noise came closer. He took Prickles' hand and pulled her as fast as he could, across the gravel and stones, and together they crouched down behind a stack of rusty oil-drums that someone had left beside the road years ago. He put his finger across his lips to tell her to keep quiet.
The car wasn't approaching very fast, but the driver obviously meant to go straight up to the state line barricade, and try to get through. Dr. Petrie wanted to see what would happen — how many National Guardsmen would come out to stop it, and what kind of fire-power they had.
It was only when the car came near and had flashed past their hiding place that he realized who was driving it. It was a dusty Delta 88, and behind the wheel was Adelaide.
'Adelaide!' he shouted, and scrambled out from behind the oil-drums, waving his arms. 'Adelaide!'
She neither heard nor saw him. She kept on driving towards the barricade, and as she approached it, he saw her red brake lights flare. She had pulled up right next to a National Guard truck, and was waiting there.
Dr. Petrie bit his lip, watching anxiously. Minutes passed, and no National Guardsmen emerged from the truck, nor from any of the makeshift command posts that had been set up around it. He saw Adelaide get out of the car and look around.
Five minutes went by, and he understood then what had happened. He walked quickly back to the oil-drums and collected Prickles. Then, picking her up in his arms, he jogged as fast as he could back to the hidden Torino. He climbed in, started the car up, and swung back on to the highway in a cloud of white dust.
He drove the mile up to the barricade and stopped. Adelaide was still standing there, looking around in a strangely dazed way, supporting herself against the side of her car.
He got out, and walked across to her.
She turned. Her face was bruised, and her lips were swollen. Her hair was mussed up and filthy. She was dressed in nothing but a red coverall with MacDonald's embroidered on the pocket. Her eyes stared at him as if she was having difficulty focusing.
'Adelaide?' he said quietly.
He came nearer, and held out his arms towards her. She kept on staring at him like a stranger.
'Adelaide? It's me — Leonard.'
She said nothing.
'Adelaide — what's happened?'
She lowered her eyes. Tears dropped down her cheeks, and stained her red coveralls with damp.
'Oh, Leonard,' she choked. 'Oh, Leonard, I'm sorry.'
He took her arm. She was shivering, in spite of the heat, and she couldn't seem to stop.
'Sorry? Adelaide — what's happened to you? Who's made you like this?'
'I'm sorry, Leonard,' she wept. 'Oh, Leonard, I'm so sorry.'
He said, 'Adelaide — ' But then she dung to him, and cried in great desperate, agonized gasps. She tugged at his sleeves, at his wrists, and wound his shirt in her hands, shaking and trembling with anguish. He couldn't do anything else but hold her, and soothe her, while Prickles sat in the car and watched them both with a concerned frown.
The National Guardsmen were all very young, and they were all dead. The plague had touched them all during the night, and they lay where they had been infected by it. In their bunks, beside their truck, in their command posts.
Dr. Petrie kept Adelaide and Prickles well away while he checked over the barricade and its twenty corpses, and he wound a scarf around his own nose and mouth in case he wasn't as resistant to plague as Anton Selmer had suggested. The whole place was buzzing with glistening flies, and stank of diahorrea and death.
Beside one young guardsman, he found an open wallet with a photograph of a smiling woman who must have been the boy's mother. But this was not a war — the mothers didn't wait at home, fondly smiling, while their sons died on the battlefield. If the mother lived in Florida, she was probably dead, too. Plague did not discriminate.
When he had finished his cursory check of the command post, Dr. Petrie roughly kicked down the wood and barbed-wire barricade. Then he went back to the Delta 88, which he had decided to drive in preference to the Torino. Its air-conditioning worked,' and it had nearly twice as much gas in its tank. He climbed in and started the engine. Adelaide tried to give him a small smile.
'I guess it's no use posting guards against diseases,' said Dr. Petrie. 'Not this disease, anyway.'
'No,' she replied.
Prickles said, 'Why do those men let flies walk on their faces?'
Dr. Petrie looked around. 'They're dead, honey. They're all dead, and because they're dead, they don't mind.'
'I won't let flies walk on my face, even when I'm dead.'
Dr. Petrie lowered his head. He said nothing.
They drove into Georgia in the early hours of Thursday morning, and it was only then that they saw how rapidly the plague had spread. Leonard Petrie kept on 75 towards Atlanta, but even as they drove north-west, away from the polluted eastern shores, they saw suburbs where dead housewives lay on the sidewalks, towns where fires burned untended, abandoned cars and trucks, looted stores, blazing farmland, rotting bodies.
Throughout the long hours of the morning, Adelaide sat silently, her head resting against the car window, saying nothing. Dr. Petrie didn't press her. He could guess what had happened, even if she hadn't told him. He had seen rape victims before, and knew that what she needed now, more than anything, was reassurance.
Dr. Petrie drove fast, and one by one they began to overtake other cars. Most of the stragglers were old family Chewys and Fords, stacked high with belongings. It was almost bizarre what people felt they desperately needed to keep — even to the extent of hampering their flight away from danger. Dr. Petrie saw a Rambler groaning under the weight of an upright piano, and a new Cadillac bearing, with frayed ropes and great indignity, a green-painted dog kennel.
The plague survivors were heading north, heading west. They drove with their car windows dosed tight, and they hardly looked at each other. Pale, tense faces in locked vehicles. As Dr. Petrie overtook more and more cars, the traffic became denser, and the jams became worse. At last, twenty or thirty miles outside of Atlanta, they were slowed down to a crawl, and way ahead of them, glittering in the fumy sunlight like an endless necklace that had been laid across the Georgia landscape, they saw a six-lane jam that obviously stretched the whole distance into the city.
'Oh God,' said Adelaide hoarsely. 'What are we going to do?'
Dr. Petrie stretched his aching back, and shrugged. There's nothing we can do. Maybe there's a turnoff someplace up ahead, and we can try to make it across country.'
The jam was made even more hideous as drivers died from plague at the wheels of their cars. Dr. Petrie saw wives and children mouthing frantic appeals for help through the windows of their cars, but the vehicles were now locked so solidly together that no one could open a car door. Anyway, every family was keeping itself strictly quarantined inside its own cell, and no one would risk infecting himself by going to assist anyone else.
It was the ultimate experience in American hostility, but perhaps it was also the ultimate experience in American togetherness, too, for the drivers and families who died inside their cars were not left behind or abandoned, but irresistibly pushed forward by the crushing metallic weight of the living refugees behind them. Adelaide slept for two hours, and when she woke up she looked a little better. As they bumped and rolled gradually northwards, she made them a lunch of franks and canned mixed vegetables, and they drank Coke and orange juice. Police helicopters flackered noisily overhead, warning drivers who felt unwell to try and pull off the highway. There was no way they were going to be able to halt the exodus of plague survivors, and they didn't even try.
Inside the chilled confines of their air-conditioned car, Dr. Petrie and Adelaide and Prickles were shunted northwards in a curious dream. Trees and road signs went past so slowly and gradually that they grew tired of looking at them, tired of reading them. As far as they could see ahead, there was nothing but a wide river of car rooftops, wavering in the afternoon heat. Behind them, the same endless press.
The convoy's progress was further hampered by cars that had broken down or run out of gas, and had no way of filling up again. Only the slow-boiling fear of plague kept the immense and agonized jam inching forward. Dr. Petrie saw an old Buick that had immovably seized up being deliberately shunted off the highway by the cars around it. It overturned and rolled down a dusty embankment, with its family trapped inside it. And there was nothing anyone could do to help.
