at them, packed with enough deadweight and momentum to hit their right flank dead on.

Larry goosed the throttle and the bike hopped neatly forward, almost tumbling Shane off the back.  The corpse sailed past them, crashing with grim finality in the dry and thorny weeds beyond the shoulder of the road.

By the time Shane regained his balance, two more of the atrocities had appeared.  Where they’d come from he hadn’t a clue, but they were badly burned, so blistered and charred that they looked more like worms than human beings.  Bald mutations crawled out of a radioactive desert; naked yet sexless.

He supposed they must have come from Brace.

Larry was able to maneuver around them, leaving the crowded asphalt and angling down the soft slope of the shoulder.  Once there, and through a shallow screen of trees, they found themselves faced with a seamless wall of traffic, a westward exodus of empty cars which had been hopelessly stalled by something beyond their sight and comprehension.

Larry faltered, uncertain which direction to take to get around them.  The line seemed to stretch, solid and unbroken, for hundreds of yards in either direction.  The sputtering sound of the idling engine, now out in the open, began drawing unwanted attention.

“Which way?”
he shouted to Shane, hoping the kid had a better vantage than he did, though this seemed unlikely: both of them occupying a single seat on the same motorcycle.

“Left!” Shane shouted back, firing his father’s 9mm at a woman in shorts and a summer blouse approaching from that same direction.

The bullet knocked her down and Larry drove over her neck, feeling her hands flutter at his ankles even as the weight of the bike passed over her.

A boy with curly blonde hair, his iPod headphones still clipped to his ears, came bounding out of the line of cars like a wolf cub, his mouth an infected sore that had ruptured and turned black in the sunlight.  Shane saw that the boy was going to catch them; that, in all likelihood, a single bite from his swollen mouth would be enough to infect an entire city.

He tried to bring him down with the shotgun but found he couldn’t turn far enough on the seat to get him in his sights; not even with the handgun.  Faced with this dilemma — of feeling diseased fingernails drag him off the back of the motorcycle or jumping off himself — Shane shouted for Larry to keep going and took his chances on the later.

The Yamaha wasn’t moving fast, certainly no better than 7 or 8 miles per hour across the uneven terrain, but Shane knew he was heading for a crash as soon as he and the bike parted company.  The knobby rear tire, stripped of its fender, caught the inside of his thigh with an excruciating burn and from there it was just a matter of controlling his fall as best he could.  There were two or three impossible strides, then his ankle turned on a loose rock and the next thing he knew he was choking on dust, all the breath knocked out of him.  Curled up in a defensive ball, the shotgun and pistol flown from his grasp, Shane felt the blonde boy stumble over him and go sprawling just as gracelessly, throwing up another cloud of dust.

Shane realized that he probably had bare seconds left to live and the thought jolted him to his feet, unaware of the burn in his thigh, the swell of his ankle and the myriad scrapes and contusions all over his body.

He
was
aware that the blonde boy was getting rapidly to his feet.

And that he no longer had a gun to defend himself.

Forty feet away, Larry had brought the motorcycle to an awkward halt, he had unholstered one of his own guns and was busy firing it into the empty dust and sky, but to Shane these things seemed distant and unimportant, incapable of touching him.

The world around Shane seemed to shrink down to a scuffled patch of dry weeds, and in a panic, he searched amongst them for his guns, knowing they had to be somewhere near.

The blonde boy broke into a predatory lope, coming at him with his mouth open and his arms outstretched.

Larry was firing his gun.  Shane felt one of the bullets whiz past his face like an angry hornet.  Something fell heavily to the ground behind him and he stumbled over it; he went down into the embrace of its soft putrescence.

Then the blonde boy was on top of him, the two of them grappling.

Shane managed to get a knee up between them as he caught hold of the boys flailing arms, screaming out loud with the terror and effort it took to keep the snarling face at bay.  Ironically, with his leg folded against his chest and the weight of the boy pressing down on him, Shane glimpsed the polished steel of the hunting knife strapped just below his knee.  Its rounded butt close enough to see his distorted reflection in, though it might have been on a mountaintop in Tibet for all the good it would do him now; he couldn’t relinquish his hold on his opponent long enough to grasp it.

His opponent…

This boy, surely no older than 12 or 13… the awful black cavity of his mouth snapping over him like the beak of a squid or an octopus, leaning closer until Shane feared the infection would drool down onto his face.  The boy seemed to have no saliva though, just a dry and feverish rot that made Shane gag when he could no longer escape it.

A shadow flickered by, followed by a succession of gunshots that sounded like God Himself was standing over him, harvesting His bounty with a Smith & Wesson instead of a scythe.  The blonde boy was dealt an unseen blow from above and his mouth seemed to exhale from the force of it.  His face froze, slackened, then all the tension went out of him like a raft quickly deflating.