He removed the card and tried again. This time there was a brief Ding! and Taylor was able to pull down a small metal lever that activated the pump. He began filling the tank, watching the numbers roll by on the pump’s old-fashioned display.
“It’s working,” Carl said. “I can’t believe it. I didn’t think it would. Nothing else has.”
Taylor pointed to the row of cars lined up neatly side-by-side in front of the glass display of the car dealership. “If that had been the case, we could have siphoned some off from those. It would have been a lot more time consuming though.”
When the tank was full, Taylor hung the nozzle back in its cradle. He looked to the west and saw some them rounding the corner, still moving en masse, participants in a parade for crazy fuckers. “Time to hit the road,” he said and got into the car.
“You realize how many of those people we know?” Carl asked. “I could name off most of them.”
Taylor nodded. He focused on the road ahead, watching the needle of the speedometer jump to sixty. He recognized most of them, too. He was thankful that the three Coldwater residents that were the most important to him had had the sense to head for the mountains. Whether they had made it or not was another matter. He shoved those dark thoughts deep down; there wasn’t room for them now. The trick, he thought, was to set small goals and work on completing them one by one. You didn’t disregard any possibilities, but you let them sit along the side of the road like mile markers; signs you glanced at only occasionally because there were larger signs to follow.
Taylor glanced into the rearview mirror. “How you doing back there?”
Tina’s eyes fluttered open. She surveyed the world outside the confines of the Escort and said, “Okay, I guess. We’re going the same way we came?”
“Yeah, we’re kind of backtracking. The place we’re going is a about an hour and a half into Wyoming. Going seventy-five, it’s probably a four hour trip. Like I said, that’s optimum conditions. Most likely it’ll take longer than that.”
The morning fog was thick. Taylor was glad for it. It was like having a security blanket; a cocoon that obscured anything dangerous that lay outside its confines. He could see the road twenty yards ahead and then it was swallowed up by the haze.
“You just let me know when you need me to drive,” Carl said. “I’m not feeling too bad.”
“I must have hit my second wind because I’m not doing too bad at the moment. But I’ll let you know.”
Carl switched on the radio, toying with the dial. “Still nothing.”
“I don’t get how it spread so fast. If it’s a disease. That means it started somewhere. A monkey in Africa or something. Right? So how does the whole world go to shit overnight? Wouldn’t we have seen something about it on TV or read about it in the paper? People getting sick?”
“Not if you were where the original outbreak took place,” Tina said. She yawned into her hand and leaned forward. “We know about it ahead of time when it happens someplace else first.”
Carl said, “So you’re saying you think it started here?”
Tina shrugged. “Maybe.”
“That still doesn’t explain much. Like what’s here? What’s the scale? Our town. Your town. It was happening in both of those. So is it happening in just a few surrounding counties or just this state or the entire country?” Taylor slowed the car abruptly to swerve around a truck that was angled on the shoulder, its front end sticking out into the road. “One town, I could see it. But it’s not. At least two towns that we know of and they were talking about it on the radio before we broke down. People did know about it, but not very far in advance. It happened fast. Maybe the question is how does it spread?”
“Or how it originated,” Tina said. “Anything that affects so many people that rapidly has got to be airborne.”
“Maybe it was a meteor.” Carl twisted around in the seat so he could look at Tina, both hands holding onto the barrel of the shotgun. “Crashed and gave off some kind of alien radiation.”
“You said you heard about it on the radio. Was it a local station?”
“Denver.”
“Well…if it was radiation than it had a pretty big radius. I think we would have heard about the impact.”
“I was joking.”
“Oh.”
Taylor met her eyes in the rearview mirror. “He does that.”
“So it’s happening in the States, maybe the whole world. It almost has to be spread through the air. And it spreads fast. Fast enough to infect everyone in about…” She opened her cell phone and checked the time. “Sixteen hours. God, is that all it’s been? I feel like we’ve been going like this for close to forever. It’s funny how quickly we adapt. One of my first classes in college covered adaptation by species. How animals have evolved over millions of years to survive a changing environment. Yesterday morning, I was driving my car on a normal road in a normal world, heading home from college to see my dad. Now look at things. Some people think nature does it on purpose. Like this natural cleansing. Only the strong adapt and survive.”
“Sixteen hours,” Taylor said. He glanced in the rearview mirror again, this time seeing past Tina and out the back window. He could see the sun low in the sky, a hazy orb whose brightness was muted by the fog.
Carl said, “Does it sound like rabies?”
“Going only off the symptoms, they mimic a lot of those found with rabies,” Tina said. “But nothing else really fits. Being airborne, the rapidity of the infection, traveling in packs. I guess it doesn’t have to add up. This is something different. Normally, a disease or virus doesn’t mutate that fast. It almost makes me think…”
“What?” Carl asked. “Finish what you were gonna say.”
“Well, it just makes me think that maybe it was manmade.”
“Terrorists?”
“Could be. People have been worried about something like that for years. But it could just as easily have been an accident. That’s not as rare as you might think. It doesn’t matter how many precautions you take to prevent them, people still make mistakes. I’m just glad they’re afraid of water.”
“The place we’re headed has lakes. Two small ones and a bigger one.”
“Do your parents have a boat?”
“Yeah. It’s just a small fishing boat. Can seat five or six tops. I didn’t think to check to see if they took it with them or not,” Carl said.
“Pray they did. I wish I knew where my dad went. We could find him and bring him with us.”
Taylor felt a stab of guilt again. It was another opportunity to lay the truth on her, but he remained silent again. He couldn’t bring himself to do it. The more he thought about it, the more telling her seemed like the right thing to do. From what he had gathered in a short amount of time, Tina was about as level-headed as you could get, but telling her that her father was one of them was heavy news for anybody to have to hear. If she went off the deep end they could be in trouble. She could do something stupid and endanger herself or, worse yet, all of them. And when weighing it out based solely on what was best for their survival as a whole, his instincts told him to keep that knowledge to himself. Sometimes morals had to take a backseat.
He said, “Maybe he’ll find a way to contact you,” and, despite his good intentions, he still felt like a total slimeball.