Last Gasp (63 page)

After the encounter that afternoon Chase was unsure what to do. It was a straight choice between civilization and the backwoods, neither of which had great appeal. Was this how it was going to be from now on? A slow disintegration into madness and chaos? No grand finale, just a gradual slide into gibbering mindlessness?

They ate off metal plates sitting cross-legged next to the camping stove. The sultry heat of the day lingered on, so the unlit stove served merely as a symbolic campfire.

Something squawked near at hand in the undergrowth and they both jumped. “We’re a couple of townies and no mistake,” Chase remarked, wiping his mouth.

“Is that what we are?”

“Sure. City people who drive at eighty miles an hour without seat belts and yet turn pale at the sight of a cow. Where were you born?”

“Columbus, Ohio. Though we had a place in the country where I learned to ride.”

“Are your parents still there?”

“Both dead. My father was a druggist. He ran his car into the back of a bus when I was twenty-one. He was drunk at the time. Six months later my mother committed suicide.”

“So you put yourself through medical school?”

“Yes. It wasn’t too hard. I didn’t have the struggle that is supposed to be character-building. There was money from the sale of the store and two fat insurance policies to collect on.” Ruth smiled mirthlessly. “I never starved.”

“No brothers or sisters?”

“An older brother, Kevin. He’s a chiropodist in Wisconsin Rapids, married with two kids. I haven’t seen him in over three years.”

“You never married.”

Ruth shrugged, a dim blue shape in the darkness. “I had my chances, I guess. It was all set up at one time for me to marry Frank Kollar—you remember, the guy at Bill Inchcape’s the first time we met?”

“What happened?”

“It occurred to me one day that I didn’t love him. I liked him, he was fun to be with, but he was a rat. A very charming rat, you know the type. And after that I started to get involved in other things, for which you were largely responsible.”

Chase was quite genuinely astonished. “I was?”

“You impressed me no end, that first time at Bill’s,” Ruth said. “And what was worse, you started me thinking. I began to realize what a hell of a mess we were getting ourselves into and I decided I’d better do something about it—Ruth Patton, a one-woman crusade to save the world. The Madam Curie of the twenty-first century. So I went to the Rotten Apple and dedicated myself to mankind. The rest, as they say, is history.”

Her spiritual desolation was even deeper and more intractable than his. And he had nothing to offer her except empty phrases and meaningless platitudes.

In the middle of the night he was shocked into bleary life by a kick in the ribs. He opened his eyes and everything was dazzling white. The pain seeped through him like syrup as he shielded his eyes from the flashlight shining directly into his face. Ruth wasn’t beside him. That fact brought him fully awake, and simultaneously he was trying to remember where he’d put his Windbreaker with the gun in the pocket.

“Take that light out of my eyes, for God’s sake!” Chase said, angry with himself. What a cretin! He should have known red gums and the other men would come after them. They’d followed the jeep’s trail to this secluded spot in the trees and now he and Ruth were helpless, defenseless, at the mercy of those five mean son-of-a-bitch bastards with revenge in their hearts.

Where
was she? What had they done with her?

The flashlight swung away and a voice with a peculiar nasal intonation said haltingly, “Don’t bother—looking for rifle—won’t do—no good.”

Chase squinted into the darkness but could only make out a vague humped shape. That wasn’t the voice of the man with the straw Stetson. Must be one of the others. He struggled to sit up, wincing at the pain in his rib cage.

“What have you done with the woman, you bastards?”

The beam flicked across the grass and settled on two figures, one held in the embrace of the other. Chase felt his stomach go rigid. Transfixed like a rabbit in the light, Ruth stared at him, her eyes dark and wide, something bony and clawlike covering her mouth. Behind her shoulder he saw a white gleaming skull with black eye sockets and two rows of exposed teeth: the head of a skeleton.

“Woman not harmed,” said the clotted nasal voice behind the flashlight.

Chase knelt up on the canvas groundsheet and the voice said, “Don’t move!” He subsided slowly and felt something digging into his left knee. It was the hard shape of the gun in the zippered pocket of his Windbreaker, which he’d rolled up and placed within easy reach.

