Chapter Thirteen
Author's Note: There will be no update for Friday, Nov. 26, due to the Thanksgiving Holiday. Unfortunately I'll be away from my computer for the rest of the week. Regularly scheduled posts will resume on Monday. Happy Thanksgiving to all my American readers!
--David Wellington
Downtown Denver is considered a safe zone until 9:00 PM tonight or until further notice. Medical care and food distribution centers on the 16th Street Mall will remain open until that time. [Emergency Broadcast, Denver, CO 4/4/05]
“Shar, turn the AC up. It’s getting’ all sweaty in heah.” Charles wiped at the back of his neck. Nilla studied the small thin hairs there, the way they lined up where his hand had plastered them down. She could see his pores opening up in the heat, the tiny droplets of sweat gathering together, turning into rivulets that ran down into his collar.
“It’s all the way up already,” Shar complained, but she played with the controls anyway.
In the back seat Nilla felt the heat but she stayed perfectly dry. Her sweat glands didn’t work anymore. She tried rolling her window down a crack but the air that came pushing in felt like the exhaust from a blast furnace. Too much. She was tired of riding in the car, tired of being hot and cooped up.
The two of them shared a coke—the last of the sodas they’d pilfered from the motel—but they didn’t think to offer her any. They had barely spoken to her since they’d started out that morning. When Charles had stopped to refuel at an abandoned gas station at a lonely intersection high in the mountains Shar had gotten out with him, as if she didn’t feel safe in the car with Nilla.
She could hardly blame the girl, she supposed. Not with the kind of thoughts she’d been thinking. Mael Mag Och had told her the kids weren’t her friends. She’d seen for herself the way the living looked at her—like she was something unclean. The enemy. Why should she think of them any other way? She didn’t belong among them anymore. That should have been clear to her from the start.
Mael had said she should abandon Charles and Shar. That she should make her own way east. He’d said some other things that she didn’t even want to think about but he’d been quite clear on that point. No more fraternization with the living. Something in her responded to that message and she longed to strike out on her own. No more dirty looks. It would be so much easier than the silent game the three of them were playing.
Still—he was who knew how far away. Hundreds, maybe thousands of miles away. She could hardly walk across the country. She needed the kids. If she wanted her name back she had to have a ride. Surely he would understand. He seemed to have a pretty poor grasp on the English language and he had kept lapsing into what sounded a little like Gaelic, she thought. Maybe he wasn’t from America originally. Maybe he didn’t know how far his body was from her. He would have to understand.
Just to get out of her head for a while Nilla nudged the back of Charles’ seat. He tried not to flinch. “So when are you going to tell me?” she asked, intentionally cryptic, a little ashamed of what she was demanding when the two of them had clearly intended to keep it amongst themselves.
“Charles,” Shar said, as if she expected her boyfriend to lurch into violence at any moment. Maybe that was what Nilla expected, to, or even hoped for. It would be a great justification. The boy didn’t say anything, though.
“Seriously, I want to know. Why did you run away? Were you getting beaten by your parents or something? That would make sense.”
“I know you didn’t just say somethin’ ‘bout my moms,” Charles muttered. There was no force in the words, no anger. He was scared of her now. It angered her more than anything. She had turned to him for a little human contact and now he was scared of her. What the hell was up with that?
“Please don’t,” Shar said. It sounded like she was saying it to herself.
“Was it school? Were you having a hard time at school? Come on. Just tell me. We’re all friends now, right?” The neediness in her voice annoyed her and in frustration she slid across the back seat, putting the soles of her bare feet up against the window. The sun felt like a blowtorch on her skin and she yanked them away. When he maintained his stony silence she sat up on the warm seat and stared out at the mountainous land that flew by, its folds and creases etched into the side of a barren, unfinished planet. “Were you just bored?”
“Shar,” he said, but she knew he was speaking to her, not his girlfriend.
“Huh?” she asked. “What does that mean?”
“Shut up! Oh my God don’t you say it!” Shar scrunched down in her seat and buried her face in her hands.
“Her name—” Charles began, keeping his eyes on the yellow line running down the middle of the road.
