Devil’s Wake (7 page)

And he couldn’t get a damn Internet connection.

Piranha didn’t like his stepfather, Ed Simmons, with his Brooks Brothers suits and pomposity. He’d
hated
Ed Simmons when he filed charges after the hacking incident—who would send his own stepkid into the jaws of the criminal justice machine? Yeah, Piranha had hacked into the computer system at Simmons’s office and embarrassed him in front of his boss, maybe lost him a little corporate cred, but you call the
cops
? Piranha’s rage flared anew. But since his older sister was married and living in Dallas, Ed Simmons was the only person who could give Piranha an answer about what to do now.
He’ll never replace your father, Charlie,
his mother had told him when they got married,
but Edward Simmons will always be there for you.

So Piranha sat at the old laptop he’d found in the office nook of the abandoned house and tried again. And again. He hoped the servers were only flooded, not blown.

At one a.m., he nearly gasped when the Gmail logo finally appeared on his screen. His mind tried to blank out on his screen name
and password, but he typed with shaky fingers, careful with each letter, and his mailbox presented itself like a hallucination. A note from “Edward Simmons,” the latest in a string of at least twelve from his stepfather, sat at the top of his list. The time stamp said it had been sent only thirty minutes earlier. Ed was alive! And he was the only person on the planet trying to get in touch with him, just like his mother had promised. Maybe the SOB wasn’t all bad.

Piranha held his breath as he tried to open the most recent note. “Please, God, I know I haven’t done right by you, but let me have this one thing…”

Working,
the screen promised.

Except that it
wasn’t
working, or didn’t seem to be. For ten eternal minutes, Piranha was sure the overloaded server would boot him off and ask him to try again, severing the last bare thread of his life.

Suddenly, the note was there:

Charles,

I remember you telling me you don’t have access to a computer, but I’m praying you’ll see this note. I can’t reach you on your cell. I’m trying to send the same note again and again.

You must have heard by now, but there’s a terrible national crisis, an epidemic of a kind of hysteria and insanity involving an infection from people who may try to bite you. A single bite spreads the terrible disease. I have not been bitten, and neither has Lori. I heard from her, and she and Tyrone are staying with friends in Dallas. So far, she is safe, and I pray you are too.

May God protect you in the woods, far from anyone who might try to hurt you. PLEASE DO NOT TRY TO COME TO ME, because it’s too dangerous and I don’t know how long we’ll stay here. So far, we’ve avoided contact with any infected, but the radio keeps warning us that we’ll be asked to evacuate and go to a camp near the military bases if the situation doesn’t im
prove.

Charles, we are living through a war. Neighbor against neighbor. I’ve seen things on TV, and with my own eyes, I cannot describe in words. I keep thinking of that quote by Nietzsche: “He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he become a monster.” These are the days of monsters.

ONCE IT IS SAFE, I WILL COME TO YOU.

Until then, be careful. Watch everyone for abnormal behavior and red eyes, friends and strangers alike. DO NOT LET ANYONE BITE YOU. Wait for me to come for you. Above all, SURVIVE. I’ve lain awake many nights wondering if I did the right thing by sending you there, what your mother would have thought. I believed I saw you headed down a path of no return, and I made the hard choice, praying you would be a better man for it. I lost two brothers in prison because no one stepped in when they were young, and I didn’t think I could live through that heartache again. This is the first time I’m glad you’re tucked far away in wilderness. You have no idea how much weight has been lifted from my soul.

I love you, Charles. I look forward to the day when we can start again.

Dad

The note stayed frozen on Piranha’s screen long after the connection died.

Dad.
Not Ed.
Dad.

Piranha was glad the others had left him, because sobs fought from his throat like flames.

Vern banged on the freezer door all night and most of the next day.

On the third morning, they woke to silence. When they finally opened the freezer, blankets readied like fishing nets, Vern was curled on the floor, silent and cold in a slick of frozen blood. His banging had pulped his face so badly that even Jolly Molly wouldn’t have recognized it.

