Immortality (21 page)

Sarah’s cheek was on the pavement. She didn’t remember passing out or how she had gotten out of the car. She sat upright, and looked across the street. She could see Shepherd and Cussack sitting inside their cruiser not twenty yards away. From the looks of it, they had rolled into a shallow ditch and were stuck. What the hell was wrong with them? Where were the emergency vehicles?

Sarah walked toward the cruiser. She was staggering slightly and leaning to the left, babying her injured ribs. There was a growing feeling that she was invisible and not part of this world. The cruiser’s headlights were a faint yellow. The engine had stopped running. The battery was almost drained. She stared in the passenger window. Shepherd looked like a wax museum mannequin. She opened the door. The dome light glowed a dying amber. She touched his face. The skin was cool, and soft, and pale. His eyes were open. Sarah held onto the door as she bent over and heaved out her last meal.

She wiped her mouth on the sleeve of her jacket. Without looking at Shepherd or Cussack, she reached in and tried the ignition. The headlights dimmed completely. The engine clicked a few times but didn’t turnover. She was actually relieved there was no reason to pull Shepherd and Cussack from the cruiser so that she could drive it.

She looked down the street at a row of homes. All the lights were on. She refused to accept how odd it was that no one was out on the street after all the noise these accidents had to have made. She popped the trunk and got a flashlight and hand-held radio from it. She tried to call for help: still nothing but static. She set the radio on the car’s roof. She pulled her hair back into a ponytail. She pulled harder and harder until it hurt. None of this was real. The radio had to work. Everyone couldn’t be gone. She let go of her hair. She ordered herself to get a grip. She was a police officer. She was trained to deal with disaster. She would get though this. She picked up the radio and headed toward the nearest house.

Sarah knocked on the door with the butt of her flashlight. She didn’t expect an answer, and there was none. She turned the knob. The door was open. She went inside. “Hello,” she called. No answer. She spotted a telephone, and picked it up. There was a tone. She dialed the station. With each button she pressed, the dial tone came back. She tried pressing the buttons at random. The dial tone never switched off. She gave up and wandered deeper into the house making her way toward the back. She got as far as the kitchen. There was a man and woman slumped over a table. There was a stew bubbling on the stove. She turned off the burner and left.

The weather was growing colder outside. Sarah took a deep breath. She couldn’t remember breathing the entire time she’d been inside that house. She felt dampness on her cheek. She rubbed it and came away with blood. She stared at her fingers for a moment then dismissed it. She no longer cared if the blood was hers or from someone else.

Sarah started down the center of the roadway. She played her flashlight back and forth across the street as she moved. A dog trotted in a confused manner into an intersection pulling an empty metal leash. The canine’s eyes glowed demonically in the flashlight before it ran off.

Her foot hit something. She shined the flashlight down and saw a child crumpled on the frigid pavement. She moved on without allowing the thought to register too deeply. The flashlight illuminated other bodies in yards and in the street. She was growing numb to the insanity.

She thought about her nightmares where something evil lurked in underground rivers. She came to the dark opening of a sewer drain cut into a curb and stopped walking. Her legs refused to move any farther. Something evil was there below the ground. She could almost feel it waiting for its chance to get her. Half of her wished it would. She shook off the feeling and moved on.

The blocks drifted by. Periodically, she forgot where she was going; then, remembered. She was heading home. She wouldn’t allow her thoughts to wander any farther than that. She refused to imagine Kenny like the bodies she’d already seen.

Sarah gazed at all the silent homes and cars. She’d thought about trying to steal one of the cars but couldn’t bring herself to add to the trespass of all this violence. Abruptly, several of the house lights stuttered on and off in unison; then the electricity failed. The streets went black except for moonlight. The puddles of darkness grew impenetrable. The small noises of modern civilization that usually went unnoticed were now gone. The void felt as deep and still as the night.

Sarah didn’t understand what had happened. Were they at war? Had terrorists done something with poison gas? The world felt silent but wasn’t. There were sounds of wind and the rustle of dried leaves.

