Children of the Mountain (Book 2): The Devil You Know Page 2
I’m glad to have her with me but the truth is I’m more nervous about this than she is. For the first time I think I understand why Marv was reluctant to take me out with him after Benjamin died. I’ve spent the last few weeks trying to remember everything I learnt from him; I even dug out the first aid book I used to keep under my bed in the farmhouse and read it through again, cover to cover. But what if I forget something? What if I screw up and get us lost, or worse? Mags says I should stop worrying, and maybe she’s right. The worst of the storms have passed and we’re both carrying enough MREs for several weeks, more than enough to get us to The Greenbrier and back without having to worry about finding food along the way.
We’ve been tracking steadily downhill for maybe an hour when we come to a road sign. I scrape off the ice; the rusting metal underneath says we’re approaching the highway. I tell Mags it’s time for frostbite checks. She unsnaps the respirator, lifts her goggles onto her forehead and closes her eyes. I study the faint smattering of freckles that run along her cheekbones underneath those long, dark eyelashes. There’s little wind but the cold still bites at every inch of exposed skin and I know I should hurry. Nevertheless I can’t help but pull down the surgical mask I still prefer so that I can kiss her.
‘Hey! Pay attention. I thought you said we had to take this seriously.’
I offer her a sheepish grin and lift my goggles onto my forehead so she can check me. A moment later I feel her arms slip around my waist and she leans in to me and I feel her lips, soft and warm, back on mine. We’ve barely left and already I find myself wishing we could just forget about Kane and turn around and go back to the warmth of our small apartment.
The mountain road ends quarter of a mile later and a long, straight section of highway, two, maybe three lanes in each direction, stretches off in both directions. The wind’s stayed low and it’s eerily quiet. I look up. The storms might be moving on but the skies are still heavy with snow. When I hiked out to Culpeper a week ago I took the road east from here. I haven’t ventured west yet but I doubt there’ll be much in the way of shelter along the highway.
We make our way down. The snow’s heavier now and we’re trudging through drifts, Indian file, from the get-go. The road inclines for a mile or so and for the next hour it’s a long steady climb uphill. I listen to the sound of Mags’ breathing as she follows in my footsteps. She’s been in Mount Weather’s gym over the winter preparing for this but my legs are longer than hers and I can already feel them burning with the effort.
Eventually the road crests and levels and we come to a faded sign that says Ashby Gap and beneath it Welcome to Clarke County. We sit next to it in the snow, our breath escaping in white plumes as we sip water from our plastic canteens. A wide, open valley stretches out, gray and cold and lifeless, beneath us. I search the shrouded landscape for anything of color but there’s nothing.
We stop for lunch where US340 crosses the highway. The wind’s picking up again, blowing the gray snow across the road, already starting to cover the tracks we’ve made behind us. Up ahead the traffic light gantry’s collapsed, the virus-weakened metal no longer able to bear the weight of the gantry arm, which now lies buried in the middle of the intersection. It’s deep enough to step over but I take us out wide around it anyway. What Kane did to the skies means it shouldn’t be a threat but you can never be too careful.
I ask Mags where she wants to eat and she takes a moment to weigh the options. There’s a McDonalds right there, a faded red flag with the arches fluttering next to a tattered stars and stripes, but she chooses a Dunkin’ Donuts that sits kitty corner opposite. It’s been turned over like everywhere else but overall it looks in better shape than the other places currently competing for our business. We trudge up to the entrance and step out of our snowshoes. The door’s definitely seen better days; all that’s left is a mostly empty frame, the last of the glass gripped in fragments around the edges and in the corners. Broken shards crunch under our boots as we walk in.
I get our MREs heating while Mags stares out the busted window at a panel van that’s settled on to its tires under the snow. I can tell she’s taking it in, processing it, so I don’t say anything. It used to happen to me sometimes, even after I’d been scavenging for a while. Sometimes something simple like an abandoned car or a faded road sign will cause the enormity of it all to suddenly hit you, and you realize the way the world once was is nothing more than an idea now, a place to be visited in memories but never again found.
