Immortality (44 page)

Soon, she was staring at all the passing faces again. She was both scared and exhilarated. There were people, hundreds of thousands of people, filling six lanes of highway to the horizon. Life had become surreal. The sound was the most amazing thing. The ground vibrated with the collective voice of humanity. The din had the timber of a monastic chant combined with the sense of a great force held back by the weakest of dams. The relative quiet could erupt into deadly chaos with no provocation. Suzy watched as an occasional scuffle turned into small whirlpools of people inflicting pain. It was almost as if human bodies were plugging holes in the social fabric by surging inward toward vacuums caused by the conflicts.

She set up her camcorder and started wandering around, careful not to stray far from where Artie would expect her. The equipment she had was the smallest pro model available. The camera wasn’t much larger than a big consumer camcorder but was easily recognizable as professional gear. She knew the camcorder had the magical power of shielding its owner against violence. The logo of her employer NBC was decaled on the side of the camcorder. Few people would attack someone who looked like a press photographer. Everyone wanted to be on TV. She talked with people, taping them, asking them their story. A little girl and an elderly man caught her attention. It was the contrast between young and old. The man’s face was a wrinkled map. The girl’s skin was pink and her eyes so large she seemed owlish. The two were sitting on a bundle of clothing. The girl’s tiny hand was enfolded in the huge palm of her elder. Suzy started the taping with a close-up view of the hands, and then slowly zoomed out to fill the frame with the man and child.

“Is she your granddaughter?” asked Suzy.

“My daughter’s child,” said the man. His voice started to break up. “I’m too old to have lived to see this. My daughter’s gone. Her husband’s gone. Me and Amy are all the family that’s left. Now I’ve got to keep going for her.”

“Amy, sweet heart, how old are you?” asked Suzy.

The little girl didn’t answer. She leaned in close to her grandfather.

“It’s okay,” said the man. “This is a nice lady. You can talk with her.”

“Three,” said Amy.

Suzy felt her eyes tearing. She took a deep breath and told herself to hold on.

“Do you know where you’re going?” asked Suzy. She had directed her question to the grandfather.

“Uhuh,” said Amy. “We’re going to find mommy.”

“She doesn’t understand,” said the man. “I don’t have the heart to tell her.”

Suzy sat on the curb. She thought about that little girl and grew teary again. So many had died. When she and Artie got to Washington, would her parents be gone too? Was she going to become like that girl? She touched her womb and sensed the baby that was alive within her. What kind of world would their child inherit? She looked up and saw Artie parting the crowd. Just seeing him yanked the anguish from her chest. He was her future. His face seemed older. She ran into his arms. Her cheeks were damp with tears.

“You alright?” he asked.

“I’m fine. Just hold me.”

“I’ve got us a car,” he said.

“Where is it?”

“About a mile from here on a surface street. I want to get back there fast before anyone gets any ideas. I left our food in the back.”

Suzy carried her camera gear. Artie took the duffel bag. They headed straight for the opposite side of the highway and over a guardrail. There was a hill of grass and trees. The far side of the hill led down into a backyard. Artie helped her down over an eight foot cement wall. As Suzy stood, she was captivated by the silence. It was as if all the people were gone. The thousand of voices had been stilled. Here there were trees, and grass, and birds. An old crow was staring at her from a second floor ledge. She had stumbled into another world that existed only hundreds of yards from where she’d sat on a highway curb. She stood there in awe until Artie tugged at her hand. She followed after him, feeling as if she were walking through a dream.

The car was an old Volkswagen camper with a single bench for a front seat. As Suzy climbed in, she saw boxes of food piled in the back. There was more than what Artie had left with and none of it looked familiar. What was going on? Suzy had noticed over the last few days that he’d gradually been taking on more and more of the appearance of a gang member. She didn’t know everything about his past, but it was as if the streets were reclaiming him.

“Was the supermarket having a sale?” she asked, not wanting to know.

Artie pulled out a key ring that wasn’t his and started the engine.

“I had to trade all our food for the Volkswagen; so before I headed back, I did a little shopping.”

She noticed a scratch on his cheek.

“No one got hurt, did they?” she asked.

