It had been hard going as far as central Utah, not far from what used to be Capitol Reef National Park. Their lucky break had been finding a beat-up panel van pulled down off the highway, out of sight near a river. If Kyle hadn’t been taken short and used the opportunity to fill his water bottle from the fast-flowing stream, they wouldn’t have found it.
Every single mile of blacktop had its quota of abandoned vehicles. After checking the first twenty or so and finding every one had bone-dry tanks, they’d given up looking and walked on past the corpses of trucks and automobiles, with a scattering of dead humans lying everywhere.
After the first bodies, neither Kyle nor Steve paid much attention to the leathery, desiccated bodies. They were just another feature of the bloodred, dusty, alien landscape.
But the panel van was a find.
Someone had spent a lot of time and skill in decorating the sides and rear, customizing the interior with orange fur and a lot of leather and chrome. The panels were painted with ornate fire-breathing Oriental dragons in glittery shades of peach and rose and purple and gold.
And it had had half a tank of gas.
There had been no sign of its owner or driver, and the ignition key was still in place.
Steve hadn’t hesitated, though Kyle had been worried about someone appearing from the dead bushes and opening up on them.
The van had carried them through until they came across the big truck.
Kyle had been behind the wheel, anxiously watching the gas situation when Steve had called to him to stop, then made him back up three hundred yards to a side trail between a couple of grain silos.
“Just caught the gleam of sunlight off the polished exhaust pipe,” he’d said as they cruised around and found the Volvo.
They had also found what they assumed were the driver and his mate.
It had been a sad and ironic tableau, a scene that brought home to Kyle and Steve the appalling way that society had clawed its way to its ending.
The bodies had obviously been there for weeks, lying together by the cold ashes of a camp fire. The scavengers had been at them, stripping off the soft tissues, but enough was still left to tell the macabre tale.
Both men gripped knives in their gnawed fingers, a dark, rusted smear on each blade. Their arms were around each other’s necks, one knee jammed between the taller skeleton’s thighs.
On the ground at their side was the item that had obviously provoked the fatal fight. Part of the label had disintegrated, and the metal was discolored and dented.
Kyle had picked the small can up, peering at what remained of the label.
“It’s ravioli,” he’d said. “They killed each other over a tiny little stinking tin of horrible ravioli.”
The truck had been a bulk-grain carrier, but it had been empty when they found it, and the silos were also echoingly empty.
Now it was beginning to look as though the two men were going to be left to their own devices again for progressing any farther toward their destination of Aspen.
The engine was starting to cough and splutter protestingly. They were on a long downgrade and Steve threw it out of gear to try to save the last spoonfuls of gas. The high vehicle cruised along, running between fields of dead corn, the stalks still carrying the bloodred tint that had become so familiar over the past seven days.
“Nearly done,” he said.
“Back to walking. Boy, I sure love that walking.” Kyle laughed. “Never thought that my life might depend on it.”
It was late afternoon.
Around noon they’d passed through a nameless hamlet, a string of shacks hung out to dry along the highway, mostly with tar-paper roofs.
They’d been unoccupied, except for a skinny little black boy. He’d been standing by the side of the road, sucking his thumb, staring intently at the Volvo as it drew closer. A frayed T-shirt was all he wore, sticking out over his hunger-swollen belly and his pipe-thin legs. The boy’s eyes were huge, seeming to fill the fragile death’s-head face.