9.0 - Sanctum (24 page)

West of Fort Stockton we wound up on Interstate Highway 10, the main artery for traffic crossing through Texas from Houston to El Paso.  It was two lanes in each direction with a barren median a hundred feet wide and right-of-way bordered by thin barbed wire fences thirty or forty feet from the shoulders.  When we did see abandoned cars, they were off the roadway and where the passengers had gone was anybody's guess.  The desert, dotted with scrubby brush, stretched flat all the way from a row of smooth mountains far in the south to the horizon in the north.

We made good time driving west on the highway, as there was no reason to slow.  The road was clear and flat for miles.

Grace, who'd been driving the lead vehicle since my pit stop in the oil fields, took the exit off Highway 10 to Balmorhea, and that put us on a two-lane road heading toward the foothills of the mountains in the south.

Grace slowed the truck to thirty.  It was time for caution.

Houses, barns, and dilapidated buildings with no apparent purpose dotted the lots along the road.  They gave the impression we were nearing a ghost town.  When we passed a green sign that marked the city limits, Balmorhea looked like any of the dozens of dead little towns I'd seen on the trip—abandoned cars, houses with broken windows and open doors.  One thing was missing, though, the remains of the dead.

My sense of normalcy had altered since the virus came.  The dead were supposed to be in the streets.  Their absence felt creepy.

Alternatively, the missing dead were signs of hope.  Somebody had disposed of the bodies.

Grace turned left when we reached a yellowish-tan brick building the size of a small house, the post office.  We drove through a grid of streets maybe eight blocks long and eight blocks wide that made up the whole town.  We saw no sign of life.

“Which way?” Grace asked, stopping the truck in an intersection no different from most of the others.

Murphy shook his head, silently.

I nudged Javendra as I looked through his side window.  “You see anything out that side?”

“No.”

I didn't see anything either, at least, nothing like what I was looking for—one of the Humvees, one of the pickups, Sergeant Dalhover, and Rachel.  But no Whites either.  Not one.

“The place isn’t that big,” said Grace.  “We can check every street.”  She looked at Murphy.  “It’ll take us what, fifteen minutes?”

Murphy nodded.

Grace looked over her shoulder at Javendra.  “Jump out and go tell Fritz what we’re doing so he won’t think I’m going nuts.”

“Okay.”  Javendra reached for his door handle.

I flung my door open and said, “I got it.”  I jumped out of the truck, not wanting to risk humanity’s hope with such a trivial task.  I let Fritz know the plan, went back to sit behind Grace, and we drove.

Indeed, it took all of fifteen minutes to go up and down every street in town, passing the cars and houses, seeing no signs of life.  We found ourselves back on the two-lane road we’d exited onto from Highway 10.  Our pickups stopped in the middle of the road with engines idling and we were all out, standing, drinking water or warm soda, taking our necessary breaks, and sharing a box of stale crackers.

“I don’t want to be the one to say it,” said Grace, “but if they’d driven those Humvees here, we’d have seen them.  Town’s not that big.”

“Do you think there’s a place they could have stopped on the way?” Fritz asked Murphy and me.  “Maybe a better place.” 

Murphy and I shared a look.  We understood Fritz was trying to make us feel better with the suggestion, but neither of us was inclined to believe it.  We’d seen too many hopes dashed.  Murphy’s face turned hard.  He was accepting the same thing I was accepting.  Dalhover, Rachel, and the others had never made it.  They’d been ambushed somewhere along the way, or were overrun by Whites, or broke down and been killed one by one as they tried to scavenge and survive, one of a thousand stories we’d heard or seen.  There wasn’t a lot of room in the post-virus world for hope. 

It was time to stop pretending and focus on practicalities.  It was late in the day.  We had a few more hours of sun.  I told the others, “We should probably find a place to stay tonight.”

“Where’s this spring you told us about?” Jazz asked.  “I mean, that’s the whole reason for coming here, right? An unending supply of clean water to drink and irrigate the fields.  Where is it?”

I looked around to get my bearings, then pointed down the two-lane highway.  "A mile or two down that way.  It's a state park."

“A state park?” Grace asked.  “So they’ve probably got a few buildings for the rangers or something?”

“Something like that.”  I’d been to the park once, years ago.  “Some cabins too.”

Fritz stepped away from the group and looked down the highway as though the room around him would help him to see better.  “Remote?”

I looked around at the empty landscape outside of town.  “Even more remote than this.”

“Maybe we stay there tonight,” offered Grace.  “Should be safe.”  She looked around at each of us.  Silent consensus.  We loaded up in the trucks.

