The Night Parade (11 page)

“Hi,” David said. “My son and I just got lost. I'm sorry.”

“This is a restricted area,” said the man. His voice was muffled on the other side of the clear plastic shield that covered his face. His breath caused little clouds of moisture to bloom on the plastic. “This road is closed. There were signs posted.”

“Were there? I must have missed them. I apologize. We'll just turn around and go back—”

“You live around here?”

A second figure dressed in similar attire—and carrying his own rifle—appeared in the space between two of the camouflage tents. He approached the scene without hesitation, pausing just a few yards behind his comrade. The person was too far away for David to make out any features behind the plastic face shield.

“No, sir,” David said.

The man bent slightly so that he could peer into the car. His hazmat suit crinkled like tarpaulin. His breath continued to fog the faceplate. David couldn't tell if he was checking the interior of the vehicle for anything in particular or if he wanted a better look at Ellie. David held his breath and found he couldn't take his eyes from the man's gun.

“You two need to turn around and get out of here,” the man said finally, straightening up. He pointed with one gloved hand back in the direction they had come. “Don't stop until you're back on the main road.”

“Yes, sir,” David said, already rolling his window back up.

The man in the hazmat suit stepped backward onto the curb. He continued pointing in the direction they had come, one hand on the grip of his rifle.

David executed a clumsy three-point turn, his heart hammering in his chest the whole time, and found himself waving stupidly at the man in the hazmat suit as he drove past him at a quick clip.

What if he had asked to see my driver's license?
he wondered, passing those darkened, eerie houses with the
X
's on their doors again.
What if he had recognized my name and pulled me out of the car right then and there? What if—

But he could
what if
himself to death. The important thing was that the man
hadn't
asked to see his driver's license. They were headed back the way they had come, no worse for wear. Couldn't he just leave it at that?

This time, when they drove past the school and its assortment of antiseptic white tents, David saw what were undeniably body bags lined up in a tidy queue along the sloping lawn. A few of the people in hazmat suits paused to watch them go by. Ellie waved to them. To David's astonishment, a few waved back.

D
avid bought a newspaper, two packs of Marlboros, and two sixteen-ounce bottles of Pepsi at a gas station just over the Kentucky border. The gas station was nothing more than a ramshackle clapboard structure with a few ancient pumps beneath a graffiti-laden portico and a murky front window as dark and uninviting as a panel of glass that looked down into the depths of a black sea. The blacktop had been defaced by graffiti, and straggly haylike weeds sprouted through its many cracks. Ellie waited in the car.

They were back on the road before anyone else pulled up to the gas station, and were motoring along with steady traffic—the most they had seen in several hours—a minute or so later.

In the passenger seat, Ellie had the shoe box back in her lap again. Its lid was open and she was absently stroking the three tiny eggs inside the nest while watching the ebb and flow of traffic. She had calmed since the incident at the diner and her subsequent breakdown behind the highway billboard. In fact, her face had grown tight, her eyes distant, with a look of contemplation. Grief at her mother's passing was normal, but David worried that she was regretting having spoken to him about her ability. He was anxious to bring it up again—to have her touch his arm or the back of his neck again—but he didn't want to make her uncomfortable. She looked frightened.

But she's strong,
he thought.
She's strong.

They drove until hunger growled deep in his belly. He knew better than to ask Ellie if she was hungry, so he simply turned off into a shopping center and drove around until he found a random burger joint that was open. Ellie said nothing as he read the items on the menu aloud, and David did not afford her the opportunity to rebuke any suggestions he made; he merely ordered a sack of cheeseburgers and two Cokes at the first window, avoiding the whole messy routine.

Across the plaza was a strip mall that had long been forsaken, judging by its appearance. Skeins of yellow weeds swayed among the broken shelves of asphalt. The windows of the shops were either soaped over or boarded up, the signs above each entranceway no longer in existence, save for the ghostly gray outline they left behind on the façade, like fingerprints at a crime scene. Someone had rolled a bunch of steel barrels beneath the awning of one shop, their arrangement somehow suspicious and off-putting to David, though there was no one around to cement his discomfort.

David drove along the ruined parking lot, the Oldsmobile bumping and thumping the whole way, until he pulled out of sight behind a row of Dumpsters, shielding them from the street traffic and the rest of the plaza.

Ravenous, he tore open the paper sack, yanked out a fistful of burgers, and tossed a couple into Ellie's lap.

