He opened his eyes, surprised to see that Jeff and the golden bike were gone. There was a gleaming blur, down the hill, toward the west.
At least his knee wasn’t hurting at all, but he was feeling cold. And he had a pain in his ribs, like a small fire lighting up.
There was the sound of feet running toward him and shouting. But Jed wasn’t concerned. He was far more involved with the mystery of his own dying.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Henderson McGill and Peter Turner were also carrying knives.
Like Jeff and Jed, they’d taken them from an abandoned house, but they’d been luckier. In what looked like the bedroom of a teenage boy, with rock posters on the walls and skin magazines at the back of the closet, they came across a set of good-quality hunting knives.
Steel hilted, with tempered nine-inch blades, double-edged and needle pointed.
Both men had their weapons drawn as they walked cautiously along the main street of Hustonville. Pete’s Kawasaki was propped on its stand outside a small grocery store. Mac’s Norton was leaning against the wall of the Fluff ‘n’ Fold laundry next door.
“Think the sign was a trap?” said Pete.
“Paint was new, still sticky. And we need gas or we have to dump the bikes.”
“Town’s dead as Dead McDead of Deadsville.” Pete looked round. “This could’ve been a hell of a good place once.”
Hustonville looked as if it had been put together for a movie about a typical American small town. Single main drag, with a boardwalk, and a few side streets straggling off, with what must have been leafy sidewalks before the Earthblood virus struck. Now there were just irregular rows of dead tree trunks, bare white branches sticking jaggedly out at all angles.
There were half a dozen stores, and an ancient building that would once have been the local cinema. But it had enjoyed its own last picture show sixty or seventy years ago and had been most recently a carpet salesroom.
There was also Ed’s gas station. Only two pumps. One for unleaded and one, a rare sight nowadays, for leaded gasoline.
The two men walked slowly and cautiously up and down the street, glancing along the intersections at the neat houses with picket fences and stone-dead gardens.
There was a light wind blowing. Ma’s Diner had its window smashed in. On the far wall, above broken tables and chairs, a calendar was flapping, showing a faded view of Grand Rapids, Michigan. But all the dates had been torn off.
“What day is it, Pete?”
“Can’t you remember?”
“No. You’re the second pilot. Should be your responsibility.”
“You’re the astrophysicist, Mac.”
“Right. Well, it’s October 10.”
“Sure?”
“Yup.”
“If we’re getting up to your folks’, we gotta make some good time.”
Mac nodded. “I know it, Pete.” He spat in the street. “And we’re getting short on the hi-concentrates. Have to find some food soon.”
Pete hesitated, scuffing in the dust with the toe of his boot. “You sure you still want to try and make it north?”
“See my family, you mean?”
“Yeah.”
Mac sighed. “Got to go. Way the world looks, I realize… no, I accept that the odds are they might be done for. But both Jeanne and Angel are tough ladies. If there’s any way of making it through the bad times, then they’ll have done it. And they’ll know that if I made it… that I’d come and find them. Doesn’t matter where or when, Pete. You understand that?”
“Sure.”
“But if you want to cut back, head for Calico for November 15, then…”
Pete grinned. “Together we swim and alone we sink. Or some shit like that. Come on, let’s look a bit harder for this mysterious gasoline.”
The small Episcopalian church stood on the grandly named Forrest Avenue, in reality a tiny, snaking lane with a dozen poor frame houses on it. The mummified corpse of a little baby lay on its steps.
On a board by the church gate, weathered and torn, was a notice. The usual one, once a common sight outside a thousand churches across the land. A text from the Bible, intended to draw the reader’s attention to a serious contemporary problem of society.