Will McIntosh - Hitchers

I desperately wanted to get out of there and climb back into bed. I was so sore, so achy. I’d always thought Atlanta was a striking city, but today I felt like I was walking in an enormous tomb, the buildings blackened by the soot of a billion tailpipes, a million grey gum-smears mottling its sidewalks.

The glass door to a high-rise swung open; a woman in a black coat guided a young girl out.

“Excuse me,” the woman called. I kept my head down and hurried on, pretending I didn’t hear. I wasn’t afraid to catch anthrax—on the news they’d made it clear it wasn’t contagious. You picked up or inhaled spores, and they could be anywhere. I just didn’t want to get waylaid from reaching Annie.

“Hello? Can you help us?”

I stopped, turned. The young girl was wheezing, her eyes ringed in red and her nose running. She was wearing a pink Dora the Explorer jacket.

“She’s sick,” the woman said. “On the news I saw big tents with doctors—do you know where I can find one?”

I pointed back down Courtland. “I passed one about three blocks down. You can’t miss it.”

She thanked me more profusely than my stingy help deserved. I wished her luck and hurried on, watching my sneakers—white blurs flitting in and out of my narrow field of vision.

My damned throat seized again, like it had in the shower, and my first thought—laced with a jolt of fear-induced adrenaline—was that it was the first whispers of an anthrax infection. I hadn’t heard anything about throat clenching as an early symptom, though, only a sore throat, and mine wasn’t sore.

I spotted Annie’s building and quickened my pace, suddenly filled with a sense of urgency.

Annie lived on the third floor of a brown brick walk-up. My muscles screaming, I took the steps three at a time, huffing from the exertion, the scratchy mask pressing against my lips on the inbreath.

Annie didn’t answer the door. She could be out getting food, or looking for help. I weighed my options. I didn’t relish the thought of sitting in the hall, and if Annie was inside and too sick to answer, I wasn’t doing her any good in the hall.

I’d never knocked in a door before. After making sure the hall was empty I tried kicking it. After seven or eight fruitless kicks I tried ramming it with my lowered shoulder. When I hit the door, pain lanced up my neck, but I felt the door rattle. I tried again, and this time heard a splintering crunch. It swung open on my third attempt.

Annie was lying on the couch, curled on her side.

“Annie?” I knew she wouldn’t answer. If she hadn’t heard me break in the door, she was beyond answering.

There was an empty bottle of Valium on the coffee table, and a note.

Finn,

I know I have it, and it’s hurting too much. Love you.

Tell my family goodbye.

Exhausted from dealing with the police and emergency management, from six hours in the crush of traffic heading out of the city, I stayed in my apartment and watched the news for the next few days. There were people sick in dozens of U.S. cities, plus London, Cape Town, Hong Kong, the list went on.

People in what looked like space suits were spraying the subways, MARTA stations, and the surfaces all around the hardest-hit stations. But the spores had been carried all over the city and beyond, on the wind, tires, the soles of shoes. They couldn’t scrub it all.

Footage of army engineers using bulldozers to plow up the big field in Chastain Park played on all the news channels. They were digging mass graves—big enough to bury half a million people.

When the guy in the hazard suit had taken Annie from my arms, while another took down her name and address, they assured me they’d take good care of her. I knew they were lying, but I also knew they weren’t going to let me put her in the back seat of my car and drive away.

Isipped tea with gobs of honey, my mom’s suggestion for relaxing the spasms in my throat. It hadn’t worked so far, but it tasted good.

On TV, the Wolfman was strangling a remarkably well-dressed young woman in a fog-laden forest. The hero, waving a silver-tipped walking stick, rushed to save her.

The problem with the original version of The Wolfman was that the Wolfman was too cute. With that blow-dried bouffant hair and puppy nose you wanted to hug him, not flee in terror. Come to think of it, how much of Wolfie was conjured from my memories of The Wolfman? I hadn’t done it consciously, but the similarities were hard to miss.

I felt frozen to the couch. No way I could concentrate on work, or on a book, on anything really. I’d be a fool to go out needlessly, but that was all right, because the thought of putting on shoes and a coat and walking outside was more than I could even contemplate.

I turned back to the news.

The dead looked like giant cocooned larvae as they were bulldozed into the burial pit. One of those bags, or one just like them, held Annie, and Dave, and Dave’s wife Karen.

On day three the military had begun setting up food banks, and now, on day seven, everyone in the affected area was getting enough to eat. There was no formal quarantine, because the spores had quickly spread beyond any feasible protection zone, but no one was coming into the city voluntarily. So far I’d kept my mother from driving in from Arizona by calling three or four times a day with updates on how well I was doing.

Now the worst seemed to be over. Anthrax spores were still out there, but the number of deaths had dropped off dramatically in the past forty-eight hours.

I dropped the TV remote on the couch and looked for something to distract me. My photo album lay on the coffee table, open to the page of pics from the rock climbing trip Dave Bash and I had taken after high school graduation. Dave had been my best friend back then, and, though it had been about a month since I last talked to him, he’d still been when he died. Or maybe he and Annie had been tied.

There was a photo of Dave dangling from the safety line, looking chagrined after a fall; another of me in my stupid hat with the Velcro flap, about to start a climb. We had such a ball on that trip.

I closed the album. I shouldn’t have let a month go by without calling Dave. Now it was too late.

It wasn’t fair. I’d already suffered my losses.

I pressed my palm to the photo album, got up and wandered into my studio. The thought of working made me want to scream. Five or six more days and we would be at code red—the syndicate would be out of strips. Typically they liked to have an eight-week cushion; I was trying their patience, to say the least.

When I first got control of the strip Cathy Guisewite warned me that coming up with a strip each and every day was more difficult than I thought. Add to that the prospect of creating something funny while thousands of bodies were being bulldozed into mass graves in Central Park, and you had the perfect storm. Steve said Toy Shop was more popular than ever, that the new look was catching on in a big way. It would be a shame to start printing reruns.

I threw on a coat, went downstairs, through the empty drive-in snack bar, and pushed through the big swinging doors that led outside.

There was a layer of thin snow on the benches surrounding the empty bumper boats lagoon. I swept a spot and sat for a moment, hands in my pockets. Washed-out images of Tina and Little Joe in maritime outfits covered the fence that surrounded the lagoon. A tiny lighthouse sat on a concrete island in the center, the base dented and scratched, evidence that once motorized rubber boats had careened madly off of it.

I’d put my share of dings in that lighthouse during the eighteen months that Toy Shop Village was open. So had Kayleigh. We rode for free, the grandchildren of the owner, wide-eyed eleven-year-olds astonished by their luck. Hard to believe that had only been nineteen years ago—Toy Shop Village looked fifty years old.