Molly’d already broken the sliding glass doors with a chair. Scattered glass shone on the floor. Doug had a hand on Steve’s shoulder, talking to him in a low voice with words Kathleen couldn’t make out. She got to her feet, sick to her stomach from how fast her heart was pounding, but ready to move.
Doug recoiled. Molly let out a low cry that got louder, but Kathleen couldn’t see what had happened. She had a hand on the railing to keep herself upright, and that’s when Steve turned toward her, mouth yawning wide and wider, a vast and open space gone black inside, no sign of teeth or even tongue.
There was no sound. Just the sensation of a fine, hot mist hitting her face and a stench like dirty bandaids, thick enough to choke her. Kathleen clapped a hand over her mouth, and pain flaring again from her nose doubled her vision. She staggered back and hit the railing. She went to her knees.
Everything went dark.
* * *
Somehow, she was standing on her front porch.
No Molly, no car in the driveway, nothing but the soft hushing whisper of the breeze across grass that had grown too long for what should’ve been only a few days. A bird called. From farther away, a dog barked and yipped, and Kathleen realized that she’d been hearing that dog barking for a very long time.
She touched her front door. Metal against her palm, hot enough to burn, and she pulled it away. Her fingernails were broken, black with dirt. The pads of her fingers raw.
Her hair, when she put a hand to it, was tangled and filthy. She wore a pair of jeans and a t-shirt she didn’t recognize. Her feet were bare.
She couldn’t remember leaving Ocean City, or how she’d gotten home, or anything after Steve had…what had he done? What had happened? She touched her face with trembling fingers, mapping the lines and curves that should’ve been so familiar and finding only the face of a stranger.
Kathleen put her hand on the doorknob. She opened the door. She went inside.
She’d gone home.
SIX
28
Kelsey had been walking for a long time.
Her feet had blistered, torn open, scabbed but didn’t heal. She’d started the journey in a pair of ill-fitting flip-flops that had rubbed the skin raw between her toes. Then in a pair of donated, heavy, lace-up shoes. Now she wore a pair of soft white athletic socks from a store that had been looted clean of most everything else, but the hiking boots she’d found had been a size too big and now her heels were mangled too. The cut on her sole, the one she got on the boat, oozed pus, infected though she’d done her best to clean it. She wrapped her feet in the socks and bound them with bandages. She switched to duct tape when she ran out of gauze and discovered the tape’s slick surface protected her feet better, though she had to cut it off with a pair of nail scissors when she wanted to change it. It was easier to leave on for a few days at a time, even though the dull, hot throb going all the way up to her calf told her she wouldn’t like what she saw when she took off the tape.
The world had turned to shit in the past week. Or had it been two? It could’ve been three for all she knew, or frankly cared. Time had lost meaning, become a blur, while she walked.
She didn’t really know where she was going. She didn’t really have any place to go. All she knew was that she had to go somewhere, because the place she’d been had become a nightmare.
After picking her up from the sailboat, her rescuers had taken her to a shelter someplace in North Carolina, where she’d been given a pallet in a school gymnasium. She’d asked to be allowed to return to the hotel to get her things, but the people in charge had put her off with a “later” or a “tomorrow” or, more frighteningly, without an answer at all. And what did she have to get, anyway? She’d lost everything of importance over the side of that boat. Phone, wallet, I.D. Clothes. Boyfriend. Would-be lover.
The gym had no televisions, but enough people sheltering there had smart phones and therefore, maintained a connection to the world outside the concrete walls and beyond the armed soldiers guarding them. Rumors flew about the purpose of the soldiers’ guns — to protect the refugees from whatever it was going on outside? Or to protect the world from the ragtag collection of displaced tourists who’d been yanked away from their vacations and herded into this stinking, echoing chamber with inadequate bathroom facilities and food so disgusting it was no trouble to pass up?
Kelsey had seen what happened on that sailboat. Nothing in anyone’s newsfeed could compare to the reality. People talked in hushed but hysterical voices about rioting, brownouts, a State of Emergency. Nobody said a word about flowers that bloomed and died within minutes, or boyfriends whose faces exploded. Nobody said anything about corpses that came back to life,
Only two days into her stay, Kelsey knew she had to get out. She recognized a prison when she was in one, no matter how it was disguised. It wasn’t the first time she’d ever used her cleavage to distract a man into thinking he was giving her something of his own accord when he was actually being manipulated. Those other seductions had been about getting a meal, a place to sleep, some cash. Something pretending, even for a short time, to be love. They’d always been about survival, but this time was in actuality about life or death, even if the other refugees didn’t seem to know that. Neither did the the soldier, who fucked her up against a wall and cried out someone else’s name when he climaxed. Three minutes of breathless heaving, that was all it took for him to avert his eyes when Kelsey snuck out a back door and across the parking lot.
Out here, the story was only a little more clear. News vans heavy with equipment circled up like wagons around a campfire, their inhabitants running on coffee and doughnuts. Kelsey spotted a well-known national reporter who usually covered red carpet events and dissed skinny actresses’ fashion sense—today her coif was limp, her outfit worthy of the most scathing mockery. She shouted at the cameraman from a distance, pointing at the brick building against which Kelsey had only moments before been engaged in sexual congress with a soldier. Kelsey didn’t know what the woman was shouting about, but didn’t waste her time trying to find out.
She did, however, stop next to one of the vans to sneak a look at what they were broadcasting. Storms. There’d been storms.
Kelsey didn’t wait to see more than that.
At twelve, she’d dreamed of escaping. Running away, with maybe some clothes hung over her back in a bandanna tied to a stick. She’d never done it. She’d taken matters into her hands in another way, more beneficial, in the end. She hadn’t needed to hit the road, but now she remembered the plans she’d made. The maps she’d studied, tracing roads and rivers with her fingertips, thinking of all the places she would go. Just like in that book by Dr. Seuss.
She’d gone a lot of those places, too. Found a way to get there, by hook or by crook. But even in her darkest days, Kelsey had never imagined herself sneaking along a highway underpass or slogging through a drainage ditch or climbing a chain-link fence in order to get away from the double threat of the military and the media.
She saw the evidence of the storms in fallen trees and mucked up fields. She scanned the earth for those flowers, those goddamned flowers, but if they’d taken root and bloomed anyplace, they’d already died. When a convoy of military trucks and assorted police and emergency vehicles passed her by, the cop cars alight with red and blue but the ambulances ominously silent, Kelsey decided it was time to avoid the highways.
She took back roads after that. She snuck into a back yard and lifted some clothes from a line. They didn’t fit, but were better than the shapeless jumpsuit they’d given her in the shelter. She felt worse about this theft than about using her body to tease a man into abandoning his duty, until she peeked into the windows of the house and saw its residents sitting in front of a television neither could possibly see, as neither of them had intact faces.
She walked without direction or purpose, wondering when it would be her turn to stagger and choke. When her eyes and nose and mouth would stream with black goo. When she
would go crazy and try to tear the world apart in her bare fists. Every morning, Kelsey woke and ate or drank from whatever she’d managed to scrounge and store in the backpack she’d stolen along with the socks and hiking boots. She did fifteen minutes or half an hour of yoga or Tai Chi to warm her muscles and center herself. She studied the sky and tested the air with a wet finger to see which way the wind blew, and then she set off with it at her back because that seemed to be the easiest way to decide where she should travel.
The world had become a nightmare, but it didn’t all fall apart right away. Not entirely. The storms had come and decimated rural areas, but people didn’t stay in one place. They moved. They travelled, some to get away from the destruction or their suddenly insane neighbors setting things on fire, some with some strange urge eating away at them from the inside, a tickle in their minds like a tickle in the throat.
The cities began to fall.
And Kelsey walked.
