CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

THE AFTERMATH

 

 

HE CAME TO three days later.

Or it may have been four.

He’d got third degree burns over a fair amount of his body, probably more than a man should have and still be walking, or even breathing. His skin was cracked and leaking something that looked like pus. He was blind in his right eye, which was a shapeless blob of jelly oozing from the socket, and there was a constant ringing in his ears that, in the end, took a full three weeks to go away. He’d lost two fingers on his left hand. His eyebrows, and most of his beard and hair, had been singed clean off.

He was halfway down Nineteenth Avenue, and everything on all sides was a blackened ruin. He had no idea how he’d gotten there or what he was doing there.

He stood, swaying, blinking with his one good eye, and ran a dry, sandpaper tongue over cracked lips.

After a couple of minutes, he remembered what his name was.

Cade.

Then the blackness rushed up to claim him all over again.

 

 

HE WASN’T SURE how much time passed, but when he opened his eyes he could have sworn the Duchess was standing over him, soaking a cool sponge loaded with ice water over his skin, and he was seeing her with two eyes.

Then he blinked, and realised that everything was flat and a little blurred and his skin was in agony. The pain came in waves, washing over him like chips of broken glass rubbing into his flesh. Hadn’t there been a fella with a laugh like broken glass at one time? A laugh like broken glass and a walk like a snake. Cade maybe killed him, or somebody else did. Probably Cade.

Cade winced. His head was like crazy paving, one thought running into another. It came to him that he was in a coffee shop somewhere, which made sense. He seemed to pass a lot of time in coffee shops. He realised he was laying on his side, on a leather bench that was sticking to his suppurating, pus-coated skin. That didn’t make as much sense, on account of every time he moved, the leather tugged at him. Moving hurt so much that he figured he should just pass out again. Pass out and maybe not wake up this time.

He tried for a while, but he couldn’t.

Hell with it.

Somehow, Cade got himself onto his feet and wandered into a back room. He didn’t see any corpses around, and that meant something, but he wasn’t sure exactly what right at the moment.

On a table in the back room, there were bandages and antiseptic, and some kind of shiny hinged blades that Cade couldn’t remember the name of. Handle-blades. Finger-blades. Dammit. Skin-blades. Skin-saws. Scythe-saws. Something close.

Scissors. That was it.

He looked at them for almost a minute.

Then he blacked out again.

The first couple of weeks were like that.

 

 

IT WAS KIND of a wonder that Cade didn’t lie down and die at any point during this, but Cade wasn’t the lying down and dying type, even in as much pain as he was in. Gradually, agonisingly, his body started to put itself back together, and his mind followed suit.

Somehow, he managed to keep his burns from killing him and do what he needed to do to bandage and treat them. To begin with, he did this using the contents of medicine cabinets and whatever drugs he could scrounge from other places, but after a while he was spending whatever time he could stand on his feet scavenging around Haight Street and the surrounding blocks, looking for any storehouses of medical supplies Clearly might have had. The Park was a ruin, of course, and big sections of Stanyan Street, Oak Street, Fell Street... it was a big blast, and it’d damaged a hell of a lot of the area. Cade still wasn’t sure how he’d survived it.

Hand of a generous God, he figured.

He knew there were a couple of the love children left – he hadn’t got all of them with the Pastor’s bomb – but whenever he saw them they were wandering the streets like broken dolls whose clockwork had yet to come to a halt. It took him a day or two to realise that anyone who knew where Clearly’s compound was stockpiled had taken their knowledge into the grave with them.

After a while, he didn’t see the love children anymore. They just wandered away, whether to start again somewhere new or just to die away from the memories of their strange, good/evil community, Cade didn’t know.

He didn’t much care, either.

The last love child he saw on the streets was Thelma. He came across her suddenly – just a matter of turning the corner and seeing her at the other end of the street. She was looking broken – she’d lost an eye too, and it looked like she had a broken arm – but instead of running, or cursing him, like the other flower children did, she’d smiled, and raised something up in her hand.

