The fog grew thicker, tangling and twisting, flying past them in fuming pockets and sheets. Got so they couldn’t see much out there in the headlights but the jagged contours of gnarled black trees, a few rusting cars on the side of the road. Nothing else but that mist, enclosing and enveloping, blowing out at them like steam from a pot. Now and again, Cabot spied shapes and shadows moving through it but he didn’t dare mention it. Kid was getting nervous. Starting to shift a lot in his seat, looked like he was about to have a litter of puppies.
“Why do you do it, though?” Blaine asked him.
“This? Because I was a truck driver before and that’s what I’m good at. You need a load run through hard country, I’m the guy for the job. I ain’t worth a shit at anything else.” Cabot told him how it was in the old days, running freezer trucks of Texas beef up from Kansas City, flatbeds of harvesters into Boise, tankers of hi-test down to Little Rock. “Been everywhere and hauled everything, kid. This ain’t so different. Not really.”
Blaine studied the rack of pump shotguns. “Oh, it’s different, I think.”
Cabot shrugged. Maybe the kid wasn’t so dumb after all.
He drove on, cutting through the fog, keeping the truck in creeper gear all the way. Just too damn much wreckage and debris on the roads. They’d used a big loader a few years back to sweep all the wrecks into the ditch or onto the shoulder, but now and again some fool tried to cross the Deadlands or skirt them and he plowed his pick-up into a rotting hulk and created yet another driving hazard.
Blaine sat up straight, looked out his window port, tried to catch something in his rearview. He stared at Cabot. “You see that?”
“What?”
Kid swallowed. “I don’t know…I thought I saw some woman standing there by that wrecked van. Looked like she was holding a kid.”
“Out here?” Cabot stepped on the accelerator, got them moving a bit quicker. “Ain’t no women or kids out here.”
“But I thought-”
“Maybe you saw something, but it sure as hell wasn’t a woman and what she was holding was no kid. You know better than that.”
“But she didn’t look… bad.”
“Some of ‘em don’t, not until you get up close and see their eyes, smell the stink coming off ‘em.”
There he went being fucking naive again. Jesus. Kid knew the score, all right. He’d gotten his ass into a bind out in the Deadlands when he and some other survivors tried to slip through in a van. They’d blown a tire outside Carp River of all places. That town was just as infested with Wormboys as a dead dog was with maggots. And, yeah, the comparison was appropriate. The kid got away, but the others were butchered out there. He hid out by night, ran by day for over a week. That’s when a patrol from Hullville out mopping-up stragglers came across him and brought him back Cabot jerked the wheel to the right to avoid a smashed minivan and nearly put them right into an overturned Greyhound bus rising from the ditch like a missile from a silo. He jockeyed the truck a bit, jerked the wheel this way and that, got her under control. Just as he did, a blurred form appeared out of the fog. They both saw it for maybe a split second before it thudded off the Freightliner’s grill and was gone.
“Christ!” Blaine said. “You’re gonna kill us!”
Cabot laughed. “Don’t worry kid. I could thread a fucking needle with this baby. Relax.”
But the kid was past relaxing and Cabot saw it.
He couldn’t seem to sit still like his shorts were full of ants. He was tapping his fingers rapidly on his knees, shifting around, peering out the port of his window. Cabot could hear him breathing real fast like he was ready to hyperventilate. There was a sheen of sweat on his face.
The radio crackled and the kid jumped.
There was static, then: “Seven? You alive out there? Talk to me.”
Cabot grabbed the mic. “Hey, Chum. We’re about ten minutes out.”
“How’s that fog?”
“Like soup.”
“Anything to report?”
Cabot peered out into the soup. “Not much. We got a wrecked bus that’s a hazard. Seen a couple stragglers, no numbers, though. Sweet and clean.”
There was silence for a moment. “How’s your guest doing? How’s Blaine?”
Blaine sighed and shook his head.
“He’s not liking it much, Chum,” Cabot said, winking at the kid in the dim cab. “Sitting over there with a sour look on his puss like he’s got about seven inches of cruel loving up his ass and he can’t shake it loose.”
Chum giggled over that. “Okay, don’t be a stranger, Cab. Out.”
“Why’d you have to say that?” Blaine asked Cabot. “It sounds gay.”
But Cabot never answered him because in the back of the truck there was a sudden thudding sound, a thumping. Then something which might have been a hand slapping against the rear door, a low moaning like someone was in pain.
Blaine had balled his hands into fists now. He was shaking.
“Just our cargo, kid,” Cabot told him, grinning. “They must be waking up back there. Dope must’ve worn off. It does that. We better push it, get our piggies to market.”
*
It began with a microbe in Clovis, New Mexico.
A robotic satellite called BIOCOM-13 was sampling the upper atmosphere for microorganisms of possible extraterrestrial origin. Somewhere during the process, it found the microbe, analyzed it, sealed it in a vacuum jar, then proceeded to get cored by a rogue meteorite. Long before a maintenance crew could get up there, BIOCOM-13 fell into a rapidly decaying orbit and plunged to Earth.
It crashed outside Clovis, its sample jars bursting upon impact. Several were bacterium of terrestrial origin, a few exotic mold spores, and a virus. The virus would come to be known as Biocom after the satellite. The virus, it was later learned, was not from Earth. It had drifted here, scientists theorized, perhaps stuck to a rock or a speck of cosmic dust, on a trip through deepest space that might have lasted ten-thousand years or ten million.
It probably would never have made it down if the satellite hadn’t grabbed it.
NASA exobiologists had long said that the possibility of pathogenesis resulting from contact with an alien microbe was minimal. That extraterrestrial agents such as bacteria, fungi, protozoa, and multicellular parasites evolved differently and would share no common biochemical or cellular traits with terrestrial types. Ergo, it was more conceivable for a human being to get infected with Dutch Elm Disease or wheat rust than an alien microbial agent. But Biocom was a virus. And NASA had left viral agents out of the loop. Viruses have no cellular machinery of their own; they convert that of the host organism to reproduce themselves. So a virus is a virus is a virus, regardless of where it comes from. It adapts to any chemistry.
And nobody knew where Biocom came from.
First contact was in Clovis and from there it spread in every conceivable direction, mimicking pneumonic plague and putting two thirds of the world’s population into the grave within six months. But they didn’t stay there.
They started rising.
They got out of their graves, feeding on the dead and the living and spreading the virus like the common cold. If you got bit, you died. And if you died, you came back with a whole fresh slate of culinary impulses.
Of course, nobody believed it at first.
Zombies? The dead rising? Utter bullshit. File it away with those aliens on ice at Roswell and Bigfoot shitting in the Oregon woods. But the stories did not go away: they proliferated. From Florida to Maine, Michigan to Texas, the dead were rising. And it wasn’t long before videos of the same showed up all over the internet. One in particular was posted to YouTube. It got so many hits it crashed the server.
What it showed was Clovis, New Mexico.
At first glance, the grainy video taken with a night-vision device looked almost comical, like something from a Gary Larson cartoon about the living dead: men in bathrobes and fuzzy slippers, women in fluffy nightgowns with curlers in their hair, all wandering the streets in the dead of night. Then some daylight footage was added and things got spooky. Men, women, children. Some stark naked and some dressed in burial clothes, pallid, decaying, infested with vermin. They were rising from cemeteries and crawling free of mortuary slabs and morgue drawers. Their faces were gray and seamed, their eyes flat dead white or lit a lurid red and filled with a cunning, evil intelligence, narrow teeth jutting from shriveled black gums, chattering and gnashing, looking for something to bite.