Hitchers (6 page)

When I reached the roadblocks at Baker Street I turned and drove along the perimeter, scanning the sidewalks, until I spotted a box sitting on a low concrete wall. Masks. I parked, plucked a mask out of the box as I went by, and slipped it on. It fit snugly over the bottom half of my face, made me feel both anonymous and oddly powerful. No anthrax spores could touch me now. I put my head down and walked, watching the frenetic activity out of the corners of my eyes.

People in uniform were everywhere, shouting orders, clomping
boots, flashing lights. I spotted a police officer moving to intercept me. I kept my head down, tried to look like I belonged.

“Where you headed?” she asked. She had braided hair and reminded me of Whoopi Goldberg.

“I live on Auburn Avenue.” I swallowed, my casual expression falling away for an instant to reveal the scared boy underneath. “My wife is all alone; I was away at a conference and I have to get back to her.”

She nodded, took my elbow and propelled me gently. “Get inside once you're home, and stay inside.”

“I will. Thank you.” I kept moving.

A block further a big canopy had been erected. Medics and doctors in white scrubs were moving among victims in cots. Screams of pain ripped the air; a raised syringe caught the light. I half-closed my eyes, willing myself to walk faster. I wanted to run, but didn't want someone with a gun to mistake me for a looter.

Down the street I spotted white bags piled in a heap. They looked to be trash, but as I got closer I realized they were body bags. I crossed the street to avoid getting too close, but couldn't help staring at them as I passed. It was hard to wrap my mind around it; those were people, dead, in a pile. According to the news they were just the tip of the iceberg.

I desperately wanted to get out of there and climb back into bed. I was so sore, so achy. I'd always thought Atlanta was a striking city, but today I felt like I was walking in an enormous tomb, the buildings blackened by the soot of a billion tailpipes, a million grey gum-smears mottling its sidewalks.

The glass door to a high-rise swung open; a woman in a black coat guided a young girl out.

“Excuse me,” the woman called. I kept my head down and hurried on, pretending I didn't hear. I wasn't afraid to catch anthrax—on the news they'd made it clear it wasn't contagious. You picked up or inhaled spores, and they could be anywhere. I just didn't want to get waylaid from reaching Annie.

“Hello? Can you help us?”

I stopped, turned. The young girl was wheezing, her eyes ringed in red and her nose running. She was wearing a pink
Dora the Explorer
jacket.

“She's sick,” the woman said. “On the news I saw big tents with doctors—do you know where I can find one?”

I pointed back down Courtland. “I passed one about three blocks down. You can't miss it.”

She thanked me more profusely than my stingy help deserved. I wished her luck and hurried on, watching my sneakers—white blurs flitting in and out of my narrow field of vision.

My damned throat seized again, like it had in the shower, and my first thought—laced with a jolt of fear-induced adrenaline—was that it was the first whispers of an anthrax infection. I hadn't heard anything about throat clenching as an early symptom, though, only a sore throat, and mine wasn't sore.

I spotted Annie's building and quickened my pace, suddenly filled with a sense of urgency.

Annie lived on the third floor of a brown brick walk-up. My muscles screaming, I took the steps three at a time, huffing from the exertion, the scratchy mask pressing against my lips on the inbreath.

Annie didn't answer the door. She could be out getting food, or looking for help. I weighed my options. I didn't relish the thought of sitting in the hall, and if Annie was inside and too sick to answer, I wasn't doing her any good in the hall.

I'd never knocked in a door before. After making sure the hall was empty I tried kicking it. After seven or eight fruitless kicks I tried ramming it with my lowered shoulder. When I hit the door, pain lanced up my neck, but I felt the door rattle. I tried again, and this time heard a splintering crunch. It swung open on my third attempt.

Annie was lying on the couch, curled on her side.

“Annie?” I knew she wouldn't answer. If she hadn't heard me
break in the door, she was beyond answering.

