ocalypse (Book 10): Drawl (Duncan's Story) (9 page)

In hindsight, Duncan’s decision to travel north on 92nd
Avenue was no better than the direct route. Cursing under his breath, he jinked
the dually Dodge pick-up around slow drivers, avoiding the right lane whenever
he saw traffic backed up on cross streets or cars lined up and waiting to get
into already overflowing store parking lots. All of the usual west/east running
boulevards—Foster, Holgate, Powell, and Division—were beyond busy, with the
traffic pattern favoring no particular direction. The cross-competing McDonalds
and Burgerville at Powell were doing brisk business with full parking lots and
lines of cars snaking up to their drive thru windows.

“Getting a final Happy Meal before the apocalypse,” Charlie
said, half-joking. “I haven’t seen people panic buy like this since that storm
of oh-eight. And before that—”

“Nine-Eleven,” said Duncan, finishing the sentence. “I’ll
never forget seeing fighter jets flying CAP over the Rose City.”

“CAP?”

“Combat Air Patrol. Like what was rattling the windows at
your place earlier. Air National Guard F-15s outta PDX. With the crap happening
in D.C., Chicago, and Vegas … may be that the FAA was worried about someone
hijacking commercial jets. Ounce of prevention type of thing.”

“Nate mentioned that all taxi, town car, and bus access to
the airport was cut off around noon.”

“Nate?” Seeing a major jam up ahead where eastbound
Washington Street fed toward I-205, Duncan rode the truck up onto the curb,
edged by a minivan that he could see from his elevated perch was brimming with
kids and groceries, and blew across the four-lane against the red.

“Nate’s the taxi driver … oh shit!” Charlie blurted, the
sudden burst of speed pressing him into the seat. “You just blew by a cop.”

Flicking his eyes to the rearview, then, reflexively, to the
shotgun, Duncan said, “He’s got no time for us. Looks like he’s trying to get
on the Interstate. We’re good.” He pushed off his seat in order to see the ramp
to 205, which was uphill and to the right. Whistled and said, “Looks like the
Friday night five o’clock rush.”

Tires squealed as Duncan hauled the wheel over and suddenly
they were passing through a quiet neighborhood on the back side of Mount Tabor
en route to Belmont, which Duncan figured would be less crowded going into town
than Hawthorne, on a weekend day always clogged with bikes and pedestrians.

Regarding the well-kept old homes, Charlie said, “I remember
when we used to tool our bikes all the way out here.”

“Fifth grade, I believe.”

“Those were the days,” Charlie said, nodding. “Before your
folks dragged you off to Texas.”

“Couldn’t be helped,” Duncan said, wheeling around a
pedestrian who appeared drunk, staggering, arms outstretched and making an
awful moaning sound.

“Good for you. Had I stayed I’m sure I would’ve talked you
into going off to Nam.”

The words dredged up a bit of guilt. Charlie agreed,
silently wishing the subject to turn.

And it did when Duncan honked at a slow-moving Buick with a
blue hair at the wheel. “Feed the squirrels, lady … or get off the road,” he
hollered.

Up ahead the traffic on Belmont was also moving slow with
most of the cars peeling off down 39th presumably to access the Banfield
Expressway a few blocks north. Eventually merging with Interstate 5 near the
Willamette River, the Banfield snaked a handful of miles west from I-205,
splitting the east side down the middle and limiting access to central northeast
Portland via a handful of overpasses.

Keeping south of the sunken expressway, Duncan continued
threading his way west toward downtown. Four miles and roughly thirty minutes removed
from the near collision and close call with the law, he looped back south onto
12th Avenue with the signal at Hawthorne Boulevard dead ahead showing green.

“What do we have here?” Charlie said, his voice trailing off
as he spotted a static knot of cyclists in the right lane. Most were still
straddling their bikes, front wheels pointed east. They were
all
looking
toward the ground and rooted in place as if in shock. There were no first
responders and no wail of distant, but fast-approaching sirens. The Tour de
France crowd, to a person, continued gawking, a few of them now dismounting,
none of them taking out a phone to make an urgent 911 call. All of which when
sorted and put back together led Charlie to believe the unmoving man tangled up
in the remains of his bent and broken bicycle was a goner.

“He fought the Ford and the Ford won,” Duncan said, matter-of-factly,
as the reason for the growing assemblage finally became evident to him.

