Jack lowered his window as the man collided breathlessly into his door. He tried to speak but he was gulping down breaths of air and emanating the hospital stench of sanitized death.
At last the man raised his head off his forearms and said in a voice gone soft and raspy from disuse, “What’s happening? I woke up several hours ago. The doctors and nurses are gone.”
Jack said, “How long have you been in the hospital?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you know how you got there?”
Whispers: Interactive StoriesMake your own choices and decide what happens next!
“I don’t remember.”
“You’re in Albuquerque.”
“I know that. I live here.”
Jack shifted into park, eyeing the rearview mirror. “It’s October fifth—”
“October?”
“Things started about a week ago.”
“What things?”
“At first, it was just bits on the news that would catch your attention. A murder in a good neighborhood. A hit-and-run. But the reports kept coming and there were more everyday and they got more violent and unbelievable. It wasn’t just happening here. It was all over the country. A police officer in Phoenix went on a shooting rampage in an elementary school and then a nursing home. There were fifty home invasions in one night in Salt Lake. Homes were being burned. Just horrific acts of violence.”
“Jesus.”
“The president made a televised speech last night, and right after, the power went out. Cell phone coverage became intermittent. The internet too jammed up to use. By this afternoon, there were really no functioning lines of communication, not even satellite radio, and the violence was pandemic.”
The man looked away from Jack as gunshots rang out in a neighborhood across the street.
“Why is it happening?” he asked.
“I don’t know. The power went out before any consensus was reached. They think it’s some virus, but beyond that. . .”
Dee said, “Do you know how you were injured?”
“What?”
“I’m a doctor. Maybe I can help—”
“I need to find my family.”
Jack saw the man look into their car, and he thought he was going to ask for a ride, wondering how he would tell him no, but then the man turned suddenly and limped off down the road.
There were lights on inside, but no customers, no cashier. He swiped his credit card through the scanner, waiting for authorization as he studied the ghost town and listened over the dwindling telephones in his head for the threat of approaching cars.
All but super premium had run dry. He stood in the cold pumping twenty-three and a half gallons into the Discovery’s tank and thinking how he’d meant to bring the red plastic container that held the lawnmower gas.
As he screwed the gas cap on, three pickup trucks roared by, pushing ninety down Lomas. Jack didn’t wait for a receipt.
Another mile and I-25 materialized beyond some dealerships, cars backed up from the onramps on either side of the overpass. Streams of red light winding north through the city, streams of white light crawling south.
Jack said, “Doesn’t look like they’re getting anywhere, does it?”
He veered into the left lane and streaked under the overpass at sixty miles per hour, his right ear improving, beginning to pick up the guttural sounds of the straining engine and the whimperings of Cole.
A blur of citylight, the Wells Fargo building glowing green in the distance. They shot three miles through downtown and Old Town, past Tingley Park, and then across the Rio Grande into darkness again, the western edge of the city without power.
“You have blood coming out of your ear, Jack.”
He wiped the side of his face.
Naomi said, “Are you hurt, Dad?”
“I’m fine, sweetie. Comfort your brother.”
They drove north along the river. Across the water, a great fire was consuming a neighborhood of affluent homes, their immense frames visible amid the flames. Jack said under his breath, “Where the f**k is the military?”
Dee saw the lights first—a cluster of them a couple miles up the road.
“Jack.”
“I see them.”
He killed the headlights and braked, crossed the yellow line into the other lane, then dropped down off the shoulder onto the desert. The Discovery’s cornerlamps barely lit the way, showing only ten feet of the desert floor as Jack negotiated between shrubs and sagebrush and skirted the edge of a serpentine arroyo.
The hardpan reached the broken pavement. Jack pulled back onto the highway and turned out the cornerlamps. Some distance to the south, the roadblock they’d detoured at the intersection of 48 and 550 stood out in the dark—cones of light blazing into the night.
They rode north without headlights, cold desert air streaming in through the jagged windowglass. Jack’s eyes were adjusting to the starlight, so that he could just discern the white wisps of reflective paint that framed the highway. Their city fell away behind them, a mosaic of darkness and light and four distinct fires that burned visibly from a distance of twenty miles.
An hour north, on the Zia Reservation, they met with a car heading south, its taillights instantly firing, Jack watching in the rearview mirror as it spun around in the highway and started after them. He accelerated, but the car quickly closed on their bumper. Its lightbar throwing shivers of blue and red through the fractured glass of the Discovery’s windows.
The officer’s boots scraped the pavement as he approached the Land Rover, his sidearm drawn and paired with a Mag-Lite. He sidled up to Jack’s lowered window and pointed a revolver at his head.
“You armed, sir?”
Jack had to turn his right ear to the man so he could hear, blinking against the sharp light. “I have a Forty-five in my lap.”
“Loaded?”
“Yes sir.”
“Just keep your hands on the steering wheel.” The state police officer shined his light into the backseat, said, “Jesus.” He holstered his gun. “You folks all right?”
“Not especially,” Jack said.
“Somebody shot your car up pretty good.”
“Yes sir.”
“You coming from Albuquerque?”
“We are.”
“How are things there?”
“Terrible. What do you hear? We’ve been checking our car radio, but it’s all static.”
“I hear I’ve lost officers up on the northwest plateau, but I don’t know that for certain. I been told of roadblocks, widespread home invasions. A National Guard unit getting slaughtered, but it’s all rumors. Things came apart so fast, you know?” The officer pulled off his wool hat. He scratched his bald dome, tugged at the tufts of gray that flared out above his ears and ringed his skull. “Where you headed?”