300 Miles to Galveston (11 page)

He had an idea, and headed toward the metal building.

“Where are you going?”

“Something Bane told me once. I want to see if it’s here.”

He pumped his flashlight, and they entered the building.

“Dad! Those things are coming this way.”

“We can’t outrun 40 of those freaking things.”

“We don’t need to outrun them if they don’t know where we are.”

“I don’t think they’re that stupid. We lost them, for a bit. But they’re cunning. They caught us at the campfire – well, me anyway – and they caught you, without giving it away. I’m not saying they’re geniuses, but they’re at least as smart as dogs, and probably harder to scare off.”

She admitted that was true. “What are we looking for?”

“Ammonium Nitrate. White pellets, should be in buckets or big bags.”

His flashlight went across a yellow diamond, and Sophie pointed.

“A-something N-something, Oxidizing Agent 5.1. Is that it?”

“Yep.”

There were a dozen of the clear plastic 500 kilogram bags with blue plastic handles, like shopping bags for giants.

Sophie heard a grunt, and put her hands over Kurt’s flashlight. He clicked it off.

He made a knife-opening gesture. She fished her knife from her pocket and unlocked the blade. Pointing to an empty grey bucket, he whispered, “Cut open one of those bags and fill that bucket up about halfway. Then meet me over by the farm equipment.”

Kurt sneaked to the other side of the warehouse, where the rental skid steer loaders and compact tractors stood. He cursed as he got close to one. It looked like a tank built for dwarves in some steam-punk fantasy.
I have no idea where the fuel line is on this thing,
he thought.
Bane, you better guide me with the Force.
He smiled at that, then went cold. There was the silhouette of a devil standing in an open loading bay, sniffing. Two more ran across the parking lot behind him.

Sophie held the bucket close to the slit she had just cut in the bag, to muffle the sound of the ammonium nitrate pellets pouring in. She was thankful that a light breeze was making the metal roof creak.

The Devil took a few steps forward, then two more Devils jumped to the loading bay, nimble as birds.

The bag of ammonium nitrate shifted, overflowing the bucket and pouring onto the floor. Sophie cursed and stole away, carrying the mostly-full bucket with both hands.

The lead Devil walked her direction.

She walked swiftly toward her father, who was on his back next to one of the loaders. He bit through a black rubber line and fought the urge to cough as fuel spilled into his mouth, along with a one-inch piece of dry rubber. He sat up and let it all roll out of his mouth into the bucket, eyes squinting. He motioned to Sophie to put the bucket under the leaking fuel line.

“How do you know if the diesel is good?” she whispered.

“This one was filled to the neck. It’s when they have air in the tank that algae can grow and muck it up.”

Sophie held the bucket to catch most of the fuel, though some splashed onto the floor.

More Devils came through the loading bays, and Sophie could hear their feet cross the gravel in the parking lot. Half a dozen of them howled together, like newborns.

Kurt and Sophie quit speaking.

He gestured, and she unscrewed the lid to a spare gas tank on a low wooden shelf. He set the bucket down, and spread his fingers wide, as if to say, boom. Then he pointed at all the metal parts on the shelves, and made the fly away gesture with his fingertips, before pouring the mixture into the tank.

She nodded.

He motioned for her to cut off a strip of her t-shirt. She froze. They could hear one of the Devils breathing. They pulled back behind a metal cabinet, where the air smelled of rat traps.

The Devil’s scarred, bare feet slapped the diesel on the concrete floor. It looked down, sniffed, and walked toward the cabinet. With a lurch, it reached behind the cabinet and grabbed a slender water pipe and tugged. Kurt and Sophie squatted in a recess in the wall where a water fountain had once been, two feet below.

Kurt gestured to Sophie, poking his finger into his cupped hand, then stretching out an imaginary line; the long cotton strip of her t-shirt needed to be poked into the spare gas tank, and left touching the floor where the fuel had splashed.

The Devils started pulling out the 500 kg bags, yanking boxes off of shelves, knocking over palettes. The noise brought more of them – how many, they couldn’t be sure, but at least 50. There was no way they could get back to the spare tank and push the strip of cotton in without being seen.

