“We could camp here, start again in the morning.”
“It will be easier to sneak past the cordon in the dark.”
“So.”
“So.”
The office park was squat and bland. After the quiet isolation of the forest, it seemed alien and surreal, as though the world had been abandoned. The whole zombie apocalypse metaphor was starting to get to him.
Still, it had a broad drive they could follow easily, and though his knee twanged a bit, it felt good to move at a normal pace. He shrugged to shift the weight of the backpack and led the way.
They found themselves on an east-west street, three lanes and no cars. He flicked the lighter and held it as close to the old-fashioned paper map as he dared.
“I think we’re here,” he said. “Pleasant Valley Road.” There was no valley, and it didn’t strike him as all that pleasant. He found himself wanting to zoom in and switch to satellite mode. When he’d been a kid, he’d known the phone numbers of all of his friends, could dial them from memory; now, thanks to d-pads and mobiles, he barely remembered his own number and hadn’t navigated on anything but an interactive GPS display in a decade. Technology made life so much simpler.
Yeah. Tell that to Cleveland.
Amy said, “It looks more populated to the west.”
“Right. East it is. Then we can pick up . . . this one, Riverview.” The street was illustrated with the thinnest line and ran a meandering course through the national park. It changed names a few times but led more or less directly into Cuyahoga Falls.
They set off down the middle of the lonely street.
It was almost nine when they saw the first of the others.
Sweat soaked his back, and his hips had started to burn. Twenty-two miles was a day’s march for a soldier, a reasonable hike for an experienced backpacker. But working as a research scientist didn’t offer much in the way of physical conditioning. Both he and Amy hit the gym when they could, but since Violet’s arrival, that had meant a half an hour snatched here and there.
At least they were making better time. Riverview Road turned out to be a narrow two-lane stretch of cracked blacktop with fields on one side and forest on the other. Skeletal towers strung power lines along the west side, and they passed the occasional rural driveway, just a mailbox and a dirt path.
Ethan was looking at his feet—not counting steps so much as feeling the rhythm of them like a drumbeat—when Amy put a hand on his shoulder.
Something white bobbed ahead of them, and by the time he’d realized it was a flashlight, the beam had splashed over them. It was maybe forty yards ahead, and all he could see was the pinpoint of light itself. A heaviness sank through him.
“Ethan—”
“No sudden moves,” he said. Slowly he extended his arms and turned them palm up, remembering the nervous teenager behind the gun turret on the Humvee. Caught is bad, but panicking them is worse.
As suddenly as it had hit, the light flicked away. It whirled in an arc that threw strange shadows off the trees until it pointed at the chest of a man. The barrel of a rifle stuck up above one shoulder, but he was dressed in hunter’s flannels, and beside him were two other figures: a woman and a boy of eight or so.
The light lingered for a moment, and then it swung forward and once again began to bob, heading away. Ethan released a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding.
“They’re like us,” Amy said. “Trying to leave.”
Ethan nodded. They started walking again themselves, following the will-o’-the-wisp of the flashlight. “I wonder how many other people have the same idea?”
An hour later, there were dozens. Each group walked apart from the others, strung along the road like beads on a necklace. Most had flashlights and made no effort to conceal them. Some talked. Up ahead, someone sang “Auld Lang Syne.”
“I love that song,” Amy said.
“I know.”
“Kinda fitting, huh?” She broke into soft song. “We two have run about the slopes, and picked the daisies fine; but we’ve wandered many a weary foot, since auld lang syne.”
“My feet are weary,” he acknowledged.
They were passing a development suburb, one of those strange neighborhoods in a box plunked down in the middle of nowhere. A dozen houses were under construction, the steepled framework dark against the sky. There was a sign by the entrance he could just make out: THE BEST OF NATURE WITH THE MOST MODERN CONVENIENCES. DREAM HOMES STARTING IN THE LOW THREE HUNDREDS! Next to it was a completed model home, and Ethan saw a man standing on the front porch, watching the slow trail of refugees. He nodded at the guy but got no response. Out in the woods, a bird shrieked. The sound was unmistakably predatory, and Ethan wondered what had just died. A mouse, maybe, clutched in the talons of an owl.
“ ‘For auld lang syne’ means ‘for the sake of olden times.’ ” Amy’s voice was soft. “I wonder if that’s our life. Olden times.”
Ethan glanced sideways, caught by the sadness in his wife’s voice. She wasn’t one of those aggressively cheery people, but overall, Amy saw the existence of the glass itself as pretty amazing, whether half-full or half-empty. More than what had happened to their city, to their neighborhood, more than the terrorism or the riots, more than becoming refugees, that note in his wife’s voice brought home the weight of circumstances. Not just what was happening to them, but what was happening to the world.
He flashed back to something he’d heard on the radio the night the supermarkets had been stripped. The guy had been talking about the way stores were supplied, how everything happened in real time. Ethan could imagine the system to make that work, the scanners and computers and inventory management and logistics and shipping. Just one of a million plans that kept the world turning, a scheme as intricate and efficient as the vascular system that supplied a human being with blood.
But for all the efficiency of the vascular system, cut an artery and the body died.
Is that what the Children of Darwin had done? Was it possible that the madness engulfing Cleveland would spread, that power would fail widely, that food wouldn’t move from farm to store, that the police wouldn’t protect nor the hospitals heal?
Could life be so delicate?
You know that it can. The world worked because people agreed to believe it worked. He could hand a piece of paper to a clerk and walk out with clothing because they agreed to ascribe value to the paper. He could interact with people thousands of miles away and call it chatting. The d-pad in his pocket could access the sum total of accumulated human knowledge, from setting a bone to building an A-bomb.
And none of that was real. It was a shared and beneficial hallucination.
What happens when we can’t believe anymore?
“Everything will work out.”
“You don’t have to keep saying that for me,” she said sharply. “I don’t need to be managed.”
He started to protest, caught himself. “You’re right. Sorry.”
She softened, said, “Me too. Just tired.”
“Yeah. Your mom’s pullout couch never sounded so—” He broke off and stopped moving.
“What is it?”
“Do you hear . . .”
Engines. The sound, faint at first, grew rapidly louder. The night was quiet; they should have been able to hear a car for miles. Instead, it was as though . . .
As though they had been parked and waiting.