“Not hungry,” she intoned.

He rubbed the back of her head, then stripped away the greasy wax paper on his own burger and folded half of it into his mouth.

The newspaper was wedged between his seat and the console. He grabbed it now, a wad of burger swelling his right cheek as he chewed, and opened it up in his lap. He searched first for any mention of him and Ellie. There was none. That was good; it most likely meant they hadn't been looking for him by the time the paper went to press. Still, it was a small victory, what with their faces—their
old
faces—presumably on television screens across the country. Freshly dyed hair and a baseball cap would only get them so far. If some inquisitive police officer happened to stop them and ask for identification, they were screwed.

It's not just the police,
he reminded himself, stuffing the rest of the burger into his mouth.
It's those people in the white vans and the black cars I've got to keep an eye out for, too.

On the second page of the A Section, he found what he was looking for: a map of the United States. This map had become a staple in pretty much every newspaper throughout the country over the past few months. David had stopped looking at it many months ago, unnerved by the prospect of what the future held. Or whether or not there would even
be
a future. But he needed it now.

The map detailed a variety of things, from the diplomatically named “free zones,” to the hot spots with their color-coded bull's-eyes, the coding disconcertingly similar to the Department of Homeland Security's terror alert levels. There were also a few areas designated by stark black
X
's—only a few, but still, more than there had been the last time David had checked this map in the newspaper back home. The colored bull's-eyes were bad enough, signifying the estimated level of infection in any given area. There was a key in the lower right-hand corner of the map that explained, in very general terms, what was typically being done in these areas depending on the color level. But the black
X
's were worse, because those were the places that had fallen early and fallen quickly. The key identified these locations as places of thorough evacuation, though there had been rumors back at the college that those
X
's really meant that everyone there had died. Looking at the increased number of
X
's on the map now—perhaps two dozen at a glance—David hoped that rumor was not true.

Whether it's true or not, that doesn't change the fact that those places are empty,
he thought now, studying the map. He traced an index finger along the ridge of the Great Smoky Mountains.
Either those places have been evacuated or the people there are all dead. Either way, there will be no people. No cops.

As if reading his mind, Ellie said, “Where will we go?” She was staring out the window, the cheeseburgers in her lap untouched. On one slender thigh she balanced the shoe box. Its lid was off, and she was absently petting the three speckled eggs within.

“You know, I've been thinking about that. Do you remember Uncle Tim?”

“Your stepbrother,” she said.

“We should get in touch with him, go to his place for a while.”

“I haven't seen him since I was little.”

“Yeah, well, it's been a long time for me, too,” David said.

“Mom says he's a slouch.” Then she hung her head, as if physically pained by the sheer mention of her mother. “Where does he even live?”

“Missouri, last time we talked.”

“That's far.”

“It isn't so far,” he said. “We can do it.”

“In this car?” She glanced up and looked out the windshield, which appeared hazy behind a cloud of gravel dust.

“It's the only car we have, Little Spoon.”

She looked back down at her lap and at the speckled eggs in the bird's nest.

“I'm not going to let anything happen to you,” he told her.

“I know.” She turned over in the passenger seat so that he was left staring at her back.

David went back to the newspaper's map. Yes—given their situation, Tim was the only logical choice he had left.

It wasn't that he and Tim had left things on bad terms; despite Kathy's disapproval of his stepbrother's irresponsible lifestyle, David had never expressed this to Tim, nor had he let it sour anything between them. It was simply that they had gone off in different directions in life, and their infrequent conversations over the phone had eventually stopped altogether. He wondered now what kind of reception Tim might show him, receiving a phone call out of the blue. Moreover, what might he say or do if he'd already seen the news bulletin? David couldn't imagine.

