“Weren’t enough left alive to dig graves for them,” Jeff had said. “You can still see the tracks of a big dozer where they collected them up and then just shoved them together.”
Jed had researched the Final Solution to the “Jewish problem” in the Second World War for his master’s degree. The boneyard below had brought back pictures of sweating, booted SS guards dragging fragile skeletons to death pits in Auschwitz and Belsen.
Now, here, in the United States of America.
JEFF THOMAS CAME BACK into the kitchen of the isolated cabin. Jed noticed that the journalist was looking remarkably better for a week’s trekking. His podgy one-sixty-five had fined down to about closer to one-fifty, and his usual pallor had been replaced by a healthier color under the fall sun.
His temperament also seemed to have changed. On the Aquila he’d been way short of being Mr. Popular, with his constant bitching and moaning and his insistence that his paper’s massive financial contribution to the project gave him special privileges. In the past three or four days, despite obvious discomfort from the broken nose, Jefferson Lee Thomas had been much better company.
“Nothing around.”
“Wonder how the Earthblood virus affected animals and snakes and all? Would be good for the scavengers for sure.”
“Saw that big rattler yesterday, when we hit off up this side trail. More scared of us than we were of it.”
The cabin was almost invisible, even from the dirt road that they’d been using, traveling roughly parallel to the highway. Both men had realized that their best hope of finding shelter and maybe even food was to search out this sort of dwelling, untouched by the refugees from the towns desperate for food.
It was also a place where they weren’t likely to encounter any bands of marauding hunters.
As night fell, they bolted the doors and locked the wrought-iron shutters tight. Jed lay in the narrow, damp bed, watching the pattern of moonlight moving across the ceiling.
“Jeff?”
“Yeah?”
“Your father, are we going to try and find him? After visiting your place in San Francisco?”
A long stillness was the only answer for a while.
“Devil of a way to walk it, Jedediah, my sporting friend.”
“Maybe we’ll find some sort of transport by then and some gas.”
The figure in the other bed rolled on its side, wheezing a little through the displaced septum. “He was dying when we took off. They were talking a couple of months. Odds are real long against him still being in the land of the living.”
“Don’t you want to find out?”
“Not that much. My old man was a miserable bastard. If I could pick up a phone and call the hospital in San Luis Obispo, then I’d do it. Walk three hundred miles for one of his smiles… Thanks, Jed, but no thanks.”
The room became filled with Jeff’s steady snoring.
Jed wished he’d been able to use his electrical skill to get the power on in the cabin, though there was the danger that lights glowing up the hillside might attract unwanted company.
But even he couldn’t conjure gasoline from thin air. It looked as if the previous occupants of the place had made their plans carefully, taking their personal possessions and draining every last spoonful of gas from the generator at the rear of the two-car garage.
At their present rate of progress, it would take Jed and Jeff weeks to get up to San Francisco. And that wouldn’t leave them enough time to return south and hike to meet up with the others in Calico in the middle of next month.
Jed slipped toward sleep, his mind occupied in wondering where the other six were at that precise moment and what they were all doing.
Chapter Eighteen
The needle on the fuel gauge was quivering close to E.
The big Volvo truck was thundering eastward along state Highway 146, toward Placerville in western Colorado. Steve Romero and Kyle Lynch had soon made their own discovery that small roads were a better and safer bet than risking interstates where the natives—those that survived—were a lot less than friendly.
They’d disconnected the trailer and were pushing the pedal through the metal in the six-wheel cab, making the best speed they could on the straight stretches, slowing down on the sharp bends close to walking pace in case of road blocks.