He knew this: it was a vehicle parked in the road. One of its doors open.
For ten minutes, Jack didn’t move, didn’t take his eyes off the car.
He began to pedal up the road again, stopping every few hundred yards to view things from a closer vantage.
It was a late-model minivan. White. Covered in dust and pockmarked with bullet holes. Some of the windows had been shot out, and there was glass and blood on the pavement. All four tires low but intact. Utah license plate.
Jack stopped ten feet from the rear bumper and climbed off the bike.
The smell of death was everywhere.
There was a girl in the sagebrush. The sliding door of the minivan was open, and it looked as though she’d been gunned down running, her long blond hair caught up in the branches. He wasn’t going to get close enough to see how old she was, but she looked small from where he stood.
A woman sat in the front passenger seat, and her brains covered the window. Twin teenage boys lay slumped against each other in the backseat.
Jack climbed in behind the wheel. The keys dangled in the ignition. Fuel gauge at a quarter.
He turned the key.
The engine cranked.
He pulled the boys out of the back and their mother out of the front and laid them all down in the desert. Didn’t want to, but he couldn’t just leave the girl face-up and naked, entangled in the sage.
He stood for a long time staring down at them.
Midday and the flies already feasting.
Jack started to say something. Stopped himself. It would’ve meant nothing, changed nothing, been solely for his benefit. No words could put this right.
He drove north, keeping his speed at fifty. A CD in the stereo had been playing the Beach Boys, and Jack let it go on playing until he couldn’t stand it anymore.
He passed through a small, burned town, and fifteen miles north, on the outskirts of another, had to swerve to miss someone walking alone down the middle of the highway.
He stopped the car, watched a man staggering toward him in the rearview mirror, his defective gait unfazed, as if he hadn’t even noticed the car that had nearly hit him. He didn’t carry a gun or a backpack, nothing in his hands, which he held like arthritic claws, his fingers bent and seemingly frozen that way.
Jack shifted into park.
The closer the man got, the more wrecked he looked—deep purple with sunburn, his dirty white oxford streaked in blood and missing one of the arms entirely, his loafers disintegrating off his feet.
He walked past Jack’s window and kept going, straight down the double yellow.
Jack opened the door.
“Hey.”
The man didn’t look back.
Jack got out, walked after him. “Sir, do you need help?”
No response.
Jack drew even with him, tried to make eye contact, then stepped in front of the man, who stopped finally, his gray eyes staring off at some horizon beyond even the scope of this infinite country.
“Are you hurt?” Jack said.
His voice must have made some impact, because the man met his eyes.
“I have food in the car,” Jack said. “I don’t have water, but this road will take us through the Little Belt Mountains. We’ll find some in the high country for sure.”
The man just stood there, his entire body trembling slightly. Like there was a cataclysm under way deep in his core.
Jack touched the man’s bare arm where the shirt sleeve had been torn away, felt the sun’s accumulation of heat radiating from it.
“Come on. You’ll die out here.”
He escorted the man to the passenger side and installed him in the front seat.
“Sorry about the smell,” Jack said. “It ain’t pretty, but it beats walking.”
The man seemed not to notice.
They sped down the abbreviated main street of another slaughtered town. Mountains to the north, and the road climbed into them. Jack glanced over at the man, saw him touching the gore on his window, running his finger through it, smearing it across the glass. A bag of potato chips and a candy bar sat in his lap, unopened, unacknowledged.
“I’m Jack. What’s your name?”
The man looked at him as if he either didn’t know or couldn’t bring himself to say. His wallet bulged out of the side pocket of his slacks. Jack reached over, tugged it out, flipped it open.
“Donald Massey of Provo, Utah. Good to meet you, Donald. I’m from Albuquerque.”
Donald made no response.
“Aren’t you hungry? Here.” Jack reached over and took the candy bar out of Donald’s lap, ripped open the packaging. He slid the bar into Donald’s grasp, but the man just stared at it.
“How about some music?”
Jack turned on the Beach Boys.
They rode up into the mountains, Jack hating to be on a winding road again. All these blind corners meant you could roll up on a roadblock before you even knew what hit you.
In the early afternoon, they passed through a mountain village that was very much a ghost town before anyone had bothered to burn it. A few dozen houses. Couple buildings on the main strip. Evergreen trees in the fields and on the hills, the smell of them coming through the dashboard vents, a welcome change.
On the north side of town, Jack pulled over and turned off the engine. When he opened the door, he could hear the running water in the trees and smell its sweetness.
“You need to drink something, Donald.”
The man just stared through the windshield.
