“What, you think he opened the doors? That’s crazy! Why would anyone do that?”

  “He was already planning on checking himself out before we showed up,” Mason replied. “Maybe he didn’t want to go into that undiscovered country all alone.”

  Addison gave his head a shake.

  “Wow. Hank Mason referencing Shakespeare. Now, I have officially heard it all.”

  “Oh, you shouldn’t be so surprised,” Sarah said as she returned to her map. “Hamlet didn’t like people, either.”

  “Okay,” Mason cut in. “All I’m saying is that the guy wasn’t far away from offing himself when we barged in. It’s not a huge stretch to imagine him wanting company in his existential misery. Who knows? Maybe our arrival gave him the extra push he needed.”

  “He sure is a scared little bunny,” Addison allowed, casting a quick look back over his shoulder.

  “I thought he was going to jump out of his skin when he saw us,” Diego said, hiding a sheepish grin.

  Just then, the man in question emerged from behind the cedar tree and began to make his way back, casually wiping his hands on his trouser legs.

  “And scared people are capable of monumental acts of stupidity,” Mace grumbled.

  “Sure, but letting the swarm into his fortress?” Sarah scoffed. “Mace, the man’s afraid of his own shadow. Did you see him in the courtyard? He couldn’t get far enough away from them.”

  “Look at him, Mace.” Becks tossed her head Charlie’s way. “Does that really look like a man who’d choose to take that way out?”

  Mason watched Charlie hustle across the road with his head on a swivel, but between wide detours to avoid one of the group doing his business here and another doing it there, and jumping at every random sound, he looked more like a duck in a shooting gallery.

  At last, he spotted an opening and made a mad dash the rest of the way with his eyes glued to the ground.

  “S’pose not,” Mason allowed. “But again, we know nothing about him. We don’t know the kind of man he was before, and watching people die all around you can be a major mind-fuck for even the sanest man. Maybe he ultimately realized that he was incapable of putting a gun to his own head and pulling the trigger. Honestly, if he was a sane, rational man, he probably should have stepped into the courtyard on the first day and ended it fast.”

  Sarah sighed wistfully.

  “Oh, I long for the days when suicide wasn’t such a sane, rational idea.”

  “Here’s something you didn’t consider, Mace,” Addison threw in. “Maybe he heard you talking about stripping his cupboards bare, and this was his big ‘Fuck you, too’.”

  “It couldn’t have been easy going through all that,” Becks considered. “The man watched fifty-three people die, leaving him all alone in an unrecognizable world. The thought of being left alone with nothing would be enough to scare the hell out of anyone.”

  “And to paraphrase the scholar of San Francisco,” Addison tacked on. “Scared people are capable of monumental acts of ‘Fuck you, too’.”

  Charlie was almost upon them, so Mason lowered his voice.

  “So it’s my fault? Well, forgive my lack of empathy, but my only regret is that we didn’t rob him blind and get the hell out of there the second we knew Mack was okay. And here’s another thing. It’s pretty convenient that fifty-three people died under his watch, leaving him with all of those supplies for himself.”

  “They were old and sick, Mace,” Sarah reminded him. “It’s a miracle he was able to keep them alive for as long as he did.”

  Just then, the short, sharp crack of a gunshot shattered the air, and all eyes went to the stand of trees Richie had disappeared behind. And just like that, every last one of them jumped into action. Mason threw open his door, Sarah dropped the map to the floor, and everyone piled out of the Peterbilt with guns drawn.

  Alejandra appeared with her machete in hand, shouting, “Que mierda? Who’s doin’ the damn shooting?” then she joined the group as they all took off in a dead run toward the trees.

  “Richie!” Mason hollered, flicking off his pistol’s safety. “Richie!”

  “I’m okay!” came Richie voice, followed almost immediately by the man himself, clumsily trying to fasten his pants and zip his fly with his pistol in one hand and the roll of toilet paper tucked under his arm. “Sorry about that, guys. She snuck up on me while I was… while I was, uh… Well, let’s just say that I was in the right place to have the shit scared out of me.”

