Page 19

chapter eighteen

Tuck

I craned my neck, trying to see as far as I could from the roof of the big rig I was standing on, but I didn’t even see so much as a flickering light. Not one. The power was out for as far as the eye could see. At least now we knew where we were—eleven miles outside Springfield, Illinois. And the highway in front of me was littered with vehicles of all types. Some had made it to the side of the road, but the majority had come to a standstill in the middle of a lane. What in the hell type of event would cause that? This was far from a mere power outage. Of course, our plane practically nose-diving from the sky had clued me in that something took place to cause that, as had the fires burning on the ground. But this was even bigger than I imagined. Something much more widespread was going on, and the mild buzz of trepidation that had been rumbling in my gut since we came up on the gas station and the abandoned cars there, intensified.

I hopped down and looked around. Where the hell were Charlie and Emily? I heard some scuffling from the rear of the truck and headed in that direction, stopping when I came upon the two of them. The rear door of the truck was wide-open and a glance inside showed it to be mostly empty except for a few scattered boxes of cereal, two of which Charlie and Emily had snagged and were currently shoveling handfuls into their mouths.

Without ceasing to gorge herself, Emily reached next to her and picked up a third box of cereal and tossed it at me. I caught it and she grinned, her teeth filled with brown cereal flakes and pink dehydrated strawberries. I held back a laugh as she said, “Truce?”

She’d saved me a box. I was momentarily touched. “Slow down,” I muttered. “You’ll make yourself sick.”

Then I tore open the box, tipped my head, and poured the stuff straight into my mouth, trying not to follow Charlie and Emily’s leads, but mostly failing. God, I was so hungry I could feel my stomach eating itself. The crunchy cereal and the tart, chalky fruit were so good I moaned, my jaw working to grind the mass quantity of food enough that I could swallow without choking to death.

“Slow down,” Emily said with a cheeky smile. “You’ll make yourself sick.”

“Touché,” I conceded as I tossed back another handful. “Good find,” I said, nodding to the truck. We’d need some protein eventually, but this “meal” was going to allow us enough energy to make it to our next stop, wherever that might be. I saw movement a little ways down the highway and paused, squinting and craning my neck forward.

“What?” Charlie asked.

“I think I see someone in a car right over there.” I pointed, and Emily and Charlie stood, turning in the direction where I’d seen someone sit up in the driver’s seat of a compact car. “I’m gonna go talk to him.”

“We’ll come,” Emily said, brushing the crumbs off her jacket and following me.

We wove through the abandoned vehicles and the man sitting in the car spotted us and gave a small wave, opening his door and getting out. “Hey. Hi.” He looked sort of rumpled, like he’d just been sleeping and when I glanced in his vehicle, I saw a few boxes of the same cereal we’d just scored.

“Hi. I’m Tuck.” I pointed behind me to where Emily and Charlie were approaching. “That’s Emily and Charlie.”

“Neil. Hi. Damn, it’s good to see a few faces. The last of the folks around me gave up and left yesterday. There might be one or two back that way, but I haven’t walked in that direction because there’s a pileup and I hear there are bodies.” He turned and pointed behind him and drew his shoulders up in a shiver.

“Bodies?” Emily asked. “No, no that can’t be true.” But the look on her face said that she knew very well that it could be. The three of us might have been casualties of whatever event this was too if Russell hadn’t had the skill to land the plane like he did.

But I shook off the thought of Russell. “What do you mean, ‘gave up’?” I asked Neil. “Can you tell us what happened? From the beginning. We were in an accident, and it’s taken us three days to get here.”

“Oh man. Shit. Yeah, uh, I was just driving along when this bright white flash almost made me crash. Other cars veered sideways. Most of us managed to stay on the road, but our cars died. Just…died. All at the same time. After waiting for a couple hours for some help to come, most of the people here decided to walk home. A group of us from out of town walked to the closest exit where there are some businesses, but there was no power there. No one’s phones were working either. Luckily, I had a little cash and went to a liquor store in a strip mall and bought some snack food and water and brought it back here. Once the truck driver took off—” he inclined his head toward the now empty cereal truck “—others who were waiting broke into the back and took the product. I was out of food by then, so I did too. There’s nothing else to do. That liquor store is boarded up now, but I’d bet that the food and water is all gone and only the liquor remains anyway. Yesterday, people started getting real nervous.”