The burnt remains of a blond wig.

“I told you!” she yelled at him, laughing. “Disguises! I told you!”

Then she ran around the corner, laughing giddily, as if the world had just begun to make sense.

He never saw any of the love children again.

 

 

IT WAS ANOTHER week before he found Clearly’s medical stores, in a warehouse just outside the blast radius on Frederick street, complete with an eighteen-wheeler sitting outside. The Doc had been right – there was enough insulin there for hundreds of people, maybe thousands.

Enough to keep the Duchess going until she died of old age, Cade figured, and he’d still have enough space left in the trailer for some other bits and pieces that’d come in handy.

Of course, he couldn’t load it as quickly as he’d have liked to, not in his condition. Time was, it’d have taken him less than a day to fill the damn thing top to bottom, but now it was a full week of agonising labour as every inch of his body screamed at him, every damn box of insulin like hefting blazing lava against his burned flesh. Loading that damned eighteen-wheeler up was like a punishment from the depths of Hell, and Cade was still messed up enough in his mind to wonder if he hadn’t ended up there, if the Pastor hadn’t been right. If he hadn’t damned himself by standing against the snake-legged little bastard. Cade had never in his whole damned life been in so much pain.

Cade being Cade, he loaded the damned thing anyway.

And then he spent a couple of days sleeping, drinking any whisky he could find and getting ready to find the gasoline.

Another week, or near as. Five and a half days of trudging from gas station to gas station, all over San Francisco, trying to find ones that hadn’t burned to the ground, ones that still had gas in pumps or in cans, and the right kind of gas for an eighteen-wheeler at that. And on those rare occasions he found it, Cade had to drag it back to Frederick Street in the hot sun, with every muscle screaming at him.

Hell with it. Cade figured he could rest when he got back to Muir Beach.

In the end, he got most of the gas he needed from the Pastor’s people, or what was left of them. It was just women and children now, as well as a couple of shaky-looking fellas, the people who’d cracked during the battle with the cannibals. When Cade limped back into the supermarket parking lot, he was greeted like some kind of returning royalty, and they pretty much let him take what he wanted. Things were changing a little – they had clean mattresses now, and he saw one kid with a colouring book, and another with a GI Joe figure. A woman named Emily was the head of the community, and she was talking a lot about planting seeds and raising some kind of crop. And about Jesus, too. Cade figured it was better than nothing at all.

 

 

AFTER HE’D FUELED up the rig, and checked the engine over, and loaded the trailer, and gotten a couple days rest to make sure he wasn’t going to pass out on the way back to Muir Beach, Cade figured it was about time to go. He’d seen enough of San Francisco, and he had a strong feeling San Francisco had seen enough of him, given that he’d killed about ninety-eight per cent of it with his own two hands.

He threw the eighteen-wheeler into gear, coaxing the engine into life and feeling the vibration of it rush through the leather seats of the cab and into his body. It was painful, sure – pretty much anything was going to be painful for at least the next year – but it felt pretty damned good, all the same. Gave Cade the feeling of a job well done. The roar of that engine was as good a note as any to end on, at least the way Cade figured it.

Still, there was an itch in him – something that went deeper than the crawling feeling of his burned skin as the hot leather hummed underneath him.

It wasn’t like he’d had fun, exactly. He’d been carved up, staked out, damn near fed to a bear, blown up, drugged and had his shoulder cried on a couple times, which he wasn’t used to.

But.

Cade thought about the routine of life in Muir Beach. Whittling down wood. Screwing the Duchess every day. Playing solitaire. A beer with Woody once a week.

It could be a lot worse, Cade figured. That wasn’t a bad routine at all for a man to have.

Cade sighed.

No killing, though.

He’d have to get used to that.

 

 

HALFWAY ACROSS THE Golden Gate Bridge, Cade realised he owed Woody a new pickup truck and he was going to have to go get one from somewhere.

He figured San Diego.

 

 

THE END