Five

Harlow was little more than a mostly-straight stretch of road bounded on both sides by redwood forest and located in the dip between two large hills. There were no houses visible through the trees, though several dirt roads broke off from the main road, marked by mailboxes perched atop leaning posts.

There was an old Baptist church that seemed to have been abandoned at some point, a small garage whose fading sign proclaimed it to be the location of Mr. Kim’s Mechanic and Towing Services, and nothing else. Nothing else and no sign of life until they drew near the end of the mostly-straight stretch of road.

“Here,” Guy said. “Good. They’re open.”

The parking lot was empty. A pale blue rust-spotted Crown Victoria sat on the side of the two-story building. The sign in the door was turned to OPEN.

An old man of forty or sixty (his wild beard, unkempt hair, and densely wrinkled face made it difficult to tell) sat on a bench next to the door leading into MISTY’S FOOD AND GAS. A large brown dog of no particular breed slept near his feet. In the shade of a tin overhang, the old man watched their approach from beneath bushy eyebrows. As they crunched into the gravel parking lot and past the two pumps (they were probably older than the Crown Vic), he raised his right hand, held it there, beside his head, for just a second before allowing it to drift down to his lap.

“I don’t think he’s dead,” Daniel said, and Richard gave a chuckle that started as a grunt and died as a sigh.

“You see what I see?” Guy asked.

“No,” Kimberly said. “What?”

“He’s got a gun,” Colleen said. A rifle rested behind him on the bench, its butt and barrel visible to the left and right of the old man’s narrow hips.

“Oh,” Daniel said.

“Should we just keep going?” Kimberly asked.

“We need gas,” Guy said.

“Food and gas,” Richard said, as if it were a punch line meant to revive the chuckle.

“I need pads,” Colleen said, and shot a hateful glance back at her brother, who looked away, his veil of hair dropping.

“Nobody do anything,” Guy said.

“It’s a good thing you said that,” Daniel said. “Because I was about to rush out there and beat his face in with my bare hands.”

“Your brother’s an asshole,” Guy said to Colleen, opening the door and getting out of the van. He stood with the door between him and the man on the bench, returned the old man’s wave. “Hey, man.”

“Hey, man.” To the old man’s right, barely seen in the gloom, something moved on the other side of the glass door leading into the place.

“Guy,” Colleen said, her voice an inch above a whisper.

“Everything cool?” Guy asked the old man. Either he hadn’t heard her or he was choosing to ignore her.

The old man sat up and leaned forward, his bushy brow knotted. His fifties, Colleen thought. He was maybe in his early fifties. “Everything sure as hell ain’t cool, my man. You haven’t heard?”

“We’ve heard,” Guy said, stepping from behind the door, his hands held at chest height. “I mean between us, is all.”

The big dog lifted its head and surveyed the visitors. Finding them of little to no interest, it seemed, it settled its snout onto its paws and closed its eyes.

“Is everything cool between us, you mean?” The man laughed, and Colleen realized that he was older than fifty. “I guess so. You’re not dead and you don’t look like you want to eat me, so, yeah. We’re cool.”

“Okay, good.”

“You see any of them yet?” The old man asked.

“Just a deer,” Guy said. “A few miles back. But no people. You?”

“Nothing, except on the news.” The old man sounded disappointed. He nodded toward the door. “Food inside. Misty cooked it a few hours ago, but it’s good.”

“Sounds good,” Guy said. He looked at Colleen. “Let’s go in.”

They filed out of the van. Colleen looked from the road to the store and back again, expecting to simultaneously be assaulted by walking corpses from the road and gunfire from within the shadowy confines of Misty’s Food and Gas. Guy walked over to her, placed a hand on each of her shoulders.

“You okay?”

“Yeah,” she nodded. “Not really.”

Nearby, Richard and Kimberly went through a similar ritual, their words hushed. Daniel shuffled along behind them, head low, hair in his face.

A bell jangled as they entered the store. The smell of food greeted them. The woman behind the counter—sixty-ish with a head of thick, closely-cropped silver hair—regarded them with an expressionless face and unblinking eyes. She looked like the guy on the radio had sounded: completely shaken. Behind her, a small black and white TV droned and flickered, the antenna atop it a mad jumble of tinfoil and coat-hangers.

