I try to imagine staying back at the cabin, to see if my conscience would have kept quiet. The answer is always no. I want to tell Jamie that I’m sorry for leaving. But he doesn’t complain and I’m thankful he’s here. When I ask him to stop, he agrees without making me feel bad. When I ask if he’s okay, he nods and smiles and asks if I am.
But I’m still lying to him every day. That part kinda sucks. It doesn’t help that we don’t see any of the graffiti I saw before. Nothing saying “DCA 6/10 HELP COMING!”, which makes me nervous. Maybe it was all disinformation.
But no, I don’t want to believe that. There can still be a reason forJamie to go to Reagan National while I go to Alexandria. We’ll find other survivors on the road and he can continue with them and I’ll find a way to get to Alexandria. I’ll be able to do it on my own if I know someone else is there to protect Jamie.
On the fifth day I leave the crutch where we camped. Jamie says I’m probably fine as long as I take it easy. So no sprinting.
On the sixth day, it isn’t as hot, but as noon approaches, the clouds filling the sky behind us begin to look ominous. The pain returns to my leg as well. It’s a fun new superpower that comes with an improperly healed leg—I can tell when rain is coming.
We’ve been walking along the highway. There are large stretches of empty road and a smattering of abandoned cars here and there. Some of the cars are filled with bodies, but we don’t need to stop and look. We do check a few of the empty cars but they’re either locked, don’t have keys, or don’t start when we try the ignition. Not that it would matter if they did, because it seems like we’d just be stopping as soon as we reached another roadblock of cars in a half mile or so.
“We should probably get off the road and find shelter soon,” Jamie says, glancing at the clouds. “The last thing we need is to get struck by lightning.”
“Aw, man. Now that the lottery’s defunct that’s the only gamble we really had left.”
“At least wait until we’ve been traveling for a month before you do it.”
We walk another mile and a half before we take an exit into a small town called Mailey. We pass a large wooden sign on the ground; the beams that held it were chopped away with what looks like an ax or a hatchet. The sign has similar marks across its typeface, large gougesof wood taken out. It’s painted white with dark green lettering that reads “Welcome to Mailey, PA! Our home is your home! Pop. 1,113.” The paint is peeling and cracking.
“Well, that looks fucking ominous,” I say, my hand dropping to the gun that Jamie gave me, just to make sure it’s still there.
“Yeah.” Jamie unslings the rifle from his shoulder, checks to make sure it’s loaded, and looks around us. “Let’s take it slow.”
Thunder rumbles to the north and west of us as the storm rolls in. The wind’s picked up. I’m on edge. One look at Jamie and I can see he is as well. The wind gusts in our ears, making it harder to hear if someone’s coming up on us. As we move into the center of town, I dart my eyes around constantly.
It doesn’t look like the other cities and towns I’ve seen. The streets are empty save for old leaves that blow in the wind. The pavement has cracked and split from the winter snow and now green weeds poke up, swaying back and forth.
No windows are broken; nothing has been set on fire. The stores don’t even look as if they’ve been looted. In fact, they look more like they’ve been neatly packed up. As if the town was dead even before the bug wiped everyone out.
It’s growing darker as the black clouds creep toward the sun like tendrils of smoke across the sky. A wind gust creates a miniature dust devil that dances across the road and dissipates as it hits the waving grass on the other side.
We turn a corner, and the street sign above it reads, “Viking Lane.” My eyes are so focused on the sky that when Jamie puts his hand out to stop me, I jump and grab on to his arm, pulling it to my chest. He’s looking down at the ground. I follow his gaze and let out acry, but a rumble of thunder drowns it out.
Right at my feet is a decayed and decapitated body of a man. He’s tall, even without his head, and his leatherlike skin is tight against his bones. His frayed clothes hang loosely from his body. Seeing a dead body is nothing to me, but I’m still shocked.
“Where’s his head?” I ask. His neck is a ragged tatter of broken bone and shredded flesh. The ground around his neck is dark and oily with the remains of washed and sunbaked blood. There are dried brown bloodstains on his shirt and pants and deep cuts in his arms and hands. “He was still alive.”
I point to the cuts on his hands and arms—defensive wounds. At least, that’s what the police procedurals on TV called them.
Law & Order: Avian Flu.Now isn’t the time to make a joke. Why does all my best material pop up at serious moments? My therapist would call it a coping mechanism.
It feels like someone’s watching us. Jamie must feel the same way, because when I look over at him his eyes are darting around Viking Lane as well.
Lightning turns the sky purple and a loud crack of thunder follows shortly after. Thick drops of rain begin to plop to the ground around us and the smell of petrichor is all at once a terrifying one.
Jamie nods to the right of us. “Let’s try over there.”
I follow his gaze to a storefront that looks like it used to be an ice cream shop—what’s that old saying? You can take the boy out of the ice cream shop, but you can’t take the cliché out of the other boy who’s with him. Now the windows are dusty and the inside loooks vacant. I step around the body and move toward it, looking around for theeyes I swear are following us. It could be my imagination; Ihopeit’s my imagination.
I pull on the glass door of the shop and it swings out. The wind blows dust around until we shut the door behind us.
“Watch the front,” Jamie says. “I’m gonna check the back. And take out your gun.”
The handgun Jamie insisted I be in charge of. I take it out and watch as the storm rolls in. The rain begins to pound against the glass storefront. Lightning illuminates Viking Lane in a bright purple flash and I see a face in the storefront across the street. I cry out but thunder cracks again.
The man is standing back from the window, but his shape is burned into my eyes. I know exactly where he’s standing. I hold my breath, waiting, shaking in the darkness. The lightning flashes again and I get a brief look at him once more before I flinch and lose sight of him. He’s standing there, naked, staring at me from across the street. There’s an ax in his hand.
“All right, looks like the back door can only be opened from the inside.” Jamie’s voice makes me jump and I drop the gun. I flinch, expecting it to go off. Instead it just clatters across the floor. Jamie stops it with his foot, widening his eyes at me like I’m a total dork. Which, all right, I’ll give him.
