Page 44 of The End of the World As We Know It

From under the hood of the Buick, the one that had collided with the sick mobile, steam hissed into the morning air. A door opened. A young woman climbed out, clung to the door to stay afoot. In a surprising coincidence it was the blond, red-nosed woman from the newscast. She looked worse than before, not as bad as those in the collided car, but bad enough to expect a similar fate.

She said, “It’s killing everyone. It’s killing me.” She wandered out into the street as if walking on ankle stubs. “Stay apart. It spreads so goddamn fast.”

And with that she fell down in the street. People gathered around her. “Go away,” she said. “It spreads. I can hardly see.”

The woman on the asphalt rolled her eyes, showing only the bloody-stained whites. She said, “The poor elephants, and all those bears without ice.”

She turned her head slightly, made a choking sound, like she was seriously trying to swallow an anaconda, then puked up a blackness that contained what looked like intestines, and that was it for the Red-Nosed Reporter.

Ricky stepped away from the crowd, and as he did, he saw military trucks, the National Guard, rolling into sight, and he saw another cop car, too. The cop car parked near him, and Gene West got out of it. He was a big cop. Ricky had gone to high school with him. Theyhated one another. Ricky had been better as quarterback, and Gene, who was a sometime quarterback, spent a lot of time on the bench. He had lost his girl to Ricky. Not that Ricky had done anything to take her. It just happened, and was long over now, but Gene was not a forgiver. They had three or four fistfights back in the day, real piss-and-vinegar stuff, and Ricky had won them all. This anger and disappointment had nested inside Gene West like a poisonous bird.

Gene was the kind of guy who threw gasoline on cats and lit them up. He had done it more than a few times in high school. He was proud of it and found the screeching horror of the running, finally smoky, charred, collapsing cat a real hoot.

Gene was a fucking bully. A rotten bastard who never forgot a slight. And as is often the case, shit floats to the top. Gene West was chief of police.

You could see his face change when he saw Ricky. They stared at one another for a long moment, then Gene turned away from him, pulled a bullhorn from the cop car, and yelled into it. “Everyone go back to your homes. Martial law has been declared. Medical help is being organized. If you’re on the street in the next few minutes, you are subject to arrest. Or worse.”

“What?” said someone from the crowd.

There was mumbled protest.

Ricky knew Gene, what he was capable of, the power he wanted, so he stepped back to his apartment. If he were arrested by Gene today things might become most uncomfortable. He felt that things were about to go wonky.

Ricky didn’t go back to bed. He watched from his curtain-parted window and saw more National Guard trucks and soldiers roll in.

They came out of the back of the trucks in waves of tan uniforms, carrying rifles of some sort. They came out less than efficient. Some of them staggered and went down. They were sick, too.

Men and women dressed in white coats dragged them to the side of the road and ministered to them. He saw Gene waving his arms as if he were needed to guide the trucks in.

He wasn’t.

A little later, while Ricky was having a cup of coffee in the kitchen, he heard shots. He went back to the window and looked out. People were running. Shots were snapping. My God, everyone had lost it.

He saw Shelly the Shit staggering about. The light wasn’t good, but Ricky could tell Shelly’s neck was swollen, had an accordion look to it.

Gene West was twelve feet away. He had his pistol drawn. Shelly said something. Ricky saw his mouth move, and then Gene shot him. A solid chest shot. Shelly dropped to his knees, blasted out a pond of vomit, then fell on his face.

This shit was real.

Ricky grabbed a backpack out of the closet, strapped on his sleeping bag. He put a clasp knife in his pocket, stuffed the backpack with some food that would keep. He had a first-aid kit, his old Boy Scout camp axe and mess kit that clamped on the outside of his pack, along with a flashlight that fit in a canvas holster. He had a spare flashlight in the pack. There was a flint and steel kit, and a box of matches.

He filled his Boy Scout canteen with water, placed it in its canvas pouch, on the pack. He even crammed his old Boy Scout manual with information for surviving in the woods into his scout pack. He put a couple of books inside, binoculars, a folder of Kleenex, and a roll of toilet paper.

Finally, just for the hell of it, he picked up his old forked slingshot and a bag of roundish rocks he’d gathered when he was a kid. Once upon a time, not that long ago, he had been a hell of a shot. The sling was a modern version. Made of metal with a thick rubber band that was taut to pull and strong to shoot.

Ricky put the pack on a chair and prepared a quick breakfast of a granola bar and a glass of water. He ate like a starved hound. Hestrapped on the pack and went out the back way, down the stairs and through the trash-canned alley of the apartment complex. There was a back fence, but he used a garbage can to climb on and slipped over it. Now there was an un-mowed strip of grass that led to a small patch of woods, and beyond that was the highway.

He went along snappy-like and into the woods. He found a thick wooded spot. There was a hickory tree there with a natural fork in it. He climbed into the fork, which was reasonably comfortable. There were enough limbs and leaves about so he could see the apartment complex, but unless someone were actually looking for him in that tree, he was unlikely to be spotted.

He sat there for a long time, finally climbed down, took a wee, dropped his pants and leaned against a tree, squatted a bit, and took a shit. He wiped his ass on the toilet paper he had brought, covered his pile with leaves and dirt that he raked over it with the side of his shoe.

He climbed back onto his perch. Hours fled by. He slept in the fork of the tree, feeling mildly safe and exhausted from stress. Light came. He climbed down and walked around the woods to put some feeling back into his legs and ass. Being in the tree had numbed them. He took out one of his books and sat beneath an elm and read a bit, but it was hard to concentrate.

When it was solid dark again, using his flashlight he made his way through the wooded patch and came out along the highway. There were a few houses there, spaced comfortably apart.

Ricky went past an open garage and saw a bicycle in there. The front door of the house was open, and a woman in a mumu lay facedown in the yard. The night wind picked at her hair. Not for a moment did he think she might be alive, but to make sure, he put the light on her. She was bloated and had a phone with an antenna on it clutched in her hand. Her face was pressed against vomit-coated grass. She smelled like the ass end of a diarrheic camel.

Ricky went into the garage and looked at the bike. Probably belonged to one of her kids, maybe long gone to college. He consideredgoing into the house to check and see if anyone was alive, then decided against it. He didn’t want to expose himself unnecessarily to the disease. Or surprise someone inside, who might decide to ventilate him with a few well-placed shots. This was Texas, after all.