“Hello,” Guy said, and the woman gave a curt little nod, the corners of her mouth barely twitching into the shadow of a smile. A short, portly man with a neatly-trimmed beard, a receding hairline, and thick glasses stood near the counter, hands perched on his round hips. He’d been watching the television, and Colleen suspected he was the form she’d seen moving around within the store.

“Can I use your phone?” Guy asked.

The woman gave him a disappointed little head shake and pushed the phone across the counter him. “You can, but you won’t be able to reach anyone.”

Guy took the phone, dialed, waited. He looked hopeful for a second, his eyes wide, and then his hope was washed away by disappointment. He went through the ritual once more before placing the phone onto the cradle.

“The lines are busy,” he said, facing them.

“Dammit,” Richard said. Kimberly lowered her head. They all had loved ones somewhere, all but Colleen. There were relatives, yes—her uncle and cousins in San Diego, her Aunt in Vermont—but relatives weren’t always family, and everyone who mattered was right here beside her.

This was calming. This was devastating.

“Can I use it?” Kimberly asked, giving a little shrug. “You never know.”

While Kimberly sought out her own private disappointment, Colleen looked around, took the place in: three aisles of groceries, a cooler, red-and-white-checked tablecloths draped across three tables located on the other end of the small room, just before the glass case filled with deli meats and cheeses. Behind the deli case, a small kitchen. Aside from the woman behind the counter and the short man looking at them like they were a stain on his best shirt, there did not appear to be anyone else there.

Kimberly placed the phone in the cradle, thanked the lady, and drifted over to Richard.

“Where you all from?” The woman behind the counter asked. Behind her, a wall of cigarette packs and a colorful quilt, neatly folded within a clear plastic baggie and covered in a kaleidoscope of geometric designs. The hand-written sign taped to the baggie said, LOCALLY MADE HAND MADE ANGEL BLANKET.

“Fresno,” Colleen said, her eyes moving from the woman’s grim face to the television behind her. It sat atop a file cabinet covered in magnets that held various faded and curled papers in place. A fluttering cramp closed a painful fist in her stomach.

“Fresno,” said the portly guy, shaking his head. “You won’t be going back there any time soon. Why the hell are you way up here?”

“Charles,” the woman behind the counter said, and Colleen heard the warning in her voice, a warning laced with tired familiarity.

“Now, now, Misty,” Charles said, waving a shushing hand at the stone-faced woman behind the counter. “Just let me talk to the kids, all right?” This, Colleen had no doubt, was a routine in Misty’s Food and Gas: Charles hung around and annoyed the customers, and Misty tolerated it while tossing out idle threats.

“What are you doing up here?” Misty asked, overriding Charles, who got as far as opening his mouth.

“Well,” Guy said, and Colleen pressed close to his side and gave the woman a weak smile and a nod. “We were on the way to Tahoe. Now?” He shook his head.

Seen through an undulating haze of static, the newscaster on the small television had the same look on his face as everyone else. A map of Africa was superposed over his left shoulder.

“It’s everywhere,” Guy said.

“Seems like it.”

“They say what’s causing it?” Daniel asked, sliding up to the counter.

“Not yet,” she said. “Someone said it might be germ warfare.”

“Who’s saying?” Daniel asked.

“This guy on TV,” the woman said. “But someone else that there wasn’t any proof of that. Falwell was on earlier, talking about Revelations.”

“Revelation,” Charles said.

Misty shot him another look. “What?”

“It’s Revelation. The Revelation of Saint John. Not Revelations.” He adjusted his glasses, looked at each of them, and nodded once. “No s.”

“Whatever,” Misty said. “Falwell’s a windbag, and you’re an idiot if you buy his shit.”

Daniel laughed once.

“It apparently started all at once, at the same time everywhere, so it’s not a germ,” Misty shrugged. “At least they think it’s not. I’m Misty, by the way.”

Colleen gave a half-hearted smile and introduced herself. Nobody followed suit.