There was an empty bottle of Valium on the coffee table, and a note.

E
xhausted from dealing with the police and emergency management, from six hours in the crush of traffic heading out of the city, I stayed in my apartment and watched the news for the next few days. There were people sick in dozens of U.S. cities, plus London, Cape Town, Hong Kong, the list went on.

People in what looked like space suits were spraying the subways, MARTA stations, and the surfaces all around the hardest-hit stations. But the spores had been carried all over the city and beyond, on the wind, tires, the soles of shoes. They couldn't scrub it all.

Footage of army engineers using bulldozers to plow up the big field in Chastain Park played on all the news channels. They were digging mass graves—big enough to bury half a million people.

When the guy in the hazard suit had taken Annie from my arms, while another took down her name and address, they assured me they'd take good care of her. I knew they were lying, but I also knew they weren't going to let me put her in the back seat of my car and drive away.

I
sipped tea with gobs of honey, my mom's suggestion for relaxing the spasms in my throat. It hadn't worked so far, but it tasted good.

On TV, the Wolfman was strangling a remarkably well-dressed young woman in a fog-laden forest. The hero, waving a silver-tipped walking stick, rushed to save her.

The problem with the original version of
The Wolfman
was that the Wolfman was too cute. With that blow-dried bouffant hair and puppy nose you wanted to hug him, not flee in terror. Come to think of it, how much of Wolfie was conjured from my memories of The Wolfman? I hadn't done it consciously, but the similarities were hard to miss.

I felt frozen to the couch. No way I could concentrate on work, or on a book, on anything really. I'd be a fool to go out needlessly, but that was all right, because the thought of putting on shoes and a coat and walking outside was more than I could even contemplate.

I turned back to the news.

The dead looked like giant cocooned larvae as they were bulldozed into the burial pit. One of those bags, or one just like them, held Annie, and Dave, and Dave's wife Karen.

On day three the military had begun setting up food banks, and now, on day seven, everyone in the affected area was getting enough to eat. There was no formal quarantine, because the spores had quickly spread beyond any feasible protection zone, but no one was coming into the city voluntarily. So far I'd kept my mother from driving in from Arizona by calling three or four times a day with updates on how well I was doing.

Now the worst seemed to be over. Anthrax spores were still out there, but the number of deaths had dropped off dramatically in the past forty-eight hours.

I dropped the TV remote on the couch and looked for something to distract me. My photo album lay on the coffee table, open to the page of pics from the rock climbing trip Dave Bash and I had taken after high school graduation. Dave had been my best friend back then, and, though it had been about a month since I last talked to him, he'd still been when he died. Or maybe he and Annie had been tied.

There was a photo of Dave dangling from the safety line, looking chagrined after a fall; another of me in my stupid hat with the Velcro flap, about to start a climb. We had such a ball on that trip.

I closed the album. I shouldn't have let a month go by without calling Dave. Now it was too late.

It wasn't fair. I'd already suffered my losses.

I pressed my palm to the photo album, got up and wandered into my studio. The thought of working made me want to scream. Five or six more days and we would be at code red—the syndicate would be out of strips. Typically they liked to have an eight-week cushion; I was trying their patience, to say the least.

When I first got control of the strip Cathy Guisewite warned me that coming up with a strip each and every day was more difficult than I thought. Add to that the prospect of creating something
funny while thousands of bodies were being bulldozed into mass graves in Central Park, and you had the perfect storm. Steve said
Toy Shop
was more popular than ever, that the new look was catching on in a big way. It would be a shame to start printing reruns.

I threw on a coat, went downstairs, through the empty drive-in snack bar, and pushed through the big swinging doors that led outside.

There was a layer of thin snow on the benches surrounding the empty bumper boats lagoon. I swept a spot and sat for a moment, hands in my pockets. Washed-out images of Tina and Little Joe in maritime outfits covered the fence that surrounded the lagoon. A tiny lighthouse sat on a concrete island in the center, the base dented and scratched, evidence that once motorized rubber boats had careened madly off of it.

