Chapter 34
The residential area began where the country road met a four-lane highway, a transition common across America.
Trees gave way to strip malls, and strip malls gave way to subdivisions, as commerce yielded to community, a pattern Charlotte had observed for twelve years.
The highway was clogged with stalled vehicles.
Cars, trucks, delivery vans, and even an ambulance with open rear doors were stuck in the lanes or on the shoulder, all bearing the same abandoned look Charlotte had seen for miles.
The heavy traffic forced her onto the narrow median between opposing directions.
As she walked along the median, she kept her eyes down on the pavement.
She understood that looking at the cars meant confronting what they contained.
Some were empty, while others weren’t. Through the glass, she saw shapes that her mind noted and set aside, much like she had done with the more difficult parts of her route in the past.
One minivan with Connecticut plates contained a family of four, all belted in and seemingly asleep, as if they had all succumbed to slumber at once.
There was no blood, and there was no visible trauma.
The gas had found them while they tried to flee, turning the van into a sealed chamber.
Charlotte looked away and continued walking.
The subdivision opened off the highway’s eastern side, a collection of modest homes with identical yards, garages, and decorative mailboxes.
Charlotte knew neighborhoods like this. What she saw now bore no resemblance to their usual rhythm.
A woman lay on a porch swing with one hand on the chain.
A man sat by a charcoal grill, lighter still in hand, raw hamburgers on the table beside him.
Two houses down, a teenage boy had fallen halfway up his front steps, aimed toward the door he never reached.
They had died where they stood, sat, or ran.
The pattern was terrible. The gas had moved through this neighborhood as it had through Crestview Street, with little or no warning.
The alerts had urged people to stay indoors and seal the windows, advice that came too late for many.
Charlotte kept her eyes lowered to conserve what emotional capacity she had left.
Each body was a fact, and she had reached the limit of how many facts she could process in a day.
So, she walked at a measured pace, the watch in her right hand and the water bottle in her left.
Not every house showed death. Some had curtains drawn and doors closed.
Those houses troubled Charlotte more. Closed doors suggested the strategy her family had used.
Stay inside, seal the windows, and wait it out.
She wondered how many concealed survivors and how many concealed the same stillness she had seen on the porches.
The evidence of looting appeared three blocks later.
A convenience store’s front window was shattered, and glass was scattered across the sidewalk.
Inside, shelves had been cleared violently, merchandise dumped and trampled.
A cash register lay on its side near the door, drawer open and empty.
Across the street, a pharmacy had been hit more selectively.
The front door was intact, but the security gate had been pried open, and the interior showed a targeted search.
Charlotte passed both stores. She needed water, antibiotics, and something for the blisters on her hands, but going into the dark pharmacy alone with evening approaching and her strength fading felt too risky.
Tuckerton was still miles away, and daylight still mattered.
The commercial district gave way to older homes shaded by mature trees.
The silence was deeper, the quiet of a place where life had been present and then removed, leaving behind an absence of sound.
Charlotte had walked two blocks through the deeper quiet when she heard the first gunshot.
It came from the east, distant but unmistakable, a flat crack that carried on the evening air and faded into the trees.
She stopped. Her body recognized the sound before her mind did, the alertness gunfire triggered in anyone who knew the difference between a backfire and a weapon fired with intent.
A second shot followed, closer than the first. Then, a third in rapid succession, the rhythm of someone shooting not in panic but with purpose.
Charlotte moved off the sidewalk and into the shadow of a large oak that overhung the nearest driveway.
It offered cover from the road and sightlines in both directions.
She set the water bottle down, pressed her back against the trunk, and listened.
The shots had stopped. The silence that followed felt charged. Charlotte counted the seconds. The light had turned amber in the late evening.
She was about to leave the tree when the fourth shot came, and it was much closer.
Perhaps two blocks east, in the direction she had been walking.
At that distance, the shot sounded sharper, with the echo of gunfire taking on in neighborhoods.
Someone was shooting and moving toward her.
Charlotte picked up the water bottle and stepped out of the tree’s shadow.
She continued down the sidewalk, staying close to the houses and using porches and hedges for cover when the road opened up.
Her cough had settled into a rhythm she could manage, and she had learned to brace herself against it without losing balance.
The fifth shot came as she reached the next intersection.
Close enough that she felt it as much as she heard it, a pressure shift in the air before the sound arrived.
She dropped behind a parked SUV and listened.
The voices were male, raised in argument, though she couldn’t make out the words.
Then another shot, and the voices fell silent.
Charlotte stayed behind the SUV, feeling the watch dig into her palm.
The gunshots were coming from ahead on the route she needed to take, and the people firing were moving closer.
She had two options. She was weighing the choices when the sixth shot rang out, close enough that the SUV’s window beside her head vibrated with the concussion.