“Fuck off.”
I sighed. “Zip it, both of you.”
“Another house?” Janie suggested.
But I didn’t like that. The Children were out there, they would find us again. I had hoped that they wouldn’t be in this town, but they were here like everywhere else. No, another house wasn’t an option. It had to be something different.
“Hear that?” Texas Slim said. “That’s not coyotes.”
I heard it all right: the telltale baying of dogs echoing out through the shadow-carved town. Children. Dog packs. Jesus. South Bend was no different than every other town. I supposed they were all like that now, maybe some even worse.
We needed to get downtown. But that meant getting farther away from the Bronco with its flat tire.
“Let’s go,” I said.
“What way?” Texas Slim wanted to know. “All ways being the same, I suppose.”
“Towards the center of town. We’ll scout back for the Bronco come first light. Right now, let’s get off the streets.” . 30.06 in hand, I led them away.
The night was warm, but not unpleasantly so. Just the sort of night you might have spent out on the front porch with a cold beer in your hand in the old days. I led them down alleys and streets, through a maze of avenues, and across an empty field.
Downtown.
Main Street. It was a graveyard like every other main street in the world now. Windows broken, buildings half-burned out, the corpses of cars and trucks clogging up the streets. Drifts of sand pushed into doorways. Desolation and nothing but.
The sidewalks were choked with leaves from the past autumn. Nobody was there to sweep them up now. There were things beneath the leaves, probably skeletons, but nobody bothered to look. The windows were all dirty from sandstorms.
We moved past storefronts draped in shadow.
A video store. An insurance office. A cafe. Several stores with soaped out windows and badly faded going- out-of-business signs. We passed a department store with dusty, cobwebbed Halloween costumes behind the dirty windows, saw yellowed and curled Halloween decorations in the windows of several others. A theater with the lofty title of The Grande Ballroom still had an all-night horror show up on its marquee. Many of the letters were missing, but it looked like it was really going to be some kind of All Hallows hoot with four movies and a couple stage acts.
“See that, Texas?” Carl said. “Halloween horror show. Be like a fucking family reunion for a peckerwood like you.”
“Quiet,” Janie said.
As I saw the marquee, the decorations, the memories weighed down on me. Good God, Halloween. I’d forgotten about that being that every day was fucking Halloween now. The bombs had come down a week or so before Halloween and that was almost a year ago now.
Shit.
We kept going, waiting for something to show its ugly face, but so far nothing had. Janie was right behind me, Texas Slim behind her, and Carl taking up the backdoor with his shotgun.
So many shadows…spilling, pooling, spreading over the streets in tar-like lagoons of night. A light breeze was blowing, leaves skittering about, sand trickling against windows. I led them around a car stalled on the sidewalk, a Chevy. It looked like it had popped the curb and been abandoned there, two of the doors still thrown open. Moonlight flooded it. There was sand and leaves inside. The browned skeleton of a child was curled up on the back seat nearly buried in sand. It still had blonde curls. A girl. Looked like she had gone to sleep, gone peacefully, probably waiting for her mother to come back.
Radiation. Plague. Who could say?
We skirted more wrecks, refusing to look inside them, but always wary of anything moving in them. Nothing did. We came around a dead minivan and there was movement. People.
“Stay back,” I told them, keeping my rifle on them. “Just stay back and we won’t have any trouble.”
But these people were not going to try anything.
We all saw what they were. Four or five of them…a man and a woman and a few kids, a family maybe. They were crouched there, holding onto one another. The stench coming off them was nauseating, like hospital dressings rank with gangrene and drainage. And there was a good reason for that: their faces were lumpy with rising sores, splitting and bleeding. It looked like one of the kids had some kind of growth coming out of his eye. They all breathed with rasping, phlegmy sounds. The man reached out a hand, broke into a fit of coughing, and vomited a dark slick of blood onto the walk.
The stink was unbelievable.
“Fever,” Janie said. “They have the Fever.”
Everyone backed away.
The family crawled towards us with squishing sounds, but nobody fired. Last thing we wanted was to be blasting blood and fluids into the air. Lot of the germs that had mutated with the fallout were airborne pathogens. These days, it was all collectively known as the Fever: a lethal zoo of what military biohazard specialists call “hot agents.” And unfortunately, at this zoo, the cages were wide open and all the creeping beasties were in the air, the water, you name it.
I jogged away and the others followed. Next to the Children, there was nothing scarier than bodies hot with plague.
I ran across the street kicking my way through drifted sand, around a rusting furniture truck, and my luck almost ran out right there. A dog was waiting for me, a big one, in a pool of moonlight. Looked like it might have been a shepherd once, but it was hard to say. Its hide was patchy, threadbare, grotesque pink tumors and open sores rising like bread dough. A dark sap dripped from them.
I went down on my ass to avoid colliding with it.
I crawled away and then the others were with me. The beast was making a low mewling in its throat. Its fur, what there was of it, was sticky and spiky with discharges from its open wounds. It had only one eye, the other consumed in a pulsing pink growth that had burst out of its skull. The entire body was flabby and loose.
It opened its jaws and growled, slime dripping.
“Well, come on then,” I told it.
And it did.
It tensed itself to leap and as it vaulted up I fired twice, dropping it to the pavement. One round punched through its chest and the other smashed its head open, cleaving it apart almost perfectly. It lay there, mewling and jerking around, its head waving from side to side on a snaking trunk of a neck that almost looked boneless. Blood spattered the walks.
We got out of there.
I could hear more dogs howling in the distance. I had no idea what I was looking for, but I knew I’d recognize it when I saw it. And then there it was: an Army/Navy store. The door was open, a down of leaves and sand having blown in.
We went inside, clicking on flashlights.
Displays were tipped over, a case of war medals smashed…but other than that, the store was relatively unscathed and that was a real rarity these days. All of which made me think that South Bend must have been hit pretty hard by disease.
“Carl? Get that door shut. Lock it and prop something against it to keep it closed,” I said. “Help him out, Texas.”
“I suppose somebody’s has to.”
I turned away from them. “Janie, let’s find a place for us to spend the night. Dawn won’t be for six hours yet.”
Everyone did what they were told and the long night began.
