Chapter 10

The night was on fire, and John Hawthorne was out looking for gasoline.

Ashflakes flurried across the Mojave River. The moon sat low and yellow in the sky. Mariah drummed the dashboard and kicked the floor, scream-singing to the music on the radio, good old Zeppelin moaning about that mean old levee, and if John didn’t come back in the next few minutes, it wouldn’t be the levee that broke. It would be her. They were north of nowhere and south of nothing, and time had died all over again, only this time the sun had squat to do with its demise.

After Wrightwood’s dirt roads, there’d been more dirt roads, endless and rutted and each one the same. In Phelan, a man guarding his house shined a spotlight on them and fired a warning shot into the air. In Hesperia, during a rare stint on asphalt, a cruiser coasted up behind them and whooped its sirens. John sped up, testing to see how badly the cop wanted them. Not very badly, as it turned out. The cop laid off the gas and fell back into the dark, never to be seen again.

“Most likely he just wanted to check on us,” John told her. “Make sure we were okay, with everything going on. But you never know. Could have been anybody behind the wheel. Anybody at all.”

That was it. The sum of excitement since their departure: a testy redneck in a lawn chair and an-over-before-it-began police chase. Crossing the 1-15 had been similarly tedious. As they’d approached the freeway, Mariah had been amazed to discover how bright it was (even the firebank smoldering in the distance, donning the horizon with an angry red crown, didn’t seem half as bright). All those lights, all that noise… it had been like pulling up to some hellish midnight carnival where admission was free but no one was ever allowed to leave. In the end they’d gone beneath the freeway instead of over, sneaking through an underpass that echoed and hummed violently from the activity above. The clock on the dashboard counted off six miserable, obsolete hours before they’d traveled thirty miles, but John—careful John, steadfast John—seemed content to crawl as long as he was crawling forward. His patience had no apparent limits. Unless of course someone was standing in his way. Unless that. Eventually they had come to the Mojave River, which wasn’t really a river since most of its water flowed underground, and from that point on, they had followed its squiggling course into monotony.

At least until they ran low on gas.

Well, not low. John didn’t believe in letting them run low on anything, with the exception of Mariah’s sanity.

Mariah heaved her body side to side, rocking John’s pickup on its great big wheels. Stay in the truck, he said. Be quiet, he said. Save the battery, he said. She raised the volume on the radio and howled despite the bad air and her ticked-off lungs. She knew John was right, understood that his rules made sense, but that only made her want to break them all the more. Blame the Catholic girl in her. Crying didn’t help, and praying didn’t do no good. When the levee broke, mama, you had to move.

Mariah popped the latch on the door and stepped out, couldn’t sit for another second. A quick walk to stretch her legs, that was what she needed—that and a pee. John also had strict regulations when it came to bladder relief. He’d let her out to go once, under the condition that she tie it off immediately if he said so, and then he’d lorded over her while she squatted in the bushes, ready to toss her back in the truck at the first sign of another human. But except for the policeman and the shotgun guy in the lawn chair, they hadn’t crossed paths with a single person since Matthew Krauter, and Mariah didn’t like to think about him, didn’t like to remember the way he’d sounded, sucking air in through his crushed windpipe as he clutched her hand. How long did it take? she wondered. How long did he go on breathing before—

She slammed the door and cut off the thought. After a moment’s consideration, she re-opened the door and reached in for the keys. She didn’t think John would leave her here if he got back before she did, but she’d prefer not to find out. And where was here, exactly? She scanned the windswept riverbed, which had grown wide again after a long narrow passage. Dunes stretched off in one direction. Over the last of them, she could make out a hazy buttering of yellow. There was a town over there, John had said, brushing a finger along his atlas under the dome light—a town, or at least a few houses. That meant cars. Maybe even a gas station. Mariah had wanted to come, but John had been quick to point out that she had no shoes and could cut her feet on something.

“Infections are easy to come by,” she mumbled in the gravelliest voice she could manage. “Harder to get rid of. Especially now.”

But he’d have gone off on his own regardless, she suspected, because he preferred being alone. Because he didn’t know any other way.