“Probably disregarded a red light and paid the price,”
Charlie added.

“Don’t get me started on that topic,” Duncan replied. He
slowed the truck and inched up off his seat for a better view.

Leaning on the fender of a copper-colored Taurus wagon, on
the periphery of a growing dark pool of blood, was an elderly gray-haired man.
Tears streamed from his eyes and ran under his glasses, cutting a wet vertical
path down both cheeks. His head shook subtly side-to-side as he wrung a tan fisherman’s
hat with both hands. Duncan slowed and noticed the man’s mouth going a mile a
minute—no doubt explaining, apologizing, and pleading with the usually
overly-defensive bike crowd. And as the scene slipped into his side vision, he
leaned forward, looked past Charlie, and read the man’s lips. He was saying “
I
killed him”
over and over as he collapsed slowly to the ground, ending up
in a vertical heap, back pressed to the car’s front tire and sitting in the
glistening pool of blood.

Duncan saw the orb ahead turn yellow and gunned it, slipping
around the morbid scene and crossing the intersection just before the light
turned red.

“You almost ran another red there.”

“Almost only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades,”
quipped Duncan.

Ignoring the inappropriate Duncanisms, Charlie shifted his
attention to his wing mirror and locked his gaze on the downed cyclist’s bright
orange shoes. Then, just as the ticking of the left turn blinker filled the cab,
clear as day, Charlie saw the downed cyclist’s legs spasm and the entire group near
him recoil at once. Almost as if lightning had struck in their midst, a dozen
riders in colorful jerseys emblazoned with the names of foreign bike makes,
local microbreweries, and International soccer clubs were jumping off their
bikes and leaving the thousand-dollar items where they fell. In the next beat,
backpedaling was happening at a furious pace while the dead man rose to
standing and started a slow speed pursuit after the nearest among them—the
latter action lost on Charlie as Duncan wheeled the Dodge diagonally onto a
narrow side street lined with towering elms and hundred-year-old one- and two-story
homes.

***

Tilly’s house was three blocks inside of Ladd’s Edition, one
of the nation’s oldest planned developments. The enclave, encompassing roughly
eighty city blocks, was laid out like a wagon wheel, with the streets the spokes
and at the center of it all, a quartet of beautiful rose gardens as the hub.

Duncan pulled the pick-up hard to the left curb and slipped
the transmission into Park.

Eyes wide, Charlie asked, “Did you see that back there?”

“See what?” Duncan asked as he stuffed the holstered Colt near
the small of his back.

Charlie clicked out of his seatbelt, turned by a degree to
face Duncan, and described exactly what he had just witnessed go down in his
wing mirror. When he was finished he insisted there was no way he could have
been seeing things, then went strangely silent.

“I had more to drink than you today … I
think
,” Duncan
said. “And
I
didn’t see that dead man moving in either of
my
mirrors.”

Charlie slid the shotgun behind the seat and out of sight.
With a shake of the head he opened his door and stepped out into the street.
“Two words,” he said, filling the doorway up and peering in at Duncan, “Optometry
appointment.” His eyes narrowed under the brim of his hat just before he slammed
the door shut and stalked around the front of the truck.

Duncan said nothing. He stepped out of the truck, adjusted
his tee shirt over the obvious bulge made by his pistol, then closed and locked
his door.

Standing on the grass parking strip a yard away, Charlie
jabbed a finger at his friend’s sternum. Speaking slowly he said, “I know what
I saw.”

Speaking even slower, his drawl heavier than normal, Duncan
shot, “So the guy was unconscious and came to. Big … God … damn … deal.”

“There was
waaaay
too much blood pooled around him
for that to happen. His face was caved in like a pissed off bookie had given him
the curb treatment. Plus … the old man who hit him was mouthing ‘
I killed him
’
… over and over. You saw that, too. And as far as I know, people with compound
fractures like that don’t get up on their own power. Joe Theismann ring a bell?”

