Cruel World(125)

“Do you think he was sick before he caught the plague?” Alice asked as the last buildings of Fort Dodge passed by on their left. “You said he came home from a business trip right before everything happened, right?”

“Yeah,” Quinn said, prying his vision from the road ahead.

“Maybe it wasn’t a business trip at all. Maybe he was getting treatment.”

“I don’t think so. He never had more than a cold all my life. He wasn’t sick; he would’ve told me.”

“Parents don’t tell their kids everything.”

“I know, you never tell me anything,” Ty muttered from the backseat.

“Oh stop it, Tyrus. You’re the most informed six year old I know.”

“I’m almost seven!”

“You won’t be seven for another nine months.”

“That’s pretty close, though. Right, Denver?”

The dog woofed once.

“See?” Ty said, crossing his arms.

Alice rolled her eyes. “Now I have to argue with a dog too.”

“Take this next right coming up,” Quinn said, studying the smart phone’s display. Alice turned the car onto a beaten county road, its surface pockmarked with attempted patches of potholes and frost heaves.

“But the guy, Harold Roman, was definitely military, right? I mean, that ID had nothing but his photo, his name, and clearance number,” Alice said.

“If I had to guess, I’d say military, but who knows,” Quinn said. “Turn left on the next road.”

The landscape around them was featureless grasslands only beginning to green. The sky continued to descend, the clouds churning above the treetops. In the distance, the land humped into a broad hill, and dots of abandoned vehicles began to appear. They weaved in and around them, doors yawning open, windows broken, a sprawled and bloated body on a tailgate.

“What’s that smell?” Ty asked, covering his nose.

The air thickened with each mile they drove, the stench of the plague’s rapid decomposition like a clinging curtain hovering above the land. Ahead, the line of vehicles became a mass that choked the road as well as the dirt track snaking around the base of the broad hill. A business sign had been knocked down and a torn banner waved in its place, only a handful of words discernable on its flaccid surface.



United States Ar

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Only nec belongin

Milit guiden

Stay inside your ve



Alice pulled to the side of the road, and they stared at the lane strangled with hundreds of cars and trucks all parked at different angles like a portion of rush hour traffic had detoured here and then fallen still indefinitely.

“Holy shit,” Alice said. She sighed and let her face drop into one hand before rubbing her temple. “If they’re—”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Quinn said. “We need to check out the compound before we make any decisions.”

“You ever see that movie where the family drives all the way across the country to go to an amusement park but when they get there, it’s closed?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s not like this at all,” Alice said, climbing out.

They armed themselves, and Quinn strapped Roman’s pack on. They left the rest of the supplies with the car, locking it before moving along the ditch lining the dirt drive. They walked past car after car. Many were intact, their windows rolled tight as if the occupants had merely paused here to get out and sightsee. There were no bodies visible, inside or out, along the road. Only the chirp of insects and the sounds of their passage accompanied them. The stagnant line of vehicles curved, and they followed their arc, stopping as one as the scene opened before them.

“What is it?” Ty asked, gripping Denver’s collar.

It was a warzone.

The vehicles past the point where they stood were torn masses of steel and shattered glass. The road became a battered field, studded with debris and cratered to a lunar quality. A chain link fence had been erected beyond the devastation, topped with spools of razor wire, but it too lay mashed to the ground in countless places, support posts leaning like weary soldiers. Past the fence was a five-foot concrete barricade made of interconnected pieces like those separating the center of a four-lane highway. It’s top was painted a bronze that shone in the cool light of the day. Many of the sections were tipped over or crumbling, cracks spanning from bullet holes like eggs ready to break. Beyond the first ring of concrete, a second much higher barrier stood, interspersed by vacant, steel guard towers and scaffolding.