Dead & Gone

10

It was so hard to resist the temptation to open all three cans and have a feast, but that would be a bad choice. She gave it some thought, forcing herself to work it through before she took any action. That caution had kept her alive until now.

The meat would keep as long as the can stayed sealed and out of direct sunlight. To open it now, in this heat, without any means of keeping it cold, would mean that she would have to eat it within a day or so before it spoiled. The fruit, as much fun as it would be to taste something cool and sweet, had no protein.

The beans were the smarter choice. She could eat them throughout the day, and they would keep her going as she continued on toward the town.

It would mean leaving this place, and leaving whoever had left the food for her.

She half believed that it was one of the loners. There were a few of them even out here in the desert — people who could not abide company, who preferred the absolute stillness of a world on the brink of death. Most of the loners were crazy, and a lot of them were downright murderous. There were so many tales — not all of them tall — about loners who trapped unwary wanderers and killed them. Sometimes in order to loot their supplies. Sometimes to enforce their own isolation. And, if some of the tales were to be believed, because a lone traveler was a handy source of food.

It hurt the girl’s mind to think that anyone would turn to cannibalism in a world where everyone who died had been reborn as a flesh-eating monster. But the stories were there, and many of them were told by people who weren’t prone to exaggeration. That made them all the more frightening. These weren’t scary stories told in the dark to frighten children. These were firsthand accounts by hardened travelers who had nothing to gain by making up such tales.

Avoiding loners was a smart habit of anyone who traveled the wastelands.

And yet leaving her three cans of vittles was not an act of cruelty or hostility. Not unless the cans were tampered with or poisoned, and the girl had examined every inch of them under the stark light of the morning sun. No pinholes, no evidence that the cans had been opened and somehow resealed.

No, someone had given her the cans as an act of charity.

After weighing it all out and eliminating the risks, she took the can opener from her pack and carefully worked its sharp hook around the edge of the can of beans. She did it slowly, with great control, making sure not to spill a single drop of the sauce.

She set the lid aside and looked at the nutrition information on the can. High in protein, low in sodium. The first was a good thing; the latter wasn’t. Not in the desert, where the heat leached water from the body. Sodium helped retain water. Lots of iron, though, and she needed that.

Sitting in the shade of the Explorer she ate half the beans. Taking her time, chewing them one at a time, almost weeping from the wonderful taste. Licking the sauce from her fingers.

It took an incredible amount of willpower not to eat the whole can. Once she started, her mind conjured a hundred reasons why she should continue on and clean out every last bean, every last drop of rich red sauce.

“Don’t be a hog,” she told herself, speaking the words out loud. “Like as not we’ll be wanting those beans afore long.”

Her scolding voice sounded just a bit like her father’s, and that made her smile as she wrapped the can in the plastic she’d used to gather morning dew. It went into her pack along with the other cans.

She could already feel the effect of the food. When she pulled herself to her feet, there was strength in her legs. When she took a breath, she could feel her lungs fill all the way.

“I’m obliged to you,” she said aloud, but her voice didn’t seem to carry very far, so she used her finger to write a thank-you in the grime on the Explorer’s broad windshield.

Then she addressed the road that lay before her. She knew that she had a piece of work ahead of her. Today already held the promise of being hotter than yesterday. Hot enough to make rock soup, as her father used to say. The town was at least six miles ahead.

Now, though, she was sure she could make it.

She dug a scarf out of her backpack and tied it over her tattooed scalp.

Don’t want to boil what brains you got left, girl, she told herself.

Then she stepped out of the shade of the SUV and onto the road.

For the first four miles there was nothing but road and a few smashed cars on the shoulder, but none that held any surprises. She found a lot of bones along the way — mostly animal bones — but there were human skulls and rib cages mixed in. No way to tell how they died, but out here there was no shortage of things that would pick a juicy bone clean in no time. When she squinted and looked up into the sky, she saw a single vulture drifting on the thermals, maybe two thousand feet up. Was it the same starved buzzard who’d watched her from the wing of the plane?

“Not today, you ugly varmint,” she said.

The buzzard, pretending indifference to her, continued to circle above the road she walked.

Then the girl saw the tank.

It sat askew in the middle of a steel bridge that spanned a dry riverbed. The tank was massive, with a hull that was easily twenty-five feet long and a dozen feet wide, and it had been slewed around to completely block the two-lane bridge. The long cannon barrel pointed away from her, as did a heavy-caliber machine gun. The tank and the ground around it were littered with hundreds of empty shell casings that were pitted and rusted.

The tank was monstrous and looked like it was powerful enough to win any battle. And yet here it stood, empty, its sides stained with old smears that were probably once bright red.

She either had to climb over the tank or go down into the riverbed. The sides of the riverbank were very steep, though, and it would take a lot of sweaty effort under the pitiless sun to make that detour.

She walked sideways down the edge of the riverbank to see around the tank.

On the other side was a long line of wrecked cars and trucks, stretching off into the heat haze. Beyond them, she could see the purple silhouettes of buildings.

The town she’d seen on the map.