Her feet got tougher, except for that cut on her sole that still ached and itched and throbbed and broke open every once in awhile to ooze thick pus and blood. Her nails broke. Her hair grew dark at the roots. She hadn’t worn mascara in what felt like a lifetime, hadn’t looked in a mirror. She scavenged and scrounged and hid away from the world, what did it matter what face she wore to do it?
Sometimes, cars passed her even on the rural roads. If she heard one coming, Kelsey usually managed to blend into the brush or hunker down in a ditch, but none of them even slowed as they passed her. Sometimes she heard the far-off wail of sirens or the rumble of big trucks, and she stayed as far away as she could. She bathed in gas station bathrooms and shoplifted energy bars. Once she blew a guy for an egg-and-cheese biscuit, and afterwards he told her to take whatever she wanted from the store, to fill her pack, because he was getting the hell out as soon as his buddy came to pick him up.
“Shit’s going down,” he told her, and offered her a cigarette. Kelsey had never smoked, but took it anyway. “My buddy says this State of Emergency bullshit’s gonna become martial law. Anyway, I’m out of here. I’m going North, to my ex. I figure, if the world’s gonna end…”
He shrugged and gave her a surprisingly sweet grin. “Well, you gotta be with the ones you love. Right?”
Kelsey agreed, but didn’t take him up on his offer to go with him and his buddy. She’d grown up in the North. It got cold in the winter, hard as it might be to believe in the middle of summer, but it would. And if the world really was ending, she intended to be warm.
She filled her pack with crackers and as much water as she could fit, and she wished the attendant luck. She hadn’t asked his name or told him hers, but he shook her hand almost formally just before she went out the door. The bell hanging from the top jangled. She looked at him once, over her shoulder, and he waved.
Three days later, she wished she’d taken more water, no matter how heavy it would’ve made her pack. She’d been on a long stretch of nothing but worn and pitted asphalt without so much as a dirty creek running alongside. She didn’t want to venture too far off the road — her memories of maps included vast expanses of forests in which a girl could get very, very lost, and she was far from prepared to survive in the woods. She was barely making it as she was, camping with a single blanket and a few packs of matches, her scavenged and scrounged supplies. At some point, she realized, she would need to look for a town, if for no other reason than she needed to find out what was going on in the rest of the world.
Kelsey was used to the slashing teeth of hunger. Once a fatty, then slender, her stomach had never lost its love for being full. But she could deal with being hungry. What she really needed, craved, what she desperately wanted so fiercely it was worse than hunger, was a shower. A long, hot shower with lots of soap and shampoo to clean her matted hair. She’d kept it pulled back from her face in twin braids, but not even the cute style could keep it from getting filthy. It was hot in the south in summer, and she sweated. A lot.
The ache in her foot ebbed and throbbed as she walked. She was so fucking thirsty she’d have dropped to her knees and sucked up filthy water from a puddle, if there’d been any to suck. She scanned the sky but caught no sight of storm clouds, no sign of any impending rain. She was hot, too, and pulled at the throat of her t-shirt to fan herself. Wet armpits, her crotch a swamp. Her head spun.
Fever. Kelsey had a fever. When she stopped on the side of the road to pull off her boot, it didn’t seem as big as it had. Her foot had swollen. She peeled off the sock, then dug for the nail scissors, the blades dulled and gummed by cutting the duct tape. Somehow, she managed to cut the last layers away. Her foot beneath was pale and pruned like something dug up from under a rock. The smell, horrific, made her gag. She’d have puked if there’d been anything in her stomach to lose.
The wound pulled apart like a lipless mouth, scarlet inside. Oozing. When she pressed on the edges, the skin parted further to release a gush of thick, green pus tinged with black. She had to turn her face to the side, the world swimming, and breathed in through her nose, out through her mouth. She couldn’t afford to pass out.
