He had to find some transportation.
9.
Greg eventually needed to slow his pace, but he kept moving, still cutting through yards, heading south. He was at least five blocks from the pool house now, although the distance did little to separate his thoughts from the sight of the blood-splattered solar cover and its indiscernible contents. He’d been ultra cautious in his selection of which yards to travel through since then, and he visually scanned each new area with paranoid apprehension. The size and value of the properties he encountered here were rapidly decreasing, and he guessed that he was nearing the highway.
Minutes ago, a helicopter had roared past, skimming the rooftops. Greg wasn’t positive, but he thought it might’ve been a military aircraft. Since then, all had been quiet—save for a faint, smoky-smelling wind that rustled the treetops.
He squeezed through the branches of a dry hedge and emerged in the weedy back lot of a dilapidated three-story apartment building surrounded by trees.
He wasn’t familiar with this end of town, and he hoped he was still moving in the right direction. He had no idea how to hotwire a car, and he didn’t trust knocking on the doors of homes that could be crawling with plastic bags, so he’d been hoping to find a ride once he reached a major artery of traffic.
He jogged around the side of the building.
Just as he did, a balding middle-aged man with a mustache and goatee flew around the corner at precisely the same time, followed closely by a half-naked woman wearing only the charred remains of a short yellow bathrobe. They saw Greg and both screamed, eyes wide with fear and surprise. The man skidded to an abrupt halt, slipping on the grass, and Greg didn’t see the gun in his hand until he heard the loud crack of the shot that exploded against a tree trunk less than two feet from his head.
Greg slid to a stop himself, slipped, regained his balance, spun around, and dashed back the way he’d come, leaping through the hedge even as the woman screamed, “Wait! Come back!”
Rather than answer, he turned left and raced down a shallow creek bed, putting a solid three blocks of ground between himself and the couple before slowing to a quick walk. By then, his lungs burned in protest again.
He climbed up the creek bank and found himself on a cracked and littered street that terminated about fifty feet away in a cul-de-sac rimmed by a duplex and several other old houses. Beyond it, Greg could see the land rose at a sharp grade, coming to a height that brought it level with the roofs of the houses. Through the trees, he spotted the telltale noise barrier created to help reduce the roar of traffic coming off the highway.
He tried to tell himself it was doing a hell of a job, because he couldn’t hear any noise at all, not a single engine, but he knew the terrible truth: there were no cars on the highway to hear.
Nevertheless, he had to check.
He located a dirt path probably made by teenagers to access the barrier wall, then walked another six blocks west before coming to a spot where he could get on the other side. Twice he heard gunfire from separate areas of town, but neither bout lasted long.
The highway looked like something out of a war movie.
He’d been wrong with his initial thought that there were no cars here. In fact, there were scores of them. They were scattered across all six lanes, spaced out as far as he could see in both directions. Some stood alone, while others had clustered in groups. They were smashed into the lane divider, the noise barrier, the lampposts. Ravaged scraps of metal and rubber lay everywhere. Half of the ruined vehicles had flipped over, some on their sides, creating the largest, most chaotic display of mechanical wreckage Greg had ever seen.
A few smoldering fires lingered here and there among the ruins, but the few vehicles that had gone up in a blaze were now nothing more than blackened, burned-out hulks.
He thought of the poor unsuspecting motorists, all cruising along at seventy miles an hour, off to the mall, or church, or coming home from a weekend getaway. How many of them had had plastic bags in the back seat, or the trunk, or the glove compartment, unknowingly traveling with a killer waiting to strike?
Greg let his eyes move from the river of twisted metal to a billboard along the roadside. It was a huge picture of a giant hand cupping a small and fragile sapling pine tree. The caption read:
The Future Must Grow; Recycle Today!
The bags are the ones doing the recycling now, he thought. They’re recycling us.
And suddenly, something clicked in his head.
Astonished, he looked up at the recycle billboard again then glanced around to the nearest wreck. Two cars down, he found a Chevy Avalanche half imbedded in the rear of a fourteen-foot U-Haul truck. Strewn around the open passenger door were three brown paper bags of fresh groceries that had split open on the pavement.
Greg rushed over and searched through the items. He picked up an empty box of Reynolds Plastic Wrap, finding the familiar triple-arrow triangle on the back.
“Son of a bitch,” he gasped. “That’s how they’re doing it!”
Dropping the box, he turned a slow 360 degree circle, his eyes darting around the wrecks, searching the rumble. He started jogging west, excited, afraid, still looking for what he wanted.
A quarter mile down he found it: a scraped and dented red Yamaha motorcycle, possibly the only type of vehicle that could maneuver through this obstacle course of destruction and still give him speed when the conditions allowed. It was on its side, having slid halfway under a pickup truck, and it took Greg a full ten minutes and a gallon of sweat to work it free. As he’d hoped, the key still sat in the ignition, and when he settled himself onto the seat and tried it, the engine revved to life.
Then he was off, weaving his way west.
10.
Greg saw the smoke from four blocks away.
It coiled skyward like an unearthly black serpent, rising over the rooftops of Mia’s apartment complex.
He gunned the motorcycle’s engine, cutting between car wrecks at suicidal speeds and weaving on and off of the sidewalk before skidding to a halt at the entry of the building.
Three stories overhead, a window exploded, showering him with glass.
He dodged the lethal rain without losing any skin and slipped through the broken glass of the main security door, which someone had apparently shattered using a potted plant from the lobby. He took the stairs in great bounds, pushing through the ache that echoed in his thighs after his earlier sprint up the hill. Mia’s apartment waited on the second floor, on the far side of the building—
Through a tunnel of fire.
Greg emerged from the stairwell to find the main hallway leaping with flames.
He flinched backward as the intense heat touched his skin. At the same time, he drew in a sharp breath of smoke that seared the back of his throat and overpowered his olfactory senses with its toxic aroma.
He managed to retreat three steps before stumbling over a scorched bundle of plastic similar to one of the cocoons he’d seen at the Jacobsons’. No sooner had he laid eyes on it when a dripping tentacle of half-melted plastic reached out toward him.
He shuffled out of reach as the stubby appendage slapped down on the floor, immediately adhering to the carpet like a slime-coated worm dropped on a hot griddle. It twitched feebly for a moment, then fell still.
He pushed to his feet and was about to return to the stairs to search for a fire hydrant when he glanced to the heap that the plastic limb had extended from and spotted a black man’s arm protruding from the mass, clutching a fire extinguisher.