The Night Parade(31)
Also, that wasn’t just a man. It was a soldier. National Guard, most likely.
This time, when they drove past the school and its assortment of antiseptic white tents, David saw what were undeniably body bags lined up in a tidy queue along the sloping lawn. A few of the people in hazmat suits paused to watch them go by. Ellie waved to them. To David’s astonishment, a few waved back.
16
David bought a newspaper, two packs of Marlboros, and two sixteen-ounce bottles of Pepsi at a gas station just over the Kentucky border. The gas station was nothing more than a ramshackle clapboard structure with a few ancient pumps beneath a graffiti-laden portico and a murky front window as dark and uninviting as a panel of glass that looked down into the depths of a black sea. The blacktop had been defaced by graffiti, and straggly haylike weeds sprouted through its many cracks. Ellie waited in the car.
They were back on the road before anyone else pulled up to the gas station, and were motoring along with steady traffic—the most they had seen in several hours—a minute or so later.
In the passenger seat, Ellie had the shoe box back in her lap again. Its lid was open and she was absently stroking the three tiny eggs inside the nest while watching the ebb and flow of traffic. She had calmed since the incident at the diner and her subsequent breakdown behind the highway billboard. In fact, her face had grown tight, her eyes distant, with a look of contemplation. Grief at her mother’s passing was normal, but David worried that she was regretting having spoken to him about her ability. He was anxious to bring it up again—to have her touch his arm or the back of his neck again—but he didn’t want to make her uncomfortable. She looked frightened.
But she’s strong, he thought. She’s strong.
They drove until hunger growled deep in his belly. He knew better than to ask Ellie if she was hungry, so he simply turned off into a shopping center and drove around until he found a random burger joint that was open. Ellie said nothing as he read the items on the menu aloud, and David did not afford her the opportunity to rebuke any suggestions he made; he merely ordered a sack of cheeseburgers and two Cokes at the first window, avoiding the whole messy routine.
Across the plaza was a strip mall that had long been forsaken, judging by its appearance. Skeins of yellow weeds swayed among the broken shelves of asphalt. The windows of the shops were either soaped over or boarded up, the signs above each entranceway no longer in existence, save for the ghostly gray outline they left behind on the fa?ade, like fingerprints at a crime scene. Someone had rolled a bunch of steel barrels beneath the awning of one shop, their arrangement somehow suspicious and off-putting to David, though there was no one around to cement his discomfort.
David drove along the ruined parking lot, the Oldsmobile bumping and thumping the whole way, until he pulled out of sight behind a row of Dumpsters, shielding them from the street traffic and the rest of the plaza.
Ravenous, he tore open the paper sack, yanked out a fistful of burgers, and tossed a couple into Ellie’s lap.
“Not hungry,” she intoned.
He rubbed the back of her head, then stripped away the greasy wax paper on his own burger and folded half of it into his mouth.
The newspaper was wedged between his seat and the console. He grabbed it now, a wad of burger swelling his right cheek as he chewed, and opened it up in his lap. He searched first for any mention of him and Ellie. There was none. That was good; it most likely meant they hadn’t been looking for him by the time the paper went to press. Still, it was a small victory, what with their faces—their old faces—presumably on television screens across the country. Freshly dyed hair and a baseball cap would only get them so far. If some inquisitive police officer happened to stop them and ask for identification, they were screwed.
It’s not just the police, he reminded himself, stuffing the rest of the burger into his mouth. It’s those people in the white vans and the black cars I’ve got to keep an eye out for, too.
On the second page of the A Section, he found what he was looking for: a map of the United States. This map had become a staple in pretty much every newspaper throughout the country over the past few months. David had stopped looking at it many months ago, unnerved by the prospect of what the future held. Or whether or not there would even be a future. But he needed it now.
The map detailed a variety of things, from the diplomatically named “free zones,” to the hot spots with their color-coded bull’s-eyes, the coding disconcertingly similar to the Department of Homeland Security’s terror alert levels. There were also a few areas designated by stark black X’s—only a few, but still, more than there had been the last time David had checked this map in the newspaper back home. The colored bull’s-eyes were bad enough, signifying the estimated level of infection in any given area. There was a key in the lower right-hand corner of the map that explained, in very general terms, what was typically being done in these areas depending on the color level. But the black X’s were worse, because those were the places that had fallen early and fallen quickly. The key identified these locations as places of thorough evacuation, though there had been rumors back at the college that those X’s really meant that everyone there had died. Looking at the increased number of X’s on the map now—perhaps two dozen at a glance—David hoped that rumor was not true.
Whether it’s true or not, that doesn’t change the fact that those places are empty, he thought now, studying the map. He traced an index finger along the ridge of the Great Smoky Mountains. Either those places have been evacuated or the people there are all dead. Either way, there will be no people. No cops.