Sawyer dragged the remains out by their legs or skulls or punched them deeper into the car, whatever was easiest. Keys dangled from every ignition — but every engine had been left running, heat on, lights on, radio on.
Four of the six vehicles were locked. At first Cam had giggled at the absurdity, yet his head swam each time he bent to find a rock and he nearly cut open his jacket when he broke the third window, too weak to disengage himself from the momentum of heaving his crude tool into the glass. He stared back at himself from the fourth window. Even hefting ten pounds of asphalt pried from the road’s edge, his posture was tight and defensive, shoulders hunched, head bent, as if making himself smaller would help in any way.
He understood locking the doors.
Every vehicle was a bitter frustration and Manny wasted time trying each ignition again after Sawyer had given up. Sawyer was all business, in and out, cranking each key three times. Only three times. Then he walked away.
The blacktop let them maximize every stride rather than fighting rocks and mud. They were also now on nearly level ground, the bottom of the valley, halfway there. Moving too slow. It was as if they were old now, bodies bent inefficiently.
Highway 14 was not a parking lot. At 6,200 feet, this road had been under several inches of snow, yet Cam imagined the lack of cars was due more to the fact that most people had been drawn off by Highway 6, farther down the valley…but if they couldn’t get an engine running soon, their only option would be to continue on foot up the northern face. Hollywood had said Route 47 was blocked in at least two places, anyway, but if they could ride all the way to the first obstacle…
Erin slumped against him, as heavy as dread. They’d come upon another vehicle, an old brown pickup half in the ditch, and Sawyer simply let go of her.
A fly smacked into Cam’s fogged lens. He blinked, awareness opening and closing in him like a lighthouse beacon. It hurt. He burned. Molten barbs swam through his hand and his wrist. The same fire distorted his ear, pushing the tissue apart.
Erin tried to sit and he clubbed uselessly at her side. Then Manny bumped past. Erin’s weight peeled away from Cam and he staggered, trying to soften her fall but desperate to stay upright himself. He looked at the others for help.
Sawyer had dragged a freakish little body from the pickup.
Cam stared, realized it was a dog, and Erin managed one word hardly different than breathing. “Rest.”
Bacchetti’s boots scuffed into Cam’s field of vision and the big man grumbled, encouraging the truck just as he’d talked to the flies. “Rrrrrrr. Rrrrr—” He coughed.
“Help,” Cam said. “Get her up.”
Bacchetti had already settled into a wide, braced stance. He might have been a little nuts but Cam was glad for his presence, glad for his strength and his loyalty — so it confused him when Bacchetti sidestepped away, until he heard other boots.
Together, Cam and Sawyer heaved their lover into a sitting position. Her eyes rolled open and the band of skin framed by her goggles crinkled in a familiar way. She was smiling.
“I can’t carry you,” Sawyer told her. “I won’t.”
“Please,” Cam said, maybe to both of them.
* * * *
He’d studied the town so often from his favorite cliff that he thought he knew where he was going. The Forest Service and CalTrans shared a lot on the northeast side, a complicated zoo of chain-link fence populated with a limited variety of green trucks, orange trucks, and orange plows. They could get an engine running there for sure. It shouldn’t be hard to find. This place only had eight streets, a three-by-five grid set off-center on Highway 14, plus several curling back roads lined with old cabins and giant modern homes.
“Sick?” Erin said. Six. A wooden sign on metal stilts read
WELCOME TO WOODCREEK
POP. 2273, ELEV. 6135.
Bacchetti continued to help Cam each time Sawyer tried another car, stepping in to keep Erin upright, but the big man had stopped making his engine sounds. He coughed whenever he did. He coughed constantly now.
The fucking things were in his lungs.
Regret filled the core of emotion that Cam maintained inside himself, banked against his despair in the same way they’d learned to protect the embers of their cookfires. Bacchetti had been the real surprise, the surprise hero, and Cam hoped somehow he would make it.
Woodcreek seemed remarkably well preserved. Two homes had burned and there was a jeep rammed up on a guardrail, but anyone who’d died here had hidden themselves away.
The ghosts came out as they reached downtown. Their feet echoed down every road, and shadows paced alongside them in the dusty storefront windows.
Then Sawyer got a van to turn over. Tucked between a deli and an antiques shop, the white Ford would not idle, dying again and again. He pumped the gas and tried shifting into neutral or first, giving the van more time than the last three cars put together. But it just wouldn’t catch.
They detoured left when they wanted to go straight, avoiding a huge nest of rattlers sunning in the street. The thick, brown, ropy bodies held their ground when Manny waved his arms and yelled in a pleading voice—“Go! Move!”—and the ghosts began to talk.
They were not alone in Woodcreek.
* * * *
The mumbling and whispers became real words as Cam hurried Erin into an intersection, Bacchetti dragging on her other arm. He actually looked the wrong way first, tricked by the silhouettes in the glass of a real estate office.
McCraney’s urgency was clear. “Heard him—”
“—doing, you know, we don’t—” Hollywood saw them and lifted both arms overhead. “Hey.”
Cam shouted back, “Hah!”
They were seventy feet off, standing in a bunch on the sidewalk. He recognized Silverstein and Jocelyn Colvard and that was as much counting as he could manage. All twelve seemed to have made it.
Price had been right. Jim Price had made the best choice. Yes, these people had gotten stuck farther west of Cam’s group — they must have, or they would’ve driven into town an hour ago — but while both groups had hiked roughly the same distance, the miles that Price covered on foot had been the last part of the logging road and then the easy surface of Highway 14.
Even better, Price hadn’t wasted time trying to get any cars started. It must have been obvious, doors open, bones scattered, that each vehicle had already been tested. Every failure and disappointment had been a help to them.
The surge of gladness in Cam carried him forward despite Erin’s weight and she moaned, “Stop.”
He knew that she hurt. He knew she wanted to sleep. It was smarter to keep moving. The others would need to come up the street to reach the CalTrans station, but he wanted to see their eyes. That was worth fifty steps.
Erin let her legs go limp and Cam and Bacchetti sagged together, holding her up. “Stop,” she said.
“Get back!” Sawyer yelled behind them.
Cam felt his thoughts open and close again, and realized suddenly that Hollywood had not raised his arms in welcome. The boy had made himself larger as a warning.
The knot of people on the sidewalk shifted, retreating, leaving three men in front like fence posts. Price. Nielsen. Silverstein. An open doorway stood at Nielsen’s elbow and above it jutted a touristy Old West sign. the hunting post.
Price held his rifle down alongside his leg as if its heft was too much for him, and Silverstein’s long torso had kept the outline of his weapon from showing. Only the tip of its muzzle poked above his shoulder. Nielsen’s hands were oversized, a pistol in each, the barrels like stiff ugly fingers.