Chapter 4

 

The shit show Riker had alluded to was a massive vehicular pileup. It was maybe a quarter mile out and coming up blindingly fast.

The southbound lanes dead ahead of the speeding Shelby were clogged with a myriad of vehicles. The first two-thirds of the run of cars were soot covered and sitting on melted tires. A few vehicles at the rear of the column had plowed into the burning cars but somehow had been left untouched by the flames. In the northbound lanes, separated from the conflagration by a short median that quickly transitioned to a long run of Jersey barriers, was a cluster of first responders’ vehicles. Beyond a boxy ambulance and what looked to be a Santa Fe County fire engine sat a medium-sized helicopter. It was painted black and green, the writing emblazoned in white on its flank an illegible jumble.

The entire stretch of four-lane highway was hemmed in on both sides by thirty-foot-tall dirt embankments that seemed to go on forever. They were steeply graded, dotted with vegetation, and completely blocked Riker’s view of everything east and west.

The fires that had engulfed the vehicles in Riker’s lane had long since gone out. There was no smoke. No heat shimmers. No lights strobed on the emergency vehicles. Nothing moved in or around the static vehicles. It was as if a set for a disaster movie had been assembled on the road and then all the actors and crew had gone to lunch.

Mere seconds removed from the encounter with the falling dead, the Shelby was still clipping along at close to eighty miles per hour. When Riker first became aware of the scene filling up the windshield and had made his shit show proclamation, his right foot was already going for the brake pedal.

When the big Brembo brakes caught, Dolly fishtailed and her front end dipped substantially. As the brake’s antilock feature kicked in, the rear end snapped back around and the speedometer needle crashed precipitously toward zero.

Seatbelt still unbuckled, Steve-O was thrown into the back of Benny’s seat.

One hand going for the grab handle, the other clamped white-knuckle tight around his shoulder belt, Benny let out a surprised yelp.

And just like that, Riker’s seemingly never-ending headache was back with a vengeance.

Flaring from the back to back stresses of the zombie shower and having run up unexpectedly on the multi-vehicle accident, the twin daggers of pain stabbing his retinas, as per usual, had come at a most inopportune time.

As a result of the IED explosion that stole Riker’s lower left leg and left his body permanently scarred by shrapnel and third-degree burns, he suffered from CTE—chronic traumatic encephalopathy. It was a brain injury that, in addition to the headaches, sometimes affected his mood.

Fighting a rising wave of nausea, Riker wrestled the pickup onto the right-side shoulder and stopped them close enough to the tangle to see what they were up against, while still leaving room to beat a quick retreat should the need arise.

Relaxing his grip on the grab handle, Benny said, “What the hell happened here?”

For fear the act of speaking would hasten the flow of bile from his stomach to the great outdoors, Riker dragged out his pill bottle and dry-swallowed a couple of ibuprofen.

“That bad?”

“Yes … and then some,” Riker gasped.

“Looks like someone was texting and driving,” Steve-O theorized.

“If they were, they paid the ultimate price,” Benny said.

Just off the Shelby’s left-front fender, blocking both southbound lanes, were the blackened husks of the vehicles they had spotted from a distance. Viewed up close, the human toll was literally staring them all in the face. Lips drawn back in perpetual grins, charred corpses sat gripping the steering wheels in most of the cars. Bringing up the rear was a pair of vehicles that were just as mangled as the rest but had somehow escaped the flames. Thankfully they were both unoccupied. To their immediate left was a low median that quickly gave way to the long row of Jersey barriers stretching off to the south.

A hundred feet beyond the front of the pileup sat the modern-looking helicopter. It was in the southbound fast lane, cockpit facing the first of the burned-out autos, and angled forty-five degrees in relation to the Jersey barriers. Save for having skids instead of wheels, the aircraft was quite similar to the one Riker had chartered to ferry him, Tara, and Steve-O from the winery in Pennsylvania to the golf course in New Jersey. The words Rapid Life Flight – St. Vincent Hospital dominated the side of the fuselage facing Riker.

Parked the wrong way on the northbound passing lane, its right-side wheels aligned with the low median, was a Santa Fe County ambulance. Its rear doors had been left wide open. If there was anyone strapped to the wheeled stretcher in back, either living or dead, the gloom was concealing it from prying eyes.

Backed up close to the ambulance was a triple-axel turntable ladder-truck. It bore the Santa Fe Fire Department insignia and had been left parked diagonally across the northbound fast lane. Hoses unspooled from the rear of the firetruck rose up and over the cement barriers and curled around behind the rear of the pileup, where the brass nozzle had been abandoned mere feet away from the vehicles untouched by fire.

A third emergency vehicle, a red Chevy Tahoe, was part of the pileup. It had come to rest at the culmination of a fifty-yard-long run of dark skid marks that stretched diagonally across both southbound lanes.

Benny said, “Looks like he braked a little too late.”

Eyes tracing their own faint skid marks in his rearview mirror, Riker said, “Could have just as easily been us.”

