We laid in bed, her wet hair against my face. I pulled a few strands from my mouth.
There was an embroidered cloth over the doorway I hadn’t seen before. I read it aloud:
“He who pours contempt on nobles made them wander in a trackless waste.”
“Battle hymn of the poverty stricken,” Audrey said. She leaned across me and blew out the candle on the bedside table. We were wrapped in darkness and alone. Wandering in the trackless waste.
If I wandered, I did so alone. Audrey was not part of it. Soon she wouldn’t be part of anything. Same with Sewell. And Claire. The vigilantes and the infected locals. I couldn’t get the scripture out of my head. The house was long asleep, but the embroidered cloth echoed.
I carefully slid out of bed and walked to the kitchen. I felt for the rifles in the dark. Then, the ammunition. Blindly, silently, I loaded the Winchester. I loaded the Remington and the Glocks. There was a mountain of ammunition on the table.
I held a Glock in each hand. They felt like bricks.
I pulled the slides.
The house shook with gunfire. Not my gun. Surely not my gun. I felt the barrels. Cold as night.
Another shot shook the air. An earthquake of the ether.
The hallway flashed. I saw Georgie’s tiny outline behind it firing straight into an open door. Audrey got out of bed, bed springs popping and I heard her hand working the knob. Georgie tiptoed down the hall and passed right in front of me, the butt of his rifle caressed the back of my hand. I watched him raise the rifle to the bedroom door. To Audrey.
Click. Slide. Click.
When the world ends, survival is the right and all else is the wrong.
I shot the boy in the back of the head. The rifle clattered to the floor. I set the Glocks on the kitchen table and eased into a chair.
“Get the flashlight from the pack,” I said coldly.
“Jack? What happened, Jack?”
“Just get the flashlight. Don’t turn it on.”
She did as I asked. Carefully walking around Georgie’s body, I took the flashlight from her in the doorway.
Claire and Matthew were curled together. Mai had a pillow over her head, a .22 rifle leaned against her nightstand. I went back to the kitchen and pointed the light at the boy. Audrey didn’t react. Maybe she thought it was a dream.
“There is nothing here for us,” I said. “We cannot stay in this house any longer.”
We filled the backpack with ammunition, leftover cornbread, and a few jars of preserves. In a clay dish by the door, we found two Ford keys. I took both. We stole Matthew’s truck, camouflaged and outfitted with mud tires and a steel bear cage.
The console held maps of Marshall, bordered by the French Broad River and a highway. The master map showed substations, water towers, dams, warehouses, schools, surveillance locations, crews, meeting points, and patrol routes. More importantly, it detailed blockades, shift changes, radio frequencies and pass codes. Carefully, I backed out of the driveway. We headed slowly toward the first checkpoint.
“So,” Audrey sounded upset. “We’re heading to the river?”
“We can’t drive out of here.”
“We’ll swim?”
“We’ll find a boat.”
She shook her head.
“This is unreal, Jack.”
“I know.”
“No. Not this,” she pointed out the window. “But this idea. We don’t have a boat. We don’t know where to find one. We’re liable to drown. To get shot. To tip over. I don’t trust you.”
We rode in the gentle hum of the exhaust. The truck was finally warm. I turned on the heater and held my hands up to the vents. “I didn’t ask you to trust me. I didn’t say I had a great idea.”
“I thought you had all the ideas,” she was serious.
“I’m as lost as you. But I come up with an idea and I don’t doubt it. I’ll make it work. If you can make something else work, we’ll do that.”
“You’re…”
“What?”
“So much like Watts.”
I stopped the truck and turned on the dome light. The clock on the dash said it was three in the morning. “I’ll be honest with you. From here on, I don’t have a plan. If you have an idea, any at all, I’m willing to try it. Does that make me like Watts? Because Watts was a coward. I could tell that the second I saw him.”
“Only a coward shoots a little boy.”
“Did you want to go back? Did you want to look at his sister? His parents? Did you want him to shoot you, like a coward hiding in the dark? I wasn’t going to let it happen. But you can go back and stay there and wait for whatever’s next.”
Her eyes swelled but she didn’t look away. Fat tears splashed across the front of her jacket. “I hate it here. This isn’t a place I know anymore.”
“We’re lucky he didn’t go to our room first.”
She nodded.
The first checkpoint was at a Presbyterian church past a sharp bend in the road. Before the curve, I stopped in the road and killed the lights. I let the truck idle around the curve until the church came into view. Stadium lights mounted to booms were powered by a generator on the ground. It puffed a silent, silver exhaust. I drove slowly into the ditch.
I checked the map and turned up the radio. It chirped.
I picked up the mouthpiece. “Ascension unit check-in.”
“Ascension unit, check.”
“Howell, Huff, and Gerard?”
I watched a guard answer the radio. He paced the large white door of the church. A pair of binoculars and a rifle hung from his neck.
“Negative, Huff’s reassigned tonight. Manhunt.”
“Howell?”
“Check.”
“Gerard?”
Static.
“Gerard?”
“Uh, he’s in the john. I’ve got his radio.”
An orange portable toilet sat shrouded in the church’s shadow. I rested the barrel of the rifle on the edge of the window and aimed at Howell, who stopped in front of the doors to stare at the sky. The moment his skull sprayed against the white door we heard his delayed voice, “Hello?” on the radio.
I reloaded and aimed at the portable toilet. But Gerard was in no hurry. Surely, I thought, he must have heard the gunshot.
But there was no sign of Gerard. I fired at the port-a-john several times up and down. Still as a summer lake.
We came to a bypass, a four-lane highway barricaded with barbed wire and chain-link fence. A rickety checkpoint was fashioned out of an old Sno-Cone stand. More stadium lights and generators were set up, and as we approached the guards trained them right at us. The checkpoint was lousy with guards wearing camouflage jumpsuits and Carhartt beanies. Their arms rested on top of their rifles. The men just shuffled around. Matthew Scudder was right. It was the most useful these people had probably ever felt. One by one, the men spotted the truck and waved. I drove straight for the checkpoint, the Winchester propped up on the dash.
“Radio check, Scudder,” the radio crackled.
Audrey tossed me the receiver and I answered in a whisper, “Check.”
“You just wake up?”
“Yeah, another long night.” I slouched in the seat and flipped a row of auxiliary switches for the lights, blinding the guards. We rolled past the Sno-Cone stand awash in white halogen.
“Be advised, we haven’t seen the salt truck yet.”
“Copy.”
Audrey held up a small yellow notebook, a hundred or so pages covered front and back with numbers, addresses, and names. “Look,” she said, “the real yellow pages.”