C.E. Murphy - Mountain Echoes

Both men stopped talking like they’d been caught doing something naughty, and looked at me guiltily. I deduced they had not been discussing a game plan, but had instead been talking about me. “I don’t even want to know.”

Relief replaced guilt, which made me want to know afantalking liter all, but it was too late. “Do you guys have a plan? Because I don’t have a plan, and we’ve missed a week and I don’t know where the hell Aidan is and I don’t know what to do and somebody’s got to go tell Sara her husband is dead and I’m hungry enough to gnaw my arm off and, and, and...” I put my arms on the top of Petite’s door and put my forehead against them, completely out of steam. Muffled, I asked, “Is that diner we used to go to still open, Dad? Because I could really go for about three pounds of applesauce biscuits and grits.”

My father, cautiously, said, “There’s going to be a lot of magic coming our way, Joanne. Eating—”

I lifted my head to give him a flat stare. “I. Don’t. Care. Having food in my stomach has never weighed me down when I needed to work magic—” which may have been because I never remembered to eat while running around on adventures, but he didn’t need to know that, because “—and even if it did, I’ve been running on empty for most of two weeks, how can it possibly have been only two weeks since that dance concert? Two and a half weeks? Since I shot Raleigh?” That was addressed to Morrison, who half smiled.

“Because despite your best efforts, Walker, the calendar only passes one day at a time.”

“I guess.” I kept looking in his direction, but I wasn’t focusing on him anymore. “Oh, hell, Morrison. It’s Thursday. Never mind Dad and Lucas. We’ve been missing for most of a week. And Aidan...”

Aidan had been pulling down power strong and focused enough that he wasn’t as wedded to arriving at the same times or places we were. For all I knew, he could have come back within minutes of us leaving. He could have returned to an entirely different location. For all I knew, he’d stepped into some already volatile location and dropped a massacre’s worth of death magic into it. If we’d been missing most of a week, we could be screwed .

“We need to get into town.”

Cherokee was deserted. It wasn’t like high tourist season anyway, when people came by the thousands to go to the casinos and visit the mountains, but at noon on a Thursday there should be traffic, people coming and going to lunch, little kids out of school, buses carting older students on field trips—the usual signs of life in a small town. But it was all missing. Petite crept down the main drag, no traffic to make me drive at a normal speed, and we all peered down side streets and into blank, black business windows. Vehicles were idle, dust-sprinkled like Petite, CLOSED signs hung on normally open doors, and no one was to be seen on the streets. It felt like a ghost town.

None of us said anything, because we all knew none of us could answer the questions we all wanted to ask. Dad was wedged into Petite’s tiny backseat, nose all but pressed against her window. Seeing the town like this had to be worse for him than me, and I found it disconcerting as hell. We passed a guns-and-ammo store and Morrison said, “Stop.”

I did. He got out of the car and, to my eye-popping astonishment, broke the store’s front window to let himself in. Three minutes later he came out with new ammo for our duty weapons and the shotgun, and a guilty expression. “I left a couple hundred dollars on the till,” he muttered defensively.

Grinning, I leaned over to kiss him, whispered, “Good thinking,” against his mouth, and got back to the business of creeping down Cherokee’s main street.

We all three saw it at the same time, glimpsed out of the corner of our eyes as we passed another side street. I hit the brakes, not that we’d been moving fast, and hovered my hand above the gearshift, not quite willing to put her in reverse yet. “Was that...?”

Dad and Morrison said, “Did you—” and, “Was that—” at the same time, making me pretty sure we’d all seen the same thing. I said, “What the...” and cautiously put Petite into Reverse. We backed up a few feet, all of us looking to the left.

A CDC truck sat at the other end of the street. I killed Petite’s engine and we all sat there staring at it. I’d never seen one except in movies. It wasn’t particularly menacing in and of itself, but the words blazoned on the side were by their nature scary: Centers for Disease Control.

There were no circumstances ever in the whole wide world that a person wanted to see a vehicle with those words in her hometown. In fact, a person never wanted to see a vehicle with those words anywhere, because the CDC was not an agency that fucked around. They were the people called in for anthrax scares. They were the people who maintained—for reasons I would never, ever understand—live smallpox samples. They were the people who went into Ebola breakouts, who fought the plague, who, for sweet pity’s sake, kept the live smallpox virus under lock and key within their facilities. CDC workers were goddamned superheroes, and any circumstances that required superheroes were not good circumstances for the local population.

“Walker,” Morrison said in a thunderous voice, “please tell me we haven’t triggered the zombie apocalypse.”

I said, “We have not triggered the zombie apocalypse,” obligingly enough, and Morrison relaxed a hair. I said, “Aidan might have,” and Morrison tensed up again, glowering at me in a fashion reminiscent of the tried-and-true Almighty Morrison.

My father, unable to believe we were making light of the situation and possibly a little afraid we weren’t, said, “The zombie apocalypse?”

Right about then the CDC guys came pouring out of everywhere and surrounded my car.

A fully bio-suited man in orange threatened Petite’s window with a fist. I unrolled it slowly, trying to keep my hands visible as I did so. Morrison put his hands on the dashboard, and my father put his on the back of Morrison’s seat. The bio-suit man did not look reassured by any of that, and my brain, scared silly of what a bio-suit suggested, disengaged from smart and went straight to smart-ass.

“Hello, officer,” I said in the most chipper voice I could come up with. “Was I speeding?”

Morrison groaned and the bio-suit man didn’t look like he thought I was funny at all. “Who are you? How did you get in here? This whole county is quarantined.”

“Holy crap, really? How are you controlling the bor—” That was not a helpful question. Neither was “You can’t possibly have managed to roust everybody out of the hills, have you?” which I also got halfway through before Morrison growled, “Walker,” as a suggestion that I shut up.

I said, “I’m sorry,” after a few seconds of trying to get my mouth and my nerves under control. “We were camping. We had no idea anything was going on.”

“We’ve been doing low flyovers for the pa wrhe nest three days, broadcasting messages to come to a center for inspection. How could you have missed those?”

I glanced at Morrison, who had no helpful answers written on his forehead. I swallowed and looked back at the CDC guy. “...we were spelunking?”

“Where’s your gear?”

The only answer to that was “In the trunk,” and I really did not want paranoid government officials opening a trunk full of shotguns and other monster-hunting gear. I did have carry permits for all of it, but they were carry permits for Washington State. I wasn’t sure how well that would go over, two thousand miles from home. I tried for distraction instead. “Officer, what’s going on here?”