Chapter 40
The fever found her at the intersection of Main and Spruce, a dry heat that climbed from her chest into her face, leaving her vision swimming at the edges.
Charlotte braced herself against a dead streetlight pole.
The irony of holding something that no longer functioned wasn’t lost on her, and she waited for the dizziness to pass.
Her cough had taken on a new quality, deeper and wetter, with a sound she could feel in her ribs.
Each spasm left her weaker than the last, and the intervals between were shortening.
The antibiotics were losing. She could feel them losing the way you feel a storm approaching before the first drop falls, a pressure change in the body that has nothing to do with barometers.
She pushed off from the pole and kept walking. Main Street was a canyon of damaged storefronts and abandoned vehicles. A delivery truck had struck a utility pole and come to rest across the sidewalk, its front end crumpled. Everything Charlotte passed carried the signature of sudden stopping.
The intersection ahead had been hit harder.
The northeast corner was a blackened shell where a gas station had stood, its canopy collapsed onto the pumps.
Debris from the blast had been thrown across all four lanes, including glass, twisted metal, and signage remains.
In the center of it all, lying on its side with its rear wheels still elevated, was a fire truck.
Charlotte stopped. The truck was massive, red with white striping; its ladder extended partway as if the crew had been positioning it when something interrupted.
It lay on its passenger side, the driver’s-side wheels pointing at the sky, the cab partially crushed by the weight of the roll.
The rear compartment doors were closed. The vehicle had the settled look of something left there for days, untouched.
She approached slowly. Her balance was unreliable, the fever tilting the world slightly off its axis, but she moved with the caution of someone who had learned that survival now meant reading environments before entering them.
The truck’s windshield was webbed with cracks but intact.
Through it, Charlotte could make out the cab’s interior.
There were two firefighters. The driver was still behind the wheel, harnessed, his helmet askew.
The officer in the passenger seat had been thrown against the door during the roll, his body positioned at an angle that suggested the impact had been violent.
Both men wore turnout gear. Neither had moved in some time.
Charlotte looked away. The men had been responding when something stopped them.
The gas, most likely. Or the EMP that had killed their communications and their vehicle’s systems mid-response.
She circled the truck, keeping her distance from the cab.
She knew that fire trucks carried equipment, and that meant resources.
The rear doors were secured with a combination lock that had been engaged when the truck rolled.
Charlotte tested it. The mechanism was stiff but functional.
She worked the dial by feel, trying combinations at random because the correct one was knowledge the dead men in the cab had taken with them.
On the fifth attempt, something clicked.
The lock released, and the right-side door swung open with the groan of metal under stress.
Charlotte leaned in, one hand on the frame for balance, and let her eyes adjust. The compartment was organized the way emergency vehicles are always organized: tools in brackets, hoses coiled, everything in its designated place except what had been dislodged by the roll.
A first aid kit had spilled its contents across the floor.
A halogen lamp lay beside an oxygen tank.
Against the far wall, mounted on hooks, hung something that caught the late afternoon light through the open door.
It was yellow. Not the sick yellow of the haze but a bright, synthetic yellow, the color of industrial caution.
Fabric, thick and hooded, with a clear faceplate and gloves attached.
She immediately recognized it as a hazmat suit.
Next to it, on a wall-mounted shelf, sat a gas mask.
It wasn’t the same simple respirators Charlotte had seen volunteers wearing at the shelters, but it was something military-grade, with a filter canister and a sealed facepiece.
She stared at the suit and mask. The equipment was designed specifically for entering environments where the air would kill you.
Equipment that had, until that moment, existed only in the realm of things she needed and couldn’t have.
The fever receded beneath a wave of clarity so sharp it hurt.
Charlotte reached for the shelf, her bandaged hand stretching into the darkness of the compartment, and the world narrowed to the distance between her fingers and the mask.
For a moment, she didn’t move. Hope had become a dangerous reflex, something that rose only to be struck down by the next fact, the next body, the next locked door.
The mask sat inches away, heavy and intact, its straps neatly folded.
The suit hung beside it. Charlotte felt her pulse quicken despite the fever.
For the first time since Crestview Street, the contamination zone no longer seemed like an absolute barrier.