Robby broke the silence—“Nate’s going to join us for a bit.”
“We’re hustling these citizens from the truck there over to this sled,” Pete said, pointing.
“Why don’t you help us on the sled?” Robby asked. “We could use a hand keeping all the deceased in one place until we get the straps up over them.”
“Sure thing,” Nate said.
Brad walked with Sheila, Lisa, and Ted over to the truck while Pete and Robby brought Nate up to speed on how they were stacking the corpses. After a brief consultation, Ted and Brad volunteered to carry the bodies from the truck to the sled while the women worked inside the truck. Brad caught pieces of the conversation between Robby and Nate as they worked to pile up the bodies on the sled.
“… and Brad experienced the same thing up his way, but he waited out the first part of the storm.” Robby told Nate. “If you look on a map, you can see concentric circles around where this thing is gestating. In South Portland, you happened to be in the protein-rich area. It’s like the albumen of an egg. In some zones all the biological material was removed, but down in your zone…”
Brad walked away before Robby finished his sentence, but Brad had heard his theories before. Robby related the whole Earth to a giant egg, where the embryo was from an enormous alien species. Before planting its egg, the aliens prepped the Earth by destroying as much of the population as possible and then released antibodies to take care of the rest. Robby equated his plan to scrambling the contents of the egg.
When Brad and Ted carried the next body over to the sled, Robby was talking about the antibodies.
“We call them the ‘Elementals’ because we’ve seen solid, liquid, air, and fire. The solid was Brad’s rock monster. I saw the liquid down in New Hampshire and destructive wind. A guy up from Virginia described the fire creatures, and the aether is the thing that snatched up everyone on Thanksgiving Day,” Robby said.
Nate grunted something Brad couldn’t hear.
Robby replied, “No, I don’t. But it could be something passed down through oral history from a much earlier time.”
After their last Denny’s dinner, Robby had shared some of his research with the small group. He’d found copies of scientific articles which theorized that a mass extinction had nearly killed off the human race seventy-thousand years earlier. Based on genetic evidence, the worldwide human population had been reduced to just a couple-thousand individuals. Most scientists blamed the earlier crisis on a supervolcano, but Robby showed the group eerie similarities between that event and their current situation.
“Why are we bothering with this guy?” Ted asked as he and Brad walked back over to the truck.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s clear to me that Nate is up to no good. Why are we bending over backwards to explain what we’re doing?”
“It’s not terribly strange,” Brad said. “I mean, he’s getting the same information we all got when we signed on, you know? It seems reasonable.”
“But we were already part of the group,” Ted said. “We made a conscious effort to seek out other survivors and then form into a network. That’s how we all came together. If this guy was living this close, he must have known there were other people in the area. How many months did he know about us and yet he never tried to make contact?”
The men were now standing back at the truck. Lisa and Sheila dropped another body over at the edge of the moving van and listened to the conversation. Back at the sled, Robby, Pete, and Nate were strapping down a row of bodies.
Lisa offered an observation—“Some of us tried to make contact several times before we found a welcoming party.
“You’re talking about when you met Lyle? I think Lyle had problems before all this started. It was just bad luck you ran into him first,” Ted said.
“Yes, that’s my point,” Lisa said. “Maybe he did try to join up, but he ran into somebody like Lyle first.”
“That’s no excuse,” Ted said. “He should have tried again.”
“And here he is,” Lisa said. “He’s here, and he appears to have reached out to join up with us. Seems like the only difference between him and us is timing.”
The four stood and watched Robby explaining something to the newest member of their loose group.
“Let’s keep moving,” Brad said. “It feels like it’s getting colder out here.” He tugged on the shoulders of an old corpse and waited for Ted to grab the man’s ankles. Brad tried to keep his own shoulders back as they lugged the body over to the sled, but his upper back always wanted to hunch forward. A dull ache settled into the space between his shoulder blades.
“Why didn’t you guys pull up closer to the sled?” Brad asked. “We could have just slid them right from the truck.”
“We did with the first one. It got stuck and we didn’t want to waste a bunch of time to move it out of the way. The shoulder drops off too fast on the other side of the road,” Ted said.
“But we could have just unloaded to one of the other sleds,” Brad said.
“I just work here,” Ted said, smiling. “Those guys make all the decisions.”
The men reached the sled and started their gentle, swinging, three-count automatically. On three they slid the corpse onto the deck of the big trailer.
“We almost done with this truck?" Pete asked.
“I think just a few more,” Ted said.
“Can one of you guys get the next one backed up right here?”
“You read my mind,” Brad said. “I was hoping we wouldn’t have to haul them by hand this time.”
“Great,” Pete said. “Back right up here, please.”
Brad nodded and headed back down the road. He circled around the left side of his moving van to look for Romie’s footprints. He hadn’t seen her leave the vehicle, but the passenger door was pointed away from the group, so she could have snuck off. The snow on her side was undisturbed. Brad continued around the moving van, leaving his own set of prints. He checked out the back to see how much room he had to turn the big truck around, and then came back to the driver’s door.
He climbed in expecting to find Romie in the cab. She was crouched down in the cargo area behind the front seats.
“You okay?” Brad asked.
“Are you?” Romie asked. “That crazy guy hasn’t attacked you all and eaten your privates?”
Brad closed his door and started the moving van. He strapped himself in with his seat belt and reacquainted himself with the mirrors.
“We don’t know he was the one who desecrated the body in the Chinese restaurant,” Brad said. “Maybe it was an animal or something.”
“Animals don’t know shit about zippers,” Romie said. She’d used this same line earlier as they’d driven north to rejoin their compatriots.
“Well Robby’s giving him a tryout,” Brad said. “He might be perfectly normal.”
Brad pulled the gear shift down into reverse and eased off the brake as the van’s alarm beeped rhythmically.
“Sure, he might be,” Romie said. “He might also follow us until we fall asleep and then murder us all. Did you ask him how he happened to follow us here? We went south for five miles and then looped back around. Then we spent an hour at the nursing home. How did he find us again?”
“He probably just watched the bridge,” Brad said. “He probably saw us go south this morning and was ready to follow us back north over the bridge.”
Brad shifted into drive so he could straighten out the moving van before making his approach in reverse. He centered the sled in his two rearview mirrors and shifted back to reverse.
“The hell is that?" Romie asked.
“What?”
“That,” Romie said. She pointed slightly to her left, through the windshield. Brad shifted to park. On the side of the highway, facing directly towards them, an abandoned car rested half on the pavement and half in the ditch next to the shoulder.