Brautigan and Lacey both nearly jumped out of their snakeskin boots as two cars collided right outside. She spun, and saw him. “Dad.”
He stepped into the light separating them. She recoiled at his appearance, then said, “What happened?”
“Fucking shuttle drove right into… Pearce is dead. I don’t even know about the others. I just came here. It’s happening everywhere, Lacey.”
“I know.” She took a tentative step toward him, hazel eyes flashing. “Why are you here?”
“Came to see you.”
She sighed. “Because of what’s happening?”
“No, it was planned…”
She turned slowly to the pair behind the bar, two men with their arms linked. They looked from the television to her. “He called me last week,” one of them said to her. “It was a surprise.”
“Surprise.” She laughed bitterly. “Dad—Seth—I’ve got enough to deal with right now. My best friend OD’d this morning. And don’t try to play Father Knows Best and lecture me, you know I stay away from users. She’d never touched the shit before.”
“Young people are killing themselves,” Brautigan said.
“It’s people between fourteen and twenty-four so far,” Lacey replied. “Like my friend. I’m twenty-six.” She said it as if he might not know.
“So terrible,” one of the men whispered. Another breaking item appeared on the TV, this one about the streets; streets worldwide turning into a gory spectacle by suicidal drivers. A scene in Atlanta, an intersection in flames. First responders simply throwing themselves onto the pyre.
Lacey started toward the exit. Brautigan caught her arm. “You’re safer here than out there.”
“Let go of me,” she snapped, and wrenched herself free. He nearly fell over.
“Lacey!”
She looked back. “You need to get to a hospital.”
“Won’t be safe there either,” he said. “The panic’s going to be worse than the catalyst. We’ll just stay here.”
A gunshot rang out in the street. “Please!” Brautigan cried. “Don’t be stubborn now.”
“You should get out of the city,” one of the club owners called. “We have to stay,” said the other. “But you better get the hell out of here.”
Lacey nodded. To her father, she said, “You can stay, or you can come.”
Every bit of logic, every scrap of instinct, told him it was wrong. But she’d just extended an olive branch, thin and brittle as it was, and he took it.
Her car was parked in the back. Brautigan stared at her as she fished through the pockets of her jeans for the keys. “What?” she demanded.
“Can’t use the roads,” he said. “The only way out is on foot.”
She swore softly. “You’re right.” At the sound of another gunshot, she glanced worriedly at Brautigan, and for a moment she was the little girl he’d walked out on. God, it was that same face, that same exact face, silently begging him to make it better.
“We ought to stick to the back streets,” he advised. She nodded, and they began their slow, uncertain jog. Glimpses of the main thoroughfares yielded only sheets of flame. The city’s arteries were clogged with the ruin of smashed cars and mangled bodies. There was the occasional gunshot, and a recurrent thump that might have been distant explosions. Other than that, it was oddly silent. No sirens, no choppers, no chatter. How quickly it had all happened.
“We have to cross 35th to reach the expressway,” Lacey told him. “Then it’s not far to the suburbs. I know people there.”
People my age, Brautigan hoped, and wondered why this epidemic of suicides was confined to that particular age group. Couldn’t be a virus, could it? Some neurological agent targeting the brain chemistry of developing youths, maybe? But how could something like that strike simultaneously worldwide? He wouldn’t even consider the metaphysical. Besides, there wasn’t any scripture on Earth that laid out the end in this manner.
Father and daughter stepped out onto 35th Street. A utility worker’s blackened corpse swung nearby, hands fused to a severed power line. The street itself was a maze of compacted wreckage. That thumping noise was close. Any one of these twisted and bleeding vehicles could explode at any moment. “We’ve gotta move fast,” he said to Lacey. “Now.”
They ran into the street, weaving around columns of hot metal, ignoring the sounds of scratching and what could have been moaning from within the steel. Brautigan wanted to clap his hands over Lacey’s eyes and ears, if only he could still wrap her up in his arms.
A muffled thump came from the right. Brautigan threw himself at Lacey, driving her to the sidewalk on the other side of the street. “What is it?” she screamed.
“I don’t know.” It definitely hadn’t been any sort of explosion. He looked to his right then, and saw what it had been, what all those noises had been.
A boy of about fifteen lay crumpled in the center of a cratered Mazda. He’d jumped. Most of the cars along the curb, Brautigan now saw, were littered with bodies shattered by freefall.
A wail sounded overhead. He looked up and saw an open window several stories up. The boy’s mother was there. Her hands clutched at the air.
Brautigan turned Lacey’s face away from the sight and ushered her toward the expressway ramp. She winced as he urged her along, and he saw that his fingers were digging into the flesh of her arms. Pulling his hands away, he saw there the mother’s mad, grasping claws.
“I know where we should go,” Lacey said, and pointed east toward a horizon of sloping hills.
The sky had turned gray and the air cloyingly damp. It would rain soon, and wash the blood from the expressway. Brautigan forced his focus from the ruddy asphalt to the hills and said, “Where?”
“It’s the hospital where I was. Last year.”
“No, I said hospitals are no good.”
“It’s not that kind of hospital.” Lacey lowered her eyes . “I had a breakdown. I spent two months there.”
“Months… why? Drugs?” He immediately regretted saying it.
She glared at him. “No, not fucking drugs. I just lost it. I was fucking miserable.”
“I never knew. Your mother never told me.”
“I didn’t want her to.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s not any of your business.” She stopped there on the roadside and shouted over the crackling of flames. “I’m not your business. You shouldn’t have come here! You unloaded me eleven years ago, remember? What brought you back? Ditching the wife and kid didn’t turn you into a rock star?” She spat at his feet and started off at a brisk pace. “You know what, Dad? Fuck you! Just go save yourself like you always do!”
“I know I can’t fix anything!” Brautigan yelled after her. “I can’t go back, I know…”
She turned and stared icily at him. “You were going to get up on stage with me, weren’t you? In front of everyone. Fucking coward.”
He stood there and watched her walk away; gave her a generous berth before starting after her. She glanced back a few times, but didn’t say anything else. Kept up her pace, arms swinging. Pulled off her boots and hurled them skyward and then went off-road into the grass. He followed suit. The rain began to come down.
She pulled away when his jacket fell over her shoulders, but didn’t shrug it off entirely, and said nothing as he adjusted it. “Where are we going?” he asked quietly.