“The supermarket was being cleaned out fast. I was amazed no one had hit it before now. There was a little shoving. No big deal.”

He avoided her eyes. Something was different about him; he was remote and a little sad. She decided to leave it alone for now.

“Does the radio work?” she asked.

“Yeah, but it’s the funniest thing. It only plays music. Somehow I just can’t seem to find a news channel.”

He smiled for the first time since he’d come to collect her.

“Well, let’s hear it,” she said.

Artie turned the stereo on and selected the CD player. She immediately knew the music. It was an old Joni Mitchell song, Court and Spark. The song was what had been playing when he’d asked her to marry him. Tears welled up in her eyes.

“How’d you find it?”

“The people that I got the camper from threw in a box of CDs. Said they didn’t have another player, so what would they need ’em for? When I saw Court and Spark, I knew everything was going to turn out okay.”

He reached behind the seat into a box and came back with an orange and handed it to her.

“You should eat this for the baby,” he said.

Suzy leaned over and kissed him on the cheek.

They’d been moving at a steady crawl for hours. The surface road they were on had passed through the nicer suburbs, large houses, well groomed lawns, and the occasional main street of a town. They were at the crest of a large hill. Ahead of them was an open blue sky. Suzy momentarily aimed the camera back through the rear window. The ruined spires of New York were still visible amid the smoke. The scene through her viewfinder was 9/11 all over again. Traffic was snarled in front of them. There were cars which looked like they’d been pushed to the side after running out of gas or breaking down. Most of the people on the sidewalks were carrying weapons in plain sight.

Suzy focused her camera onto a mother and teenage daughter waiting by the curb for someone or something. The girl had a canvas shopping bag. The mother was holding a shotgun. Suzy zoomed in on the woman’s face. As they drove past, the woman looked straight into the camera. There was no change in the woman’s expression. Her eyes were cold and shiny black. The pupils were as wide as dimes. Suzy set her camera down. She’d had enough for now.

After hours of bumper to bumper traffic, Artie was frustrated and had started using the back roads. He was relieved when it turned out to be a better strategy. Suzy played navigator with a folded paper map, jumping them from street to street. Every dozen miles or so, he headed back toward the interstate to check out the congestion. At a point halfway across New Jersey near a town called Dover, they got back onto Route 80. The highway was almost empty. There must have been some kind of wreck behind them blocking all traffic.

In forty minutes, they were crossing a bridge through the Delaware Water Gap into Pennsylvania. The Delaware River was a ribbon of blue a couple hundred feet below them. There were several small craft heading downstream toward the ocean. Little remained of the military barricades that Artie had seen on the tube. He saw a trailer with a broken searchlight and the burnt out shell of a Humvee. A piece of the bridge was missing. Concrete and twisted reinforcing bars rimmed the crater. He hadn’t heard anything about this destruction in the news, but it was clear a battle had been fought. People had died here.

The distant smoke had worried Artie the moment he’d seen it. He’d been watching it for the past several miles as they drove closer, and this was close enough. He pulled the camper to the shoulder and got out, leaving the door open. The spiral of smoke was less than a half mile downrange. He got out a riflescope that he’d liberated along with the Volkswagen and a deer rifle. The lens quality was poor. He made a mental note to find something better. He could see a tractor-trailer rig blocking the eastbound lanes of highway. Near it were several wrecked cars, one ablaze. Maybe a hundred people were milling around; most appeared to be heavily armed. Gang signs were being flashed. Lines were queued up in front of what looked like kegs of beer and food. Just immediately west of the tractor-trailer, the highway had been turned into a parking lot filled with motorcycles. Artie looked back at the tractor-trailer. He couldn’t see any damage. He wondered if it was intentionally parked to block the highway. His eyes moved to a bonfire. He couldn’t tell what was burning, but it didn’t look like wood. Maybe car seats or cans of oil?

He stopped moving the scope, tried to focus it better. The image remained fuzzy. What he saw was a naked body staked out with ropes on the ground. He moved the scope a little to the right and saw another body next to the first. Someone walked by and flung the contents of a beer mug at it. A head lolled to one side. The hair was long. The captive could have been a woman. Artie’s mind started working. He knew what this was – a party, but not any kind he wanted to attend. Memories of a past he’d tried hard to forget flooded back into his brain.