The newscaster droned on:

“…from South Africa and the Middle East confirm earlier reports that th—” Static obscured his face and dissolved his words, and Misty leaned back and slapped the side of the television. The image came back, and the man’s voice came through: “…of China is denying that the phenomenon is occurring there, despite the fact that one of the earliest confirmations the World Health Organization received came from a doctor in Beijing…”

“I don’t think he did this,” Kimberly said, sidling up to Colleen pressing close to her. Colleen was talking about Nixon again.

“No,” Colleen said. “I don’t think he did.”

Pressed between the man she loved and her best friend, Colleen felt safe; she felt as safe as she had earlier, when she was certain that all they had to do was stay in the van.

“What about here in town?” Guy asked.

“What about it?” Charles said, sounding a little too suspicious.

“Anyone see anything?”

“No, hon.” Misty said. “Connie Willits had a heart attack about three hours ago. Her husband and kids drove her out to Beistle. About twenty miles from here. There’s a police station and a hospital.”

“And more people,” Charles.

“Yeah,” Misty said, casting a tired glance at the television. “More people. And more people means more trouble, so we’re in a good place.”

“How many people live here?”

“I don’t know,” Misty said. “People around here stick to themselves, for the most part. Maybe two hundred?” She looked at Charles, eyebrows raised.

“Less than that,” Charles said, shaking his head. “About a hundred.”

“Jackass says about a hundred,” Misty said, shrugging. Richard laughed.

“God,” Charles said, disgusted. “This again.” He turned away from the television and stomped toward the tables, where he pulled out a chair and sat down, his back to them.

Following a stern warning from the network anchor, a reel showing various shots of walking corpses was played.

“Oh,” Guy said.

“My God,” Colleen said. Beside her, Kimberly gasped.

“Jesus,” Richard said. “No way, man.”

Slack jaws, dead eyes; skin like wax. Impossible wounds dry and gaping and roiling black with flies. There was the elderly woman they’d heard about on the radio, shambling naked through a morgue with her chest and stomach laid open in a clean Y-incision. There was a well-dressed man whose jaw and throat had either been ripped or blown away; the tip of his tongue rested atop the blood-soaked knot in his necktie. A man with no arms walking between stalled traffic on an interstate somewhere. A woman who held the stump of a severed arm to her eager and gnashing mouth. And so on, until the images of walking death were replaced by the grim face of the news anchor.

Colleen felt something churn in her stomach. Kimberly pulled away at some point and now wept in Richard’s embrace. Guy held Colleen’s hand too damn tight. Daniel left the store without a word, the bell jingling above his head.

“Do you have—” she began, making eye contact with the woman behind the counter.

“Bathroom’s right there, hon,” Misty said, nodding toward the back of the store, toward the kitchen. “To the left.”

That’s not what she was going to ask—not yet, anyway, that was going to be her next question, after she found out where the pads were, but suddenly she had to be someplace else, someplace away from the television, someplace away from the woman behind the counter and the round man who clearly didn’t want them there. Someplace away from her friends, even. She needed to be alone.

“Be right back,” she said, stepping away from Guy and Kimberly, shouldering past Richard, and walking toward the deli. Through the entrance, she could see her brother loafing toward the road, his hands in his pockets, head down, dealing with things however he dealt with them. She walked down a short aisle, her eyes drifting across boxes of cereal, bags of rice, canned soup, canned fruit, and so on. She held out her right forefinger and left a trail through the road dust atop a box of Raisin Bran, and the menstrual cramps in her abdomen got together with the shocked nausea in her stomach and threatened to light fireworks.

The bathroom was small and neat. There were no obscenities scrawled upon the walls and the scent of the air freshener wasn’t struggling to conceal smells of human waste. She stared at herself in the mirror, suddenly seeing her mother’s features—her mother’s face—embedded within her own. She’d heard it all of her life, “Oh, you look just like your mother,” but it had never really meant much to her, and she wasn’t sure she ever really saw what they were talking about, anyway, or if they were just saying the kind of obligatory shit people say when they don’t really have anything of value to say.

