Degeneration (63 page)

The small building that the elevator led out of was topped with a few decorative weather monitoring devices and satellite dishes. The aged tin sign on the building read ‘US Army M
eteorology
Monitoring Station Number 5’.

“
Sanitization commencing,”
the female voice said from inside the open elevator.

The ground shook violently and knocked Andy down onto his hands and knees. The elevator car broke in half and tumbled down the elevator shaft and a pillar of flames shot up immediately afterwards. The small building collapsed in on itself and crumbled down into the earth.

The resulting hole was almost perfectly symmetrical.

             
After the ground stopped shaking, Andy got up, dusted himself off, and staggered over towards the hole to look down inside.

             
Something under his feet rumbled to life.

             
Two heavy blast shutters rolled out from the earth near the top of the hole and sealed it shut forever.

             
As soon as the shutters sealed shut, the rumbling stopped. The solar cells powered down and the facility was dead forever.

Andy limped away from the sealed hole and pushed open the chain-link gate.

The rusted gate fell off of its hinges and landed on the desert floor. It had a tattered sign on it that read ‘US Govt. Property – No Trespassing’.

He started to stagger forward into the desert, unsure of where to go, unsure of where he had been.

As he walked under the daunting desert sun, his thoughts inevitably turned to Richard.

43

H
e walked for what seemed like ages but strangely he was not tired. His exposed skin was red and blistering, but he felt neither pain nor thirst.

All he felt was hunger.

Ahead, after countless miles of walking, he saw an interstate cutting across the desert.

He staggered up towards the two-lane highway and stared out at the endless stretch of cars that clogged up the eastbound-lane. The westbound-lane was clear.

Walking slowly, he made his way to a four door sedan that had its roof loaded with luggage. The car’s windows were rolled down. The badly decomposed driver and passenger sat slumped in their seats. Both of their bodies were festering with maggots and the car’s cabin was ripe with the stench of death.

He backed away from the car.

Looking down the road, he saw that most of the cars had their doors open and windshields smashed. The cars were with dirt and grime. Mummified corpses were strewn on the pavement, wasting away.

Something slapped against the rear passenger window of the sedan near him, startling him.

He peered through the streaked glass and saw the sunken face of a young girl no older than six or seven.

The girl stared at him disinterestedly, opening and closing her rotting jaw as she continued to weakly bat against the glass. She made a pitiful moan, staring at him with dead, sunken eyes.

He looked down the road and saw a few of the other mummified corpses were moving, but none of them had the strength to stand; not any longer.

He looked down the highway towards the setting sun, the direction all of the traffic was traveling away from. He saw countless smoke plumes in that direction rising up from a fractured metropolitan skyline.

He saw something in his peripheral vision.

He turned and startled at the sight of a gangly infected man standing next to him.

Slowly, he realized that his eyes were playing tricks on him; it was just his reflection caught in a tinted car window.

Moving as fast as molasses, he moaned and turned back towards the horizon. He focused on a green highway sign far in the distance, towards the direction of the rising smoke plumes and the direction where the traffic was headed from.

The highway sign read:

‘Chandler – 7 MI’

‘Phoenix – 10 MI’

             
A white sign had been sloppily mounted below the green one. It swayed with the hot desert breeze. It read:

‘FEMA Safe Haven – 18 MI’

He stared at the fractured skyline in the distance and the endless line of desolate vehicles.

Something was very wrong.

He had to get to the east coast.

He had to save his brother.

He ignored the hunger that consumed him and focused all of his attention saving the only person in the world who mattered to him.

Richard turned east and lurched along the interstate towards North Carolina with the sun on his back.