  They all stepped cautiously around the stand of trees to have a look for themselves.

  “No manches…” Alejandra breathed.

  “Scheisse…” Addison seconded in his own way.

  The thing had been an echo. Female. Youngish. Now it was a piece of meat. But no ordinary piece of meat, even for such extraordinary times. Dressed only in tattered and soiled pajama bottoms, little was left to the imagination. An ancient wound graced her shoulder. The telltale string-of-pearls puncture marks of a human bite. Her feet were bloody pin cushions of thorns, pine needles and cactus spines. At least one toe had been torn entirely away. Her breasts were crusted over with dried vomit, and the rest of that war-ravaged body was a veritable landscape of ugly red blisters, and wet, ulcerous sores. One side of the creature’s head was caked with blood, and between its eyes was a fresh bullet hole that bled not a drop.

  Teddy gasped and turned her eyes away from the awful sight, but when she saw Alejandra gawking at the thing and even taking a few steps closer for a better look, she rallied herself and came right up beside her, choking back bile but refusing to look away.

  “Dios mío…” Alejandra hushed.

  “Si,” Teddy hushed back. “Dios mío…”

  Alejandra turned to the girl and narrowed her eyes, saying nothing.

  “You can see why I was startled,” Richie shrugged.

  “That would do it for me,” Becks admitted, unable or unwilling to tear her eyes away.

  “Jeez, girl,” Christopher hushed down to the corpse. “You didn’t go easily, did you?”

  Charlie snuck a single peek and backed quickly away with his hand over his mouth. Mason let him go with a scowl and squatted down to give the corpse a good, hard look. And as he inspected the poor, mutilated creature, the others said aloud nearly everything he was thinking to himself.

  “She was in bed when it happened,” Diego pointed out, solemnly. “But not alone. She was bitten while she slept.”

  “She fought back, though,” Becks added. “Torn fingernails. Blood on her knuckles. She fought him off.”

  “Fought her off,” Sarah corrected her. “She’s five-three, and a hundred pounds at most. No way she could have fought off a male alpha. Besides, she’s wearing a wedding band on her right hand, not her left.”

  “She fought her off long enough to run.” This, from Teddy. “But it was already too late.”

  “Then someone else fought her off,” Richie tossed in.

  “And after that,” Christopher finished the narrative, looking at her feet, “came the endless walking.”

  Alejandra bent low to get an even closer look.

  “But what’s with the sores? Jesús, I never seen nothin’ like that before.”

  Mason rose up to his full height and glared down at the body.

  “Burns?” he suggested.

  “Acid?” Teddy offered.

  “Predation?” Addison threw in.

  “Maybe,” Sarah considered. “But I suggest we all stay back, just to be on the safe side.”

  “No problem there,” Addison readily agreed, backpedaling even as he spoke.

  “You think it’s something contagious?” Becks asked.

  “Hard to say,” Sarah shrugged. “If it’s an infection, it could be. With so many corpses lying around, I’ve been half-expecting typhus, or even cholera, but neither of those present with lesions.”

  “There’re a lot of rats around, too,” Richie put in. “Could be some of our furry friends are carrying hitchhikers.”

  “I fucking hate rats,” Alejandra growled.

  “What, you’re talking plague?” Christopher howled. “Seriously? Because there aren’t enough things trying to kill us already?”

  “No, this isn’t plague,” Sarah assured them all. “Bubonic plague enlarges the lymph nodes into buboes, hence the name. This isn’t that. Besides, the fleas that carry the plague would much rather stay with rats. It was only when people started killing off rats in the Middle Ages that the Black Death took hold. With the rats gone, all of those infected fleas had nowhere else to go but onto humans.”

  “Like I said,” Alejandra harumphed. “I fucking love rats.”

  Mason felt a tug on his sleeve and looked down to see Mackenzie’s worried face.

  “There’s more coming, Mace,” she hushed, pointing off into the distance.

  He crouched down beside her.

  “You still feel them, Mack?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Do you know how many?”