Jack lifted a travel mug out of the center console.
He rinsed the residue of ancient coffee out of the mug and filled it with water from the stream. Headed back to the van, opened Donald’s door.
“It’s really good,” Jack said.
He held the mug to Donald’s sun-blasted lips and tilted. Most of the water ran down the man’s chest under his shirt, but he swallowed some of it.
“We’ll reach Great Falls in the afternoon. It’s a big city. I used to live there.”
Impossible to know if the man registered a word he was saying.
“I got separated from my family five days ago.” Jack glanced at the man’s left ring finger, saw a gold wedding band. “Were you with your family, Donald?”
No response.
Jack sipped the water, grains of sand from the streambed catching on the tip of his tongue.
“Let me guess what you do for a living. My wife and I used to play this game all the time.” Jack studied the man’s loafers—nothing much to look at now, but they suggested wealth. Couple hundred dollars off the shelf. He inspected the tag on the back of the man’s collar. “Brooks Brothers. All right.” He looked at Donald’s hands. Covered in blood and still clutched like claws, but he could tell they weren’t the hands of a man who earned his living working outdoors. “You strike me as an ad man,” Jack said. “Am I right? You work at an advertising and marketing firm in Provo?”
Nothing.
“I bet you’d never guess my vocation. Tell you what. I’ll give you three…”
Jack stopped. Felt the cold premonition of having missed something. He almost didn’t want to know, but the fear couldn’t stop his curiosity.
He opened the glove compartment, rifled through a stack of yellow napkins, plastic silverware, bank-deposit envelopes, until he came to the automobile liability policy, protected in a plastic sleeve. He opened it, stared down at the small cards that identified the coverage, the policy limits, and the named insureds.
Donald Walter Massey.
Angela Jacobs Massey.
Jack looked at Donald.
“Jesus Christ.”
They went on through the mountains, Jack trying to pay attention to what was coming in the distance, but all he could think about was Donald, wondering what had happened back down the road. Couldn’t imagine the man fleeing. He wouldn’t have left his family. Had the affected purposely left him alive? Murdered his family in front of him and then sent him down the highway on foot?
Jack looked over at the man who now leaned against the door, wanting to tell him that he’d taken care of their bodies, or at least done what he could, shown them respect. He wanted to say something beautiful and profound and comforting, about how even in all this horror, there were things between people who loved each other that couldn’t be touched, that lived on through pain, torture, separation, even death. He thought he still believed that. But he didn’t say anything. Just reached over and laced his fingers through Donald’s, which barely released their incomprehensible store of tension.
Jack held the man’s hand as he drove out of the mountains and he did not let go.
In the early evening, the city lay several miles in the distance. The sun low over the plains beyond. Everything bright, golden. The way Jack dreamed of this place.
He disengaged his hand from Donald’s, the man still sleeping against the door. The gas-gauge needle hovered over the empty slash, and he was debating whether to head into town or take the bypass when he saw the first sign—a billboard that had once advertised a casino, now whitewashed and covered in black writing:
Jack took his foot off the gas.
Another billboard, same side of the road, one hundred yards farther down:
Jack looked in the rearview mirror, saw several vehicles trailing him, no idea where they’d come from.
He could see a roadblock in the distance, set up at a fork in the highway. More than twenty cars and trucks. Sandbags. Staunch artillery.
He passed vehicles on the shoulder that had been shot to hell and burned.
The cars behind him were close now, one of them a Navigator with the moonroof open and two men with machine guns standing on the backseat, ready to unload. Jack brought the minivan to a stop, put it in park, and turned off the engine. He looked over at Donald, started to rouse him, then thought, Why wake a man just to be killed?
Six heavily armed men strode up the middle of the highway toward the minivan. One of them brought along an emaciated, blindfolded human being on a leash.
They didn’t strike Jack as military, didn’t carry themselves so cocksure.
The greeting party stopped thirty yards out from the front bumper of the minivan, and the tallest of the bunch raised a bullhorn to his mouth.
“Both of you, out of the car.”
Jack grabbed Donald’s arm. “Come on, we have to get out.”
The man wouldn’t move.
“Donald.”
“You have five seconds.”
Jack opened his door and stepped out into the highway with his hands raised.
“You in the car, get out or—”
“He doesn’t hear you!” Jack yelled. “His mind is gone.”
“Down on your stomach.”
Jack got down onto his knees and prostrated himself across the rough, sun-warmed pavement. Listened to the sound of their footsteps coming toward him, and he didn’t dare move or even raise his head. Just lay there with his heart throbbing against the road, wondering, from a strangely detached perspective, if this was how and where it would end for him.
