Chapter 1 #2
Traffic on both sides of the highway was headed south.
The man wondered if it was official or mob rule that had made that decision.
There were no corpses. Some of the car doors stood ajar, but those that did were propped open by another vehicle or stray debris.
The rest had been blown shut, the man assumed.
They must’ve all started to run. None of the windows were even broken.
How long were they stuck for? How bad could the traffic have been for them to get out and walk?
Ahead, the sky began to hemorrhage color.
The man checked his watch; the morning cries weren’t far off.
With no exit in sight and rural forest on both sides of the interstate, he began to peer into the cars and trucks, searching for a place to sleep.
Even if a Scorpion did come this way, it wouldn’t be able to sneak up.
He’d have eight lanes of tin-can noisemakers surrounding him.
But it didn’t take long for the man to realize that his earlier assumption had been wrong.
In one minivan, he saw a grotesque half skeleton, the details obscured by shadows, prone in the back seat.
A pus-stained blanket had fused to the corpse.
The man found a few others like it, the ones who must’ve chosen to hide while everyone else ran away. He refused to dwell on them.
The fact that their bodies remained and had not been eaten or used for any kind of incubation lent L.B.’s words even more credence. Nevertheless, the man decided that he wanted something without windows. The nearest big rig truck was his next target.
The massive vehicle had been hauling an unmarked container. The moment that the man’s hand pressed down on the locking latch and opened the cargo door, a sour stench seeped out into the lifting dusk. Inside were crates upon crates of produce and other groceries, most of them perishable.
Perished, actually.
He let the heavy metal door swing ajar behind him and headed for the next truck.
It was a dirty, used-to-be-white semi with New York plates.
The side panel bore the logo of a company the man vaguely remembered but didn’t care to try to recall.
The cargo doors required three solid shakes before the man was able to break them open.
Upon his third pull was a snap and he stumbled backward, nearly tumbling to the ground.
A wooden cane toppled to the asphalt, broken in two, followed by a shower of cardboard and paperwork.
Although the container had been locked from the inside, there was nothing of any apparent value within—just mountains upon mountains of boxes. Not strange, the man assured himself. Someone barricaded themselves in there until help came. There must be another exit.
But as he hoisted himself up, he didn’t see anything at first, his nose the only witness. A tinge of metal in the air. There! At the far end, only a shadow but there, the man could see a pile of boxes silhouetted against the back wall. A neatly stacked pyramid. A shape slumped at the bottom.
He groped for his flashlight and clicked it on.
The LEDs washed the dark cargo in a blinding white, the first light those boxes had seen in years. The source of the foul stench was immediately obvious: yet another half-rotted corpse at the foot of the cardboard mountain.
The man very much wanted to turn back now.
His nostrils had had enough decay for one night, and dawn was fast approaching.
Yet he was curious. It had taken all his courage just to leave the bunker, but this person appeared to be guarding something.
This person had a point. A purpose. Something so important that they had died for it.
The man hadn’t died for anything.
But there’s still time.
He reached over the body, his flashlight sending a small insectoid army scattering, and grabbed the box at the top of the pyramid. Expecting something grand, the man hurried back over to the mouth of the cargo container so he could examine its contents in the approaching light of dawn.
When he opened the box, it fell from his hands at once. The slips of paper within spilled out, each of them a shade of sterile green.
As the man walked away, he spat out his tobacco on the faces of dead presidents.
The third truck was just right. It was a U-Haul, and a big one at that.
The cargo latch was guarded by a heavy padlock, but the man found the key in one of the cupholders inside the unlocked cab.
This time, when he pulled open the cargo doors, the man was met with only pleasant aromas.
Fresh linens. Laundry detergent. Varnish.
Familiar traces of a time before. They’d faded, of course, but were present all the same.
It was a moving truck. A family’s worth of possessions crammed into thirty-some feet of cargo.
Most of it was boxed up or covered, but there were three bare mattresses stacked alongside one another.
The man waded in and tipped the mattresses back onto the clutter.
