Was it the booze? If the gang had been drunk since the outbreak, their synapses were probably ruined. Rotted out. Meth or whatever else they were using to fend off the disease wouldn’t help. Unable to transmit even the simplest thought. Fear. Fear was a disease all its own, able to infect individuals and crowds and bring them crashing to their knees. But these men knew nothing of it. They seemed immune. They’d embraced the disease. They’d embraced their own mortality. They laughed.

  This time, two men ran together. Alex shot the first, but wasn’t quick enough to hit the second. The man arrived on his side, swung a fist and caught Alex clean in the temple. He staggered back, only just holding on to the gun. A huge cheer erupted from the other men. This was sport, Alex realized. That’s why they weren’t afraid. They didn’t think this was real.

  The man who had hit Alex was jumping up and down on the spot, showboating, eliciting applause from the crowd. Then, he had his fists up, boxer style, and stepped in toward the duel. He was too close. No way to swing the rifle round, no way to keep a bead on him. Not while dodging punches at the same time.

  Alex tried to keep the gun raised but he was only blocking. A blow to the shoulder, one to the ribs. The man was picking him apart. No space to find a shot. No room. Another crack to the ribs. Don’t shoot him, he thought. Try something else.

  Shaping up to shoot, Alex welcomed in the punch. Here’s my face, he suggested, why not take a crack? The man obliged, swinging hard for the cheek. As the fist flew through the air, Alex stepped sideways and brought the rifle butt firmly up into the jaw. The man staggered, not expecting the counter. There was space. Alex shot him. Eight left.

  This time, Alex didn’t wait for them to move first. As soon as the bullet caught the dead man in the chest, the rifle was swinging around again. A person in the crosshairs. Close enough he barely had to aim. Pull the trigger, quick. Dead. Seven left. And another. Snap. Six left.

  Altogether, they realized that the sport was ruined. This wasn’t gladiatorial combat. Even in their drink-addled minds, the situation became clear. Alex had just wiped out half their number and they were next. They attacked at once.

  The trigger squeezed twice. Both shots flew up into empty air. Alex felt a hand try to grab his shoulder from behind and he leapt forward, into the path of another. Ducking under one fist, he fired the rifle again. It caught someone in the shoulder, then a fist landed in the small of his back. They laughed, but not like before.

  Alex kicked out, swinging a foot into a crowd of legs. As one fell, he smashed the rifle butt down on the stricken man’s nose. He was out. Might as well be five, now. Kneeing the man in the jaw for good measure, he turned back to the crowd.

  A punch knocked him backwards, a hand snatched the rifle away. Alex staggered and found himself pressed up against a rock. There were all five of them, arranged in a line. Breathing heavily. A drunken chase and a car crash, then watching their friends die in front of them. A difficult day for most people.

  “Listen, I don’t want to hurt anyone. I just want to get out. We want to get out. Please.”

  As Alex pleaded with the five encroaching men, one of them looked behind, turning his head up to the man who had been standing on top of one of the cars. No one there. He’d vanished. Between them, the gang members turned back to the one thing they knew for certain. This man had to be hurt.

  The rock face pressed up against Alex’s back. He was bleeding from his forehead; he could taste the trickle of blood which dribbled down into his mouth. The pain in his back was terrible, like the fist had reached through and smashed a kidney inside. The rifle was missing. There were five of them.

  A man screamed. The others turned. A dog, biting down on his calf, tearing. Alex didn’t look. No time. They were too close. Reaching to his hip, he pulled out the knife. Swung it at neck height. Caught one of them. Blood everywhere as the man sunk to his knees. The shower of blood sprinkled down on the rest of them. Alex danced forward. Four now.

  No one knew where to look. Finn was sneaking between legs, sinking his teeth into anything that looked like enemy flesh. That meant the men had two enemies to watch. The knife was swirling, cutting down and diagonal. It caught against arms, against shoulders, against spines. Not quite enough to take people out of the fight but enough to make them take notice.

