Chapter 1 The Road West #2
Dane breathed out through his nose. Then, moving slowly, he tucked the shotgun under one arm and pulled back his cuffs. His forearms were scarred, sun-browned, unbitten. He turned them over once, like meat at a butcher counter.
The woman appeared from behind the ambulance.
She was shorter than he expected and carried herself like someone taller. Dark hair tied back. Raincoat over blood-stained scrubs. Her pistol was not pointed at his head but at the center of his chest, which told Dane she had either training or sense. Maybe both.
“You alone?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“You hesitate before answering that next time, I shoot your tire.”
“I didn’t hesitate.”
“You thought about lying.”
Dane gave her a tired look.
“I think about a lot of things. Keeps me sharp.”
Her eyes flicked to the pharmacy bag on his shoulder.
“You have antibiotics in there?”
“Some.”
“Bring them inside.”
“No.”
Her mouth tightened.
“There’s a man dying in here.”
“There are a lot of those.”
“And a child.”
Dane hated her for saying it like that, not because it was unfair but because it worked. He looked past her, through the broken glass doors, into the dim waiting room where a shape moved behind a barricade of chairs and filing cabinets. Small. Thin. Watching.
The woman saw the moment his attention changed.
“My name is Rosa Venn,” she said. “I was an EMT before that stopped meaning anything. Dr. Quist is inside. He’s the one who rang the bell. He asked for a truck.”
Dane’s fingers flexed on the shotgun.
“Did he ask for me by name?”
“He asked for anyone who still had enough engine to leave town.”
“Then I’m not special.”
“No. But your truck is.”
That was honest enough to be dangerous.
Dane looked back down the street. Still nothing, but the pharmacy shot had gone out into the rain and bounced off every empty wall in Sallow Creek. The infected did not always come at once. Sometimes they gathered like weather.
“I’ll hand you the medicine,” he said. “Then I’m gone.”
Rosa lowered the pistol a fraction, not enough to be friendly.
“He said you’d say that.”
“He doesn’t know me.”
“He knows men with trucks.”
The waiting room smelled of bleach, blood, and old coffee.
Someone had tried hard to keep it clean after cleanliness stopped being a thing the world rewarded.
Plastic sheeting covered the broken front doors from the inside.
Chairs were stacked into barricades. A map of the county hung on one wall, marked with red Xs and black arrows.
On the reception counter sat a portable radio, a lantern, two empty soup cans filled with spent brass, and a framed photo of clinic staff at a summer picnic, all of them smiling under a sky so blue it looked obscene.
The child stood near the hall.
Not hidden. Not exactly. She had placed herself where she could see the door and the hallway both, ready to run in either direction.
Fourteen, maybe. Brown skin gone pale from too many days indoors.
Hair cut unevenly at her chin, likely with medical scissors.
She wore a man’s flannel shirt over leggings and held a tire iron in both hands.
Her eyes settled on Dane’s shotgun, then on his face.
“You’re not army,” she said.
“No.”
“Good.”
Dane almost smiled, but it came out wrong and died before reaching his mouth.
Rosa shut the door behind him and dragged a filing cabinet back into place with a scraping groan.
“Don’t point that at Nell,” she said.
“I wasn’t.”
“You were thinking about where everyone was standing.”
“That’s different.”
The girl’s chin lifted.
“I’m Nell.”
“Dane.”
“I know. He said.”
Dane looked toward the hall.
“He who?”
An old man answered from somewhere deeper in the clinic.
“The fellow bleeding on my exam table, Mr. Whitlock. Come in before I change my mind and die without being a nuisance.”
Dr. Harlan Quist had the dry, papery voice of a man who had spent his whole life telling people things they did not want to hear.
He lay half-upright on an exam table under a plaid blanket, skin the color of candle wax, white hair pasted to his forehead.
His left sleeve had been cut away. A bandage covered most of his forearm, but blood had soaked through in a brown-red bloom.
Not a bite, Dane noticed first.
A gunshot wound.
Quist noticed him noticing and smiled faintly.
“That expression is why I asked Rosa to let you in instead of shooting you from behind the ambulance. You look at the wound before the face.”
“Faces lie,” Dane said.
“Constantly.”
Rosa set the duffel on the counter and began sorting through the supplies with controlled urgency. Nell remained in the doorway, tire iron lowered now but not forgotten.
Dane stood just inside the room, keeping his back near the wall. Exam-room wallpaper showed faded cartoon animals reminding children to wash their hands. Someone had taped newspaper over the window. Rain pressed against it with soft fingers.
Quist nodded toward him.
“You drove for Bremer Cold Freight. Mostly western routes.”
Dane said nothing.