She stopped and listened. There was a dog howling somewhere far off and another one answering. The woods were alive – she sensed smaller animals moving in there. No weapon of man could have done this – killed all the people and not harmed the animals. She wondered if all this destruction was the wrath of God.

Sarah felt like she had been walking for her entire life. She was exhausted. The city of Morristown was still miles farther, and her home was eight miles beyond that. She had begun checking cars that had been in accidents along the way. While they all had keys, none of them had been drivable. She walked up to a Mercedes that was idling. A man was slumped against the driver’s window. The side of a pickup truck had stopped the car in a low-speed impact. Around the car was a scattering of leaves that had recently fallen. Her feet crunched on them.

Sarah opened the door. The man remained behind the wheel as if frozen in time. His seat belt and shoulder harness were properly fastened. In his hand was a miniature voice-recorder. Sarah folded back the man’s fingers. They felt like cold sausages. She extracted the voice-recorder. The digital memory had been completely filled. She pressed the play button and heard wind buffing through a car. A radio was playing a news show. The man was dictating a letter to his secretary. He coughed and then moaned softly. She could hear the car swerving, brakes being applied, and then the crunch of a bumper meeting the soft middle of the pickup truck. Sarah glanced at where the car had struck. The recorder was emitting the distorted blare of a horn being repeatedly hit. Maybe the man was trying to call for help? The recording grew silent except for the sound of the news show. There was some kind of commotion and then the news show went silent.

Sarah stopped the recorder. The world came back. Her breathing was shallow. She slipped the tiny recorder into her coat pocket then dragged the man from his car and deposited him on the sidewalk.

The Mercedes had a very expensive digital FM radio and CD player. The radio was picking up nothing. She had it scanning from one end of the dial to the other in an endless loop. Headlights from an overturned car shone at eyelevel through her side window as she drove slowly past it. The Morristown police station was located five blocks from the town square which was an historical landmark. Morristown was considered the military capital of the Revolutionary War and much of its history remained. Sarah parked the Mercedes at the opposite side of the square. An old church towered over her. The streets were an impassable pileup of cars. A fire hydrant was sending a geyser into the air. Some of the water had frozen into a thin glaze of ice. Nothing felt real. There was a sense she could almost reach out and change the channel to a better story. Some of the buildings still had emergency lights running. Sarah looked in through the windows as she walked passed them.

She stopped walking in the middle of a block. At the end of the block facing her was the silhouette of a woman. Sarah gasped. She slowly directed her flashlight onto the woman’s face. Someone else was alive! The woman’s cheeks were smeared with water and soot. A baby was in her arms.

“Don’t be afraid,” said Sarah.

The woman shook her head no. Sarah took a single step forward. The woman appeared ready to either flee or run toward her. She looked like she was fighting back inner demons.

“Let me help,” said Sarah.

“My baby,” cried the woman.

“What’s your name?”

No reply…

Sarah slowly edged toward the woman, trying not to frighten her. Within arms length, she stopped. The woman was soaking wet. The baby was dead. The little face was as still as a doll’s. The eyes were like glass. The woman was shivering. Sarah guessed she was in shock. She needed to be kept warm. Sarah looked around. There was a clothing store two doors back.

“Wait here... I’ll get you something warm.”

The woman nodded while fresh tears flooded her eyes. Sarah went inside the store. A sales clerk was slumped over a register. Several customers were splayed out on the floor. She was surrounded by the smell of human waste. Sarah grabbed the first coat she saw and went back outside. The woman was gone. On the sidewalk was the tiny bundle of infant.

Sarah ran to the end of the block and looked both ways. No one. The woman might not survive the night. Sarah heard a thumping sound almost like a pillow being fluffed. The sound was coming from down the block to her right. She ran along the sidewalk, stopping frequently to reorient to the sound. At the end of the block, she stopped and looked up. The sound was coming from the side of a building. She expected to see a face looking out, someone banging on the glass with their palms. There was no one.

