'Gertrude?'
'Flame on, honey. Flame on.'
'What about me?' Little Rashad asked, stepping forward with his trumpet in his hands.
Grandma Riggs appraised him with blind eyes. 'What about you?'
'Am I gonna die too?'
Grandma Riggs grinned. 'Probably. Maybe. You scared?'
'Not as much as I used to be.'
'There you go. Maybe you can talk to Sissy,' Grandma Riggs said.
Little Rashad examined the young blonde woman with surprisingly old eyes. Dropping his trumpet to dangle at the end of a rope tied around his neck, he offered Sissy his hand. 'Mr. Adamski taught me about ‘awakes.’ He said it was important to celebrate the life, not the death.'
'It’s a
The boy frowned and glared at Buckley. 'That’s what I said.' To Sissy he added, 'You tell me what you liked about Samuel and I’ll tell you what I liked about Sally.'
Sissy stared at the boy, then wiped the tears from her eyes. She managed a weak smile and allowed the boy to lead her to the curb a ways down, where they both sat.
From this distance, Buckley couldn't hear more than their muffled words, but it was clear that the boy had made some kind of connection with the young woman. 'You aren’t as crazy as you seem,' he murmured to Grandma Riggs.
'Yes I am.'
'I bet you were a great teacher.'
'I was the best.'
'You still are.'
With his neck craned, Buckley waited for a reply, but there wasn't any. Instead, he heard the cackle of laughter and the sound of a lighter followed by the harsh whisper of a crack pipe.
CHAPTER 24
They'd been walking for twenty minutes with Sissy now in the lead. After Little Rashad had spoken with her, she'd stood away from the group for awhile. When she'd returned, a flinty hardness inhabited her eyes, determination in her gaze.
Buckley trudged slightly hunched as he carried Grandma Riggs. Maggies had begun to pop along his lower back, escaping the salt-laced cellophane to fall sizzling to the ground. He'd tried to stop to fix the rent in the cellophane, but Grandma Riggs wouldn't let him. '
Little Rashad followed with one hand grasping one of the chair legs, oblivious to Buckley's leavings. The boy was so exhausted, all he could do was allow himself to be led without care for reason nor destination, his eyes on a far away horizon.
Last came MacHenry and Gert, whispering softly to each other and laughing at some private joke or another. They seemed more like teenage lovers than doomed souls. Then again, teenagers were doomed souls.
The streets hadn't gotten any better. Once busy thoroughfares had become parking lots. Car doors had been left open. Bodies lay exploded where they’d fallen. They'd passed a Volvo with an open back door. Buckley didn't want to remember the blue and white plastic rattle that angled out from the pile of sludge in the baby seat. Volvos were supposed to be the safest car. Even at the end of the world a family deserved the expectation of safety. Yet even as he thought it, he realized how horribly manic it was to think that way, a part of him coming unhinged-or maybe too much secondhand crack smoke.
Caddies roamed like rare cattle munching on buildings as if they were tufts of wheat grass. The original maggies, the small name-sakes, were thankfully few. They depended upon human hosts it seemed and the one thing lacking in Wilmington these days were humans. Shops stood empty, windows shattered at intervals making the facade of a wealthy street seem more like a good-natured hooker with a broken-toothed grin.
At Seventh Street, a school bus had plowed into a fire hydrant, long gone dry. Schoolbooks and backpacks colored the street like sprinkled confetti. Here and there bones and hair, mingled with mud that had most probably pooled when the hydrant had first geysered free. Pooled, because of the gaping hole that had been torn in the road, by what, Buckley could only imagine. Filled to the top with red muddy water, the breeze stirred the surface like a lake. Miniature whitecaps formed, revealing skeletal hands and the occasional fleshy skull in the troughs of the waves. On the ground surrounding this earthy cauldron, red and black skirts flittered along on greedy winds like tumbleweeds. Buckley stared at a particular skeletal hand poking free of the water and couldn't help but sense that if the hand's owner were merely drowning, he could pull him or her to safety.
Everyone had stopped and stared at the scene knowing that the children had died, their remnants so unsentimentally strewn seemed disrespectful. Gert had moved to pick up one of the skirts as it drifted by, but MacHenry pulled her back. When they finally moved away, they were a more somber pair, the idea of a busload of children dying so horribly coating their conscience with hot slimy details.
With heads slung low, the group continued on another ten minutes, before they found a space devoid of death. Sissy paused and looked around. 'I think we should stop here, huh?'
Buckley nodded. 'Good idea.'
Sissy, Gert and MacHenry took the opportunity to check their Super Soakers. MacHenry worked the mechanisms, while Gert pulled out some bags of salt. Here and there water had puddled from the run-off from Seventh Street, but out of respect for the dead, they left these alone. Instead they checked the radiators of the cars, draining them into the rifles. As they worked, all of them kept an eye on the buildings.
Little Rashad, Buckley and Grandma Riggs, who was fast asleep, plopped down in the shadow of a store front. A sign in the window read — PAULINE’S PULLED PORK. As Buckley finally divested himself of Grandma's chair, setting it none too gently on the ground and untying the ropes, he made smacking sounds with his lips. 'Mmmm. Mmmm. I could do with some Barbecue. What about you, kid?'
'I could eat a whole pig,' Little Rashad said.
'I’m with ya. What do you think the odds are that we can get us some pulled pork sandwiches, potato salad and a cold soda?'
MacHenry crossed the street and sat heavily beside Buckley. He glanced at the storefront, then shook his head. 'Dream on, Adamski. Your days of pulled pork and ribs are over.'
'Now that would be a reason not to go on living.'
'It can't all be that bad,' MacHenry said.
'It's not.' Buckley smiled wistfully. 'I'm just talking because I'm too tired to do anything else.'
MacHenry glanced at Grandma sleeping in her chair. 'Old Lady's heavy, isn't she,' he said.
MacHenry nodded. 'Anyone would be heavy after all the running we did. This back wasn't meant for transporting people. Hell, sometimes I do well just to get out of bed.'
'How's the infection?'
'Not as bad as I thought it would be. I'm wondering if maybe the maggies have a set lifespan, because frankly, I should be dead by now.'
'Set lifespan? You getting science fiction on me?'
'Kind of. Yeah, I suppose I am. Follow me if you will.' Earlier Buckley had refused to believe that maggies had evolved from anything other than pure evil. But the more he saw, the more logic dictated something else. No matter how he hated Star Trek logic, he found himself embracing the possibility. 'What if this is some sort of invasion, or even better, terraforming? What's the first thing someone would want to get rid of if they were going to take over the planet?'
'Reality Television?'
'Seriously.' Buckley pointed at himself, MacHenry and the others. 'Us. People. They'd want to get rid of all the people.' Buckley chuckled. 'That reality television comment was funny, by the way.'
'Thanks,' MacHenry deadpanned.