“Your truck has their old fleet plate bracket. You used to stop at the Sallow Creek diner for black coffee and pie you pretended not to like. You once helped Marion Fitch change a tire in January and refused twenty dollars for it.”
Dane stared at him.
“Small towns have memories,” Quist said. “Even when they shouldn’t.”
“I don’t remember you.”
“I was the man at the next booth pretending not to listen.”
“That’s comforting.”
“It shouldn’t be.”
Rosa tore open a packet of gauze with her teeth.
“Harlan, stop circling it.”
“Rosa believes death should make a man efficient,” Quist said.
“I believe blood loss should.”
Dane looked at the old doctor’s wound again.
“Who shot you?”
“Men calling themselves Milemen. They came yesterday. Asked what we had. Asked who we had. Asked whether any of our patients had survived infection longer than forty-eight hours.”
Nell’s fingers tightened around the tire iron.
Dane did not look at her. He kept his eyes on Quist because children deserved the mercy of not being studied in the moment adults discussed their value.
“What did you tell them?” Dane asked.
“That my patients were dead, my medicine gone, and my opinion of road gangs unprintable.”
Rosa pressed fresh gauze down harder than necessary.
“He told them to go to hell.”
“Rosa is paraphrasing with admirable restraint,” Quist said, and then pain caught his breath. His face folded inward for a moment, all the humor draining away. When he opened his eyes again, they were wet but clear. “They’ll come back.”
“Then leave.”
“That is the idea.”
Dane shook his head once.
“No.”
Rosa looked up.
“You haven’t heard what he’s asking.”
“I heard enough when the bell rang.”
Quist gave a small nod, as if Dane had confirmed something useful.
“Harbor Nine,” he said.
The name hit the room differently than the others.
Rosa’s hands stilled. Nell looked away. Dane had heard it on shortwave two nights ago, the signal weak and wandering under static: Pacific refuge maintaining quarantine, medical research ongoing, controlled entry at coastal perimeter, Harbor Nine remains operational.
It might have been real. It might have been bait.
The end of the world had taught people to manufacture hope the way they once made counterfeit bills.
“That’s a story,” Dane said.
“It is a place.”
“It’s two thousand miles from here.”
“Roughly.”
“Through Denver, the mountains, Utah dead zones, Nevada heat, and half the dead in America.”
“Not half,” Quist said. “Population density makes that unlikely.”
Dane stared at him.
The old man sighed.
“Yes. I know. This is not the moment for statistics.”
Rosa zipped part of the duffel with more force than needed.
“Nell has to get there.”
Nell’s face closed.
“I’m standing right here.”
“I know,” Rosa said, softer.
“No, you keep talking like I’m in a jar.”
Quist turned his head toward the girl.
“My apologies.”
“You say that every time.”
“Because I am wrong every time.”
The girl looked as if she wanted to keep being angry and could not find a clean place to put it. Dane knew that feeling. Anger required a future. Otherwise it just circled inside the ribs and burned whatever it found.
Quist raised a trembling hand toward the counter. Rosa hesitated, then opened a metal medical cooler about the size of a lunchbox. Inside, packed between fading cold packs, were six sealed vials in foam slots and a black hard drive wrapped in plastic.
“This is not a cure,” Quist said before Dane could speak.
“No one honest would use that word yet. It is a blood-derived stabilizing serum based on Nell’s immune response and three weeks of work done by people cleverer than I am, most of whom are now dead. The data is in the drive. The living key is Nell.
Harbor Nine has the laboratory infrastructure to replicate the process, test it, improve it, or prove us fools.”
Dane looked at the cooler.
It was too small to be the weight of the world. That seemed unfair.
“Send it by radio.”
“Data, perhaps. Blood, no. And we tried. The uplink failed four days ago.”
“Then find another driver.”
Rosa gave a short laugh.
“We’re taking applications from the crowd outside.”
Dane turned toward her.
“I’m not your man.”
“You keep saying that like we nominated you for mayor.”
“I have one truck, three guns, and not enough ammunition to feel stupid on purpose.”
Quist’s mouth twitched.
“How much ammunition would you require to feel stupid on purpose?”
“More than exists.”
Nell made a sound that might have become a laugh if she trusted it. Dane glanced at her despite himself. The girl looked away too quickly.
Rosa stepped closer, her voice lowering.
“Listen to me. I don’t care if you’re brave. Brave people have gotten almost everyone killed. I care that you know roads, you know trucks, and you came into town alone without making enough noise to wake the whole county. That puts you ahead of every other option we have.”
“You don’t know what I’ve done.”
“I know you came when the bell rang.”
Dane had no answer for that, which irritated him more than her pistol had.
From somewhere outside, faint through the rain and plastic sheeting, came a long, wavering moan.
Everyone in the room went still.
Another answered it.
Then a third.