  Finn dragged a man to the ground. Alex swung a foot, kicking him hard in the temple. Out cold. Three left, but they were scattered. One was now up against the rock where Alex had been trapped. Leave him there a moment. The other two were searching around, looking desperately. They wanted guidance. Their leader, that man from the top of the car, they couldn’t see him. Not anymore.

  Punching, Alex knocked the first to the ground, a blow to the neck and a jab to the chin. Lights out. The other ran, making straight for the trees. Let him go. Finn had the final gang member cornered up against the rock. Alex had a knife. Alex had questions.

  “Who the hell are you people?” he snarled to the man, reaching down to drag Finn back.

  Shivering, the man could barely speak. He wore the usual outfit. The black pants and the white vest, the same selection of prison tattoos, spread across the skin. A uniform.

  “I-I-I-I… I just did what I was told. Roque told us to block the road.”

  “Who’s Roque?”

  Alex already knew the answer.

  “I don’t know, man,” he whined, dragging out the syllables. “He just tell us what to do.”

  “And who tells Roque what to do?”

  “How the hell should I know? We were just sitting around, and then, you know, I don’t know man. You just do what people tell you, yeah?”

  Lifting the knife, Alex wanted answers. He leaned into the cornered man, pressing the knife point up against his belly.

  “Tell me what happened. Everything. Everything you know.”

  The man whimpered. Then his eyes widened, looking over Alex’s shoulder.

  “Roque, wait!” The desperation in his voice was clear. “I wasn’t going to tell him noth-”

  A shot rang out. Blood splattered against the rock. The man fell to the ground. None of them left, now. Apart from one. Alex turned around.

  Chapter 42

  The sun sat low, breaking a red haze across the tree-lined horizon. In the middle of the clearing, a man stood holding a woman, his arm wrapped around her shoulders and neck. Roque, Alex thought, that’s what the man shouted. That’s what Saul had said. The heavy man who’d been standing on the hood of a car. Now he had Joan by the throat, a flick knife pressing into her flesh.

  Joan had dropped her glasses. The light caught the hint of a tear pooling in her eye. Finn growled, sitting on his haunches, ears pricked. Alex ran a firm hand along the dog’s head, telling him to stay still. The animal obeyed; he knew the stakes. The stench of blood and fear hung in the air.

  “Drop the knife,” Roque shouted. “Throw it to the ground.”

  Alex obeyed. What option did he have? This wasn’t just Joan being held prisoner. It was the child inside her. Whoever this man was, whoever had sent him, he ruled the moment.

  “Let her go,” was all Alex could muster. “Let her go and we’ll leave peacefully.”

  Roque listened for a second, sniffed, and spat on the floor.

  “No peace anymore. No time to leave. She stays with me.”

  There were a few essential truths: Roque, if that was his name, had Joan. He had a knife. He had the height on Alex and he had the weight. He had a stance and an aura, no stranger to altercation. Alex, in every second, could feel the adrenaline thinning in his veins. He wasn’t built for this.

  For days and weeks now, he’d been endlessly propelled forward, crashing through the end of everything he knew with an interminable momentum. Only to find himself standing still, in a field, wishing he was anyone else. Just like being back in Virginia, he thought.

  One of the crashed cars burned. The acrid smell of burning paint drifted across the clearing, stealing a ride on the breeze that blew between the trees. The grass swayed. A bird sang, alone. This was a single moment, an instant: everything in all recorded history had arrived to this one second. The pinprick pressing down under the weight of all the world.

  The image of the empty warehouses. The sight of the lines at the ATM. The way the neon lights from Al’s diner blinded pedestrians and kept them hungry. The panic in the President’s voice as he lamented from aboard his private plane. The glacial eyes of the girl who’d caught them in the store. The sound of glass shattering as the stolen bikes rode off into the sunset. Joan stamping on his foot. Finn licking his face. Every memory whistled past the graveyard of Alex’s mind, making itself felt.

  There were decades where nothing happens and there were weeks where decades happen. The words floated up through the ether, arriving from some teenage sketchbook or motivational poster. Somewhere in the past. Back when everything was normal. When everything was boring. Alex had felt the decades of nothing, had seen them sidling by his whole life. A life lived in the last three weeks, all of it leading him here. The bird sang, still, alone.

