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 firepower 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 clung 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 diarrhoea 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 Chevvys 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