The men stopped several feet away.
One of them came forward and Jack felt hands running up and down his sides and then his legs.
“Clean.”
“Check the other guy. You, sit up.”
Jack sat up.
“Where’s Benny?”
One of the guards produced the blindfolded rail of a man. He was naked and beaten to within an inch of his life, bruises covering his body and face, his hands cuffed, a chain linking his ankles above his bare feet.
The tall man pointed a large revolver at Jack’s face and asked him his name.
“Jack.”
“Is there a bomb in your van?”
“No.”
The one who’d frisked Jack peered over the front passenger door, said, “This one’s completely checked out.”
The tall man stared at Jack. “Jack, I want to introduce you to Benny.” Benny’s handler gave a hard tug on the leash, dragging him within a foot of Jack. “So here’s the deal. If Benny likes you, I’m going to blow your brains out all over this road. If he doesn’t, we’ll talk.” He looked at Benny and said, as if speaking to a dog, “Ready to do some work, Benny?”
Benny nodded, salivating.
“I’m going to take your blindfold off now and show you our new friend.”
Benny urinated on the pavement.
“If you’re a good boy, I’ll give you some water and a treat. Are you a good boy?”
Benny made a sound that wasn’t human, and then the tall man nodded to his handler, who pulled off the blindfold.
The wild man crouched in front of Jack. Eyes ringed with black and yellow bruises but still a deep clarity and intensity in them. He was inches from Jack’s face. Smelled like he’d been bedding down in his own shit, and he seemed to be staring at something on the back of Jack’s skull.
Jack looked up at the man holding the revolver. “What the fuck is—”
Never saw the thing move, but Benny was suddenly on top of him, trying to tear Jack’s throat out with his teeth. It took three men to drag him away and several jolts from a cattle prod before he finally collapsed in the road and curled up moaning in the fetal position.
Jack scrambled back toward the van, trying to catch his breath, the man with the revolver moving toward him, saying, “It’s all right. This is good news. If Benny had crawled into your lap and started cooing, you wouldn’t be with us anymore.”
“What is that thing?”
“Our pet. Our affected pet. He checks out everyone who tries to come into the city. I’m Brian, by the way.” He offered a hand, helped Jack onto his feet.
“Is the city safe?” Jack asked.
“Yeah. We figure there’s ten, fifteen thousand people still here. Many have left, gone north for the border. But that’s a rough trip. We’ve got all the roads into town protected.”
“No affected in the city?”
“Nope.”
“How’s that possible?”
“It was cloudy the night of the event over this part of Montana.”
“You haven’t been attacked?”
“Not by any force that stood a chance. We’ve got five thousand armed men ready to fuck shit up on a moment’s notice.”
Jack looked around, the RPMs of his heart falling back toward baseline.
“Has a woman with two children passed through in the last five days?”
“I don’t think so. You have a picture?”
“No.”
“Your wife and kids?”
Jack nodded.
“We haven’t had much traffic. You’re the first person to even come up this road in three days. Are they coming here to meet you?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know where they are. We were separated in Wyoming.” He looked at the rest of the crew. “Any of you seen them? Fourteen-year-old girl, seven-year-old boy.”
Nothing but headshakes.
“My boy is affected,” Jack said. “He isn’t symptomatic or violent, but he saw the lights. Would you let him in?”
“How is it possible he isn’t like the others?”
“I don’t know, but he isn’t. His name is Cole.”
“We’ll keep an eye out for them,” Brian said, “and if he isn’t hostile, we’ll let your family through.”
“You swear to me?”
“We don’t kill kids.” Brian pointed toward the windshield at Donald. “Friend of yours?”
“I picked him up this morning outside of White Sulphur Springs, just walking down the middle of the road. He needs medical attention.”
“Well, there’s shelters set up at some of the schools. You might find a doctor at one of those.”
“There’s an air force base here, right?”
“Yeah, but it’s been on lockdown since everything went to hell. I guess it’s understandable—they’ve got the silos holding the Minuteman missiles.”
Jack had passed through the outskirts of Great Falls a handful of times in the last ten years, during those long driving trips to see his father, when his old man had still lived up in Cut Bank. But he hadn’t been in the city proper since he and Dee had left to start a life in Albuquerque, sixteen years ago. Thought this might be the most peculiar circumstance under which to experience the emotion of nostalgia.
Driving the quiet streets, he found it haunting to see the darkness fall upon a city that had no light to raise in its defense.
