And yet as I scramble up the side of the overturned bus and drop down through a shattered window, I find myself wondering how to switch it off. If I see what I’m afraid I’m about to see…do I really have to feel it too?
There are bodies in the bus. A man with a gut wound and a chunk of metal through his skull. A man with a bite on his leg, a gun in his hand, and a bullet in his head.
No one else.
A rush of warmth replaces my desperate calculations. I hop back down to my waiting friends. “Empty.”
“What happened?” Julie wonders.
“The kids,” I say, permitting myself a morbid smile at the thought of the guards’ wounds. “I think…they fought.”
“But where are they?”
M is walking the perimeter of the crash, scanning the ground with military focus. “Driver escaped.” He studies the debris on the pavement, the indentations in the grassy embankment. “Kids scattered.” He leans down, squints, touches the dirt. “Except…three. Group of three went together.”
“That’s them, right?” Julie says. “Joan, Alex, and Sprout? They would’ve stayed together.”
M follows the footprints—or whatever it is a tracker tracks—for a few yards, then stops. “Four now.” A faint note of anxiety enters his voice. “Another kid. Barefoot.”
Tomsen is still at the wheel of the RV and she idles along behind us as we follow M down the highway. The tracks lead up the embankment and stay there, as if ready to jump into the bushes at the first sign of pursuers. That had to be Sprout’s forethought. She must be leading them. But to where?
After about a mile, M traces the tracks onto a highway offshoot and stops. He looks into the distance, where the wilderness road becomes an urban arterial. “They went down there.”
“Highway One,” Nora murmurs. “That’s…” She turns abruptly and hops into the RV, and we follow her. “They’re going to DC.”
“DC was the Fire Church’s favorite target,” Tomsen says. “They were blasting away at it right up until the collapse. Been empty for years.”
“The kids don’t know that. They’re just trying to find people.” Nora drops into the passenger seat and slaps her thighs. “Let’s go.”
“Tomsen,” Julie says with a certain reluctance. “Is it empty? Or just exed?”
“Are you asking if there’s a hive? In a vacant city walking distance to a population center?”
Julie frowns. “Maybe…?”
“Is the sky gray? Is the Pope dead? Does a bear shit in the White House?”
“So that’s a yes.”
“Yes. There are many, many zombies in Washington Dead City.”
Julie looks at me. I look at the floor, my guts knotting.
Nora kicks the dashboard. “I said let’s go!”
The cold morning has matured into a full-boil summer afternoon. The sun hovers directly overhead, turning the RV into a barbecue, and I feel my skin getting slick with sweat. I should be thrilled to see my body resuming its Living functions—I am very nearly normal—but my concerns have moved outside of myself. All I can think about is Joan and Alex and tiny, worried Sprout wandering into town looking for adults to keep them safe, and finding a swarm of self-gratifying monsters instead. Are my kids at least still Dead enough to be ignored? Or will their hard-earned steps toward life be turned against them?
No one speaks as we travel up this dry artery into America’s stilled heart. Vine-choked suburbs give way to the beige boxes of retail, all bright colors long since bleached away, sidewalk trees and other caged flora baked to death by the hot concrete, advertisements faded to blue-hued ghosts of impossibly happy people, faint mouths grinning through the haze.
As far as I can see, the city is a silent tableau, and I begin to wonder if Tomsen’s information might be faulty. I see no signs of the super-hive she implied; it feels as empty as Detroit. I watch the windows of apartments blur past us, flashes of dark bedrooms, moldy kitchens, a face—I pull back with a grunt.
Sunken eyes follow me as we fly past. A man standing at his window, watching the street. And now that I know where to look, I start to see more of them. Not massed together like herds of animals. Huddled in their homes, watching their televisions or the street outside, as if awaiting news.
“Something’s different,” Tomsen says, squinting into the buildings around us. “Why aren’t they swarming? Hunting? I’ve never seen a hive like this.”
I remember a quaint neighborhood on the outskirts of Post. A cul-de-sac of crumbling houses. A quiet man named B, and hundreds of others like him, and I mumble:
“I have.”
As we enter the historic part of town, I begin to see more signs of the Fire Church’s efforts, but their work is oddly spotty. Individual buildings blackened, half a block here and there, but none of the scorched-earth devastation I remember. Perhaps the capitol put up more of a fight than the sad little towns they were used to. Not that it mattered in the end. The capitol is dead, all its grand endeavors erased, just like the Church promised. Whether by fire or subtler ruin, the point gets made.
But I wonder how their dogma has adapted to the Dead. What do they make of the aftermath of their work here, this booming population that’s not at all bothered by the loss of its comforts and not at all interested in the Church’s reasons for taking them? These people who simply are?
The density increases as we approach the city center and small swarms appear in the weedy lawns of various monuments. But even these are oddly subdued. Almost focused. They don’t shuffle around in vague orbits, waiting to detect human flesh. They stand and stare at the ground and even at the sky, that gaping mouth of an unknown god that’s always about to swallow them.
The knot in my gut begins to relax, warming with cautious hope. If this is the assembly that met the kids, they may have passed through freely. They may even have found friends.
“Last time I visited,” Tomsen says, “there was a steady flow of hunting parties going into Baltimore and the surrounding camps. They were stockpiling flesh. It was a busy place, almost industrialized.” She watches a woman standing alone in the Reflecting Pool, staring at its bone-dry bottom. “But this I don’t understand. No signs of feeding. They should all have starved to full-death.”
“Maybe the rules aren’t as rigid as we think,” Julie says, and glances at me.
We drive deeper into the white marble carnival of American pageantry. The sun blazes off Egyptian obelisks and Roman columns, an empire’s monuments to its invincibility built in the styles of fallen empires. The White House is now just a white house. Barely even that with its pillars and doorways scorched by the flames that gutted it. But I’m surprised the Fire Church wasn’t more thorough. Surprised they didn’t come back to finish the job once the government was gone. For a group seeking to scour the earth of its pretensions toward progress, there could be no bigger target than the very symbol of civic ambition. I see a few of their slogans graffitied on the walls, but they’re lost among the thousands of other tags, the disgust of an entire nation hurled like rotten fruit at the government’s face. Perhaps a pillory is exactly what Paul Bark had in mind when he chose to leave the place standing. A public humiliation instead of the usual obliteration, driving the point a little deeper: none of this is coming back.