Mariah pushed down the much-too large sweatpants John had loaned her after the incident with Rick Lot (another someone she didn’t want to think about), and crouched among a few foxtails. As she peed, she opened her mouth and caught a feather of ash, also known as summertime snow in California, on the tip of her tongue. It melted. Bitterly. She tried to pat herself dry without much luck—one might even say she did a piss poor job—then got up to face the fire. From where she was standing down in the riverbed, she couldn’t see much but smoke and a suggestion of reddish orange. She started up the slope to get a better view. It was tough going, all soft sand and crumbling granite shelves. She gouged her heel on a sharp rock and clapped her hands at the pain—a quirk she’d picked up from her mother, who broadcasted every barked shin and stubbed toe with an enthusiastic round of applause. Kneeling, Mariah checked for broken skin and sighed in relief. That would have been fun to explain to John.

“Don’t worry,” she said as she rose. “There’s still plenty of time to fuck up.”

What looked like the top of the slope proved to be a sham; the ground levelled out for a few yards before giving way to another incline, this one even more treacherous than the last. She felt a vague, uneasy tug in her stomach and glanced back to make sure she could still see the truck. She could. But she wouldn’t be able to for long, if she kept going. That should have been enough reason to turn around, and yet she wasn’t ready to turn around. Not yet. She struck off again, watching her step. The smoky air leathered her throat and tightened her chest. She coughed, her head changing sizes, becoming too big for her neck. The moon tipped sideways up above, a toothless yellow grin, and in her mind she heard John’s hushed, almost reverential voice. Something else, he’d whispered when they had first spotted it—no, when it had first appeared, because that was what the moon had done. It had appeared, the way a magician does in the middle of a dark and abandoned stage. Something else. At first she hadn’t known what he’d meant. It was one of those things taught in school and untaught by time. A small, seemingly innocuous fact: the moon generated no heat and therefore no light of its own. Whatever glow it gave off, it had borrowed from the sun. To see it up there, even a slice of it, meant the sun was up there too. Somewhere. Mariah had tingled with hope at the realization . . . until another realization—the final realization—had turned those tingles into a shiver.

If the sun was shining and the world was dark, then the day had not died from natural causes.

It had been killed.

But by what?

Mariah climbed the final stretch on all fours, then crawled through the thick Manzanita clumped on the lip of the slope. The ground became flat and hard beneath her fingers. Asphalt? Here? She stood up on trembling, tired legs. A road. She was standing on a road. It reached in either direction without a single fencepost or streetlight to mark it. She could not tell where it went, except that it seemed to follow the general path of the riverbed. Ahead of her, the sky was a pot of flames. Flickering crimson, shifting oranges, deep smoking darkness in between. A forest burning, but which forest? She wished she knew. If she knew, she might not feel so lost.

Mariah heard the Toyota before she saw it, a smooth, constant rumble that softened and fell away every time the wind rose. It was sitting right in front of her, its front end slewed off the road and its headlights soaking into the fire. The horizon glared dimly through its windshield, tinting the car’s interior red. If the seats were empty, she could not tell. Spit dried in the desert of her mouth. The rope tying her to the truck, to John, gave a sharp warning tug. Leave, she thought as her legs carried her forward and more details swam into view: dented sideboards, tires covered in dust. Something about the casual angle of the vehicle suggested that it had not been pulled onto the shoulder intentionally, that it had coasted there. The idea was inexplicably chilling.

Drawing up alongside the Toyota from a careful distance, Mariah spotted two heads in the back, both of them still. Little girls, each with long, luscious hair. There were two more heads in the front, staring forward. Mariah waved at them. They did not move. She stepped closer, and their faces began to form out of the dusky redness. A man and a woman. A mother and a father, one hand on the wheel.

A family.

Mariah stared at the small, unmoving bodies in the backseat, and an ugly and all too plausible thought came to her. Suppose Mom and Dad didn’t know what to do once the night had fallen. Suppose the dark had been simply too much to bear, and they had decided to go out for one last ride, find someplace nice and quiet where they could put an end to things. Sit still, sweetheart. Close your eyes. Daddy’s here, Mommy too, and you’re going to feel so much better soon. Yes, oh yes, she could see exactly how it would have played out. The girls in their jammies, sleepy from shock. Mom with a put-on smile, Dad with the forced jokes. A lie, perhaps, to get them packed and in the car. We’re going to Disneyland! Hurry up so we can get there bright and early, before the sun comes up. On an emotional level, it all made perfect, horrifying sense. But the hand hanging from the wheel, the trunk sticking out into the road . . . she could not quite make these things fit. They did not belong to the same story.

