“Yep. Students loved ’em, extra money in tourist season, and it helped my two oat-burning buddies earn their keep. I’d already gotten the straw in for Halloween.”
There were four others waiting for their rides into town, which Bashore—“call me Doc, everyone does”—told them would be about four miles, an hour’s drive, “but you don’t have to work, the horses do. And they know the way better than I do.”
“So this thing is all made out of metal and wood?” Jason asked.
“Yeah, but I nearly had it seize up earlier today. The silicone grease turned to watery, sticky stuff, more like Elmer’s Glue than anything else. We had to take the hubs apart and re-grease ’em with fat from the Dinner Bell Café’s grease can. Also, I had a prairie schooner top for this, which would come in handy, except it was made of nylon with plastic tube ribs, and it turned into brown snot overnight. But there’s nothing electric, and no plastic fittings, on any of the parts that make it go. And I guess we can make another cover for it. Giddup, there, fellas, we have people to deliver.”
As far as Jason could tell, the horses moved no differently; probably that’s just for effect, he thought. That’s okay. Right now I’d take a masked man on a white horse followed by a whole troop of cavalry.
Something was shaking beside him; he turned and saw Beth crying, big wracking sobs, her whole body trembling. He put his arm around her and she buried her face in his shoulder, resting her injured wrist on his thigh. He stroked her, made soothing noises, and looked up at the blue sky, just now being invaded by high cirrus in the late afternoon—a sign that the warm chinook was about to be over and the first big storm of the winter was on its way.
ABOUT THE SAME TIME. WASHINGTON. DC. 12:30 P.M. EST. WEDNESDAY. OCTOBER 30.
“That’s the story,” Cam said, “a big, cold wet storm, crossing the northern US or possibly veering south, within a few days. Bad enough to cause death from exposure. What should we prepare for? Anyone got something to say about the impact of that?”
Steve from Deep Black nodded and pushed his glasses up onto the bridge of his nose. “We’re still getting pretty decent data from reconnaissance drones flying off carriers—not as detailed as we would like because they have to stay high up to avoid catching nanoswarm and taking it back to the carriers. But what we see looks semi-okay. The impromptu evacuation of the cities in the Northeast is going faster than we hoped—lots of people are just walking out, with whatever they can carry in shopping carts and wheelbarrows. Private motor traffic seems to have stopped completely; we think there are probably almost no tires left, and so many biotes around that the few tires there are don’t last long.
“We see high densities of people walking out of the big cities on highways. The flow started early this morning, right after the regular trucks didn’t come in and the grocery stores ran out of a lot of staples. Still a lot of people staying put and hoping it will get better right now, of course, but as they see people streaming out, they’ll probably start to move, themselves.
“That’s the good news. The bad news is, we’re not seeing any evidence that they’re turning off the road and getting indoors much of anywhere; it’s warm enough today for them to keep walking. Most of them have been moving for less than twenty-four hours, so to some extent they may still have scruples, and to some extent the people they’re meeting are in the same situation they are—there’s big parts of the Northeast Corridor where you can’t really walk to a real evacuation area in less than a week—”
“Just for my information,” Graham Weisbrod said, “by ‘real evacuation area’ you mean… ?”
“A place it makes sense to evacuate them to, rather than just the same bad situation farther up the road. If there’s no food, no heat, hardly any shelter, then traveling there isn’t really evacuation—at best it just gets them closer to the real evacuation point later. From well north of Boston to down past Richmond, we’ve got a band of highly populated areas that are about a week’s walk from real evacuation areas.”
“So to live they’ll have to walk for a week without food or a warm place to sleep?”
Cam said, “That’s right. They’ll start to improvise tonight and tomorrow night, when it gets cold and they’re hungry. They’ll start knocking on doors, and then knocking down doors; there’s going to be some violence, and a lot of people will be building fires out of whatever they can find, and wherever there’s something to loot, there’ll be looting.
“Then each successive wave coming out of the deep population centers is going to be worse; by the time the last ones make it out, they’re going to be really dangerous and not especially sane, and that’s what people will be out there as the storm hits. Which means a lot of them will die and solve the problem of themselves for us, but while they’re doing it they’ll tear up the areas they manage to reach pretty badly.”
Steve fidgeted. “I saw some of the pictures a couple hours ago. Take I- 80 across New Jersey and into eastern Pennsylvania—we got some photos from there—pictures from the air show literally hundreds of miles of highways covered with people walking. The highways run through huge suburban areas of single-family housing; once it gets dark, and especially when the cold and the rain hit the refugees, those little suburban houses will be obvious targets, and basically you’ll have a… I mean, I don’t want to sound… but that crowd on the highways, hungry, cold, nobody there to tell them what to do—”
“They’re going to hit that suburban tract housing like a ravening barbarian horde,” Graham Weisbrod said. “Which they’ll be.” His face was drawn and tight as if he were watching it happen already. “Not because they’re bad or even because they’re angry, but because… well, hell, I think about my kids when they were little and helpless, I imagine them hungry, crying, and cold, and yeah, I’d break down a man’s door and maybe kill him just for a can of beans for the kids, especially if I’d had all day to stew and think about the fact that no one was coming to help and how I needed it more than the guy who still had a house, until I rationalized it all. It might be hard to talk myself into that the first time, but by the second time on the third day, it would be business as usual.”
ABOUT THREE HOURS LATER. WASHINGTON AND CLEVELAND PARK. DC. AND CHEVY CHASE. MARYLAND. 4:15 P.M. EST. WEDNESDAY. OCTOBER 30.
Heather was the last drop-off for the biohazard Hummer, and he invited her to move up to the front seat “for two more eyes and one more gun.” He left the scanner running; no signal on any emergency bands. KP-1 was holding on, broadcasting government announcements from Pittsburgh. The midshipmen at Annapolis had hand-built a radio station they were calling Radio Blue and Gold; a young-sounding kid was reading the morning’s Advertiser Gazette over the air. A faint, sputtering station that claimed to be coming from RPI’s physics lab came in for a second, then faded.
I left a mountain of chow on the floor for Fuss and Feathers, and set out five litter pans; they’ll be all right for a week, which is more than you can say for us.
The driver said, “I don’t want to try to go all the way to this address in Chevy Chase. Last reports, an hour ago, there was a lot of bad stuff going down. The minute I drop you off, I’m swinging over west, picking up my family, and heading out, as far and fast as I can. Listening to all the nice people I’ve been driving, I’ve heard about the two-hundred-mile dying zones around the cities, there ain’t gonna be any United States in another week, it seems to me, and I’ve got one of the few vehicles that can keep running, at least for a while, and if I take it right now to haul my family, maybe they can live.”