Then I understood. I stumbled for a reply. “Wow. I can see how that would be nerve-wracking.” Was he saying what I thought he was saying? Could he possibly be telling me something that personal? I wouldn’t tell anyone, not even Colin, if I had a small dick.
And suddenly, I liked Cortez. He would probably risk his life for me if it came down to it. He was part of my tribe. I should cut him the same slack he cut me.
“Yeah, well. We all got our crosses to bear,” he said, standing and brushing the seat of his pants. “Try to get some sleep if you can.”
“Cortez,” I said, holding out my hand. He took it, squeezed it hard. “Good talking to you, man.”
I got up early, when the world was still a little gray. Everyone else was still asleep. I sat on the ground and looked through my photo album, at pictures of when I was a little boy. Mom and Dad on the teacup ride at Disney World, sunburned and laughing; Sis on the front lawn in her purple majorette outfit; me, missing a front tooth, at the plate in t-ball.
A woman hurried past our camp, up on the railroad tracks. She looked too scared to be out for exercise, but she was too clean to be a gypsy, and had no stuff with her.
“Hey!” I called to her quickly receding butt. “You all right?”
She glanced back, jolted to a stop. She stood panting, hands on hips, as if she wasn’t sure if she was all right or not, or maybe she wasn’t sure if she could trust me.
“We’re harmless,” I said, holding up my photo album as if it was proof of this.
She paused another heartbeat, then climbed down the slope to our camp. She was small, with an eager, slightly aggressive look. She stopped about twenty feet from me.
“What are you doing out here by yourself?” I asked.
“Are you coming from Vidalia?” she said. I nodded. “I’m from Vidalia. I’m getting as far away as I can.”
Some of the other tribe members poked their heads out of the tents to see who I was talking to.
She was a doctor. Another doctor in town had tried to pack up and leave when things started getting ugly, and now he was sleeping in the city jail when he wasn’t treating patients. She’d bolted before dawn, taking nothing that might raise suspicion if anyone saw her. She said her name was Eileen.
She told us that the virus acted like polio, but spread like influenza. The victims slowly lost feeling, starting in the extremities. If paralysis reached the torso, they suffocated.
“It’s horrible, you have no idea,” she said. “Half the town has it. Young children and old people usually die. Stronger people survive, but end up paralyzed. People are either leaving town or holing up to avoid being exposed. There aren’t enough people to bring food and water to the infected, so the victims have to go outside to find food and water, until they can’t any more. Then they die of dehydration.”
I poured her half a Styrofoam cup of water, walked it halfway and put it down. Eileen thanked me and retrieved it. She held it with two hands as she drank, to stop the cup from shaking.
“There was nothing I could do,” she said. “I can’t help them! This is not a normal virus; it spreads too fast. It’s got to be engineered.”
“Who would engineer something like that?” Colin asked.
Eileen shrugged.
“Could be insurgents looking to overthrow the government. Or the government,” Jim said.
“Look, can I buy supplies from you? I have cash,” Eileen said.
We sold Eileen some things, and she went on her way.
Around midday we began to hear gunfire—not the occasional shots we’d become used to, but sustained automatic weapons fire. Military gunfire. We looked at each other, confused.
“Oh, jeez,” Colin said. “They’re cleaning out Vidalia.”
I could picture it—soldiers in yellow hazmat suits, going door to door, killing everyone. That’s exactly how this government would deal with the outbreak.
We reached Statesboro by late afternoon. Cortez and Charlie volunteered to try buying supplies at Wal-Mart while the rest of us went downtown to sell energy to some of our reliable trading partners.
Getting downtown meant winding through a series of what used to be middle-class neighborhoods. It was hard to figure out what to call the classes now, though. There was the starving, the almost starving (us), the dirt poor, the poor, and (as there always are) the filthy rich.
We passed a group of kids playing immigration and illegals. The kids playing the illegals jabbered in mock-Spanish as they were handcuffed with plastic six-pack rings and taken away.
A guy in a sweat-drenched t-shirt came out of his garage and stared at us, his arms folded across his chest.
“What do you want here?” he called.
“We’re here to mow your lawn,” Ange said. An old joke, but a few in our tribe laughed anyway.
“Move on, you fucking gypsies, no one wants whatever you’re selling,” the guy shot back. He was wearing those black hipster-doofus glasses that were big fifteen years ago.
Ange gave him the finger.
“When did lawn mower jokes start?” I asked Colin.
“Hmm.” He thought about it. “I’m gonna say the summer of ’19. Really poor people stopped mowing a couple years earlier, but that year was the biggie. I think the first jokes were about watering lawns though—” Colin stopped walking. “Oh shit.”
Two more men had come out of the garage, clutching rifles. One of them tossed an empty beer can into the weeds and stormed up the driveway.
“You think you’re funny?” he said, getting right in Ange’s face, blocking her from continuing. This guy wasn’t wearing glasses; he had muscles, and a swagger. Everything about him screamed “angry
war veteran.”
Ange didn’t say anything.
“Well?” the guy said. “You think you’re funny?” He smacked her across the face, hard.
Barely skipping a beat, Ange spat in his face. From thirty feet away I could see rage light up the guy’s eyes as he wiped a spot just under his eye with the back of his wrist.
“We’re leaving now, we’re leaving now,” I said, edging toward them. “We’re sorry.” My heart raced as the guy turned his glare on me.
“You go right ahead and leave. That’s a smart idea.”
He grabbed Ange’s wrist and yanked. She screamed, dug in her feet, clawed at the fingers clamped to her wrist.
We all ran to help her. The third man took a few quick steps forward, raised his rifle and aimed it at Colin’s chest. Everyone stopped.
The guy with the glasses grabbed Ange’s other flailing arm. They dragged her, screaming, down the driveway and up the concrete stoop. The third guy, a short, bald guy, backed toward the door, pointing his rifle at one of us, then another.
“If you know what’s good for you, you’ll move on,” he said from the top step. He lowered the rifle and followed them into the house.
Inside, Ange screamed.
“Somebody help!” Jeannie cried. She was facing a scrum of onlookers that had formed across the street. None of them moved.
“Oh shit. What do we do?” Colin said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “We have to stop them. We have to.”
Colin nodded. He was huffing like he was out of breath. “How?”
Inside, Ange screamed, “Let me go.”
“Somebody call the police,” Jeannie called.
“Already did. Five minutes ago,” a teenaged girl said.
I scanned the street in both directions. Nothing. There was a bark of hoarse laughter inside the house. I took a few quick steps down the driveway.
“I wouldn’t,” someone shouted from across the street.