The pain wasn’t bad, but the heat spread rapidly up her ankle and to her calf as she probed at the cut. It wasn’t even that long or deep, a stitch or two would’ve taken care of it had she been given proper medical attention when it first happened. Now here she was on the side of a country road in the middle of nowhere, maybe North Carolina, maybe Virginia or Alabama or Ohio, for all she knew, and all she wanted to do was lie down in the dirt and maybe…just…die.
“Fuck that. Fuck that noise.” Kelsey’s voice growled out of her throat with a sound like coffee beans in a grinder. She swiped at her face to clear her vision, realized the blurriness was not from sweat, and put her head between her knees.
She had lived through a water tornado and fought off resurrected corpses. She’d fended for herself on the road for two weeks, three weeks, however long it had been. Her entire life she’d done what she had to, and she would just keep doing it.
She had not survived her grandmother’s love just to give up now.
She needed medicine. And walking would be next to impossible, since she had no more duct tape and doubted she could force her foot back into the boot without a lot of effort. She screamed when she tried, the pain sudden and bright and flaring. It forced her down and kept her there.
Hey girl. Get up. Get up and walk, you stupid little bitch.
But this time, her grandmother’s voice didn’t work. Kelsey couldn’t move. She wept without tears, her cheeks burning so hot they disappeared the moment they slid from her eyes.
She dreamed of mountains made of chocolate cake.
She dreamed of cold, clear water.
And then the car came. She heard it from far away, her cheek pressed to the gravel. A low rumble, the crunch of tires on the asphalt, the whoosh of wind flowing over metal and across glass. She heard the sound of freedom, and it was coming straight for her.
Kelsey got to her feet, her pack on the ground beside her and her wounded foot lifted so only the toes touched the ground. To do more than that sent shudders of blackness shivering across her vision. The pain had faded again to the dull throb, but she remembered how quickly it could turn to agony.
It seemed she waited forever, but at last the car came into view just in front of the shimmering puddle mirage where the road dipped out of sight. It drove with indescribable slowness, weaving a little back and forth across the yellow. It stopped about five feet away from her, then inched forward. The road crunched beneath its tires.
A late-model Benz, ivory in color. A shape behind the wheel. This kind of car turned heads when it passed on the highway, it was just that nice. It could’ve been a rust-garroted jalopy, and Kelsey wouldn’t have cared.
She bent, gathered her things, fought her swimming head. She moved forward. Put a hand on the door, the metal warm and slick under her fingertips. She looked through the window. A man inside.
A gust of cold, not t
epid, not merely cool, but frigid and delicious wafted over her when she opened the door. Kelsey drank it in like wine, though not with the finesse with which she’d trained herself to drink that beverage. She gulped it, gobbled, snorted and snuffled it. She sank into the passenger seat, lolling, her feet still outside the door.
The man looked at her. He wore a tailored designer suit. Silk tie. A gold and diamond ring on his finger that winked when he shifted gears. She knew the labels, recognized the cut of his hair. Once upon a time he’d been the sort of man she’d have smiled for and fluttered her lashes.
“Close the door,” he said.
Kelsey managed, with effort, to pull herself upright and yank the door closed. She settled into the leather seat with a sigh. Her hand batted at the seatbelt but didn’t tug it across her lap; she looked at the driver. He stared at the road, his fingers tight gripped on the steering wheel. After a minute, a very long minute, he turned on the radio. Then he put the car into gear and drove.
Kelsey let her hot face rest against the cool glass of the window. He didn’t ask her where she was going, and it didn’t seem important to tell him. He would take her somewhere, eventually. And if he thought that place was a hotel room or a truck stop parking lot or even the side of the road, well…she’d dealt with his sort before. She could deal with it again.
He faced the empty road with grim concentration, never looking her way. Every so often he’d tap his fingers against the steering wheel in time to the music that went on and on. At last a voice broke in and Kelsey tensed, forcing herself to pay attention. But it wasn’t the news, it was an advertisement for a used car lot, and after that, a peppy voice started talking about a concert tour and its local stops.