A bird flew out of the darkness and into the side of the building... thump. The creature fluttered halfway to the ground and then took to the air. A few seconds later, the bird came at the building again... thump. The world had gone mad. Sarah turned away and headed back toward the station.

Sarah walked in the front door of the police headquarters and stopped. The lights were on. The emergency generator in the basement sent a subtle vibration through the floor. There were bodies everywhere. Their faces were contorted. Some had claw marks on their throats. Sarah steeled herself to walk back to the communications room. On her way, she passed the cellblock. Glancing into the guard booth, she saw movement on one of the television screens. All the cells were occupied by the dead except for one. The guy was banging at the lock with what looked like a piece of toilet. Sarah picked up the log entry for that cell. The guy was in for a third count of aggravated assault. She looked back at the screen. Stupid bastard was still banging away at the lock. Sarah left him.

The radio room appeared to be working. Most of the equipment had glowing lights. Sarah had no idea how to operate it beyond the basics. She repeatedly tried changing channels and keying the microphone. She called for help. There was no response to anything she tried. She began to wonder how far the destruction extended. Did it stop at a dozen miles, a hundred miles? Was civilization still there?

Sarah went out to the parking structure. She got into her antique Nissan and cranked it over. She had to try a few times before the old engine caught. The chassis vibrated from a rough idle and then smoothed.

Sarah headed out of town, taking the back roads to avoid any heavily trafficked areas that could be blocked with wreckage. The moon drifted behind a bank of clouds. The world grew darker. Sarah could feel the power of civilization waning along with the moonlight. The dark ages were coming back. How long would it be until the machines they depended on rusted into decay? How long before their cities were reduced to indistinguishable rubble?

Sarah was within two miles of her home when she gave up on the roads. Half the streets she’d tried had been blocked. She felt like a rat in a maze. She had driven across people’s lawns to get as far as she’d gotten. Twenty minutes ago, the hand-held police radio had cut in with a distant signal. For a moment, there was a human voice saying something about an emergency. The signal had drifted off. Sarah had been broadcasting every few minutes since then, trying to get the voice back. She stared at the radio, her only link with the world. The radio was drawing power from the cigarette lighter. On its built in batteries, the radio wouldn’t last long if she kept broadcasting every few minutes. Reluctantly she turned off the engine, unplugged the radio, and climbed out.

The street was lined with old trees, mostly oaks and a few maples. Sarah stuffed extra batteries into her coat pockets. She switched on her flashlight. Car wreckage completely blocked her way. She slid over the hood of one of the cars. A twinge of pain in her ribs reminded her to take it slowly. She began to walk down the middle of the street. The occasional sounds of animals seemed to be amplified by the silence of humankind. She found more signs of life here than in town. A bat flittered across the sky. A cat ran from under a car and out into the woods. Still there were no people except for bodies in cars and on the streets; and they weren’t people anymore. Sarah no longer fully noticed them; her mind was defensively filtering out the horror as if it were part of the natural scenery as much as a fence or a lamp post.

Suddenly it was quieter. Sarah froze. There was complete silence, not even a breeze. Slowly, she turned in a circle playing the beam of her flashlight over fronts of houses and thickets of trees. She saw nothing but felt exposed and vulnerable. The urge to run was overpowering. She positioned her fingers over her holstered gun and started walking. The sound of her shoes on the roadbed echoed along the street as her pace quickened. The air seemed colder.

A twig snapped. There was movement off to the left. Sarah crouched, drew her pistol, and aimed it along with the flashlight. Someone had been stalking her from behind that tree. She was certain of it. Her breathing was tense. All she could see were branches and shadows and empty lawn. There was no place to hide. It was impossible for someone to have been there, but still her heart raced. A breeze swirled through dragging with it a scattering of dried leaves. She looked down and saw a body less than ten feet in front of her. Had it moved? Was one of them playing dead and just waiting for her to turn her back?

“Get a grip.” she scolded herself.