The storm still raged but the worms had been replaced by sweeping sheets of rain, real rain that washed the worm and zombie remains from the Wagon and brought a welcoming chill to the air, cleaning away the stink of death and cremation that was the special smell of Copton, Minnesota.
“Sheeee-iiit,” Shanks said, and everyone agreed silently, for what else was there to say?
Chapter Thirteen
By nightfall, they were on their bikes again, punching through northwest Minnesota, skirting the outer edge of North Dakota. They saw very little after the madhouse of Copton, just lots of little towns with the dead wandering the streets. But no armies; just stragglers. Slaughter led them straight through every town, only stopping for a bite to eat or a fluid exchange, emptying bladders and filling gas tanks in wide open, uninhabited country.
Around sundown, in Clay County, the forest to either side of the road became thick and impenetrable, cut by an occasional river or creek, the ragged finger of a dirt road. Nothing but woods and tree-covered hills frosted by moonlight. No cabins. Not even so much as a boarded-up roadside stand.
The road forked to the left, then the right, snaked over a series of low hills, tall pines rising above looking like they might fall at any moment. And then a valley opened up before them, the road sliding down into its belly. Slaughter was keeping a close watch on just about everything, as he knew the others were, too. He was expecting an ambush at just about every turn. Then the pack was heading down into that sullen valley, a patch of boiling mist rising to greet them. They were in it before they could even think of slowing down or stopping altogether. It was a thick and roiling mist like the sort that would blow in from the sea, gray and gauzy, rolling through the hi-beams like smoke. Suddenly, visibility was down to less than twenty feet and they all downshifted, riding the clutch, cutting their speed to a safe level, navigating the crazy twists and turns the road threw at them.
Apache Dan, as road captain, gave the signal and they all rolled to a stop. He and Slaughter checked the maps Brightman had given them by penlight.
“I don’t like this fog, John. Too easy to stack a bike out in that,” Apache explained. “All it would take is a log lying in the road, a wrecked car. Anything.”
“Yeah. We better pile into the Wagon.”
“That’s what I was thinking.”
They lowered the ramp and rolled the bikes up into the War Wagon and got inside themselves. Moondog took the wheel again and Shanks sat in the back with Jumbo and Irish, listening to more of Fish’s randy tales of life on the road, which left Slaughter and Apache Dan up front with Moondog.
With the arrival of the fog, things began to change.
The air no longer smelled chill and clean, but dank and moist and almost noisome, like swamp gas blown off a rotting bog. And it was warm. Hot almost. Sweat trickled down Slaughter’s neck and beaded his forehead. Moondog had to turn the wipers on to cut through the moisture clinging to the windshield.
It just wasn’t natural.
That’s what Slaughter was thinking and wondering why he was surprised by any of it. What did you expect out here? The Outbreak was a lot worse out here, man. Shit, they used nukes in Denver and Oklahoma City, half a dozen other places. You don’t let off a charge of radiation like that within the same twenty-four hour period and not have consequences.
But maybe he’d hoped they’d avoid things like that.
Maybe that was hoping too much.
The wormboys and Cannibal Corpse was one thing, as were the ragtag militias and the Red Hand. Those were known. It was the unknown things that worried him, those crazy nameless things you heard about from time to time: the mutations, the crawling nightmare abominations spawned by the release of atomic radiation. He wasn’t about to let his imagination carry him away into realms of darkness, yet he was not closing his mind to the things that might be out there, things he hoped he’d never have to look upon.
“Like fucking soup,” Apache Dan said. “Getting thicker.”
Moondog nodded. “Sure as shit.”
Slaughter sighed, lighting a cigarette. He could hear Fish in the back going on and on, telling one whopper after another. The boys were laughing nervously and Slaughter would have bet right then that the fog was getting to them, too. The night. The fog. The unknown.
“No, she was a beauty, this one,” Fish was saying, “tall and blonde. A Swede. Naomi Ericksen was her name. Don’t that just give you a hard on? Naomi Erickson. Her old man had bucks. Shit, I could’ve had the easy life with her. Too good for a fucking road rat like me. But she thought I was exciting. I took her to a couple club events and I’m not sure if she was turned on by it all or sick to her stomach. Maybe both. Then I made a big mistake…”
Slaughter watched the road.
The fog was thick and stayed thick. The headlights of the Wagon bounced right off it, reflecting back at them, and Moondog kept the speed down to less than thirty miles an hour because there was no way in hell to know what was out there with visibility down under twenty feet. The trees were black and thick-boled, their limbs hanging out over the road like the tentacles of giant squid. They passed a long-abandoned service station and the mist turned the pumps into stalking, mechanistic things like the Daleks on Dr. Who.
“Looks like it’s getting thinner,” Apache Dan said.
Slaughter thought so, too.
“We’re coming up a hill,” Moondog said.
It was a low, gradual grade, but it kept moving upward and that was the good thing because Slaughter was all for getting out of that goddamn valley. But then the hill crested and they started down again. Just before the fog began to thicken like pale gelatin, the hi-beams of the Wagon swept over a lonely meadow at the side of the road and what they saw—just for that briefest of moments—was something unbelievable.
“Holy shit,” Apache said.
That summed it up. The meadow was lit by the moonlight and they saw great ramparts and heaps of white, shining things: bones. Not human bones, of course, but the bones of animals lying about in a great crazy ossuary architecture of rib slats and skulls and disarticulated skeletons. They only saw it for a moment before the night swallowed it and the fog came pushing in again, but it was burned into their brains.
“Buffalo, I bet,” Moondog said.
Slaughter nodded. “Could be.”
“Maybe they all starved,” Apache Dan put in, but the idea, of course, was ludicrous with all the heavy grasses growing wild to either side of the road.
“Maybe,” Slaughter said.
But he wasn’t buying it and he knew they weren’t either. It didn’t look like those animals had lain down and died, it looked like their bones had been dumped there in a litter pile.
“…well,” Fish went on in the back, “I made my biggest mistake when I turned Naomi onto crank. I mean, who am I kidding? I cooked the shit. I sold it. I made serious scratch off it. But one thing you don’t do is turn on anyone you care about to that shit. I never used. Well, Naomi found her drug of choice and she became a first class fucking methamphibian. Fucking crazy, wild, eyes glazed over, hair falling out, sores on her face… ah, she ended up in dry out and her old man threatened to kill me. So that’s how I fucked up my sweet thing. Man, before the Outbreak, I could have had the life, but you know what?”
“You’re fucking stupid?” Irish said.
“That’s it, man. That’s it.”
Fish started laughing then and nobody seemed to get it until he jumped and shook his ass in Jumbo’s face and started dancing around, humming the tune to “If I Only Had a Brain” from The Wizard of Oz. Jumbo and Irish were laughing by then, too, and Shanks was just shaking his head as he often did with Fish. Since Fish had an audience, he danced around like the scarecrow from the movie, singing: