Cruel World(83)

In the morning he gathered as many supplies as he could find within the house. Foster had accrued two, five-gallon pails of rice along with twenty jugs of water. He took all of these as well as three scoped rifles and ammo to match. He considered backtracking the simplest route that Foster and Mallory may have taken, but dismissed it almost immediately. They’d left days before him, and only death would have kept Foster from reaching this place.

He drove away from the cabin at daybreak, coasting down off the mountain into a silver mist that hovered above the road. At the main highway, he paused, looking in both directions. To the left was home. He could return to it. There was some protection there, and it was familiar. To the right was complete ambiguity. The wild beyond. He gazed toward the ocean, now hours and hours out of sight, its crash upon the rocks like musical chaos. He looked ahead. A diverging road sign faced him from the opposite side of the highway. He waited only a moment longer and then turned right.

~

The day grew around him as he traveled. The Earth seemed to be coming alive with each passing hour. More green buds appeared at the ends of branches, a V of geese cruised over the highway heading north, and the temperature warmed enough for him to lower the windows and let the breeze flow across his skin.

Quinn ate as he drove, chewing every so often on a chunk of jerky and sipping on bottled water. There was no sign of life along the road other than animals, their habits uninterrupted by the catastrophe befallen to the dominant species. He tried the radio every ten miles, spinning the dial through the hissing channels. Only one station still broadcast any music, and after an hour of listening to it, it was clear that the last action the DJ had taken was to loop the same seven songs endlessly. He was about to try the AM band when the road dropped into a hollow and curved, opening to a huge expanse beyond.

A massive concrete bridge sat before him, spanning a wide river fifty feet below. The water was a murky brown, flowing fast with the winter’s meltings.

Quinn brought the Raptor to a halt at its edge, gazing across the breadth of the river. The bridge itself was littered with several piles of debris. It looked as if a car crash had been cleaned up at some point. Dark stains covered the first fifty feet of the structure, and a narrow cable snaked from one side to the other at its midpoint, its ends disappearing from view over the railings. A red and brown heap lay at the far side of the bridge. When he brought up his pair of binoculars, he saw it was a deer’s carcass torn asunder, its intestines draped around it in an expanded pool of dried blood.

He set the binoculars down, glancing once in the rearview mirror. The back roads had been mercifully clear, and he hadn’t seen a stilt all morning.

But this bridge…

He rolled down his window and listened. Water chuckled and the wind spoke in the reaching branches of trees beside the road. Quinn swallowed, drawing out the XDM and laying it on the passenger seat before accelerating. His tires began to hum on the concrete, the sun glinting off the river below in a blazing ball of orange. As he neared the center of the bridge, he thought he heard something, a yell or a horn of some kind, and drew his foot off the gas, eyes flying to the mirrors and ahead once more.

Something was wrong with the cable lying in the middle of the bridge.

It was moving, uncoiling, straightening as he approached it. For a moment he thought it was his point of view and the movement of the vehicle playing tricks on his eyes. As he realized what was happening, he jammed on the brakes, but it was too late.

The cable snapped tight across his path, flying up and toward the truck with liquid speed.

It sunk into and through the grille, slamming him to a stop. The Raptor’s tires screeched as boiling anti-freeze geysered skyward. The airbag deployed, sending a chemical dust into his eyes and mouth, choking him even as he crashed into it. He rebounded, bashing the back of his skull off the headrest.

The world fluttered, and the engine died.

He tasted blood.

His vision spun, and his ears hummed with the impact.

Quinn fumbled for the pistol even as the sounds of a motor reached him, but the gun was gone, lost somewhere in the crash. He tried to sit up, but the air bag pressed against his chest. It was full of air and his lungs had none. His leg hurt where the stitches were, the ones Alice had put in so carefully, twice. She’d be angry with him if he’d tore them again. He nearly laughed. The buzzing in his ears faded, but with it came a new sound.

Footsteps.

There was someone on the bridge. Someone outside the door, looking in through the window at him, but their features were indistinct, like the figures in his dream two nights before. The door opened.