Riding them with the heavy backpacks wasn’t easy, but they both found that the bikes were vastly better than walking. They could work up to an average of close to a hundred miles a day on level highway. And San Francisco was drawing ever closer.
EVERY DAY THEY SAW MORE evidence of the horrors of a forced mass evacuation.
Now, months later, it wasn’t possible to guess when the exodus from the coast had begun. But it was impossible to miss the dreadful mute evidence of the results of the catastrophe.
The closer Jed and Jeff cycled to their destination, the more grateful they were for having the off-road bicycles.
The main routes were soon impassable, blocked by hundreds upon hundreds of broken-down vehicles and trucks. Leaving them, the pair picked out a snaking route over obscure cutoffs and quiet, neglected blue highways.
Past the silent legions of the dead.
The desert scrub and slopes of the Sierras had all been tinted the palest of pinks, with the tops frosted by snow.
All that was missing from the beautiful landscape was living people.
They’d seen cats and dogs, including what looked ominously like a hunting pack of German shepherds on the far side of a fast-flowing river. Three times they’d seen bears and once a cougar loping across the track less than fifty yards in front of their wheels.
It turned to favor them with a slit-yellow, contemptuous stare.
“Doesn’t take long for the land to go back to the creatures who owned it first,” said Jeff.
“It would make a good article, if only there were any papers to write for.”
Every now and again there’d been a solitary human, keeping well out of their way. They also came across two more townships with barricades on the access roads. One was protected by armed men and women. The other guarded a deserted settlement of withered corpses.
Only once did they see any larger groups of people, and that had been at a point where the freeway dipped down below the old narrow road they were pedaling along.
Jed braked to a halt, standing astride the Engesser, swatting flies away from his face. “Will you look at that, Jeff?”
“Reminds me of a squatters’ township in some dirt-poor Fourth World country.”
Smoke rose from several places among shacks built from scrapped vehicles. The smell of roasting meat came flirting its way toward the two men.
Fifteen or twenty ragged, filthy figures came slowly out into the sunlight to stare back at the invaders.
Most of them held makeshift weapons, spears made from metal railings and crude bows and arrows.
They stood in a sullen, close group, looking up at Jeff and Jed.
The two men didn’t say anything to each other. In unison they simply turned, remounted their trail bikes and rode away.
It was Jeff Thomas who finally broke their silence seven or eight miles farther west. “I’ve seen the future,” he said, his voice quiet above the humming of the tires. “And I have to tell you it doesn’t work.”
JED HAD BEEN RIGHT. The chaos was unbelievable.
Every road they came to was blocked by stalled and abandoned vehicles. Twice there’d been fires and hundreds of cars had been fused into a huge carbonized block of blackened metal, the heat of the fireball melting the highway itself.
It was a quiet, beautiful October morning, and the still air was filled with the dry, brittle smell of death.
The open ground on either side of the freeway was carpeted with corpses. Families lay together, embracing in death.
Glinting among the dried corpses was the now-familiar sight of empty pill bottles. Green-and-brown glass, shining in the water sunlight like so many discarded jewels. The last resort of the starving and desperate refugees who had finally taken control of their destiny, choosing the time and place of their own deaths.
The last freedom left to them.
Jed and Jeff found the sight and stink of mass death so insidious, even months after the event, that they took a different route toward the city. They cut around to the north of Mount Diablo, finding fewer holdups that way.
But they also discovered that the big San Andreas Fault had been at work. Over the years the fragile earthquake zone of central California had been increasingly active, with major jolts in both 2012 and 2027.