“So, there were people in these cars?” Charlie asked. “They walked away? You saw them?”

Neil looked at him strangely. “Yeah.”

Charlie had clearly decided Emily’s theory about a people-vaporizing comet had some merit. “And no one you talked to has any guesses about what happened?” I asked as I stepped in front of Charlie.

“No. Some are saying it’s just a widespread power outage. Some guy said this happened in Detroit in the two-thousands. Other people say an EMP or a meteor.”

“EMP?” Charlie asked. “What’s an EMP?”

Neil shrugged. “I don’t know. Like a sunspot or something?”

An EMP. What was that? I’d heard the term before. An electromagnetic pulse maybe? That sounded right, but I couldn’t recall much more than that.

I looked around at all the abandoned cars. “And in the three days you’ve been here, there haven’t been any police officers or other first responders that have come through?”

“No. Not one. I haven’t even heard any sirens from anywhere. I live in Ann Arbor. I’m hundreds of miles from home. It’s not like I can just start walking.”

I glanced at that empty food truck. “You might have to.”

He looked bleakly up the highway. “Seems safer here. The authorities are bound to come. It’s not like they can just stop working. I have some food and water so… I’ll just wait.”

“Okay. Hey, good luck.”

He nodded and got back in his car. I saw him pick up the box of cereal next to him before I stepped away from his vehicle.

“Where are you going?” Emily asked as I walked ahead. The stars had blinked to life and soon it’d be too dark to do anything other than hole up and get some rest. I would bet that a number of these cars were still unlocked. It wouldn’t be the worst place to sleep.

“There’s a tower that way,” I said. “See it?”

“What are you going to do? Climb it?” Emily asked. “Oh my God, you would, wouldn’t you? Are you out of your mind?”

“No. I want to know how far this outage extends. If it goes all the way to the city of Springfield, then we need to figure out how to get to the next one.”

“The next what?”

“The next city.”

“You cannot be serious. There is no way in hell I’m walking to the next city !”

I turned. “Listen, Emily, I didn’t create this situation, okay—”

“What’s that smell?” Her face was wrinkled up, and she was sniffing at the air.

I paused. I smelled it too. Death. I turned toward the odor, noticing the remnants of a crash on the road a ways ahead. A tire rim. Some shattered glass. I pointed. “There it is. The pileup Neil mentioned.” Shit. It was true. There were dead bodies in at least one of those cars. And they were decaying.

“What’s going on?” Charlie asked before tossing back a handful of the cereal as he trailed behind us.

“Car crash,” Emily said from behind me. “Someone obviously died. Tuck! Come on, let’s go back.”

But I needed to see. I needed to understand what we were dealing with. Because if the authorities had made the call to leave a slew of abandoned vehicles on the highway for now, because there were more pressing issues in a major blackout, that was one thing. But if there were literal dead bodies rotting in the road for three days, then that was something different entirely.

I began walking and heard Tuck and Emily follow. The crash involved five vehicles in a pileup that occurred when the truck at the front came to a halt, likely after slamming its brakes—though I was no insurance adjuster. The dead woman was in the fifth car, her bloated body slumped over the dashboard, the driver’s side door having been torn from the car. Her airbag had clearly not deployed.

I put my forearm over my nose and turned back to Emily and Charlie, who were lingering behind. “Go on back,” I said. There was no reason they needed to see this. I paused as my gaze landed on one of the woman’s sneakers that had come off during the wreck and was sitting on the floor of the car. I hesitated only briefly before holding my breath, reaching in and grabbing the one shoe and then pulling the other one off the dead woman’s foot. “Thanks,” I mumbled, feeling foolish for talking to a dead person, but also a little guilty for taking her shoes.

The fact was, however, she didn’t need them and Emily did.

Emily and Charlie were standing stoically next to an empty SUV when I approached, holding out the shoes to Emily. “Put these on.”

She gave them a look of horror and stepped back. I felt a raindrop hit my cheek, and then another. “I’m not wearing shoes that you took off a corpse,” she said, disgust in her tone. “I’m not wearing corpse shoes,” she asserted more loudly.

I grit my teeth as several raindrops hit my head and began sliding down my cheeks. I felt irrationally rejected, which was stupid on several levels, but what did she think? That I’d wanted to pull shoes off a dead woman’s body for her? “Stop being a baby, Emily.” I nodded down to her grimy slippers. “Those things are about to fall off.”

