In the kitchen I help myself to as many MREs as will fit in my pack. Fill two bottles with water. Leave a note of what I took for Delaney, who, like Nelise, is crashed out in her bunk.
Irwin meets me in the atrium, where Chase is stashing a container of fuel in a rolling suitcase, effectively disguising it. As he zips it closed, I reach for the handle, but he doesn’t hand it over.
And then I notice the bag over his shoulder. The black watch on his wrist. The headset over his ear.
“I’m going with you,” he says.
“No,” I say.
“I go with you or I can just stalk you. Either way, I’m going.”
“These are fresh off the charger,” Irwin says, hooking a walkie-talkie to my belt and handing me the headset to loop over my ear. “Should last eight hours at least. Twelve at the very most. After that, you’ll have to find batteries.”
If I don’t find the medicine Julie needs in twelve hours, it won’t matter anyway.
Karam comes to see us off, shadows beneath his eyes. “I wanted to come with you,” he says, looking from Chase to me. “But it’s going to take at least ten of us to patrol this place, and I can’t leave my mother.” He reaches in his back pocket, takes out a filtration straw, and hands it to me.
“Thanks,” I say, stashing it in the side zipper of my pack.
He looks as though he’d like to say more but then, with a glance at Chase, simply nods. “Be safe.”
Ten seconds later we’re ascending the stairs to the door, where we’re let out by Sha’Neal.
The sun’s up, glinting off dew on the overgrown grass. Preston meets us at the hole in the fence. It’s been mostly repaired, enough of a space left open to admit a person at a time.
“We haven’t found the keys to the gate,” he says, holding the chain link aside as we duck through, and then helping Chase with the suitcase. “Or any keys, for that matter.”
Straightening, I take in the stretch of county road before us.
It’s been six months since I stepped foot outside this ranch. Since my two-and-a-half-month visit to the outside world I’d been taught to regard as evil.
For a minute, the earth tilts beneath me.
“You okay?” Chase says, grabbing my arm. I jerk away.
“Fine,” I say and start walking. A moment later I hear the wheels of the suitcase drag along the gravel behind me.
The sun is arcing up into the eastern sky on a cool June morning. The birds are singing. Just not the same song as before.
Nothing is the same.
“She dumped me for a doctor,” Chase says.
I glance sidelong at him.
“My fiancée. Former fiancée. She dumped me for a doctor. She wanted a different life than what I could give her. She worked in pharmaceutical sales. He’d been trying to get with her for years. Held out hope that entire time. I thought he was an idiot for marrying someone obviously after his money.”
I walk faster. Wonder how quickly I can cover six miles with this pack on. Can hear him dragging the suitcase faster, wheels tumbling over gravel.
“I ran into her a couple years later. She was pregnant, back home to have the baby. Said he’d sold his practice to join Doctors Without Borders—they’d spent the last year living in a hut in Nepal. Thing is, she was genuinely happy. I could see it. That guy wasn’t an idiot. He’d seen something for them that he couldn’t give up on.”
“You know, just because you’re coming with me doesn’t mean we have to talk.”
“Yes, we do. Because I need you to know that I would have told you eventually. I just didn’t have a chance—”
I spin back, instantly incensed. “You didn’t have a chance? When exactly did you not have a chance? When we were holed up in a barn for a night during a blizzard and—oh, that’s right—you threatened to leave me and turn me over to the police if I didn’t explain the samples in my possession? You hypocritical bastard!”
He lifts the suitcase and jogs to my side. Sets it back down to bump along behind him. “Wynter, you have to understand: I’d been told you’d stolen a bunch of medical samples! Except things didn’t add up. You didn’t add up. I just couldn’t figure out if you were really that good a con, or—”
“Or what?”
“Or as naïve as you seemed. Or just that good, period. Which is what it was. What it is. You’re a good person, Wynter. And when I think about that night in the bunkhouse—”
Someone clears their throat. “Uh, you folks know you’re on comm, right?”
Irwin.
Heat rushes to my cheeks and I rip off the headset as Chase curses and does the same.
I walk the next mile in angry, humiliated silence, my headset in a sweaty fist. Gaze trained toward my left shoulder, away from him, vision threatening to blur.
“Hey, look,” he says a few minutes later. I glance over to find him pointing at a farmhouse. There’s a black X spray-painted on the door. But the markings are different, letters I can’t decipher on the left quadrant. A zero in the bottom one.
The words beneath it are plain enough to understand.
3 DEAD
“It’s like the markings on the doors in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina,” he says. “Except I can’t tell who left it.”
I don’t know about that hurricane. But I feel the itch of panic at the back of my brain.
