That was two hours ago.
Now they could hear it again, but this time coming from their left. For a while, it sounded as if the siren was circling around them. Now it was back — except on their other side.
“Do you hear it?” Luke asked. He glanced excitedly back at her. “There it is again. It has to be the same one.”
“It’s moved,” she said. “Why did they turn it off a couple of hours ago?”
“I don’t know, but it’s back. We should get going.”
He climbed off the hood and into the front passenger’s side. He moved like a bundle of energy, the way kids get when they have their sights set on something that can’t, and won’t, wait.
Kate started the Jeep, stepped on the gas, but wasn’t prepared when it shot forward like a rocket, surprising both her and Luke, who had to grab the dashboard to keep from banging his head into it.
She quickly stepped on the brake and slowed down, giving Luke an embarrassed look. “Gas pedal’s a lot more sensitive than the Buick.”
She eased them up Fanning Street, slowly at first, then picking up speed. She had to maneuver around a couple of trucks that had rammed into each other, leaving their front fenders twisted and tangled up. They looked like bulls with locked horns.
She could see the I-45 up ahead and the multitude of vehicles on top and below it along the feeder roads. Abandoned cars stretched in all directions, every single one rooted in place since last night. She didn’t have to get near the congestion to know they were never getting through it. Instead, she turned left onto St. Joseph Parkway, and drove parallel to the raised 45 structure to her right. She glimpsed the roofs of cars pressed up against the concrete dividers.
How many people? Thousands? Tens of thousands?
She had almost joined them last night, but had turned right instead of left. That simple, seemingly arbitrary decision had saved her life.
“Why are there so many cars here?” Luke asked, looking over at the highway.
“Everyone was trying to get out. It’s human instinct. Fight or flee. Most people flee when creatures start trying to eat them. The first place people go when they’re trying to get out of a city is the highway.”
“Was that where you were headed, too? Last night?”
“It was, at first.” She shook her head. “I changed my mind.”
“Lucky, then.”
“Yeah…”
Up ahead, she saw the big intersection where Highway 59 met the 45, joining the parallel highways for the first, and only, time. From there, they would take the 59 until it became the Southwest Freeway. She was almost certain that was where the police siren was coming from. It sounded so close now, that at any moment she expected to see the squad car parked in front of her, red and blue lights flashing.
As they got closer to where the two highways converged, the roads grew congested again. She was forced to lower the speedometer to thirty-five, then thirty, and finally twenty in order to avoid all the obstacles suddenly in her path. Eventually she came to a complete stop. Putting the Jeep in park, she stood up in the driver’s seat and looked forward at the thick sea of cars clogging up the lanes in front of her. There was no getting around them.
“We’re going to have to go around,” she said. “The long way.”
“I can still hear the siren,” Luke said.
For now, she probably wanted to reply, but didn’t. The worry in his voice was obvious. He was afraid they might lose the siren again. She was, too, she realized.
“Let’s hurry,” she said.
She did a full U-turn and headed back toward Crawford Street, where she turned left. She was rewarded with noticeably less vehicles along the feeder lanes, though she still had to drive slowly, zigzagging her way through the bottleneck, and at one point had to drive up the sidewalk before she could find a path underneath the I-45 and finally onto the other side of the highway.
“Kate,” Luke said suddenly, breathless beside her.
“I know, I know,” she said.
She could hear it, too: the siren was fading again…
They drove up Crawford Street for a while, hoping to catch another whiff of the police siren, but it was gone.
Either it had gone too far ahead of them — which meant it must have really been speeding dangerously given the conditions on the streets — or it had been turned off. Maybe the people in the police car got tired of hearing the siren. Or maybe they had crashed.
There were a lot of possibilities, but there was one certainty: the siren was gone.
They were driving aimlessly now. Kate eased her foot off the gas pedal and brought the speedometer back down to twenty-five miles per hour just to be safe. The number of abandoned vehicles on the road had become unpredictable. One long stretch could be almost empty, then without warning become too dangerous to drive more than ten miles per hour on. She had thought that the farther she left Downtown behind, the more the traffic would thin out. It did…until it didn’t.
She glanced up at the sky and began counting down the hours before it would get dark.
They own the night.
Goddamn short, late November days…
Luke had all but given up. All his energy expended in the chase, and now that they had lost the siren again, he stared listlessly at the buildings around them. As with the Downtown districts, the buildings, stores, and houses out here were almost completely covered up, signs that the creatures slept — or bided their time — inside. Kate found that depressing.
“Can you hear them?” she asked Luke, though she already knew the answer.
“No. Not for a while now. I think they’re gone. Do you think they turned it off?”
“Maybe it means they found where they were going and decided to turn off the siren. It’s loud. It can be pretty annoying.”
He nodded, but she could tell he didn’t buy it. She didn’t blame him. She didn’t buy it, either. She had to remind herself that Luke was just a kid. He had survived the night, and he certainly knew how to swing that bat, but in the end, he was still just a fourteen-year-old kid.
She kept driving, because there was nothing else left to do. Eventually, she turned left onto Richmond Avenue. Richmond was one of the busier roads in the city. If there were any survivors left out there at all…
She drove in silence, Luke sitting quietly next to her, his head turned away. The wind rushing against her felt good, and she wondered why she had never gone for a Jeep before. It had stopped feeling uncivilized tens of miles ago, and the freedom, the sensation of being out in the open while driving was contagious.
Luke suddenly jolted up in his seat.
Kate, startled, jerked at the steering wheel and almost swerved into an overturned car before somehow managing to regain control. “What, what?” she shouted.
“We have to stop!”
She braked hard and brought the Jeep to a complete stop in the middle of the street. “What?” she repeated.
“Look.”
He pointed at a pawnshop in a strip mall to their right. The big parking lot contained a Wallbys Pharmacy and an old Blockbuster up front, along with a dozen other smaller businesses in the back, including a Dairy Queen. The pawnshop sat in the very center.
“The pawnshop?” Kate asked.
“Yeah. See it? Bars on the windows.”
She could barely make them out from a distance. “What about them?”
“Burglar bars, Kate, and there’s nothing covering the windows on the inside. You know what that means, right?”
She nodded. “They’re not inside.”
“Yeah. And the bars on the windows.” She didn’t know where he was going with it, and he saw it on her face. “Bars, Kate. They couldn’t get through the bars. We might not find whoever is running around with that police siren, but that place… We could be safe there. We wouldn’t have to fight them off. The bars would do it for us.”