*
AFTER LUNCH MAGS fixes herself a coffee and I use it as an excuse to bag our trash. I’ve never cared much for it; sometimes, if I haven’t eaten, the bitter aroma’s almost enough to turn my stomach. Tell the truth I’m not sure Mags started out with much of a taste for it either. I think it’s something she taught herself to like because we weren’t allowed to have it while Kane was in charge.
When she’s done we strap our snowshoes back on and take 340 south. The road narrows to two lanes but stays mostly flat. After we’ve been on it for an hour it swings west and then we hit another junction. The road switches back and forth for a while but then it straightens and starts a gentle incline. As we make our way slowly up it I see a sharp corner of something that looks metal, way too tall to be a vehicle, just beyond the next crest.
I used to be good at working out what was buried under the drifts just from the shapes they made in the snow; when I was scavenging with Marv there wasn’t a car or a truck on the turnpike I couldn’t name just from a glimpse of its roofline. But whatever this is it has me stumped. I stare at it as we approach, trying to figure it out, but it’s not ’till the road levels and I can see the extent of it laid out before me that I realize what I’ve been staring at.
It’s a plane, or at least what’s left of one. It’s the tail I first spotted but now I see the whole rear section’s detached itself; it lies across the road, blocking our way. I stop and gaze at the impossible sweep of it, jutting up into the gray sky. As I look around I see another piece of the fuselage has reached its final resting place a few hundred yards off the road, but it too ends abruptly, incomplete. I scan the fields on either side. There’s wreckage from the crash scattered all around, but no sign of the missing cockpit.
I start down towards it. Mags makes to follow me but I tell her to wait until I’ve checked it out. The drifts probably conceal a multitude of twisted, charred metal and there’s no sense both of us venturing amongst it ’till I’ve found a path through.
As I get closer the debris is everywhere and I slow down, picking my way cautiously around whatever’s lying under the snow. I pass something that might be an engine, sitting at a haphazard angle on the hard shoulder, a length of wing still attached. A little further along on the other side of the road there’s a giant set of wheels, the strut broken off and poking skyward. Finally I draw level with the section of fuselage I first saw. It tilts forward at an improbable angle, like it’s crumpled on impact, and this close it’s huge; it towers over me. I step around its jagged-edged side and look up into the darkened interior, realizing, too late, my mistake.
There used to be an amusement park in Baton Rouge. I don’t remember now how I’d gotten wind of its existence – TV probably – but I’d pestered Mom for weeks to take me, and in the end she’d relented. Jack had driven us. Mom said I was too young for any of the really interesting rides, so I’d spent the morning sitting in little plastic teacups or astride smiling elephants with huge ears and tiny hats, all the while loading up on soda and cotton candy and dreaming of the ride I really wanted: The Intimidator. You could hear the screams from all the way across the park. I figured there was little point in even putting in a request for something like that, but I guess Jack must have worked it out because as soon as she went looking for the rest room he grabbed me by the arm and we doubled back. The person handing out the tickets looked at me funny, and I figured then we were sunk. But I’ve always been one-part daddy long-legger and when I stood against the board there
was no denying I was tall enough to ride the ride.
The Intimidator was a monster; there had to be a dozen cars, each wide enough to accommodate six abreast. I remember the restraining bar coming down onto my lap and locking in place, and the never-ending clunk-clunk-clunk as it slowly climbed all the way up to the top and started to roll. I can still hear the shrieks from the cars ahead as one by one they disappeared until it was our turn and then the first sickening moment of free-fall and somewhere before the loop-the-loop I threw up pink cotton candy all over my shoes.
