Devil’s Wake (28 page)

“So we have options,” Terry said. “Threadville first. If we don’t like it…”

“We’ll see what’s next,” Piranha said.

“One day at a time,” Ursalina agreed.

“I vote for Vegas,” Darius said.

“Vegas!” Meeks said, and laughed deep from his belly. A couple of the other men outside laughed too. Kendra didn’t want to hear horror stories about Sin City.

Meeks swallowed his chuckles. “But seriously, one more thing: You get past the first roadblock, take the Ninety-six all the way to
McKinleyville. Call it thirty miles. You’ll run into another roadblock around Blue Lake. Tell ’em Reverend Meeks said ‘Blue Thunder,’ trade ’em some of that corned beef, and you’ll get through fine. They trade on the coast, and they cut a fair deal. They’re not taking in outsiders, but they’ve got patrolled camping grounds, and you might draw an easy breath for the night.”

“Yes!” Sonia said, and the Twins whooped and high-fived.

Terry didn’t seem as excited, and Kendra wondered if they were sharing thoughts again: Could they make it that far?

“Just remember: be polite,” Meeks said. “The Golden Rule is the only rule left these days, and a bad attitude can get you shot. They’re decent folks, but times are hard.”

Kendra wrote it down, every word.

Reverend Meeks paused. “They’ll give you twenty-four hours to move on, or you might end up on a work gang, understood? You don’t want to be trimming brush back from the fences, burning free-fire zones, none of that. There are still freaks around. We lost a town just last week, thought it was clear. Trinidad.” His voice cracked slightly.

“North or south of here?” Terry said.

“Ten miles northeast. Pirates hit ’em first. Freaks did the rest.”

They all sat in a moment of silence for Trinidad.

Meeks’s smile was tinged with regret and sadness. “Wish we could keep you kids. I surely do. You hold on to each other, you hear? You may not be the family you were born to, but you’re all the family you’ve got now.”

They all nodded, murmuring. Kendra whispered, “Amen.”

Ursalina leaned over Kendra’s seat to whistle toward the woman who stood guard near the front of the bus, her rifle readied. The woman was in her thirties, tired and a little dirty, her hair windswept, her face red from the sun despite the cold.

“McKinleyville’s okay?” Ursalina called through her window. “Woman to woman?”

Kendra felt herself leaning closer too, her ears primed for guidance. A good town for the guys might not be a good town for all of them. Once anyone had guns on you, they could take more than MREs.

“Reverend Meeks’s word is gold,” the woman said. “McKinleyville’s okay if you are. But rapists get shot you-know-where.”

Sounded like Kendra’s kind of town. Ursalina smiled. The boys chuckled with rounds of
Damnnnnn,
making sixth-grade jokes about family jewels and singing soprano.

The woman laughed as if their playfulness had made her week. It couldn’t be fun to stand in the road and listen to people’s tragedies.

Meeks stood to climb out of the bus, moving as if his joints hurt.

“Reverend?” Kendra said. “Will you pray for us?”

“Already am, sweetheart,” he said hoarsely. “Have been since you drove up. The good Lord hasn’t been happy with us lately, just like the Flood. But never stop praying. Maybe one day he’ll be ready to open back up for business.”

L
a
playa.

When Ursalina Cortez’s mother talked about what she missed most about living in Puerto Rico, she whispered the words with reverence:
La playa.

The beach. She’d said it like the sand and surf were alive—sister, mother, friend. As if the Atlantic might have kept her safe from heartache. And hell, maybe she was right. If her parents had been on the island instead of in Miami when the infection hit…

“For you,
Mamí,
” Ursalina whispered. Long before the beach was in sight, the scent of saltwater, brine, and sea breezes filled the bus. There had been one phone call—only one—and then she’d lost her parents to a void of questions. She hoped they were safe, or dead. It might be better if her parents were dead.

All of them noticed the smell, sitting up straighter, craning to see through the darkness as the bus drove alongside the ocean.

No gunfire rang. No screams in the night. Nothing to be on alert for. Ursalina lay her gun on the seat beside her and stretched her fingers, which were half numb from holding it so tightly. Her body sagged, resting.