In the blue dusk, he passed an ice-cream shop he and Dee had frequented on Friday nights, all those years ago. But everything else, at least what little he could see of it, had changed. He drove to a hospital and cruised past the emergency room entrance—dark and vacated. Went on.
There was no one out. The streets empty. The geography of the town might have been an asset, might have stoked his memory had there been streetlights to guide him. But it was as dark as the countryside in these city limits. He drove for thirty minutes, dipping into the reserve tank, rambling in search of anything that resembled a shelter.
The engine had already sputtered once when he saw the soft smears of light in the distance. The form of a building took shape, and he recognized it—a high school. People were milling around the steps that climbed to the main brick building, the cherry glow of their cigarettes barely visible in the dark.
Jack pulled to the curb and turned off the minivan.
He was thirsty again.
“Donald,” he said. “We’re at a shelter. They might have hot food. Clean water. Cots. I’ll find a doctor to look at you. We’re in a safe city now. You’ll be taken care of.”
Donald leaned against the door.
“Don? You awake?” Jack reached over, touched the man’s hand.
Cool and limp.
His neck gave no pulse.
Jack climbed the steps to the school. Inside, candlelight flickered off the lockers. It smelled of body odor and rancid clothing. Cots stretched down the length of the hallway. He heard hushed conversations and snoring. Somewhere, a baby cried.
He walked a long corridor, cots on either side and open suitcases—barely enough room for him to make his way without trampling someone’s filthy laundry.
Five minutes of negotiating the crowded hallways brought him to the entrance of a gymnasium, where a woman sat at a folding table, reading by candlelight. She looked up at Jack with the no-bullshit demeanor of a mathematics teacher or principal.
“You’re new,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“Do you live in Great Falls?”
“Albuquerque. I’m looking for my family. My wife is Dee. She’s short, auburn hair, beautiful. Forty years old. My son is Cole, and he’s…” As he said Cole’s name, he thought about Benny and the roadblock at the edge of town.
“Sir?”
“He’s seven. My daughter is Naomi and she’s fourteen. Looks a lot like her mother.”
“And you think they might be here?”
“I don’t know, we were separated. But they might have come to Great Falls.”
“Doesn’t ring a bell, but we’ve got over two thousand people here. Look, I wish I could offer you a cot, but we’re maxed out and I don’t know when more food is coming. The air force base had been trucking in MRE rations, but we haven’t seen them in five days.” She sounded tired and emotionless.
Jack glanced into the gymnasium—a sprawl of sleeping bodies.
“There a morgue around?” he asked. “I’ve got a dead man in my car. Guy I picked up this morning who didn’t make it.”
She shook her head. “I don’t know what to tell you. We’re in a bit of chaos here.”
“If you see my family, tell them Jack was here looking for them.”
He drove to a nearby park that took up a single city block. Unbuckled Donald’s seatbelt, pulled him out of the front passenger seat, and dragged him away from the car. He made it as far as a boulder that was surrounded by flower boxes whose contents had wilted, laid Donald down in the grass, and folded the man’s hands across his chest.
Sat with him for a long time in the dark. It didn’t feel right just leaving Donald here alone. Thinking there was something more to be done, though he had no idea what.
After a while, he said, “This is the best I can do, Don. I’m sorry. I’m sorry about everything.”
And he got up and walked back to the van.
Drove fifteen blocks toward the river, the engine sputtering, cylinders misfiring. He’d wanted to make it to the water, but that wasn’t going to happen.
The feeble moonlight was shining off the columns of the civic center several blocks ahead. When he saw them, he realized where he was and brought the minivan to a stop in the middle of the street. Sat staring in disbelief toward the square, little to see in the powerless dark but the five-story block of the Davidson Building. Wondered how it had not occurred to him until this moment to come here.
Jack put the van back into gear and cranked the steering wheel. Drove over the lip of the sidewalk into the middle of the square between two rows of potted evergreen trees.
He turned off the van. Sat in the dark and the quiet, listening to the engine cool. He was in a dark plaza, buildings on either side of him, joined by a skywalk. There was a fountain nearby, dormant.
So much as he remembered it, even after all this time.
He opened his door and stepped down onto the concrete. It was cold. There were clouds scudding through the light of the moon. Silence like this was one thing in the wilderness, a completely different matter in the city. No cars out, no people, not even the hum of streetlamps or powerlines. Too dark. Too quiet. Everything wrong.
It hit him. Pure exhaustion. The emotional expenditure of another day in hell. He felt the call of sleep, and the promise of a few hours of unconsciousness, of checking out of all of this, had never sounded better.
The minivan still smelled like death.
He cracked all the windows and laid the front seat back as far as it would go.