“Rich bitch,” Pete said.
Campbell had a bad feeling about the car, maybe because of the way the windows looked a little steamy, despite the dry air. “Leave it.”
“What are you so afraid of, dude?”
Afraid.
That was a good one. One minute he’d been playing Halo 2 on the Xbox, and the next he’d been sitting in his dark apartment, wondering if his douchebag roomie had again forgotten to pay the power bill. He’d even knocked on Tommy’s bedroom door, which had swung open to reveal his roomie sprawled on the bed, glassy eyes fixed on the ceiling. Campbell hadn’t dared touch him, because something had seemed wrong about him, and he grabbed his cell to dial 9-1-1, but his phone was as dead as Tommy.
Then he’d gone outside and learned that Tommy wasn’t the only one…
“Check it out, bro,” Campbell said, their little code for caution, a reminder that every decision had consequences. If nothing else, it was a cheap mockery of the notion of control.
Pete leaned his bike against the rear flank of the Lexus and went to the driver’s side door. Giving one last look around, probably due to the lingering tug of Old World morals, Pete yanked the door open. He immediately cupped his hand over his mouth, the cigarette still perched between his fingers.
“Ugh,” he said, his voice muffled. “Ripe one.”
Campbell didn’t bother looking. He was busy checking out the back seat, which was empty. “What did you expect?”
“I was hoping for Angelina Jolie in a see-through nightie.”
“Pervert.”
“I meant alive. I’m not that desperate…yet.”
“You could have hooked up with the chubby chick back at that camp.”
“Gypsy Rose? I’ll take a corpse over that mess any day.” Pete reached down beside the driver’s seat and flipped a latch. The trunk popped open.
Campbell had never known anyone who could afford a Lexus, so he was a little curious about what the trunk might contain. Since the Big Zap had caught people with their pants down, sometimes literally, it offered a snapshot of human civilization in the early twenty-first century. A cultural anthropologist might have noted the widespread worship of plastic electronics and gasoline-powered engines, but Marvin the Martian would have summed it up as, “Well, back to the old drawing board.”
The trunk of the Lexus was clean, carpeted, and empty, except for a leather briefcase. It featured a combination lock with a dial. Campbell gave the serrated metal wheels a few random turns, but the hasp stayed tight. He was about to close the trunk, realized there was no point, and heard a moist squishing in the car’s interior.
He hoped Pete wasn’t doing anything disgusting. His friend had gone through a brief desecration phase on the third day, placing corpses in humorous poses. In one memorable instance, he’d drawn a mustache and goatee on a little old lady who’d fallen down with her dead poodle’s leash still wrapped around one frail wrist.
“Doomsday score,” Pete said, lifting a purse.
“Charming. It matches your fashionable ensemble.” In truth, the bright lime-green vinyl clashed horribly with Pete’s plaid jacket and filthy red sweatpants.
Pete rummaged around in the purse and pulled out a make-up kit. “Maybe I can rub this junk on my face and look like one of them.”
“They look like one of us.”
“No, they don’t. They’re redder around the eyes and their skin is pale.”
“That’s racist, dude.”
Pete tossed the make-up kit to the pavement and continued scrounging. He came away with a wallet, an iPod, a spare set of keys, and a plastic package of tissues. He tapped futilely on the iPod’s dark glass screen. “Dead like everything else.”
“Good. I don’t think I could endure your Lady Gaga marathon.”
Pete hurled the iPod across the road, where it dinked off the side of a blue SUV. “What’s in the briefcase?”
Campbell hefted it. “Heavy. Like papers.”
“Or cocaine?”
“Yeah, right. All you think about is getting high.”
Pete made a show of looking around. “You got anything better to do? Besides, I think those Zapheads kind of lowered the bar on moral inhibition.”
“I don’t give a damn about coke, but you got my curiosity up.” About a hundred feet ahead, a plumbing van had coupled with a Toyota Prius in an obscene tangle of steel and plastic. Campbell could see the driver of the Prius slumped over the wheel, dark dots of dried blood stippling the windshield. The panel van had no windows in the rear, but Campbell was willing to bet it contained all sorts of tools, probably jumbled and scattered by the collision.
All he had to do was endure the smell of corpses for a moment, but that was getting easier by the day. The stench had become like a second skin, something worn instead of smelled. Carrboro had been the worst, in the immediate wake of the Big Zap, but even outside the city, death had sent its sweet musk into the sky as if to mark the territory it now ruled. And, in the absence of governments, law, and civilization, death was the only world order remaining.
Pete followed him to the van, still shucking items from the purse, calling out as he dropped them. “Hair clip…fingernail file…a little billfold with—”
Campbell looked back to see Pete stopped in the middle of the glittering asphalt, staring at the fold of vinyl in his hand. His friend’s abrupt silence was amplified by the desolation around them.
“Family pictures, man,” Pete whispered.
Campbell hadn’t thought of his family all day. Dad Brian, a financial advisor, a guy you could toss a football and drink beers with, a solid Republican who’d vote “liberal” if he was mad at the stock market. Mom Mary, like most every Mary in the world, pretty, pleasant, and Catholic-loyal, although she’d made relief mission trips to eight different countries. Little brother Ted, or Turdfinger, as Campbell used to call him, back before Ted hit his growth spurt and could kick his butt.
The Grimes family lived on Lake James, in the North Carolina foothills, with the 3,000-square-foot Swiss-style house and little speedboat dock that was expected of people in Dad’s circle. Campbell tried to picture the three of them out on the lake: Dad at the helm with his sun visor, shades, and tanned face, Mom perched loyally by the outboard motor and keeping an eye on Ted, who trailed behind them and cut his skis through the greenish-brown water.
But that other image—the one with them all slumped and rotting in front of the widescreen TV, flies dive-bombing their eyes—was the one that burned into his head.
“We’ll get there, Pete,” Campbell said, with a conviction he didn’t feel.
Pete flapped the little photo album. “Yeah, and then what? Don’t you think her family is sitting there with dinner on the table, waiting for Mom or Sis or Wife to walk through the door and bitch about the traffic?”
Pete’s drinking not only slowed them down and increased the danger of traveling by bicycle on cluttered roads, but it also made him prone to blubbering. And Campbell did not want any damned blubbering at the moment. The world had already thrown itself the biggest Pity Party of all time, and the clam dip had definitely gone bad.
“Let’s check this out and get moving,” Campbell said, eyeing the smoky horizon. “We have to find a safe place to crash before dark.”
Campbell hoped the rear door of the van was unlocked. He didn’t want to open the cab. Pete dropped the purse and said, “Hey, don’t you want to—”
–check it out, Bro?
But he was already swinging the door open and Marvin the Martian was definitely very angry indeed, because a blur of bulky movement exploded out of the shadows.