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PART TWELVE
CENTRAL CALIFORNIA AND POINTS EAST
TWO DAYS EARLIER . . .
STRANGE HIGHWAYS
&n
bsp; I had crossed the line. I was free;
but there was no one to welcome
me to the land of freedom.
I was a stranger in a strange land.
—HARRIET TUBMAN
55
THE SIX QUADS DROVE ALONG slowly, each of the riders more watchful now than they had been before the prison fiasco. Experience was a harsh and unrelenting teacher. Even though their attempt at mass quieting was behind them, it felt fresh and raw to Benny. Everyone else was processing it at their own speed. No one was happy. No jokes, no smiles. But also—no tears. He wondered what the processing was doing to them; what it was turning them all into.
Although the engine roars drew wandering zoms to the sides of the road, the six of them could see the creatures coming in plenty of time to go off-road when necessary to evade encounters. By midafternoon, even at a reduced rate of speed, the prison was many miles behind. They followed Route 426, skirted Bass, and headed south, past a spot where a military jet lay crumpled amid a sea of bones. All the trees around the crash site were younger than fifteen years, and Benny figured that the jet’s fuel tanks had probably exploded, burning down the older growth.
They stopped at the deserted Bass Fork Mini Mart, where people had clearly lived for a while, but there was no one alive to greet them. Just bones. Meals were mostly conducted in silence. Their route took them along North Fork Road to where a campground was littered with tents and RVs that were completely covered with creeper vines and kudzu. They saw many zoms, but those dead were trapped by the endless coils of vines, unable to give chase. It was a sad, strange place and Benny was happy when they found open road again.
They rode and rode and the hours melted away, and then days.
The six of them avoided any area where they thought zoms might naturally have gathered. Towns, food warehouses, hospitals, malls, military bases. Places where people would have gone seeking food, shelter, and protection during First Night. Those places became feeding grounds for the dead.
It struck Benny how little borders meant in the Rot and Ruin. The maps and compasses they brought with them insisted they’d left California and entered Nevada, and then passed below the border of Utah into Arizona and then into New Mexico, but it was all wasteland to Benny. They saw thousands of zombies. Young and old, torn or seemingly whole.
They found no living people at all. Not one.
It saddened Benny. He kept hoping to find outposts, settlements, camps of traders or scavengers, and in truth they did find many of those, but they were all empty. Some had clearly been abandoned years before. Others looked newly deserted, and of these, every one of them was marked with the clear signs of violence. Spent shell casings, dried blood, some bodies too badly mangled to reanimate.
All dead, though.
They came to a place where a train had derailed, spilling all kinds of chemicals from ruptured tanker cars. They stopped for a while, though, and gaped at what they saw.
All along the train tracks, and growing wild between the tumbled cars, were trees. But they were all wrong. The chemicals had worked some kind of sorcery on the genetics of the plant life and twisted what had probably been scrub pines and piñon trees into towering monstrosities, with bark that looked more like the scaly hide of some dragon. Strange, ugly fruit hung where pinecones should have grown, and swarms of deformed wasps buzzed in clouds, warring with one another, filling the air with insect rage.
On the ground, where those fruits had fallen and split open, thick yellow worms feasted on the body of a five-legged deer. Roaches the size of mice teemed over the side of one tanker, and Benny could see something pale and obscene moving inside the ruined metal container. It looked like a praying mantis, but it was far too large.
“No,” said Nix, and that was all that needed to be said. They backed their quads away, careful not to make any noise that would attract those insects. Then they headed south as fast as they could.
Their plan had been to go north of Albuquerque, but they stopped again when they encountered the first of several signs that been erected across Route 40. The signs had been hand-painted on bedsheets and hung on trees and on the sides of overturned vehicles. The signs read:
NUCLEAR REACTOR MELTDOWN
DON’T GO THIS WAY
“Won’t the radiation have, I don’t know, faded by now?” asked Morgie.
“Not for another ten thousand years,” said Chong. “Let’s get the heck out of here.”
They got the heck out of there.