  “You’re Roque?” Alex sent the question out into the world for lack of a better option.

  “You may have heard that.” Roque smiled. “But I couldn’t comment.”

  “What do we do? Where do we go from here?”

  “My friend, you really know nothing? There’s nowhere to go from here. Nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide. We’re all just waiting to die, in different ways.”

  Joan squirmed, struggled, pushed against her captor’s arms. But Roque held firm. From ten feet away, Alex could see the man’s arms were like girders: thick and inflexible. This was the closest he’d been to a gang member without having to fight for his life.

  The man’s upper lip quivered, Alex could see a dusting of white powder stuck to the skin. The eyes twitched. Roque smiled. There was no joy there.

  This close, the tattoos looked different. Less religious. More intricate. Under his neck, Roque had painted a dragon, drawn in the Chinese style and wrapped twice around his throat. The monster’s jaws opened wide just beneath the man’s chin, about to swallow his head whole. Every time he spoke, the dragon’s scales rippled.

  “We’re not going anywhere, you and me. Her,” Roque nodded his head to Joan, “she might come for a ride. But we got nowhere to go. Nothing to see. We’re at the end of the line for you.”

  “Just tell me why. Tell me who you are. Who were those people in Rockton?”

  The big man laughed.

  “Why would I tell you anything? You think this is a film? A story? Be quiet.”

  The end of the line. Roque’s words. Alex agreed. This was it. This was life now. Not sneaking his cell phone under his office desk, waiting to stamp a signature on pieces of paper he’d never see again. Not retiring each day to an empty apartment and listening to the distant sounds of Detroit trying to stitch itself back together. Not lamenting every single piece of Chinese technology he’d ever bought and relying on it at the same time. Everything that mattered was in this clearing. They had to get to Virginia to make it all count.

  The dog barked, Finn straining against his instruction. He’d picked up the paradigm pretty quickly, Alex thought. One moment he’d been locked in a room, topped up with enough food to get him so far, the next he was snapping at the tendons of gang members after a car chase along the freeway. Still just a puppy. A quick learner.

  “Joan, listen to me. It’s going to be fine. I’m going to get us out of this.”

  She tried to nod. The arm around her neck was too tight. Where was Timmy? Still out cold. With two of them, they could do something. Anything. People have plans. And people get punched in the face. A few weeks ago, a stray punch from a discontented vet in a disused warehouse was all Alex had to worry about. Freddy was probably dead now.

  The pistol sat on his hip. But it was holstered. Not just a reach away, but held in place by a button. By the time he’d unclipped everything and trained the barrel on to Roque, the blade would be dripping wet. Even then, he’d have to make the shot without hitting Joan.

  But what other option was there? Time had not just slowed down, it had almost stopped. There wasn’t really a notion of time anymore. Before, Alex had arranged his life based on his work or other people’s plans. There was none of that any more. The entire way he thought about the hours in a day had changed overnight. Changed for the better. Now, as he stood inside the atom of a moment and watched it turn from the inside out, time meant nothing. He had to act.

  To get the gun from his hip, Alex needed time. Time to move, time to act. He needed Joan. He had to remind her of what to do, how to help. But first, he needed Roque’s attention.

  “Roque, you know, I think I met a friend of yours?”

  “Oh yeah?” the man grumbled, uninterested. “What was his name?”

  “See, that’s the thing. There we were in the drug store. I’d met this swell girl there.” Alex tried to speak confidently, nonchalantly, trying to press any button he could, trying to convey a message to Joan at the same time. “What she did to me that day, boy, I wish I could show you right now.”

  Roque wasn’t watching. His eyes were trained on the cars, inspecting those which seemed most able to drive, still. Thinking about escape.

  “Yeah. I wish she could show you herself. Anyway, I met a guy there. Saul.”

  The name caught Roque’s attention. He tried to hide it. But it showed.

  “I don’t know no Saul,” he muttered. Not looking at the cars anymore. Only looking at Alex.