David's mother had married Tim's father when David and Tim were nine and eleven years old, respectively. Memories of David's stepfather, Emmitt Brody, were of a hulking lumberjack of a man, broad-shouldered and thick-nosed, with a deeply furrowed brow and hands as abrasive as the outer shell of a pineapple. He had been a physically intimidating man, a stern man, but also a fair and kind man, and he had always treated David and his mother with respect and, to the degree he was capable, love. As he grew up, Tim Brody had adopted some of his father's workmanlike attributes—he took to building things with his hands, for instance, to include an entire canoe that he carved from the bole of an enormous tree one summer—but he did not possess his father's work ethic. Time spent punching a clock, which Emmitt Brody had done his entire adult life in a Pennsylvania quarry up until he was whisked away by pancreatic cancer in his early seventies, was time wasted slaving away so some corporation could get rich, according to Tim. And while David had somewhat admired Tim's aloofness and free spirit, he couldn't quite bring himself to follow in his stepbrother's shoes. David had gone on to college, got his teaching certificate, fallen in love with and married Kathy, had a daughter. Tim had dropped out of high school his senior year, spent the next decade or so running around with various women—one of whom accidentally got pregnant and had a subsequent abortion, David had heard—and never worked the same job or stayed in the same place for long before his feet got itchy and, like a wonky compass needle, he switched direction. It occurred to David now that while Tim had been living in Kansas City the last time they had spoken, there was a good chance he had rolled up his carpets and headed someplace else—perhaps
many
other places—since then. For all David knew, Tim Brody could be anywhere in the world right now.

Or dead,
he thought, the notion seizing him about the throat.
Maybe it's unlikely, but maybe it's true, too. Just look at that map. Look at all those colored bull's-eyes printed right there in front of you.

There was also an ever-changing number printed below the map, maintained by the Social Security Administration, known morbidly as the Death Tally. The SSA and the CDC had stopped using actual numbers and had changed to percentages sometime last year, because 0.05 percent of the country's population dead or infected sounded a hell of a lot better than 17.5 million people. David folded the paper in half and tucked it down between his seat and the console.

He rubbed Ellie's shoulder. “I'm gonna step outside and check my phone, see if I can get reception out here.”

Ellie didn't respond.

“Try to eat something,” he said.

Leaning over the seat into the rear of the car, he dug around in his bag until he located his cell phone. Then he stepped outside, startled by the heat of the fading afternoon, and of the smells of gasoline and decay emanating from the deserted strip mall.

He turned on the phone. A series of chimes indicated that there were more text messages waiting for him. He ignored those. At least there weren't any additional voice mails; if there were, he might be tempted to listen to them this time.

He scrolled quickly through his contact list, distraught when he did not find Tim's number listed under the
T
's or the
B
's. It had been so long since they'd spoken that it wasn't out of the question that he'd deleted Tim's number or simply replaced his phone since then. Goddamn, that was foolish. He wondered if Tim had likewise deleted him at some point.

He executed a quick Google search on his phone for Tim's name, and was hastily assaulted with over five million results. He blinked and looked stupidly at the phone's screen, his greasy fingerprints smudging some of the lines of text. This would require more extensive searching, at a time and a place where he could sit down and do it properly without worrying about the federal government tracking his cell phone via GPS. As it was, he was beginning to feel conspicuous parked out here all alone in the middle of a run-down, deserted shopping center.

He was about to power the phone off again and get back in the car, when the phone suddenly rang in his hands. The number wasn't programmed into his phone, yet he recognized it nonetheless.

Anger twisted his guts. Suddenly, he was back in that horrible hospital room again, the smell of death clinging to everything, his wife's eyes on him at first . . . then gone, distant, emptied of life. The utter helplessness of it all. And it was bad enough that they had broken in to his family's house and stolen pictures of him and Ellie—goddamn
family vacation photos!—
to use for their bullshit news bulletin, but now they were calling him to goad him out of hiding . . .

Before he knew what he was doing, he answered the call.

“You sons of bitches,” he growled into the phone.

“David.” It was the heavily accented voice of Dr. Kapoor. He sounded surprised that David had answered the phone.

“You've got a lot of nerve,” he said into the phone.

“Please, David, hear me out—”

“I saw the news report. That's some stunt.”

“It wasn't my idea. I was against it.”

“Bullshit.”

“David, you must hear me out. You are acting out of impulse, and you are only causing greater harm. Believe me, I understand your grief, and I'm here to help you see things more clearly before you—”

“You're here to
help
me?”

“If you'll only listen—”

“Leave me and my daughter alone,” he said.

“David, please—”

“Listen to me. You stay out of our way or you'll be sorry.”

“David, it doesn't have to be this way. You have misunderstood the situation.”

“Don't you fucking tell me what I—”

“Listen to me, David. You can't keep running.”

“You'll never find us.”

“You can't keep it up, David.” There was a hitch in Dr. Kapoor's throat. “David, you're sick.”

For a moment, Dr. Kapoor's voice faded out . . . then faded back in.