Duncan grimaced at the visual brought on by just hearing the
former pro footballer’s name evoked. The visual even brought back the telltale
snap-heard-round-the-world that day when the quarterback’s leg folded
unnaturally. Then, thinking back to all the time he had spent ferrying broken
and dying nineteen-year-olds out of the jungle and to faraway field hospitals,
Duncan dismissed the latter part of Charlie’s statement as false. Running on
adrenaline and a will to survive, the human body could keep on keeping on for
some time after suffering horrific injuries—greenstick fractures the least of
them. However, though Duncan hated to admit it, where the blood loss part was
concerned, Charlie probably hit the nail on the head. Because more often than
not, after returning to base with an empty chopper, he had personally hosed
buckets of blood off the litters and floor of his Huey’s troop compartment. And
as he recalled those horror-filled tours in Vietnam, the hose work usually came
right after bringing back a bird full of KIAs leaking out under flapping olive
ponchos,
not
a compartment full of walking wounded likely to survive
long enough to board a Freedom Bird home.

“Let’s check on Tilly,” Duncan said, pushing the decade’s
old images from his mind. “Nothing we can do about Lance Armstrong.”

“That’s
wrong
, Duncan.”

“Looks like he’s gonna
live strong
.” Duncan chuckled
and headed for the stairs leading up to the compact bungalow.

Downtown Portland

By no choice of her own, Mary Palazzo, in her mind already
formerly employed by
Victory Medical Transport
, found herself sitting by
a window beside one of the gawkers she had had words with on the sidewalk in front
of the Unico parking garage.

The moment she boarded the commandeered Tri-Met city bus and
looked down the narrow aisle and saw at least twenty sweaty people already
taking up the last four or five rows, a lump had formed in her throat. In the
next beat, as she shuffled past empty seats, a cold runner of sweat trickled
down her spine and she began to mentally berate herself for making the
unsanctioned stop that got her partner killed and led to her being here in the
first place.

That thought naturally led her to replay the events outside
of the garage, which brought her to the conclusion that Captain Castle’s offer
of a
ride
out of the newly expanded quarantine zone did not come from a
position of benevolence. This was no quid-pro-quo transaction meant to reward
her for relinquishing the ambulance without a fight. She was so much cattle
like the others in various stages of shock and staring doe-eyed from the back
of the bus.

The more she thought about it the angrier she became. And
once she processed all that she had seen so far, the trickle of sweat became a
deluge because in choosing her seat by the window she had unwittingly put herself
between a rock and a hard place.

The former being the twenty or so people at her back, many
of them possibly infected. While no better, the latter consisted of the fifteen
or so people herded onto the bus after her, at least one among them who she
knew was already infected—the suit who had inadvertently fed a fingertip to the
undead street kid.

Now, settled into the hard plastic seat, her upper body matching
the bus’s swaying motion, Mary white-knuckled the grab bar on the seatback in
front of her and peered out the windshield, trying to guess where the soldier
at the wheel had been ordered to take them.

The commotion started a few blocks from the bank building.
Passengers in the front of the bus began haranguing the driver and demanding to
be told where they were being taken.

At first the driver ignored the one woman and two man tag-team
who didn’t seem to know each other, but were still of the same mindset, and
acted nearly in unison, even jumping out of their aisle seats at the same time
when the bus stopped to let an ambulance blaze by.

Mary watched the ambulance, lights flashing but running
silent, as it disappeared around a corner and sped off with a whoosh in the
direction of the Square. In her mind’s eye she saw the driver and partner in
the zone and just doing their job, all the while questioning in the back of
their minds—just what in the hell was really going on. Which was exactly what she
and Kenny had been doing on their first three round-trips between what at that
time had been an ongoing and very bloody melee in the Square, and Emanuel
Hospital just over the Steele Bridge in inner Northeast Portland. The first to
fill up with the recently deceased and dozens of badly injured police and
protesters, Emanuel quickly closed its doors and began diverting casualties to
other nearby hospitals with open beds. Not that beds were needed. A fact that
had become abundantly clear the first time she and Kenny had rolled up to the
clogged emergency entrance at Providence and saw the entire medical staff
performing triage on new admits, who were still under sheets on gurneys pushed
against walls and basically taking up every available square foot of the avocado-green
tiled floor. There were soldiers there lending a hand, and at times taking
ambulatory patients with suspected bite wounds to a separate quarantine tent set
up on the lawn between Inpatient Services and the Cancer Services building.

