Black River Falls by Jeff Hirsch(6)

I tested the edge with a finger. It whispered through the skin, sending a pinprick of blood curling into my palm. The world became a little brighter and a little more clear. I smeared the blood off on my jeans, then sheathed the knife and threaded it onto my belt. I left camp and started down the trail toward Black River.





3


I?SAW THE RIVER first. I’d come around the second-to-last switchback and the trees had started to thin. The Black River cut the Quarantine Zone roughly in half, with the mountains on one side and the town on the other. From up on Lucy’s Promise it looked like a dark ribbon. The only bright spot along its course was where the water ran fast over the falls, turning to white foam as it slipped beneath the stone bridge.

The town appeared next. From where I stood it was just trees mixed with black and russet-colored roofs and a few lines for roads. It grew larger with every step, until I could pick out the red brick of Black River High at the south end of Main Street and the crown of mansions way up at the north end. As soon as we came off the mountain, the kids sprinted down Route 9. Greer chased after them, but my legs wouldn’t move. I stood there, one foot on the asphalt, one on the grass, looking down the road at what had become of Black River.

The last time I’d been off the mountain was just after the sixteenth, when the QZ had been packed with people. Infected. Uninfected. National and local news teams. Ten different charities. Eight different government agencies.

The uninfected went first. They were released from quarantine around Thanksgiving. Once another month or two passed without any real developments—no cure or vaccine, no culprit, no other outbreaks—the news vans left skid marks on their way out of town. The Red Cross and the Salvation Army were next, followed by the Gates people and the Clinton people and the World Health Organization. The CDC, USAMRIID, and the rest of the government agencies hung in there until early March. After they left it was just us, a dwindling force of National Guardsmen, and the occasional smalltime charity—a bunch of losers shuffling around an empty dance floor long after the cool kids had found someplace better to be.

It was the silence that tripped me up the most. The chaos of those early days was long gone, but there was nothing to take its place. There were none of those old summer afternoon sounds. The pre-outbreak sounds. No whirring lawnmowers or blaring radios. No hissing hoses as people washed their cars or watered their lawns. Just wind moving down empty streets and in and out of the open windows of abandoned houses.

Months of neglect had led to overgrown yards and weed-cracked sidewalks. Roofs with missing shingles. Shutters hanging from broken windows. A family of white-tailed deer, two adults and two fawns, stood on someone’s front walk, nibbling at the grass. Another house seemed completely untouched, except that the front door was hanging open, exposing the empty throat of the hallway and shiny hardwood floors.

“Yo! Cardinal!”

Greer had stopped in the middle of the street and was waving me forward. Benny was standing next to him, looking back, curious, as if maybe I’d forgotten something. Of course it was also possible that he was wondering why a seventeen-year-old kid couldn’t just walk down an empty street. I took a deep breath and then I forced one foot in front of the other.

Every few blocks there were reminders of the night of the sixteenth. Empty lots where, instead of a house, there was a pile of ash and charred wood. Two police cars, burned black with smashed windows, sat in the cul-de-sac at the end of Elm Street. Spent tear gas canisters, mixed in with trash and fallen leaves in the gutter, made bonelike sounds as I kicked through them. A rat’s nest of zip-tie handcuffs lay bleaching in the sun.

I stepped up onto the cobblestone bridge that spanned Black River Falls. My shoulders tensed. Forty feet below me, the water crashed against jagged slate-gray boulders. The sound was like a wave of static. I looked over my shoulder, up toward the peak of Lucy’s Promise. The trail I had walked on only minutes before had vanished into the trees. It felt like a hand had grabbed hold of my guts and twisted.

“Hey. Take a look.”

Greer had stopped the kids at the far side of the bridge. He nodded up the street as a large black pickup truck came rolling toward the intersection. The back of it was open, packed with ten or fifteen men wearing bright blue hazmat suits. Black rifles hung from their shoulders. The men turned to face us as they passed. The eyeholes in their suits were shiny plastic, blankly white in the sun’s glare. The air filters that grew out of their masks looked like the jaws of huge insects. I stepped back, my hand automatically going to the knife at my side.

“Easy,” Greer said. “They’re just passing by.”

They picked up speed as they crossed Route 9 and headed toward Main Street. Just before they disappeared, I saw a logo on the tailgate—a globe pierced by a sword. Beneath it were the words MARTINSON/VINE.

Greer stepped into the street to watch them go. “Dude, who the hell is Martinson Vine?”

I didn’t know, but something about them made me feel my heartbeat pulse in my throat. “Come on. Let’s just get this over with.”

Greer and the kids had a quick huddle, and then they were on the move again. I followed along, and pretty soon the heart of Black River came into view. This is where most of the infected lived. Thousands of them. They slouched against the walls of boarded-up shops or lounged in the tall grass around abandoned houses and apartment buildings, eyeing us as we moved down the street. I’d heard that there were infected with enough money hoarded away from before the outbreak that they could make a life in the QZ that was almost normal, but they were a minority. Most everybody lived like these people, jobless and adrift.