“I don’t care,” she ground out, and now the rain really started coming down, drumming on the roofs of the cars all around us. “That’s disgusting and—”

“God, you really have zero survival skills, you know that? I’m surprised you didn’t complain there was no milk for your cereal on that truck.”

“Who the hell do you think you are anyway?”

I stepped forward. “The guy who got you out of a field in the middle of nowhere to—”

“A deserted fucking highway with a bunch of dead people!” She practically screamed, her voice rising over the pounding rain. She stepped forward too. Her cheeks were flushed, eyelashes glittering with raindrops, shoulders jutted back, and fuck if she wasn’t beautiful, and fuck if it didn’t piss me the hell off. “And now we have to walk again!”

“Yes,” I snarled. “We do. So put. The. Fucking. Shoes. On.” I held them between us and pushed them against her chest.

We stood toe to toe, staring angrily, both breathing heavily as rain streamed down our skin. Her hands came up and she took the shoes, her eyes narrowed, as she pressed her lips into a thin line and hissed, “I’ll never forgive you.”

“Likewise,” I hissed back.

I felt Charlie’s hand on my chest as he pushed us apart. I stepped back and so did Emily, and then I grabbed Charlie’s hand and threw it off me.

When the hell had it started raining like this? It was already cold, and now it was freezing, and we were soaking wet. I moved quickly to a nearby black Sedan and was elated to find it unlocked. I slid into the front seat, while behind me, Emily and Charlie were clamoring in the back. Both our doors shut with twin thwacks .

I took off my coat and used the inside lining to dry my hair and my pants as best as I could, and I heard them doing the same thing. From behind me, Emily’s quiet sobs took up again, mixing with the steady drumbeat of rain and making me feel trapped. It was either get out of the car and get soaked again or sit in here and listen to her crying. When the rain let up, I’d try to find another open car in the immediate vicinity, so I at least had my own space. But for now, I knew it was important to get dry. I was already chilled from removing my jacket and sitting in soggy jeans. “My God. I’m really trapped in a car with these two,” I murmured, mostly under my breath.

“Stop acting like you’re better than us,” Emily muttered from behind me before letting out a soft whimper.

“This isn’t about who’s better.” And that was really what both she and Charlie hated, wasn’t it? In many ways, this situation had completely upended our roles. Case in point: I wasn’t the one crying because I was wet. “It’s about who’s most equipped to lead us through this. But if you don’t agree, you’re welcome to go your own way.”

“Quit throwing your help in my face. If you don’t want to be here with us, then go! Leave me here in this car on the highway with corpse shoes! You think I haven’t survived you leaving me behind before? I’ll be just fine.”

I glanced back to see Charlie peeling her socks off, and got an eyeful of her blistered, bloody feet. “Damn, babe,” he said. “These are bad.”

I swiveled my head before cringing. Fuck. I closed my eyes. I’d figured her feet were hurting, hence the corpse shoes, but I hadn’t realized how injured she was. Regret twisted. I dug in my duffel bag and pulled out the first aid kit I’d used on the sore on her hip. That had been far less severe than her feet, and she hadn’t had to put pressure on that for miles. I suddenly felt like a total dick. She had been in pain but sucking it up, and I hadn’t realized it. She’d finally broken down, but not because she was a baby like I’d called her. I handed the kit to Charlie, including an extra pair of my socks. “Put some antibiotic ointment on those blisters and then bandage them up before putting on the dry socks.”

He took the items and then I heard the sounds of him attending to her. “You know, Emily,” he said quietly, “that comet thing?”

“Yeah,” she murmured.

“I know I said we’re not in a movie, but maybe we pretend we are. It might sound sorta silly, but if this is all just an acting job, it’ll make it easier to handle, you know?”

“I don’t know if I can do that,” she said.

“You can. You have me here to play your hero, okay?”

She sighed. “Okay.”

Charlie nudged my shoulder and I turned to see him handing the kit back. I took it and put it away and then glanced back at them to see him holding Emily in his arms and stroking her hair. I turned quickly, facing the rain-streaked windshield, a feeling settling in my stomach that I refused to name. I was exhausted. I just needed a night of sleep in a dry car where we were relatively safe, and I’d be ready to problem-solve again in the morning. I closed my eyes, finally lulled by the rainfall into a fitful slumber.