The question wasn’t really a question, Grey understood. It was the natural thing to ask, just as it was his job to decline the offer. “No, I can do it.”
They got back in the Volvo. As Grey put the car in gear, Lila took up her magazine from the floor.
“If it’s all right with you, I think I’m going to read a bit.”
A hundred and twelve miles to the north, traveling east on Interstate 76, Kittridge had also begun to worry about fuel. The bus had been full when they’d started; now they were down to a quarter tank.
With a few minor detours, they’d managed to stay on the highway since Fort Morgan. Lulled by the motion of the bus, April and her brother had fallen asleep. Danny whistled through his teeth while he drove—the tune was nothing Kittridge recognized—gamely spinning the wheel and working the brakes and gas, hat tipped to his brow, his face and posture as erect as that of a sea captain facing down a gale.
For the love of God, Kittridge thought. How in the hell had he ended up in a school bus?
“Uh-oh,” said Danny.
Kittridge sat up straight. A long line of abandoned vehicles, stretching to the horizon, stood in their path. Some of the cars were lying upside down or on their sides. Bodies were scattered everywhere.
Danny stopped the bus. April and Tim were awake now as well, gazing out the windshield.
“April, get him out of here,” Kittridge directed. “Both of you to the back, now.”
“What do you want me to do?” Danny asked.
“Wait here.”
Kittridge stepped down from the bus. Flies were buzzing in vast black swarms; there was an overwhelming odor of rotten flesh. The air was absolutely still, as if it couldn’t bring itself to move. The only signs of life were the birds, vultures and crows, circling overhead. Kittridge moved up the line of cars. Virals had done this, there was no mistaking it; there must have been hundreds of them, thousands even. What did it mean? And why were the cars all together like this, as if they’d been forced to stop?
Suddenly Danny was beside him.
“I thought I told you to wait with the others.”
The man was squinting into the sunlight. “Wait.” He held up a hand, then said, “I hear something.”
Kittridge listened. Nothing at all, just the creak of the crickets in the empty fields. Then it came: a muffled pounding, like fists on metal.
Danny pointed. “It’s coming from over there.”
The sound became more distinct with each step. Somebody was alive out there, trapped inside the wreckage. Gradually its components began to separate, the pounding underscored by a strangled echo of human voices.
“Hello!” Kittridge called. “Can you hear me?”
The sound was coming from a semitrailer with the bright yellow FEMA insignia printed on its sides. The pounding was frantic now, the voices a shrill chorus of indistinguishable words.
“Hang on!” Kittridge yelled. “We’ll get you out!”
The door had been knocked kitty-corner in its frame. Kittridge looked around for something to use as a lever, found a tire iron, and wedged the blade under the door.
“Danny, help me.”
The door refused them at first; then it began, almost imperceptibly, to move. As the gap increased, a line of fingers appeared beneath the lip, attempting to draw it upward.
“Everybody, on three,” Kittridge commanded.
With a screech of metal, the door ascended.
They were from Fort Collins: a couple in their thirties, Joe and Linda Robinson, the two of them still dressed for a day at the office, with a young baby they called Boy Jr.; a heavyset black man in a security guard’s uniform, named Wood, and his girlfriend, Delores, a pediatric nurse who spoke with a thick West Indian accent; an elderly woman, Mrs. Bellamy—Kittridge was never to learn her first name—with a nimbus of blue-rinsed hair and an enormous white purse that she kept clutched to her side; a young man, maybe twenty-five, named Jamal, with a tight fade haircut and brightly colored tattoos winding up and down his bare arms. The last was a man in his fifties with the coarse gray hair and barrel-shaped torso of an aging athlete; he introduced himself as Pastor Don. Not an actual pastor, he explained; by trade, a CPA. The nickname was a leftover from his days coaching Pop Warner football.
“I always told them to pray we didn’t get our asses kicked,” he told Kittridge.
Though Kittridge had initially assumed they’d traveled together, they had wound up with one another by accident. All told versions of the same story. They’d fled the city only to be stopped by a long line of traffic at the Nebraska border. Word passed down from car to car that there was an Army roadblock ahead, that nobody was being let through. The Army was waiting for word to let people pass. For a whole day they’d sat there. As the light had ebbed, people had begun to panic. Everyone was saying the virals were coming; they were being left to die.
Which was, more or less, what happened.
They arrived just after sunset, Pastor Don said. Somewhere ahead in the line, screaming, gunshots, and the sound of crunching metal; people began to tear past him. But there was nowhere to run. Within seconds, the virals were upon them, hundreds blasting out of the fields, tearing into the crowd.
“I ran like hell, just like everybody else,” Pastor Don said.
He and Kittridge had stepped away to confer; the others were sitting on the ground by the bus. April was passing out bottles of water they’d collected at the stadium. Pastor Don removed a box of Marlboro Reds from his shirt pocket and shook two loose. Kittridge hadn’t smoked since his early twenties, but what could it hurt now? He accepted a light and took a cautious drag, the nicotine hitting his system instantly.
“I can’t even describe it,” Don said, ejecting a plume of smoke. “Those goddamn things were everywhere. I saw the truck and decided it was better than nothing. The others were already inside. How the door got jammed I don’t know.”
“Why wouldn’t the Army let you through?”
Don shrugged philosophically. “You know how these things work. Probably somebody forgot to file the right form.” He squinted at Kittridge through a trail of smoke. “So what about you, you got anybody?”
He meant did Kittridge have a family, somebody he had lost or was looking for. Kittridge shook his head.
“My son’s in Seattle, a plastic surgeon. The whole package. Married his college sweetheart, two kids, a boy and a girl. Big house on the water. They just redid the kitchen.” He shook his head wistfully. “The last time we spoke, that’s what we talked about. A fucking kitchen.”
Pastor Don was carrying a rifle, a .30-.06 with three rounds remaining. Wood was carrying an empty .38. Joe Robinson had a .22 pistol with four cartridges—good for killing a squirrel, maybe, but that was about all.
Don glanced toward the bus. “And the driver? What’s his story?”
“A little off, maybe. I wouldn’t try to touch him—he’ll just about have a seizure. Otherwise he’s okay. He treats that bus like it’s the
“And the other two?”
“They were hiding in their parents’ basement. I found them wandering around the parking lot at Mile High.”
Don took a last, hungry drag and crushed the butt underfoot. “Mile High,” he repeated. “I’m guessing that was nothing nice.”
There was no way around the wreckage; they would have to backtrack and find another route. They scavenged what supplies they could find—more bottles of water, a couple of working flashlights and a propane lantern, an assortment of tools, and a length of rope that had no obvious use but might find some purpose later on—and boarded the bus.
As Kittridge mounted the bottom step, Pastor Don touched him on the elbow. “Maybe you should say something.”
Kittridge looked at him. “Me?”