The door of the next house we pass isn’t even closed. Three turkey vultures are gathered over a meal on the front porch and I realize this is where I saw them circling earlier. A sign in the front yard next to an old-fashioned well spigot reads: FREE WATER. The handle is up. Nothing’s coming out.
Chase loops his headset back over his ear.
“Irwin? Yeah, sorry. Hey, doesn’t look like the neighbors came through this that great.”
The morning silence is eerie after the hum of generators and air systems we’ve lived with the last six months. The humidity feels sticky, the sun too harsh in the cloudy sky. Chase pulls a pair of sunglasses from his pocket, offers them to me. I ignore him and pull a worn baseball cap from my pack. It’s the same one I wore with a fake beard when I disguised myself as a man after delivering the samples, the frayed bill shielding my eyes as I sped down I-80 hell-bent on the only thing that mattered:
Getting Truly out of the Enclave.
I tug the cap on, pick up my pace.
County Road 46 turns into First Street on the edge of a town that’s far too quiet. We pass a trailer home, the empty door and window frames of which are shrouded in black soot. A white house that might be a hundred years old with a black X on its front door, a zero in the bottom quadrant. A Lutheran church, doors hanging open, a single word spray-painted across the white siding in front:
INFECTED
The town—which is really a village that once housed fewer people than the enclave of five hundred I grew up in—is utterly still.
Devoid of life.
My mind is churning. I’m looking for a medical clinic or, barring that, a vehicle. But for all the abandoned vehicles along the highway and back roads six months ago, for all of the campers I saw parked in driveways of the small towns we passed through last winter, I don’t see a single vehicle now.
“Where is everyone?” I say, and realize I’m whispering. I can feel my pulse ratcheting against my eardrums.
And all I can think is: What if it’s true? What if we’re all that’s left?
Magnus preached about the end of mankind. The few who would inherit the Earth and populate it anew.
Stop.
Even if Magnus was right, the earth would never pass to a known apostate like me.
There must be people alive out here somewhere.
“Maybe this is a good sign,” Chase says, and I realize that he’s unnerved, as well. “That there’s shelters or supplies—maybe even vaccines—in the cities. We need to get to Sidney.”
A flash of gray skirts across a yard and clamors up a tree trunk.
Tumbles out of it a second later, feline claws flailing.
Clearly not right.
We walk past a bank of grain silos, straight for town—what there is of it, anyway. It’s mostly just a street with a few storefronts. A bar and grill. A repair shop with a tall false front.
The crunch of our soles, the bump and scrape of the suitcase, is too loud in the silence. So much so that I put the headset on just to know Irwin’s there.
The door to the post office has been broken in. The two newspaper dispensers out front stand empty.
The breeze stirs, carrying the smell of damp earth and decay. Something flutters along the concrete ramp to the door:
A piece of dirty paper with big block letters.
“Anything?” Irwin says.
“Place is a ghost town,” Chase says as I go over and pick it up.
As I do, I note several more like it matted to the sidewalk.
I smooth out the weathered page.
STAY SAFE
STAY HOME
• Keep your doors closed.
• Do not leave your house.
• Quarantine sick family members to a separate part of the house, sterilize any surfaces they might have touched, and wear protective masks and gloves at home.
• If you must leave, wear protective masks and gloves.
Last updated 03/18 12:36
I read the flyer and then glance around. But none of the houses we’ve passed have shown evidence of occupants in weeks, if not months.
Where is everybody?
There’s a similar notice stapled to the telephone pole on the corner, though as I get closer I can see it’s slightly different:
STAY SAFE
STAY HOME
DO NOT leave your home seeking supplies or vaccinations!!
Do not believe rumors that vaccines are available!
Do not buy injections from those purporting to sell vaccines!
These injections are FAKE and may harm your health.
Do not trade food, water, fuel, or other vital supplies to anyone offering to sell a vaccine, cure, or other treatment for the disease commonly referred to as rapid early-onset dementia.
When a vaccine becomes available you will receive instructions from the Department of Homeland Security. Until then, stay safe—STAY HOME.
Stay alive.
Last updated 05/01 1:27
It’s been stapled on top of the torn remnants of others like the one in my hand.
And then I notice the date at the bottom.
“This was six weeks ago,” I say, glancing at Chase, who frowns.
Do not believe rumors that vaccines are available . . .
But they should be by now—shouldn’t they? It’s been six months since the National Guard sent a helicopter to retrieve Ashley and the samples from Fort Collins. Since I watched the best hope for our nation—and the world—roar overhead as I sped down I-80 toward Iowa in disguise to retrieve Truly.
Hiss of static. “What was six weeks ago?” Irwin.
I read the flyer aloud.