“My fucking name is Sharona, okay? Is that what you wanted to know?” The girl whirled around in her seat, her eyes huge and sharp. “You know. Like ‘M-m-m-my Sharona,’ like in that stupid song! That should tell you a little about my parents. You know the song.”
Nilla had no idea what the girl was talking about.
“They thought it was funny. I would come home from school and I would be crying, bawling my eyes out for fuck’s sake. And they would laugh at me. Then they would sing that stupid song, over and over again.”
“I don’t understand. You came along with Charles when he ran away because of a song?” Nilla fanned her face with one hand. Had it gotten hotter in the car?
“No! I’m the one who’s running away! They don’t care about me. I called my Mom from that hotel and you know what? She was so fucking stoned she didn’t even ask if I was okay. I tried, I tried so hard but when they closed the school because of this Epidemic I just could not face them anymore. I used to go to school to get some peace, can you believe that? I used to love school and the government took that away from me. So I went to Charles and I talked him into this. Into running away with me. He cares about me. He loves me.”
Nilla couldn’t process the girl’s outburst. “I don’t understand,” she said. “You ran away because of a song?”
“Holy shit,” Charles shouted. “Holy shit!” He pointed through the windshield as he stepped on the brakes, throwing Shar forward against her seat belt. The sign read DEATH VALLEY NATIONAL PARK, 2 MILES.
He pulled the car to a stop just at the top of a ridge and got out of the car, letting a wave of overheated air rush through the car. Nilla could taste how dry the air was as it buffeted her face and hands.
Nilla grabbed the map and rolled out of the car to join him. Together the two of them looked down the slope of craggy rocks at a depression in the landscape that seemed to go down forever. The view shimmered in a blast of heat that burst up at them, not so much like a hot wind as the shockwave of some terrible fiery cataclysm.
“I knew it was getting hotter,” Charles said.
“We have to keep going,” Nilla said. He laughed at her. She jabbed at the torn map with one clumsy finger. “No, seriously. We have to keep going east. Look, look here. It’s not as wide as it looks and on the other side we’ll be in Nevada. We’ll be safe there.”
“It’s called ‘Death Valley’,” Charles told her. “‘Death Valley,’” he repeated as if that alone would change her mind. “It’s the hottest place on earth, I think. We learned about it in Geography class. People who go there get lost and they die. You don’t go in there without water. We don’t have any water, in case you didn’t notice.”
They could not just stop. Not when Nevada was so close. They couldn’t go back, either. The entire US Army was probably looking for her back there. “It’s just a name! We can cross it in a couple of hours. We can stop for water in just a couple of hours.” He started heading back to the car. “Charles, wait—look. There’s somebody else here.”
He looked where she pointed. She was right, there was a pickup truck parked on the side of the road just a couple of hundred yards away. Dust and grime besmirched its sides so thoroughly that it had taken on the colors of the desert. It looked like there were two people lying down in the bed of the truck, moving against one another. Lovers parked in the middle of nowhere for a little afternoon fun, she guessed. It felt too hot for that but she supposed hormones could overcome heat exhaustion if they were strong enough.
“Oh, dude,” Charles said, his face falling. “It’s two guys.”
“Yeah, well,” Nilla said, getting desperate. They couldn’t turn back now—her name was waiting for her. “Maybe they have some water.”
Charles didn’t move. She smiled weakly at him but she knew very well he wasn’t going to go ask for water from the truck’s occupants. Fine, she thought, she would do it herself. She covered the distance between the two vehicles as quickly as she could, her feet slipping on the loose gravel of the shoulder. It was so hot. When she reached the pickup she cleared her throat a couple of times to try to warn the two men that she was approaching. They didn’t stop what they were doing so she stepped closer. “Hello? Excuse me?” She took another step and smelled blood in the air. She closed her eyes, knowing what she would find. There were two people in the back of the truck, yes. One of them rapidly bleeding to death. The other one had beat him there.
The ghoul must have felt her regard. He reared up, a mouthful of flesh tumbling from between his lips and got to his feet so that he towered over her, his stained face ten feet up in the air. He wore a torn-up padded vest even in the intense heat and his legs looked as thick as tree trunks. That wasn’t what she noticed first, though.
He didn’t have any arms.