It took all of a minute to pass the city limits sign on the way out of town.  Houses grew sparse again and the bleached land stretched into nothingness in the north.  In the southwest, the direction we were heading, the bald, brown mountains grew taller with our approach. 

I watched through the windshield, looking across the plain at an irregularity far down the road.  It grew larger and slowly clarified until I was able to make out a flat, white building with a red tile roof just off the highway on the left—the park's visitor cabins.

They weren’t cabins, not as anyone would think of a cabin.  Lodge might be a better word, though it resembled one of those roadside motels from the 1950s.  The lodge was made up of two L-shaped buildings, five small apartments each, laid out in roughly the configuration of a horseshoe with a narrow gap at the top, opposite the open end.  At the open end, there was a driveway a few cars wide, which provided access to a central courtyard for parking between the buildings. 

The layout gave the feeling of an old Spanish mission laid out a bit like a fort to defend from the Apaches in the area.  To enhance the impression, canals drained water away from the spring and down to a lake that lay southeast of the city.  The canals looped around the horseshoe fortress adding an extra defense for anyone inside.  As Grace had guessed, it would be a relatively safe place to stay.

After a few more minutes of slowly driving, we passed a sign for the park and Grace slowed the truck to make the turn into the entrance.  We drove right by the ranger’s booth.  Nobody there to charge us an entry fee.  What a surprise.  Off to our left, the driveway led to the mouth of the courtyard between the two main buildings and Murphy said, “Holy shit, Zed! You see this?”

Just inside the mouth of the horseshoe, hidden from the road, sat two Humvees with fifty-caliber machine guns mounted on top.  Behind each gun, the figure of a person stood, training the weapons on us.

“Stop the truck!”  Murphy told Grace.  “Stop!”  He jumped out while the truck was still rolling, letting the door swing open behind him.

Seeing Murphy go, I followed quickly.

Murphy ran ahead and slowed to a walk, as I came up beside him.  We were still twenty or thirty yards from the Humvees and several people were moving around behind them, armed, not ready to show themselves.  I couldn’t tell if they were our friends or some bunch of hostile assholes with the same idea I’d had. 

Come to Balmorhea.  Be safe.

Three figures walked out from between the two Humvees—a tall, older woman, an athletic black woman, and an unimpressive older man with bad posture.

“Holy shit,” I muttered.  It was Gretchen, Dalhover, and Rachel.

They’d made it.  They were fucking alive and they’d made it all the way across Texas.

Rachel shrieked and the tears flowed as she ran to Murphy, who grabbed her in his arms, hugged her, and cried as well.

“Figured you were dead,” Dalhover rasped as he drew close, his hand extended to shake mine.  Gretchen trailed behind, a smile on her face as well.  Others stepped out from behind their cover.

“It’s—”  My voice cracked as I grasped Dalhover’s hand.

In a very unlikely move, he reached an arm around my back to give me a hug.  “Never thought I’d say I was glad to see you, but I am.”

We separated.  I wiped some creeping moisture out of my eyes and was immediately engulfed in a big hug from Gretchen.

“Didn’t think we’d ever see you again,” said Dalhover shaking his head and looking back toward the Humvees.  “Guess you don’t know.”

Gretchen let me go, grasped my shoulders and held me still to look me up and down.  "I'm not sure if you look better or worse but it's good to see you, really good."

"It's good to see you guys too,” I told them.  It was better than good.  It was fantastic.  It was the refutation of all my irrational dread.  It was a genuine reason to be happy.  Wait.  I looked at Dalhover, guessing immediately some of them hadn't made it.  Some of them were dead.  "What don't I know?"

Dalhover looked toward the Humvees again, drawing my eyes in that direction.  Walking toward us, with pale skin, green eyes, flaming red hair blowing in the breeze, looking bewildered, was Steph. 

I think my heart stopped beating for a second, maybe a minute.  The world stood still around me.  Everything went silent.  I thought I might explode from a mix of confused feelings.

Reaching her arms around me to pull me tightly to her, close enough for me to feel her breath blow across my ear, she said, "Wow, you're still alive.”  She started to cry.

A rush of confusion slapped me in the face.  A mountain of guilt poured over me.  I’d abandoned her on the shore all those months ago.  I thought she was dead.  I fucked up.  I so fucked up. 

“Wow,” my mouth said, running on autopilot, as my arms tried to remember how to hold a woman like I never wanted to let her go again.  “You’re still alive.”