“It’s time, Mariah,” she told herself. “You’ve stretched your legs, you’ve had your little rebellion. Now go back to the truck.”

Only what if they weren’t dead? What if they needed help?

“Everyone needs help,” she said. “You can’t help everyone.”

That was John talking, not her. She stepped up to the car and rapped lightly on the passenger window. No response. She rapped again, louder. The family remained motionless, heads fixed on their necks, faces pointed forward, and now she noticed something new. Something else.

No. No, that couldn’t be right. Mariah reached slowly for the door handle. As she opened it, the wind picked up, moaning through the riverbed and howling across the big-empty of the desert.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

They were smiling.

All four of them.

Smiling.

They sat quietly in their seats, skin stained by firelight, faces creased with identical, dreamy half-smiles. They were sound asleep. The girls wore matching flowered dresses, while the dad was stuffed into a sleeveless shirt much too small for his stomach. Mom had a belly too, the kind that announced a number three was on the way. Nausea knocked suddenly and forcefully; Mariah felt it standing on the welcome mat, hat in hand, like an old friend. Hello there, remember me? It isn’t quite morning yet—in fact, it won’t ever be morning again, but don’t you worry, dear. I live by my own clock, and I’ll be swinging by to see you soon. Oh, by the way, what are you going to tell John when I call? You can’t very well puke in secret, now, can you? Not when he won’t even let you out of the truck to pee on your own.

Mariah shut the voice out, but not before it planted a sick nugget in her stomach. The radio crackled softly as she reached in and touched the woman’s arm. It was warm. Greasy. How long had they been sitting here like this? And what was this, exactly? Falling asleep was one thing, but this . . .

. . . it was almost as if they’d been put to sleep.

“Hey.” The word came out as a smoke-hoarsened whisper. She shook the woman’s shoulder. Gently at first, then harder. “Hey, you don’t know me and I’m probably going to scare the hell out of you, but you have to wake up.” Mariah leaned into the car, close enough to feel the lady’s soft breath through her parted lips. It smelled like cinnamon, like Altoids, and she needed to wake up, it was time for her to wake up. “Come on, damn it. Wake up, wake up, wake up!”

The woman’s eyelids lifted.

So did the eyelids of her husband and her children.

Still smiling, the family turned to look at Mariah with eyes that had rolled back in their sockets—eyes that were completely white.

Static popped loudly on the radio.

Mariah Nowak screamed.

✽✽✽

There was a gas station, as luck would have it. It sat caddy corner to a shuttered diner and adjacent to a closed bank, the last man standing on the dust-blown intersection that served as downtown to the dead end burg of Sheridan. John wasn’t surprised to spot it in the distance as he climbed out of the riverbed. The people who lived here had to leave somehow, and they sure as hell didn’t walk.

He strolled along the road, keeping outside the reach of the streetlamps as he approached the lot. In his hands were two ten gallon fuel jugs, the biggest on the market he’d been able to find. The first was to refill the truck. The second was for insurance. He didn’t like occupying both of his hands at once, but his fingers were ready to let go should he require their use. He didn’t think he would. Except for an empty can rolling on the pavement and a barn door creaking out by a dark ranch house, the night was quiet. When sound wanted to die, this was where it came, to a place like this.

Still, he paused awhile before leaving the shadows and stepping under the Texaco’s neon red sign. Once he felt certain there was no one else around, he walked over to the pumps. A maintenance flag dangled over one, but the other was in fine condition. John pulled out his wallet and paid with card, using the monitor’s touch screen. It was almost funny that the machine worked. The sun was lost save for its reflection on the moon, and all of Earth was covered in darkness, but his Visa remained unshaken. For now, anyway. The conveniences of modern society were built on weak pillars. They would crumble soon, and fast.

As the first jug filled with gasoline, he looked over to the Denny’s across the street. There was a car parked in front. The vehicle had likely been left behind, but he would be wise to keep an eye out for its owner, just in case. Meanwhile, the Texaco’s lot was completely empty. Either the attendant had gone home or run off to look for family. Or maybe the car across the street belonged to the attendant, and he was lurking indoors, crouched down behind the counter with the gun he kept under the register, ready to pop the head off the first person to walk through the doors. Like John told Mariah on the road, you never know. You just never know.