He then dusted off the one on top, cleared away a few odd trinkets that had spilled from boxes, and almost immediately passed out.
There were no dreams, at least none that he remembered.
The next night, after a Bic-lit breakfast of nuts and canned peaches inside the cab of the U-Haul, the man continued north.
Two or three miles up the interstate, he noticed a change in the abandoned cars.
More of them were piled up on the shoulders, as if they’d tried to go around something blocking their way.
Meanwhile, the four-lane, bumper-to-bumper traffic wasn’t nearly as orderly as before.
It looked like everyone had panicked. There were cars and trucks all over the place, facing in every possible direction, some even resting at the bottom of the grassy hill beyond the narrow shoulder.
As if they’d all tried to scatter at the same time.
The road was surprisingly clear in some places and totally logjammed in others.
Nearly every vehicle was damaged in one way or another.
Some of the fuel tanks had even blown, the surrounding asphalt singed with a sickly gray.
Up ahead, a passenger bus was toppled onto its side like a Hot Wheels miniature on a child’s bedroom floor. On the opposite side of the highway was a similarly impenetrable wall of wreckage in the form of a flipped-over semi, mirroring the violent pileups on either shoulder.
He approached the underbelly of the overturned bus, a jagged wall of rusting tanks and axles.
A nearby sedan, its bumper crumpled against the massive wreck, served as the perfect stepladder.
The man climbed onto its hood, grabbed hold of the tire floating a few feet above him, and hoisted himself up onto the bus’s side.
As he got to his feet atop the twisted metal and broken glass, the man realized what had become of the passenger vehicle.
Beginning at the first window and tearing across the entire length of the bus was a deep gouge.
From the high ground, he saw the same ragged tear on the moonward face of the trailer on the other side of the highway.
His stomach roiled. These were no random accidents spurred on by panic. This was an ambush. This was them.
The highway beyond the pileups confirmed his suspicions.
It was a wasteland, a brutal testament to humanity’s futility in the face of a new world order.
Military vehicles, tanks and helicopters and Humvees, sat dull and broken.
If the bus was a child’s forgotten toy, then the scene ahead was one perfected by a dog left home alone for too long; the entire landscape appeared chewed up, torn open, and spit out.
Craters speckled the debris. The nearby woods had been broken and burned…
bombed. Matchstick trees stared at him, their branches still blackened and bare.
The carnage stretched as far as he could see in the vast moonlight.
The man, abandoning the high ground, leapt down and landed on the highway with a gravelly crunk.
He bent over and picked up a chunk of torn asphalt, tossed it back and forth in his hands like a baseball before dropping it again.
His mind worked to pick up the pieces: Abandoned cars there, a war zone here, gashes on the bus.
These people were evacuating, and the Scorpions ambushed them.
Went for the two biggest vehicles they could find and brought them down as blockades, trapping everyone else.
Is that why most of the people farther south made a run for it?
Was the military buying them time? Counterattacking? Were they able to clear out the others?
It doesn’t really matter, though, does it? The only story left has been lost in the dust.
He walked on through the wreckage, treading carefully over the buckling asphalt. It wasn’t just the military that had been caught in the chaos. There were passenger and emergency service vehicles everywhere. Limos and lemons alike.
The man steered near the wooded shoulder to avoid a downed helicopter, whose rotor was bent at such a precarious angle that it looked as if it could guillotine toward the ground at any moment. Painted on the chopper’s side, he could just make out the familiar insignia of the Red Cross.
Farther down the hill, amid the tree line, the man could see even more cars. Moonlight sifted through the screen of foliage, spotlighting several vehicles that had been dragged away into the forest and dissected like helpless bugs.
After two or three more miles, the battlefield finally began to disperse.
The craters and shattered earth slowly shifted back to a more familiar landscape.
Highways and lush forest. Fewer cars, most of them unmarred.
The carnage behind him wasn’t even a thumbnail on a map.
A blip of destruction. An insignificant instance of obliteration. One of a billion.