Even working together, it took two hours to dig holes deep enough to bury Vern and Molly Stoffer, two people they barely knew. They’d waited a day too long to bury Molly. At least. Her stink was a revelation. Even Hippy stayed far away.

Nobody said anything over the graves. What could they say? They were burying far more than Vern and Molly, and there were no words to describe what they had lost.

August 15

T
he
morning after burying Vern and Molly, they woke to discover that Dean and his cherry-red Honda were gone. Darius raged about it, calling his cousin every profane name he could think of, but Terry got it: Dean hadn’t wanted to risk anyone else’s life. He must have rolled his bike far enough down the path to prevent them from hearing the engine.

They finally found a note on the kitchen counter, meant for Darius more than anyone else:
Have to check on my folks. Stay safe. Still Here.

No promise to return.

The last part,
Still Here,
probably meant he was still with them in spirit, but it was a slogan they’d seen on the news. People were spray-painting it on their houses and rooftops in case rescuers came to evacuate them, or scrawling it in big letters on signs and T-shirts so no one would mistake them for a freak and shoot them while they walked on the side of the road. Caravans of pickup trucks with armed riders were patrolling some areas, spraying anything that moved with bullets.
Still Here
meant you hadn’t been infected. Hadn’t turned into one of Them. Wouldn’t give up. Sometimes it wasn’t true, of course. No declarations or signs could change what was happening out there,
the bodies piling up on the roadsides. Terry had seen footage of burned-out houses, their front yards littered with dead.

They took quiet bets on whether Darius would follow his cousin, but he didn’t. Darius slipped into the woods to be alone, but he left his bike in the shed. He was back by lunchtime, his eyelids swollen and his knuckles raw from hitting something. Trees? The soil? They accepted his return without comment, and ate canned ravioli.

“Dean is smart, and he’s fast on that bike,” Terry told him. “He’ll be fine.”

He was both right and wrong.

Two days later, Dean came back without a scratch or a bite. But whatever he’d seen had changed his eyes, not red like Vern’s, just stripped blank. He wasn’t fine.

It didn’t take a psychic to know that none of them would be fine again.

Camp Round Meadows, once a prison, had transformed into the
closest thing to a safe haven they could imagine. The only path to the camp was two miles of a bumpy dirt road most people would want nothing to do with. Since Vern had been preparing for fifty new campers, there was an obscene amount of food for the five of them, as long as they didn’t waste it.

They avoided the freezer the first days after Vern died, but exploring paid off: the shelves were crowded with ground beef, hot dogs, bags of chicken legs, corn on the cob, Fudgesicles, and, of course, fish. Vern must not have left the door or thought about food while he was locked inside, because none of the packages had been marked or moved from their neat stacks. Terry and the others debated how sanitary the space was, whether or not the infection might have spread in the freezer, but in the end, they chose the food. Chef Boyardee’s mustache was starting to wilt.

They lost their milk fast, within a week. The bread was gone before that, except for the hot dog and burger buns, which apparently were so crammed with preservatives that they could sit forever without molding. They froze buns to defrost later.

The television went to emergency broadcasting, and that devolved to frightened people talking against blank backgrounds, and from there to test patterns with intermittent static-filled footage. As television faded, Terry felt an eerie sense that they were lifting off in a balloon far from the world, floating aimlessly into the sky.

The radio was a little better, thank God. FM died fast, but AM radio kept broadcasting for a month, with signals coming in from Moscow, Idaho, and Vancouver, British Columbia. It was all the same, increasing despair and confusion. After the news stations died, most of what they could pull in was that movie guy, who called himself Reverend Wales, or “Josey” Wales, based in some place called Domino Falls down in Northern California. Preached an end-of-the-world broadcast with a new and impressive enthusiasm.

Hell, it was hard not to see his point.

As fall stretched on, they finally caught an emergency radio broadcast from a man whose voice sounded like sugarcoated panic. He congratulated anyone listening for holding out, and advised them to report to the Seattle National Guard armory.