Murphy was so goddamned happy, his happiness seemed to wash over everyone in range of his big voice.  People were smiling all around us, introducing themselves, asking questions and trading answers. 

Not Steph and I.  It was like they were all outside a bubble, the center of which stood me with her, separate from them.  Looking at her face, seeing a ragged scar on her forehead running up into her hair, another on her cheek below her left eye, I felt a stab of pain at what she’d gone through.  But the scars didn’t make her ugly.  They made her real.  They made her on the outside what she was on the inside—tough and beautiful.

The wind blew her hair across her face and when she brushed it away, I saw the marks where teeth had torn at her forearm, and across the top of her hand.  They’d healed, too.  I recalled all the cuts, the bites, the bullet hole, the bruises, and the scrapes that left marks all over me I’d carry until the day I died.  In that way, she and I were a match, damaged survivors, still standing when so many others had fallen. 

Steph started to shake her head as she looked at me, as if to answer an unasked question, she said, “It was my fault.  It was my choice.” 

I choked on my words but I managed to say, “I thought you were dead.”

“I let go of your hand.”  She reached up and traced her fingers over a scar on my face.  It was new since she’d last seen me.  I didn’t remember how I’d gotten it.  “It was a bad situation.  I didn’t want you to die with me.  I knew you wouldn’t leave.”

“I wouldn’t have.”  I took her hand in mine and I squeezed.  How could I have let it go that day on the beach? “I didn’t.  After you died—I thought you died—I don’t know what happened.  I probably would have stood there in a stupor until they killed me.  Murphy hauled me to the boat.  He saved me.”

“He saved us both.”

“I don’t understand.”  The memory of that day on the shore surrounded by a mob of Whites was so deeply etched into my mind I didn’t see how I could have missed a thing so important.  Steph had been tackled by Whites.  I was low on blood, barely strong enough to walk, and was trying to fight them off, trying to drag her into the lake.  The naked ones were afraid of water, mostly, and I knew if I could get her to the water I could save her.  But there were so goddamned many of them.  And then her hand went limp.

"It was the hand grenades,” said Steph, "I think.  I heard the first ones.  I felt the last ones.  I think one of them must have detonated right next to the Whites who were on top of me.  It killed them, maybe wounded them.  I'm not sure.  The concussion knocked me unconscious."

Was that possible? It had to be.  It just fucking had to be.  Steph was right here in front of me.  She was alive.

"When I came to,” she said, "it was over.  Most of the horde that attacked us was gone.  Maybe they followed the Humvees when they drove away.  I don't know."

“Only the cannibals stayed,” I said.  “There are some in the horde who prefer to hang back and eat dead Whites.”

“When I crawled out from under the bodies on me,” she said, “there might have been a few dozen on the beach, feeding.  I was so covered in blood I don’t think they understood what I was.”

“You just walked away?” It was an incredible story.

She shook her head.  “I was hurt pretty bad.  I crawled to the water and swam out to the boathouse we’d been staying in.  I found a boat and took it back to Monk’s Island.”

"You were at Monk's Island?” She'd been so close, the whole time, maybe an hour away.  "Murphy and me stayed in a house on the shore way up the lake until I got better.  If it wasn't for Murphy,” I shook my head to finish the sentence as I remembered how I felt at the time.  Had I died, it wouldn't have mattered to me.  "He nursed me back to health.”  But she was only an hour away.  Damn.  "How long were you on Monk's Island."

"Three weeks.”  Steph looked down as though she was guilty.  "I didn't search for you in Austin.  I guessed that you made your way out here with everyone else.”  Tears started to flow down her cheeks again.  "After I got settled enough, I found a Jeep, stocked it with supplies, found a rifle and a sidearm, and headed west.  It took me about a week to get all the way here.  I took the long way, I guess.  I avoided anything that looked like trouble.”  She smiled weakly through her tears.  "When I got here and they told me the shape you were in the last time they saw you, I figured you must have died."

Steph’s tears were flowing in earnest.  Mine were, too.

“That’s why I didn’t come back to find you,” she said.  “I thought you were dead.” 

"Don't,” I told her.  "You don't have anything to feel guilty about.  You couldn't have known.”  All of my guilt was threatening to smother me, though.  "You didn't do a single thing wrong.  Not one.  You tried to save my life.  That's it.”  I blinked through my tears to focus on her face.  "If anybody's guilty, it's me.  Will you forgive me for leaving you?"

“There’s nothing to forgive,” she said, half laughing through her tears.  “Will you forgive
me
?”

In what might have been my smoothest move ever with a girl, I answered her with a kiss.