9.0 - Sanctum (23 page)

I'm not sure how we decided it, but when we drove the pickups out of San Angelo the next morning, I was behind the wheel of the lead truck with Murphy riding shotgun.  Grace was in the back seat with Javendra.  I'd have preferred to have him in the other truck.  Not that he was a bad guy—I'd gotten my fill of his company the day before.  Fritz, Eve, and Jazz were in the truck following close behind.  Both pickups were piled high with cardboard boxes wrapped in plastic garbage bags and thoroughly taped, just in case it rained.  Not all of our cargo was in cans.  Everything was strapped down with nylon cargo straps, way more than was necessary for a drive down a narrow country highway, but the warehouse store had cases of the straps packaged in sets of six, all untouched by post-apocalyptic shoppers and looters.  We went overboard on securing our loads in case we had to go cross-country on our trip.  We didn't want any of our valuable supplies bouncing out.

We left town heading southwest down Highway 67, keeping the speed around forty, with the sun coming up behind us.  The two-lane highway with paved shoulders as wide as the traffic lanes lay clear, flat, and mostly straight, giving me views a half-mile ahead.  On both sides of the road, rusty barbed wire fences bordered endless tracts of flat, dead ground blanketed with spiky gray-branched mesquite trees that had lost their leaves for the season.

Houses, some owned by the recently deceased, and some empty for years, were sprinkled at wide intervals along the road.  Few businesses thrived along the desolate highway.  The farther we drove from San Angelo, the more sparse the signs of civilization became.

In the back seat, Grace examined a map.  Though the towns along the way were small—most of them a few dozen or fewer than a hundred houses—we planned to avoid as many as possible.  We’d skirt them on small ranch-to-market roads and even dirt roads if needed.  The towns presented a risk we wanted to avoid.

Ambushes were my main worry, I guess that and the possibility of running across a horde of Whites though I kept telling myself there should be no hordes so far west.  The population density out in West Texas was low, severely low.  Few people around meant few Whites left after the virus burned through the population. 

As a matter of fact, that had been the foundation of my argument when I first proposed escaping to Balmorhea all those months ago.  After visiting San Angelo with a population near a hundred thousand sitting just two hundred miles from our goal, I had cause to worry.  Then there was Fort Stockton with a pre-virus population just under ten thousand, planted directly in our path and only fifty miles from Balmorhea.  Those were significant numbers.

Would hungry Whites hike west on Highway 10 through fifty miles of desert in search of something to eat? If they did, how many would make it all the way to Balmorhea.  When I'd conceived the idea, I knew, I just knew they couldn't.  I'd taken the drive across Texas, heading through El Paso on the way to California a few years back, and it burned a memory into my brain of a dry, desolate desert with no water of any kind, anywhere.

As I pictured it, the central defensive characteristic of Balmorhea where Whites were concerned were the dry, endless miles of chalky dirt and scrubby, half-dead trees, crawling with scorpions and rattlesnakes.

But we'd passed a reservoir on the way out of San Angelo fed by a river that roughly paralleled Highway 67.  It wasn't a deep-and-wide, sing-a-song-about-it kind of river—it was more of a collection of pools connected by a lazy creek down a gulley that got washed out during flooding thunderstorms in the spring.  But it had water in it, and it ran for miles and miles near the road.

That made me worry. 

The icing on my cake of bad assumptions and shitty plans was what I saw when we were throwing up huge plumes of dust behind our trucks while driving on a dirt road to get around a small collection of houses on the highway called Mertzon, Texas.  We got farther and farther from town on a network of straight roads at right angles and started to see tracts where the mesquite trees had been chopped down, and the sparse vegetation had been scraped away, leaving only chalky white squares around pieces of oil pumping and storage equipment.

As we drove slowly through the oil fields, passing one chalky square after another, and another, I started to see what looked like low, earthen dams built in squares and rectangles on the barren oil field tracts.  From behind those earthen dams, glints of sunlight reflected off of what I first thought were pools of oil.  With an anxiety knot growing in my chest, I pulled my truck off the narrow dirt road and onto a driveway toward one of the pools.  Murphy started to ask questions.  Grace rattled her map and protested. 

At the end of the dirt driveway, the truck rolled into the square of dirt, scraped clean of plants.  As I slowed the truck, I looked around and didn’t see a living thing in any direction save thorny trees and plants. 

Murphy and Grace had passed the point of worry, but I'd stopped caring what it was they were saying.

I brought the truck to a stop and set the parking brake, leaving the motor running, as I got out of the pickup.  I marched over to the edge of one of the gravelly berms and climbed the slope up to the top edge—maybe five or six feet up—and stopped walking.

