300 Miles to Galveston (12 page)

“Everything worth doing is dangerous. Falling in love. Having kids. Riding bikes. Going to Mars. We lost our courage as a people. Sure, some people still had it, but as a people, as a group where we all had to commit resources to a common good, we were too scared and petty and divided to do anything worth remembering. Maybe that’s what happened. Maybe we were too stuck for too long, and some invisible force said, ‘That’s it. You can’t sit on your ass and eat bamboo all day, like a bunch of picky pandas. Time to give the real estate to something more ambitious.’”

They watched two seagulls fight over a dead frog, one dropping, the other catching, and closed their eyes. They only intended to rest for ten minutes. When they woke, the sun was setting.

Kurt cursed. “Hey! Wake up.”

Sophie looked around.

“Check the radio.”

She fumbled with the zipper on her bike’s rear bag, cranked the handle, and turned up the volume.

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

They poured the rest of their water bottles on their heads and got on their bikes.

Pushing hard through the slopes and broad hills, they careened past abandoned cars and startled deer. The smells of Pasadena blanketed them from the east, giving further motivation to push, climb, and time their breathing. They were steady pumping machines, antelope of the highways, so sleek and fast that even hungry predators would just sit on their haunches and watch.

Or so they hoped.

The wind was their persistent enemy. It shifted from shoulder-facing shoves to glancing, stinking blows from the east.

Back when supplies could be counted on, the main weekend activity in Pasadena was crystal meth and racing cars down East Avenue. Big Oil may have kept its pot of black gold boiling near the Houston ship channel, but that didn’t mean the execs of Marathon or Exxon-Mobil ever came within smell range. They were in River Oaks, stinking up the place with $200 Arturo Fuentes and single-grain scotch, grousing about
lib’ruls
and
the
gub’mint
while dock workers drag raced their rice burners for pink slips, and hookers booty-bumped crystal meth in gas station restrooms before singing their siren song for the quick and the dead.

Kurt took in the smells and sights, and knew racing to the ocean was not crazy. If he could, he would have raced to the Moon.

The air cleared when they got to League City. Kurt’s bike computer read
29 miles
. Then, the world turned, the highway lifting to smash his head, his bike floating away as if made of air. It took 50 feet for his body to stop. Sophie saw what had happened, and leaned left, going off-road into the gravel and grass.

From the right shoulder, a man had thrown a long, straight stick – maybe a broom handle – straight into Kurt’s front spokes, the wood locking against the fork and turning the bike into a man-launching machine. Stunned, he tried to stand, but fell again, bleeding from his left forearm, which had a yellow bone sticking out below the elbow.

Sophie struggled to control her bike as the ground shifted from gravel to weed patches, bouncing the tires free from any useful traction. She fell off the bike in a more controlled manner than her father, and rolled across her back with a sound like luggage thrown from the back of a truck.

Kurt could hear nothing but a whine in his ears, as if he’d been shooting without earplugs. He couldn’t stand, but he could see the man coming towards him with an aluminum bat held to the side like a matador’s cape.

He had practiced this a thousand times. Never with a broken arm, and never while unable to stand, but he had practiced it enough that it came to him now through his fogged mind, the chilled comfort that said
I know what to do
.

The man approached warily, testing the weight of his bat before deciding to take it in both hands and swing in wide arc, counter-clockwise, to strike Kurt’s head.

Kurt waited. He had heard this was true, but he had not experienced it before, and in his shock there was a pleasant detachment to the experience. Knowing what his enemy was going to do, and being prepared for it, the motion seemed to take minutes. He waited. The man pulled back to swing with his full force, and in that moment Kurt leaned towards him, raising his good right hand and catching the attacker’s clenched hands like a baseball, and making a practiced arc towards his own hips. The man swung with such force that he was airborne halfway through the arc, his center of gravity so far past his feet that it looked like he’d been flung from a moving vehicle. The bat slid gracefully into Kurt’s hand as the man slammed into the asphalt, first by shoulder, then by skull.