  “Uh uh.”

  “But you’re sure they’re coming.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Alright then,” he announced, climbing back to his feet. “Bathroom break is over. Hoss, you and Ally take the kids. Charlie, you’re with them. Ally, stay close on my ass. Sarah, you’re in charge of finding us a way out. It doesn’t have to be pretty. It just has to get us to the highway. And if anyone spots anything that looks like a gas station, call out. We’ll be sucking fumes before the day’s through.”

  They all hurried back to the vehicles, and Sarah wasted no time in diving back into the map.

  “I don’t know, Mace. We’re at the western edge of town, and with hills on both sides, there aren’t a lot of options.”

  Becks leaned over her shoulder and dabbed a finger at a likely spot.

  “If we backtrack to Chorro Street and follow it down to Marsh, we could hop onto Broad Street for a straight shot south.”

  “But Chorro goes right through downtown,” Sarah pointed out.

  “Exactly. Gas stations, grocery stores…”

  “Alphas, echoes… Look here, if we go all the way to California Boulevard, we can skirt the eastern edge of the city, then deke back to the 227. That’s got to be easier, don’t you think?”

  “Agreed. Or we could keep going the way we’re going, take Foothill across to Los Osos, then down to Buckley, and that’ll let us hop onto the 227 even faster.”

  Mason didn’t even bother trying to get a look at the map for himself. With the two smartest women he’d ever known planning the route, there was no need. And even with Mack’s insistence that company was coming, they were safe for now.

  Soon enough, a consensus was reached, and he had his orders.

  “Okay, Mace,” Sarah instructed. “Continue on. You’ll come to something called Los Osos Valley Road in five miles or so. Take a left. Got it?”

  “Copy that,” he said, keying the Peterbilt back to life.

  “Hey, there’s a Costco along the way!” Becks hooted, jabbing an excited finger at the map. “I love Costco. It’s the only place in the world where you can get ten times as much of everything you need.”

  Mack plunked herself down on the floor between the seats and looked up at Mason.

  “Don’t stop, Mace,” she told him, plainly. “No matter what, don’t stop.”

  The dire expression on her face did the job. With one eye on the road, the other on the mirror, and a chill raising the hair on the back of his neck, Mason threw the truck into gear and drove on into the unknown.

  CHAPTER

  XXI

  After only two miles, the road to paradise turned into the highway to Hell. Wedged between Laguna Lake and the Irish Hills Natural Reserve, there were few detours possible. They were on two miles of winding road, and with no other way out once the end came, every car from miles around had converged at this very point.

  Sarah kept folding and refolding her map, trying to find an escape route, but even with Becks lending a hand, the whole endeavor was pointless. At last, she got so frustrated that she tossed it back to Becks and announced, “There’s only one way out, Mace. Straight ahead. No way through, but through.”

  Mason grumbled at the prospect, but he obligingly planted his foot to the floor and let Gloria’s cow catcher carve them a trail between, around, and sometimes through the jumble of vehicles. Alphas and echoes came at them from behind houses and out of alleys and from everywhere at once, and Mason barreled over them without batting an eye. The blades of the cow catcher ran wet with gore, and with every yard they traveled, they became wetter still.

  Behind him, Alejandra had her ludicrously impractical Mustang tucked into Gloria’s butt and simply rode the wave. Diego stuck his upper body through the window every now and then with his slingshot to lob a chunk of gravel or lead slug at anything that got close, but no one else dared act. With crossbow bolts dearer than dry socks and any gunfire at all likely to bring the whole damn house down, everyone else stayed well inside the vehicles, windows closed, mouths shut, and absorbing every wet thud against the cow catcher with barely a wince.

  Mackenzie was still sitting cross-legged on the floor between the seats when she suddenly reached up and tugged on Sarah’s pant leg.

  “Behind us, Sarah,” she hushed.

  “Lots?” Mason asked.

  The girl put a finger to her temple.

  “They’re filling my head. I can barely… Uh oh…”

  She jumped to her feet and pointed off the port bow just as a trio of alphas came out of a side street, chasing after a teenaged boy in a hoodie.

