I felt very grand, very high and mighty, maybe even noble at that moment like I was some kind of fucking hero, some errant knight sacrificing all for God, country, and queen. But later, my delusions failed as they often do. I found a place where I could be alone, the very back aisle of Waldenbooks where I sat on the carpeted floor, surrounded by racks of kidlit-Junie B. Jones, Dr. Suess, Horrible Harry, the Boxcar Children, Henry Higgins, assorted Roald Dahl’s and Beatrix Potter’s-and I cried. Face in my hands, I cried my eyes out, remembering when I’d had a wife, a life, and, yes, some dignity.
Not like now.
When I opened my eyes again, I stared at the neat rows of books. At cardboard standees of Harry Potter and Max from Where the Wild Things Are. Surrounded by books that made me remember my secret childhood worlds, I had never felt so broken, so frayed, so fragmented. A post-apocalyptic Humpty Dumpty.
The sandstorm blew on and off for five days.
We were nearly ready to tear out each other’s throats by then. Any diversion would have done, even a pack of crazies and a firefight. When it ended we piled into the Bronco, barely speaking. Carl drove us out of the mall and into the world. Entire streets were blocked with sand dunes. The city looked completely different blown with sand and whitened with dust.
“Where to, Nash?” Carl finally said when we were rolling down South Main again like five days before.
“West,” I told him. “Get us to the highway, to U.S. Twenty. We have an appointment, I think, in South Bend.”
SOUTHBEND, INDIANA
1
We didn’t make it there for a week.
We had one problem after another. Suffice to say that when we did arrive, as luck would have it, the Bronco blew a tire soon as we rolled in and left us stranded there on the dirty backside of Indiana. And at night yet. Nothing worse than being on foot at night. Too many things out there. Too many predators haunting the ruined carcasses of the cities. Wild dog packs, mutant rats, swarms of bloodsucking insects, things much worse that it was hard to put a name to.
The radiation had done funny things.
We found a little ranch house in a devastated neighborhood at the edge of town and laid low. Nothing out there but wild dogs picking in the gutters, rats, lots of wrecked cars, sand blowing in the streets.
I thought we’d be safe for the night. I was wrong.
The house was empty. It was solid. And it appeared to be defensible. Of course, it wasn’t real easy to ascertain the latter, it being dark and all. And I didn’t want to be using any flashlights. Batteries were hard to come by and I didn’t exactly want to telegraph our position to whatever was waiting out there…because something was, you see. I could feel it right up my spine and I knew better than to dismiss such a feeling.
Ten minutes after we got there, we all heard it: a high, almost electronic piping that sounded oddly like a locust being imitated by a machine. And there was only one thing that made a sound like that.
We got ready.
Breathing in and breathing out, I waited with the. 30.06 Savage cradled in my arms. Because it was coming. It had been scenting us for the past hour and now it was closing in.
The others were back in the kitchen-Carl and Janie and Texas Slim-huddled up in the shadows, trying to keep quiet and failing at it. Whatever came through that door, I wanted first crack at it. Believe me, I was no hero, but the idea of whatever was out there flooding into the room in numbers and us being boxed in together…no, it was a recipe for disaster.
That feeling at my spine went electric.
“Get ready,” I called out.
The others were anxious to run, to fight, to bust caps or retreat, as long as it was something. The waiting was hard. Very hard.
“Anything?” Carl whispered from the kitchen.
“Nothing. Be quiet. We wait.”
“How long?”
“Always in a hurry, our friend Carl,” Texas said. “Notice how he’s always in a hurry?”
“Yeah…and who dropped a quarter in you, dipshit?”
“Knock it off!” Janie warned them.
I just shook my head. Those two were like a couple kids sometimes.
It was times like these, in the dark and the quiet, that I remembered the way things were before the war. How I’d been married. Had a life. Ancient History 101, I guess. Now I was just a scavenger trying to stay alive, killing and taking and running, always running, just hanging on by my fingertips, suspended uneasily over some yawning black pit filled with human bones. Thirty-seven years old, a chromed-up Beretta 9mm jammed in the waistband of my jeans and a knife with a seven-inch blade in my boot. That’s who I was now.
I lit a cigarette, sweat trickling down my spine.
I blew out smoke and walked over towards the window, staying in the shadows along the wall, keeping clear of the cool moonlight that flooded in. The windowpane was grimy, speckled with dust and soot. I wiped a clean spot and studied the streets out there. In the semi-darkness of a moonlit night, it could have been ten years ago. Cars at the curbs. Trees lining the boulevards. Houses lined up in neat little rows. It was only when the moonlight washed it all down that you could see the cars were all rusted and wrecked, the trees gnarled-looking, leaves and dead limbs scattered about, the houses weathered gray from the blowing sand, yards overgrown, windows broken.
Nothing else.
“Carl?” I whispered. “What’s the Geiger saying?”
“Pretty cool, Nash. Getting twenty to twenty-five.”
I thought it over, wondering if maybe the wind had made a lonesome howling sound and my imagination had channeled it into something else. But if it had, then we had all imagined it. And I didn’t believe in mass hallucination.
Outside, it was silent.
Nothing moved.
I leaned against the wall, finishing my cigarette. If nothing happened in another twenty minutes, I figured, then we’d relax, wait out the night, go scavenging in the morning. Had to be a decent ride in this town somewhere.
And it was as I was thinking this that I heard the Geiger Counter in the other room start to click.
“Carl?” I said, my breath barely coming.
“Yeah…going up. We got…forty, fifty, sixty…she’s climbing, man.”
The Geiger was clicking madly now, ticking like a bomb. My heart was pounding, trying to keep up with it.
“We spiked a hundred…it’s getting hot.”
The Geiger was clicking so fast now it sounded like one steady clicking roll.
“One-fifty and climbing, man…shit.”
Sweat running down my face, I looked out the window and there they were. The kids. The fucking Children. Just standing out there on the sidewalk like they were waiting for Susie or Jimmy to come out and play with them.
“They’re here. Get ready to bust.”
Out on the walk, the Children waited, just standing there. There were six of them. If you squinted your eyes real tight, you might mistake them for real kids, but they weren’t. Just wraithlike things that looked like they’d been blown from a tomb, clothes hanging in rags, faces gray and corrugated, eyes burning a hot noxious yellow like seething reactor cores.
We had to move now, take them out. There could be no hesitation. They were walking atomic waste, kicking