But she did. She looked like her mother. Not just like her, of course—her jaw was not as wide as her mother’s jaw, and her nose wasn’t quite so long, but she was as close to a dead ringer as one could be, and now she was all that was left of the woman. The rest, the sad, dead thing she’d watched her mother wither into, was—

What was her mother doing right now? Was she lying dead, her arms crossed on her wasted breast, as she had been when the funeral parlor attendant had gently closed the casket? Had her mother’s overpowered body been spared the effects of whatever the hell was going on, or was she now awake somehow? Colleen hoped the cancer might stop it, as they had stopped her life, but perhaps the alien tissue would twitch to life and follow the same commands as the natural tissue, finally working in concert and giving her mother increasing strength.

Colleen splashed water on her face and when she was certain that her breakfast wasn’t going to come jetting up from her throat in an acidic gout, she turned from the mirror and lifted the toilet lid. The seat was clean, but she wiped it down anyway before sitting.

“Dammit,” she said. There was a small red spot on her pad. A drop of blood tinked into the toilet bowl, and through the V of her thighs she could see the water in the toilet bowl turning pink.

The door was within reach. She opened it, just a crack, called for Guy, and shut the door again, locking it. A few seconds later, she heard him brush against the door. “Everything okay?” He asked.

“I forgot to get pads,” she said.

“Have you asked Kim?”

“She didn’t say anything when I said I needed them, so I figure she doesn’t have any on her.”

“Okay,” he said. “You think they’ll have some?”

“It’s a store, right?” She snapped back, immediately sorry. She opened her mouth to apologize but he was already gone.

She sat there, feeling the world twist and coil into something unrecognizable beneath her feet, wondering how long it would be until she saw one of the dead things with her own eyes, wondering what the hell tomorrow would bring. Wondering what it would be like to be pulled down by a group of them and eaten alive, as was apparently happening across the globe, if the horrors being coughed up by the news were to be believed.

“Hon?”

“Yeah.”

“She’s out of stock.”

“Aggh.”

“Yeah. She says most of the woman in town use cloth.”

“Agh,” she said, suddenly enraged. She roared: “Fuck you, Daniel.”

“He probably heard you,” Guy said, a few seconds later, sounding both light and worried.

“Yeah,” she said. “I hope he did.” She wanted to punch her brother more than she ever had in her entire life, and that was saying something.

“Sorry,” Guy said. Empty words—he had nothing to be sorry for—but she let them slide.

“Okay,” she said. “I’ll manage.”

“You sure?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“I guess not,” he said. “We’ll find you something.”

“Yeah, okay,” she said, her tone telling him to get the hell away from the door. He did.

The pad in her panties had some life left. She pulled up her pants, flushed the toilet, and, washing her hands, stared at her face in the mirror until he flesh looked too white and her pores looked too large and she felt like maybe she were going crazy. Her stomach churned, at last giving up its contents, which arced out of her mouth and into the sink, spattering her hands.

“God,” she said, crying.

 

 

 

Daniel stood where the gravel parking lot met the road, his back to the store. He could feel the old man’s eyes on him, wanted to turn around and tell the old bastard to find something else to look at.

No weed left. He needed to get drunk. If ever he needed to get utterly smashed and spread to the four corners of the earth, it was now.

He looked back at the store, wondering if maybe they had vodka. He hadn’t gotten a decent look around. They probably did, but you never knew with middle-of-nowhere dives like this. Maybe they were into Jesus, and would tell you to look elsewhere if you came looking for booze.

Some part of him was holding out hope that someone on the television would start making sense, hope that someone would figure out they’d been wrong and dead people could not get up and walk because they were fucking dead. But he’d seen the footage, and he didn’t want to see it again, and he could do without seeing Richard pawing all over Kimberly, without their glances and their hushed whispers. It was more off-putting even than seeing his sister get felt up.

He rubbed his eyes with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, pinching the soft flesh between his eyebrows. Hard, with his fingernails. It was a stupid thing to do—he was awake, dammit; this was no dream—but he did it anyway. He shook his head, turned to face the store, and saw a lone form walking down the street and toward him.

“Fuck,” he said, taking three steps backward, and the form lifted its arm and waved.