Something clanged and rattled behind the station. John lifted his head. Listened. The noise gave way to a low snuffling, and then to the steady crunch of teeth. His shoulders dropped. A dog, seeing to some garbage. Only a dog.

John looked to the riverbed, cast in shades of red and purple by the fire burning to the northwest. Sequoia National Forest. Over one million acres of drought-parched trees marching north into the Sierras and from there into Yosemite, Eldorado, Plumas. Together, the chain added up to a stripe of wilderness nearly as long as California itself. It would go now. All of it. With no one working to stop the blaze, the flames would spread in a great destructive swath, taking entire towns and cities before they finally ran their course. John watched the sky swelter and wondered how Mariah was doing. She was restless from the journey, which had been slow so far, and frustrated with him. Perhaps even a little frightened of him, and rightfully so. She should not have come. Letting her into the truck had been . . . a moment of weakness. She wasn’t prepared for this kind of undertaking. She didn’t know what she’d signed up for, didn’t even have her own shoes. Then there was the fact of food and water. Having her around halved his already limited supplies, and that meant more stops, which meant more complications. In a dark world, a world of night, the laws that humans lived by during the day would be forgotten. To encounter anyone in this new lightless America was to take a risk. He’d just as soon cross paths with nobody until they reached his brother’s house in Wyoming. From there, they were only a hop and skip away. Marshall would take them up in his white-winged Lily, and if the winds were right, they would be in Maine the next time they touched solid ground, somewhere near a town called Haverhill, where a blue house waited by the Atlantic ocean.

They?

Them?

In a one-engine plane with only two seats?

The jug began to overflow. John removed the nozzle and put the cap back on, then he filled up the other one and started the way he’d come. At the edge of the lot, he paused and looked back at the Texaco. He’d been lucky, finding it here. Maybe he’d get lucky again. He set the jugs down and headed for the station. Out back he could hear the dog rooting around in the garbage, snorting, grunting. A big dog, too, judging by the sound. Hopefully it was getting itself good and full.

John cracked opened the Texaco’s door and called inside, “If somebody’s here, you yell out and I’ll be on my way. I don’t want to see you, just like you probably don’t want to see me.”

The air conditioner, set on high for a summer day, hummed loudly.

John counted to five. “All right, I’m coming in now. If you’ve got a gun and you feel the need to shoot, I’d appreciate you putting one in the ceiling instead of me.” He stepped in slow, hands raised, and waited a few seconds before lowering them.

If someone was here, that someone was determined to stay hidden. For a little while longer, at least. John stuffed a few bags of peanuts into his pockets, making extra noise for anybody who might be listening to him, say, from behind the counter. He wandered to the refrigerators and experienced a deep, miserable ache of thirst—of want—as he passed the liquor section. Water. That was what he needed. Water. He washed the ashy taste from his mouth and then, with a quick twist, launched the empty bottle over the cash register. Nobody popped up. Satisfied at last that he was alone, he went over to have a look. To see what he might find.

John had never liked guns. He’d owned a few, a long time ago. Learned to use them. But never liked them. Guns were a cheat. They made easy what should have been hard.

That said, they could be useful.

Behind the counter lay a tipped plastic stool, proof that someone had left in a hurry. But a closer investigation turned up nothing in the way of the second amendment. It seemed John had already used up all his luck. That was okay, though. There would be more opportunities down the road. This was America, and in America, a gun was never far away.

John left the gas station and was halfway across the lot when he heard the dog coming. Its ears must have picked up on the door shutting, or else it had listened to him enter and had been lying in wait for him to leave. It moved in a clumsy, pounding scramble, and even as John turned to meet it, he knew that something about the picture wasn’t right. A running dog didn’t sound like a drunk person falling down a flight of stairs. Nor did it growl with such cackling, human madness.

Because it wasn’t a dog.

It was a woman.