Now that his eyes had adjusted to the darkness he could make out the owner of the voice, a broad squat figure whose head was sunk into his shoulders. What facial features he could dimly discern were twisted askew beneath a deep sloping forehead. There were dark patches on the hairless cranium, which Chase realized were open suppurating sores; he could actually smell the sweetish odor of decay. The creature was rotting alive.

And he realized something else that made his heart thud in his chest—they weren’t armed. The creature with the flashlight had no weapon because its other arm ended in a stump at the elbow, and the skeleton man was using both arms to hold Ruth in his bony embrace.

Chase cautioned himself to take it slow and easy. First he had to get the gun. He inched his hand downward, his fingers delving into the wrapped folds of the Windbreaker.

“Where you from?” The creature sounded as though it had no roof to its mouth. The light swung back and Chase froze in its glare.

“I’ll tell you if you’ll take that bloody light off me.”

The beam dropped away.

“A place called Desert Range in Utah. It’s a —” He stopped. He’d been about to say “scientific establishment” when it occurred to him that these two would hardly be kindly disposed toward science of any description—not after what chemicals and the climate had done to them.

He said, “My companion is a doctor and we’re on our way to treat a patient in Oregon. We have no money and nothing to give you. Just this camping gear you see here and a few personal belongings.”

His fingers touched the metal tab of the zipper. He tugged and felt it grate along the grooved teeth. Keep talking, keep them distracted. “Tell your friend to let the woman go. She can’t do you any harm.” Although concerned for Ruth, it had also occurred to him that she was effectively shielding the skeleton man. Yet he was beginning to wonder whether a bullet would actually kill something that looked more dead than alive. Perhaps the creature had changed into something bloodless and nerveless, functioning to a different set of physiological principles.

He shut further speculation off before it spooked him even more. As if this nightmarish phantom weren’t bad enough ...

“Let her go,” Chase said, worming his fingers into the pocket. The crosshatched butt was cold and solid in his hand. The safety—don’t forget that!

The creature holding the flashlight grunted nasally and turned the beam onto Ruth and the thing behind her. “Let—woman—go.”

As the skeletal hand fell away Ruth tottered forward, wiping her mouth with both hands. She uttered a sob and sucked in air.

Now Chase had his first clear view of the skeleton man, who was bizarrely dressed in a gray pinstripe suit with wide pointed lapels that hung upon him as emptily as on a hanger in a closet. His face was covered in a pale, almost transparent membrane, the tendons and musculature connecting the head to the neck clearly visible. Between the lapels his collarbones shone like ivory, the plate of his breastbone reflecting the flashlight. He had wasted away to practically nothing. Just a walking bag of bones.

“You have drugs?” said the hunched creature with the light.

Chase slid the Browning out of the pocket, keeping it hidden. “What kind of drugs?”

“For us ... for this.” He pointed the beam at his own head. Chase flinched and felt the flesh crawl on his back and upper arms.

The creature gave a gurgling growl, which sounded threatening, and then it began to cry. Tears were squeezing out from beneath the raw peeling eyelids and dribbling down over the misshapen features. “Need help—we die—help us.”

Chase grimaced from the stab of pain in his side as he stood up. He made no attempt to conceal the gun, nor to use it. These pathetic creatures were no longer a threat. It was fear that had driven them, fear of what was happening to their body, fear of what they were turning into.

He went to Ruth and held her. She was shaking, her skin clammy, her mouth red where she had rubbed it.

“Can we do anything for them?”

“No, it’s too late.” She sucked in a shuddery breath, clutching his arm. “It’s hopeless. There’s nothing anyone can do.”

Daybreak on Interstate 80, twenty miles from Reno.

Chase was determined to reach Goose Lake before nightfall. Keeping to the side roads and the backwoods hadn’t been such a great idea after all; whatever Reno had to offer couldn’t be much worse. He kept his foot pressed down hard on the accelerator, willing the jeep to take off and fly. When daylight came he thought it would somehow diminish the memory of those figures seen by flashlight, bring back a measure of everyday sanity, but the reverse had been true. Seeing for himself the terminal effects of pollution sickness had intensified his feeling of dread and filled him with a desperate panic that Cheryl might be suffering the same fate.