Having run out of supplies necessary to sterilize the
ambulance on the turnaround, Mary was behind the wheel on yet another
unassigned run downtown when Kenny talked her into pulling over for the
pedestrian waving them down in front of the Unico Tower. A detour from the norm
that ultimately saw him in the back of the same unsterilized ambulance and on
his way to a meeting with the cold slab, bone saw, and unyielding scalpel
awaiting him up at the Oregon Health Sciences University—the de facto northwest
front in the fight against some never-before-seen viral pathogen.

Knowing what she knew about what her late partner had begun
calling
“the sickness”
she wanted to be nowhere near the suit three rows
up when he came down with it.

Sickness
. The word alone reminded her of two things.
First was a metal song popular in the nineties. Hard driving music she had once
been into. Second, she recalled the eighties B-movies where a comet’s tail passed
through the Earth’s atmosphere, seeding her population with a sickness
necessary to bring about one calamity or another. From vehicles and machines
that suddenly and inexplicably automated. To an alien spore that killed the
majority of people outright. And lastly, the one where something riding the
comet’s tail quickly turned everyone it came into contact with into blood-thirsty
cannibals.

It was the latter premise that this thing resembled most.
Only this was no B-movie. And as far as Mary knew, NASA hadn’t mentioned anything
about Earth coming anywhere near a comet—past, present, or near future.

So that left as a plausible explanation, either a flu
strain’s split-second mutation in the wild—as had been reported about
extensively abroad before cropping up in Portland—or, some kind of a manmade
virus gone wild.

The shouting at the front of the bus increased in volume,
snapping Mary back to her current predicament. A virus she couldn’t see.
However, the suit doubling over and falling into the aisle, knees first, face
down on the adjacent passenger’s lap, was all the proof she needed she was
about to be in the thick of the shit she’d so far kept at arm’s length.

As if they were all part of the same organism reacting to
the threat, a ripple went through the passengers up front. The ripple preceded
full-blown panic as the people near the moaning suit leaned away and where
possible pressed their backs to the windows.

In the next beat the driver was standing on the brakes and
the only other soldier aboard was ordering everyone to remain seated. As the
bus lurched to a halt, a twentysomething four rows back on the right side of
the bus wrapped up the soldier from behind, causing them both to pitch forward
and land face down in the aisle opposite Mary’s row. And as a result, the man beside
her who had been casting glares her way for blocks let out a shriek several
octaves too high for his age, gender, and put-upon disposition.

“Get ahold of yourself,
Nancy
,” she bellowed into his
left ear. Then, without thought to the consequences, she stood on her seat with
her back exposed to the panicky man. Tuning out the frantic chatter rising all
around her, she calmly ran a hand around the window in search of some type of
lever or button that might let the thing swing out in case of emergency.

“Right here,” said a mousy-looking elderly woman in the next
aisle back. She was stabbing one bony finger at the metal plate riveted to her seatback.

A piercing scream sounded from the front of the bus.

Mary leaned over the seatback and glanced at the metal
plate. After committing the upside-down picture to memory, she quickly craned
around toward the commotion and saw the suit rear up from the screamer’s lap, a
mouthful of quivering meat sluicing a trail of blood down his chin and once-white
button-down oxford.

“Open the fucker,” howled the man beside her.

She shot him a look that said
get off of my back, fucker
and she meant it, literally, because he was crowding her to the point that it
took a shot from one of her sharp elbows to create enough space so that she
could pop the window release mechanism depicted on the instructions.

The wails rose in volume and now everyone was standing and
crushing forward, trampling the soldier and his attacker.

As Mary watched the newly freed window pane tumble away to
the street, out of the corner of her left eye she saw a pulsating jet of
crimson spatter the wall and ceiling. Without a second thought she knew it was
coming from the helpful elderly woman. She’d seen the same thing dozens of
times after responding to horrible auto accidents or the occasional knife
attack. And it never got easier to look at, for the spray from a carotid
artery, no matter the size of the owner or depth of the wound, was a very messy
affair.

With the old woman in her prayers, Mary tumbled face first
behind the freed window. She broke her fall with both arms outstretched—wrists,
elbows, and shoulders taking up most of the shock from the impact. Her palms
and face, however, didn’t escape the hasty egress unscathed. Though but a hundred
and five pounds dripping wet, the five-foot plummet ensured that dozens of
glass kernels from the shattered window became embedded in her palms. And on
the follow through, as she instinctively tucked and rolled to keep from
breaking her neck, her right shoulder and face bore the bloody brunt of the
remaining broken glass.