The others stood at the bottom, concerned but not asking any more questions.  They were worried.  Maybe they thought I’d finally cracked.  The pressure of so many months of running for my life, killing, and murdering, slaughtering on a genocidal scale, doing things that would warp the mind of any sane man, should have broken me.

I looked again across the uninteresting landscape, seeing for miles and miles.  Flat, white patches spread to the horizon, each with an oil pump or tank, many with square-shaped dikes, all of those with dark pools reflecting the sky.

The pool at my feet was water.  The dike I stood on was one side of a retention pond to hold the water for whatever purpose it served in drilling for oil.  Whatever compounds it was retaining besides the water had settled to the bottom, leaving what looked like clear, drinkable water near the surface.  I wouldn’t drink it because I had a brain and I could deduce that it was probably laden with enough exotic chemicals to give me a dozen varieties of cancer.

But a White wouldn’t have the brain capacity to worry about cancer.  A White wouldn’t even know what a harmful chemical was.  A thirsty White hiking across miles of desert in search of food wouldn’t think twice about drinking from one of these pools.

And with that, I realized there was nothing to keep a horde of Whites from walking from Houston all the way across Texas to El Paso, killing and eating every normal in every little town along the way, including Balmorhea.  There was more water out here than I ever imagined.

My plan for West Texas salvation was a crock of shit.

The realization felt like a brass fist punching me in the chest and crushing my ribs.  I fell to my knees and stared at the water.

I'd seen everybody I liked or loved die at the hands of Whites and assholes, and I'd sent the ones lucky enough to survive out to chase a West Texas dream that was a rerun of a nightmare they were trying to escape.  The only thing I'd accomplished was that I gave them a different name for the place they were going to die.

Zed Zane was a guilty fuck.

"Say man.”  It was Murphy.  He'd climbed the berm beside me.  He looked at the glistening square pool of tainted water, perhaps wondering what it was that had me transfixed.

Grace was crunching her way up through the loose gravel on the slope of the dike.  They were going to tag team me.

“You’re not going to strip down and run off with your machete again, are you?” Murphy added a chuckle.  “You know, like you did that night before we chased the naked horde all the way to Killeen.”

I shook my head.

“What is it, then?” Grace asked with no judgment in her voice, just concern.

A despondent weight was coming down on me.  “What if we don’t go to Balmorhea?” I turned and looked up at Murphy.  “What if we go up in the mountains like you said.  Maybe drive to New Mexico—not too far north, where the snow won’t be too bad—then work our way up the Rockies when spring comes.  Maybe stop in Montana or Canada like you said.”

Grace put a gentle hand on my shoulder.  I wanted to brush it away, torn between accepting the kindness of a friend and the feeling of being placated, manipulated by someone used to dealing with adolescent misfits like me.  “Talk to us,” she said.

"Yeah, man,” Murphy added his weight to the request.  "Whenever you get like this, some shit's about to go down, or you're gonna do something crazy.”  Murphy exaggerated his look around at the flat ground and the spiky mesquites.  "Unless you wanna start choppin' firewood, I don't know what's got you riled up."

I didn’t want to tell them because I knew in my heart I was right.  Now, I was right about what to expect when we arrived. 

Either way, they'd insist on finishing the journey.  They'd say, "We've come this far.  We can't know for sure.  Let's just go and find out."

I stared at the water and saw through the clear layer to the settled murk at the bottom as it oozed in unnatural, transfixing colors that didn't mean anything.  For a moment they were just distracting me from my fear.  And my fear was certain, and it was painful.  I didn't want to see another dead friend. 

Somewhere along the road I’d been ticking through a quota of murders and a quota of dead friends without knowing it, without knowing it existed, until that moment as the idea of seeing one more person die felt too painful to face.  I’d seen enough.  I’d killed my share.

The Ogre and the Harpy in all their attempts to forge a remorseless malcontent, a pale-faced demigod, a haunting demon, a heartless destroyer to thrive in the aftermath of humanity's fall, had failed.  Their nasty words, their shitty apathy, their brutal fists, their leather belts, and their hard hearts had done nothing but make a man who could still see one too many broken bodies.  There was nothing special about Zed Zane.  I was as fragile as everybody else, and I was afraid to put a voice to the confession because speaking the words would cement my mediocrity into reality. 

Null Spot the Destroyer was dead.  He died of a daunted heart in an introspective moment when nobody was looking.

“We need to get going,” said Grace.  “Maybe you should sit in the back for a while.  I’ll drive.  You want to get back in the truck?”

“We’re safe here.”  It was a deflection.  I looked around the dead landscape.  “Not a White for miles.  There’s no hurry.”