  “Stop!” the boy howled at the vehicles as they bore down on him. “Please, stop!”

  Even if Mason had wanted to, it was already too late. Before he could even begin to think about braking, the boy flung himself directly into the truck’s path and was flung aside like a broken doll.

  It could have been a misstep. With alphas hot on his heels and nowhere left to run, the kid might simply have misjudged the speed of the Peterbilt and arrived at the very worst spot on Earth at precisely the wrong time. Or, it was entirely possible that he’d been so desperate for them to stop that he threw himself into the road in order to force their hand. To Mason, it seemed far more likely that something else was behind the suicidal charge. He had seen the look on the kid’s face too many times before. It hadn’t been fear etched across those wide eyes and gaping mouth. It had been wild, manic terror. A man with that look was no longer a thinking being. As powerful an instinct as self-preservation was, a man with that look knew only cold, stark panic. After days among the swarms, a man with that look would do anything at all to keep his worst fears from being realized. If he thought that he was about to be passed by and abandoned to the swarm, a man with that look might even throw himself under those passing wheels rather than face the alternative. Either way, the end result was the same. The kid’s head came apart as it bounced off of the asphalt, and the things that had been chasing him turned their attention to the roaring Peterbilt.

  Mason steered directly into them as Sarah lifted Mackenzie into her lap.

  “What do they sound like, boo?” she asked, softly. “Do you hear words?”

  The girl shrugged at first, but then there was a tiny uplifting of her eyes, a pensive wrinkling of her nose, and she uttered a most befuddled, “I don’t actually hear them. I just call it that because it’s kinda between hearing them and feeling them.”

  “But feel them how? Is it like you can feel what they’re feeling?”

  The girl shook her head.

  “No, you were right before. They’re not feeling anything at all. I guess I kinda just feel what it must be like to be inside their heads, you know? And mostly what I feel is mad.”

  Sarah shifted in her seat to disguise a cold shiver running down her spine.

  “But you don’t hear them all?”

  “Nope. I hear the ones behind us, but I can only hear a few of these ones. Dunno. It’s weird.”

  Sarah kissed her on the forehead and turned to Mason.

  She didn’t have to ask. As usual, she and Mason were on the same train to crazy town. And, as usual, they had no needs of words to convey their thoughts.

  How is that even possible?

  No idea…

  Is she in danger?

  Let’s hope not…

  Then came the clincher from Mason.

  Watch her close...

  With the matter tabled for now, Mason continued doing what he did best. He followed his instincts, he plowed a path as best as he could for the low-slung Mustang, and he hoped. He hoped he would find a way out of this mess. He hoped they would make it to the 227. He hoped it wouldn’t be a parking lot like every other highway in the state. Mostly though, he hoped that what Mackenzie was experiencing was more a lingering aftereffect of the recent near-tragedy than what he feared it might be. And for that, there was nothing to do but hope, because everything was a guessing game now. Everything. Never before in the history of mankind had every single facet of existence been brought into question. What had been relevant before was suddenly meaningless, and what had seemed inconsequential before was now absolutely vital for survival. The world had been turned upside-down, and all anyone could do was hang on for dear life. So for now, he would leave the mechanics of Mack’s new behavior to Sarah and concentrate on the one facet of existence he knew with certainty. Namely, getting them the hell out of San Luis Obispo.

  “Prefumo Creek,” Becks piped up. “We’re halfway there.”

  “Wait, what?” This, from Sarah. “Prefumo Creek? I don’t remember Prefumo Creek. Where the fuck is Prefumo Creek?”

    Becks leaned over her seat with the map and dabbed a finger at it.

  “There,” she said, then she took Sarah’s chin between finger and thumb and directed her gaze to the side window as a road sign rolled by. “And there.”

  “Ah,” Sarah harumphed. “Apparently, you have an arcane and enigmatic power, Becks. You can actually read a map. Well, thank goodness, cause I can’t make heads or tails of the damn thing.”

 

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