“Power in numbers!” he preached. “We
can
rebuild, but we need your help!”

It was the first time anyone had offered a solution.

By then, the rains had started up again, night fell sooner, and all of them were long past ready for a change… even if they were afraid
to go.

Dean suggested a Council meeting the way his ancestors had made important decisions, so they built a rousing campfire and sat in a circle around flames that painted their faces golden orange. The cons, eloquently argued by Sonia and Dean, were obvious: The Outside was a hellhole. What if they got ambushed? Rape and murder were rampant, unchecked by authorities. What if they could never find another secluded place to hide from the chaos?

Piranha and Darius were equally passionate about the pros: They couldn’t hide forever. They were bound to get raided eventually, and it was better to leave before they exhausted their food. They could take the old school bus in the shed and bring enough supplies to barter and survive.
And they had to find more guns,
or they were done.

On that last point, no one could argue.

Terry suggested that they put off the final vote until morning, so they could all think it over in the quiet of the dark.

Fate decided for them: by morning, scattered reports on the radio hinted that the fledgling Seattle encampment had been overrun by freaks.

Terry tried to feel disappointment just to feel something, but he didn’t feel anything. He’d always suspected the Seattle National Guard armory would be a version of Dorothy’s Oz—a whole lot of hype that boiled down to doing it your own damned self. Still, he searched Vern’s house until he found the keys to the Blue Beauty, the Blue Bird Vision school bus, in a kitchen drawer and started driving the big monster, warming up the engine to keep the battery alive, navigating past the trees to learn the hang of the steering. He hoped he would never need to drive the Blue Beauty if it mattered, but he figured he’d better turn the engine over every few days, just to keep it honest.

A week later, the power sputtered off. Vern’s generator wasn’t powerful enough to run the fridge, much less the freezer. The frozen food began to rot. That left the cans: mostly tuna, salty veggies, and
SpaghettiOs.

By early December the days were short, the sky misted, and the rain was ice water. Winter was coming, and with it the possibility of being snowed in. The threat of winter finally convinced them to take another vote—to try to reach Portland, Oregon, this time, about six hours’ drive south under normal conditions. The newest Oz. In Portland, the emergency broadcast promised, there was a functioning compound protected by National Guardsmen.

They didn’t need a campfire Council this time. As soon as they heard about the possibilities in Portland, they knew they had no choice. No one argued against it.

They spent a day fitting the snowplow to the front of the Blue Beauty, stocked it with their remaining food, water, and gas, and planned to pull out at first light. Hipshot didn’t sleep with them that night, as if he knew what was up.

At dawn, it took a while to find the pooch. He had hunkered down on the Stoffers’ shallow grave behind the house, soaked and shaking. Despite their whistles, clapping, and cooing, Hipshot wouldn’t budge.

“Leave him,” Darius said. “Just another mouth to feed.”

“No way,” Sonia said. “At least he’s some protection.”

“Protection how?” Darius said. “Where was he when Vern jumped us?”

“Under my bed,” Piranha said. “Whimpering.” Sonia gave Hipshot a sour look, as if she felt betrayed. Piranha and Sonia sometimes went off alone, but he usually didn’t sleep in her bunk, even without Vern to keep them apart. They had all been sharing the main bunkhouse.

“But he can sniff out freaks,” Terry reminded them. “He smelled it on Vern from the minute we brought him back. Before Vern went all Cujo.”

They decided to bring Hipshot whether he wanted to go or not.

But they didn’t have to force him. Hippy rose unsteadily to his feet, shook the mud and rain from his shaggy black coat, and climbed
slowly into the bus.

The dog’s head hung as if he had failed his humans.

Be careful when you fight monsters, lest you become one.

—FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

December 15

J
ellyfish.
That’s what they look like at first, wispy reddish tendrils floating in blackness. A few at first, but then a nest of them waft down in the dark with a reddish glow, like dawn, growing brighter as they drift like snowfall.

They are everywhere now, like a spider’s web. No, not jellyfish.