Artie set the scope onto the driver’s seat. He thought about the guns he was carrying. The magnum would be useless, the rate of fire too slow and the deer rifle was even slower. That was a gang at war, and a huge one from the looks of it. They must have been using the tractor-trailer as a portable roadblock. If he hadn’t seen the smoke or been more curious than cautious, he and Suzy could have been the next guests of honor.

“Something wrong?” asked Suzy.

“No big deal,” he said. “The road’s blocked by a huge accident. We’ll have to turn around and find another route.”

The sun had been fading for the last half hour. The sky was a deepening purple-blue. Even thought he’d driven a hundred miles from the gang roadblock, Artie felt like it wasn’t far enough. They were parked on a shoulder. He’d been watching a rest area from the cover of some trees. There were a lot of people there and more than a few guns, but there were also kids and dogs. He watched cars pull in and then later leave unmolested; more than a few had been offered food. The rest stop looked like a huge roadside barbecue. A fifty-five gallon drum had been split lengthwise to make a pair of cooking pits. Suzy stood behind him with her hands on his shoulder.

“Let’s check it out,” she said. “I can almost smell the food from here.”

“Looks okay,” said Artie. “But if I start talking about going to find my parents in Maine, that’s the signal something’s wrong and we’re getting out fast.”

“You worry too much. We haven’t seen anything bad since New York.”

The evening was almost over. Suzy was curled into his arms. She was half-asleep. The food had been great. The price was barter or labor – or free if someone could offer neither. He’d eaten two burgers and more hotdogs than he could remember. Artie was on his third beer and enjoying the conversation. A half dozen men and women were sitting in a circle around a small campfire. This must have been the way news traveled hundreds of years ago. He caught himself wondering if maybe there was some hope after all. The plague was forcing people to leave their homes and band together in ways that hadn’t happened in centuries. The arbitrary walls that society had erected were being torn down. Henry, a heavy set man with a beard, was talking. Artie had learned that Henry and his family had been on the road since the first New Jersey kill zone.

“I’ve heard they call themselves The Pagans,” said Henry.

“Yeah, I was told the same thing by an ex-cop from Philly,” said a woman named Claire.

“They travel in a pack as large as a thousand. I’ve seen it,” said Henry. “They’ve got military hardware. There’s a rumor going around that a lot of them are deserters. I was passing through Atlantic City when they were laying siege to a police station. Me and the wife and kids almost got spotted by ’em. We hung back behind some cover and watched. Nothing else to do. They were using heavy machine guns mounted on Humvees. Those guns were punching holes clear through concrete walls. The cops inside were being slaughtered. I’ll tell you, it put a chill down my spine.”

“Might have been fifty-caliber,” said Artie. “That stuff was designed to cut through armored vehicles.”

“Man! Where the hell’s the Army when you need them?” said another guy. He tossed an empty beer bottle into the fire where it popped like a small grenade.

“Wish I knew,” said Henry. “There was a report on the radio that parts of Atlantic City were under control of what they called rival gangs… Rival gangs, my ass. They’re not reporting the truth. It’s one gang and they’re not rivaling among themselves. They’re after us.”

“I heard from the same ex-cop that Philly was in total chaos,” said Claire. “He said it was the Pagans. I’ll tell you what: me and the boys are heading south to the safe zone. We’ll find a way through that damn line.”

“Satan’s Crossing,” mumbled Henry in a softer voice.

“Huh?” said Claire.

“That’s what people down there call the I64 line – Satan’s Crossing.”

Artie was barely listening at the moment. He was thinking about what he’d seen earlier today. That tractor-trailer party on I-80 could have been the same gang. If half of what he’d just heard was true, these animals were not only well armed, they were winning.

Something felt out of place. Mark opened his eyes. Light beamed onto his face through a crack in the shades. He was lying on the couch in Kathy’s office. A blanket was covering both of them. She was cuddled into his side and, as far as he could tell, she was not wearing anything. Her skin felt hot. He realized he was naked.