Epitaph Road (13 page)

Two state police cars were angled halfway across the highway, their noses just far enough apart to form one narrow lane. Their roof lights were on, spinning. Another car, a plain sedan with the familiar giant-woman, midget-man insignia on the door, was parked on the shoulder. To the west of the police cruisers, two state troopers stood, flashlights in hand, pistols holstered. So far. To the east were two other troopers. Two PAC cops paced the pavement. They were all women, but their intuition wasn't working. None of them looked in our direction.

Next to me, Tia breathed — slow, shallow, almost silent. I forced myself to exhale. Inhale. Rich dank smells rose from the crushed plants at our feet.

A car approached from the west. The state cops waved it down. The PAC cops strolled over, examined the driver's papers, had a discussion, and backed away. The state cops motioned the driver — a woman — through. It wasn't a full quarantine.

Elisha hadn't been unleashed.

“Let's get moving,” Sunday whispered, and we did.

We collected our backpacks and bikes and struggled back through the woods and out, well beyond the roadblock, unnoticed. We pedaled away, not wasting our breath on talk. I left my hood up, trying to be inconspicuous. A few cars passed, going our direction, then a couple moving the other way, toward the roadblock.

We arrived at the Hood Canal Bridge. No roadblocks, but behind us the sky was lightening. I checked my watch. “It's almost five,” I said, and without discussing it, we picked up our pace, flying across the long, floating span. The dark water, stirred up by a northern wind, smelled of salt and sea life.

A half hour later we reached Highway 101, the route to the remains of Port Angeles, to the settlement of Afterlight. We stopped and slipped off into the woods for a pee break and out again for water, cheese, apples, and more pedaling.

At almost six o'clock, a car came up behind us and slowed. Fake engine sounds disrupted the quiet. Headlights illuminated the still-shadowy road in front of us. We went into single file, the girls in front, to let it pass. But it didn't.

Lack of sleep had caught up with me. I felt myself getting irritated, and I turned to stare down the offending driver. But as I did, the car pulled parallel to us, and the passenger motioned us to the shoulder.

A familiar logo — big woman and tiny man — decorated the car door.

We stopped. My heart pounded. I put on my innocent look, hoping we could remember our story and tell it with a straight face.

The PAC-sters got out. They were both youngish, but they looked dowdy in their dumpy, drab, retro uniforms. The driver clicked on a flashlight, even though the sun was nearly up behind the trees and I could read the words on her name tag from fifteen feet:
CLARK
,
MONITOR
. The other one was Bellows; she was an
INVESTIGATOR
.

Clark shone the flashlight in my face. “Going somewhere, throwback?”

“I'm not a throwback.”

Clark and Bellows exchanged a smirk. “ID?” Bellows said, fingering the handcuffs that stared hungrily up from her leather belt.

I handed over my card. She slipped it into her pocket scanner and studied the screen. “Seattle?” she said. “How'd you get through the roadblocks?”

“Roadblocks?” Sunday said. “We've been over here since Tuesday.”

“We're visiting Kellen's dad,” Tia said. “Our uncle Charlie. We're just taking a ride while he's out fishing.”

“He's a throwback?” Clark said. “At Afterlight?”

“A loner,” I said. “His boat's moored near Afterlight.”

“You're Kellen's Minders?” Bellows said, eyeing Tia, then Sunday.

They nodded.

“ID and credentials?” Bellows said. She gave my card back to me and took two each from Tia and Sunday. Again, she slid them through her scanner and studied her screen. Birds were awake now, greeting the morning. Cars passed occasionally, their drivers giving us curious looks.

“Your Minders' credentials are in order,” Bellows said finally. “But you're a long way from Nebraska.” She returned the cards to Tia and Sunday.

“We're visiting,” Tia said.

“How much longer on the Peninsula?” Clark said.

“Just until tonight or tomorrow,” I said.