  “Met him in the drug store. He didn’t like me. Reminded me of you. We had a fight. He’s still down at the bottom of the basement steps. Wonder if the rats have got to him yet?”

  “Why, you son of a b-”

  The anger boiled up in Roque like the screech of a steam whistle. Joan stamped down on his foot. Alex’s hand already had the holster unbuckled, brought the Glock up to eye level, looking down the barrel.

  Roque shouted in agony. Turning back to Alex, he threw Joan to the ground, running forward with the knife. One shot. The trigger clicked. The hammer dropped. The firing pin hit into the primer. The powder caught. Everything inside burned. The pressure shot up. The bullet found itself riding the wave of an explosion, spinning and hurtling through the barrel, out of the muzzle, and slicing through the air.

  It hit cloth, then flesh, then bone and buried itself in the chest of the charging man. Alex stood still, arm raised, gun smoking, and the breeze caught between the last remaining leaves of the fall tress. The grass rustled. The dog whimpered. Roque writhed around on the ground like a worm caught beneath a baking sun.

  Alex ran to Joan first. She was bundled on the ground, her knees up as far as they could muster against her belly, her arms locked round in a protective loop. Finn sniffed at her hair and licked her ear.

  “Joan? Joan? Are you okay, is everything fine?”

  She looked up. A thin trickle of blood was drooling down her neck. The knife had caught her. Joan waved her hands, pointing to Roque.

  “Don’t worry about me, get him, stop him!”

  The black clothes were stained with a deep brown blood. The color spread across Roque’s chest as he tried to prop himself up from the clearing floor. Handfuls of dirt and nothing else. Alex stood over the man, holding the gun.

  “Help me,” Roque muttered, dying. “You got to help me.”

  “Tell me who you work for. Tell me who sent you. Tell me everything.”

  As Roque laughed, blood seeped up and between his teeth.

  “No time. No time for that.”

  And he laughed again, each sound softer and softer until, at last, silence arrived back in the clearing. Not even the bird sang. The breeze didn’t dare to blow. Just Alex and the world, quiet together.

  Chapter 43

  Alex Early felt the weight of the gun in his hand, felt the weight of the arm hanging in the air, and felt the weight of the heavy sky as day turned to night. He searched around the clearing, but no man moved to hurt him or his friends. Safe. Free.

  As the last of the light left over the horizon, he left the body lying on the ground. Nothing more to be gained from asking questions to a dead man. The dead don’t have a way with words, he thought, and now we’ve got more dead men than we know what to do with. Best to let them lie.

  Holstering the handgun, he went to check with Joan. She was standing, picking with a finger at the fine line of blood scratched across her neck. A ring of crimson pearls. Nothing too deep. As he helped her steady, helped her breathe again, she left her arm hanging over his shoulders. Support.

  With her, the dog seemed pleased. The tail swept from side to side, taking the hips with it. Finn with his fine nose could ignore the deluge of sweat and smoke and bodies that drowned out every sense. Alex had no such luck.

  His heart slowing, his friend standing by herself, he began to notice the thick, dank fug which settled over the forest clearing. His stomach revolted, churning up a thin gruel which he coughed up onto the grass. All bile and adrenaline and memories. Not the start of a sickness, he hoped.

  They found Timmy still unconscious in the car. Out cold, as diagnosed by the nurse, but more a result of the heady cocktail of medicines and viruses he’d endured over the past weeks. They dragged him into the fresh air, laid him comfortably down, and brought him back to the cruelty of the world.

  “I had plenty of dreams,” he admitted. “I can’t believe I missed all the fun again.”

  There was nothing left to do but laugh. Pure hysteria, a breakdown in the thought process, the reveries of the world offering nothing else but the utmost absurdity. They told Timmy what had happened, covered every movement and action in the most minute of details and then understood where they were, once more.

  Surrounded by the dead. The mysterious dead. Once Timmy could stand and walk, perhaps half an hour later, they began to search through the belongings of the gang members. They began with the cars, the stripped-out SUVs, the Jeeps which had chased them down and through the forest.

 

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