The hard shoulder and inside lane of the highway were strewn with wrecks. People were living in some of them. Small fires burned in front of doors hanging off their hinges, cooking utensils and belongings were scattered around, and ragged sooty-faced children played among the dented metal and rusting engines.

Fleeing from the south they’d got this far and run out of money, gasoline, goods to barter, and luck. Now they were stranded in no-man’s-land with nowhere to go. Large recently erected signs every quarter mile warned:
ABSOLUTELY NO ADMISSION TO IMMIGRANTS WITHIN CITY LIMITS!
So here they were and here they stayed.

If conditions were this bad here, what must they be like back east in the densely populated industrial areas of Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Cincinnati? Chase visualized it as a vast stinking Dickensian slum where the skies were perpetually black and the rivers choked with putrescent sludge, inhabited by gray ghosts who trudged to work and carried out their tasks like automatons. According to the newscasts goods were still being produced and sold, the service industries still functioned, life went on “normally” ... but for how much longer?

“What’s happening, can you see?” Ruth asked, craning to look over the windshield.

Chase slowed down as the stream of traffic built up into a solid jam. It was a perimeter checkpoint manned by state militia and city police. Each vehicle and its occupants were being closely scrutinized. The guards were wearing respirators, Chase saw, their visored white helmets gleaming like skulls in the murk that had thickened the nearer they got to the city. He recalled with a small prayer of thanks that Drew had packed respirators and goggles, which at the time had struck him as both morbid and unnecessary.

“They’ll want to see our IDs,” Chase said, fumbling for his own. He noticed that many of the vehicles, the majority in fact, were being directed onto a slip road. These were the rejected, turned back to swell the tide of flotsam along Interstate 80.

The line crept forward with infuriating sluggishness. The vehicle in front was a clapped-out microbus with taped-over cracks in its tinted windows and a bent TV aerial on the roof. It contained a family, with two or three kids and an old woman who stared morosely through the rear window, chin propped in her hand.

A semicircle of militia, weapons drawn, covered all angles. Chase watched a barrel-chested sergeant who topped six feet examining the family’s ID cards and papers. His voice sounded hollow and distorted inside the faceplate.

“State your business in Reno.”

“Just passing through.”

Chase couldn’t see the driver’s face, but he could imagine it from the tone of voice. Timid, hopeful, anxious, sweating.

“Destination?” demanded the burly sergeant.

There was a fractional pause. “San Francisco.” The driver rushed on with a hurried explanation. “We got relatives there, officer, my wife’s parents. They wrote and promised us a place—”

“San Francisco is off limits. Has been for six months.” The sergeant pointed with a gloved hand. “Pull over to the right. Access denied.”

“But we
have
to get through,” the man whined. “You see, it’s my son, the youngest, he’s sick. He needs medical attention. My wife’s parents have fixed it for him to be—”

“In that case you’ve crapped out twice,” the sergeant said indifferently. “Nobody with an illness or disease of any description is allowed inside city limits. Now move this fucking heap of rust before I have it impounded. That’s if you don’t want to forfeit everything except the clothes you stand up in.”

The microbus shuddered off to the right and Chase took its place. He handed the documents over. “We’re both doctors. We have a patient who urgently requires—”

“Did I ask you a question?” The sergeant glanced at the ID cards and held them over his shoulder without looking. “Check these on Memorex.”

Chase blinked. His eyes were starting to sting. He noticed that Ruth’s eyes were red-rimmed too. Photochemical smog activated by the sun’s rays. Welcome to California.

“State your business in Reno.”

“Passing through.”

“Destination?”

“Goose Lake, Oregon.” Chase could see the trooper inside the glass-walled booth feeding data into a keyboard terminal. What did they expect to find? That he and Ruth were a couple of homicidal maniacs on the run from a mental institution? He gripped the wheel with both hands, fingers flexing, trying to curb his impatience. They couldn’t turn them back now. There was no earthly reason why. They
couldn’t.

“Are the two of you healthy? Pollution sickness?” To judge from the flat gaze behind the faceplate he might have been inspecting a side of beef to see whether it ought to be condemned.