Sophie closed her eyes. Kurt wondered if she was praying, but she was sniffing. Even over the smell of diesel and Devils, she could smell... feces. It was on the floor, about twenty feet away. She poked her head out and looked. In the moonlight on the concrete from the open loading bays, she could see a collection of dark pellets at the bottom of one of the industrial shelving units. As one of the Devils walked through them, she saw them smear, rather than snap from dryness.

She gestured that she wanted to throw something up there.

Kurt saw the box she was nodding towards, got a spark plug from a small display case, and waiting until the nearest Devil turned the corner, hucked it. The stiff cardboard box was like a bass speaker, the terrific thump turning every Devil in the warehouse that direction, and, more important, scaring the raccoons that lived inside out of their nest.

The nearest Devil shook the storage shelf, and five raccoons shrieked and scattered, two falling to the floor, three jumping to the next shelf, and then the next.

Sophie crawled to the spare tank, tucked the long cotton rag that was the bottom half of her t-shirt into the neck, and let the other end fall to the puddle of diesel below. With one hand, she smeared the puddle in a long, thin trail back to their hiding place. Kurt could see it evaporating on the concrete. He struck the match, dropping it to where Sophie’s finger had stopped, and watched the flame sputter along the floor.

They ran through a small office, dodging vinyl chairs and defunct computers, slamming the front glass door open, and jumped down beside the steps which led up to the concrete slab. Kurt put her head down under his arms as they wedged themselves into the corner.

Nothing happened.

A Devil pushed the glass door open and looked across the moonlit field. He rested his scabrous hands on the rail, just above Kurt and Sophie. As Kurt looked up and their eyes met, a disturbingly subtle smile grew on the creature’s face, which went black as a tidal wave of brick, metal, and flame blossomed over him. The earth snapped, sending gravel into Kurt’s eyes, and Sophie’s head into his lower jaw.

They woke, coughing. Sophie helped Kurt stand. “I can barely see,” he said.

“The building is gone,” she said. “It’s morning. Eww.”

“What?”

“There’s a foot jammed into the railing above where we were hiding.”

“Is it attached to anything?”

“Nope.”

The air held the acrid smell of fertilizer and the muddy smell of decomposition. “I need water,” said Kurt.

“There’s a pond, but it doesn’t look clean.”

“Probably full of chemicals. I’ll need you to guide me, until we find some clean stuff.”

She took him by the arm. “Are you blind again?”

“I don’t think so. I can see light when I open, but it hurts, and I can feel the dirt under my lids. I don’t want to blink and scratch my corneas.”

“Where should we go?”

“Back towards the bikes. There’s a medical kit, if they didn’t destroy it.”

Before they walked very far, Kurt paused and sniffed. “How many did we get?”

“Wait here,” she said. He squatted to keep his balance until she came back.

“There’s nothing left but a concrete slab and a water pipe. I can see some body parts scattered a hundred yards away... man, I dunno. Twenty? Twenty-five?”

Kurt smiled. “Thanks, Bane,” he said. “That was what they call an ANFO bomb. Ammonium Nitrate and Fuel Oil. Bane told me how he’d done it once, with just a couple of ounces in a Coke bottle. It’s what they blew up the Federal Building in Oklahoma with, in my dad’s time.”

“Too bad we don’t have more of it, and a Coke bottle,” she said. Sophie led him through the field of metal and brick, back to the woods, back to the highway. He felt her warm exposed torso against his forearm, and thought about what a strong woman she was becoming. The sky was sunny, the air was still, and the only sound was the conversation of crows. 

Chapter 12: Forever Hers

After washing out his eyes with a full bottle of water, Kurt said only one thing as they hopped on their bikes.

“Ride ‘em like we stole ‘em.”

Whether the Polunsky Devils let them pass, or they simply got fast and lucky, Kurt and Sophie didn’t know. They strained their senses for the first hour of their ride, turning at every sound, imagining smells of burned flesh, waiting to be ambushed by howling, scarred madmen. They peddled smoothly and fiercely through the tall pines of Huntsville State Park until their thighs burned. Finally, Sophie's legs wore out, and Kurt had to take some Advil to deal with his headache. They had made it to New Waverly, 15 miles south of Huntsville.