Nothing moved, though. No gray people. No reapers.

Nothing that she could see.

This was different from the jet; it wasn’t an enclosed, darkened death trap of a metal shell. If she got into trouble she had a fallback plan. She could run.

So, she climbed.

There were all sorts of metal fittings that were useful as handholds. It was hot, though. The first touch burned her fingers, and she whipped them away.

Well, I guess you ain’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, are you, girl?

There were pieces of cloth in her pack, and she dug them out and wrapped each of her hands. Burned hands were blunt survival tools, and she couldn’t allow that.

With her makeshift mittens in place, she grabbed a handhold on the tank and began to clamber upward. The tank was easy to scale, and once she was atop the big turret she paused. The machine gun was belt-fed, and there were still a dozen unfired rounds. The weapon was smeared with the dusty brown residue of old blood, and when she turned to examine the curved metal hatch that led down into the tank, there was a clear handprint. The gunner must have been badly hurt, perhaps bitten, when he’d deserted his gun and tried to escape.

She heard a faint moan.

That ain’t the wind, she thought.

The girl pulled her knife and froze, then tilted her head to try and locate the sound.

At first she thought it was behind her, but the road she’d walked was completely empty. Then she heard a faint rasping sound.

No, not rasping.

Scratching.

And then another soft moan.

It sounded so close, and yet there was no movement anywhere.

That’s when she realized where the sound was coming from.

The plaintive moan and the feeble scratches were below her.

The girl turned and looked at the hatch once more. The handprint was partially obscured by the closed lid, and she understood. The wounded, dying gunner had crawled back inside the tank and pulled the hatch shut. Down there in the darkness his wounds had killed him, and the plague that lived in everyone had brought him back.

“Gawd!” she gasped.

Revulsion filled her, and she gagged at the thought of that soldier, trapped in the iron kettle of the tank, cooked by a dozen summers of Nevada heat, kept alive by the plague. Below that hatch was some blackened nightmare thing, its nails scratching at the underside of the hatch, its hungers awakened by her presence on the turret, its mind consumed by disease and filled only with a need that could never be satisfied, not even if it somehow managed to feast on her. The hungry ghosts of this old world could never eat enough, never feed enough to assuage their monstrous appetites.

She backed sharply away from the hatch, fighting down the urge to throw up.

The horror of it was so great that she missed her footing and tumbled backward, twisting as she pitched off the tank and onto the unforgiving blacktop.

The girl had just enough time to turn her body, to position herself for the impact, as she had been taught in the Night Church. She landed hard, and the jolt drove all the air from her lungs, but nothing broke. However, her blade went tinkling away under a parked car.

“Laws a mercy, girl. You are dumber than a coal bucket,” she groaned.

For a long time she lay there, gasping for hot air, appalled at the image in her mind of that roasted creature scrabbling to escape its prison.

Pain washed through her in waves as she struggled to sit up. As she stood, the world took a lively sideways reel, and she had to slap her hands against the hood of the closest wrecked car for balance.

Screw your head on rightways round, she scolded herself.

She stayed there for a moment, waiting until the world stopped spinning. All she could see were cars that had been rammed into one another or blown to black skeletons by the tank. The scene was typical of many she’d seen, many that her father had interpreted for her. The cars were part of some mad exodus of refugees fleeing the growing armies of the dead. They probably thought that the vacant desert would be a haven, but this tank had been deployed to block the bridge. Maybe the soldiers thought that some of the people in the cars were already bitten, or that the fleeing civilians were smuggling out their dead or dying relatives. That sort of thing had happened a lot, she knew. Growing up, she’d heard countless tales about how people — crazed with fear and grief, confused by the collapse of their world — did insane things. One woman she knew, one of her mother’s personal servants in the Night Church, confessed that she’d carried her own two dead children out of Houston in the trunk of her car. Even though they thrashed and pounded on the trunk after she knew that they were stone dead, the woman had brought them all the way to Wyoming before electromagnetic pulses from the nukes dropped by the army on the major cities killed her car. The woman said that it took four grown men to pull her away from her car so the right thing could be done for her children.

Everyone had stories like that.

Her dad had said that it explained a lot of why the plague had spread farther and faster than it should have.

We killed ourselves, Dad had said. If we’d had a chance to adjust to what was happening, to study on it some, and to know which way to jump — why, then we might not have deviled it all up. But we panicked, and panic fair killed this world.

And laziness is going to kill you, girl, snapped her inner voice. You best collect your knife and your wits before you lose both.

“Knife,” she said aloud.

Moving carefully, she knelt down and fished under the nearest car for her knife, but it was too far away. So she stretched out on her stomach and half crawled into the darkness below, scrabbling at the weapon’s leather-wrapped handle, coaxing it into the curl of her fingers.

A sound made her freeze.

Scuffing sounds.

At first she saw nothing, and for a broken moment she wondered if she was only imagining the sounds.

Laws a mercy, no…

The unmistakable sound of clumsy feet moving uncertainly along the blacktop.

Not merely one set of feet.

Many.

And then the moans.