On the SUV’s roof was a trio of needle antennas and a low-profile light bar. Barely visible on its rippled passenger-side door was a gold-leaf shield. Written across the shield: Santa Fe Fire Department. Below that, also hand-lettered in black, were the words: Chief Ronald Hickok.

A compact car was jammed up underneath the Tahoe’s rear end. No way to tell what make or model, nor if the driver had survived. Riker thought it highly unlikely, seeing as how the rear portion of the tiny white sedan’s roof had been cut open and peeled back.

It was a wonder the sedan hadn’t ruptured the Tahoe’s gas tank.

Steve-O said, “Looks like a crushed sardine tin.”

Drawing a deep breath, Benny said, “Chief Hickok’s ride would have benefited from some brakes like Dolly’s.”

“I don’t think Chief was a responding unit,” replied Riker. “Looks to me like he got caught up in the wreck as it happened. No time to do anything but stand on the brakes.”

Benny said, “You think he survived?”

Riker shook his head. “Doubtful. If he survived the wreck and extraction, that helicopter wouldn’t be here.”

He transitioned his foot from brake to the accelerator and slow-rolled the pickup forward a few feet. From the new angle, he saw that the Tahoe’s once-rounded nose was buried deep into the rear of a Volvo station wagon. With the bumper and grille pushed in a couple of feet, he guessed Chief Hickok’s lower extremities had made the acquaintance of the Chevy’s big V8.

The impact had been so severe that the Volvo’s many windows were now a sea of glass scattered across the blackened asphalt, the pea-sized pebbles glittering like so many diamonds. Next to the Volvo, reduced to a blackened windowless hulk, was a minivan. Several human forms were frozen in place, burned to death where they sat.

On the ground near the Tahoe’s elevated rear tire was an empty backboard. Near one end, sporting a white cross, its top hinged open, was a tool-box-sized medical kit. It was filled with supplies. Some of them—bandages, rubber gloves, rolls of gauze—had spilled out onto the ground.

Impossible to miss, even from a dozen yards away, was the massive pool of blood. It was several feet across and had dried to a shiny black. The backboard was also soiled with like-colored splotches of dried blood. Gauze bandages and paper wrappers were fused to the pool and flapping in the wind like little flags of surrender.

No doubt some kind of life and death battle had occurred here. And the longer Riker stared at the pileup, the clearer it became to him that the Grim Reaper had come out the winner.

Riker brought the pickup to a stop alongside the minivan.

Suddenly sitting forward on the edge of his seat, belt pulled tight across his shoulder, Benny said, “Why are we stopping, Lee?”

Riker didn’t address the question. He was craning around, looking up and down the highway, a concerned look on his face. “See anything moving, Steve-O?”

Steve-O pulsed his window down. Pointing to a four-door sedan up near the front, he said, “So far just the Sicko in the car up there.” He looked over his shoulder, out the back window. “Then there’s the ones back there … the jumpers.”

The truck’s cab was filling up with the sooty chemical smell of burned rubber and plastic coming off the vehicles. A single gust brought with it the stench of carrion coming off the zombies upwind from them.

“We’ve got a little time before they get here,” Riker said. “I’d guess the overpass is a quarter mile back. Should give us five minutes or so.”

Steve-O said, “Not if one of them is a Bolt.”

Fingers still locked around the grab handle, Benny asked, “What are you planning, Lee?”

Riker looked at Benny, then swung his gaze to the rearview mirror. Finally, he said, “I didn’t stock up on much in the way of medical supplies.”

“You mean to tell me that after your huge online end-of-the-world shopping spree, you failed to include basic prepper stuff? Hell, I watched that Discovery show—”

Interrupting, Steve-O said, “Doomsday Preppers?”

“Yeah, that one,” Benny said. “Even those wingnuts thought to stockpile bandages to go with their beans and bullets.”

Riker nodded. “There was some stuff in the bugout bags I bought. Not enough, though. What with Rose changing that dressing of yours twice a day, we’re almost out.”

Running his window up, Steve-O said, “Tara thinks Lee was too busy buying toys. Says he is no good at thinking about the”—he made air quotes—“big picture stuff.”

Eyeing Steve-O in the mirror, Riker said, “The very same toys you seem to find plenty of time to play with. And as far as Tara’s assessment of me: She’s dead wrong. I just put a bit more emphasis on the things I figured everyone else would be making a Black Friday run on. Besides,” he went on, “nobody could have known Crystal was going to bring that asshole Raul to Trinity House.”

“Murdering asshole,” Steve-O reminded.

Smiling smugly, Riker said, “And that, Steve-O my man, is another buck for the swear jar.”

Steve-O harrumphed. Then he said, “Newsflash, Lee Riker. Money is no good. The Sickos saw to that. Sooo … I’m done playing that game.”

While the odd couple was exchanging barbs, Benny had taken his semiautomatic Glock from the holster on his hip. He’d already press checked to ensure a round was chambered and was aiming the muzzle at the floor, trigger finger pressed to the slide, just as Riker had insisted he do.

“Daylight and gas,” Benny reminded. “We’re burning both.”