Sophie and Kurt had some of Bane’s equipment, but not the heavy stuff. They had water in small travel bags on their handlebars, and in small bags tied to the backs of their seats they had snacks, a few tools, and first aid stuff. They left the tents behind.

Sophie cranked the radio and pressed the soft red power button.

“This is the USS
Fort Worth
at Coast Guard Station Galveston. We have room for 9 survivors. We will update the count as we accept new passengers. Message repeats.”

Kurt tapped his bike computer. “108 miles to Galveston. Our pace is faster...” He frowned. “I’m sorry, Bane,” he said to the sky. “Our pace is faster now, Sophie. Looking at our morning sprint, I think you and I can keep a pace of 19 miles per hour, which would get us there in six hours, if we can stick to short breaks. How are your legs?”

“I feel... fine, actually. Huh.”

He kicked out his bike’s stand and walked to her. Holding her face, he pushed down with his thumbs, tugging her lower eyelids down. Her irises were huge and amber, but otherwise normal. Unless she opened her eyes wide, it was hard to tell her eyes were not normal.

“What is it?”

“I’ve noticed this for the last couple of days, but we’ve been so busy I just haven’t talked about it. Here, look.” He took a chrome tool and held a flat side out, as a mirror.

“My eyes changed from blue to green when I was your age. But they didn’t get bigger irises and completely change color in two days. Something is happening to you, but so far I can’t see anything bad in it. Maybe it’s related to our healing powers. Do my eyes look normal?”

She held his face, and tugged down with her thumbs. “You look the same.” He took off his shirt, had her look at his back. “Nothing.” He checked her back and legs. Except for her eyes, she was the same. With that epicanthic fold from her mom’s side of the family, it was hard to tell.

They were in a diamond-shaped clearing where a small highway crossed over 45 South. It gave their minds space to think.

“Whatever happens,” said Kurt, “I’m glad I got to take this journey with you.”

“Me, too.” She drank some water. “Dad, are we going to die?”

“Yeah.”

“Wait. What?”

“Death makes you uncomfortable?”

“I could have had a normal dad, but no.”

“Sophie, a few years ago I had a job in an office with friends. I had a thousand restaurants to choose from, museums, concert halls, eBooks on demand, free video chat with relatives in Asia and Europe, and my own
dojo
. Now I’m on a bicycle in East Texas, hoping some guy on a Navy ship has some answers as to why all that just went away. Are we going to die? Yes. But not today. Today, we’re going to Galveston, we’re going to come aboard that ship, and we’re going to see something new. Today is worth living.”

She smiled. “Yeah.”

He got onto his bike and tapped the computer. “Let’s see how long we can push it. We don’t have much time.”

The asphalt hummed beneath their thin tires, and sweat stained their backs and thighs. A headwind pushed back as they approached Conroe, and kept up throughout the Houston suburbs, from the lush planned community of The Woodlands to the census-designated place of Aldine, two of the hundred moons orbiting Houston, the fourth-largest city in the US, a moist pit of poverty, exhaust fumes, and cockroaches the size of baby shoes.

Kurt tried to think of a song about Houston that was worth singing, and started humming Tom Waits’
Fannin Street
. He wished he could take its advice.

They paused at the I-10 intersection, that east-west interstate forming the cross at the bull’s-eye of the city with I-45. A dozen Amtrak cars sat on the tracks, creaking in the wind. The Houston skyline started to the south, a mix of structures from 1920s castles to post-modern five-sided buildings and mirrored spires that reflected the sea-born clouds. Without the people and traffic, it felt like an open-air museum, an unnatural preserve with no mannequins to show what people once did there. It was odd to see a city built on the energies of oil, natural gas, and people like this. The h in H-Town now stood for
hush
.

They paused on the overpass at Memorial Drive, and had lunch in the shade of an abandoned semi-truck.

“I never went to NASA,” said Kurt as he chewed his way through a handful of pecans.

“What?”

“NASA. The space place. Where we used to launch rockets, here in Houston. “

“We launched rockets out of Houston?”

“Back in my grandfather’s day, that’s where we launched the first manned mission to the Moon. You didn’t learn that in school? Hard to believe that was our peak. We made a space shuttle that never had anywhere to shuttle people to, so it shuttled experiments and satellites, until two of them blew up, and we gave up.”

“Sounds like they were dangerous.”