Kurt got to his feet and staggered two steps towards him, raised the bat high, and dropped his hips sharply, slamming its tip into his skull. With one sharp
crack
, the man’s skull split, dislocating his jaw on the opposite end. His eyes looked at nothing, and he let out his last breath.

The other man appeared now, looking at Kurt in shock, and raced his bike ahead of them to the south.

Sophie cursed, scrambled to her bike, and pumped after him.

Her bike swayed left and right, like the tip of an ax trying to wedge its way out of the pavement. In a moment she was on him, and without a thought she crashed her bike into his, reaching out with both hands to wrap around his torso, tugging him off the bike and rolling onto the pavement. When the road and sky stopped spinning, she was on top of him, punching with both fists, over and over until he coughed bloody teeth and threw her off, cursing.

He pulled a knife, and Sophie drew her stomach back, extending her arms. He swiped, and she jumped back. He swiped again, and she jumped forward, keeping the outside of his the elbow in one of her palms while sliding her other hand up to his shoulder. Shifting her hips forward, she torqued him down, using his shoulder as a fulcrum, bouncing the knife and his face off of the pavement together. As he got to his knees, rubbing his bloody nose with his hand, she picked up the knife and looked to her father. He held his broken arm, but only watched. It would be her decision.

She grabbed his left ear and some hair and yanked, and as he turned his head to relieve the pain, she pulled the knife across the right side of his neck. Blood leapt to the road, and he clutched his throat, and rolled on his back. They looked at each other as he bled out, Sophie silent, the man gurgling. His heels scraped against the asphalt, and then he was still.

A radio played from the dead man’s bike bag.

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

 She unzipped it, and turned the radio off.

“I need you to do it,” said Kurt, prone on the pavement.

Her lips curled as she approached, staring at his compound fracture.

“It’s going to suck, but I need you to do it.”

Kurt extended his arm across the road, palm down. Sophie held her foot a few inches above the bone and balanced herself.

“Just step down, like you were taking the stairs. Don’t stomp. Don’t put half your weight on it and freak out and pull back. Put
all
your weight down. OK?”

She nodded.

“OK.” He closed his eyes. As her foot rolled across the bone, snapping it back in line, he slammed his other fist against the ground and cursed.

She unscrewed the peroxide bottle and poured it over the wound. It foamed and turned pink with blood. He sat up, fighting the urge to vomit.

“Wrap it,” he said.

She placed a large flat bandage across the open wound and wrapped gauze around it, over and over. Once it was tight and thick, she bound it with two metal clips.

“OK, OK, OK... gonna lie down for a bit. Water, please. Water.”

They rested about ten minutes. He had kept his arm on his chest as he lay on the road, keeping the wound higher than his heart. The tight binding had stopped the bleeding. His stomach settled down, and he took six Advil.

“We need to go.” He said it more to himself than to Sophie. She held his bike while he climbed on, and they continued south.

The dead man’s knife was clipped to her waistband, the handle brushing against her thigh with each pump of her legs. It was a slender Gerber blade. She had decided to keep it, partly because it was well made, but mostly because it was hers, truly hers, forever hers.

Chapter 13: Foil Hats

They heard the ocean.

The water at Galveston was brown, but not from pollution. Silt naturally spread along the coast, brought to the Atlantic by the Mississippi River and its smaller offspring which spread its gifts from New Orleans east to Texas and west to Mississippi. Five miles from shore, the water was clear as beer.

As they crossed the bridge to Galveston Island, they could see the Fort Worth. It was a littoral combat ship, built for shallow waters. To Kurt’s untrained eye, it looked like a life-size token from the Battleship board game, the one that took three pegs to sink.

They crossed the bridge to Pelican Island, dropped the bikes, and started waving white t-shirts. A light flashed from the ship, Morse code, though Kurt couldn’t read it. A moment later, the away boat – an inflatable motormount – sped towards them across a calm sea. Four sailors were aboard. As two jumped out, Kurt could see they were armed with 9mm Beretta M9 pistols, but had not drawn them yet. The two who stayed on the boat also had M4 carbines, held high.

The sailor closest to them said, “Who was the first President of the United States?”

“Under our Constitution, or before then?” said Kurt.

