surprise there, but we figured that everything that belonged to the Devourer had been consumed during its attempt to hold open the gate, so it was probably safe enough. Besides, everyone knew that Chuck was going back to bury Mazie and Greg, and that he wanted to be alone while he did it. I could understand that.
My clothes had dried stiff and foul after being soaked in the pit, causing flakes of dried gore to rain off of me as I stood up. Chuck got out of the truck and headed to the back to open up the rear door.
“I got that stuff you wanted. Sorry it took so long. I ended up having to siphon gas out of parked cars. The gas stations were either surrounded by mobs of scared people or on fire.”
The cargo area of the truck was filled with the supplies I had asked for from the hardware store. A dozen jerry cans full of gas, two big packages of those red cloth shop towels, a box of road flares, and two cans of soapless hand cleaner for mechanics. I stripped out of my blood-soaked clothes right there in the parking lot.
“Dude!” Chuck turned his back to me. “Do you mind? Like I survived the end of the world just to see some guy’s junk waving around in the breeze. A little warning next time.”
“Sorry.” I scooped out handfuls of the cleaner-it had the consistency of a loose paste-and started rubbing it all over my body, taking special care with my face and hair, and then scrubbing hard with the shop towels.
A short but chilly time later, I was clean enough to put on a fresh change of clothes from my duffel. I started unloading gas cans from the back and stacking them next to the curb.
“Well,” I asked Anne when the last ones were unloaded, “how do I look? Better?”
Chuck piped up, “Hell, yes, you look better. You looked like a goddamn tampon ten minutes ago.”
Anne threw him a look. “You are disgusting. Seriously.”
He shrugged.
She turned to me. “You won’t scare people who look in the window when we’re on the highway, but you’re still going to need a shower. Or two. Or three. Your hair looks like you rubbed chicken livers in it, and you smell like a dead cat that’s been soaked in nail polish remover. When we get back in the car, we’re rolling the windows down.”
“Fair enough. Let’s get to work so we can go.”
We carried the jerry cans to the gym and spent the next twenty minutes soaking the corpse-covered bleachers and wooden floor with gas. I added my bloody clothes to the mix while we were at it.
When it was done, we stood well back from the open doors and starting pitching in road flares until we could no longer see into the gym through the roaring, smoking inferno inside. Then we stood together in silence thinking about the people whose pyre we had just lit, wishing that things had been different.
We drove away into the brilliant sunrise with a rising column of black smoke at our backs, visible long after we left the city limits, and into a world that had changed in ways no one yet understood.
Despite all that had happened, I was excited at the thought of starting my new life and experiencing whatever the world could throw at me.
It was a good time to be alive.