“Good luck on that,” Bellows said. “There's a quarantine drill in the works. There may be more roadblocks going up ahead of you. If you get stopped, give them this.” She wrote something on a stiff paper form and handed it to Sunday.

The cops got in their car, made a U-turn, and headed off.

“We did okay,” Tia said as we climbed back on our bikes and wobbled away.

“I guess nobody's sounded an alarm yet,” I said.

“But now they know who we are,” Sunday said. “And where to find us.”

We accelerated. We were running out of time.

We kept moving. Here the highway was once divided into separate belts of two-lane concrete. But what had been the eastbound lanes was now in ruins. Its surface was heaved up and fractured, and vegetation — everything from dandelions to blackberry bushes to forty-foot-tall alders and firs — reached skyward through the jagged, widening cracks. The westbound lanes accommodated two-way traffic with no worries of congestion. On both sides of the old thoroughfare, abandoned buildings shed layers of paint and façade as they crumbled and settled and faded into the backdrop of greens and browns.

Nature, resurrected.

As time moved us deeper into morning, we came across travelers — all men and boys — on bikes and motor scooters and muscle-scooters and skateboards and skates. Bare-bones transportation. If these guys cared about status, they must have looked for it in intangibles. Most of them waved to us as they passed. Our brothers. I thought again about the Fratheists, gliding along in their flowing crimson robes, treating me like I was someone special.

We were getting close, but we were closer to seven o'clock. We sped downhill and around a curve and in front of us, too late, we saw another roadblock. Four sets of eyes took us in as we kept pedaling.

“What if they know?” Tia said without moving her lips.

“Cross your fingers,” Sunday said.

We braked to a stop. I took it as a good sign that they hadn't jumped us and put us in handcuffs yet. Sunday handed the free pass to a PAC cop, a tall, square-jawed woman with friendly eyes. She looked over the form, me, Tia and Sunday, me again.

“Trials soon, Kellen?” she asked, handing the paper to her partner.

“Three months,” I said.

“You studying hard?”

“Night and day.”

“You Dr. Dent's — Heather Dent's — son?” the other cop asked. She was older, shorter, and had eyes like a cod — round and cold and emotionless. And, suddenly, I was sure we'd had it. All the congeniality had just been preliminary crap.

“Yeah,” I said casually. I looked for an escape route. Could I make a break for it? Crash off into the woods? I didn't think they'd shoot me. I could maybe get the rest of the way to Dad by foot.

“I met her once,” fish eyes said. Her name tag read
PELLEUR
,
INVESTIGATOR
.
“She gave a talk to a group of us a while ago. A smart woman.”

“Kellen's smart, too,” Tia said. “He's going to ace his trials.”

“Wonderful,” the tall one —
MILNE
,
INVESTIGATOR
— said. “Then you won't have to bother these young women to escort you around anymore.”

“We don't mind,” Sunday said. “He's our cousin.”

“That's generous,” Milne said. “But I'm sure you have better things to do.” She handed the form back to Sunday and gestured for us to continue on.

The pleasantries were genuine after all. But I kept my mouth shut. Better to keep a low profile. I'd been dislodged from the conversation anyway. And we'd been dismissed. We mounted our bikes and moved out. “Study hard,” Pelleur said to our backs. “All of you.”

Another close call had given us a little rest. But how much longer before Mom discovered we were gone and every cop on the peninsula knew? The adrenaline came roaring back. I had no problem keeping up with the girls as we topped a hill and raced down its windward slope.

Ten minutes later we caught our first glimpse of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, blue, flecked with white, its landmasses rising in the distance. Vancouver Island was one of them. It was once part of Canada, a foreign nation. Now we were all united on this continent. Unless you were a guy who hadn't passed his trials, you flowed freely everywhere, even across those arbitrary borderlines on PE maps.

We reached the fringes of a town. Clumps and rows of houses and other buildings rotting under the weight of neglect and weather began to appear on the sides of the highway and down intersecting roads that had decomposed into haphazard patterns of pavement and dirt. The skeletal remains of traffic lights and streetlights and billboards materialized in the distance.