The sailor rested his hand on his holster. “The regular answer, not the smart-ass answer.”

“George Washington.”

“OK,” the sailor said. Let the little lady answer this one, please. How many states are there in the United States?

“Fifty-one,” she said.

“Which was the last one admitted?”

“Puerto Rico.”

The sailors relaxed. Then, the closest one said, “I’m sorry sir, but we can only take able-bodied survivors. We’ll send a medic out to give you a look, but we can’t take you aboard.”

Kurt said, “I’ll be able bodied by morning. Tell your doc that, and I’ll bet he’ll want to see me on board.”

The sailor squinted. “I don’t follow, sir.”

Kurt held out his left hand, and nodded to Sophie. She unfolded her Gerber blade and drew it across his palm. As Kurt held his hand up, the bleeding stopped in about ten seconds.

“You heal like one of them, but you’re not stupid or crazy. Yeah. I think the doc’ll want to see that.”

The two sailors helped Kurt and Sophie get aboard the boat, and they sped back to the Fort Worth.

* * *

Captain Nicole Rodriguez MD was a petite woman with dark brown eyes and straight black hair, cut short. Her glasses highlighted her Asian features; without them, people assumed she was from Central America instead of the Philippines.

She had qualified as a flight surgeon right after her internship, but had been pulled back into bio warfare research after the terrorist attack on Atlanta in 2028 that infected 20,000 people with yersinia pestis bacteria, which developed into pneumonic plague for half of them, killing a total of 5,000 over a six month period, mostly children and the elderly. Nicole had a keen love of science, but still held on to a few familiar superstitions. She was cautious when she heard about Kurt and his daughter, and didn’t shake hands when she met them.

When they agreed to let her take a blood sample, she had the nurse draw it.

“Did they explain to you why we’re taking survivors?”

Kurt shook his head.

“We can’t keep sailors who die and come back. Burying them at sea seemed cruel, so we take them to shore and go elsewhere to find replacements. If you decide to stay aboard, you will be expected to follow our protocols and contribute to work around the ship. You are not being pressed into Navy service. You would be treated as contractors. Make sense?”

“Yes. You’ve lost 40-something people?”

“No. That’s just the most we can carry, in addition to the staff. Most of you won’t work out, and will be dropped back at shore. The usual problems are fitness, intelligence, and work ethic. We can figure out all three pretty quickly. If you’ve got those traits, you’re useful. If you don’t, you’re not. We only have room for useful people.”

“What about kids?”

“We have three aboard right now who have been contracted, two under the supervision of their guardians, one solo. It’s an option we’re open to in wartime.”

“War? Who are we at war with?”

“We don’t know. But on during the 2034 Leonids, they released nanites across the atmosphere of Earth which were designed to bond to humans, and which activate upon death, repairing the body and keeping it in a low-functioning but high-healing state indefinitely.”

“Except for the Devils.”

“Right. For some, it doesn’t work well. We estimate 92% of people come back as Angels, 8% Devils. We don’t know why.”

“Why didn’t the government tell us this?”

“We didn’t know until recently, and we still don’t know what the purpose is, or how to fix it. Dealing with all the walking dead used a lot of our resources, and as you know, it crippled our economy and infrastructure. We figure it’s a wounding strategy.”

“What’s that?”

“Shoot a guy dead, and that’s that. But wound him, and two other guys have to help him. With one bullet, you’ve removed three guys from the battle. It’s resource starvation, weakening the enemy before the big attack.”

“And when’s that going to be?”

“If our data are correct, any day now. We crossed the tipping point a week ago. Most civilians are out of ammunition, no one’s been born in three years, and no one’s died. Normally, we lose 1% of the population each year, and gain a little more than that. But since the Leonids, we’ve only lost people without replacements. Add to that the 2% we already had in prison, the panic and mass killings of the first few months, and the prolonged high death rate due to loss of infrastructure and medical care, and we’ve effectively been through 10 Civil Wars, back to back. With our communications and distribution networks crippled, the ancient Greeks could show up off the coast of South Carolina in triremes and take half the East Coast.”