That meant it was only last night he was bitten.
He wanted to be startled by this, shocked even. The tenuous strands of humanity in him demanded it, but he did not have the strength. For a split second there was a surge of panic, but then it, too, was lost in the chill gray fog.
An agonizing wave of muscular spasms swept through him. He writhed and contorted and finally slid off the car into the street. His lips were bearded with bloody foam, his eyes glazed and yellowish.
Am I the last one?
Are there no others left?
Is that even possible?
Yes, he knew it was.
In two days, the town had been swept into the dustbin. It probably started a few days before that, he supposed, being that’s when he first heard about it. That rain—dark, bloody, bizarre. By the time anyone realized how bad it had gotten, it was too late to do anything about it. Flu bug. That’s what everyone said.
Ha, ha. Flu bug, all right.
Then when the storm passed, Cut River was a graveyard.
Haynes made a choking, gargling sound in his throat that was supposed to be a laugh. But it was laughter like a scream is a whisper.
His body grew very cold as his core temperature plummeted.
Weakness moved through him in sluggish waves.
His eyes focused one last time and he saw the Last Call Tavern. Northland A & P. The Drill Sergeant Army/Navy store. Cut River Cinema, formerly just the Rialto. It was good to see those things. He remembered them from when he was a kid. And memories, sentimental memories, were good to go to sleep on. They made him feel like maybe he was still a man, still a human being.
As he slipped into a coma, he prayed he would hurt no one. Prayed that someone, somewhere would shoot him down like the animal he would soon be.
These were Tom Haynes’ last rational thoughts.
2
Lou Frawley rounded the bluff just outside Cut River and saw the little town lying in the hollow below, pretty as a postcard and about as exciting as ten feet of fence. He piloted his Grand Am down the winding stretch of blacktop that fed into town. He slowed, passed over a bridge spanning a rushing, restless river. It must have been the Cut. The moon had just come up and its ghostly reflection rode the waters, rippling, shimmering, but never disappearing entirely.
He slid a cigarette in his mouth and sped over the bridge.
On the other side, in the yawning fields, he caught a momentary glimpse of… what? He wasn’t quite sure. Almost looked like scarecrows strung up on crossbars, dozens of them. And then he was past it.
Some crazy rural custom, he thought without much interest.
He exhaled a stream of smoke, stretched his back.
He drove up a main thoroughfare which was probably called Main or Elm or something equally as bucolic and quaint. When you pushed plumbing supplies in several hundred small Midwestern towns on a yearly basis, you got to know all their secrets. He had once kept count. On his yearly travels through Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota etc. he jotted down in a travel book how many streets were named Main and how many named Elm. Elm beat out Main six to one.
The main drag.
About what he expected.
Stores were squeezed together on either side—sporting goods, drug stores, video stores, clothes shops, party stores. All the essentials. He saw the spires of churches climbing in the distance, old homes, a sprawling park along the riverbank, and, separated by a stand of gnarled, leafless trees, a cemetery hugging a series of shadowy hills. He saw old hotels, coffee shops, sheet metal Quonset huts that housed garages, auto body joints. There was a huge building in the distance, lots of pillars and stone work, a big clock set in its face.
A lot of the town was dark. There were trees down all over the place and telephone poles, too. Maybe not as bad as out on the highway, but bad enough.
Lou was looking for the local Ace hardware, Shinneman’s Hardware.
He’d tried to call them from Green Bay that morning, but the operator told him that service hadn’t been restored yet to Cut River and probably wouldn’t be for a few days. Even the cell towers were down. Entire place was cut off.
Oh, well. Come bright and early tomorrow morning, he’d be hawking PVC pipe and flushing kits to some bored local zombie.
Right now, however, he’d have been glad to see anyone.
Because, thing was, he hadn’t seen a soul since arriving.
Not a car, a truck, nothing.
He thought: These places, Jesus, they sure roll up the sidewalks at seven sharp.
It wasn’t a bad-looking little town, he decided. Much better than some. One thing he liked right off the bat was all the saloons. Every block seemed to have a few, PABST and BUDWEISER signs competing for attention. He pulled to a stop across from a place called the Town Tap. Just to be different they had a neon OLD STYLE sign glowing in the window. There were a few pick-up trucks and a couple cars crowded in front. Looked like the place to be.
Lou got out, tossed his cigarette.
The air was chill and damp, screaming late September at him. Waterlogged leaves were plastered in the gutters. His stomach wasn’t feeling too good about then; he’d had a couple burritos at a Taco Bell on the highway a few hours before in Wisconsin and now they were beginning their obligatory march to the sea. He decided he’d feel more at home in Cut River after a good, healthy shit.
The door, an old weathered oak affair, gave a groan when he pulled it open.
He was expecting muted laughter, Hank Williams Jr. on the juke, the Monday Night Football game on the tube, the overpowering, reassuring stink of stale beer and cigarette smoke.
But what he got was absolutely nothing.
The place was empty.
He stood there in the doorway, feeling oddly like a stranger at the borderland of some ghost town.
He stepped in.
A bar ran along one side, booths along the other, a scattering of tables in-between. The light was on behind the bar—he could see all those bottles of liquor lined up like soldiers, like hookers offering him a hard, fast time—but everything else was dark.
He licked his lips, went to the bar.
He could smell a faint trace memory of old booze, old smoke, but vague, a ghost of what was, was no longer.
“Hello?” he said, his voice echoing emptily like a whisper in a tomb.
Nothing. Nobody.
He turned, made his way out of there quickly, gooseflesh prickling his arms and the nape of his neck. He wasn’t an imaginative sort, but damn if there wasn’t something eerie about the silent vacancy. The breeze was slight, chill, peppered by tiny drops of rain. It felt good, cementing him back in reality.
Don’t make sense, he thought. Door wide open… but the joint’s closed. Everybody head for the hills when the storm hit?
He saw the lights on in a café a few doors down.
He walked over there, noticing with an almost palpable sense of alarm how incredibly quiet the town was. No cars passing, close or in the distance. No far-off barks of dogs, shouts of children.
Nothing.
Just a heavy, almost brooding desolation… a sense of creeping expectancy, like something was about to happen any minute.
A surprise party, is what he was thinking.
The town, its residents, were holding their breath, waiting, just waiting to jump out, to throw open doors and start screaming.
The image of that made his flesh crawl.
He shook it off, lit another cigarette, moved up the sidewalk consciously making as much noise as he possibly could. At least, he wanted to, but in reality he moved very soundlessly, afraid, maybe, that someone would hear.