Insanity had shoved her down to all fours, reduced her to something primitive, territorial. She wore a red collared shirt over tan slacks—working clothes, Texaco clothes. The missing gas station attendant. She had fled her post, but she hadn’t gotten far. Grime blackened her teeth, which were bared in a grin of pure misery. A French fry poked from her hair. Ketchup smeared her cheek. As she tore headlong across the lot, the light falling from the neon sign turned her eyes into drops of blood. John sidestepped her lunge. Her jaws shut on the air with a resounding clap and then she sprawled flat across the ground.

John stomped on the back of her neck.

Some people just can’t handle the dark, he thought, looking down at her body. The top half of it was still, but the bottom half had caught a bad case of the twitches. Her shoes—and they were good shoes, in good condition—tapped weakly against the asphalt.

Well.

Maybe he hadn’t used up all of his luck, after all.

✽✽✽

“Where’d you find these?” Mariah asked, slipping the Nikes onto her feet. She sat in the truck’s passenger seat, her legs hanging out of the cab, as John filled the tank with one of the fuel jugs. It was a big sucker. She didn’t know how he could hold it that way, one-handed, tipping it forward like it was some itty-bitty water pail. But then, he’d carried her across town (and how long ago that seemed already, how distant from this place, this moment), and in his arms she’d felt so light her body might have been stuffed with feathers.

“Payless.”

“Funny. Where’d you really find them?”

The fire-brightened sky touched his face with subtle movement, so that his bones appeared to shift beneath his skin. He took so long to answer she almost asked again. Finally he said, “Hanging over a telephone line. Knocked them down with a rock.”

“That’s more like it.”

“How do they fit?”

“They’re big,” Mariah said as she cinched the laces. “But that’s okay, I’ll grow into them.”

He looked sideways at her.

“That was a joke, John. But you could be a dear and fetch me a pair of socks to soak up some of the extra room.”

He finished filling the tank and went around to the truck bed, where he’d already put the other fuel jug. As he rummaged about, Mariah tried not to think of the family in the Toyota, the family who had fallen asleep and would not wake up and whose members were still sitting up at the top of the hill, wearing the ghosts of smiles on their faces. After their eyes had opened and their heads had turned to her—turned with such awful, deliberate slowness—she’d screamed and fallen back onto her butt. For a moment she hadn’t moved. She’d just sat there on the shoulder of that long-forgotten frontage road, listening as the static inside the car fell silent. And that was the thing. Because the static hadn’t been there when she opened the passenger door . . . Mariah was sure of that. No, the radio had been quiet. Dead. Until she’d reached in and touched the mother’s arm. That was when the speakers had woken up, almost as if they had been responding to Mariah. To her presence.

But that was crazy.

Yes. Yes, it was.

And what she heard as they’d turned to her with their blind white eyes, what she’d thought she’d heard, beneath the rising snowfall of static—

“Here.”

A pair of wool socks landed in Mariah’s lap. She glanced over to find John behind the wheel, reaching for the keys, which were once again hanging from the ignition, and her heart scrambled up her throat like a squirrel on a tree trunk. She remembered the time she’d spent alone in the truck, rocking side to side with the music turned high, and she spun the volume dial down, shut the radio off before it had a chance to switch on.

John gave her a questioning look.

“I might have listened to a song or two while you were gone,” she said, hoping he couldn’t read the fear on her face.

“You could have killed the battery,” he said.

“I know. I’m sorry.” She rubbed the socks nervously between her fingers. “If it makes a difference, Led Zeppelin was on.”

“It doesn’t.”

For a spell neither of them said anything. Outside the truck, ash drifted from a sky whose moon and stars were being tucked to bed under a blanket of smoke. Then John let out a breath Mariah hadn’t known he’d been holding, and he spoke again, softer.

“Do you want to see if he’s still on?”

“What?”

“Led Zeppelin. Would you like to see if he’s still on?”

John reached for the volume dial, and Mariah took his hand, stopped it, squeezed it, let it go. “That’s okay,” she said. “I’ve had enough radio for a while. Some quiet, that’s what I need right now. Quiet, and a little sleep.”

But sleep didn’t come for a long time. As John navigated his truck along the Mojave River, the nausea that had not so long ago knocked on Mariah’s door began to tap-tap-tap again, and her mind turned back to the sleeping family in the Toyota and the voice she’d heard fleetingly in the static, the voice of a young boy, trying not to sob.