Grief came in a stomach cramp so sharp Ursalina nearly cried out. One of the last promises she had made to Mickey and Sharlene was that she would take them to the beach. She had hidden the memory from herself, but the ocean brought it back.

Ursalina realized she was crying, but she didn’t try to cover her face.

In darkness, no one can see your tears.

The ocean rolled against the beach to their right, as it had since
before the first human being stood upright, and would even after the last of us shuffled red-eyed through the sand.

Somehow, defying all odds, the Blue Beauty had made it through two checkpoints and thirty miles. Terry found himself stroking the steering wheel almost sensually, wondering if it was wrong to fall in love with a bus.

The password had worked just as Meeks had promised. A single case of MREs had brought them driving instructions to the camp and a living miracle: the ocean. It was concealed in shadows, but it was there.

It was nine o’clock, dead night and dead dark, and the Beauty felt like a space shuttle lifting into orbit. All Terry could make out at first was the openness, an absence of trees. Then, suddenly, they were close enough to see glowing bonfires dotting the beach from campers who kept a careful distance from one another.

The headlights illuminated a few more signs now: TRADING TODAY, said one. And WOOD AND FISH FOR TRADE, said another. Here, along the coast, life endured. They passed a car going north, and each vehicle moved as far to its own side of the road as possible. The other car was a station wagon, crammed with possessions and guns. Three adults and maybe two kids. A big, beefy woman, perhaps two. A guy with a beard turned to glare as he glided past.

Terry wanted to yell out to him that there was nothing up north but death.

The sun had long set, but the moon’s shadow danced like a dolphin
on the waves, shimmered, bringing back memories of other times and places that sent Kendra rushing to the right side of the bus, pressing her face against the glass.

“I haven’t seen the ocean in a year,” she said to no one but her reflection.

“Washington beaches suck,” Darius said. “This is
way
better.” He and Dean slapped hands and broke into song simultaneously:
“‘Wish they all could be California giiiirls.’”
Impressive harmony. It was odd, and reassuring, to hear Dean singing.

Something had changed. Even Hipshot moved to the right side of the bus, fogging his seat’s window with his tongue. He barked at the night-dark waves.

A guy with a powerful flashlight guided them to the sand with a dead-eyed reminder that McKinleyville would only host them for twenty-four hours, warning that dawdlers might be conscripted into work crews. To some travelers, Kendra thought, forced labor might not be a bad trade for food and protection.

The bus jounced along shallow dunes. Invisible waves marched across the shoreline with steady growls and whispers that seemed to stretch from one end of the earth to the other. The moon showed her flashes of cresting white from the waves, and the back of Kendra’s neck glowed with the unnameable joy of knowing that something was still the same.

There were a half-dozen other campers out there, and three campfires. The fires might not be as warm as they looked, but it was still good to see the guards patrolling the sand, those guns pointed not at them but out at the road itself, or toward the surf.

They parked several yards from a campfire that was home to three people: a man about fifty-five, a woman a little younger, and a kid who looked about thirteen. The group had been watching them race out of the Blue Beauty onto the sand, keeping an eye on them while they stretched, chased each other like puppies, and drank in the ocean air.

“It’s freezing,” Ursalina said sourly, comparing it to beaches in her memory.

“Fire,” Darius said. “Great invention.”

“True,” Piranha said. “Let’s find driftwood.”

The Twins and Piranha had just started combing the beach when the man at the fire rose and began walking toward them. Kendra tensed, but not for long. She saw none of the fearful caution of the others they had met on the road. The man probably had a handgun hidden somewhere, but he didn’t carry himself with that one-wrong-move-and-I’ll-shoot-you posture that was all the fashion since Freak Day.

The woman walked closely behind him, leaving the boy at the fire. She wore a brace on her right leg and moved like a broken Slinky. She was pale-haired and pretty but looked as if she hadn’t slept in a month.

Hipshot greeted the couple with a friendly bark and wagging tail.

“Hi,” the woman said. “We’re the Lamphers, and my name is Sharon. Might take a while to build a good fire, so you’re welcome to share ours.”

“I’m Joe,” the man said. “That scrawny kid tending the fire is our son, Adam. Think we might have a beer or two to spare. These days, we’re willing to bribe for company.”

Kendra might risk her life for a Coke, but beer tasted horrible and only made her sleepy. But the offer was miraculous, and the others whooped.

