ruined in antiquity, rather than just a few years earlier. They had come to Tulsa seeking supplies, needing to replace all they had lost in the flood, but instead found themselves staring at a wasteland of ash and desolation.
The others spoke in her dream, but she could not understand them. Fear began to fill up the empty places inside her as the four of them advanced cautiously through the charred remains of the city, under a lowering sky of poisonous clouds turned the colour of bad blood and meat sickness. She clutched Papa’s hand tightly as dark shapes flitted at the edge of her vision.
The dead and the Disappeared. They had all come back from wherever the damned go when the world is done with them.
She was a little girl again, tugging on her father’s arm to gain his attention. But he seemed not to notice. Like he didn’t know she was there. No matter how hard she tried to pull him away, he just led them deeper and deeper into the dead city. And then she lost her grip on him. It didn’t slip or falter, he was just gone.
No … he was up ahead, but holding hands with Maive, and leading Adam into the ruins of a 7-Eleven that had somehow escaped the worst of the conflagration. It was as if he had forgotten her. Had left her behind.
She was suddenly paralysed with terror. There were wolves stalking them, along with the spectres of the dead and the Disappeared that lay in wait inside the shell of that building. Why was he going in there? Why had he left her?
Increasingly she was able to make out the features of the ghouls and shadows circling them at a distance, drawing in more tightly with each pass, like sharks intending to feed. She saw the shape of Cooper Aronson, his neck bent at an impossible angle, his eyes just dark ragged holes. Insensate fury twisted the rotting remains of his face into a rictus of ill-favoured rage as the animated corpse contemplated the vision of his wife walking hand in hand with Miguel Pieraro.
Sofia tried to call out to her father, but then Aronson was gone, and she shuddered as she felt the cold claws of a dead man brush her shoulder. Turning, somehow as swiftly as the flight of an arrow, but as slowly as specks of frozen dust floating through the vacuum of space, she turned and turned … and her mouth fell open in a silent scream when she saw Orin, the young Mormon boy they’d found ten miles downstream of where the flood had overtaken them, his body suspended in a tree as if crucified. He reached out to her, his black bloated hands closing around her throat.
‘
She came awake, gasping and trembling. Cindy had one hand on her shoulder, shaking her lightly.
‘Sofia, are you all right?’
For a few seconds her waking panic was every bit as deep-seated and animalistic as her terror in the dream. She had no idea where she was or what she was doing. It was daylight - morning. Why was she not in bed? Where was her father? This wasn’t their apartment …
And then she remembered, and wished she could’ve fallen back into confusion and ignorance. A pitiable moan escaped her throat, until she clamped her mouth shut, forced herself to accept what she could not hope to change.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, as much to stop herself moaning again as anything. ‘A bad dream. Memories.’
‘That’s all right, you’re safe now. Just take a moment and get your soul back,’ said Cindy French.
A ragged breath escaped her. She realised her bladder was painfully full, and was relieved at least that she hadn’t wet herself in her terror. She must’ve slept through the convoy’s earlier stop, at Ottawa.
The truck’s powerful motor propelled them through the dull glare of morning. The road ahead was deserted, but their path was framed between ramparts of twisted metal; the disintegrating bodies of crashed automobiles bulldozed off the highway by army engineers. The government hadn’t bothered removing the wreckage this far out from KC. It would all eventually decompose into the earth. Sofia had seen the same thing many times when coming up from Texas. Clearing the nation’s highways often meant simply sweeping the debris to one side.
‘I’m okay,’ she told Cindy in a voice that was still shaky. ‘I just get nightmares.’
The truck driver mulled that over for a while. The only sound in the cabin was the steady growl of the engine, and the hum of the eighteen wheels on the highway.
‘I think we all do,’ admitted Cindy. ‘Anybody who remembers, anyway.’
She turned to face Sofia again, in that same disconcerting way as before, taking her eyes off the road. At some point in the last few hours, Cindy had removed her own coat and hoodie, leaving a pink tee-shirt with a frustrated-looking cartoon mouse diligently working at a school desk. Underneath the cartoon was a single line of text:
‘Aren’t you cold?’ Sofia asked.
Cindy shook her head. ‘Nah, I’m hot, in truth. But it isn’t menopause.’
Sofia pulled her jacket in tighter around her. ‘If you say so.’
‘Anyway, I know the younger kids are okay with it all - you know, if you were young enough when the Wave came, the world just is what it is now. But I guess you’re old enough to remember it pretty well, eh?’
She replied with a brief nod as Cindy’s gaze turned back to the monotonous passage of Interstate 35.
‘I was up in Alaska when it happened, driving tankers for Exxon. I hated that work, but it saved my life. For what it was worth.’ Her voice took on a mournful tone. ‘My family were all down here. Granted, it was no great loss, losing my husband. Part of why I had to go to Alaska in the first place was to pay off the income taxes he never filed. The Wave gave me the divorce I always wanted. But I’d take it all back to see my kids and grandbabies again.’
For the first time in their journey together, Sofia thought Cindy’s jolly exterior might fail. Her features squeezed in on her blue eyes, the tears welling up and falling freely. She wiped her eyes and took a deep breath. With one hand, she waved at her face until the tears faded.
‘Oh Lord, it never gets any easier.’ She cleared her throat and sniffed. ‘I still have two sons in the Corps. They were in Iraq. But everyone else, well … I’d always driven short-haul routes before then. My worthless husband saved my life with his laziness.’
Everybody she met had one of these stories, thought Sofia. All of the Americans, anyway. You could sort them by type. There were those who hated the Wave for everything it had taken away. There were others who were grateful for the Wave because it gave them a clean slate to start over again. And you had your fence-sitters like Cindy, who saw it as a mixed blessing, but mainly bad.
Most of them seemed to think that Sofia’s own history - when she was telling it straight - sounded exciting and adventurous. Right up until the point they learned about what had happened to her family. But apart from telling the trucker that her father had died recently, she hadn’t shared much of a personal nature since they’d met.
‘I’m sorry about your family, Cindy,’ Sofia said. ‘You must miss them very much.’
‘Every day,’ she replied, wiping at one eye with the back of her hand. ‘And I get the nightmares with it, just like you.’
Cindy cleared her throat, before powering up the radio and calling up the other trucks. ‘Hey fellas, we’re about ten minutes out. Y’all up for a pit stop?’
A speaker box crackled somewhere above their heads and a man’s voice answered.
‘
‘She’s fine, Dave. Slept like a baby inside your old coat.’
‘
There was nothing about the approach to Emporia, Kansas, that marked it as being any different from a thousand other haunted towns, other than the banks of tangled vehicle wreckage by the side of the road, indicating an obvious effort to clear a path. As she knew only too well, so many places remained exactly as they’d been left when human life departed them on 14 March 2003.
Or rather, as the towns and cities had become in the hours, days and weeks afterwards. She still marvelled at the biblical scale of destruction she witnessed when walking and riding up from Texas. It was not sinful to compare the perdition that had come upon America with the Old Testament tales that the nuns had scared her with as a child. The cities of the plain had nothing on the Midwestern ruins she’d seen.
As they entered the outskirts of Emporia, the roadside wreckage began to thin out.
‘What happened to all the old cars?’ Sofia asked.