I'd put my share of dings in that lighthouse during the eighteen months that Toy Shop Village was open. So had Kayleigh. We rode for free, the grandchildren of the owner, wide-eyed eleven-year-olds astonished by their luck. Hard to believe that had only been nineteen years ago—Toy Shop Village looked fifty years old.

What had my grandfather been thinking when he let Dad talk him into this? We couldn't even sell the property now, out in the middle of this industrial purgatory. Anyone who bought it would have to demolish and haul away tons of metal and concrete before it would be usable for anything. How had they thought people would drive all the way out here to play miniature golf? Cheap real estate is cheap for a reason. That hadn't even been their biggest mistake, thinking people would haul their asses out to the middle of this depressing area, across the highway from a junk yard. Their biggest mistake had been their choice of businesses, which was thirty years behind the times.

I tossed a piece of windblown Styrofoam into the concrete pond. Maybe it was time to brave the Wal-Mart. I'd spent the past week living off canned goods from the pantry and forgotten frozen entrees from the back of the freezer, all of the crap that had looked
good in the supermarket but sat uneaten year after year.

My butt still felt strange on the Avalon's leather seat. I rolled down the windows, sniffed the cold air as I sped down Johnson Road.

I coughed, tried to relax my aching throat. The twitching just kept getting worse. It felt like there was a gerbil in there.

I hung a quick right on West Marietta and picked up speed. The near-empty roads looked so strange. I'd always hated the congestion of Atlanta, the intersections perpetually clogged with vehicles, but now I missed it. I wanted things to return to normal, or as close to normal as it was likely to get.

There was a lot of talk on TV about the long-term effects the attack would have on Atlanta. The city had literally been decimated, having lost around ten percent of its population. That was the theoretical cutoff point for when irreparable damage is done to the psyche of a community.

There was a tank in the Wal-Mart parking lot. The place was packed; I had to park across the highway in a strip-mall, on the lawn. In the parking lot I passed two people, both wearing white medical masks, who looked at me the way my eighth grade English teacher used to when I forgot my homework. I wasn't wearing a mask, I realized. That was a no-no. Most people didn't seem to grasp that I wasn't endangering them by not wearing a mask, only myself. Anthrax wasn't contagious, you could only inhale the spores if they were around, and they weren't likely to be in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart ten miles from ground zero this late in the game.

At the entrance two National Guard troops stopped me.

“Mask,” one of them said, pointing at her face.

“I know, I forgot.”

She jerked her thumb at the doorway. “On your left. Put one on right away.”

A mountainous display of pale blue medical masks met me just inside the door. I grabbed two boxes, opened one and retrieved a mask. It smelled like rubbing alcohol.

Half of the shelves were empty in the grocery area. Most of the basics were there—milk, water, cereal, ramen noodles—but non-essentials like olives and Snickers bars were pretty much nonexistent. Signs beside each item listed the maximum number you could buy. Mostly that number was one. Troops patrolled the aisles, evidently making sure no one took more than their share.

When I finished grocery shopping I didn't feel like going home. After a week in solitary I wanted to be around people a while longer. I pushed my cart around the store, feeling punchy as I wandered past laundry detergent, between walls of pink girls' toys. My Little Princess. Barbie Snip 'n Style Salon. A dozen big-screen TVs flashed identical Dentyne ads. In the pharmacy area I discovered licorice toothpaste. That was a new one. Or maybe I just hadn't noticed it before. I picked up a tube, then sought out the candy aisle, suddenly craving real licorice.

They had licorice, both black and red. I chose the black, opened it with my teeth and pulled out a fat stick. I felt like a rebel, the way I was opening packages before I'd paid for them.

I hadn't eaten licorice since I was a kid. Kayleigh and I used to each take an end and pull, stretching the stick until it snapped. We'd compare our stretched pieces to see who got the longer.