“Looks like people got impatient,” Chase says. “We haven’t seen a vehicle since we got here.”
“Maybe there was another flyer. Info on where to go for the vaccine,” Irwin says.
Chase lets go of the suitcase and circles the pole, glancing up and down. But I’ve already looked and there’s nothing newer. I walk out to the intersection, glance down the unpaved cross street past a mobile home with a sidewalk that goes straight to its stoop. The front door hangs open, crooked on its hinges, a red X spray-painted on the siding to the right of it. A MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN sign in the window.
“FEMA, or the National Guard, or whoever it is can’t be everywhere at once. Especially a town as tiny as Gurley. I’m guessing folks would have to go to Sidney, at least. Better yet, North Platte or Kearney. Maybe even Denver . . .”
I turn in the middle of the intersection, shielding my eyes from the sun. Walk a little ways down the street past an old concrete building. It’s been boarded up as though against a storm. I take in the junk heap beside it. The open lot at the end of the block.
The grass interspersed with rows of dirt mounds. Five mounds in each, the last row unfinished with only three.
As though waiting for two more.
And then I see it—a patch of earth darker than the others. Messier, where it’s been disturbed.
A low growl sounds from the direction of the junk pile, the sound amplified by the old hood of a car.
“Back away,” Chase murmurs, raising his pistol.
Too late.
A black dog darts from beneath the hood and I skirt back. But before it’s gone four feet it wavers and falls sideways. Flails. Gets to its feet and starts for us, something not right in the way the front legs are churning as though independent of its back.
It falls again, worming against the grass.
A sound rises up in my throat, because even though the dog’s the wrong color, it reminds me of Buddy. The size I imagine him to be now. How I pictured Truly playing with him in Wyoming, splashing through river shallows this summer. Curling up with him in front of the fireplace this fall.
But that idyllic dream is gone. Julie might not live till summer. How twisted everything has become.
“Cover your ears,” Chase says.
I turn away as the shot rings out.
We have to move on. But without a car, nothing will be fast enough.
I glance at the sun. It’s nearly midmorning, the hours passing too quickly. I fight down a surge of panic, wondering if we’re too late. If Julie’s slipped away already. I need to know what’s happening at the silo. Lauren and Truly have to be awake by now.
“Irwin,” I say, not needing to touch the button to speak. There’s no one to overhear me. “Have you seen Truly or Lauren? Can you check on Julie?”
“Hold on.”
I hear him a few seconds later in conversation with someone else.
Chase points to a double garage near the mobile home. I nod and draw my pistol. He grabs the suitcase handle, pistol in his other hand. And then we’re crossing the yard and circling around to a small patio attached to the back, looking for a way in.
“Ivy’s checking,” Irwin says, too loud in my ear.
We come to a back door. Chase checks the knob and, when it doesn’t turn, peers in through the window beside it—then drops back against the siding.
“What is it?” I ask.
He shakes his head.
“What?” I move to look and he takes my arm.
But not before I see the figure dangling inside.
I shove away, hands going to my knees as my stomach rebels. The image branded into memory by my sheer will to unsee it.
What is this world we have reemerged into?
Magnus’s voice, once the voice of God Himself, comes unbidden to my inner ear.
Have I not told you what is to come?
Did I not say: not in an age, but in this age? I tell you today: it is here. The end is happening even now.
Shut up.
But from what I can tell, everything Magnus said has indeed come true.
I glance at Chase, who’s looking through the window at an angle—not at the body, but at something along the wall.
He tries the door and, when the knob doesn’t turn, steps back and takes in the patio. The black wire table and chairs that look about as comfortable as a cheese grater. The terra-cotta planters stuck with giant plastic candy canes and a Santa on a stick.
“What are you doing?” I say, wiping my mouth on my sleeve.
Static. Irwin in my ear: “The girls are fine . . .”
I straighten at his hesitation.
“But what?” I say.
Already bracing for the next months and years of wondering what more I could have done to save her. Just as I did with my own mother.
Chase pauses, hands on the edge of a planter, his eyes on me.
When Irwin doesn’t answer, I say, “Irwin! What about Julie?”
“Sorry,” Irwin says. “Ivy said she’s awake, but not doing well. Hey, Micah’s joining us.”
“Uh, hi,” Micah says, having apparently donned a headset.
“Micah,” Chase says, tipping up a planter and looking beneath it. “Tell us something good.”
“I was able to replay the security footage,” Micah says.
“What’d you find?” Chase.
I walk back out to the street, look around the tiny intersection at the only stoplight in town.
Movement catches my eye from the building across the street. My head snaps up toward a second-story window crisscrossed with iron bars.
Where a gaunt figure is pressed against the glass.
Staring down at me.