Now as I stare up into what remains of the cabin it’s like I’m back there, in that amusement park. It’s not the oxygen masks, dangling like plastic fronds, twisting this way and that in the wind, or the luggage bins that hang open above, their contents disgorged into the snow. It’s the passengers, or at least what remains of them. They’re still strapped to their seats, and now they just hang there, like they’ve come to an abrupt halt on the world’s most gruesome roller coaster ride.
I tear my eyes from it and look back up the road to where Mags is waiting. I’ve seen my share of dead bodies; I can’t say I care much for it but it doesn’t bother me anything like it used to. I’ll never forget my first, though, the guy clutching the jar of Maraschino cherries in the frozen foods aisle of the Walmart back in Providence. I’ll spare her that for as long as I can.
I turn my snowshoes around and retrace my steps through the wreckage. I tell her it’s not safe, we have to go around. She glances over my shoulder, at the tracks I’ve already plotted, and then looks at me. I know what she’s thinking. She’s desperate for something new to read, and the luggage scattered in the snow will be a treasure trove. But in the end she just says okay and we make our way out into the fields, giving the plane a wider berth than I can possibly justify.
We spend the first night in a Waffle House that sits next to the long concrete sweep of the on-ramp at the interchange with I-81. We passed a Comfort Inn on the way up, a strip of rooms two stories tall horseshoed around a long-emptied swimming pool. The walls were brick, and the roof looked like it had mostly held, which meant that some of the beds might even have been dry. I could see Mags looking at it as we walked by, the sky slowly darkening around us. I know what we’d find in there, though. When the weather changed and people finally figured out they had to get themselves south the motels got busy. But by then it was cold and few of those that had taken to the roads had prepared for it. Most that checked into places like that never checked out again.
We cut some firewood from a stand of thin black trees perched on the edge of the highway and head inside. The wood’s damp so I head out to find fuel and something that’ll work as kindling while Mags checks the kitchen for anything that might have been missed. When I come back in she’s already built the fire. I go to light it but she says she wants to so I hand her a stack of flyers I found in the Comfort Inn’s lobby and a small soda bottle of gas I siphoned from a Honda in the parking lot that had been overlooked. She examines the flyers for a moment and then scrunches them up. She pours the gas into one of the plastic spoons we saved from our lunch MREs and places it underneath the kindling, just like Marv showed me. She takes a lighter from her pocket and strikes the wheel. The lighter’s new, fresh from the stores, but still it takes a dozen tries before it sparks, which makes me think I should have checked it before taking it out. But finally it catches and she cups her fingers around it and offers it to the spoon. The flames slowly climb up into the crumpled flyers and then start to lick at the wicker of blackened limbs above.
She steps back, proud of her work. But the wood’s damp and it hisses and steams, sending slow coils of white smoke rising into the air. It throws off little light and even less warmth, and we eat our MREs wrapped up in our parkas and then quickly transfer to the sleeping bag I’ve unfurled next to the fire. It’s cold, and my muscles ache from the day’s hike but I have been looking forward to this moment all day. After a winter together in Mount Weather I know exactly how we fit together. As I slip my arm around her shoulder she seems tense, however. I figure she’s still working through all the things she’s seen so I don’t say anything. It’s a long time before she speaks.
‘Is it the same everywhere?’
‘Everywhere I’ve been.’
She nods, like this is the answer she was expecting, but doesn’t say anything more. I try and inject a cheery tone into my voice.
‘But then Marv and I never really went that far. It could be different somewhere else. Maybe further south.’
It’s full dark outside now and what remains of the diner’s scattered furniture sits like so many humped black shadows around us. The fire’s already dying down; only a handful of scattered flames survive among the embers. She reaches for one of the branches and stirs what’s left of the damp wood. Red sparks rise in a shudder and then disappear in the blackness overhead.
‘You can’t protect me from all of it, Gabe. Sooner or later I’m going to see something.’
‘I know but…’
She turns around and props herself up on one elbow so that she can look at me.
