The stable doors were wide open.
A horse’s skull, picked bare, and four hooves were all that the stable held. A few flies, lazy and winter ready, were wandering through the gristle and gray bones on the head.
“Won’t ride far on that.” Mac laughed at his own joke, stopping as it echoed away up among the empty loft and forbidding rafters.
The unidentified hamlet was far enough from any major center of population to be safe from total looting. Even so, all the houses had been stripped of anything remotely edible and the stores were bare shelved.
But there was a dirt road along the back of the few houses.
That’s where the garages were.
And that’s where they found the Kawasaki and the Norton. Greased and polished and fueled up and ready to go.
THEY’D SEEN ONE odd thing.
On the powerful bikes they’d been able to make good time and distance, weaving between the stalled and crashed cars and trucks, avoiding the dry-stick, withered remnants of human beings along the highway.
Someone had shot at them from behind a camper van, near Little Rock, but they were going too fast and were too far away.
Farther on, near the hamlet of Beulah, Arkansas, about a hundred miles west of Memphis, there was a big poster offering recruitment to the United States Marine Corps.
But it had been defaced.
A quarter of the billboard had been covered in white paint. On it, in black, was the cryptic but neatly-painted message: “Tempest. Calico. 11-15. If this means you, then this means you.”
NOW THE KAWASAKI WAS giving trouble.
Pete had tried cleaning the plugs, but it hadn’t done much good.
Also, both of the bikes were running low on fuel. The garage in the town with no name had jerricans of gas stacked on a bench, and they strapped two spare cans on each pillion before setting off again.
Now that was almost gone.
“Don’t want to run out when we’re halfway through what’s left of Memphis, Tennessee,” said Henderson McGill.
“Best we go around it.”
“Yeah. North or south?”
“North’d be quicker,” Pete said, studying the creased map.
“Looks easy?”
“Sure. Turn off north at Forrest City. Few miles to Wynne. Then east to bring us onto 1-55. Seems easy on the map.”
They rode on through endless fields on either side of them, fields that would have once been lush with a variety of crops. Yellow and gold and green.
Now they all looked the same, like something out of a documentary vid about the Dustbowl Depression of a hundred years earlier.
The land on both flanks of the blacktop was blasted, layered with tumbled, red, withered plants so rotted that it wasn’t even possible to guess what they might originally have been.
They rode in single file, both keeping on the alert, ready for any kind of threat.
Back in Arkansas they’d found a smashed Harley, with the remains of its decapitated rider lying near the wreckage. Two telegraph poles on either side of the road held the rusting remnants of a thin wire that had obviously been strung across to catch the motorcyclist.
Pete was taking his turn in the lead and he suddenly held up his right hand, in their agreed warning sign. Mac throttled back, easing down to almost walking pace.
“What?” he shouted above the throbbing of the two engines.
“Look.” Pete pointed to a hand-painted sign set up in a field about a quarter mile ahead of them: Cheap Gas In Hustonville. Two Miles.
The paint seemed fresh.
“Why not?” yelled Mac.
Chapter Twenty
The warning lights were flashing on the corners of the bright yellow school bus.
Though Jim Hilton had tried every available switch and button, nothing seemed to turn them off. Since there wasn’t a lot of traffic on the back road, it didn’t much matter.
They hadn’t actually seen any other traffic since they found the abandoned bus the previous afternoon.
Now they were closing in on Jim’s Hollywood home, via winding back road from the north.
The first six days had been tough going. Carrie was having recurrent headaches, like vicious migraines. They’d needed to stop several times while she lay down, pale and sick, her face looking as if it had been rebuilt from slabs of candle wax.