“Sir,” Ursalina said. “You’ve said the magic word. You can even check my ID.”

The couple laughed at her joke, the idea of checking a driver’s license quaint and long-ago. The woman hung very close to her husband, holding the crook of his arm. It was only after they started moving toward the fire that Kendra realized she was blind.

Joe had run a liquor store in Sacramento before Freak Day and
had loaded up the camper with all the beer and booze they could hold, figuring to trade. The figuring had been pretty good. The tepid cans of Newcastle Brown Ale he offered hadn’t come from their store: it had been traded a hundred miles east for a case of Chivas, Joe figuring that cans of beer might be better small change than a fifth of whiskey.

Kendra knew plenty about their story before she heard the details.

When their neighborhood had fallen to infection, they’d risked packing up to stay with friends who owned a farm. That sanctuary had lasted a week, and then the farm had been overrun too. Neither of them mentioned dead friends or loved ones, but their long silence said enough. Adam poked at the fire angrily with a stick, and sparks sprayed up like fireworks.

Finally, Joe sighed. “Pirates rule the roads, so everybody thinks towns are best,” he said. “You hear about these towns rebuilding, and they seem fine for a while. But it’s like the freaks can smell it. One day, everything is clear. The next, there’s a hundred freaks at the wire, somebody’s been bit, and his husband or wife won’t give warning. Within a couple of days, there’s freaks inside, and it’s all gone to hell. We’ve seen it, oh, a dozen times, just here in Northern California. We’ve learned how to move fast.”

Sharon and Adam were nodding emphatically.

Darius let out a satisfied beer belch and excused himself. “This place has a good setup,” he said. “How are they surviving?”

“They know each other. Aren’t taking outsiders, except to camp
and work. Plenty of guns and dogs,” Joe said.

“Strange how dogs can tell,” Kendra said, ruffling Hipshot’s fur as he settled beside her. Hipshot usually gravitated between Terry and her.

“You know what I think?” Sharon said. “I think we can all tell, but we don’t let ourselves know what we know.”

With a shiver, Kendra remembered her father’s wild eyes after his bite. “Why would we do that?” she said.

Sharon Lampher turned her face toward Kendra with a fond, distracted expression, her eyes turned more toward the night sky. “Because they’re us, darling. They may bite and tear, but when it comes right down to it, they’re our brothers and sisters and mothers and cousins. They are us, if we make one mistake. And so whatever signals we get are all confused, all scrambled up. We don’t want to know what we know.”

Sharon closed her eyes about halfway, fluttered her eyelashes. Joe patted her knee. “Sharon…”

“No, it’s all right,” Sharon said.

“Mom used to give workshops, do readings… aura stuff,” Adam said. “Tarot. Native American juju. Stuff like that.”

Joe folded his hands. “If you believe in that kind of thing,” he said.

“O ye of little faith,” Sharon said. “Ask him why we went to you kids.”

“Mom said you were okay,” the boy said simply.

“Good auras,” Sharon said.

Joe shrugged. “Sharon has great hunches, I’ll admit. I don’t know if ‘auras’ really exist outside our perception, or if it’s just what I’d call a ‘complex equivalent.’ ”

“A what?” Sonia said. She had settled in Piranha’s lap, and his arms were wrapped around her as he rested his chin on her shoulder. Kendra envied their pose, but Terry was far on the other side of the fire. He kept glancing toward the Blue Beauty to make sure no one
was trying to board the bus, still on alert. The Blue Beauty was Terry’s more than anyone’s.

Joe went on. “Let’s say you have a whole lot of information you’ve picked up unconsciously. I went to engineering school, took psych classes. The unconscious mind is the ocean, and the conscious mind is a teacup. There’s just a pinhole to squeeze information through, and most of it never makes it. Haven’t you ever had a gut feeling you couldn’t explain?”

Terry and Kendra glanced at each other when he said that, as if he’d tugged on puppet strings on opposite sides of the fire. Embarrassed, they both quickly looked away.

“Maybe they just smell right… or wrong,” Joe said. “Or it’s their body language. But you don’t have time to run through a whole list, so you just get a feeling. Right? I think auras might be like that. We pick up a huge amount of information, can’t process all of it as data, but we get a feeling.”