‘But nothing. Marv didn’t stop you from seeing things, did he? I think it’ll be better if I get it over with.’
I don’t know what to say, so instead I slip out of the sleeping bag and bank the fire. Sometimes my feelings for her ambush me, threatening to crush my chest with the whole weight of them. When I climb back in beside her again she slips one arm around me and closes her eyes.
I lay awake for a long time staring up into the darkness after she’s drifted off to sleep, thinking about what she’s said. The fear that I may have done something foolish and selfish and dangerous by bringing her out here with me settles cold and heavy inside my ribcage.
Mags is smart, and brave, braver than any of us, but she can’t understand yet what she’s asking for. There’s a whole world out there, filled with things that are too terrible to contemplate. And no good will ever come now of seeing them.
*
I-81 WINDS ITS WAY through the middle of a wide, flat valley. For the next four days we hike south, slowly cresting low rises, trudging into the shallows between, the gray foothills of the Appalachians always to our right in the distance, the Blue Ridge Mountains on our left. There’s little on either side of the highway but dead fields, only the occasional bare and blackened tree poking up through the shroud, the remains of recent falls lying in skiffs in the crooks of the branches and along the stunted limbs. Most of the interchanges we come to have collapsed. The crumbling concrete’s sharp edges have been softened by the snow but bent and twisted rebar lies waiting for us underneath. We pick our way slowly through the rubble, taking our snowshoes off to clamber over girders, testing for twisted or broken metal buried in the snow that would break an ankle or shatter a kneecap.
Most days we take our lunches huddled under overpasses rather than wasting time searching for anything better off the highway. We eat our MREs cowled up in our parkas, our backs to the cold concrete. Each evening as the banished sun tracks westward towards the horizon we leave the road in search of shelter, gathering what little wood might hold a fire and then curling up inside our shared sleeping bag next to it.
And then finally, just as we’re about to lose the light on the fourth day we spot the junction where I-64 splits from I-81 and turns west for Lexington and Charleston, the road that will take us to Sulfur Springs and The Greenbrier.
That night we sleep in the Rockbridge County High School, a concrete two-story that sits, bleak and grim, atop a low embankment. The parking lot opposite is filled with school buses like the one that brought us to the White House on the Last Day. They line up in neat rows, sunken onto their perished tires under a blanket of gray snow.
It’s already growing dark outside as we climb the steps to the entrance. The door’s not locked and we snap off our snowshoes and make our way in. It sighs closed behind us, sending a soft stir of echoes down the empty hallway. We head up the staircase and
make camp in what used to be the library. I noticed a couple of withered trees still clinging to the embankment when we came in so I dig the handsaw from my backpack and head back outside to cut a few limbs while she checks the shelves to see if anything’s been left behind.
On my way back in I stop at the noticeboard in the hallway, looking for something that might serve for kindling. A faded flyer announces try-outs for the Wildcats. Next to it a sign reads: Lexington County Fire and Rescue and underneath it Volunteers Needed!!! In the space underneath where you’re supposed to put your name somebody’s written It won’t help. I pull both notices down and stuff them in the pocket of my parka.
When I get back upstairs Mags has a small fire going and is feeding the damp branches I’ve collected to the flames. We eat our MREs and then climb into the sleeping bag. She pulls Owen Meany from her pack but before she has a chance to open it she’s fast asleep.
I half wake from a dream I don’t remember. Dawn’s not far off but the fire’s died down and it’s cold. I reach for Mags but she’s no longer lying next to me. I sit up and slowly scan the room, rubbing sleep from my eyes while I chart gray shapes and darkness against memory to try and place where I am. I find her at the window, wrapped in her parka, staring out.
I climb out of the sleeping bag and pick my way between the scattered chairs to stand behind her. For some reason I’m suddenly feeling uneasy, and there’s that scratchy feeling I sometimes get inside my head when something’s not right. Spidey’s been dormant all winter but now he’s back and telling me I need to pay attention.