August Ansel - Shadow Road

Cross my heart. The words echoed across Arie’s mind, and with a little start she recalled making the same promise to Kory the day they surprised him at the Wallace cabin. A promise of safety. Of good intent. And gods, the woe that had met him, so far.

What is the promise here? Arie wondered, studying the other woman.

Moxie stood silently, fingers laced before her in an attitude of patient repose. When a raven sailed low over their heads, riding a current of the steepening wind, she let her gaze follow its progress.

Despite the sense among them that time was of the essence, Moxie and Saeed kept their peace, letting the choice hang there, on offer. They waited as if they had all the time in the world, while this new wary and bedraggled little clan chose for themselves.

Stay put, or take another step into the unknown.

And then another.

GARRETT WAS FLYING. His hair streamed back from his face and the biting air, full of salt from a blustery onshore wind, stung his skin and made his eyes leak tears. He was midway down a length of highway that had a steadily declining grade—not too steep, but enough to really pick up speed.

It was only a bicycle. But after two years spent getting everywhere on foot, his entire body thrilled to the particular pleasure of machine locomotion. Born and bred to the farm, all his early memories involved one fossil-fueled apparatus or another. He’d over-lamented the lingering death of gasoline and battery power, grieved the lost noise of all those engines—tractor, truck, mower, blower. This, though, the almost-silent momentum, had just been waiting around for him to pick it up again.

Out of the trees, at last! Now there was a forest of dead vehicles to negotiate, but this blessed stretch wasn’t overly impacted and was straight enough to offer a sight line between stalls. The real danger was the state of the road. He was moving fast enough now that it was getting hard to see the divots, ruts, and potholes before he was on top of them. He was braced for a hit, one that would send him flying, but so far the bike’s knobby tires had trounced over everything he hadn’t been able to avoid.

Finally the road’s trajectory changed, first flattening and then rising. A half-dozen rusty cars were marooned along the way, windows opaque with the long accumulation of salt air, dirt, and bird shit. He aimed for a narrow alley that ran right down the middle of them, and he shot through with his hands raised overhead.

“Score! Garrett Hubbard takes the Tour de France!” He mimicked the roar of a distant crowd and coasted to a stop at the top of the rise. He straddled the bike, panting slightly, looking back in the direction he’d come.

Russell was miles behind him. Garrett felt as though he’d been holding his breath, holding it for months and months, and had just remembered to breathe. He wheeled around and got peddling again.

The thing with Alex had finally helped him decide to split. It was bad.

Alex was a bigmouth. He was dumb as a bag of hammers, and most of the time he smelled like gone-over cheese. But it wasn’t his fault, their mistake.

Didn’t matter. Alex had paid for it.

The day they raided the cabin full of dead people, Russell had lost it. Garrett had seen him angry, seen it plenty of times. The cabin fuck-up was a whole other level of rage. First he’d thrown his machete right past Doyle’s head. That was nuts, but nothing compared to what happened after.

They hadn’t gotten ten minutes away from the corpses, when Russell saw Alex diddling around with his new knife, tossing it mumblety peg-style into the ground while he walked. How is that a trigger? Garrett had no idea. But Russell asked Alex to give him the knife. He sounded completely calm. Sounded sane.

When Alex handed it to him, Russell buried the blade into Alex’s neck so fast none of them saw it coming.

Then he wouldn’t let them dig the stupid kid a grave. They left him lying where he fell and just kept moving.

Even Doyle went white over that one, and he hated the kid.

Garrett had decided right then he was done. But he waited. It was like Gilch and Doyle expected him to break, were waiting for him to try running. So he didn’t. He played cold. Played hard. Went along.

It took almost a week. Five days of Russell’s simmering rage. Five days listening to Doyle trying to convince Russell to quit the search. Five days before they finally saw the road through the trees and camped under an open sky. He took second watch and ran like hell.

Ran like my ass was on fire and my hair was catching, he thought. That’s what Dad used to say.

For the next two days, he kept to the roads and jogged. When he got too tired to run, he walked as fast as he was able and then jogged some more. He had no plan, no destination. He didn’t give a damn about stealth nor who might see him. The one he was running from was behind him and—he reckoned—losing a little more ground every hour that Garrett pushed ahead.

Away was where he wanted to be.

On the morning of the third day, he found the bicycle entirely by accident. He was following the highway, which eased steadily west as it bore north, when he decided to jump the guardrail and hoof it across a field to a lone farmhouse. A gambrel barn faced the road, and if its second story hadn’t partially collapsed would have hidden the house entirely.

Thinking to make a quick search for food, he skirted around to the back door. It stood ajar, opening onto a small mudroom that had succumbed to a wild rampart of blackberry briars. Long, barbed tendrils snaked through gaps in the siding and under window frames, creating a nightmare sculpture of the rusted hulk of a water heater. The kitchen door hung partway off its hinges, likely kicked in by some earlier forager.

He made a quick sweep of all the closets and cupboards, but it was obvious the house was a bust. Utterly scavenged, there was no food—not a single useful thing to be had. He spotted a can lying in one corner of the living room, but before he could pick it up he saw it was bulging through its rotted, illegible label.

He’d gotten outside again, ready to jog back to the road, when he saw the bicycle.

In fact, he saw only a few inches of handlebar poking out from under a pile of collapsed shingles and splintered bits of roof joist. If the sun hadn’t slipped out from behind the overcast at that moment and winked off the bicycle’s rust-spotted chromework, he’d never have noticed it.

Disentangling the debris took some heavy lifting, but when he got the bike out from under the rubble, Garrett was amazed at its condition. It looked to him as though someone had leaned it against the wall of the barn and the jumble of broken roof that fell down around it had been a barrier against the elements. He lifted the rear wheel, gave the pedals a shove, delighted to see everything spin as if it had just been waiting to hit the road.

So far, Garrett had zipped past every highway off-ramp, driven more by his desire to flee than by the gnawing desperation to find food. Late afternoon of his fourth day on the road, though, Garrett’s hunger was a roaring void. Twice he’d hit a gnarly snag in the asphalt and tumbled right off the bike. Picking himself up the second time and pulling a sharp bit of gravel out of one knee, he understood he either had to eat and catch some sleep, or reconcile himself to a serious head injury.

A faded highway sign indicated the next exit. Long before he reached it, he could see the ramp was packed with dead cars, dead people in most of them. He was forced to walk, pushing the bicycle alongside. He tried to mount it when he reached the top, but his legs had picked up a tremor and it seemed prudent to go on foot awhile, using the handlebars to keep himself steady.