“If we want to get there by dark,” Grace countered, “we need to go.”

I dropped to the ground and sat in the dirt, still facing the pond.  Grace and Murphy shared some silent glances, trying to figure things out.  Eve came over to the bottom of the dike, and Grace urged her to give us some room while hinting that she take the opportunity to top off the gas tanks with the full cans in the rear of the truck.  Then, Grace sat down beside me.

Murphy huffed and sat down too.

“We can stay a while if you want,” she said.  “It’s pretty here in a desolate sort of way.”

Murphy laughed.  “It’s fuckin’ ugly.  It’s like the Devil’s butthole or something.”

That took me by surprise, and I couldn't help but laugh.  "It
is
fuckin' ugly out here."

“I bet we’ll have pretty sunsets.”  Grace pointed west.  “No buildings to block the view.  Nothing really.”

Murphy added, “Not until you get to the mountains.”

“The Davis Mountains,” Grace confirmed. 

I took a deep breath.  “I know you guys think I’m half crazy half the time.”

“More than half on both counts,” Murphy told me.

I looked over at Murphy.  "Back in College Station after we got off the helicopter that first day.  You were in a weird mood, and you've been different ever since.  I was thinking at the time maybe you'd had your fill.  You were done with the killing and running.  Is that true?"

Murphy looked at me for a long time, but he wasn't looking at me as much as he was looking into his own heart, maybe deciding what he was going to say, maybe deciding if I was speaking the truth.

“People can only take so much,” said Grace.  “It’s natural.”

“So much death?” I asked.

“It’s all emotional trauma,” she told me.  “Everybody’s got their limit.  Murphy has his.  You have yours.  Everybody does.  Is that what this is? Do you think you’ve hit yours?”

I glanced over at Murphy, who was still wending through the maze of his thoughts.  I looked back at Grace, and I wanted to wrap my bullshit in another lie, but I nodded.  I said, "Yeah.  I think maybe so."

Murphy smiled in the heartbreaking way he does sometimes when his eyes are stuck with the depth of all the sadness he's trying to work through.  "I think I've been cooked for a while.”  He shook his head in answer to an unasked question and wrapped his arm over my shoulder.  "But you're my brother, man.  We've been through the shit, and we get more shit every day.  I can't let you down.  Seemed like you had some crazy you needed to work out of your system and if I didn't come along to watch your back, you'd have got yourself killed."

I wanted to insist that I'd have been okay on my own, but I knew it was a lie.

“Is that why you don’t want to go to Balmorhea?” Grace asked.  “You’re afraid of what you might find there?”

I chuckled through the briefest of seconds as I looked back up at Grace.  “You’re insightful.  I’ll give you that.”

“People aren’t as hard to read as they think they are,” she said.

I shrugged.  Maybe she was right.

“Why the change of heart?” asked Murphy.  “You were optimistic about it.  I mean, optimistic for you.”  He added a pained laugh.  “What’s different today?”

I pointed out at the arid landscape.  “That’s how I remember this part of Texas.  I didn’t think a White could ever cross the distance to get all the way out here, not from Austin, hell, not even from Fort Stockton.”  I pointed at the water.  “But they could.  I wouldn’t drink this shit but Whites will.  There’s nothing to stop them.”

“It’s still a long, long way,” said Grace.  “Like we talked about, there aren’t that many people out here.  So no matter what else is a factor, the chances are better for somebody out here than back in Austin or College Station, let alone Dallas and Houston.”

“And in Easy Town,” said Murphy, hope in his voice.  “What if most of the Whites out here are the docile ones? What if most everybody died from the virus and never turned into a White.”

“He’s right,” said Grace.  “Maybe things aren’t as bad in Balmorhea as you think they’ll be.”

“Maybe,” I allowed.  “Maybe.”

Murphy said, "Look, man if you want to wait out here in the desert or whatever the fuck this dry ass place is, and sit here watching the stinky water, I'll sit here with you.  If that's what you want.  But I need to go to Balmorhea.  It doesn't have to be today.  It can be tomorrow or the next day.  You don't have to come if you don't want, but I have to go.  I'll take a truck and go by myself if I need to.  No big deal.  I need to know if Rachel is okay."

And that was a fear I didn’t want to face.  If she was dead, it was my fault.  “What if she’s not?”

Murphy pursed his lips, and the pain showed deep in his eyes again.  He shook his head slowly, and a few tears rolled down his cheek.  "She's my sister.”  His voice cracked, and he cleared his throat.  "It's a fucked up world.  I understand what might be there.  I just need to know."

“I’ll come with you.”  I took a deep breath.  “We’ll deal with it together.”