Adrenaline coursing through her veins, and ignoring the hot
blood stinging her left eye, she popped up and sprinted headlong for a
twenty-foot-tall wall of dense shrubbery just beyond the nearby sidewalk. Once
there, she burrowed through the tangle of gripping branches, squeezed sideways
past a pair of narrow trunks, and was instantly arrested by a less-forgiving
lattice of tautly wound steel.

The chain-link rattled furiously upon contact and only
stopped when she laced her fingers through the holes to steady herself.

As she gulped air, the throaty screams coming from the
direction of the bus rose to a crescendo. Then gunshots. Of which she lost count
before the firing ceased. However, much to her horror, the moaning and
screaming did not. Soon, the shrill animal-like peals of people dying reached
her ears.

She felt her pulse rate and respiration coming back to base
line. Just being off that bus and away from the carnage was a miracle in
itself. Now, with blood flowing from her palms and following the twists and
turns of the chain-link in little gravity-aided spurts, she realized what the
cryptic words Captain Castle had uttered really meant.
Lima, Hotel, Sierra
was
an acronym in military phonetics for Lincoln High School. And spread out
horizontally before her, ringed by an oval running track, was the LHS football
field. The field’s left end zone all the way to the fifty-yard line dead ahead from
Mary’s vantage point was taken up entirely by black body bags, all of them
full, a good many of them gently undulating and tenting up in places.

All it took was that one quick sweep of the eyes and the
full breadth of the outbreak became crystal clear to Mary. This was no longer a
quarantine with decisions of triage and transport resting on the shoulders of
first responders like herself. The hospitals and morgues were filled to
capacity with the dead and dying, and she was staring at the place people were
being brought to die. She saw a handful of armed soldiers in hazmat suits
guarding the gate near the far end zone. Parked near the soldiers and
surrounded by walking wounded were a half dozen city buses like the one she’d
just escaped. Sadly there were no nurses or doctors in scrubs walking the
gridiron amongst the amassed casualties. No care was being given to the
stricken. She guessed, from what she had witnessed during the many transports she
and Kenny had made to the various hospitals, that there simply weren’t enough
medical personnel to go around. And of the skeleton crews who had been on duty
since the outbreak of violence in the Square—if they were half as mentally and
physically spent as her—even taking care of themselves would be a chore unto
itself.

Mary let go of the fence, turned a slow one-eighty, and
steeled herself to face whatever was on the other side of her impromptu hide.
But first she moved her hands over her face. Once smooth and youthful, it was
now rough to the touch and slickened with blood.

She probed her right cheek with her fingertips and found
that it now felt like a topographical map of the Cascade mountain range. The
glass there was embedded deep and would take specialized tweezers and a certain
skill set to excise. She steadied her shaking hands as best she could and
examined her palms. The glass there was ground in and the wounds continually wept
blood. Same deal as her face: they would need attention from a specialist, too.
Once she made it to a safe place. Which wasn’t at her back. That was for sure.
Many of the body bags contained reanimated infected. And many of the casualties
laid out on the turf appeared to be dying or already dead. Which meant that in
time, they too would be joining the already turned.

In a bit of a panic now, and wanting to get as far away as quickly
as possible from the downtown core, Mary exited the bushes much like she had
entered them—wide-eyed, mouth agape, and arms outstretched. Only this time
there wasn’t a chain-link fence standing in her way on the other side. Worse.
There was a trio of men in black. They each wore a sleek, form-fitting gasmask
that revealed only their eyes, nose, and upper cheek. The two nearest were Caucasian.
The one kneeling behind them by the Tri-Met bus was African American. All three
were armed with black rifles sprouting long, like-colored cylinders on the end.
And all three men spotted her within the span of a heartbeat. Simultaneously
their bodies stiffened and their rifles swept up to track her.

Still processing what it all meant, she broke out onto the
sidewalk arms fully outstretched, bloody palms leading the way. In the next
beat electrical signals were jumping synapses in her brain and her lips parted.
But instead of delivering her intended heartfelt thanks to the soldiers for
sorting the mess in the bus, a half-dozen bullets silenced her. Stitched from
belly to throat, she was lifted off her feet and tossed sideways to the
sidewalk, where she twitched violently then curled into a fetal ball.