We passed a battered road sign. Under the words
PORT ANGELES
, the word
POPULATION
could still be deciphered. After it, someone had painted over the number, whatever it was, and printed neatly:
Only God Knows.

We passed another sign, handmade:
Afterlight
, it read.

So we'd arrived. But I didn't know where, exactly, Dad kept his boat.

The water was to our right, to the north, a half mile or so beyond what was now a dense dilapidated collection of houses and other buildings.

A few people, mostly men, walked the streets. I pictured them gasping for breath, falling, lying still. Guilt laid a heavy hand on my shoulder, shouted in my ear:
They deserve to be warned.

I ignored the words. Dad was my priority; he was the only one who counted right now. But I couldn't help comparing myself to Mom, who would have gone to any length to get me out of Elisha's path but wouldn't consider alerting anyone else.

Even Dad.

“See if you can see anything that looks like a marina,” I told the girls from landlocked Nebraska, pedaling determinedly just ahead of me. “Masts, or a sign sticking up above the roofs.”

Sunday, sitting on the front seat of the tandem now, looked behind us. A frown darkened her face. “Let's get off this highway,” she said, and turned down a lumpy side street. We worked our way toward the waterfront and along it. But there was no moorage in sight, and we were nearly out of town again.

On the side of the road, a prehistoric blue-and-rust pickup truck idled. Genuine engine sounds escaped from under its hood and all along its ancient exhaust system. Behind the pickup was an empty salt-corroded boat trailer, and an old guy messing with the hitch and chains. In the back window of his truck hung a rifle, something I recognized only from photos.

Tia and Sunday stopped. I stopped. “Are you going somewhere to get your boat?” Tia asked the guy sweetly. It sounded sweet to me anyway.

He looked her up and down. He wasn't as old as I'd first thought. He'd just let himself go — oily ball cap, dirty tattered clothes, unruly grayish-brown beard. What showed of his face was red, maybe from weather, maybe from drink. “Gotta get her in for some bottom work,” he said. “Even old girls need their babying. And fishin's about to get hot.”

“Where do you keep her?” Tia asked.

“Second-Chance Marina,” he said. “Just outside town.”

“The direction we're going?” Sunday said.

“A mile or so,” the guy said. “Why?”

“We're looking for someone,” I said. “A fisherman. You know a man named Charlie Winters?”

“He a loner?” he asked. “I know a loner fisherman named Charlie.”

“Yeah,” I said. My heart thumped at the possibility of good news. “You know where he moors his boat?”

“Right near mine,” he said. “Slip C-forty-four.”

“Is he there now?” Tia said.

“Don't know. I been away from the docks for a bit, doing my security job.”

“Thank you,” I said. “We'll go take a look.”

We pedaled away. I could feel the guy's eyes on our backs, boring in. What would he tell the cops if they stopped and talked to him the way we did? “I'm glad you asked him,
Tia.
” Despite all that was going on, I recalled Sunday's advice.

She gave me a fake annoyed look, but I detected the unmistakable hint of a smile at the soft corners of her mouth, in the deep brown of her eyes. “It's really true,” she said. “Guys never stop to ask for directions.”

“We were getting there,” I said.

“Maybe,” Sunday said. “Or maybe we would've gotten discouraged and wandered around and around in a circle for an hour.”

I didn't argue with her. She could have been right. I pedaled harder, following this waterfront road as it snaked through the outskirts of Afterlight. The pickup truck passed us, its empty trailer bouncing and rattling along behind it, and the guy gave us a toot and a wave. The rifle barrel glinted in the morning sun.

To our right, a hill cut off our view of the water. On top of it stood an old lighthouse, striped in red and white like an antique barber pole. Beyond the dirty glass of the windows that surrounded the watch room, there was no sign of light or life.